by Jake Needham
Ike’s eyes flicked over at me. “You’re not nervous, are you, hotshot?”
“No, I’m… yes, of course I am.”
Ike nodded as if that satisfied her, then she reached across and patted me on the knee.
“Relax, son. Aviation talk’s always in American. Prab went to the University of Oklahoma. Take it from me, he’s as Thai as tai chi.”
“Tai chi is Chinese.”
“You know what I mean.”
The fragile limestone stacks and placid surface of Phangnga Bay were coming up just left of our nose and beneath us was an unbroken carpet of mangrove trees.
“The Phuket airport doesn’t seem to be a great place for me to slip onto the island without being seen,” I said to Ike with what I hoped was an appropriately diplomatic note in my voice.
“It’s not. That’s why you’re not going there.”
“But weren’t you just talking to somebody about landing there?”
“Yep, because I’m going there. Just trust me, son. You’re in good hands.”
I figured Ike would explain what that was supposed to mean when she was good and ready.
Below us I watched the Phuket highway twisting south toward the Sarasin Bridges, the twin roadways that were the island’s only connection to the mainland. Off to the left Krabi’s famous beaches were strung out like pearls tucked into pockets of green satin. Waterfalls gushed down from the low mountains and in some places I could track the course of the rushing streams through the thick jungle canopy until they reached its edge and fell into the sea.
Ike changed some numbers on her dials again and took down the microphone.
“Ah… Phuket Tower, this is Cherokee Hotel Sierra Golf Zulu X-ray with you. I may have a little problem here.”
I stopped admiring the beaches and waterfalls and started listening very carefully.
“Go ahead, Zulu X-ray.”
“I’ve got a rough engine and… ah, I’m losing power pretty fast.”
The engine sounded okay to me. I looked at Ike sitting placidly to my left.
“Are you declaring an emergency, Zulu X-ray?”
“Negative, Phuket Tower. Not at this time.” Ike absent-mindedly keyed the mike three or four times. “Let me stay with it and see what happens. Be advised that I’m losing altitude and may be off your radar shortly.”
Ike pushed the nose of the Cherokee over gently, nudged our course back toward the east, and settled into a gradual descent in the general direction of Phangnga Bay.
“Can you make the field, Zulu X-ray?”
It was a different voice on the radio this time.
“Ah… say again, Phuket Tower. You’re breaking up.”
I’d heard every word. The radio sounded fine to me.
“I asked if you can make the field, Ike.”
“Cannot copy, Phuket Tower. Repeat. Zulu X-ray cannot copy.”
Ike reached for a toggle switch on the instrument panel to the right of the radio. When she flipped it, the dials went dark. Then she turned to me and winked.
With a snap of her wrists on the control wheel, Ike rolled the Cherokee up onto its left wing until we were ninety degrees to the horizon and then she peeled off like a World War II dive bomber making an attack run on a battleship. Another snap of Ike’s wrists and the little plane leveled off about fifty feet above the water. Before I could say anything, she banked through a hundred and eighty degrees and crossed inland over a beach. Then she banked steeply again just above the tree line and a short, empty stretch of asphalt road abruptly loomed up in the rainforest right in front of us.
As we roared over the end of the road, Ike hauled the plane’s nose up to a forty-five degree angle and jerked on a lever between our seats that looked a great deal like a parking brake but which I devoutly hoped wasn’t anything of the sort. Her right hand shot straight out, chopping off the throttle, and as the engine dropped to a purr I heard first the left and then the right landing gear squeal onto the road.
Ike pumped her toe brakes a few times and the little plane stopped rolling almost immediately. Gunning the throttle while she held one brake, Ike spun the Cherokee smartly on its left gear until it was lined up on the roadway pointing back in the direction from which we had just landed.
She reached over, popped my harness release, and shoved open the passenger door. The pulsing of the plane’s engine filled the cabin as she leveled her index finger toward the wing. I got the idea quickly enough and scrambled out, dragging my duffle bag.
