Singapore Sling Shot

by Andrew Grant

  I disassembled the Barrett on the run, pieces of it going into streams and simply being tossed away into the jungle as I went. It was a waste in some ways, but the equipment was expendable and we weren’t. With the thirty-five-pound weight of rifle gone, I became a hell of a lot lighter on my feet.

  Down off the ridge, we hit a dirt road. In the bushes beside the road was the means of our rapid getaway. The battered little Honda motorcycle with the square sidecar attached was probably the number one form of transport throughout much of rural Asia. Sami and Jo, being Thai, were going to play at being locals. Because I was a white guy, I got the sidecar and the wide conical straw hat. With the hat pulled low over my head and by making myself as small as possible, I became the little woman.

  We hauled the bike out of the bushes. I got in the sidecar while Jo and Sami debated who was going to drive. Jo ended up at the front. The bike kicked into life and we were away in a cloud of blue smoke. I have no idea what the bike was running on. Probably it was coconut oil. Whatever it was, it went and we started putting kilometres between the kill zone and us.

  “Fuck!” Sami shouted and pointed. Above and ahead of us was a helicopter. Not just any helicopter, it was a huge, dust-coloured Russian Hinde. This was the flying version of a damn tank.

  The giant bird of prey was nose down and coming at us straight down the road. It was fully armed. There were rocket pods bristling and a heavy machinegun was starting to chatter.

  A long line of fountaining dirt swept towards us. Jo was hit. The bike swerved as the first rocket impacted on the road just yards in front of us. The blast lifted the bike and hurled it into the air. I twisted one way, Sami the other, while Jo’s body, torn in half by the machinegun fire, was buried by the falling motorcycle.

  I hit the ground and tried to get up, but I couldn’t. I had no legs and no arms. I was just a torso with a head attached. I screamed, but no sound came. Sami was on his feet. He was staggering and the Hinde was coming towards him, flying lower and lower, its nose almost on the ground. That brought the giant rotors to within centimetres of the road.

  Suddenly, Sami was no more. He was lost in a haze of bloody pulp. His upper body was gone. His torso remained standing for a moment as the Hinde settled down to land, and then it fell into the blood-soaked dirt.

  The helicopter settled. The cargo door opened and out stepped Dimitri Chekov. He was untouched by bullet or fire. He was laughing. More than laughing, he was bellowing. His eyes were on me.

  “Mr Swann, so pleased to see you again. I have a friend or two of yours here. You could say this is a reunion of sorts. Chekov reached back into the cargo hold and lifted something out. It was a head, a human head. It was the beautiful Babs. She was smiling at me.

  “Hi, Dan. Remember me? We had so much fun together.”

  “Go to your lover. Give him a kiss,” Chekov teased. He tossed the head of beautiful Barbara from Bristol into the dirt beside me. She was still smiling at me, her green eyes dancing.

  “And another of your friends, Mr Swann.” Chekov was holding Geezer’s head out to me. Geezer was grimacing. Against the putrid blue-green colour of his flesh, his milky-white eyes found me.

  “Dan, you’ve got to pick your friends better. You’ve been the death of me.”

  Chekov tossed Geezer’s head towards me. It rolled to stop beside that of Babs.

  Death of me. Geezer was right, of course, I had been the death of him, and of Babs and of so many others. The others followed as Chekov lobbed head after head towards me. There was Kim, Sami’s beautiful daughter. Her head rolled to join the chorus. Soon the heads of all my dead surrounded me. They formed a circle that was many rows deep. So many dead from my life and they were all talking to me. Talking at me. Some were berating me. Others were laughing and making jokes. Chekov had been right. This was a reunion.

  Some of the faces I didn’t know, but most I did. I’d killed so many people in my life and so many had died because of me. Was this my hell?

  Then I saw Simone and knew it truly was. She was stepping out of the rear of the Hinde. She was wearing a wedding gown, a beautiful creation of flowing silk. There was a long train and two young people followed, tending to it. They were her children. There were flowers in her hands. White roses.

