by Adam Hall
‘That makes me very happy. Why are you calling again? Are you all right?’
‘Yes, but there’s something else you could do for me. Call Johnny Chen and ask him to meet you inside the High Commission building. Inside it. When he comes, ask him if he can fly me out.’
‘Where from?’
‘He knows.’
I didn’t want her to be seen with Chen in the open and I didn’t want her to know where I was. Whoever was bugging Chen could be tailing him too and I didn’t want her exposed.
‘All right,’ she said.
‘Tell him to see if he’s being watched. Tailed. If he is, tell him to lose them before he goes to your building. If he can’t lose them, he doesn’t go there.’
In a moment: ‘Is he in danger?’
‘No.’ Chen could handle whatever came up; that was the way he lived. ‘Finally, tell him that when he’s found the bug, I want it.’
‘The bug.’
‘When he finds it, let me have it.’
‘All right.’
Sound of a shot and I reacted. Somewhere on the far side of the street but quite loud, a heavy calibre.
I said: ‘That’s it for -‘
‘What was the bang?’
‘Car backfired.’
Short silence, then, ‘Shit.’ Didn’t believe me. ‘Look after yourself, Martin.’
I rang off at once in case there was more shooting. Someone out there was yelling his head off and there was another shot and he stopped. I’d have said it was just the life-style in this place; when I’d got here along the half-obliterated jungle track the first thing I’d seen were three burnt-out aircraft near the airstrip and a troop of Laotian soldiers guarding the mule-train coming in from the mountains and half a dozen ranking police officers and an army colonel, guns on their hips. In the street there’d been people with attaché cases chained to their wrists on their way to the refinery and more soldiers guarding a flat-bed cart leaving the refinery for the airstrip. Everyone looked tense except the local workers, and a lot of those were stoned out of their minds. In this heat I wouldn’t have thought it needed much to provoke some gunplay.
I’d been surprised at first to find a phone in the room here because it didn’t go with the rusty wash-basin and the burnt-out fan and the caked fly-papers and the peeling walls, but this was the only hotel I’d seen and this was where a lot of the business must be done, so they’d need telephones.
I tried calling Cheltenham but the girl on the switchboard told me it couldn’t be done, so I stripped off and lay on the bed under the mosquito net reeking of citronelle and waited for Chen to call and tried not to think that he might not do that. I didn’t know how long that bug had been there - it could have been for months, a routine narcotics operation by the Singapore police, or it could have been put there recently by people who’d decided to move in on Chen, and it’d be logical for them to stake out his place with surveillance. On the other hand we’d got into the van perfectly clean the night he’d taken me to the airport and flown me out, so it could be just the narcs.
They couldn’t have done the same thing at Cho’s place, but it was too late anyway because I was past the point of no return and in the end it was going to depend on karma, kismet, whatever the hell you wanted to call it, running with sweat, the bastards were after me, I could hear them, teeth like knives Phone ringing.
Woke me, I’d drifted off, yes, nightmare, are you surprised, for Christ’s sake, you didn’t see those dogs, thought they’d got me.
‘Yes?’
‘Jordan?’
‘Yes.’
‘Chen.’
18:00 on my watch; I’d slept for two hours after that bloody trek.
‘Where are you calling from?’
‘The British High Commission.’
‘You weren’t tailed there.’
‘No.’ By the way he said it, he was sure.
‘Did you find the bug?’
‘I haven’t had time to look. What do you want it for?’
‘In case I want to talk to Colonel Cho. Johnny, can you fly me out of here?’
Silence, thinking.
‘No. But hold it a minute.’ I heard the sound of paper scuffing on the line. The bed was hitting the wall again; one of the girl’s rooms, then, poor little bitch, one of them told me once that boredom’s the worst thing about it. ‘You there?’
‘Yes.’
‘There’s a guy named Tex Miller, a Yankee. He’s putting a Partenavia P.68 Victor down on that strip sometime around midnight. You got a pencil?’
‘Yes.’