“Don’t fall in the prop, son!”
Ike slammed the door shut behind me and I slid off the wing to the ground just as the engine gave another roar and the Cherokee began its take-off roll away from me. The whine of its engine made it sound like a very large and angry lawnmower and I clapped both hands over my ears to avoid the worst of the racket.
That was why I didn’t hear the jeep as it drove up behind me.
“She’s a hell of a pilot, yes?” a man’s voice shouted over the noise.
I turned around and saw a man wearing sunglasses and smoking a cigarette slumped over the steering wheel of an open jeep that was dented and covered with dried mud. His accent was thick and French and sounded like stale smoke.
“Now she’ll call the little fuckers in the tower with some stupid story about dirt in her fuel or some shit like that and then fly right on into Phuket just like nothing ever happened. Nobody will ever know she was here.” The man shook his head in admiration. “Big balls for an old lady. Big balls.”
I walked around the jeep and pulled myself up into the passenger seat. Pushing my bag onto the floor, I looked the man over. At a glance I took him for forty-five, maybe fifty. Fit looking and wiry with a bit of a burn on his face and forearms, his hair was very long and gray and it hung in a thick mop down to his shoulders. He was wearing a crisp khaki shirt with epaulets, matching shorts, and ankle boots with floppy green socks.
“Welcome to Phuket, Professeur. Just think of this as Casablanca with no fucking heroes.”
The man straightened up, flicked away his cigarette, and threw me a professional-looking salute.
“I’m Captain Tom, a genuine civilian no longer affiliated with any military unit, government agency, or other form of socially oppressive organization.”
“Captain of what?” I asked.
“Ah well, merdé…”
The man shrugged in that elaborate sort of way that only looks right on a Frenchman.
“They used to call me Major Tom, but that sounded too bourgeois so I busted myself down to captain.”
Christ, another one.
The man checked his watch. “Enough of the small talk, Professeur. We shall go, no?”
FORTY ONE
CAPTAIN TOM DROPPED the jeep into gear and accelerated up the road.
There was no sign of life around us, but the foliage was so thick that the Taj Mahal could have been a hundred yards off in either direction and I would never have spotted it. As we came to the end of the asphalt surface, a track continued straight into the dense rain forest. I braced myself when we left the roadway, but the dirt was unexpectedly smooth. Captain Tom never even slowed down.
We drove for a few minutes in silence and then Tom glanced over and pointed to the storage space in front of my seat.
“Monsieur Emmanuel said to get that for you.”
There was a dark blue nylon pouch in the open compartment. I pulled it out and unzipped it. Inside was a map of Phuket, a gold American Express card, and a California driver’s license with a picture that looked as much like me as any driver’s license photograph ever had. The credit card and the license were both in the name of Benny Glup, and the driver’s license had an address in Redondo Beach, a place just south of the Los Angeles airport where I had actually been once back in another life.
I held up the license and gave Captain Tom a look. “Benny Glup?”
Tom shrugged again, perhaps a little less elaborately this time since he was driving.
“It’s a name. You have a problem with it?”
“Probably no more than the real Benny Glup had, whoever the poor bastard is. Or was.”
“He never existed. The license is from of a batch of DEA covers a pal of Monsieur Emmanuel’s gave us.”
The shifting alliances among the players in Southeast Asia were a slippery thing, particularly when you were mostly on the outside looking in. I didn’t even want to try and guess what Manny might be doing for the DEA in return for a big bag of cover IDs.
I reached down between my legs and pulled out the duffle bag with my dirty clothes in it. Unzipping the duffle, I tossed the dark blue pouch inside.
“Those glasses are for you, too,” Captain Tom said, pointing to a pair of dark gray night-vision field glasses tucked under the edge of my seat.
When I added the field glasses to my duffle bag, something made me lift out the .45. Mostly I just wanted to see what Tom would say when he saw it.
His glanced over, but only briefly.
“Chrome plated piece of faggot shit,” he said, hardly batting an eye.