  Chekov was no longer wearing the sweaty fatigues of just moments before. He was dressed in a morning suit. With Simone on his arm, he came to where I lay in the blood-drenched dirt.

  “Mr Swann, I want to introduce you to my wife. The beautiful woman you killed when you tried to kill me. You are dead and she is mine forever!”

  Now I found a voice and the screaming started.

  “Daniel, Daniel. It’s all right. Everything is all right, my darling.”

  I opened my eyes. Simone was beside me, holding my hands in hers. I was lying on soft grass. Her hands were warm. There was no ice in them or on the lips that brushed my cheek. She was alive and her smile enveloped me as I lay there dazed, looking up at her. The grey sky was blue and the grass under me was as soft as cloud. This was not the coarse carpet of the cemetery in which I had died.

  Simone was wearing the gown she was to have been buried in. It glowed with an inner light, purer than fresh snow. The little gold crucifix that had been entwined in her cold fingers while she lay in her coffin was now around her neck. It sparkled in the sunlight.

  “Come with me, my darling.” Simone rose to her feet, drawing me effortlessly to mine. We weren’t in the cemetery. We were standing in a garden. Hedges defined a pathway that stretched into the distance. Trees towered above us. Flowers filled the air with their sweet perfume. Was this heaven? Had a sinner like me gone to heaven? It must be heaven for Simone to be here with me.

  We started walking, she gently leading me after her. It was as if she had walked this way before. Along the avenue of trees we moved, following the pathway to only she and her God knew where.

  Then I knew it wasn’t heaven. Simone was gone in an instant. Voices were calling a name. It wasn’t my name, but I knew it. I had heard it before, somewhere.

  A bright light was on my face, my eyelids were being pried open. I fought against it, but failed. There was a face above me. Not one but several and a voice was calling that name again.

  “Mr Crewe, can you hear me? Mr Crewe, are you awake?”

  I knew Mr Crewe from somewhere, but I wasn’t awake. The light vanished and the voice faded. I wanted to find Simone again. I wanted for us to walk hand in hand to eternity or wherever she had been leading me.

  But she was gone and I was lost in a black cloud.

  38

  Fractured skull and heavily concussed. He’s been drifting in and out of consciousness for the last twenty-four hours.”

  “Do you think he’ll be okay?”

  “I think so, but it’s difficult to say with head injuries like this. He may suffer any number of complaints, temporary or permanent, because of it. Amnesia, for instance.”

  “That might be a blessing, Doctor,” Sami Somsak replied.

  “It was a terrible thing that happened.”

  “Yes it was! Thank you. Please call me if there is any change.”

  Sami stood and looked down at his friend lying in the hospital bed. Daniel’s face was the colour of chalk. There was an oxygen feed running into his nose, but he was breathing unaided. A drip feed was connected to his left wrist. His shaven head was covered in an iodine solution and a mass of staples created jagged patterns across the top of his scalp.

  The doctor had told him that they had inserted a small metal plate to replace a shattered piece of skull. There was a drainage shunt fixed to the side of his head. The tube terminated in a bag hanging from the side of his bed. There was another bag beside it. This one was full of dark urine.

  “Oh, Daniel,” Sami sighed. His friend had saved his life and as fate would have it, he had been smashed on the head by a falling angel scythed from its pedestal by the hail of steel released by the bomb.

  The death toll had b
een horrendous. Jo Ankar, who had been at Sami’s side for almost three decades as a brother, minder and friend, had died. Justine, her children, and twenty-five others were dead and many more were in critical condition.

  Sami left the room. There were two police officers waiting to interview the injured man. The doctor spoke to them briefly, giving them notice of the patient’s condition. The pair departed, following Sami to the elevator.

  Sami rode to the ground floor deep in thought. The policemen were talking, discussing the bombing. Sami filtered their conversation out. He had another problem apart from his dead. There was a traitor in his camp and he had no idea who it was. Until he could identify and eliminate that threat, he had to fly solo. With Jo gone, there was only K left who he could trust, but the problem was that K could be that traitor, despite the fact that he had been with Sami as long as Jo had been.

