by Ed Kovacs
His dive computer read 18:04, so he needed to stall. “Somebody will have to go in with me. One statue weighs too much to lift by myself. It may take all three of us.”
Kraus looked skeptical. “You swim Sergeant?”
“Very good.”
“You go in with him.” Kraus lit a cigarette as he stood at the edge of the pool holding the mini-Uzi.
18:05. “You may want to take off some of those clothes before you go in,” Sky offered to Tin Oo. Wilder slowly removed his shoes, but left the rest of his clothes on, except for his vest. He took it off, turned it inside out and showed the blood chit to Tin Oo. “A gift to you, Sergeant.”
Tin Oo read the Burmese script on the chit, seemed intrigued, then looked to Sky.
“What’s that?” Kraus showed mild curiosity.
“The biggest label you’ve ever seen. It says ‘Made in China,’” joked Wilder.
Tin Oo folded the vest and tossed it to the floor without showing further interest. But Sky knew he had the man's attention. One hundred thousand American dollars paid in gold if he delivered him safely to Thailand was a King's ransom to a lowly sergeant. For that kind of money, Wilder thought the man just might desert and kill Kraus.
“I’ve got dive lights right here.” He fitted the hands-free light onto the sergeant’s head, taking his time. He found a bag and instructed the pudgy man to tie it around his waist.
18:07. Sky sat at the edge of the pool. He could reach the knife. Sgt. Tin Oo, stripped down to skivvies, had his Galil leaning against the wall. Wilder picked up the two masks. “You know how to use this?” Sky rinsed his mask in the water, then spit in it, rubbing the spittle around the inside of the lens. He gestured for the sergeant to do the same.
18:08. Trying to sound over-anxious, Sky said, “I’ll go in first.”
Kraus pointed the mini-Uzi at his head. “Let the Sergeant go in first. Bring me up a gold dagger, sarge.”
Tin Oo flopped into the water like a seal. “How far down?” he asked?
“Can you hold your breath for one minute?”
“Very easy.”
“That might be enough.” The chunky soldier took a breath and slid under. Sky considered making a move for the knife.
“If he doesn’t find anything, I’d hate to think of what he’s gonna do to you with that machete. And that’s after I get through with you.”
“I’m not bluffing about the gold. I know where it is in the underground cave system. I’ll make you fabulously wealthy, but I want to walk out of here alive and well.”
“You mean it’s not right here under the false floor?”
“If it was, you’d just scoop it up and kill me.” Sky shook his head. “No, I have to scuba in to get to it. Anyway, you don’t really want to share it with fatty and his goons, do you? Kill him and his men, you keep the gold, I walk away. Deal?”
Tin Oo shot to the surface gasping. He took several deep breaths and didn’t look happy. “No gold. I see no gold!”
“You didn’t go deep enough.” Sky glanced at his wrist computer.
The sergeant yelled, “You show me! Right now!”
Sky looked to Kraus. “Well?”
“I think you’re full of bullcrap, but then, I’m not a very trusting soul. Still, on the one-percent chance you just told me the truth, I’ll put the ball in your court. Let’s see how you do.” With that, Kraus planted his foot into the well of Wilder’s back and rocketed him into the water, giving him an opportunity to kill the sergeant.
Sky recovered quickly and moved to the edge of the pool next to where Kraus stood. The dive knife was inches from his left hand; Kraus’ foot maybe ten inches from his right. The dive computer read 18:10 as he looked up to Kraus. “Be prepared to see something that’s totally hot.”
Wilder felt the first rush of hot bubbly water race up his legs.
“Oh!” exclaimed Tin Oo, looking down.
In the moment Kraus shifted his eyes over to Tin Oo, Sky grabbed the back of Kraus’ heel and yanked hard while reaching for the dive knife with his other hand. Kraus landed hard, painfully cracking his hip bone. He squeezed off a burst as he fell, the first rounds missing Sky by less than an inch, but one of them tore into Tin Oo’s shoulder, and the sergeant stumbled backward in the water.
###
On the front porch, a dozing soldier was startled awake by the sound of gunshots, then saw three young hill tribe girls standing over him. He was further startled as one of them plunged a tent stake into his heart. Then he didn’t see anything, ever again. The tallest girl grabbed his rifle in a way suggesting she knew how to use it.
