Chapter 24 Alternate.
Phnom Penh
Almost exactly on schedule we rolled to a stop in front of the hotel, the bus parked straight out from the hotel entrance. The driver quickly stepped out to open the cargo hatches while the tour guide reminded everyone we left in 45 minutes for our first tour and dinner, the bus would toot the horn twice when boarding started.
The hotel owner was a petite older man in a suit that greeted everyone and asked them to grab their suitcases and step inside to the main desk. He had a few words in English he knew like: air conditioning, hotel check-in, passport, clean rooms, happy, and thank you.
On the ground floor all the hotel consisted of was a hallway with doors at both ends, a check-in desk, and a wide staircase. It looked exactly like it did on the youtube videos except they added a vending machine. The hotel view looked more third world-ish seen from the street, especially with trash blowing around on the ground. All the hotel rooms were on the 2nd floor, under them were retail storefronts: hair and nails, massage, acupuncture, and a fortune teller - spiritual counselor.
We stood in line for about ten minutes and finally checked-in. The elderly desk lady handled the crowd very well. She checked us off her reservation list, compared us to our passport photos, then handed me a room key on a USA style 1960s motel key ring. She pointed down the hall and mumbled something unintelligible, we quickly stepped away from the counter. We walked up the stairs, read the signs, our room was to the left and we went down the hall three doors and unlocked our door. I was half expecting to see something like the hotel in the movie The Beach where the upper walls were all screen mesh but these rooms had privacy. Each room had a small vent window above the door. I got the impression that none of the buildings here had eight foot ceilings. Most of the Asians I saw here looked short and I'm not tall by US standards.
The room felt cool and looked clean but small. The bed was tightly made, the AC was running, the ceiling fan rotated slowly. He went straight to the bathroom and I put our suitcase on top of the dresser then checked out the view from our window, over the balcony and out onto the hectic street below. I saw the roof of our bus through the railing. The street was thick with scooters and bicycles. I could not believe we were actually in Phnom Penh. We left home three days ago and in that time we managed to make our way to the far side of the planet, which I thought was amazing. Just one hundred fifty years ago we'd be in a steam train chugging our way to Los Angeles and from there on a coal-fired iron steamship that would cross the ocean at twelve miles an hour. Back then it took half a year to get this far, if you survived.
I asked Gary if we crossed the equator and he shouted back from the toilet: "No, we're about 800 miles north of it, Singapore was nearly on the equator." I told him our window opened to the balcony and the balcony was open to every room on this side of the building, it was another hallway but on the outside and it created a potential security problem for our stuff and our mission. After a loud flush and water in the sink he joined me looking out the window, then it was my turn in the bathroom.
After time in the bathroom we crashed on the bed and enjoyed the cool breeze. After twenty minutes of resting side by side on the bed holding hands we heard the bus horn toot twice, it was time to re-board for our first adventure. Tonight we would tour the only reconstructed Watt in the city where they had a Buddhist welcome center with a banquet hall. We locked the door and went downstairs, I was hungry but felt better. Gary told me it would probably be like a box dinner without the boxes. But I told him the food we had on the bus was great.
We got back in our seats and after ten minutes it was fully loaded and the bus left heading north for the temple. The traffic was heavy and we crawled across the city, outside the bus windows was a storefront with a large photo covering the entire plate glass window with the smiling face of Pol Pot III, which was his campaign office just down the block from our hotel. I leaned over and whispered to him that we'd probably get there faster on bicycles. He patted my knee and winked at me.
It took almost 35 minutes to drive three miles to the Watt, the bus parked along the street and we were guided inside by fifteen (barefoot) young men wearing orange monk robes and took the tour of their 600 year old temple and monastery, made of hand carved limestone. It had lots of damage, the Khmer Rouge used it for target practice in the 1970s but lots of that damage was preserved as a reminder. I thought to myself seeing the cracks and missing chunks why someone from that party would ever run for office in this country when the history of their party was nothing less than mass murder and the destruction of the tremendous cultural history of the Khmer people. It started to make me angry but it made me happy to know that the USA wasn't the only country that had power hungry weirdoes and dangerous perverts on the loose.
We also toured their large cemetery with graves marked from hundreds of years ago. A young monk from the Monastery spoke briefly but he was difficult to understand so we sort of looked around and admired the remaining buildings. The purple and red sun set during our time looking at their cemetery.
I doubted any of the monks were over the age of 22. All of them Khmer and most spoke in decent English but a few needed improvements. They all had shaved heads and hairless chests, some had arm pit hairs, most didn't. Their robes covered everything except one shoulder, a few wore them loose enough to flash an occasional tit. Our tour guide explained most of these boys came to the monastery as orphans that lived as criminals on the street and life as a monk was offered as an alternative to time in prison. We quietly decided to anonymously gift money to the monastery after we got home, if it was possible.