Without slowing down, Tom bent forward and reached around to the small of his back. Lifting his shirt, he produced a black automatic with a nasty profile.
“Now take this sweet bébé here. Glock 30. All polymer. Even with a fifteen-round magazine it weighs less than thirty ounces and it’s got a trigger pull that’s silky as pussy hair. Load it with 230-grain hollow points and you can stop a truck if you can handle the kick.”
Tom shot me a quick look to check out my reaction.
“I could loan it to you. Better than that fucking piece-of-shit .45 you got.”
“Couldn’t you just get me a bazooka instead?” I asked.
Tom tapped his fingers on the steering wheel and thought for a moment. “It’s no problem if you can give me a couple of hours.”
“That was just a joke, Tom.”
“Oh, oui,” he said, but he didn’t laugh.
After another twenty minutes the track we were following suddenly emerged from the folds of moist greenery and intersected a well-maintained asphalt highway with very little traffic. We turned south and before long I saw a pair of bridges up in the distance.
“Those are the Sarasin Bridges,” Captain Tom said when he noticed me looking. “Phuket is just on the other side, but Nai Harn Beach is all the way down at the south end of the island. We’ve still got at least another hour of driving.”
“Is that where Barry Gale is?”
“That’s where the Phuket Yacht Club is. Benny Glup has a room there.”
“I wondered what the credit card was for.”
“The room’s already taken care of—Monsieur Emmanuel’s got a friend at the hotel—but use the credit card for anything else you want. Order some champagne if you want. The bills don’t go to us anyway.”
“Forget the champagne, Tom. What about Barry Gale? When are you taking me to him?”
Captain Tom didn’t answer my question immediately. He kept his eyes fixed on the road and didn’t speak again until we had crossed the bridge and were rolling steadily down the divided highway on the other side.
“Monsieur Emmanuel told me to take you to the Phuket Yacht Club, Professeur. My instructions are that you’re on your own from there.”
We slammed through a pothole and Tom fought to keep the jeep moving in a straight line. Slowing down didn’t seem to cross his mind as an option.
“The man you’re looking for is in a villa on the southwestern tip of the island. It’s a few miles east of the Yacht Club.”
Tom glanced over to check out my reaction. I tried not to give him one.
“I’m leaving mon bébé here with you. That map you have has a route marked out from the Yacht Club up through the ruins of an old tin mine and then onto a four-wheel track that circles above the main road and intercepts it just north of the villa.”
“Can’t I just use the regular highway?”
Captain Tom looked at me like I had just ridden in with a bunch of tourists, which in a manner of speaking I guess I had.
“That’s what they’d expect. Nobody would think you might be coming in from the east, and that could be worth something to you. Besides, the track takes you down on the compound from a little above it so you can see what you’re getting into before you get there.”
“Are you sure Barry Gale is there?” I asked.
“Not absolutely,” Tom admitted with what I thought was undue good cheer, “but we figure he must be. There is a guy there who meets the description. And we know there’s a tall Chinese woman with him.”
“What would it take to make sure?”
Captain Tom took both hands off the wheel and rubbed the back of his neck without slowing down. The muddy jeep wobbled along on its own for a moment.
“Well, somebody could go up there and ring the doorbell, I guess.”
I hoped the rest of the ideas Tom had were better than that.
“Do you know how this guy got to Phuket?” I asked, changing the subject.
Captain Tom looked at me strangely. “Is that a joke, too?”
“No. Why should it be?”
“That was how we found him so fast. I thought you knew.”
“Knew what?”
“That he flew down from Bangkok on a Thai Airways flight three days ago.”
“Why would I know that?”
“His ticket,” Captain Tom smiled. “It was in the name J. Shepherd.”
I chuckled and nodded as if I was appropriately amused.
What in God’s name was that crazy bastard up to? He was just daring me—or somebody—to come and get him.