‘The ID number’s NK6-75832. Tex is okay, talks a lot, but he’ll do whatever I want. He’ll get you as far as Nah Trang on the Vietnamese coast - they’re shipping his goods from the seaport. It’s a civil airfield and you can get a scheduled flight from there to Singapore, if that’s where you’re aiming for. Got that?’
Said yes.
‘If you don’t have the right papers, ask Tex to get you through - he can do that, they earn big from him. Okay?’
‘I’m grateful.’
‘Think nothing. Telling me about that fucking bug, you don’t know what you might be saving me from.’
I thought of asking him to tell Katie I’d be back in Singapore soon but didn’t. Never chance fate.
The whole village was blacked out except for a few chinks of light where the blinds didn’t meet. All I could see from the edge of the airstrip was the glint of metal as the soldiers moved in the moonlight, some of them carrying rifles. Cigarette smoke hung on the still night air, laced with marijuana.
I thought he was running late but that was because I hadn’t picked him out from among the stars: he was coming in with no lights on; there was just the sound of his twin engines gunning up for the approach and then a generator tripping in from somewhere near; then the strip lamps came on, only six of them, and half-hooded. His landing lights blazed suddenly a thousand feet from the ground and the plane’s shape began blotting out the stars as it passed against them. The wings yawed as he corrected the angle and he gunned up some more and then settled, throttling back, and as his lights threw a pathway down the strip I could see how rough it was, pitted and undulating. As the edge of the jungle was tit beyond it there were cries of alarm; it sounded like monkeys and parakeets, some night-birds.
By the time the P.68 had come to a halt it was surrounded by troops, and as Miller dropped to the ground a police captain flashed a light on him briefly and then asked for his papers. I waited for him in the half-dark, then stopped him as he came through the group.
‘Jordan.’
‘Who?’ He peered at me. ‘Oh. Yeah. C’mon over here, okay?’
Metal attaché case chained to his wrist, cold cash. He peered at me again as light from a window passed over us, and stopped suddenly. ‘Jordan, okay. You got some ID?’
I showed him my Thai papers and he held them to the thin ray of light, squinting, a short man, pot-bellied, red-haired, a pilot’s cap stuck on his head at an angle, a gun outlined under his bush shirt, his left hand loaded with rings: diamond, ruby, emerald, one with a snake sculpted from gold and topaz.
‘Okay, yeah. Johnny briefed me.’ He lit a cigarette and drew the smoke deep. ‘Jesus, that’s better, you can’t smoke up there.’ Gave me my papers back. ‘Let’s go in here, I got a little business to do first.’
Under the tube lights of the refinery he looked ready to drop, red-eyed, pouchy, his skin sallow, his hands shaky as he unlocked the wrist-chain and pushed it into his pocket.
‘Pakdee here?’ he called out.
‘He’s on his way, Tex.’
‘Well, Christ, I hope so. I’m down on time.’
Stink of ammonia in here. It was a small hangar, tin-roofed, with twenty or thirty girls working at the lab benches, five or six supervisors walking constantly down the aisles, two offices at the end, their doors closed.
‘You been in places like this?’
‘No.’
�
��They stink, right?’ Put a hand out. ‘I’m Tex Miller, I guess you know that. What’s your first name, Jordan?’
‘Martin. It’s good of you to offer to take me out.’
‘My pleasure, I guess I owe Johnny the ride.’ He was watching the girls. ‘This is Kuhn’s operation, the whole village, I mean it’s just one of them. He’ll pay around a couple of thousand bucks for a batch of raw opium out of the fields up there in the mountains and then they do the refining in this place and a good few others like it, spread around the Triangle. Jesus, look at those tits, big for a coolie girl.’ He dragged on his cigarette. She looked about sixteen. They all did. Sixteen and dull-eyed and half dead.
