by Adam Hall
I held her until in a minute she straightened up; her eyes were wet and she lifted a cupped hand, tilting her head, ‘Oh bugger, can you help me? Bloody contacts, they always float loose when I cry.’
We found it in the palm of her hand and she got it back deftly on the tip of her finger, and I wondered how much practice she’d had, how often she’d cried, because of Stephen.
She looked at me steadily again. ‘Why weren’t you on board?’
I didn’t answer. There was a lot to work out.
‘You do know it crashed, I suppose?’
‘Yes.’
It had been on the radio an hour ago. No survivors.
‘My God, it’s a miracle. I mean’ - she brushed the air helplessly - ‘I was sitting there in my office today for about half an hour - for exactly half an hour, because I remember looking at the clock, sitting there knowing you were dead.’
I didn’t know if the timing was accurate, because I didn’t know when she’d heard the news of the crash. But I wanted to.
‘When did you hear about it?’
‘About an hour ago. They said you’d phoned -‘
‘No. When did you hear it had crashed?’
She looked confused. ‘About - I’m not sure - soon after noon, I think.’
‘And when did you hear I was still alive?’
‘I told you - an hour ago. Why?’
‘And how did you know that?’
She was watching me with her eyes narrowing. ‘They phoned me. The people here.’
One of the staff came down the stairs, a Thai girl, loaded with files, dropping a pencil. I picked it up.
‘Thank you. Are you being helped?’
‘Yes,’ Katie said. Tip from the British High Commission.’
When the girl had gone she said, ‘There’s a little office here where we can talk.’
‘No, let’s go up there,’ I told her. There was a gallery on the floor above, overlooking the entrance and the staircase. Rooms, even small rooms, in embassies - even the embassies on friendly territory - are notorious for being bugged. We went up the stairs together.
Her timing was probably accurate, then, because as soon as I’d heard the news of the crash I’d phoned the Thai Embassy, because Lafarge was dead and my access was cut off, but there was a chance I could rescue just a thread.
‘Why did the people here phone you?’ I asked her.
She looked surprised. ‘Because you were on the passenger list.’
There were windows along the gallery, facing the buildings on the other side of the street. The strong afternoon light streamed in, throwing thick shadows across the carpeting, glowing on some crimson leather-bound books. I sat clear of the window.
‘How did you know I was on the passenger list?’
She pulled her soft briefcase closer to her on her lap, hesitating before she spoke, but not because she didn’t know what to say, I sensed, but half-deciding not to answer at all. ‘Whenever there’s a transport accident,’ she said deliberately, ‘we always check on the passengers, in case there’s a British national involved, so that we can help relatives. I think we do quite a good job, at the High Commission, looking after our people.’
It was very quiet here, and motes of dust floated in the sunshine; there were the distant sounds of a telephone in someone’s office; Thai voices, muted; quick footsteps across marble. I supposed most people were at lunch at this hour.
‘Why did this embassy call the High Commission to say I wasn’t on Flight 306?’
She said carefully, ‘They’re friendly to us. Thailand is an ally of the West.’ Her eyes were still narrowed, and I didn’t think it was anything to do with the contact lenses.
‘How did they know I hadn’t gone on board?’
I knew, but I wanted to know if she did.
‘They said you’d phoned them, to -‘
‘When?’
‘A few minutes after the news came on the radio.’
‘Did they tell you why I phoned them?’
‘They said you were going to be here.’
‘Who spoke to you on the phone?’
‘I don’t know. Or I’d tell you. It’s odd,’ she said, looking away, ‘it’s the first time someone hasn’t trusted me. It makes me feel rather ,.. sordid.’
I realised I was aware of totally irrelevant things: the soft arch of her neck as she sat with her head down, the sharp outline of her nipples under the tan cotton shirt, her stillness.
‘How long,’ I asked her, ‘have you known Chen?’
She looked up. ‘Who?’
‘Johnny Chen.’
‘Oh. I don’t know. I think about three years. Three or four years. Why? Didn’t you find him helpful?’
‘Not terribly. He suggested I should take Flight 306.’