The highway was largely deserted except for swarms of motorcycles and an occasional pickup truck. Off to our right I caught glimpses of the ocean through thick stands of rubber trees. Over the noise of the jeep I could hear the surf slapping against the rocky cliffs. The road suddenly dipped and then emerged from the trees and we were barreling along next to a crescent-shaped beach that was deserted except for a small frame building near the surf line that I took to be a restaurant. Just past the building, whatever it was, Captain Tom swung the jeep off the road and headed inland, bumping straight across a rocky, gently rising field as if he had driven it many times before.
We bounced in and out of rolls of black rock terraced like layers of icing on a birthday cake. Avoiding the worst of the gaps between the terraces, Tom guided the jeep at an angle across the rising ground until we had climbed a few hundred yards from where we had left the highway. When we reached a gap between two hillocks, he swung the jeep around until it was pointed right through them and then he stopped. From there we had an unobstructed view down the coast.
Pushing his seat back, Captain Tom stood up and rested his forearms on the top of the jeep’s windshield. With his forefinger he pointed off in the distance and I stood up next to him and shaded my eyes with the palm of my right hand. I followed the line of surf and rock south until it turned east, twisting back on itself and disappearing from view, but I saw nothing out of the ordinary.
“What am I supposed to be looking for?”
“See that house?” Captain Tom pointed again. “Right there on the end of the point?”
All I saw was a lot of rock.
“Try using the glasses,” Tom prompted.
I sat down and pulled the field glasses out of my bag, then stood up again.
“Look just where the coast seems to end right in the middle of that last gap,” Tom said.
I lifted the binoculars and slowly scanned the area to which Captain Tom was pointing, but I still couldn’t find a house.
“I see something that looks like a big wall.”
“That’s it. That’s all you can see from here. The wall goes all the way around the compound. There are several buildings in there, a main house and a couple of smaller ones. You’ve got to get above it to see down inside. Some people around here call it the Berghof.”
I lowered the field
glasses and slowly tilted my head toward Tom.
“What did you say?” I asked.
“Some people here call that house the Berghof,” Tom repeated. “It’s the name of a place in Germany where Hitler used to—”
“I know what the Berghof was,” I interrupted.
It was also the password Dollar had used to encrypt his files. What in the world did that mean?
I lifted the glasses again and swept them back and forth over the area, but there really wasn’t all that much to see. The wall was built of black lava rock that had been smoothly mortared together into a grim-looking barrier at least fifteen feet high. It appeared strong enough to stop tanks.
“Do you know who owns the house?” I asked.
Tom shook his head. “There’s been a lot of talk, but I don’t think anybody really knows.”
He thought for a moment longer.
“Somebody once told me it was owned through some chain of paper companies in different countries. That kind of thing.”
“Could you find out what the companies are?”
“Probably. Why, does it matter?”
“Maybe it doesn’t, but I’d like to know.”
I had noticed a pad and a pencil in the jeep’s storage box, so I sat down, pulled it out, and wrote down the number of my cell phone. I ripped the sheet off and handed it to Tom.
“Call me when you find out.”
“Certainement.”
We slid back into our seats and Tom turned the jeep downhill. Within a few minutes we were back on the hard surface, traveling south at a good clip. Several miles passed before either of us spoke again.
“How did you end up here, Professeur?” Captain Tom eventually asked. “If I’m not being too personal.”
“You mean in Phuket? Today?”
“No, I mean in Thailand. It’s none of my business, I know, but you don’t seem the usual type.”
Captain Tom glanced over at me, then tossed out a real classic of a shrug, contorting his whole body into a dismissive gesture. “Ça ne fait rien. I was just making conversation.”
I always told people I had taken the teaching job at Sasin so that I could live the quiet life, but if that was true what was I doing in Phuket riding in a drug syndicate’s jeep with a loaded .45 at my feet chasing after a guy who had bought a Philippine bank for the Russian mob and used it to launder money to bribe Chinese politicians? Nobody had asked me to do it. As a matter of fact, the closer I got to Barry, the more people demanded that I not do it. So how could I answer Tom’s question? What in the world was I doing here?
