Snatched

by Lilburne, Guy

  “We already have everything in place. I just have to make a phone call.”

  ~4~

  The five men had been holed up in a safe house not far from the airport in Damascus for the last six days. They could see the airport from the window and commercial jets flew in low overhead every 20 minutes, rattling the windows, pots and pans. They all wore traditional Arabic dress and had spent their time watching TV, eating and playing cards. Their conversations were about football, food and women. They didn’t know how long they would be there. They just knew that they were waiting upon a phone call. They all knew it was going to be something ‘big’ and something that could change the course of the war in Syria , but nothing was ever spoken. Only two of the men amongst them knew the full details of the plan. All of these men were Syrian special forces and highly trained killers. They had the quiet confidence that trained killers have in their own abilities. If the call came this was just going to be another mission; an important mission that would help their motherland, but just another mission none the less. The house was basic. No decorations, no pictures, just essentials to cook and clean - a bathroom, a bedroom and the main room, which doubled as a kitchen, a door at the front and a door at the back. The five men sat on the floor of the main room. Four of them were playing cards. The fifth, Haadee, sat away from the others reading the Quran. A single ceiling fan whirled round overhead making a clicking sound with each rotation. The down blast from the fan did little to cool the hot air, but it did a slightly better job of dispersing the smoke from the hand roll-ups that the men were smoking. The men playing cards were:

  Azeez (Arabic meaning ‘Servant of the most powerful’) was 28 years old and powerfully built. He was unshaven for several days and had a scar down his right cheek. It was from a knife wound three years ago. The man who inflicted the wound was killed in the fight. Azeez was the leader of the group. He was a career soldier, a quietly spoken man and a specialist in unarmed combat or with a knife.

  Kabeer (Arabic meaning ‘Great’) was 34 years old, skinny and clean shaven. He wore glasses. He followed orders without question. He was also the cook for everyone and responsible for the smell of lamb curry that lingered in the house. He was a specialist with explosives.

  Kahlam (Arabic meaning ‘Servant to Allah’) was 32 years old and second in command of the unit. He was an intelligent man who could always be relied upon to come up with an alternative plan when needed. He was a specialist in surveillance and a specialist with any firearm, a crack shot. Kahlam and Azeez were the only two men in the group who knew about the plan to kidnap Prince William.

  Maaz (Arabic meaning ‘Brave man’) was 25 years old and another powerfully built man. He had a rugged complexion and staring eyes. He had cut off most of his right ear during a dare with a sword when he was 14 years old. But it made him look even tougher than he was and as he grew older he would tell people that he lost it in a fight with three men. He was aggressive in his manner and extreme in his views against the West. A specialist with heavy weapons and he could drive any vehicle, military or otherwise.

  The fifth man was sitting away from the card players.

  Haadee (Arabic meaning ‘The Guide’) was 37 years old. He was the quiet man of the group and spent a lot of time thinking and reading the Quran. He was the only married man in the group, a specialist sniper and mechanic. He also held a pilot’s license.

  Kahlam scooped the coins and notes up with both hands.

  “My lucky day” he laughed. “Who’s deal?”

  Kabeer picked up the cards, shuffled the deck and dealt. The mobile phone on the floor next to Azeez rang. It was the theme tune from ‘The Simpsons’. Haadee looked up from the Quran and the four men playing cards stopped playing and looked towards their leader. Azeez picked up the mobile and put it to his ear.

  “Salam” he said quietly into the phone. He listened without any movement, without any emotion and without any comments. After several moments he just said “Okay” and closed the phone. He looked back at the men looking at him and nodded. Haadee led the men in a prayer to Allah before they all showered, shaved and dressed in western style clothes; a smart casual look, just jeans and shirts. Their suitcases were stacked up against the wall in the bedroom. They were flying to Phuket, Thailand, as tourists. Their traditional Arabic clothes were left in a pile. A cleaner would come in and clean the house. There would be no trace that the men were ever there. A plain white mini bus pulled up outside the house to take them the short distance to the airport. They had separate seats spread out around the plane. It was an eight hour flight to Bangkok and then another hour and a half to fly onto Phuket. They flew out under false names and on forged Israeli passports. They didn’t speak to each other or even acknowledge each other during the long journey. It would be the following day before they arrived at their destination. Thailand was five hours in front of them in time zones. They all knew which hotel each had been designated and they all knew where they were going to meet up later that night. It was just seven days before HRH Prince William was due to arrive in Myanmar. Only Azeez and Kahlam knew the details of their secret mission.