There’d been footsteps and they were coming closer along the gallery. It was one of the staff, all white blouse and navy blue skirt and heavy glasses. ‘Mr. Jordan? Excuse me for disturbing you. It’s Thai International Airlines on the telephone.’
Tell them I’ll ring them back.’
‘They said it was urgent, Mr. Jordan.’
I’d been expecting a call. I said to Katie, ‘D’you mind?’
‘You want me to wait for you?’
‘If you’ve the time.’
‘All right.’
In the girl’s office I told the man on the phone that I’d nothing to add; I’d done all I could to warn the captain, and all I knew about the voice on the paging-phone was that it had been a young Asian woman’s, possibly Japanese.
‘Did she mention what kind of accident might happen, Mr. Jordan?’
‘Would happen. Would. As I told the captain and your airport officers.’
‘You must understand, Mr. Jordan, that we have to do everything possible to trace that caller. We need to establish responsibility. This is a major disaster for us.’
So forth, and understandable. But it brought back the scalding onrush of guilt I’d felt when I’d listened to the radio in Al’s bar, knowing then that I should have forced them to hold that plane and search it.
I told the man, yes, he could send someone round here to talk to me, but I might be leaving soon. No, I didn’t know if I’d be available as a witness at the enquiry.
Katie was sitting just where I’d left her, but hunched on the cushioned window-seat, her long legs drawn up and her arms round her knees.
‘Thank you for waiting.’
She didn’t answer, glancing across my eyes, that was all.
‘They don’t know anything new,’ I said, and took one of the Louis chairs.
‘Johnny Chen,’ she said in a moment, ‘is a drug transporter. Not a drug-runner. There’s a difference. But even so, I can imagine how you’re feeling. It’s the second time you’ve escaped death in a matter of days, so you can’t trust anyone. I can vouch for Chen, but what’s the good of my word, if you don’t trust me?’
‘It’s nothing personal.’
She swung her head and looked at me. ‘Isn’t it? Martin, you can’t be DI6, or we’d have been asked to help you. But what - ?’ and she stopped right there, looking away again.
‘Did Chen tell you I might take that flight?’
‘No. Why should he?’ She came unhunched and put her feet on the floor and sat hugging her briefcase, her shoulders forward, protecting herself. ‘Martin, do you think they were trying to kill you again?’
‘No. They wouldn’t need to blow up a plane-load of people just to get at me. They’ll come for me on the street.’
She leaned nearer me, prepared to meet my eyes again after the anger. ‘I wish you weren’t so bloody matter-of-fact about it. I also wish -‘ but she had the habit of leaving things unsaid.
Footsteps again, and I looked across at the staircase. This time it was Rattakul, the Thai security officer I’d been here to see.
‘Mr. Jordan.’ He stopped short, and I went over to him. ‘Your request has been approved.’
‘When c
an I leave?’
‘Immediately.’
‘Give me two minutes.’
‘I’ll be down there in the hall.’
I went back to Katie, and found her with the briefcase open. ‘This came for you, Martin. From Cheltenham.’
Long manila envelope, thick; diplomatic bag frankings. The only thing I could imagine Pepperidge sending me was a breakdown on the Thai Security personnel, which was why he’d sent it to the High Commission instead of here.
He trusted her that much?
I took it from her. ‘I’m not sure,’ I said, ‘when I’ll be back.’
‘Where are you -‘ She left it, looking down, zipping her briefcase shut.
I went down and found Rattakul waiting for me.
CHAPTER 9
ASH
It was difficult to see clearly, with the gas mask on. Who would warn me? Voiced were muted: there were no echoes here.
Most of them spoke in Thai, a few in American English.
Who would warn me?
It kept repeating itself in my mind, but there was no answer yet. It was important for me to know, but apart from that, what I’d missed was now being brought home to me.
Another yellow plastic bag was zipped shut and taken away.
We were north of Chathaburi, in deep jungle. A light breeze was blowing, taking the fumes away to the east. Upwind we could take our masks off and exchange information, but they had to be worn in the vicinity of the wreckage itself. Rattakul, the Thai intelligence officer who’d brought me out here, said it was raw opium burning, though God knew what opium was doing on a flight from Singapore to Bangkok.
