Harper squeezed her hand. ‘I’m so sorry.’ He realised that there was nothing he could say that would make her feel better, but he felt her pain.
CHAPTER 5
For weeks afterwards, Harper felt returning flashes of his former craving for heroin but he never had the least temptation to use again. Even if he’d been put in an empty room with a stash of the drug, he would have flushed it away without a moment’s pause. He had continued his punishing fitness regime and three weeks after he had emerged from the cellar where he’d gone cold turkey, he pronounced himself ready.
‘Ready for what?’ Maggie May said. He had phoned her on his burner mobile and she had clearly been pleased to hear from him. She had gone back to England a few days after he had emerged from the cellar, once she was sure that he had truly beaten his addiction.
‘Ready for anything, but one thing in particular: tying up the loose ends from the job that got me hooked on smack in the first place.’
‘Now why do I suspect that “tying up the loose ends” might be a bit of an understatement for what you’ve got in mind.’
He grinned. ‘Because you know me so well.’
‘Any more work for me in it?’
‘I need someone to do surveillance with me, but if you want to stay with your boy I can-’
She cut him off. ‘I miss him, of course, but he’s fine with his grandmother. Talk me through the job.’ She listened as he explained what he wanted to do. ‘Bloody hell, Lex, that’s quite a task you’ve set yourself,’ she said. ‘The place’ll be protected by a lot more than a padlock and an entry phone, and they’ll be armed like the Thai Army.’
‘They’re part of the Thai army - or were - so that’s not too surprising,’ he said. ‘But even the whole of the Thai Army wouldn’t stop me from getting to them. This is personal for me, but if you want out, that’s fine - no complaints, no judgement from me, I already owe you big time for what you did for me.’
‘Want out?’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t miss it for the world. I’ll be on the next plane out there.’
Harper also called in the help of another two regular members of his team. As usual, Hansfree, a pale, intense-looking man in his mid-thirties, arrived dressed all in black and wearing black leather gloves. The nickname, chosen by Hansfree himself, was in the blackest of black humour. It referred to the loss of both of his hands when an IED detonated as he was examining it. He was immune to feelings of self-pity, pointing out that he had been lucky to survive at all, and had made a nonsense of descriptions of his injuries as “a disability” by using his prosthetic hands, voice recognition software, his intelligence and his genius with computer technology, to become Harper’s resident electronic wizard. There was nothing a two-handed person could do on a computer that Hansfree couldn’t do just as well; and in fact he usually did it better and quicker too.
Harper also summoned another regular, who operated under the nom de guerre of Barry Big, or sometimes just BB. He was a bluff, blunt and powerfully-built man, a Yorkshireman and proud of it, who had been a member of the SRR - the Special Reconnaissance Regiment, the successor to 14 Int. He was a surveillance professional who also had the combat skills to fight his way out if he was compromised. He was now based in the Dominican Republic, the homeland of his partner. They owned a beachfront bar together, which she ran alone when he was away. She was younger than BB, very beautiful and didn’t speak a word of English. He didn’t speak Spanish either but, as he often said with a grin, ‘one way and another, we seem to make ourselves understood.’
Forty-eight hours after he called them, they were in Pattaya ready to be briefed.
The combination of Hansfree’s phone taps and email intercepts, Maggie May’s expertise at eyes-on surveillance, and Barry Big’s surveillance and combat experience, allied to Harper’s formidable skill-set and his extensive network of contacts in the Thai underworld produced results within days. It turned out that Narong, Decha and their men, who had conspired to betray him to the Burmese warlords, were heavily involved in one of the biggest drug packaging operations in Bangkok. The heroin base had been processed into pure heroin at crude factories deep in the Thai jungle near the border with Myanmar, but it was then shipped to Bangkok to be repackaged for export. The repackaging was done in a razor wire encircled compound on the outskirts of the city. The heroin was packed into crates labelled as machine parts, drums of industrial chemicals, white goods like washing machines and a multitude of other, apparently innocent cargoes and loaded into shipping containers. They were then shipped by air or sea to dealers operating in every First World country. Not every consignment got through, but it was impossible for Customs and narcotics officers to check more than a tiny proportion of the enormous volumes of goods passing daily through their ports and airports, and the profits for the drug traffickers were so enormous that the loss of an occasional shipment was just treated as part of the cost - and a very minor one at that - of doing business.
