Impact by Douglas Preston

distant and shuffled back to the mine, backs bent, to refill the baskets. The rock pile in turn swarmed with emaciated children and old women, who split the rocks with small hammers and sorted through the pieces, searching for gems.
    The central crater was, quite evidently, the mine itself.
    In the valley above the mine, an area had been cleared in the fallen timber and a crude village erected, crooked wattle huts with thatched roofs standing in rows, the encampment enclosed by rolls of concertina wire lying on the ground. It was not unlike a concentration camp. Plumes of smoke rose from dozens of cooking fires. A pair of old tanks were parked at either end of the camp and soldiers carrying heavy weapons patrolled the perimeter of the valley. More soldiers kept the lines of miners moving, prodding the slow and weak with long, sharpened sticks—but always keeping their distance.
    Ford reached into his pack and slipped out a pair of binoculars to take a closer look. The crater leapt into view—a deep, vertical shaft, showing unmistakable evidence of having been created by a powerful meteoritic impact. He examined the line of miners; they were in hideous physical condition—hair falling out, ragged bodies covered with open sores, skin dark and shriveled, backs bowed, bones prominent. Many people were so eaten up by radiation poisoning—bald, toothless, and emaciated—that Ford couldn’t tell the men from the women. Even the soldiers guarding them looked listless and ill.
    “What do you see?” Khon whispered from behind.
    “Things. Terrible things.”
    Khon came crawling up with his own binocs. He stared for a long time, in silence.
    While they watched, one of the miners carrying ore staggered and fell, the basket spilling to the ground. He was small and slight, and, Ford guessed, no more than a teenager. A soldier dragged the boy out of the line and kicked him, trying to get him to rise. The boy struggled but was too weak. Finally the soldier placed a pistol against the boy’s head and fired. Nobody even so much as turned a head. The soldier waved over a donkey cart, the corpse was swung in, and Ford watched as the donkey was driven to the edge of the valley. There the body was dumped into a trench cut like a raw wound into the red soil of the rainforest—a mass grave.
    “You see that?” Khon said quietly.
    “Yes.”
    Ford glassed the soldiers on patrol and was shocked to see that most of them, too, looked like teenagers and some were clearly children.
    “Take a look up the valley,” murmured Khon, “where those big trees are still standing.”
    Ford swung the glasses up and immediately spied a wooden house tucked in amongst the trees at the head of the valley. Built in classic French colonial style, with a pitched tin roof, dormer windows, and walls of whitewashed boards and batten. The roof sloped down to a broad verandah, shaded by tall flowering heliconias in vivid orange and red. As he watched, he could see an old, birdlike man moving around the verandah, pacing back and forth, holding a drink in his fist. His hair was snow white, his back bowed almost to a hunchback position, but his face appeared unlined and alert. As the man paced, he was talking to two other men, making chopping gestures with his free hand. Teen soldiers with AK-47s guarded both sides of the house.
    “You see him?”
    Ford nodded.
    “I’m pretty sure that man is Brother Number Six.”
    “Brother Number Six?”
    “Pol Pot’s right-hand man. Rumors had it the bastard was controlling an area somewhere along the Thai-Cambodian border. Looks like we just found his little fiefdom.” Khon slipped his binoculars back into his pack. “Well, I guess that wraps it up.”
    Ford said nothing. He could feel Khon’s eyes on him.
    “Let’s take some pictures, roll videotape, get a GPS reading, and get the damn out of here.”
    Ford lowered his binoculars and did not respond.
    Suddenly, Khon frowned. He spied something in the weeds at his