  ~5~

  The changing names of the bars and restaurants of Thailand, especially in the tourist areas of Bangkok, Pattaya and Phuket, clearly represented the changing waves of the nationalities of the people who visited Thailand. First of all came the Americans in the twenty years after the Vietnam war and American bars and restaurants sprung up along the beach resorts with names like ‘Uncle Sam’s Steak House’, ‘The Lone Star Bar’, ‘Stars & Stripes’. Then the British, Germans, Dutch and Scandinavians came along and the bar names changed to ‘The Berliner’, ‘The Dutch Bar’, ‘Mike’s Old English Pub’ and the like. Then after the bombing in Mali the Australians decided to come to Thailand and ‘The Aussie Bar’ and ‘Kangaroo Bar’ opened up everywhere. In more recent times the Russians came and took over the Go-Go bars and Russian signs appeared above every pharmacy. Then the Arabs came and middle-eastern restaurants started to spring up. Hubble Bubble pipes were stacked on tables at the front of each of the Arab restaurants.

  In Patong Beach in Phuket a number of Arab restaurants had opened up in recent years; restaurants like ‘Casablanca’, ‘Cairo’, ‘Ali Baba’ and ‘Dubai Sheeshah,.

  Rafi had opened up an Arabian restaurant along Rat-U-Thit Road called ‘Ali’s’. Like all the other restaurants of its kind it did a reasonable trade with the visitors from the middle-eastern countries. The food was authentic and on each table was the Hookah or Hubble Bubble pipe. They were already filled with water and loaded with Shisha, a fruit flavoured tobacco. Hot coals would be put on the tobacco when someone was ready to smoke. It always amazed Rafi how many Westerners, especially the young backpacker types, thought that the Hookahs were loaded with cannabis or some even more exotic middle-eastern drug. He had watched young Europeans smoking the pipes and inducing themselves into a drugged state, just because they believed that is what they were smoking!

  Rafi (Arabic meaning ‘High ranking, Cultured’) was 53 years old. He was a former Captain in the Syrian Republican Guard. He had been head hunted by Syrian Intelligence, assigned to work undercover in Thailand to recruit Muslim brothers to insurgency movements and organize the supply of arms and flow of intelligence. Sometimes he would just have to assist important visitors from Syria, provide a safe room at the back of his restaurant for them to hold meetings and also help them in any way that they requested. He never knew who these people were or the purpose of their visit to Thailand, or what any meeting that took place in the sealed room at the back of his restaurant was about. Most times he would be contacted from someone in Syrian Intelligence and told that he may have some visitors and he would be given a password. Sometimes the people would turn up within a few days. Sometimes they never showed at all. It really didn’t concern him. He just provided the room and ran the restaurant. When he was given a password h
e would write it down on the back of a till receipt and pin it, out of sight, behind the counter. If nobody turned up within a week he would just destroy it. Easy!

  Rafi was an easy going man. He smiled a lot and spent most of his time waving at people as they walked past his restaurant. He would try to entice them to come in with a wave of the open menu. Nobody had ever seen him wearing anything other than a white shirt and black trousers. He usually held a small half smoked cigar in the corner of his mouth and his upper teeth on that side were stained brown with nicotine.

  He had taken a phone call and received a password just the previous day. He had written the password on the back of a till receipt. Al-Las’Ah in English translated as ‘The Sting’. He pinned it behind the counter.

  The hotels in Phuket had been pre-selected for Azeez and his team. A small hotel or guest house would make it easier for them to be remembered, so a reconnaissance of the bigger hotels had been made and hotels selected because of the ease of avoiding surveillance cameras. Cameras that could not be by-passed would only ever record the men looking down at a mobile phone or newspaper and the men would always wear sunglasses and baseball caps. All the hotels that had been selected were on the Rat-u-Thit Road and were in walking distance of Ali’s Restaurant. Azeez was booked into the Baumanburi Hotel, Kahlam into the new Novotel Vintage Park Resort Hotel. Kabeer had the Amata Hotel. Maaz checked into the Palmyra Hotel and Haadee had a room overlooking the swimming pool at the Millennium Resort hotel. All the men had arrived safely and were checked into their rooms without raising any suspicion. At 8:00pm they made their ways separately to Ali’s Restaurant. Azeez was the first to arrive at 8:05pm. He recognised Rafi from the photograph that he had been given amongst the top secret documents that were now housed in the safe inside his wardrobe at the Baumanburi Hotel.

  “Asalamualaikum” he said in greeting to Rafi. “Al-Las’Ah.”

  Rafi recognised the password and shook Azeez by the hand as if he was greeting an old friend.

  “Do you need the back room?” he whispered.

  “Yes my brother, but I want to wait for my friends to arrive first.”

  Azeez sat at one of the open air tables at the front of the restaurant and Rafi brought him a strong black coffee, a glass of cold water and a Hookah pipe with the hot coals already burning the Shisha. Within the next ten minutes all five special forces soldiers had arrived at Ali’s. They joined Azeez at the table and drank coffee and passed the smoking pipe around. When Azeez nodded to Rafi they were shown into a room at the back of the restaurant. There was just one door into the room, no windows, no furniture. Just a light hanging down from an electric wire that was just a bit too long and an old red coloured electric fan plugged in near the far corner of the room. A brightly coloured mat was laid out in the centre of the small room. The men all nodded to Rafi as they filed into the room as he held the door open. He closed the door behind them and went back inside the restaurant.