###
As Sky struggled with one hand to get the knife free from the hard plastic sheath, he tried to pull Kraus into the water with his other hand. Bleeding heavily, Tin Oo grabbed Sky from behind and pulled, and they all three fell back into the steaming heat. They flailed for a grotesque moment, Tin Oo screaming as he tried to choke Sky, Kraus firing blindly with the mini-Uzi. Then the knife came free and the blade sliced into the sergeant’s heart.
Kraus bellowed a bloodcurdling cry, Sky broke free screaming as he hurled himself out of the water, which soon flowed red with boiling blood. A slight scald radiated his flesh, especially his hands, but the long pants, shirt and socks had given him an extra moment of protection. He grabbed Tin Oo’s Galil and wheeled: the sergeant floated wearing his death mask as a whimpering Kraus started to pull himself up over the side. Sky swung the rifle and the buttstock smashed his temple, sending Kraus back into the roiling cauldron, where his limbs curled up like live shrimp tossed into a hot pot.
“Don’t get steamed on account of me, guys.”
Footsteps in the living room. Sky wheeled with the rifle toward a Burmese soldier at the door, but it wasn’t his shot that brought the man down. Then the three hill tribe girls cautiously entered. The tall girl with the rifle waved at Sky and smiled big.
He gestured for the girls to follow him and saw the dead sentry on the front porch. The youngest girl held up two fingers and pointed to the back of the house. He ran to the back door and saw two approaching DDSI troops, no more than ten meters away. He quickly pumped two rounds into each soldier. Sky knew he should take no satisfaction from the killing. Vengeance may be sweet, but that didn’t make it right. Still, he knew what these men had done to the women and children of Zou’s village, and no doubt countless others. He would lose no sleep over having killed them.
###
At the camp as dusk set in, Sky rubbed burn ointment over his scalded hands. The girls watched as he set up the burst transmission radio. Then a branch broke, startling them. Sky picked up the Galil assault rifle and turned to face a group of smiling jungle fighters who appeared out of the mists. They all wore cheap jade triangle pendants around their necks. Sky lowered his gun and Dang stepped forward, squinting, with Lien Zou.
“Khun Dang... I thought you’d never get here.”
“I come very fast,” Dang protested, squinting.
“Good to see you. All of you.”
Unbeknownst to Diana, Sky had sent Dang away to hire Lein Zou’s men as a temporary private security force. It wasn’t that he hadn’t trusted Diana’s judgment, he simply trusted his own more. Wilder gave the men a briefing of recent events.
“We have to mount a rescue-op of Diana before Forte gets her out of the area. And I want to secure the safety of these Lahu girls.”
“One of my men, a widower, is Lahu. Perhaps he would like to take these girls as his wives,” suggested Zou.
Polygamy being a way of life for many hill tribes, Zou’s fighter, himself only seventeen, eagerly asked the girls for their hands in marriage. The union would be a good addition for the village, but the choice was up to the ladies: job training in Thailand vs. a rag-tag village in the wild and woolly Shan hills. It took only a moment for them to decide, and they accepted the offer of marriage. For many, the familiarity of hardship will always win out over a leap into the unknown.
Sky gift
ed the newlyweds and the village with the remaining mules and expedition gear he no longer needed. Released from combat, the groom set off immediately with his new brides and the mules for the long trek to Zou's village.
Sky handed Zou the pendant he’d ripped from Sgt. Tin Oo, the pendant that had belonged to Zou’s wife, Nang Saeng. “Ready for some payback?”
After checking the pendant, Zou grew excited and held it up as he shouted to his men in Tai-Yai. Now it was personal. Zou and his men stood primed for a fight.
The digital radio, ammo and other key essentials were carried by Zou’s men to the Burmese army truck sitting behind the curious Edwardian home built over a deadly hot springs in the misty valley, a kilometer away. Sky, Dang, Zou and the rest all clambered aboard the two-and-a-half ton truck. Three boys sat on the front bumper. They were the best trackers, and under the moonlight it would be easy to follow the fresh truck tracks on the dirt roads to wherever Diana had been taken. What awaited them, they would worry about when they got there.