At the end of the tour we were ushered into a modern steel framed dining hall, the area smelled wonderfully of cooking food. There were white paper covered tables with folding chairs, everyone took a seat as workers rolled out carts loaded with food, and they started to load each table.
While we ate a few bats buzzed low over our heads and I saw tiny lizards climbing the walls and steel roof trusses above us. This banquet hall was about the size of your average high school gymnasium but it looked entirely handmade inside aside from the steel parts. The temple was beautiful, even though it was (partially) rebuilt during the 1990s. All around the temple we saw reminders of the Khmer Rouge mostly in the form of bullet holes. Considering the age of the Khmer race and the Buddhist religion it puzzled me why they treated their country like a giant trash can and why they did nothing about the threat of the return of the political party that murdered a third of their people. I kept my mouth shut and enjoyed my dinner because we were guests in this country.
We were served a variety of steamed seafood, sticky rice, veg wraps, tea, water, coffee, chicken and noodles in broth with more vegetables. It was a very filling meal and like always came with small tiny ceramic cups of hot chili sauces, but some of the dipping sauces were sweet and fragrant. I had still not learned how to tell by looking which ones were sweet and which were hot. Lemme tell you, here in Southeast Asia spicy means something very different than in the USA, they were very serious about spices in this part of the world. You had to be very careful where you put your spoon. I've sort of learned to just touch the tip of a chopstick into the sauces to identify them without burning a hole in my tongue.
We got back to the hotel at 6:45pm, a little bit early.
After using the toilet in our room we changed our clothes and put on our disguise sideburns and mustaches, then we left the hotel for the shops along the street. First we headed away from the hotel and slowly made it across the two lane road and looked in every store. Eventually we found one with kitchen stuff so we looked at knives and selected three and two pairs of stainless steel chop sticks with pointy tips. The young man behind the counter told us to be careful because the paring knives had stainless steel blades like razors, they were not very thick. The pointed tip blades were just over four inches long with a blade on both sides and the handles were textured for better gripping and about three inches long. They cost an amazing two Euros each, and one Euro for each pair of chopsticks which were plated cherry red. We took our knives but first he wrapped them tightly in newspaper so I slipped them in my back pocket and we kept walking down the sidewalk. I quietly whispered that I'd never seen a paring knife with two sided blades before, but he just smiled as we walked down the sidewalk.
We stopped in a snack shop and got two shaved ice and watermelon drinks like something from a 7-11 in the USA.
Two small boys caught us and held up glowing necklaces for sale, glow in the dark things sort of like those glowing light sticks people used for camping. But these were looped soft colored necklaces that gave off a bright red, orange, or blue light. They wanted two bucks each, but we weren't interested in looking like the other tourists so we both said no. But they persisted and kept stepping in front of us and wouldn't go away. Eventually one of the locals suggested we use a side to side palm facing hand wave. I tried it and they both took off at a run looking for more tourists to annoy. The hand gesture was similar to a hand wave in the USA but worked much better than saying no.
We walked a little further down the block and got seats outside a shop that sold bite size food, called: One-Bite Shop. We ordered pork sausages (on a bamboo skewer), and fried shrimp with tempura batter (on a stick), and lastly we got fried potato chunks (also on a stick) that were heavily seasoned, sort of like eating giant steak fries with lots of spices. We sat on stools at a wobbly plastic table on the sidewalk about half a block past the Communist Party campaign office. We ate our sausages and watched the crowds walking around us. The traffic was thick and the view was usually blocked by highly decorated tuk-tuks with eye catching bling.
We ordered four beers in glass bottles and sat there drinking them, looking around at what people were doing, paying attention to, or doing on the sidewalks. We figured most of the people here lived nearby.
The energy level was high, everyone looked happy and in a hurry. Eventually we were asked to move-on so others could sit and eat. We slowly walked back towards the hotel and went into a store that sold cheap cell phones with service. The store owner spoke some English, he said it would be activated now and would work in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam but not Myanmar, Thailand, or China. We got a Nokia flip phone with a decent camera and a 2gb micro SD card and a charger. We called the hotel (across the street) and the old lady at the desk answered but we just hung up.
There was a big trash can near the cell phone store so we stopped and unwrapped the knives but kept them concealed. I carefully slipped them into my back pocket but felt I'd be safe as long as I didn't fall down.
Back in our room we turned it off and plugged it into the charger. It was 9:15pm and tour bus alarm time was 4:45am so after showers we went to bed with our little travel alarm set for 1:45am. Before I went to sleep I looked at the manual which was missing a section in English to try to figure out how to take photos and make the flash work, then I closed my eyes and went to sleep. My husband kept working at it and finally got it to take pictures with the flash, then he turned off the lights and went to sleep too.
The alarm startled me badly at 0145hrs.