Another heroin packaging operation was being run from a fourth floor apartment in Khlong Toei, the district of Bangkok that tourists rarely ever saw, where he had first met up with Narong and his men. It was armoured like Fort Knox - steel grilles on the windows, steel shutters on the doors, heavily armed guards on the entrances and exits, and a network of look-outs in the surrounding streets, reporting back sightings of any unknown faces or strange vehicles before they could get within half a mile of the place.
Harper had rented a safe house a mile away from the apartment, far enough from it that there was no danger of being spotted or compromised by the Thais or their look-outs. He paid three months rent in advance, in cash, and brought in all the weapons and equipment he thought he would need. However, before he could risk an attack on the apartment, he had to have detailed knowledge of its barriers to entry - alarms, booby-traps, guard routines - and the escape routes those inside would use in the event of a raid by police or rival traffickers, or a fire or other emergency. Surveillance, phone-taps, email intercepts and sigint - signals intelligence - could only take him so far. What he needed now was humint - human intelligence - and the only way to obtain that was to persuade one of those with knowledge of the apartment to talk about its security, access and escape routes. ‘And as you know,’ as Harper said to Maggie May, ‘I can be very persuasive.’
Operating from the cover of empty buildings or street-front bars and cafes, Harper, Maggie May and Barry Big staked out the roads leading to the apartment and tracked the Thais whenever they left the building. Either Narong or Decha was always on duty at the apartment along with two of the other soldiers, while the other three took time off. On the first three nights, the three off-duty men kept together, drinking and eating in heavily populated areas where it would have been difficult to isolate and abduct them, before heading back to the army compound where they were based. However on the fourth night, Decha remained in a go-go bar and brothel in a side-street while the other two disappeared.
Two hours later, Decha, by now quite drunk, came out of the brothel and began walking up the street towards the main road. He had gone only a few yards when Harper stepped out of an alleyway, side-swiped him across the throat, and as the Thai gasped frantically for breath, Harper hit him with a savage punch that snapped his head around. As Decha dropped to the ground, Maggie May pulled to a halt in a rusting Toyota pick-up truck. Harper dumped the unconscious Thai into the back and they roared off up the street.
When Decha came around, coughing and spluttering as a bucket of water was dumped over him, he found himself immobile, lashed by cable ties to a chair in the windowless basement of the safe house, and with Harper standing over him. He pulled up his sleeve and showed the Thai the track marks on his arms. ‘This is what you did to me,’ he said. ‘If you don’t tell me what I need to know, then I’ll kill you without a second thought.’
‘Do it then,’ Decha said. ‘I’m not telling you anything.’ His voice did not sound anywhere as sure as his words suggested, but he cleared his throa
t and spat noisily at Harper. The spit flecked across Harper’s trousers.
Harper pulled out his combat knife and showed it to the Thai, whose eyes followed the blade as Harper moved it to and fro in front of him. ‘I need you to tell me everything you know about the apartment where you’re repackaging the heroin,’ Harper said. ‘What the security systems are, how many people are there - both the people doing the packaging and the ones watching over them -any codes or passwords you use and how you would get away if there’s a police raid or a fire. Ready to talk?’
The Thai remained silent, his face set like stone.
‘No?’ Harper said. ‘Big mistake. Now I don’t know if you’ve watched many gangster movies, but when they do this in films, they always seem to start with the little finger and work their way up. However, I’m a man in a hurry, so we’re going to go a different route. Do you know what distinguishes us from the apes?’
Decha stared at him, fear in his eyes, the sweat of panic on his brow. ‘I- I don’t know.’
