State of Siege

to blush when you caught a glimpse of yourself in a powder blue beret and matching ascot.

When the UN indoctrination was done—“the gelding,” as his commanding officer quite accurately described it — the Australian contingent was spread among the eighty-six cantonment sites in Cambodia. Australia’s own Lieutenant General John M. Sanderson was force commander of the entire UNTAC operation, which lasted from March 1992 to September 1993.

The UNTAC mission was carefully designed to avoid armed conflict. UN soldiers weren’t supposed to shoot unless fired upon, and only then without escalating the hostilities. The deaths of any enlisted personnel were to be investigated by the local police, not by the military. Human rights were to be encouraged through education, not force. Apart from serving as a buffer, distributing food and offering health care were the PKO’s top priorities.

To Downer, being in the field seemed less like a military operation than a carnival. Come on, you warring or downtrodden Third World peoples. Get your bread here, your penicillin, your clean water. The circus feeling was enhanced by tents that were topped with colorful banners and local gawkers who weren’t sure what to make of it all. Though many of them took what was offered, they looked like they wished it would just go away. Violence was an expected and understood part of their daily lives. Outsiders were not.

There was so little to do in Cambodia that Colonel Ivan Georgiev, a high-ranking officer in the Bulgarian People’s Army, organized a prostitution ring. They were protected by officers of Pol Pot’s renegade National Army of Democratic Kampuchea, who needed foreign currency to buy arms and supplies and were paid 25 percent of the take. Georgiev ran the ring from tents erected behind his command post. Local girls came for what were supposed to be radio UNTAC language courses and stayed for an infusion of foreign currency. That was where Downer first met both Georgiev and Major Ishiro Sazanka. Georgiev said that the soldiers of Japan and Australia were his best customers, though the Japanese tended to get rough with the girls and had to be watched. “Polite sadists,” the Bulgarian had called them. Downer’s uncle Thomas, who had fought the Japanese as part of the 7th Australian Division in the Southwest Pacific, would have quarreled with that description. He didn’t find the Japanese at all polite.

Downer helped to recruit new “language students” for the tents, while Georgiev’s other aides found different ways of getting girls to work for them — including kidnapping. The Khmer Rouge helped gather new girls whenever possible. Except for this sideline, Downer found Cambodia a bore. The United Nations guidelines were too soft, too restrictive. As he’d learned growing up on the docks of Sydney, there was only one guideline that mattered. Did some son of a bitch deserve a bullet in the head? If he did, pull the trigger and go home. If he didn’t, what the hell were you doing there?

Downer took a last swallow of coffee and pushed the heavy mug back along the vinyl-covered card table. The coffee was good, black and bitter, the way he drank it in the field. It made him feel energized, ready to act. Maybe that wasn’t a good idea, here and now, where there was nothing to act against. But he liked the feeling anyway.

The Australian looked at the watch on his sun-darkened wrist. Where the hell were they?

The group was usually back by eight o’clock. How long did it take to make a videotape of something they’d videotaped six times already?

The answer was that it took as long as Captain Vandal needed it to take. Vandal was in charge of this phase of the operation. And if the French officer weren’t so efficient, none of them would be here. Vandal was the one who got them all into the country, had acquired the hardware, had supervised the recon, and would get them out of here so they could start phase two of the operation, which would be run by Georgiev.

Downer fished a graham cracker from an open box and snapped at it impatiently. The taste, the crispness, brought him back to his arms training in the outback. The unit lived on these things there.

He looked around the small, dark apartment as he chewed. His soft blue eyes moved from the kitchen on the right to the TV across the room to the front door. Vandal had rented this place over two years before. The Frenchman admitted that luxury was not a consideration. The one-room, first-floor flat was located on a crooked little street just off the Boulevard de la Bastille, not far from the large bureau de poste. Apart from the location, the only thing that was important was that they be on the first floor of the building for a window escape if necessary. As Vandal had promised when the five of them pooled their savings for this operation, he would spend extravagantly only on forged documents, surveillance gear, and weapons.

As the tall, powerfully built Downer brushed crumbs from his faded blue jeans, he glanced at the oversized duffel bags lying in a row between the TV and the window. He was baby-sitting the five lumpy bags filled with weapons. Vandal had done his job there. AK-47s, handguns, tear gas, grenades, a rocket launcher. All of them unmarked and untraceable, bought through Chinese arms dealers the Frenchman had met while the PKO was in Cambodia.

God bless the United Nations, Downer thought.

Tomorrow morning, shortly after dawn, the men would load the bags onto the truck they’d bought. Vandal and Downer would drop Sazanka, Georgiev, and Barone at the factory helipad and then time their departure so everyone could meet again later at the target.

The target, Downer thought. So ordinary yet so vital to the rest of the operation.

The Australian’s eyes returned to the table. There was a white ceramic bowl sitting beside the phone. The bowl was filled with black paste — burned diagrams and notes soaked in tap water. The notes contained everything from calculations about approximate tail winds and head winds at one thousand feet up at eight in the morning to traffic flow to the police presence on the Seine. Ashes could still be deciphered; wet ashes were useless.

Just one more stinking day of this, he told himself.

When the rest of the team returned, there’d be one more afternoon of studying videotapes, making sure they had everything covered for this phase of the operation. One more night of drawing maps for this part of the operation, then calculating flight times, bus schedules, street names, and the location of arms dealers in New York for the next phase. Just to make sure they’d memorized them all. And then there’d be one more dawn of burning everything they’d written so the police would never find it here or in the trash.

Downer’s eyes drifted across the room to the sleeping bags on the floor. They sat in front of a sofa, the only other piece of furniture in the room. There was a big window fan in the room’s only window, and it had been running constantly during this heat wave. Vandal assured him that the hundred-plus temperatures were good for the plan. The target was vented, not air-conditioned, and the men inside were going to be a little more sluggish than usual.

Not like us, Downer thought. He and his teammates had a goal.

Downer thought of the four other ex-soldiers who were involved in the project. He’d met them all in Phnom Penh, and each of them had a very different, very personal reason for being here.

A key rattled in the front door. Downer reached for his Type 64 silenced pistol, tucked in a holster hanging from the back of the wooden chair. He gently pushed the graham cracker box aside so he had a clear shot at the door. He remained seated. The only person other than Vandal who had a key was the superintendent. In the three times Downer had stayed at the apartment during the past year, the old man only came by when he was called — and sometimes not even then. If it were anyone else, they didn’t belong here, and they’d die. Downer half-hoped it was someone he didn’t know. He was in the mood to pull the trigger.

The door opened and Etienne Vandal walked in. His longish brown hair was slicked back and he was wearing sunglasses, a video camera carrying case slung casually over his left shoulder. He was followed by the bald, barrel- chested Georgiev, the short and swarthy Barone, and the tall, broad-shouldered Sazanka. All of the men were wearing touristy T-shirts and blue jeans. They also wore the same, flat expressions.

Sazanka shut the door. He shut it quietly, politely.

Downer sighed. He slipped the firearm back in its holster. “How’d it go?” the Australian asked. Downer’s voice was still rich with the tight gutturals of western New South Wales.

“Ewed ih gow?” Barone said, mimicking the Australian’s thick accent.

“Stop that,” Vandal told him.

“Yes, sir,” Barone replied. He threw the officer a casual salute and frowned at Downer.

Downer didn’t like Barone. The cocky little man had something none of the other men possessed: an attitude. He acted as though everyone were a potential enemy, even his allies. Barone also had a good ear. He’d worked as a custodian at the American embassy when he was a teenager and had lost most of his accent. The one thing that