We slowly got out of bed but never spoke so we could hear any activity in the hotel. All we heard was an occasional vehicle outside and our AC running. He activated the spider and the rest of our electronics while we both got dressed in black T-shirts, navy blue shorts, and our gym shoes that never squeaked. I put the knives in my back pocket which was tight enough to keep them from sliding around and cutting my butt. He carried the chopsticks in his back pocket. David put on his glasses.
I put on my glasses then stepped out in the hallway with the spider in my hand and silently walked down the stairs and paused. The first floor was silent. The check-in desk was empty but lit-up so I think someone was in the room behind the desk. I walked down the hallway to the back door and looked for sensors, slowly opened it and stepped outside and silently closed the door. One hundred feet to my right was the ladder that went to the roof of the campaign office building. I stepped away from the hallway door and set the spider on the ground and went back up to our room.
Sitting on the bed and using simple voice commands David steered the spider across the ground, up the back wall and onto the second story balcony, then in to the first room.
We saw some furniture legs so he had it climb halfway up the bedroom wall. From that spot we saw one small bed with a child asleep, we had the spider walk across the ceiling and look all the way around the room to detect any electronics or heat sources. After a couple minutes he steered it into the hallway and stopped again and monitor for people, movement, and electronics but it was dead calm and quiet. It detected no radio signals or strong electrical fields. Down the hallway we saw another room with a dining table and the top of the steps going down to the ground floor.
Next , he moved it in the other bedroom, inside that room on the ceiling we saw it was about 14x14 with a large window that looked out on the street like our hotel room. It appeared to be wide open with a ceiling fan buzzing away and two people on a full size bed, they both appeared to be asleep. He was wearing white boxers and she was wearing a flower print sheer night gown, both of them were on their sides facing the window with about a one foot gap between them.
"You ready to go?" Gary asked.
I nodded yes but never spoke. He whispered to me: 'in the next thirty minutes we'll do the world a big favor and earn five million in the process.' He said we needed to focus on doing this just like we practiced. I whispered commands to move the spider close to the ceiling fan and release all the gas. When people got gassed in their sleep they usually never woke up but were like someone under sedation during surgery, if everything worked they'd never move a muscle.
We reviewed how and where to slice, necks and hearts. Gary lifted his chin and I felt his arterial pulse which reminded me where the artery sat and about how deep, beside the artery was a major vein and beside that was one of the large muscles that helped you hold your head upright. He got out our disposable rubber gloves and we put them on.
We unplugged the cell and put it into airplane mode and took a test photo (with a flash) of my pillow, then with the stuff in our pockets we silently slipped out into the hallway but left our door unlocked. My heart was pounding hard in my chest. Holding hands we silently slipped down the hallway to the stairs walking along the wall.
Down the stairs we made it to the ground floor hallway and paused briefly to listen then went silently to the back door and out into the courtyard. He silently shut the door then we moved along a garden walkway towards the campaign office building. Now, he was in front and I was close behind him as we moved together like a ninja in the dark. I kept one hand on his back the entire way so we never collided. With our glasses on we could see fine in the dark and could also watching the spider's view to make sure everyone was still asleep upstairs.
Outside in the courtyard it was too dark to see much, but with the glasses on we saw black and white IR images just fine. Slowly we walked across the gravel until we got to the ladder, he climbed first. I stayed on the ground watching and listening. If anyone was outside or watching from a window their heat signature would stand out boldly on our glasses. He climbed up nine rungs on the welded steel ladder then stuck out one foot and touched the balcony floor then sort of fell towards it and grabbed the railing, and silently slipped over and looked down at me, he gestured for me to come quickly.
I swallowed hard and patted my back pocket to check for the knives then silently climbed the ladder. The steel still felt hot from the heat of the day. He helped me over the railing and we silently entered the young girl's room through her open balcony doors. She was hard to see under her long black hair as we inched silently across her room. I was afraid the floor would creak but it made no sound. Out in the hallway we stopped to listen and watch, in my glasses I saw us appear on the IR image from the spider still on the ceiling above us. I reached up and grabbed the spider, collapsed its legs and pushed it into my pocket.
Our glasses gave us a bright grey image inside the apartment. The people in bed were drugged asleep but probably not their daughter. They appeared bright white and their beds a light gray. Both of them were still on their sides, still breathing. He got out the cell and set it on the dresser with the camera ready. I handed him one knife then walked to the window, reached way up and silently pulled the curtains shut. I glanced across the street to see if I could see any human body heat signatures but nothing showed up in any of the windows or balconies straight across from us.
We studied their positions, he looked at me and pointed to his nose, I smiled and nodded yes, we could both smell the remnants of spider gas in the air but it had been almost fourteen minutes since it vented and was spread around the room by the fan and might have gone into the girl's room too. We'd soon find out.
