The Noble Path: A relentless standalone thriller from the #1 bestseller Peter May (intellectual books to read .txt) 📖

and careened to a stop, side on, towering over the stricken craft and causing it to roll dangerously. He moved out of the cabin and joined Rath at the rail to find himself looking down into the leaking hull of the tiny vessel and raising astonished eyebrows at what he saw.

A sheet of torn and dirty matting had been draped across two planks to create a makeshift shelter at one end, and huddled in its shadow among a pile of canvas packs were an old woman and a young girl. The stern was strewn with the pieces of an unserviceable outboard, and two tin mugs bobbed in the water sloshing back and forth in the bottom of the boat. It was clearly leaking badly and would not stay afloat much longer. From the skin hanging loosely around her neck, the cadaverous cheeks pitted with sores, and the skull that stretched the skin of her shrunken face, Nim saw with a shock that the old woman was barely alive. Her dead eyes stared listlessly up at him from the shadows. The girl, though strained and frightened, looked in better shape. Her eyes burned black with fear.

‘Runaways,’ Sien called from the roof of the cabin, the relief audible in his voice. And he relaxed his grip on the machine gun and laughed. ‘I don’t fancy yours much, Rath.’

Rath grinned. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘You always did go for older women.’

But Nim was still tense. ‘What have you got in there?’ he called to the women.

‘We need help.’ Ny’s voice was quivering. ‘We are sinking.’

‘We have no room,’ Nim said.

Rath turned to him. ‘Of course we have. We’ve no use for the old one. But the girl . . . When was the last time you had a woman, Uncle Nim?’

Sien jumped down from the roof to join them and leered over the rail. ‘She’s a pretty little thing, that one. I’ll get her.’ He swung a leg over the rail, but Nim grabbed his arm.

‘No,’ he said firmly. ‘I don’t like this. What are they doing here – two women on their own?’

‘Runaways, like Sien said.’ Rath glanced back at the girl and felt the stirrings of lust between his legs.

‘You’ve just forgotten what it’s like, old man,’ Sien snarled, pulling free of Nim’s grasp. ‘Me and Rath, we’re younger, we’ve got needs.’

‘The only thing we need is to survive,’ Nim snapped. ‘There’s something not right about this. Where did they get these?’ He pointed to the canvas packs under the awning.

‘Who knows, who cares?’ Rath sneered. ‘How can an old woman and a young girl be a danger to us?’

‘I’ll check it out,’ Sien said, and he skipped over the railing before Nim could stop him, and clambered down into the boat. Ny’s grip tightened around the butt of Elliot’s revolver hidden below her tunic.

On the far side of the launch, Elliot and McCue slipped quietly out of the water and pulled themselves noiselessly aboard. Elliot pointed to the machine gun on the cabin roof. McCue nodded and climbed, catlike, up the side of the cabin, hidden from the view of the three Khmers whose attention was still focused on Serey and Ny. Elliot drew a long hunting blade from his belt and crouching low, inched his way around the forward side of the cabin, bare feet leaving soft wet footprints in his wake.

Sien grinned lecherously at Ny. He pulled one of the canvas packs out from the awning and, squatting in the bottom of the boat, started rifling through its contents. He arched his eyebrows in surprise. Maps, a shortwave radio, various foreign provisions. He looked up at the two women and frowned in suspicion.

‘Where’d you get this?’

‘What is it?’ Nim called.

But Sien paid no attention. Instead he drew a knife from his belt and moved towards Ny. ‘I asked you a question!’ he hissed.

Ny stiffened with fear, and almost involuntarily started to draw the revolver. But her clumsy movement alerted Sien and he grabbed her wrist, twisting it backwards so that the revolver swung up and then fell harmlessly from her grasp. ‘Well, well,’ he said grinning, ‘a dangerous little thing, aren’t you?’ And he glanced at the revolver, his expression hardening. ‘Now where would you get something like that?’ His body partially masked the view from the launch, and Nim leaned nervously over the rail.

‘What’s going on?’

Sien barely registered the movement beside him, turning instinctively to find himself staring into the barrel of McCue’s revolver clutched between Serey’s trembling hands. For a moment he tensed, then relaxed and stretched his lips across yellowing teeth in a humourless grimace as Serey jerked the trigger. The explosion was deafening in the confined space, and Serey and Ny felt a singeing flash of heat. Warm blood spattered across their faces as the bullet punched a hole through Sien’s face, hurling him backwards into the bottom of the boat.

There was a second of startling confusion in Rath’s mind before he swung his AK-47 towards the women in the boat below. But his finger never reached the trigger. A burst of fire sprayed half a dozen bullets into his lower back, cutting him almost in two and launching him over the rail to sprawl across the corpse of his cousin below.

Nim threw himself backwards, instinctively, against the wall of the cabin and out of the line of fire from above. Fear and confusion tumbled together through his mind in a moment of blind panic. There were weapons below. He turned towards the hatch and literally ran on to Elliot’s blade, gasping in pain and surprise as the cold steel ruptured his spleen and slid upwards through his stomach towards his heart. Elliot’s cold blue eyes met his, and he knew in that moment that he would never see his home again.

Elliot withdrew his knife and let the dead weight of the lifeless Khmer drop to the deck, a pool of dark red spreading quickly across the boards. He crossed to the rail and