Pattaya 24/7

by Christopher G. Moore

  “As this isn’t New York, why don’t I go as well?” asked Colonel Pratt.

  “Good idea,” said Jardine.

  A cop was better than a civilian any day. The colonel would have some basic training and this colonel had come with about the best recommendation Jardine had ever seen in an American embassy file.

  “What about me?” asked Nui. She nodded at the Glock in Jardine’s belt. “Don’t I get a weapon?”

  “These are not free samples. They are guns to kill people. I suggest you go outside and drive the car out. That would be highly useful. If he was watching us drive in, seeing the car leave the site will make him relax. He’ll think whoever came in has gone out. It is important that we catch him off guard. And your leaving is essential to this plan.”

  She cocked her head to the side.

  “This is like the Hong Kong bullshit. Why do you think I can’t handle myself?”

  “Can you drive?” asked Colonel Pratt.

  “I can drive.”

  “Vincent, go with her,” said Jardine.

  “It’s a recommendation. Not an order.”

  Calvino walked her out to the parking area. She walked ahead, her hands shaking—from fear or anger, it wasn’t clear. She didn’t talk to him or look at him. She got to the car first. As he opened the car door, she took the key from his hand.

  “He wouldn’t listen to me. I know they won’t find the access door. No way.”

  “Let Jardine do it his way,” said Calvino. “There’s one chance to get it right. He knows exactly what he’s doing.”

  “Do you mind if I take this?” she said, her hand moving towards his jacket. He caught her wrist as she went for his .38 police special.

  “Not a smart move,” he said.

  “I have a right to be here, too.”

  She had started to cry. “There’s no time to argue, Nui. You are letting us take him out by leaving now. Don’t you get it?”

  She frowned and stepped back. “How?”

  “What Jardine said is right. If Hasam’s watching, and he sees the car leave, it makes it easier to do the job.” There had to be a term for sexual lust caused by a woman trying to snatch away your .38 police service revolver.

  “Or is he proving something about doing a man’s job is more important? Even if it means hundreds of thousands of people are killed so you can make your point. You understand what I am saying, Harvard?” asked Calvino.

  She lowered herself into the driver’s seat. Calvino leaned over the door for a last look. In another time and place, the chemistry between them would have kept them going some distance. There was nothing like a gun to destroy chemistry. He dropped the car keys in her hand.

  “Go to Big C and wait for me in the parking lot. In about an hour, I’ll buy you dinner.”

  She smiled.

  “Okay. Hey, good luck,” she said.

  “Got to go,” he said.

  He watched her back the Honda out, turn it around and drive towards the entrance. Suddenly she was gone. He walked back inside the building. Jardine worked over the sniper’s rifle, making adjustments to the night-vision scope, glancing at his watch, getting ready to position himself inside the elevator shaft.

  “She’s gone,” said Calvino.

  “Time to move out.”

  FORTY-THREE

  ON THE SIXTEENTH FLOOR, Jardine stuck his head inside the interior shaft, looking for the best position to give him a clear shot of anyone above. He needed to climb in quietly and he needed an angle that would make it difficult for someone directly above to detect him. After he crawled inside, Calvino and Colonel Pratt left him in position and climbed up the last two flights.

  As they walked up the staircase, Calvino thought about the security alert the American Embassy had emailed him. Phrases from that email flashed through his mind.

  You may be a target of terrorists’ action.

  He was one step behind the colonel. The stairs looked like the back entrance to a sleazy brothel with a one-eyed monster of a mama san whose thighs were buttered thick by too much time and rice. Love handles that jiggled as she walked.

  Maintain a high level of vigilance.

  Not only was there no door handle at the top, there was no door. Any cat or bird could walk or fly inside and no one would know any different. Colonel Pratt sat low in the frame and raised his hand. He squatted down on his knees, his body stretched forward. Calvino hunched down, looking over the colonel’s shoulder.

  New attacks are planned that will be more devastating than September 11.

  There was a man on the roof with a weapon. He was about ten feet away, looking out at the street. He had a cellphone to his ear.