There was mess wherever I looked: smashed bulkheads, seats, torn panels, windows, and lengths of white wire, thousands of lengths, miles of it, buried or half-buried in the churned, scorched earth of the jungle. Some of the bits and pieces were painted with yellow-green inhibitor that the fire hadn’t reached, and had serial numbers on them; when you pulled just one piece of wire you’d unearth a tiny electronic component, a miniature junction or relay or fuse. I didn’t pull at any wire, I’d just seen one of the wreckage analysis team doing it. I was here to hunt inside the unburnt forward section.
Flight 306 had come down windmilling, someone told me, cutting a swathe through the heads of the palm trees and the tropical undergrowth like a spinning scythe, and then the rear section had broken away and taken fire and was still smouldering, sending a whitish stream of smoke into the emerald green undergrowth, eastwards on the breeze. The choppers had come down in the clearing to the west, upwind of the wreck; there’d been five of them here already when our own had brought us in more than an hour ago - two Red Cross, a military and two civilian machines. Work had been delayed because of the fumes: they’d sent one of the military aircraft up again to fetch the gas masks.
A young rescue worker, with no one to rescue, said there was a tiger half a mile to the east: he’d seen it as the chopper had come down. ‘If there’s a tiger there,” the American analyst had said, ‘then he’s stoned out of his mind.’
Another yellow bag was zipped shut and lifted by two men; one of them let his end slip from his hands and drop; he got it up again and they trudged off through the mess of torn earth and leaves and ash and soot, their boots tripping on the webs of white wire everywhere.
Who would warn me? I should have been in one of these yellow plastic bags now, but for the voice on the paging phone this morning. Who was she? At a guess, she must belong to whatever group had brought down Flight 306. It had been a strictly clandestine action, and anyone outside the group wouldn’t have known what they were going to do.
There will be no survivors.
Even with the gas masks we couldn’t shut out the bittersweet smell of cremated flesh; it was heavy on the air before we put the masks on, and got trapped inside. Sweat was running on me, stinging and itching under the hospital dressings, and my left wrist burned. I didn’t know if there was anyone here, among these twenty or thirty men, who’d been sent to finish me off somehow; I wasn’t in good shape and it worried me. But I couldn’t have stayed away: the death of Lafarge had cut off the access I’d hoped to gain, and if there were a new thread to follow I’d find it here.
At the end of an hour I’d covered the first row of seats in the forward section, looking carefully at the debris for the body I was looking for. It was going to take time because the explosion - the American analyst had said yes, there’d been an explosion first - and the windmilling action and the final impact had turned the inside of the plane into a maelstrom, and the fire had smothered everything in ash and silver-grey soot. You didn’t expect to find people still sitting in orderly rows: the cabin was tilted almost upside-down in the thick vegetation. It was worse in the rear section, where they were hunting for the black box, because of the fire.
Rattakul had presented his credentials to the chief of security here and got me cleared, and now he was covering me, watching everything as the rescue team worked alongside, their movements slow and their gloved hands gentle. There was no hurry now, and this was sacred ground.
I took a break. ‘Find out, will you,’ I asked Rattakul, ‘who everyone is. I’d like to know.’
It was partly to get rid of him for a bit; he haunted me. But it would also be useful to know if there was anyone here who couldn’t be accounted for; he’d have the authority to question them.
A chopper was taking off from the clearing, and the turbulence from its rotors stirred the smoke, swirling it in a vortex, and we put our masks on again. Silence came back when the machine had gone, an eerie silence disturbed by sounds muted by the echoeless jungle: men coughing inside their masks; the clink of metal as someone used a fire-axe to clear the debris; the cackling of a monkey high in the tropical vines.
Rattakul came back in half an hour. ‘The Minister of Civil Aviation is here, and the chief of the National Transportation Safety Board, also the president of the airline. The rest are their staffs, the Red Cross workers, the rescue teams and the wreckage analysts.’ He watched me wiping out the inside of the mask. ‘I’ve asked all of them for their identity cards, all of them.’