CHAPTER 24
Captain Moe’s DDSI trucks, the jeep, and other military vehicles sat parked in a clearing adjacent to a crude jungle compound on the bank of a fast-flowing stream, pure water being essential for the making of high grade heroin.
The main lab had a tin roof, and diesel generators provided the electricity. The lab was also equipped to manufacture methamphetamine, but it being May, 'twas the season for China White. Shan State’s opium growers had mostly sold their raw opium to middlemen by now, who used mule caravans to carry the bulky cargo to small towns. A simple refinement process utilizing ammonia, water, and lime fertilizer converted the raw opium pulp to morphine bricks and eliminated almost ninety percent of the weight.
A shipment of such bricks had arrived at this clandestine mountain lab within twelve hours of Simon Forte’s placement of a one hundred kilo rush order. The shelf life of heroin is about six months, so Captain Moe would not have that much stock on hand, in fact, he would never have that much on hand, it was a large amount and must be made to order, an allotment his ethnic Chinese jungle chemists had just filled. The chemists worked around-the-clock to complete the complicated four-step process to transmute the morphine into Number Four, the Mercedes-Benz of junk.
Forte’s clout was such that he could go to the source and bypass the traditional smuggling routes through China’s Fujian Province, which was known as “The Sicily of China.” He also bypassed the routes through the Burmese ports of Tavoy or Mergui. Forte privately mocked the Chinese gangs, known as triads, and their overblown reputations. The London chapter of a triad, for instance, was not nearly as beholding to the Hong Kong “home office” as the movies would have you believe. Their secrecy, nomenclature and brutal acts succeed in instilling fear, but he found they operated in a loose, ad-hoc manner without strong centralized leadership. And strong central leadership was exactly what Forte brought to his organization.
“I love killing two birds with one stone,” Forte remarked as he toasted Diana and Captain Moe with a nice Bordeaux, which had been poured by Daniel into exquisite crystal goblets. Rene waved mosquito coil smoke away from her face as they all sat in a thatched hut. Forte had placed his dope request with the Rangoon junta as soon as the satellite tracking indicated Diana’s position had settled in the Shan hills. The generals operated many drug labs, most located closer to China and the smuggled supplies of acetic anhydrite, a key chemical in the refining process. This lab closer to Thailand was relatively new, and, it turned out, only a one-hour truck ride from the third tablet site.
“Rene, you’re not drinking.”
The flickering, generator-powered overhead lighting seemed to show Rene stewing, as if she felt threatened by Diana’s potential return to Simon’s fold. “I’ll drink with you in Bangkok, Simon. I look forward to a night in our suite at the Oriental.”
“Yes I know, darling,” Forte sighed. “Jungle life doesn’t suit you. Diana, on the other hand, seems to have adapted rather well.”
Diana sipped the delicious wine, showing an inscrutable smile. She raised her glass in salute. “You taught me to adapt a long time ago, Simon.”
Rene scowled, as if saying, You're dead, bitch. Tonight.
###
Diana Hunt felt certain a move would present itself, and understood without question she must kill or be killed. She met Rene Bailey's bloodlust glare with a completely neutral expression.
“Indeed, I did,” said Forte. “But we parted company and you immersed yourself into remote viewing. I’ve heard impressive reports about you over the years. My own viewers weren’t able to get any sense of Wilder’s location. They couldn’t even tell me which continent he was on.”
“I blocked your viewers,” she said perfunctorily.
“Really.” The notion seemed to intrigue him. He held his goblet up and Pratt hurried over to top it off. “So since you’re not MAHG, you must be part of Klaymen’s WOR,” he stated, closely watching her reaction.
She smirked. “The so-called Warriors of the Rose? Hardly.”
“Klaymen had been expanding his secret cabal,” said Forte, underplaying his interest. “A moralistic do-gooder, he gathered those of the same ilk to him. You know the type: true believers who soon adopt an ‘ends justify the means’ strategy to accomplish what they think is a greater good. Believe me, there was plenty of blood on Klaymen’s hands.”