  Terrorists do not distinguish between official and civilian targets.

  The colonel raised the Uzi with the specially built silencer fixed on the barrel; he tugged on Calvino’s jacket sleeve and motioned for him to remove the jacket. Calvino slipped out of his jacket and Colonel Pratt draped it over his wrists and forearms, covering the Uzi. Firearms 101 taught that a silencer didn’t eliminate all sound. Not all of the sound of Uzi came out of a barrel. The jacket would muffle most of the rest of the noise. For close work, the colonel would have preferred a Sten gun. Americans like the Uzi. Whatever the gun, for close-in work an important object was not to disturb the neighbors and, even more importantly, other friends of the man targeted, who might be heavily armed. They waited until the male, medium in height, thirty-something with a beard, put his cellphone in his pocket. Then Colonel Pratt shot him in the back of the head. Blood and brains sprayed across the rooftop and the body fell forward in the rain. No matter how you looked at it, when the clean-up squad came to the rooftop and looked at the body, one thing was for sure: suicide wasn’t the immediate cause of death. Except in Thailand, where at a crime scene suicide and murder was often blurred. The man Colonel Pratt had shot had wanted to die. He got his wish. Was his death an assisted suicide?

  Facilities maybe temporarily closed or suspended.

  It was strange how the bulletins played like long-play albums in the head. Songs to warn of what was coming, songs for the dead and dying. Calvino stared out at the body.

  Other geographic locations could be venues for the next round of attacks.

  Sometimes despite themselves, the government managed to get things right. They got lucky like anyone else. Pick a lotto number and spin the wheel and wait and see if your song comes, if there is room on your dance card.

  Colonel Pratt slowly moved out of the doorway and onto the roof, looking for any movement, but the roof was empty. Calvino knelt down beside the dead man, rolled him over. The dead man’s forehead had been blown away. Hair matted in blood and bone. Even with half of his head gone, Calvino could see the dead man wasn’t Hasam. Their first assumption had been wrong. A bamboo ladder leaned against a bunker- like structure. At the top was a door. Neither Calvino nor Colonel Pratt exchanged a word. Pratt pointed to the ladder. One of them had to climb up to the top and go through the door.

  One man dead on the roof indicated he was on guard duty for someone inside. The $64,000 question was whether the five million dollar man was alone with explosives tied around his waist. Or did he have a couple of men inside to make certain that at the last moment Hasam had no doubts that paradise was exactly what it had been cracked up to be.

  The colonel and Calvino walked to the outer perimeter of the bunker. The concrete structure had no windows. It had been built alongside a penthouse. While the rest of the condo building was a skeleton, the storage room had been nearly finished. They circled back to the ladder. Someone was inside the storage room. The problem was how to create a diversion, one that would cause that person to go to the internal window overlooking the elevator shaft and look down? It was impossible. No way was the plan going to work, thought Calvino. And there was no way to warn Jardine.

  Calvino knelt beside the dead man and searched through his pockets as Colonel Pratt squatted down, holding the Uzi barrel pointing down on
the roof. The barrel of an Uzi cooled down slowly. Touch the barrel after an Uzi’s been fired and you end up in hospital with third-degree burns. That’s Firearms 102. Calvino held up a knife, a handgun, a Golden gym membership card and a cellphone that rang as he held it in his hand. He didn’t answer and instead hit the “no” button for a busy signal. Signals were funny things in Thailand. Sometimes cellphone signals dropped out; other times the network was jammed and nothing went through. Whoever was ringing had to make a judgment call about why the phone hadn’t been answered. A technical problem with the equipment or network, or technical problem with the man on the other end—technical problem as in heart had stopped. As soon as the business was finished, Colonel Pratt understood the urgent need to get the phone to Jardine so his people could immediately track the incoming traffic and hunt down the callers.

