BANGKOK
THAILAND
BY THE TIME JIM Hall received the e-mail about his home in the Tuscan countryside, a tired Kyle Swanson was handing a worn British passport to a customs agent at Don Muang Airport. He had come in on a Thai Airways flight all the way from Rome, more than five thousand miles, the trip made shorter by the customary pampering of the excellent airline. Swanson had slept most of the way.
Lauren had wanted to come, but as much as he wished she could be with him, it would have been a terrible tactical decision. A single white man arriving alone in Bangkok is expected to be drawn to the seedy parts of the city, the massage parlors, bars, and whorehouses that had made Patpong Road a destination for lonely men since the Vietnam War. A farang, a foreigner, could find sex of any sort there, for a small price. Prostitution was a national industry. Kyle would be accepted with hardly a glance, while Lauren’s ivory beauty would have drawn attention.
Also, she was being sought by the CIA and was probably on watch lists around the world, while Swanson was apparently still being considered a fugitive but not a threat.
“Are you in Bangkok for business or pleasure, Mr. James?” asked the busy customs clerk, glancing at his face and the passport.
“A little of both, I hope,” Swanson answered with a smirk.
The clerk sighed. The farang always gave that answer, an impolite joke that held the country up to ridicule. He stamped the passport for a five-day stay and let him go, hoping that the man caught some horrible disease from an unclean woman.
Kyle thanked him and walked through the international arrivals lounge, where uniformed car drivers waved names of their pickups on grease-board placards. Squadrons of other young men, drivers and freelance tourist guides, tugged at his shirt, promising to take him wherever he wanted to go.
A tall, gangly American with shaggy gray hair parted in the middle and falling over his ears caught his eye, turned, and shambled away. Kyle followed the man outside, to where a battered old Mercedes waited at the curb like a faithful horse. The man slipped a handful of baht to the cop who had kept an eye on the parked car, and they got in and drove away before ever saying anything to each other.
“Can’t believe Jim Hall went over to the dark side.” Tom Hodges had a voice like doom, naturally deep and made even more gravelly by years of smoking cigarettes. Originally from Iowa, he had prowled the Quang Tri mountains as a young Marine sniper during Vietnam and had trained under the legendary Carlos Hathcock himself. When Hodges had gone to Bangkok for a liberty pass, he emerged from his first visit to a classy steam-and-cream parlor with a smile on his face and a decision to make Thailand his home. It was not at all like Iowa. At the end of his tour, he spent a weekend in Des Moines at the home of his only sister, then flew back to Bangkok, bought a bar in partnership with a Thai politician, and never looked back.
“Believe it,” said Swanson, leaning back in the seat. “How’ve you been, Tom?”
“Same old, same old. Too many girls, too many opium pipes, too much booze, and too many years.” He grinned. The shiny teeth were false. “Somewhere along the line, I got old. Lucky for me, enough money keeps coming in to pay for my deviant lifestyle and bribes. Yourself?”
“Getting by. Tired.”
“Rome is a long way from here.”
“Yeah. And I’ve got to do this thing quick and get back there soon as possible.”
“I have some pills that can help, little energy bombs that will take you way up, then a couple of pipes to bring you down again, oh so easy.”
“No thanks. I’ve got to keep a clear head. What about the other stuff?”
“Middleton sent me your shopping list. I have it all at our apartment. Anything else, you just name it. Mary Kay and I are still the best fixers in town.” Hodges had turned his links to the military into a lucrative side career, an efficient business that was guided by his wife, a beautiful Thai woman who came off a desolate farm in the country to become a bar dancer and then a respected entrepreneur. After peddling Mary Kay cosmetics to other bar girls, she made the company’s totally American brand name her own and married the huge American. When U.S. covert operators, or anyone else, needed special assistance in Bangkok, Mary Kay and Tiny Tom Hodges were the go-to team, as long as the money was right. “Speaking of which, she is making you a curry dinner tonight. She won’t let you go out to work without some solid food in your belly.”
“You okay with helping out, Tom?” The traffic had grown steadily heavier and finally was humping along just a little faster than total gridlock. Stuttering tuk-tuk taxis squeezed between the halted cars and trucks. Nobody gave way, but somehow there was motion and slow progress.
“We’ll break out of this in a half mile. Then I’ll drive you past the place for a quick look-see. I’ve already taken some pictures and made a sketch. There’s a map in the glove box. I circled the address in red marker. Not hard to find.”
Swanson recognized some landmarks and saw the circle. “You didn’t answer my question. You okay with this?”
“Actually, no, I’m not. If Hall is selling our covert operators to our enemies, then burning down his house ain’t nowhere near enough punishment, Kyle. I’d rather shoot the bastard.” Hodges pushed a hand through his hair to move it away from his face. His eyes were gleaming, excited, as if he were looking down a scope. “And since you don’t know how to drive in Bangkok traffic, I will be going along tonight as your spotter. After we’re done, I take you straight back to the airport, and you will be out of here by midnight. Sound like a deal?”
