Trade Winds

by T. M. Parris

  A barrage of bullets unloads straight into the soldiers. The gunfire is coming from another position away from me. The response is instant, soldiers dropping to their knees and firing right back with twice as much power, long and loud. But two of them have been hit, one in the arm and one, the man carrying Lucien, in the knee. He is on the ground and Lucien has also fallen.

  I look for the source of the gunfire: it’s Cesar, crouched behind two rocks. He is firing incessantly, round after round, calmly as though he does this every day. The soldiers start to regroup around Cesar’s position. They edge round behind him, passing underneath me. They shout at him to stop. But he does not.

  Suddenly he stands and yells like an animal. He runs forward through the rocks out into the open, firing his weapon in all directions. He is hit, as he knew he would be. He catches a few of them as he runs towards his death. But there are so many of them. All the while he keeps firing for as long as he can until bullets riddle him and he sinks to the ground.

  The soldiers come forward and kick the gun away from his hands. Lucien is on the ground, not moving. A soldier crouches, turns him over and puts his finger on Lucien’s neck. There’s another shout from the bushes. Two of the men carry a body forward. I recognise Yvonne from her clothing. I can see blood on it from here.

  I cannot move. All I can do is lie and stare at Cesar’s blood-soaked body on the ground. The soldiers move about calmly, collecting all our weaponry. They carry Lucien and Yvonne and retreat towards the shore. Everyone else they leave.

  I wait for a long time before I come out. Cesar is still alive. He is panting and his eyes are open. He lies on his back and looks up at me. I see splinters of bare bone through the shreds of his trouser legs. His stomach is open in a gaping wet wound. He cannot speak. All he can do is look at me. My hands are steady as I raise my gun. I am looking straight at him as I shoot him in the head.

  The camp is silent. I circle slowly around, but no one else is alive. I want to pray but I cannot. I leave my gun propped up against the rocks and slip away.

  Trade Winds Cafe, Manila

  Fairchild’s here before me again. This time he’s actually behind the bar, talking to the lady waitress from the other night.

  “The usual, Zack?” he asks.

  “Sure.”

  “You remember Carmel?”

  “Sure.” I take a seat at the bar. “They got this place sorted out pretty quickly.”

  “Yes. Most of Manila was without electricity all night. Things started coming back to life this morning.”

  Seems normal to me in here except for a boarded up window in the john and a smell of bleach. Carmel brings the rum. No boat this time. It tastes better as well, got a kick to it like it should.

  “Look at him,” I say to her, nodding towards Fairchild behind the bar. “You should get him making the cocktails.” She gives me a funny look and vanishes.

  “Interesting night?” asks Fairchild, coming to sit beside me.

  “Nope. We got backup generators at the base. We just hunkered down.”

  “No looters there, I guess.”

  “Who would dare? I heard it was pretty bad in the city.”

  “The looting caused more damage than the wind itself. It had been downgraded to a storm by the time it got here. As predicted. Still pretty impressive, though.”

  “Death toll out east isn’t pretty.”

  “No.”

  We both reflect on that morbid fact. I raise my glass. “Well, cheers. Here’s to a successful mission.”

  Fairchild raises his glass, but slowly. “That was success, was it?”

  “Sure! No ransom paid. Shame neither of the hostages survived, but these raids get awful messy. You know how it is.”

  Fairchild is looking at me. “You led me to believe your intention was to rescue them.”

  I shrug. “It was. That was the aim. The first priority, anyway. Failing that, the fallback was to ensure no ransom was paid.”

  He looks pensive. “I see. Pull them or kill them. Just don’t leave them there. That wasn’t exactly how you described it to me, Zack.”

  I give him a long stare. “You’re a man of the world, Fairchild. You’re a guy who can see a little context here. You know what lives could have been lost if that little gang had managed to funnel millions of dollars into global Islamic State coffers. Storming villages, towns, cities. Innocent women and children, killed, raped, injured, running for their lives to refugee camps to be starved or exploited. And back home, recruiting teenagers for suicide terrorist missions. More innocent women and children⸺”

  “Yes, yes, I get the point,” he says testily. “You misled me, though. Didn’t you?”

  “Since when were you so whiter than white? You think being deliberately stateless puts you above all this? If you work for governments and get paid by them, you can’t just wash your hands of it all. I’m American, Fairchild. Proud of it. I know what we stand for and what we’ll do to defend it. And so do you. Don’t make out it has nothing to do with you. Unless of course you don’t want the other half of your payment?”

  “Just be up front with me next time. If there is a next time.” His voice has taken on a hard edge. “There were no survivors from the raid at all?”

  “Not that we know of.”

  “Christ, Zack, what did you do, drop a bomb on it?”

  “We got the job done, that’s what we did. And the world is a safer place. Maybe it’s time for you to give this up, Fairchild, if you’ve got such a problem with it. You got enough money to do what you like. Find yourself a nice little trade and do something morally upstanding if you think that’ll suit you better.”