‘Then they ship the pure heroin out in kilo bags to Bangkok, where it’ll retail at around fourteen thousand, maybe around that figure, then it’ll go direct by air to the States or through the Mafia labs in Sicily and it’ll wholesale in the Big Apple and LA at around eighteen thousand, maybe twenty thousand before it’s cut with lactose, quinine, baby powder, strychnine, brickdust, you name it, going through a whole chain of dealers before it hits the street, where that original two thousand bucks’ worth of opium brings in around two million bucks as street scag.’ He turned as a man went past him. ‘Hey, where’s Pakdee, for Christ’s sake? I’m due out in three hours, goddam it, and I need some sleep.’
He turned back. ‘Course in Laos they have their local trade going too. They run a cigarette factory lab, turns out No. 4 heroin and sells under the brand name Double U-O Globe, hundred per cent pure, guaranteed, and you know what the logo is? Couple of fucking lions roaring at each other over a globe, kind of appropriate considering the competition around here. You wanna smoke, Marty? These are straight Camels.’
‘Not just now. Is that why the village is blacked out? The competition?’
Tardy that, partly the way things are run. Sure, you could have some competitor — Vang Heng or Tricky Lee or Mariko Shoda, people like that - you could have them send a couple of dive-bombers in here and wipe everything out, so they just don’t make things easy for them. Then there’s the official side, see, the Laotian army general running this operation for Kuhn greases the narcs division in the government to let the place alone, but just for the look of things they pretend it isn’t here, then the government can say they never knew what was going on. It’s big money, okay? Maybe three or four million bucks runs through this place every day, and that’s hey, Pakdee, for Christ’s sake! Take a minute, Marty, I’ll be right back.’
He was fifteen minutes and brought his attaché case back but didn’t bother to chain it to his wrist again. ‘Okay, they’ll be loading the stuff on right away.’
At the hotel he signed his name in the register, all his movements quick in spite of his fatigue. I had the feeling his time was short and he knew it.
The Asian at the desk spun the book around. ‘You wanna girl, Tex?’
‘You bet, make it a couple, is Kim here?’
‘I’ll have to see.’
‘Tell ‘em to hurry, I gotta get some sleep too. Okay, Marty, can you be down here again at three? That’s in’ - he checked his heavy gold watch - ‘two and a half hours, can you make it?’
Said I could.
We sat at the end of the strip and waited, nothing but moonlight.
‘So you ain’t in the trade, Marty?’
‘No.’
‘So what’re you doing in a place like this?’
‘I’m an agent.’
‘Shipping?’
‘Narcotics.’
If he’d been drinking he’d have choked.
‘You gotta be kidding.’ But he was close to reaching for his gun.
‘Just joking, yes.’
‘Well Jesus Kee-rist, that isn’t the kinda joke you make around here, you know that?’
‘British sense of humour.’
‘No wonder you lost the fuckin’ empire.’
A green light flashed a couple of times and the strip lamps came on and he gunned up and got the brakes off and the pressure came against the spine and we were airborne and the lamps went out below us.
‘Sorry, Tex.’
‘Huh? Oh. That’s okay. You just don’t understand the situation. You comfortable? Be there in a couple hours.’
‘Nah Trang.’
‘Right. In South ‘Nam.’
We went into a tight bank and the compass settled at 67 degrees. ‘What were those burnt-out planes doing down there, Tex?’
‘It’s a tricky strip, and some fliers are better than others. It doesn’t take much to burn us out if we get the touch-down wrong - if the trip needs extra fuel we shove a waterbed on board full of gasoline.’
‘That’s what this thing is?’
‘Right. You wanna smoke, you better go out there on the wing and do it.’
‘American sense of humour.’
‘Too-shay.’
‘I heard some shots down there, earlier. What was happening?’
‘Well, sometimes one o’ the coolies or the freight-handlers or the mule-drivers gets on a bummer - you know, has a bad trip? - and they can just take off and go crazy all over everybody, so the troops or the cops shoot ‘em down, because we can’t have that kinda thing around a place like that, you know, everyone’s so nervous and it could start something. Or I guess it could’ve been some dealer on the cheat and the supplier wouldn’t stand for it or the buyer got pissed off, you know - it isn’t too different from the Wild West with the gold rush on, except the money that changes hands in the Triangle is about a thousand - make that a million - times as much on any given day. It’s a jungle, see. You think that’s a jungle down there? It’s just a daisyfield.’
