by Ed Kovacs
“The Internet told me that you don't run Task Force Orange, so how could those men have been yours?”
“You might say I wear two hats. The captain here is on my team,” said Klaymen, referring to Diana, “but she isn't under my command. And that's as much as you need to know about that.”
Sky paused, trying to take it all in. “I’m sorry about your men. And I’m deeply sorry about my old friend Lou Burdette and the other innocent people. But let’s cut to it. She sent you my tracings of the tablet.”
He looked to Diana, then back to the general, who pulled another file from the briefcase containing the traced hieroglyphics, as well as photos of a similar tablet, which caused Wilder to light up.
“The Greek tablet?”
“Correct.”
Crisp, high resolution well-lit depictions showed minute detail of the carving. The edges of the tablets were photographed, but unlike the Arizona tablet, they looked smooth. Sky said nothing about this; perhaps the general had the photos altered to keep pertinent information hidden, similar, in a way, to what Sky had done.
“Make sense to you?”
“Yes, this appears authentic. But I have to tell you, I don’t like it that you violated the Constitution by illegally invading my privacy and then stole my discovery, to exploit for yourself.”
“I’m not asking you to like it,” said Klaymen, bluntly. “The truth of the matter is, in the real world, the Constitution is merely a reference point. I’m in a results-oriented business, if you know what I mean.”
Wilder took a healthy drink of cold beer. “I’ve made a mental note that you don’t give a damn about the law or my rights. What I don’t get, is why does a general want the three tablets of Hui and the Book of Spells?”
“As you’re well aware, Doctor Wilder, there is mainstream science and there is alternative science. So too, there is mainstream warfare, and alternative warfare. My command with the rather boring, innocuous sounding name is the front for the development and deployment of special units practicing unconventional—fringe, if you will—warfare techniques. We also keep track of what our enemies are up to in this arena. An elixir for immortality is a weapon that an army would kill to have. Forte obviously is desperate to get the Book of Spells, as evidenced by the body count and his audacity. Would he be taking such risks just to obtain a historical artifact? I doubt it. He practices black magic. He believes in it.”
“Do you? Believe in it?”
“Let’s just say that I’ve seen some things that can’t easily be explained scientifically. ”
“But this Forte guy, a former mucky-muck in the military / industrial / intelligence complex, sounds like he’s one of you,” said Wilder, pointedly.
Klaymen sipped at his beer and gave Hunt a glance. “Well you don’t think we’re a monolith, do you? There are factions within factions within factions, ad infinitum. And elitists such as Simon Forte don't have America’s best interests in mind.”
“What do you mean, elitist?”
“He’s fallen in with the New World Order crowd.”
Wilder screwed up his face and looked at the general askance. “New World Order? General, you’re not one of those anti-Semitic types who think there’s a Zionist plot by international bankers to rule the world or usher in the anti-Christ or some nonsense like that, are you?”
“Of course, not. Simon Forte embodies the new power of the new millennium, an international man without a country whose loyalties are only to himself and the dirty business that helps him thrive. His global holdings are so vast, he’s like a state unto himself, complete with his own little private army. He's like a bagman, a pimp, an enforcer for the New Globalism.”
“I don’t know if I would call it New Globalism, I think that’s being too kind,” interjected Wilder. “Maybe it should be called ‘Police-state Corporate Socialism.’ The idea that national sovereignty is outmoded; corporations mean everything; ethnicity is immaterial, although lip service has to be paid to it; your rights are going to be violated, chipped away at and ignored, so get used to it; your kids are going to be dumbed down; but don’t worry, the government will take care of all your problems.”
“That’s right, and in every administration, Republican or Democrat, we have State Department political appointees who are bald-faced one-worlders and believe the planet should be controlled by a single entity.”
“Sounds like they’ve been watching too much Star Trek.”