I moved beside him, ready to hold down limbs. If this guy woke up we'd likely end up in prison in the next 24 hours so we had a lot riding on the performance of the spider gas, but it never failed us before.
He took the knife and pointed to the spot and with one sudden quick movement he pierced the skin and pushed it all the way in then pulled it sideways then out. A huge gush of blood came up between his fingers so he pulled a pillow over his neck. I reached behind Gary and grabbed one of the chopsticks, located my landmarks and pressed it hard between his ribs into his heart. As the chopstick pierced his chest I felt several layers of tissue snap as the stick penetrated into his beating heart. About half of it stuck out so we could watch it twitch with each heartbeat to tell when it stopped.
Next we moved silently around the bed and he gently moved her hair away from her neck with the next knife, we agreed on the spot and he shoved it in hard, rotated, and yanked outward severing both vessels and her thick neck muscle too. Like him a huge gush of blood came up between his fingers, so we set a pillow over her too. I reached behind him for the second chopstick, found my landmarks and stabbed it about four inches into her left breast.
It was a nearly silent procedure so far. He went near the door to get the cell while I picked up a bed sheet off the floor and held it to block the light from the camera flash from being seen out their window. He moved pillows and took a few photos of each of them. I think it took about four minutes to complete our tasks in that room. When we took the photos of them both still had heartbeats and blood was still gushing but not as much as at first.
The apartment was already starting to stink of blood and farts as we silently walked back across the hallway. I pulled the last knife from my pocket and handed it to him, he used the blade like a comb to carefully lift her hair aside, the girl was also asleep on her side, her neck fully exposed, almost perfectly so, just like her parents. I noticed the smell of spider gas in her room, so maybe she got a partial dose. I looked at him and pointed at my nose and he nodded yes.
Her bed was smaller so we got on opposite sides, I got in position to press one hand over her mouth and the other to hold her down. He pointed to a spot and looked at me, I nodded yes and in an instant the blade was fully in her neck and then sideways then he yanked it back out. Like her parents blood gushed up between his fingers. She immediately started to struggle a little so we both held her down while a large amount of hot blood spurted from the side of her neck. Slowly, her struggling subsided and she became limp, the gush slowed to a trickle within thirty seconds and I checked her landmarks and pushed a chopstick into her naked chest to watch her heart beat slow to a stop. That was when I noticed she was naked in bed, it's not that often you saw a 10 year old girl sleep naked, but she was. Maybe it was a common practice in Cambodia.
We left the room and went back to the parent's room and carefully watched the sticks but both of them had stopped moving. Both of them had frozen corpse like expressions on their faces, with their eyes open slightly, and neither of them was breathing. The stink in the room was worse now. I pulled out the chopsticks and picked up the knives while he took four more close-up shots of them above the chest. Then we went back across the hallway. I found a pile of art paper on her dresser so I set the knives and chopsticks on it.
By the time we got back to the girl's bed her chopstick had also stopped all movement. Her face was frozen with the eyes wide open, mouth open, and an expression of horror frozen on her face. I pulled out the chopstick and picked up the last knife while he took photos of her from the hips up and a few shots from the chest up. All she was wearing were small flower print panties. In my head I asked God to save her soul and forgive us and her.
After that was over I wrapped up the knives, chopsticks, and our gloves in the paper on her dresser and slipped it in my back pocket. We silently left the apartment and climbed over the railing and down the ladder. I climbed down first and stood there while he climbed down, then after looking all around the courtyard we carefully walked over to the back door of the hotel and peeked in the window for signs of movement.
I watched the hallway and check-in desk for a few moments then carefully opened the door, we both slipped inside and closed the door. Silently moving down the hallway we climbed the stairs to the 2nd floor and went to our room then locked the door.
Gary went into the bathroom first and washed his face, hands, and arms. I inspected his clothes and skin for any blood drops, then I cleaned up and he inspected me. I took the spider from my pocket and set it on a flat spot in the toilet bowl and told it to self destruct immediately. We washed the chopsticks and knives clean of any traces of blood and re-wrapped them in newspaper and set them out to go with us tomorrow on the bus. Lastly, we carefully peeled the facial disguises off each other.
He sat beside me and reviewed the photos and made sure we had good shots of all three bodies. Then he transferred all twenty one photos from cell memory to the micro-SD card and powered the phone off and got back in bed with me. We laid there in silence and had a hard time falling asleep. I think I dozed off for about one hour.
When the alarm went off it really startled me. We showered and got dressed and went downstairs to the sidewalk with the rest of our group and got on board. They loaded two carts of meals and the bus left in the pre-dawn darkness.
I thought to myself as the bus drove past the campaign headquarters that we altered future world history, hopefully for the better.