IT WAS A NICE, solid two-story home that would not have looked out of place in any upscale Middle America enclave, except for the lush tropical greenery and a thick seven-foot-high fence with broken glass imbedded along the top. A gate of ornamental iron was across the driveway, and a pair of concrete elephants stood sentinel at the corners of the front patio and steps. Lights were on over the entrance and inside.
“Hall has kept this place as a CIA safe house for more than ten years,” said Tom Hodges, flat on his belly beside Kyle on the roof of an empty house two blocks to the south. He was peering through a spotting scope. “When the Agency had no further need for it because it had become too well known, our boy Jim sold it to himself in a sweetheart deal. A lot of us have been suspicious for a long time that he was letting terrorist types use it. I see one guard outside, just at the right side of the gate in that little shack. Looks Khmer. See the checkered scarf?”
“I see the guard,” Kyle said.
“Now look inside at the big living room. Big-screen TV has a soccer match on. The guy in the chair with a beer is also Cambodian and is a big narcotics type. Ruthless bastard named Tea Duch.”
“I see him.” The man was obese, and his undershirt bulged over his boxer shorts. “There’s a girl on the sofa. And a woman servant back in the kitchen.”
“So take your choice, pal.”
“Assuming I can hit anything with this antique.” He tightened the leather strap around his left arm and brought the smooth walnut stock of the old Model 70 Winchester.30-06 to his cheek. The long, slender weapon was a perfect fit, and the 10-power Unertl scope had no scratches.
“It was good enough for me in Vietnam, brother. If you can’t shoot it, I can. Do the guard first. An inside shot would make the women scream and alert him.” Hodges read off his data and did a final laser range check to the guard shack. The shot would be down, coming over the wall at a sharp angle. “Three hundred and seventy-eight yards, one-and-a-half-minute wind, right to left.”
Kyle made final adjustments to the old rifle’s scope and saw the lazy guard. His AK-47 was propped against a wall, and he rested against a tall stool, leafing through a girlie magazine. Lazy and ignorant, passing the time. Swanson exhaled quietly and tightened the pull on the trigger. “On target.”
Hodges lifted his head and gave a quick look at the neighborhood. Quiet except for some passing traffic in the next block. “Fire.”
The Winchester barked a single time, sounding more like a car’s backfire than a gunshot, and the bullet drilled into the guard’s chest before he could react to the sound. The impact knocked him from the stool and onto the floor, bleeding hard and in shock as his punctured heart slowed and stopped. The eyes never closed.
Swanson had already worked the bolt and reloaded and was looking at the man inside. The big Cambodian had not even twitched at the sound of the shot, probably because the sound was soaked up by the crowd noise on the television set. There was no further need for communication with Hodges, and Kyle simply centered his sight picture and fired again. This bullet had a bigger target; it plunged into the enormous stomach of the drug trafficker and tore through the kidneys and the spine. The target jolted upright, his eyes wide with surprise, and his bottle of Singha beer fell to the floor. There was a howl of pain, and he grabbed for the spurting wound. Kyle reloaded and pumped a second round into the jittering big body, hitting the top of the head and exploding the skull.
Kyle and Hodges were on the move immediately, and as Hodges retrieved the car, Swanson ran to the gate. It wasn’t even locked, since the guard inside with the automatic weapon was believed to be more than enough security. In quick strides, Kyle was inside, where a slender, pretty young girl with long and silky black hair stood in the corner, fists to her lips in terror. The housekeeper, an older woman, was standing beside her.
Swanson appeared as some dark and evil dragon, face blackened and wearing black clothing that allowed him to blend into the night. He let them have a good look at both his face and the big sniper rifle, then handed the housekeeper a small envelope on which he had printed the name JIM HALL. “Speak any English?” he asked calmly, keeping any menace from his voice.
The woman nodded. “Yes.”
“Make sure that note gets to the American that owns this place. Not the police.”
She gripped the envelope tightly and nodded her head to show understanding, for she was used to seeing violent men come through this accursed home, and to doing what she was told without question.
“Now both of you get out of here. Tell anyone who asks what you have seen tonight. Go!” Inside the envelope was a piece of paper on which Swanson had written a single word: HOG. It would make no sense to anyone but a fellow Marine sniper, who would automatically recognize it as the acronym for their private, descriptive motto “Hunters of Gunmen.”
As the women fled down the stairs and into the street, Swanson pulled the pin on an AN-M14 thermite grenade and tossed it onto the sofa.
He hustled back outside and found Hodges waiting at the end of the driveway, with the car door open. Inside the house, the grenade detonated, and for the next forty-five seconds, it spewed chemical droplets that burned fiercely at 2,200 degrees, setting fire to everything they touched. Within two minutes, the house was a raging inferno.