  These were times when fanatics used modern technology in order to return the world to the dark ages. Such men were willing to die for what they believed. They were willing to send others to die. Their goal was simple: kill as many non-believers as possible and destroy their way of life. Pattaya was the perfect symbol for what they hated. Blowing it up with the American ambassador and military in town completed the symbolism. Killing was what they had been trained to do. But it was more than training; it was their choice to kill and die. They wanted the steaming human meat of the infidels hanging from trees, blown onto the windshields of trucks and buses. They wanted to join them, to be with them.

  US embassies and consulates will make every effort to provide emergency services to US citizens.

  What would Ben Affleck do? What would Woody do? What would Warren or Harrison do? What would their women have them do? Whatever it was they would do, it would have been scripted, rehearsed, the dailies reviewed and the scene re-shot if needed. They made hard decisions look smooth and easy. They went home at night. A lot of people weren’t ever going home if the bomb was detonated. That was what Calvino thought, squatting on the rooftop of the unfinished condo with Colonel Pratt. He felt that this might be the day to die. Hasam hits a button and there’s a blank screen of nothingness. Calvino looked at the sky. He felt the rain on his face.

  He had no idea what they would do. When he had pulled the cellphone out of the dead man’s pocket, he’d looked at the call list. The number for the last call was listed. The dead man would have been watching the street, reporting activity to Hasam and the possibly other accomplices inside the windowless room. Their eyes and ears had been eliminated. Calvino looked around; there were no other buildings that were taller. There was nothing happening in the street below. He couldn’t see the security guard.

  “We have to get inside that room,” whispered Colonel Pratt.

  How did they separate the terrorists from the dirty bomb? It wasn’t a trick question. There was no Firearms 202 manual to flip through to figure how to get the men inside to come out. Calvino stared at the dead man’s cellphone. He pulled down the missed call menu and found the last phone number on the list. Then he dialed that number on his own phone. It rang twice before a voice came on with a Thai “hello.”

  “I want to order the double deluxe pizza with double cheese,” said Calvino. He sat back facing the door at the top of the ladder and waited.

  Colonel Pratt said to himself, never again. Jardine was right. Civilians have no idea about operational procedures in the field.

  “Isn’t there someone there who can speak English? I want a fucking pizza. Got that clear, shit-for-brains?”

  The dead man’s cellphone rang again. Calvino hit the “no” button, sending back a busy signal. He counted to five, and the door above opened and a man appeared. The shotgun blast made his ears ring as the second dead man fell onto the roof, leaving the door wide open.

  “I guess it was a wrong number,” said Calvino.

  Colonel Pratt didn’t have time to hear him as he ran across the roof, climbed the ladder two steps at a time, and slammed his back against the wall next to the open door.

  “Hasam, give it up.”

  What did Afghan terrorism school teach them do at that moment?

  Automatic gunfire shot raked overhead through the open door. Whoever was inside was firing blind.

  If that’s what terrorism school taught them, then the world had a chance.

  They had forced Hasam to play his hand. He had nowhere to run. He could come out the door guns blazing, or he could do what he had been waiting for months to do: set off the dirty bomb. He fired again from inside. Calvino had crawled underneath the ladder. The rounds flew overhead. As long as he was shooting, that was a good thing. He needed two hands to keep the automatic weapon in operation. The moment he stopped, Colonel Pratt would swing around the door. Only the door slammed from the inside. A bolt locked into place. The man was smart, thought Colonel Pratt. The moment he heard them trying break down the door, he would shoot through it. One could be certain Hasam or whoever was alive inside wasn’t in the line of fire of the door.

  When a rat was cornered, it went into rat-emergency mode. The rat inside the room crawled out of the window overlooking the shaft. Above the opening for the cables was one hundred kilos of dirty bomb. He edged along the supporting beam. Colonel Pratt had kicked down the door and rolled forward into the small room. He rose up, seeing the room was empty. Calvino, two steps behind him, entered aiming the sawed-off shotgun, swinging around, pointing at shadows. At anything that moved or breathed or sighed. At the far end was a window overlooking the elevator shaft. Where was the ten mile convoy of uniforms from every branch of every service, the police, tourist police, army, marines, navy, special forces, followed by another convoy of local people wanting a cut of the reward money?