Outside on the street everything was quiet with very little traffic. The bus left promptly at 5:15am and drove out of town towards our first stop about two hours north of the city at a Watt along the Mekong River. It was still dark as night outside when the bus left the hotel. The sun started to come up after we got out of the city, it was beautiful to watch Cambodia come to life. Lots of people started work very early. It appeared it rained slightly last night after we got back to our room.
The tour guide told us there was no reason to look at the weather forecast because it was the same every day, except when a typhoon was coming. Hot, muggy, windy, 70% chance of afternoon thundershowers, high temp 95 degrees, 95% humidity. If you got something to do outside get it done before noon.
At 7am we had breakfast from boxes, nearly the same as yesterday. Sticky rice came with every meal inside a tiny woven reed cup with a reed cap, the tour guide lady said if we got something too hot and spicy to grab a clump of rice and chew it slowly, that usually neutralized the burn. Breakfast had scrambled eggs in a wrap mixed with peppers and other veggies. It had fried pork strips also well seasoned, sticky rice, tea, coffee, rice noodles in broth with veggies, and tiny chunks of fish. It also came with something like a cinnamon roll.
The bus took us north along the river to the town of Pa-Av to see the large temple across the river. We were there for about 90 minutes then left on the bus northwest to Tangkok to tour their temple complex and have a catered lunch in the monastery. At our first stop we saw a large trash can with a plastic liner bag so Gary pulled the stuff wrapped in paper from his shirt and dropped it in the trash can when nobody was watching.
After lunch we stopped at the Phumi Boeung Temple for tours. They loaded dinner on the bus at that stop. After that our next tour was the Moni Sakor Pagoda and Monastery. That one sat along the Tonle Sap River. We made one quick stop at the Watt Sambo Monastery and Temple in Kampong Provence. By then we were 60 miles north of Phnom Penh and had a long drive back, which was when we had dinner and watched the sun go down over the rice fields. At the Phumi Boeung tour site we got the plastic bag from our seats and dropped it into a large trash can near where the bus parked. That bag contained the clothes we wore during the killings. The only things we had left were our shoes and our bodies.
It was a long ride in the bus going back to the city, I got the window seat and stared at the countryside. It was a beautiful place, lots of trees and people working the rice fields. Large oxen pulled plows across fields, people wore pointy straw hats and loose fitting plain clothes. The pace of life in rural Cambodia was very slow and peaceful. Their world was hard, muddy, and wet but life looked good for most of those people. Every face I saw looked happy, especially the kids. It seemed like all the children outside under the age of four never wore clothes, perhaps due to the total absence of diapers and laundromats.
We made it back to the hotel in Phnom Penh at 5:55pm and were dismissed until 5:10 am tomorrow to board the bus and start the long drive back to Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam. When we got back to the hotel we saw one military truck and three police cars outside the campaign office but if there was any local excitement it had already faded away.
We walked across the street and bought two bottles of red wine with twist off caps and went back to our room (sitting outside on two balcony chairs) and shared the bottles like we used to back in college, sitting out in our car passing the bottle back and forth because we were too poor to afford glasses or even paper cups.
Neither of us could get hard that night so we drank wine and watched the traffic go by and talked about stuff. We watched the sky flash from storms that ringed the city. We went to bed early after taking one valium each, we slept almost nine hours that night and woke up feeling a lot better when the alarm sounded at 4:45am.
Very early the next morning we boarded without incident, all the cops were gone and nobody in the bus said anything about the incident and the tour guide also never said a thing, maybe they didn't know.
As the bus rolled away from the sidewalk outside the hotel I saw the campaign office out the windows and nothing looked unordinary, it slowly vanished into the turmoil of the city as the bus headed back towards Vietnam, in the pre-dawn darkness.
We held hands a lot but never slept all the way to the Bavet Border Crossing and for some reason I knew I would feel safer after we crossed the white line.
The scene at the Bavet Border Crossing was chaotic and scary. My heart pounded in my chest and sweat dripped down my ribs. All around the border were military vehicles. We saw them drag people out of cars and strip search men, women, and children at gun point on the street near the border. Screams were loud enough for everyone to hear inside the bus as terrified people were searched before leaving Cambodia. I wasn't sure if all the drama had anything to do with the killings or not.
The bus stopped near the white line, armed soldiers came onboard and walked down the aisle and looked at everyone, they even checked inside the bathroom and up on the suitcase shelves above the seats, then they left, but the bus remained stopped near the white line with the motor running. More Jeep-style vehicles drove up carrying armed soldiers. We heard the sound of the bus being put into gear and we slowly started to roll backwards and my chest tightened and I clenched his hand. But it only rolled a little then lurched forward. Within 45 seconds we crossed the white line on the pavement and slowly entered Vietnam, a few people applauded but our Asian tour guide lady remained silent.