‘Well, you clearly weren’t paying enough attention in school, were you? The answer is opposable thumbs.’
He pinned the Thai’s right thumb under the blade, then severed it with a blow from the heel of his hand on the back of the knife. There was an unearthly scream but Harper blotted it out. The man was meat, not human, and meat didn’t feel pain.
‘Ready to talk yet?’ Harper said, moving the knife to the other thumb. ‘No?’ There was another blood-curdling scream as Harper hacked it off. ‘Then I guess there’s nothing to distinguish you from an ape now, is there? By the way, when I’ve finished with your fingers, your tongue and your cock are next, that’s if you don’t bleed to death first.’ He tossed the bloody stump onto the floor. As he raised the knife again, Decha cried ‘Stop! Stop! I’ll tell you everything you want to know.’ The man began to sob uncontrollably.
Harper made him go over every detail of the access to the building, the security systems, the number of people working there and where they sat or stood, right down to the location of the toilet, and what the escape plan would be if there was a raid. When he had finished interrogating him, the Thai gave him a fearful look. ‘What happens now?’
Harper shrugged, his expression set like stone. ‘What you’d expect. You left me for dead, now it’s your turn.’
As the Thai soldier unleashed a torrent of curses in his native dialect, Harper forced Decha’s chin back, then slit his throat with one stroke of his knife and watched impassive as the life-blood pumped from him. When he heard the death-rattle in the Thai’s throat, he wiped the blade of his knife on Decha’s sleeve and walked out. The rent was paid for three months. There were no neighbours to complain about the smell and the fresh rat droppings in the cellar suggested that by the time the owner came to investigate, Harper would be long gone and the dead Thai mere bones.
Harper brought Barry Big, Maggie May and Hansfree up to speed and then laid out his plan. ‘As you know, the factory is on the top floor and the security is close to impregnable. But if there’s a raid, their plan is to escape over the roof tops and down through a neighbouring building while the cops are still fighting their way up the stairs. That’s the weak point.’
For his plan to be effective, Harper needed a couple of smoke grenades. Bangkok was a city were almost everything imaginable could be purchased at a price and smoke canisters, pinched from the police or army or sold off from their armouries by junior ranks boosting their modest incomes, were kept under the counter of a number of stalls in the city’s teeming markets. However Harper preferred to improvise what he needed using fireworks that were even more widely available. He bought half a dozen large “Starburst” fireworks and, using only wooden tools, since any spark from a metal tool could have caused a fatal explosion, he carefully removed the fuses from each one and emptied out the contents. He now had a mound of coarse-grained black powder and two handfuls of the marble-sized explosive pellets that were hurled into the sky when the firework ignited to create the starburst.
He took two empty plastic bottles - one should have been enough but for the plan to be failsafe he needed a spare in case one failed to detonate - and filled them with the black powder and the explosive pellets. He tamped the powder down carefully with a piece of scrap wood and then fitted one of the fuses he had removed from the fireworks to either end of the bottle. When he had finished, he was holding two improvised devices like the “flash-bang” stun grenades used by special forces, but without the accompanying gas. The fuses could be lit by a cigarette end and once detonated in a confined space like the stairwell of the apartment building where the heroin was re-packaged, the home-made flash-bangs would create a deafening, disorientating noise, accompanied by dense clouds of smoke that would billow up through the building on the updraft. He handed them to Barry Big and then ran through the plan and the timings with him one last time.
While Barry Big stationed himself within range of the entrance to the apartment block, Harper broke into an empty building further down the street. He went up the stairs to the top floor, climbed out of a roof-light and then made his way across the rooftops until he found a hiding place behind a rusting steel vent, a few yards from the skylights in the apartment. He settled himself there and then made a final check of his untraceable Colt 45. It was old and well-used but still in good condition.
