Khmer Rouge End Game

Kidnapped by the feared one-legged Khmer Rouge guerrilla leader Ta Mok while visiting the ancient ruins at Angkor Wat, six foreigners find themselves unwilling pawns in a deadly game of international intrigue in the fractured political climate of present-day Cambodia--a country that in 1997 saw the "day of the grenades," a coup d'etat, and the show trial of mass murderer Pol Pot after three decades of civil upheaval.

This important "faction/fiction" work appears as Cambodia braces for scheduled elections in July of this year expected to legitimize the rule of coup strongman Hun Sen. -- Action, conflict, and bitter romance in this episodic historical novel center on the captives' ordeal and two attempts to rescue them: one by Australian mercenaries and the other by a CIA and FBI agent. The CIA agent is iron-willed Caron Stone, the comely daughter of a retired U.S. Ambassador. She is in Cambodia posing as a human rights worker.

The notorious "butcher" Ta Mok, one of the founding members of the Khmer Rouge and now a possible successor to the infamous Pol Pot, is military commander of the dwindling rebel forces at Anlong Veng. He captures the group as a bargaining chip in his negotiations with Cambodia's two rival co-prime ministers.

Art Kilmer, one of the kidnapped foreigners, is nicknamed "AK 47." He is a Professor of History at Yale University and in Cambodia to document the genocide perpetrated by Pol Pot during the brutal era of Khmer Rouge rule in the late 1970s that resulted in some two million dead.

Both rescue attempts fail. Five of the foreigners are executed. All but one are forced to confess to "crimes against the revolutionary movement." AK dies in a suicidal attempt to kill the guerrilla leader. Caron, after a brief romantic and military alliance with AK, finds herself the target of termination by the CIA. Despite being pregnant with AK's child and infected with the AIDS virus, she embarks on one final mission to kill Ta Mok and avenge the death of AK and the others.

Thus, fresh blood stains the killing fields of the 1970s in this expedition into the heart of today's Cambodian darkness--a journey that probes for meaning in the still glowing ashes of a brutal Maoist revolution and Holocaust.

Paul Ryder Ryan is a writer and journalist who lives in Cummington, Massachusetts. His previous book, "China Daily: Between the Lines," is described as a non-fiction novel. He has recently (1995-'96) conducted journalism training workshops in Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam for the Indochina Media Memorial Foundation under the Knight International Press Fellowship Program out of Washington, D.C. He spent two years (1994-'93) working in China as a "foreign expert." At that time, he was a foreign correspondent for the Pacific Rim News Service. A former Fulbright scholar to Japan (1988-'89) and a graduate of Harvard University, he has worked for The New York Times, the Boston Globe, and Reuters news agency. For several years, he was Editor of Oceanus magazine at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and also Executive Editor of The Drama Review at New York University.