I looked at Gary and smiled, his forehead was covered in sweat. We both leaned towards the glass to watch the white line go by. I reached over the armrest and squeezed his sweaty hand again. Slowly the bus accelerated as we drove away from the crossing. At first I wished the driver could have stomped the gas pedal to the floor but we steadily motored away from the border chaos. I leaned over and whispered into Gary's ear, "Hand of God." He closed his eyes, leaned his head back against the headrest and nodded yes.
The drive back went like the drive to Cambodia except traffic was worse, we arrived 34 minutes late to the hotel and got checked-in and paid. After we got in our room we went back downstairs and walked outside and found the nearest bar and had fried shrimp on a stick and drank six beers each, then holding hands we went back to the hotel.
That night neither of us could get hard so we went to bed after showers and I slowly massaged his back for a while. He lay on his stomach naked, I sat on his thighs naked and scratched and worked his muscles for almost an hour. We used the entire tube of lotion that was in the bathroom. That hour of intimate contact calmed us down.
The shape and feel of his back really turned me on. He looked and felt sinewy on his back with thin but tight sheets of muscle and tendon. He had a nice V-shape on his back, he shrunk a lot within two years after finishing seal school, but it never entirely went away like mine. He felt very strong and muscular and his skin was smooth and felt wonderful under my palms and fingers as I kneaded his back all the way down to his thighs. I spent a while working his butt muscles and even lubed his crack and his hole but nothing became of it.
After the massage I rolled him over and he was limp as ever despite the massage on his bung hole, exactly how he liked it. I hit his favorite spots and pressed hard like he taught me too but he still never got hard, I didn't either. I still had flashbacked images of our mission in Phnom Penh.
We spent that night at the Sunflowers Hotel in Ho Chi Minh City, our flight was tomorrow morning to Manila. I tried to imagine what we could do with five million bucks but kept flashing back to the image of the expression on the young girl's face after she died.
Thanks to a decent intake of beer we both slept a little that night.
Our flight left at 8:09am for Manila. We landed there and got a hotel room at the airport after buying tickets for Hawaii the next morning. The hotel was across the street from the airport terminal, we wouldn't even need a taxi. Our flight to Hawaii would be business class and on short notice they cost E$1100 each, but it wasn't our money so we didn't care. By the time we got to Hawaii we'd still have about E$2200 left, and we still had credit cards too.
We spent most of the day in our Manila hotel room but it was still a no-boner day. I had constant mental flashes of the family, and worst of all were the mental images of the dead naked girl. Their apartment was very dark so we didn't really see much blood, but we felt it and smelt it too. And we got glimpses of it when we took the photos of the bodies and their blank stares on their frozen faces. By the time we were ready to leave they already looked like manikins.
We got a 12 pack of American beer and took it into our hotel room and copied the images from the phone onto the micro SD card and pitched the phone after soaking it in hot soapy water, then bent it too far backwards until we heard it crack inside and we saw a ribbon cable pop out at the hinge, and dropped it in the trash in the hotel lobby bathroom. The only things we had left from then were our shoes.
The micro SD card was slipped inside a seam inside the suitcase. Our flight to Hawaii was due to leave Manila at 2pm local time, we checked out of our room at 10am and walked back to the airport and picked up our boarding passes then visited the food stalls.
Standing at a fried fish booth waiting our turn to order Gary looked me up and down and told me I looked very tense. I told him I felt a little nauseated too.
"Oh unclench your ass cheeks dude, the scary part's over!" He teased. I just glared at him briefly because I didn't believe he was relaxed at all, in fact I didn't feel we we'd be out of danger until our flight landed in Honolulu.
We boarded on time and got back to Honolulu the next day after a terribly long flight, but we took two valium pills and slept over half the flight then watched two movies.
In Honolulu we purchased tickets to LAX and decided to take Amtrak home from there. It took almost two more days but we eventually got off the train in downtown El Paso and took a taxi to the airport.
I can honestly say the only part of the trip home from Phnom Penh that wasn't a hassle was the train ride. The Amtrak seats in coach were huge with more leg room than first class on any airplane but you could not be in a hurry on Amtrak because they rarely arrived on time. Amtrak trains were always late because the freight trains had the right-of-way and passenger trains had to wait on freight to pass.
We paid cash and showed our fake passports to purchase tickets to Alpine, Texas but we got off in El Paso. Outside the station we grabbed a taxi and went to the airport where the truck was parked in the employee lot.
In our office the boss was there and looked surprised to see us suddenly show up, he motioned for us to come in his office, then he shut the door and locked it. We handed him the walkman, and the micro SD card, he smiled and asked how our trip went, how Cambodia was. David smiled and sighed and said it was very third world, trash everywhere, lots of very nice but very poor people working hard to make a living. Then he reached into his back pocket and pulled out our fake passports and dropped them on his desk too. David added that our presence there looking at their temple ruins felt embarrassing compared to their poverty. Captain Johnson told us to take the rest of the month off (19 days), he already had the Omaha team activated, and they needed the money and training. David reached into his front pocket and pulled out the remaining Euros and the credit cards and dropped them on his desk too.