  Outside the hospital, Sami got into a taxi. The address he gave the driver was not for the Cairnhill apartment. Until he knew who the traitor was he was not returning there, simply because that person had to be a member of his household and that group included K. Until Daniel was back at his side, he would remain at a secret location, another apartment, a much more modest one than the penthouse, and it was a property that no one knew about. He had maintained it for times such as this. In the meantime, he would continue to do business via cellphone. A rumour that he had returned to Thailand was being circulated. In reality, he would remain in Singapore and plan his revenge on Thomas Lu.

  The taxi dropped Sami Somsak close to the apartment block on York Hill. He walked to the building and caught the elevator to the eighteenth floor.

  An hour after Sami Somsak had entered the apartment, the door opened and a little old man appeared. He took the elevator back down to the ground floor.

  The old man was dressed in the traditional pyjama uniform still favoured by many of the old people. There was a brimless cap on his head. He was wearing a pair of open sandals and held a small cardboard suitcase in one hand.

  Out into the muggy afternoon the old man went. He shuffled down to the street and there he waved down a cab. The driver expressed surprise at the address he was given. He would have been even more surprised if he had seen what the old man was carrying in his suitcase. Nestled in the foam rubber cut-out inside the case was an H&K MP5 submachine gun. With it were three magazines and two fragmentation grenades.

  Sami Somsak was back on the street in a guise that Daniel Swann would have recognised. This was the same little old man who had saved Swann’s life in a Bangkok back street less than a year before.

  Being part Thai with Chinese and Japanese in the mix, Sami Somsak could pass as any or all of these nationalities as required. He spoke five languages fluently including Japanese, Mandarin and Cantonese. In his role as the old man, he spoke only Mandarin and Singlish.

  “Any improvement?”

  “A little, I think. He is opening his eyes, but I’m not sure anyone is home yet.”

  I could hear the voices. They were coming from a long way off. I tried to speak, to tell them I was home, but nothing came. I could see their faces, a man and a woman. Both were dressed in white. I knew they weren’t angels. The angels had gone away forever. This was a doctor and a nurse. I was in a hospital, I knew that much. I tried again to speak, but my eyes closed and I drifted away.

  The fact that Sami Somsak survived the bomb blast had driven Thomas Lu into a frenzied rage. He had been in his office when the news channel had released a list of the dead. Somsak’s name hadn’t appeared on that list nor on the list of the injured that followed an hour later. In his rage, Lu had demolished the television screen by hurling an ornate bronze desk ornament at it.

  Now, two days on, Thomas Lu had received word from his spy in the Somsak camp that the Thai gangster had withdrawn back to his Bangkok base. That provided Lu with momentary relief. Somsak had taken a huge hit to his Singapore-based people. Had he retreated only to plot his return? Or had he decided to leave Singapore alone, knowing that the chances of being caught were increasing by the day?

  Lu had made sure that he was outside the scope of the police investigation. His bomb maker had fled to Indonesia, along with several of the others in his organisation who knew about the device.

  The man he had inserted into the funeral home had gone back to his village in Malaysia considerably richer than when he had left it.

  Lu was confident there were no loose ends regarding the police; however, there was one that Sami Somsak could exploit if he put the facts together. Thomas Lu’s spy inside the Somsak camp has been a comparatively recent convert and was potentially very exposed.

  Lu regretted he hadn’t identified and exploited this person’s potential much earlier. But then he hadn’t known Somsak was involved in the Intella Island project at that time.

  “Chance,” Lu muttered as he walked from his study through to the lounge of his luxurious penthouse. A chance comment from a lover had resulted in a phone call and subsequent meeting; a connection had been made with the heart of Sami Somsak’s inner sanctum. It had been so simple to achieve, and so very fruitful.

  The person on the other end of the line was one whose life, loyalty and everything else was governed by the lusts of the flesh and not by power, drugs, money or loyalty. Once the connection had been made, the rest had been easy. Betrayal had been bought with the flesh of a handful of young men and women who were willing to indulge this person’s every sexual whim.