  “Yes, well,” he says. “Maybe you’re right.” His bitter tone is one I haven’t heard in a while. But he’s not about to quit the game. Sure, he’s pissed. But I’ve made him pissed before. He needs this world. He needs people like me. He needs to be a part of it if he’ll ever find the truth. What happened to Mom and Pops, whatever Cold War slipstream they were sucked into that night in Vienna, if he finds the answer at all, he’ll find it in the shadows of spookland. As much as I tell him it’s good for him, we both know he’s going nowhere.

  Carmel shimmies over and asks Fairchild something in Tagalog. He answers and she disappears with a smile. There’s something about the way that happens. “You two got something going on?”

  “Not like that,” he says. But he looks pleased with himself all the same. “You said yourself that these Trade Winds Cafes were all over the place now.”

  I feel my mouth fall open. “You bought the place? You bought the whole joint?”

  “The whole chain. Upmarket hangouts from Seoul right down to Jakarta. What better places to keep your ear on the ground? They’re doing quite well, too.”

  This guy is just way too rich for his own good. “Yeah, well, that’ll keep you busy.”

  “Not really. There’s a reason I only buy going concerns. Once I’m sure it’s in good hands I’ll leave it to run itself.”

  “Say, what happened to the guy? Rick, Raif?”

  “Raul. I had to let him go, I’m afraid. His ears were too big.”

  “His ears? Oh! You think?”

  “I was intercepted on my way from the airport by Dolores Ocampo.”

  “The defence minister? What did she want?”

  “The important thing is that she knew where I’d been and why. She’d got to hear all about that somehow.”

  “Oh, I see! So you buy a chain of bars to use as part of your intelligence-gathering network, but you don’t want them being used for anyone else’s intelligence-gathering?”

  “Well, precisely.”

  I remember something. “Hey! Wasn’t there some incident with Ocampo last night? Someone ended up dead?”

  “Yes,” he says, a little grimly. “Someone ended up dead.”

  “You were there? Why does that not surprise me?”

  “We got caught up in a lo
oting party. Things escalated. Unnecessarily, in my view.”

  “I thought her security guy shot someone who was attacking the car. That’s how it was reported. Self-defence. Don’t tell me, you don’t believe in that any more. So what did she want?”

  He pauses. “It was an interesting discussion.”

  “Okay. Likely to be followed by more interesting discussions?”

  “No. I’m moving on, actually. In a couple of days.”

  I didn’t get the full story, but then I never do. “So!” I slap the counter. “That means I’ll be getting free cocktails every city this side of China, then!”

  “I’m afraid not. Carmel’s just bringing the cheque now. You’ll find the prices very reasonable I’m sure,” he says breezily.

  Typical.

  Trade Winds Cafe, Manila

  I’ve never been to the capital before. Davao is the biggest city I’ve known, but Metro Manila stretches forever, unrelenting tumbledown corrugated iron shacks and fume-filled traffic jams and towering concrete apartment blocks. I have to walk from the outskirts because the roads are blocked with trees and pylons from the storm. It takes me all day, and by the time I find the Trade Winds Cafe it’s evening. I didn’t think that he would be there, but when I mention his name the woman at the bar disappears inside, and then the soldier from the jungle appears. But now he’s a respectable businessman in a shirt and jacket. His eyes are the same, though. He stops when he sees me.

  “You’re surprised,” I say.

  “I was told no one survived.”

  It was as I thought. “The raid was caused by you. You used me.”

  His face changes. “I was told it would be a rescue mission.”

  I think of the hammering gunfire overwhelming the camp. “They were not trying to spare anybody.”

  “Well,” he says, “I’m sorry.” He invites me to sit. I look around at the décor, the rows of bottles behind the bar. I have never drunk alcohol in my life and never will. “You got away,” says John Fairchild.

  I look down. “I hid.”

  “And you’re alive as a result. That’s nothing to be ashamed of. Why did you come here?” His voice is friendly but guarded.

  “Why did you tell me where to find you?”

  He reflects before he answers. “It was you that the boy saw.”

  “What boy?”

  “You know what boy. The boy who saw you praying. He ran away. You should have told somebody in the camp. Then you would all have moved on. But you didn’t. You let him run off and you kept quiet.”

  My face burns. “You mock my weakness.”

  “I don’t think it’s weakness.”

  “You dropped your gun deliberately.”

  He’s watching me closely. “Did I?”

  “You could have kept hold of it. But you let it fall.” I have gone over this sequence of events over and over again in my mind. “You let me take a loaded gun and point it at you.” I feel tears prick at my eyes.

  He stares calmly. “You never did tell me your name,” he says.

  I collect myself. “My name is Adel.”

  “You’re no soldier, Adel.”

  Anger rises in me. “I’m not a coward!”

  “No. You have strength. You want justice, fairness for your people. You would stand up and fight for them. But not with guns. There are other ways. Better ways. I think you know that.”

  He is right. I knew when I left the camp that I would not go back to that life. I got a boat to my home village and hugged my mother. But I had to leave again before Ismael or the others learned that I was there. They would come looking. I have no idea what to do. I love God as strongly as I ever did, and my anger is just as hot, but what that means in terms of how to live on this earth, I am unsure.

  “I don’t know that,” I say. “I don’t know what is right and what is wrong any more.”