We drove home in our truck. After unpacking and making a couple calls our next stop was the backyard. We called a deliver place and ordered a twelve inch pan crust Italian pizza with a 12-pack of Coors Lite but didn't discuss the trip. After eating the entire pizza we got out our outdoor scrubbing gear, connected the spray nozzle to the hose near the hot tub and stripped naked. We took turns using an abrasive scrubber and standing on rocks near the mini golf course we stood still while the other one scrubbed with the brush (on a handle) and lots of soap, head to toe. We used our big round bathing sponge to carefully hand wash butt cracks, balls, and our fully erect penises.
By the time we were done we were both red and itchy but super clean and felt much better. We got back in the hot tub and drank more beers and ate some chips and beef jerky strips. When David got in the tub after rinsing off the soap he sat on the edge and fell backwards with a huge splash that meant we'd have to add lots more water. Sometimes we wished we had a pool instead of a hot tub. While we soaked I tossed the hose in the tub and ran the water to replace the ten gallons he splashed out onto the mini golf course. Soon after we got in the hot tub the pizza and beer arrived.
That evening in our basement home theater we watched the original 1987 Predator movie because it sounded great on our stereo, especially the machine gun shootout scene in the jungle. We both really liked that movie.
I remembered a secret trivia thing about Predator and told David but he didn't want to believe me. In the final minutes of the film just after the Predator blows himself up, they showed the rescue helicopter flying in. The chopper crew had one black man wearing a helmet and sun glasses. I told David that the guy with the helmet and sunglasses was actually the same actor inside the predator suit and was also inside the Bigfoot suit in Harry and the Hendersons.
After Predator we watched one of the best gay films ever made: Call Me by Your Name. We fucked on the carpet during the scene where Elio and Oliver did it the first time in Elio's old bed.
It seemed both of us were recovered and we did it twice a day for the next week, he walked around the house with a boner for part of every day, but we never watched the news.
Four days after we got back we got the call on his cell about a special delivery, so we agreed to meet in two hours on the long straight paved road (McGregor Range Road) that ran (5.3 miles) from Highway 54 to the entrance gates at McGregor Range, the driver agreed to meet us at the one and only left turn before the range gates, that way we wouldn't have our neighbors see an armored car with two heavily armed dudes park in front of our house and unload some boxes.
We parked at the one and only left turn but the delivery vehicle turned out to be a commercial van and not a regular armored truck, the guards were still well armed and they arrived with an unmarked police car following. They wore vests and helmets with weapons on display. We walked up to the passenger side door and signed the papers. Then they started the motor and turned their vehicle around and backed up so it was close to the tail gate of our truck, the unmarked police car moved in closer too.
Then one guard got out with a machine gun in hand and stepped into the middle of the street with weapon ready to fire. The other guy got out and opened the side doors on the van and unlocked a large steel safe inside the back. He opened the door and took out two cardboard boxes, each about the size of a shoe box. He handed one to David, and David walked it to our truck and set it on the back seat. I got the other one and carried it to the truck and set it by the first one and strapped them down with the seatbelt. David got in and started the motor while I secured the boxes. While we did that the unmarked cop car left and the van closed doors and took off equally as fast as the black cop car, and in a dust cloud they both took off towards Highway-54 in a big hurry. My thought was they didn't want to miss happy hour and reruns of the Dukes of Hazzard at the local redneck watering hole, YEE-HA!
We turned the truck around and headed down McGregor Range Road towards the highway, David commented, 'Mark that mission complete and paid in full.' We parked his truck in the garage which was uncommon because we usually parked in the shade on the driveway to let the vehicle cool off before moving it in the garage. With the truck inside we carried the boxes into the tac room and stored them with the others in the closet, that gave us about 34 million in cash at home now.
We discussed the armored drivers and agreed it was unnecessary for him to keep his pea shooter aimed at us the entire time. Once he transferred the money the unmarked car turned around and left, which must have meant they had no other cash on board.
That evening we sat in the hot tub again with another 12 pack of Coors. He sat sort of leaned back while I floated with my body above his legs. I gently played with his limp penis while we both drank beers then after the twelve bottles were empty we brought out a bottle of wine, then another. David was drunk and started to talk about Cambodia, like me he admitted the part that really bothered him was doing the kid.
We both held her down briefly but she didn't struggle much. That was long enough to bleed-out enough to lose consciousness, then I stabbed her with the chopstick. We watched the chopstick twitch with each beat of her heart until it started to slow then we went back to the other room to gather our stuff and take some final pictures. We checked for pulses one final time on all three of them then we went back to the balcony, over the railing and down the ladder. Back in the courtyard we slinked silently to the hotel's back door.