  Lu poured himself a whisky. “Chance and timing,” Thomas Lu philosophised into his glass.

  I am drifting in and out of consciousness, but my waking times are getting longer. I know I am in hospital but everything else is fuzzy. There is a mist where my memory used to be. I know my name, Daniel Swann, but where am I?

  The police! I knew they were police by their uniforms. They came to see me. But I didn’t understand what they were saying. A bomb! People dying. I didn’t know and they went away.

  There is something in the mist, a part of a memory? I can smell the ocean. I can feel something, but what? It is just out of my reach.

  They helped me to the bathroom. That was good. I hated having that tube in me. They have taken the tube from my nose and the one from my head as well. They have told me the wound is healing. What is the wound? What caused it? Who am I really? They call me David, but my name is Daniel? Who is David Crewe?

  I want to leave this place. There is somewhere I remember. Somewhere I want to be. There is a telephone. A cellular phone. It is given to me by a nurse. She says someone delivered it for me. It rings.

  Sami Somsak? Who is Sami Somsak and why is he speaking to me as if he knows me? I tell him I don’t know him. He sounds sad, I think. I flip the phone shut and he goes away.

  I want to leave this place and go to the other place. I think I remember how to get there.

  The doctors tell me it will be some time before they can release me. The wound in my head is healing well, but my memory isn’t. But I am remembering more. I remember the jungle. I am happy in the jungle. I want to go where I am happy. Maybe then my memory will come back to me.

  I want to leave this place.

  39

  “What?”

  “I’m sorry, Mr Somsak, he’s gone. Some time late last night, he left.”

  “He discharged himself?”

  “Not really, he was in no condition to be discharged. He simply left.”

  “Is he wearing hospital clothing?” Sami had just the faintest of hopes that if Daniel had left dressed like that, he would be picked up sooner rather than later. This slim hope was immediately dashed.

  “He took his clothing from his locker and his wallet.”

  “He took the cellphone?”

  “Yes, apparently.”

  “Thank God for that,” Sami replied. He had sent a new mobile for Daniel because the previous one had been mashed when his friend had smashed him to the ground in the instant when he’d saved his life. At least the phone meant tha
t he had the means of contacting Daniel.

  “Thank you, Doctor. If I hear anything I will let you know. You have alerted the police?”

  “Of course, Mr Somsak. They are looking for him. If I receive any news I will contact you. The police asked for a photograph of Mr Crewe. Perhaps you have one?”

  “I will see if there is one. Thank you.” Sami broke the connection.

  A photograph of Daniel could be a double-edged sword and do more harm than good, especially if people remembered him as Ed Davidson. Questions would be asked. There would be no photograph.

  Sami flicked on his cell and found his address book to get the number of Daniel’s new mobile. He hoped that his old friend hadn’t yet remembered his evasive skills and that the police would find him before he vanished to wherever he was heading. Would he go back to the Miramar or even the Carlton? Would he remember exactly who he was or would he be lost in a sea of former identities? Loose cannon wasn’t a term that Sami Somsak normally used to describe his friend, but in this case it was probably accurate.

  “Yes?”

  “Daniel. It’s Sami. Where are you?”

  “I don’t know you. Goodbye.”

  “Daniel?” Sami was speaking to a dead phone. “Oh, Daniel,” he sighed. He wouldn’t try again. Not now. Tomorrow, perhaps, when hopefully the fog had lifted from his old friend’s mind.

  Sami stood. He was in his apartment, preparing to assume the identity of the old man yet again. The old man had been busy. He had a plan to get to Thomas Lu. It would just take time for it to be implemented, and he hoped that when that time came, he would have a mended Daniel Swann at his side. He also hoped that K would be there with them and he wouldn’t have to execute him for being a traitor.

  I like this place! The jungle is my friend. The rain doesn’t bother me.

  I have found a place that is dry. The house is old but it has a roof.

  I made a snare and I caught a pig. Then I made a fire to cook it over. It tastes good. I like pig. There is fruit and there are coconuts. I found a big knife and I can open the coconuts with that.