This is my third novel, and the only thriller I wrote. Set in Pol Pot's Kampuchea,it's the story of an individual's relentless pursuit of a psychopathic killer high up in the Khmer Rouge leadership. It is also a tender love story.

It remains unpublished. I'm looking for a good publisher.

Synopsis of ‘Comrade No. 4’

This is a tentative title till I think of a better one.

 

Capt. Khay of the Royal Cambodian Army has a very unusual bio in the history of Cambodia’s war against the communist insurgency of Pol Pot. He defects from the military to the Khmer Rouge, who consider it to be major propaganda coup and welcome him. He enters Phnom Peng in 1975 with a government prize on his head.

But his motive for this defection is known only to himself. He has a personal vendetta against a shadowy, psychopathic Khmer Rouge leader known as Ing, or Comrade No. 4. Khay was only five years old when Ing, then a manservant in Khay’s household, murdered the entire family. Khay survived only because he had hidden under the bed that night, fearing ghosts.

Ing is jailed but escapes and joins the Khmer Rouge. As he grows up in his uncle’s care, Khay dreams of bringing Ing to justice. As the war spills over to Cambodia, Khay decides that joining the army is the best way to kill or capture Ing.

He is wrong as Ing remainss as elusive as ever. Finally, as it becomes clear that the government could lose the war, Khay does the unthinkable and defects to the Khmer Rouge in a desperate attempt to find Ing. Though he wins the trust and respect of his fellow guerrillas, the mysterious Comrade No. 4 remains as elusive as ever.

After the fall of Phnom Peng, Khay is put in charge of guard duties at a rural ‘re-education’ camp where thousands of citizens suffer. The camp commander is the obnoxious Ta, who keeps a young doctor called Channary alive simply because he’s quite ill with diabetes. Khay is personally ordered to guard her.

Channary soon finds out that Khay is very different from the other Khmer Rouge. They confide in each other. She’s the daughter of a forest ranger killed by the Khmer Rouge. She says there is a sniper rifle buried beneath the floor of her home in a forest by the Mekong River and she knows how to use it. If they can get away from Ta, then they could fight their way to the Thai border.

One night, they trick Ta and escape in his jeep. Abandoning it, they trek along the river till they reach Channary’s home. No one is alive, but the house is intact. There is an idyll where they fall in love and Khay decides to see her to the Thai border and then resume his lone hunt for Ing. But she’d have none of it. She convinces him of the futility of seeking revenge and Khay agrees with her. They  escape to Thailand where Channary begins work as a doctor at a refugee camp and Khay joins an anti-Khmer Rouge insurgent group as an instructor.

But, unknown to him, Ing has found out all about it from some paper cuttings left behind by Khay at Ta’s camp. He lays a trap and lures Khay back to Cambodia, where he is captured, kept captive and humiliated by Ing. Finally, Ing decides to execute his prize captive and he’s led out to the killing fields. But there is sudden firing through the morning mist and Khay escapes into a nearby forest, to discover that the mysterious sniper is none other than Channary, who had followed his tracks to Ing’s notorious camp and waited patiently for weeks before her patience pays off.

As they get away, the Vietnamese invasion begins and Ing disappears again. Channary and Khay resume normal lives as the country is pacified under the Vietnamese. They settle down in Phnom Peng and have a child. She then gets posted as a doctor to a remote area where life seems to be very peaceful.

But Ing has not forgotten. He lays the final trap – kidnapping Channary and the child, and daring Khay to come and rescue them.

Khay must now rise to the final and biggest challenge of his life.

 

ChapterOne

1

As the dusty armoured personnel carrier rumbled past the old colonial-style houses of Phnom Peng, commander Khay deliberately looked the other way.