As David described in detail how it felt when the blood gushed out of her neck, then watching the chopstick twitch and slow to a stop, he started to cry. I held his hand, he lowered his head and softly cried. I remembered looking down at the faintly lit girl's naked chest partly covered in blood and thought about the life she'd miss because of her parent's history. I said a silent prayer for her while we watched for her life come to an end. I think from start to finish she took less than 30 seconds, but her parents were both gone in less than 25 seconds, the part with the knife only took about two seconds each. David wept softly while I caressed his shoulders and arms, I cried too but he never saw.
I leaned in and kissed his forehead while he held his hands over his face and sobbed. As he wept with his face inches above the water our foreheads touched several times. "Poor kid," I whispered to him and kissed his head.
I bet the image of her blood soaked naked body would be with us for years to come. We took several photos of her from the foot of the bed so the flash wasn't visible outside, it showed her from the hips up, her tiny panties and her entire upper body with her head in a large puddle of blood. The blood soaked pillow beside her head. It was pretty much the same images we took of her parents, waist up but mom was clothed, he was only in his boxers.
For each photo he took I lifted up sheets to keep the flash from being seen outside. We had the chance to save copies of the photos for ourselves but neither of us wanted them, plus they were dangerous to get caught with.
We spent an unusual amount of time close together for the rest of our time off. We also went hiking in the mountains which was technically illegal. We made it to the top of North Franklin Mountain but had to park in the west side parking lot. They didn't want people on those mountains out of fear of unexploded ammunition since it had been used as a firing range since the Spanish American War, but not after Korea.
I was surprised to see the top of that mountain was literally bulldozed flat, there was some kind of solar powered radio transmitter up there too, but the view was fantastic. We couldn't see downtown El Paso or Juarez but we could see almost a hundred miles in every direction except north-south. I blew David while he stood leaned against the radio transmitter box thing on the mountain top.
We started the climb down at 1pm but didn't make it home until nearly 5pm. On the way down David told me he heard that El Paso had more privately owned tramways (cars hung on a cable that ran up a mountainside.) than any other city in the US.
One day Captain Johnson mentioned writing a report but since the job was voluntary and secret we decided it would violate the terms of the agreement we signed. The important part was the right people died and the right people got paid.
We stopped into the office four times during our 19 days off just to check on things in general. The captain called us into his office then locked his door. He showed us a large black and white photo that was very dark. We stared at it for a while then made out it was an image taken in Phnom Penh from the CIA camera across the street from Communist Party office. If you looked very closely we could see it was a shot of someone with a mustache and black rimmed glasses pulling the curtains shut, taken from across the street. The glasses made it hard to identify the guy but I remembered that position with both arms up pulling the curtains ends together. It looked like the shape of my face even though there was almost no detail. When I reached up high to grab the curtains it raised my shirt and the photo showed my belly button hole too. David pointed at it and said he thought he'd seen one like it before.
A chill ran down my spine as he slipped the photo back inside the envelope but had little to say. We'd already been paid regardless. I think he meant that photo to serve as a reminder that we're not always as careful as we thought we were. We shook hands and left out into the outer office. On the way out we heard the shredder run in his office, it just ate that photo.
The front desk officer asked if we toured Angkor Watt and David explained, "No, that wasn't included in that two night tour package. The day long trip from Saigon to Phnom Penh was 190 miles, but from the hotel to Angkor Watt was over 220 miles, an entire day on a tour bus. We didn't want to spend two days on a bus. Angkor was a huge temple complex, it's not just one destination. You could easily spend a couple weeks just in the Angkor district seeing temple ruins. If you could afford the price you could take a helicopter to Angkor instead of a bus on the highway. And just so you knew, you seldom went faster than 40mph on any highway in those countries except in a few areas." When asked why I explained, "Imagine a stretch of I-10 where people built businesses and homes, schools and factories, with driveways that intersected the actual highway. That's what the highways in those countries were like. We saw little kids riding bicycles along the pavement." Once you explained it like that then most people understood why distances on the highways in those countries was a big deal.
Over the months after our mission to Cambodia we talked about what we did and how it might affect our souls after we died. Neither of us felt particularly bad about offing Pol Pot, but both of us felt bad about what we did to his daughter. Sometimes we held hands and prayed for her soul and ours too and asked for forgiveness but we did it to help prevent future mass murder in Cambodia. No matter how much we talked about it the mental images of that naked girl in a puddle of her own blood, her face frozen with an expression of horror still flashed in my mind at least a few times a day. David said it would start to fade, give it a year.
Later on David suggested that drinking more wine would be the best treatment for the flashback images. I suggested wine, pizza, and more time on the treadmills, he agreed.
Contact the author: borischenaz gmail