Harper slid off the safety catch and then gave a double-click on the communication device at his wrist, a Japanese throw-away walkie talkie. There was an answering click and a moment later he heard two short bursts of fire as Barry Big took out the two guards in the entrance to the building. There was a heartbeat’s silence, and then a double Crump! sound as he detonated the improvised smoke canisters in the stairwell. There was no need to attempt to breach the steel grilles, doors and shutters, nor run the gauntlet of armed guards on each landing, because when dense smoke started billowing up through the building, Narong, the other two soldiers and a Thai in civilian clothes who must have been part of the gang, all headed for the roof.
Harper was waiting for them. He held his fire until they had all clambered out onto the roof, then picked them off, double-tapping each of them, switching to the next target even as the previous one was still falling to the roof-tiles, their heads haloed by a spray of blood and brains. Harper’s controlled fire came so fast that the double-taps seemed to merge into one continuous burst of firing. The last to die was Narong. Harper gut-shot him, determined that his death would be a slow one. As the Thai’s pistol slid from his grasp and skittered away across the tiles, Harper emerged from the cover of the steel vent and Narong’s eyes widened in recognition and fear when he saw him.
‘You should have gone with your instincts and killed me in the opium fields, while you had the chance,’ Harper said. ‘Now it’s your turn and it’s going to be slow.’ He levelled his Colt and put a second round into Narong’s kidneys and another into his lung.
He picked up Narong’s pistol and was about to walk away when he heard women’s voices crying in terror. He glanced around, stepped to the edge of the roof and looked down into the street. It remained quiet for now - prudent neighbours in such districts did not go looking for trouble, least of all when gunfire had been heard - and there was no sign of any police response as yet.
He crossed the roof to the skylight and looked down into the apartment. Smoke was still billowing though the room below, which was now deserted except for six women, all stark naked apart from white surgical masks covering their noses and mouths. They were chained by their ankles with padlocks fixed to the steel tables on which they had been repacking the heroin.
Drums of the uncut heroin stood open next to the table, with plastic packs of the finished and repackaged end product stacked against the wall. Bundles of American dollars - it was hard to estimate how much but perhaps $50,000 in all - were piled on a table at the far end of the room. The six chained women were screaming in terror and making frantic attempts to break their chains. Harper had to shout severa
l times to silence them and get their attention. ‘Do any of you speak English?’
One of them nodded, a frighteningly young-looking Thai girl with tear tracks through the white dust on her cheeks.
‘Right. Tell the others to stop screaming. They don’t need to be afraid, because the smoke is not from a fire, it’s just a smoke grenade. The men who were here are all dead, so you’ve nothing more to fear from them. Who had the keys to your padlocks?’
‘Narong had them.’
‘Wait, I’ll be back in a moment,’ Harper said and turned away, ignoring the girls’ redoubled cries.
He retraced his steps across the roof to where Narong lay. He already looked close to death, but Harper kept the barrel of his rifle pressed into the Thai’s neck while he searched his pockets with the other hand and found the keys. He walked back across the roof, climbed down the ladder propped against the edge of the skylight. He unchained the girl he had spoken to, then gave her the keys. ‘Undo the locks and release the others,’ he said. ‘Now is there anybody else here or were you the only ones?’
She gestured towards a door in the far wall. ‘I think there are some boys in there. I’ve never seen them - Narong always kept the door locked - but I’ve heard them crying out.’
‘All right, I’ll take a look but don’t wait, you all need to get out of here now. Don’t try to use the stairs, there may still be guards there. Climb out of the skylight, go across the roof and down through the other building. I’ve left the roof light to it open; that’s your escape route and your chance for a new life. Take all the dollars you can carry, share them between you and then get right away from here and don’t ever come back.’
However, even as he said it, he saw the dead eyes and hollow faces of the other women, suggesting that they were all already hooked on smack and unlikely to break free. Narong and the men who had been running the place were dead or as good as dead, but others would soon take their places and business as usual would no doubt resume. He waited until the girl had begun to climb the ladder and then hurried to the door she had indicated. He didn’t bother to find the right key, two savage kicks with his boot splintered the frame and the door flew open.
Plausible Deniability: The explosive Lex Harper novella Page 5