But the jubilant cadres waving their automatic rifles were far too excited to sense their commander’s discomfort. Having entered the capital barely an hour ago, the Khmer Rouge were roaming the city on vehicles abandoned by the defeated Kampuchean army. The capital had finally fallen after a long siege. Riding on top of commander Khay’s APC were a number of Phnom Peng youth, as well as two young Buddhist monks. Large crowds filled the streets, waving and welcoming the victors. But commander Khay saw many anxious faces; often, people  avoided returning his steady gaze and looked away. Despite the wild cheering, Khay could not believe that everyone in the picturesque capital city of Kampuchea were in the mood to welcome the feared Khmer Rouge.

But they were the victors. They controlled all of Kampuchea now. Instead of feeling euphoric, Khay only felt anxious.

But the discomfort he felt as the APC rumbled past the stylish old houses with their gabled roofs was due to another reason. Just a moment ago, the vehicle had passed the middle class house where Khay had spent the better part of his childhood and grown up into a young man. He had looked away because he worried that his uncle’s family would be at the gate, watching the impromptu victory parade.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw with immense relief that there was no one in sight near the gate, nor in that part of the frangipani and bougainvillea-filled garden visible from the road. The house was closed and looked vacant, though the windows of the colonnaded verandah were open. This was a section of the city where the welcome for the Khmer Rouge was clearly less than euphoric.

But there were small crowds on the pavements, and Khay locked at them warily, worried that someone he knew -- a cousin, a neighbour or a servant from his uncle’s -- would see and recognise him. He tugged at his faded  cap with the red star, pulling it down so that the shadow cast by the afternoon sun covered part of his checks and nose. He had left home and Phnom Peng five years ago, and had changed a lot since then. But people, he thought, don’t change all that much in five years, not even if they had been with the Khmer Rouge. He still was Khay.

But by now they were back in a working class section of the city, and the streets were full of wildly cheering people. A pretty girl smiled broadly, looking directly at him. Looking stern, Khay looked straight ahead. He had a commander’s privilege of not smiling. That was the job of his cadres, mostly teenage boys from the remotest villages of Kampuchea. With very few exceptions, they were seeing the captial for the first time in their lives.

A boy came running to jump on to the moving APC. One of the Phnom Peng boys already on it extended his hand and he clambered up. A smaller boy, perhaps his brother,

 

 

 

2

came along and begged to be hauled up. Khay chased him away. Frightened only for a moment, the little boy kept grinning and running alongside the APC’s grinding tracks.

As they came in sight of the Phnom -- the grassy hill which was the centre of the city -- Khay ordered the driver to head for the headquarters of the Army’s Seventh Division, which would house his company -- indeed, the better part of the battalion that he had fought alongside for the past several years -- during their stay in Phnom Peng. Khay and his fellow commanders knew what the cadres didn’t know yet -- that their stay in the capital wouldn’t be for very long.

A dozen prisoners sat kneeling on the gravel along the driveway. These prisoners had been brought in that morning after Khay  left with his patrol. A few cadres in their black trousers and tunics were walking about nonchalantly. Just behind the furthest kneeling figure was the body of a Kampuchean soldier, his face half-buried in the gravel. His one visible eye, half-open,. gave the dead man a stupefied look.

“What happened?” Khay asked the nearest cadre as he jumped down from the APC.

“He disobeyed orders,” the cadre said carelessly.

“What did he do?”

“He asked for water,” said the cadre, smiling now. He was hardly more than fourteen years old and not from Khay’s company. Khay was glad that he had dislodged the joyriding civilians before coming here. This would have frightened them.

Glancing at the downcast eyes of the kneeling men, Khay froze. There was no mistake-- there was the old sergeant, an office clerk of his former division. There was a long, sharp cut on his forehead and his crumpled uniform was stained with dried blood. Khay tried to  walk away. But he could not. He kept looking at the kneeling figure till the old man looked up involuntarily.

The cadre who had spoken to Khay screamed and aimed his rifle at the man’s head.

 “No,” said Khay. It was really a shout, and made everyone, including the kneeling  prisoners, look at him.