  He sits back. “That’s not a bad place to be,” he says. “It was a good idea to leave Mindanao. If you need a safe place to stay in Manila for a while, I can help.”

  I look at him, and around again at this place. “Are you a soldier, John Fairchild?”

  He seems to need to think about this. “If I have to be.”

  “And when do you have to be?”

  “If I need information. Or money.”

  “Money?” I look around again. The people who come into this place are rich, expatriates and company men. “This is not your place, your business?”

  “I have a number of business interests.”

  “In Manila?”

  “In every part of the globe.”

  “So you’re not based here?”

  “I move around. A few days here, a few days there. I’m leaving tomorrow, in fact.”

  “Why do you do that? Move around all the time?”

  He finds my curiosity amusing. “There’s no reason not to. I don’t have anywhere I call home.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I don’t want one.”

  “But where are you from?”

  “My parents were British. I don’t go back there any more.”

  It seems so rootless, so formless. I look at his grey eyes that held no shadow of fear when I pointed the gun at him in the jungle. “I think you have more purpose than that. You are not a man who simply drifts around. You put yourself in danger. You must have a reason. A cause.”

  “Must I?”

  “Yes. I think you do. What are you, exactly?”

  “You’re the second person recently to ask me that,” he says. “Do you really want to know?”

  He is clever, this John Fairchild. He can understand people, manipulate them. That gives him power. But there is also something unresolved, a fire of some kind burning inside. “Yes,” I say. “I want to know.”

  He pauses, then sits forward. “Well, to answer that question,” he says, “I’d need to tell you about something that happened a long time ago. In Vienna.”

  Reborn – the first Clarke and Fairchild novel

  An unputdownable thriller spanning Hong Kong, China, Tibet and Nepal

  Introducing Rose Clarke and John Fairchild, both outcasts of the British Secret Service, their differing motivations bringing them together, often in conflict, across the globe.

  Recently disgraced Secret Service officer Rose Clarke is given one last chance to redeem herself by tracking down John Fairchild, a notorious mercenary who has developed a global network of informants and is suspected of trading British intelligence.

  Clarke’s mission takes her to China where Fairchild has links with Jinpa, a Tibetan monk whose reincarnated identity is of huge political significance. Jinpa has to flee from the Chinese authorities when they discover his secret, and Fairchild follows to try and uncover the truth of his own past. Clarke risks everything to pursue them over the Himalayas, chased by the ruthless and powerful Chinese authorities determined to stop them.

  Their perilous journey in extreme conditions will take them all to the limits of their mental and physical endurance and change them for ever.

  The story is a hypothesis featuring a real-life figure, the Panchen Lama, considered by Amnesty International to be the world's youngest political prisoner.

  Reborn is available to purchase on Amazon here.

  The Clarke and Fairchild series

  In Reborn, the first novel in the Clarke and Fairchild series, John Fairchild meets Rose Clarke, until recently a British spy, who has been sent to track him down. Meeting Rose profoundly changes his life. Up to that point Fairchild's single mission has been to find out what happened to his parents when they disappeared when he was ten years old. This Cold War mystery will gradually unfold over the course of the series. In the meantime, each novel in the series will be set in a different part of the world and will feature a political issue relevant in that region, as well as the changing and often conflict-ridden relationship between Fairchild and Clarke.

  Reborn is th
e story of Jinpa, a Tibetan monk and a part of Fairchild's extensive global network of friends and contacts. Jinpa's identity as a politically important reincarnate is a threat to China. Reborn tells the story of Jinpa's struggle against the oppressive Chinese state which draws both John Fairchild and Rose Clarke into an increasingly dangerous journey.

  Rose Clarke will feature in another short story coming soon. Members of the Clarke and Fairchild Readers’ Club will have free exclusive access to this, and will be notified when it’s ready to download.

  Trade Winds reading notes

  Blood and Silk by Michael Vatikiotis is a great overview of South East Asia and its challenges from a journalist and mediator who has made the region his home for over 30 years.

  472 Days by Bob East is the story of the kidnap of Australian Warren Rodwell by Filipino Islamist fighters in 2011-2013, and describes his ordeal in the camps in great detail.

  Radical by Maajid Nawaz is an honest account of a British boy's recruitment to the Islamist cause, and how he moved away from it.

  The film Metro Manila is a tense and touching story of rural immigrants adrift in the huge metropolis.

  The Magindanao massacre took place in 2009 exactly as described by Fairchild. In December 2019, two Ampatuan brothers along with dozens of other associates were convicted in a Quezon court following a ten-year trial. Over 50 others were acquitted.

  There is of course no Trade Winds Cafe, but visitors to any of the world's Trader Vic's might find the description similar.

  For more context and occasional blog posts, visit www.tmparris.com.

  About the author

  My name is T.M. Parris. The Clarke and Fairchild series of novels are a result of my passion for international travel and the moral ambiguities of the world of politics. I had the idea for these characters in a moment of homesickness wandering the streets of Beijing, when I really, really wished there was someone to hand who spoke the language! I live in Brighton and do a lot of running, playing music and staring out of windows when I'm supposed to be writing.