“Yes, except this is very real. The EU, the IMF, NAFTA, the WTO and so forth are all steps along that road. Did you know that the WTO is comprised of trade lobbyists, corporate lawyers, politicians, trade bureaucrats, and corporate executives who don’t answer to anyone and make their decisions in private? They’re unelected and they don’t answer to anybody, except the men in the executive suite. Men like Simon Forte.”
Wilder chuckled, then quaffed his beer. “Just then, you didn’t sound like a general.”
“You mean I didn’t sound like your stereotype of a general. There are plenty more like me in the military and the intelligence community who aren’t on the take, aren’t getting fat at the trough of dirty money, and who still believe in the quaint notion of duty, honor, and country. But we have to proceed carefully, there’s been an internal war going on for the heart and soul of what the United States and other democracies are supposed to really be about. There has been a rash of accidents that killed top generals and admirals, except I don’t believe in accidents. And I suspect with good reason that Simon Forte had a hand in some of those ‘accidents.’”
“Were those flag officers your friends?”
“Yes. Conspiracy theorists have suggested what happened was a purge. Several attempts were made on my life, as well.”
Hunt raised her eyebrows; it was the first she’d heard of this.
“Forte and I have been adversaries for years, on several fronts, but our little mini-cold war has gone hot, and this time, it’s a fight to the finish.”
“The private library I broke into in Florence... who owns it?”
“A secret society called SW. Simon Forte owns the pensione that houses the library.”
“Really?” Sky mulled over the implications. “Small world.”
“How did you find that place, the private library?” Diana asked Sky as she worked at peeling the label off her beer bottle.
“A woman approached me in Europe several months ago. Slim, fortyish, she claimed to be a researcher. It was no big secret I had a book coming out telling the story of Hui. Maybe she was SW and tipped me, wanting me to see the documents. They were stumped, they couldn’t break the code. So they gave a fringe Egyptologist a shot.”
“Maybe,” said the general.
Wilder tried to drink it all in. How much of what they told him was true? Could this all be some elaborate con? Did they work for Forte, or was Forte really the good guy? There was no way he could know. Not yet. He would take their side for now, for the short term goal of retrieving the third tablet. But they all clearly held different larger objectives that he doubted meshed at all.
###
Hunt agreed to leave everything behind that might contain a tracking device, not that Wilder trusted her farther than he could throw a brick. Flush with an infusion of $200,000 in cash and new identity papers, Sky, who had put in time flying floats in the Pacific Northwest, powered up the 450 horsepower Pratt & Whitney R-985 radial engine, bounced the craft along light chop, then pulled up sharply with the Beaver’s thick wing providing maximum lift. With Diana sitting next to him, he made north, then once safely over the horizon, circled to the southwest. Soon they landed lights out on the Salton Sea, an inland saline lake in the Sonoran Desert of southeastern California. They beached the plane on a moonlit bank a few hundred yards from Highway 86, and then their real journey began.
CHAPTER 13
The wall clock read 11:10 P.M. when the Thai female immigration officer waved Sky Wilder and Diana Hunt through traveling on their virgin Canadi
an passports. He wore a floppy green fisherman’s hat, fake glasses, and nose prosthetics to defeat facial recognition software; she presented a rumpled dressed-down look with her hair up in a baseball cap, finding this called less attention to herself. But as the world’s fashion houses knew, you could put a burlap bag on a beautiful woman and she would still look just great.
Wilder didn’t miss the old international terminal of Don Mueang Airport, where a stroll for a farang, a foreigner, through the muggy, yellowing arrival lounge was akin to a blonde in hotpants risking the night bazaar alone in Tangiers. No, way back in 2006 the new airport, Suvarnabhumi, built on land that had been known as the Cobra Swamp, finally opened all shiny and modern. To put on a good face for the international community, Thai authorities exiled the touts, pickpockets, and scam artists to Mo Chit bus station and other environs where they began faithfully executing their duty of liberating travelers from the burden of carrying cash, credit cards or traveler’s checks.