We levelled off at ten thousand feet with the heading southeast.
‘How long do you plan to stay in the trade?’
I was talking partly to keep him awake. He’d looked dog-tired when he’d brought this plane in three hours ago and he couldn’t have had more than two hours’ sleep, given thirty minutes to bring the wall down, three in a bed. We were flying a petrol tank and the fumes were no help.
‘How long do I what?’
‘Plan to keep working?’
‘Give it another couple of years, maybe around that. By then I’ll have stacked up three or four million bucks an’ I guess I’ll be ready for Acapulco or Monte-Carlo for a while, ease off a little.’
‘Is there much rivalry between you actual pilots?’
‘Not usually. Get personal feuds, sometimes, but we don’t often try and cheat each other out of trips.’
‘You wouldn’t bug each other, say.’
‘How’s that again?’
‘You wouldn’t slip a bug into a rival’s communications.’
‘Guess not. We all kinda know who’s goin’ where, an’ we keep our asses clean. Bugs? Nope, I never heard of that.’
Noted.
We came down from our ceiling at 05:14 over South Vietnam and called up the tower in Nah Trang. There was cloud cover across the coast, topped with a gilding of light from the east, and we dropped through it into the dark again.
‘Johnny said you’d get me through the barriers, is that right?’
‘Sure. Don’t show your Thai papers, okay? Gets too political.’
He left me on the terminal side of the tarmac at 05:52 with a wind rattling the shutters on the cafeteria and the heads of the palm trees rustling, shining under the floodlights.
‘You want another ride, Marty, check with Chen. I’m always around.’
‘I’m much obliged. And I hope you make it.’
‘Make what?’
‘Two more years.’
He gave a shrug and a wave and left me, a cloud of smoke across his shoulder as he walked away.
I’d need some secure transport when I landed in Singapore so I went to the line of telephones and called the British High Commission but she wasn’t there, Katie. Then I gave I the operator the routing code for Cheltenham but the phone went on ringing and I hung up at twenty.<
br />
If it’s any help, old boy, I’m marking hard at this end and I’m in constant signals with people in London and the field.
All right, but who the hell were the ‘people in London’ and who were his contacts in the field and why couldn’t he get that bloody phone manned near the mast in Cheltenham, for God’s sake, because I needed direction and I needed it now - as well as a safe-house in Singapore because there was nowhere else I could use as a base that’d let me keep the mission running, and the police could have identified Veneker by this time and if it went into the news media the Shoda team would be on the watch for me again and Kishnar would close in. Chen’s place was hazardous now because we weren’t certain that Sayako had bugged it and if it were someone else they could have mounted surveillance on it as soon as they’d found out the bug had died.
There was a Malaysian Airline flight out of Nah Trang at 16:58 and I booked on it and tried Cheltenham five times while I was waiting and drew blank again. That bloody man was as much use to me as a dead duck.
We were ten minutes late on take-off but landed early on a tail wind at 19:47, the moon behind clouds and puddles on the tarmac after rain, the air humid and scented with blossoms. I used my Thai papers and they didn’t hold me up with any questions and I used a side exit marked Airport Personnel Only and found myself in an alleyway and came round to the rear of the taxi station and began looking for cover, man in a raincoat stepping from a doorway ‘Excuse me.’
Not quite sure of me in the pilot’s cap and sunglasses. Then he nodded.
‘Good flight?’
Pepperidge.
‘Yes. What-‘
‘First thing is to get you off the street, come on.’
He took me to a car with smoked windows and diplomatic plates, Katie at the wheel.
Style, give him that.
CHAPTER 22
THE CLINIC
‘What did you try?’
‘I tried to overdose on Valium.’ Thin, pale, hollow-eyed, still young, thirty-odd. ‘But you can take a whole bottle of that stuff and it won’t work for you.’
‘That was the last time?’
Two male nurses zeroed in on a man going towards the door and got hold of him gently.