‘Thank you.’ He was short, compact, impeccably dressed in the ubiquitous khaki tunic and slacks, and had the eyes of a man I’d rather count a friend than an enemy. ‘Whenever a chopper arrives, check it out too, will you?’
I went back into the wreckage, helping one of the rescue team clear the debris from the seat area. At some time after the jet had come down the wind must have changed, because the whole of the front section was smothered under a pall of ash and soot, and as we picked gently at the shapes still hanging from the seat-belts or lying huddled or spreadeagled among the jungle leaves, we unearthed bright colours suddenly, the red of a child’s T-shirt, the brash gilded cover of a paperback, the stripes of a silk tie. Sometimes - often, during the next hour - the rescue workers would stop and put their gloved hands together in brief prayer; one of them, working alongside me, just stopped moving and crouched there in the mess of soot and began shaking, and when I touched him he broke down completely and I led him away and left him with someone.
Then Rattakul came over, masked and beckoning, and I followed him through the swathe of vines, where men were working with machetes to clear them. When we could take off our masks Rattakul took me to talk to the American analyst, who was crouched over some kind of mess: that was all there was here, an assortment of different kinds of mess.
‘Hi. It was a bomb.’ He prodded fragments and pointed to things, one of them a man’s head. ‘He blew himself apart with it. Look at this, here’s the central source of the blast, see these panels? His body’s over there, no clothes on it, blew them away. No identification.’
I was tidal-breathing; we all were; in the past hours the reek of death had been growing stronger. ‘What nationality would you say he was?’
‘For me that’s not so easy.’ He looked up at Rattakul. ‘I guess you’d have a closer idea.’
‘
I would say Burmese.’ He crouched with us, narrowing his eyes as he looked at the head, the face; then he looked away and stood up.
‘Why’s it so undamaged?’ I asked the American.
‘It was the way the blast went, mostly into his body before it took off through those panels. His head was forced upwards and back from under the chin - see here, and this flap of skin.’
‘Why would a Burmese want to blow up this plane?’
‘Be a drug connection, I guess, not political. The opium should’ve been unshipped in Singapore, but maybe there was a check in progress, so they had to ferry it back.’ He gave a shrug. ‘Listen, most major crime in this area is drug-connected, and there’s intense rivalry.’
I went back to the forward section and started work again. The thing was, how had anyone got a bomb past one of ‘the most sophisticated security systems in the world’? It could have been sheet plastic, pressure-detonated.
In the heat of the mid-afternoon the mosquitoes came in, and the Red Cross people handed out citronelle. Later they brought sandwiches and coffee, and we sat on the cool fibrous earth clear of the wreckage to take a break. A light plane was circling, with big red letters on it: TV-2 Bangkok, banking sharply to get the camera angles it wanted. Choppers were leaving regularly now, returning regularly, taking the bodies out and bringing in supplies - parka jackets, torches, tools. Every time a machine landed, Rattakul went across to it as soon as the rotor began slowing; then he came back to tell me who had arrived. Four priests were now among us, a Catholic and three Buddhists in saffron robes. Incense blended with the other smell, the thick, overall, inescapable smell; the wind had died and the freight had burned out under the fire foam; the air was still and sounds seemed louder, and we spoke even more quietly.
Towards dusk they found the black box and brought it clear of the mess. It looked intact; it had been in the tail section but was fireproof. The American carried it to his chopper, tenderly; later he’d listen to the voices that had been silenced here among the trees as the big jet had come whirling through them from the sky, mortally crippled and carrying only the dying. It was easy to believe, as dusk turned to dark, that the spirits of the departed were stealing through the shadows thrown by the floodlights the rescue team had rigged - because we were tired now, and the stress of what we were doing had soaked us in our sweat; we itched all over because of that and the mosquitoes. Things had got worse, progressively, because the more ash and soot and debris we removed from the mess, the more we discovered of people, their faces, hands, feet, the colours of their clothes, the things that had belonged to them that had been so important, a nun’s rosary, jade Buddhas with the price still on, a tennis racket -Kangaroo King.