He wanted to catch the Thai Smile Airways flight to Chiang Mai the next morning, so the hassle of contending with nightmarish traffic just to spend one night in Bangkok, wasn’t worth it. The Novotel, a low-rise but perfectly fine hotel stood a couple hundred meters away via an air-conditioned underground walkway.
Stuck with Hunt, Wilder pretended to trust her, which meant pretending to believe Forte was scouring the globe looking for them. Hence, they had taken elaborate time-consuming precautions to ensure no one had followed. In fact, she had insisted upon this. An act? He couldn’t be sure. She might be phoning in their location every time she slipped off to use a women's room. He leaned toward dumping her, but had hesitated. Someone had massacred police officers in an attempt to grab him. Giving her the slip might only postpone the inevitable, regardless of where her loyalties truly roosted. And if she was telling the truth, well, he wouldn’t want to face Simon Forte alone.
They entered the cool luxury and polished marble and glass of the hotel's five-story lobby where monitors conveniently displayed flight information. He silently lead them across the spacious lobby, calculating how to secretly make contact with a very dependable Thai asset who would help him determine Diana Hunt's fate.
###
Hunt glanced toward the cocktail lounge, where attractive, lithe young cocktail waitresses wearing floor-length Thai silk dresses in royal blue and gold moved gracefully, always smiling. “A drink would be nice, but probably not smart,” she mumbled, almost to herself. Not that Wilder seemed to be listening to her.
Dehydrated from all the flying, she felt tired, off-center and uneasy about teaming with the archeologist, whose cooperation she knew to be an artful sham. He'd survived the massacre at Camp Verde, and had escaped Forte's people at the cave site, so she had to give him some props. Okay, so he was street savvy, but was still a civilian with no tradecraft background.
Right off the bat they’d agreed she would make all decisions relating to mission security; he would rule regarding the planning, logistics and retrieval of the tablet. But even that policy had already been broken, as evidenced by his refusal to travel on the passports provided by the general, resulting in a thirty-six hour delay in Mexico City where they obtained their phony Canadian identity papers. She hadn’t argued the point too strenuously, because if MAHG had been penetrated by Forte, it would explain why so many of the general’s men were being eliminated, and she was in no hurry to join that sub-group.
So the command structure resembled one big gray area, including who got to shower first in the room they would have to share to maintain their cover as husband and wife. She assumed he wanted them traveling as a married couple simply so he could keep a closer eye on her. She could deal with that, but with neither one of them technically in charge, problems would be inevitable.
The smiling clerk behind the black marble front desk spoke four languages and gave new meaning to the word unctuous. No suites were available, but with a wink he suggested a room with a large king-sized bed, and Wilder readily agreed. Once in their well-appointed room, she tipped the bellman and then they were alone. Hunt didn’t feel like asking, she simply wheeled her suitcase into the bathroom and locked the door.
After a long shower she emerged in a tee-shirt and panties, her usual sleeping attire, to find Wilder asleep on the floor below the window, an empty mini-bottle of Chivas Regal on the table above him. Too fatigued to meditate, she thought, why the hell not? She crossed to the mini-bar, fixed herself a bourbon and seven, then sat cross-legged on the bed and considered how Forte would try to stop them. Something didn’t smell right, but wasn’t that always the case in these kinds of operations? Still, she had the nagging suspicion the stakes in this game were much higher than anyone had let on.
###
Neither of them relished getting on another plane that morning, but the short hop to Chiang Mai, Thailand’s second-largest city in the slightly cooler north took just an hour and was uneventful. After a quick stop to pay cash for a GPS unit at an electronics store, Wilder gunned a rented Toyota Fortuner 4WD SUV from Highway 107, west onto Route 1095 and began the climb into the mountains. This range was the southernmost extreme in a series of ranges crossing southwest China and Burma all the way to the southeast edge of the Tibet Plateau. The winding road, built by the Japanese in World War II, afforded breathtaking views of emerald glazed, mist-shrouded mountains overlooking fertile valleys.
