State of Siege - Tom Clancy [2]
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