“I wouldn’t know. Once in a while he paid me under the table to RV some things. I did it because I needed the money.” This wasn’t true, but she hoped to sell him on the idea that she could be bought. “After his son was killed in that plane crash, he hired me to protect Wilder. Said he needed somebody outside his unit. I'm here because Klaymen gave me two-hundred thousand dollars in cash. If I’m part of some underground brotherhood, teach me the secret handshake, because it’s news to me.”
Forte chuckled, Rene practically snorted. “She’s lying! Did you see how lovey-dovey she was with Wilder?” Rene angrily slapped a mosquito on her arm.
“Sweetie,” Diana purred facetiously to Rene, “I only met him a week ago. Did I bond with him? You bet, because he’s the best lover I’ve had in years. And for that reason, I really hope you don’t kill him.”
###
Forte stood up, signaling it was time to get down to business. “Captain Moe, let’s do the deal.”
The captain smiled, exposing his rotten teeth, clearly excited about completing the transaction. He stood up and crossed to a bamboo table that held a piece of wheeled airline luggage. He opened it, revealing one hundred kilograms of Number Four, powder-pressed into standard seven-hundred gram blocks called “Thai units” in the dope trade. It took more than one ton of raw opium pulp to result in the approximately fifty pounds of heroin in the suitcase. But with Shan State producing thousands of tons of raw pulp a year, this represented only a drop in the bucket.
“Please inspect any package you wish.”
“Not necessary, Captain. All of the packages will be checked later. If you’ve cheated me, I’ll call Rangoon and they’ll hang you by your balls.” Moe’s smile faded as Forte snapped his finger. “Daniel, the money.”
Daniel Pratt handed Captain Moe a green gym bag filled with bundles of U.S. one hundred-dollar bills. Half-a-million dollars worth. Not that much money, really. The real money would be made by all the subsequent levels of trafficking. Forte would pocket at least a million from the transaction, and he wasn’t one to thumb his nose at that, but more importantly would be all the heroin he would give away as party favors to well-placed bureaucrats and key members of political parties worldwide.
Forte’s Thai unit freebies fattened the coffers of many a national committee in such a sweet way. For one, the cost of the bribe to Forte represented only a fraction of its value to the recipient, so it went much further than a cash bribe. The other good thing was the way it corrupted; taking a little money was one thing, but peddling narcotics left Forte’s acquaintances open to a much stronger form of blackmail
or arm-twisting, should the need arise. The fact that end-users became addicts and had their lives destroyed didn’t even register on Forte’s screen.
“I’m sure it’s all here, Mister Forte,” Moe said. “Thank you for—”
The pop pop popping of small arms gunfire split the night, followed by a roaring explosion which rocked the compound and flickered the lights out to jungle blackness. Movement in the hut. A shadow as light flashed in from a powerful secondary blast. Heat and concussion enveloped them with a slap.
“Daniel, the helicopter! Rene, grab the dope!” yelled Forte, pulling a Ruger semi-auto in the darkness. He was nothing if not a heads-up guy.
Small arms fire erupted outside, from everywhere it seemed, as more explosions shook the ground.
“Charlie, fire up the bird!” Pratt shouted into his headset.
Forte lit his solid gold Dunhill lighter and the room came to life with light. He saw a section of thatch had been pushed out at the floor of the rear wall... and Diana Hunt was gone. “Diana!”
“Bitch!” screamed Rene, holding the dope luggage. She pulled her pistol and emptied the magazine firing through the thatch in the direction Hunt had escaped.
Captain Moe flinched from Rene's loud gunfire as he yelled in Burmese into his radio and reached for his assault rifle.
“Captain!” Forte leveled the Ruger right at him. “Are you trying to rip me off?”
“No, I—”
Forte put two rounds into Moe's heart, sending him stumbling into a bamboo joist. Forte grabbed the gym bag full of cash as he heard the captain curse him with his last breath.
###
The presence of Wilder and Dang and the fresh memory of the mass rape at the village had ensured that this firefight would not be a typical, overly cautious rebel attack on a Burmese position. Two sappers, after slitting the throats of a few napping sentries, confirmed the main lab sat empty. There had been too many loitering Burmese troops for them to get a close look at the huts for any sign of Diana, so the sappers had lobbed grenades into the lab, then moved toward the river to whack any retreating Burmese.