“I want to stop and use a toilet. And I’m getting hungry, how about you?”
Diana almost blanched. Her partner had barely spoken over the last few days of travel together and had never inquired about any of her needs, like food. She assumed he was keeping his own counsel because he pegged her for a spook who wouldn’t be forthcoming with truthful answers to much of anything, so why bother trying to talk with someone you didn't trust?
“I could eat,” she replied while scanning a road map, ready to play the role of navigator and curious as to their ultimate destination. Wilder, however, seemed to know the way without prompting, robbing her of anything to do.
“Let's stop at the next village.”
“Okay,” she said, “but it doesn't look very big.”
“We'll find something.”
She wasn’t thinking about lunch, she was thinking they were heading northwest, toward Myanmar, still called Burma by many, one of the more dangerous border areas in the world and part of the Golden Triangle. Hopefully they weren’t going that far.
Soon, a blue, white, and red Pepsi sign came into view, and they pulled in amongst several motorbikes and a couple of cars in the dusty parking lot of an open-air, thatched-roof cafe with a drooping canvas awning that had once been green. Long rows of empty pine tables in the lot adjacent to the cafe, some shaded under semi-permanent tarps on rickety aluminum poles, suggested this was the village market, meaning the food at the cafe should be fresh.
They entered and did a quick circuit of the wooden-floored eatery as Wilder glanced into the cooking area, seeming to size up the general sanitation of the place. He finally gestured to her and they parked themselves at a table under a wobbly ceiling fan. The view of the road enabled them to note any passing vehicles.
“This place feels pretty good,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean I think the food will be fine here.” What she really meant was that, in sensing the energy of the place, she detected no darkness or warning signs. The cook seemed happy. Happy energy going into your food is a good thing. Bad vibes had kept her from eating at more than a few restaurants.
“Allow me to suggest oliang—iced black coffee,” he said. “Caffeine and sugar like you’ve never had it. Also, noodles. The ones in the pot over there look pretty good.”
She watched him smile and gesture to the waitress. Hunt had been to northern Thailand before and knew that farangs were common enough, even in tiny hamlets like this one. Endless backpackers traversed the area hellbent to visit remote hill tribes or indulge in opium smoking experiences. In a sense, t
he trekkers helped destroy the very authenticity they thought they wanted, by handing out clothing and money, or by smoking dope in front of hill tribe children in a less-than-stellar display of behavior.
Still, she felt they stood out as a mild curiosity at the cafe, and the lunch patrons and employees checked them out without staring, using the quick glances Asians were so good at.
A smiling waitress approached, nodded slightly and lit up a bit when a smiling Wilder greeted her with, “Sawatdii-khap.” He looked to Diana. “So, noodles okay?” She nodded and he ordered two oliangs and two orders of laht nah.
“It’s great to be back in Thailand. Although they change governments more frequently than I buy suits. And when the generals have their coups, innocent people die and freedoms evaporate. I liked it better here when they had real democracy and the politicians were actually elected by the people.”
“Let’s hope we’re not here that long,” she uttered, pulling out the road map.
“We won’t be. The tablet’s not in Thailand.”
Dammit, she almost said out loud. She knew they were going into the Golden Triangle. Completely unprepared. A war zone. In fact, worse than a war zone. “Since my job is mission security, it would help if I knew our destination.”
“For the sake of mission security I’m not telling you. If Forte grabs you but not me, the mission isn’t compromised.”
“Since I have an idea of where we’re heading, it would be nice to secure some appropriate gear,” she said, her tone getting a bit frosty.
“We’ll get outfitted in Ban—” he stopped himself, then, “I mean in no time. Don’t worry about that.”
Was that a real slip or was he feeding her a false clue? “Let’s talk about the trustworthiness of your ‘outfitter.’” She didn’t at all like the notion that she was just along for the ride on this op and it was starting to stick in her craw.