  They were alone. Hasam was on the otherside of the window inside the shaft. Dark and alone and ready to die.

  Jardine squeezed off a clear shot. It tagged Hasam in the shoulder. From the side of the window, Calvino peered down the shaft. Hasam was fiddling with some mechanism. It might have been a detonator. It didn’t matter what it was. Calvino slowly slipped the barrel of the sawed-off shotgun along the windowsill, rose up and fired twice down the shaft. The smell of cordite mixed with dust and blood.

  “Don’t fucking shoot, Jardine; I am climbing inside.”

  “You got him,” said Jardine as Hasam’s blood dripped eighteen floors down the shaft.

  Calvino looked around the inside.

  “There’s nothing here,” said Calvino.

  “That’s because the bomb is over here,” said Colonel Pratt. “We have five minutes on the digital readout.”

  Jardine was out of the shaft and up to the roof in less than two minutes. He hunched down on his knees in front of the device. The bomb was set to go off in less than three minutes when he set to work.

  Calvino had not seen the bomb above the shaft. There were two bombs. Jardine had instinctively figured this one out. It took one crafty, ruthless, calculating devil to catch another. One bomb had been anchored with a pulley and duct-tape above the elevator shaft. That bomb had been placed so it could be lowered down the shaft and timed to explode at the same time as the second bomb, which was setup where the elevator switching equipment was supposed to be installed in the storage room. Only there would be no future or switching equipment. Hasam was on his way to paradise. Unless Jardine got it right, in a couple of minutes there would be a billowing of debris and dust; clouds would form over-head and float around the heavens poisoning the infidels, making them suffer for their pleasures and privileges and wrong-headed ideas about God and his plans to take mankind back to the hunter-gatherer level of development.

  Terrorists learn to build in redundancy. They weren’t rocket scientists but their instincts told them that not everything always goes as planned. They needed a backup system of destruction. Infidels might have found one bomb, but would they find two bombs in time? That was the question.

  Terrorist actions may include suicide operations, hijackings, bombings or kidnappings. Remember this is
a warning.

  What does that piece of information tell you? Nothing.

  It leaves out the redundancy possibility. They might try all four things at the same time, or one after another, leaving you to catch your breath.

  “It’s a standard detonator stuck into four kilos of C-4,” said Jardine, working on the canister housing. “A dirty bomb throws off radiation for hundreds of miles and the half-life lasts a very long time.” After he defused the bomb designed to drop down the elevator shaft, he performed the same operation in the switching room. He wiped the sweat from his brow and lay back on the floor, eyeball-to-eyeball with his handiwork. “They used the same mechanism on both bombs. Figure out one and you’ve nailed the other bomb.”

  A Thai police colonel and an American private eye had broken into the room. They were still alive. The private dick had lucked out and killed Hasam. That was a miracle in Jardine’s book. Disabling the bombs was a piece of cake. Except for one problem. The bomb casing on the second device in the switching room had been booby-trapped. Jardine had nearly been fooled. It was setup just like the bomb in the shaft. These men were well trained. They had wanted a backup. And that would lull a man in a hurry into making a mistake. They had planned on one bomb being taken out and the next one doing the job because the enemy would make the wrong assumption. Two bombs. Each having the same mechanism. That would have been the kind of carelessness they had prayed for. Assumptions based on sameness—whether a bomb or a woman—were the most deadly ones anyone could make.

  They had all been less than a minute away from paradise. Once it was over, Jardine and the colonel spent thirty tense minutes getting into the room, rolling over bodies, checking Hasam’s body in the elevator shaft. An hour later bomb squad experts and dozens of other uniforms were all over the roof, the storage room, bagging bodies, gathering evidence and taking statements. The cellphones taken from the dead men were already being analyzed for the record of calls. If they had been smart, they would have used prepaid cards for each call. Throw the card away. Make another call. Throw the card away. Never use the same card twice. Were they that smart? Probably not, since one of the men who was shot had answered the phone. No one should have been phoning inward.