  “Any problems so far?” asked Azeez. The men all shook their heads. They just wanted to hear the big plan and their part in it. Like all soldiers anywhere in the world who were about to undertake a mission, they just wanted to get on with it. But these men were professionals and sat in silence waiting for their leader to speak.

  “Welcome to Thailand. We strike our target in nine days. We meet again here in four days, on the 10th at 8:00pm. Then I will give you all the details of our mission. Until then you can relax and enjoy the Land of Smiles. I don’t need to say anymore!”

  The soldiers felt an anti-climax from the meeting, but understood the importance of secrecy. Once the men had known that they were going to Thailand they had assumed that they would be going into the south of Thailand to help the insurgency there, but they couldn’t understand how that might alter the course of the war in Syria. Azeez hadn’t given anything away and nobody wanted to ask. The five men wandered out of Ali’s separately over the next ten minutes and drifted off into the warm night air of Patong.

  Haadee walked back to the Millennium Resort Hotel and sat on his balcony looking out over the swimming pool. He had a strong urge to telephone his wife. He loved her and he was missing her, but he knew that he risked putting the mission in danger if he did, and he would never let down his brothers or himself in such a way. He tried to stop thinking about his wife and started to read the Quran.

  The other men wondered around Patong and explored the nightlife. They had four days to act like tourists and do what tourists do when they are in Patong and that pretty much boiled down to two thing; drinking and sex! Maaz had already decided that he was going to get as much of both as he could. The men bumped into each other quite a lot over the next few days, usually at Ali’s where they all liked to go to eat. If they didn’t go there then they often had him send food to their hotel rooms, but other than a polite nod the men never spoke or acknowledged each other. Maaz was having sex with three or four women a day, making full use of the massage parlours during the day and the bar girls at night.

  Maaz just had a little stump where his right ear used to be before he cut it off with a sword when he was just a kid, but nobody around the bars in Thailand seemed to notice. If they did they didn’t say anything! He was a young fit man at 25 years of age and he was powerfully built. He knew he looked hard, so he would have been surprised if anyone did say anything. He was surprised on the night before the planned meeting at Ali’s restaurant.

  Four drunken English men, aged either late teens or early twenties, came into the bar where he was sitting talking to a pretty young Thai girl. They looked at Maaz when they walked in.

  “Go and get us a kebab will you mate?” one of them said and his three friends burst out laughing. Maaz didn’t respond. He didn’t smile, he just looked at them. They mistook his silence for meekness and the jibes continued.

  “Hey Ali, there is no toilet paper in the bogs over here, but that won’t bother you because you lot use your fucking hands anyway!”

  The four young drunken men wearing football shirts and long shorts were falling about laughing at their own jokes. A few of the other older men in the bar started to laugh too. Even the bar girls seemed to be laughing too.

  “Mustaffa….Must have a fucking crap and make another kebab!”

  Then one of the four men, the tallest and skinniest one, started singing;

  “Where’s your ear gone, where’s your ear gone, far far away” to the tune of ‘Where’s your mama gone’ - the old song by the band ‘Middle of the Road’. The other boys joined in and then the other men in the bar joined in and the Thai girls pretended to start dancing to the tune.

  The anger in Maaz was boiling over. He knew he could kill all four of them before they knew what was happening. He wanted to kill them. As far as he was concerned they weren’t just insulting him, they were insulting all his brothers too. They were insulting Islam. He stuffed two hundred baht notes into the little wooden container in front of him, which held his drinks bill, and walked out of the bar. He was seething. Another time or another place and he would have killed these infidels.

  He turned left out of the bar and walked down Bangla Road onto Beach Road. Then he turned left again and walked along the road until he found a little place to sit in. He ordered a coffee. Twenty minutes later the four drunken English lads walked past him on the other side of the road. The four of them were staggering along with their arms around each other. They were still singing, but Maaz couldn’t hear what they were singing. Then the tall skinny one who had started the singing untangled himself from the others and walked to the palm trees in the shade near the beach to urinate against one of the trees. His mates staggered on without him.

  Maaz didn’t hesitate. He slipped out of the café and dashed across the road in between the taxis and tuk-tuks. He went up behind the man who was still urinating against the palm. Maaz put one arm around the man’s chest and the other
hand on his chin and, in one quick strong movement, he snapped his neck and the tall skinny man fell to the ground. Dead! Maaz walked off along the shadows back towards Bangla Road.

  Maaz had decided not to mention the incident to the others at the meeting and none of them were aware of it anyway. The local police who had attended the scene on the night thought that the dead man had fallen down drunk while he was urinating and broken his neck. The Phuket Gazette just reported that a ‘Drunken British tourist was found dead on the beach after a tragic accident’.

  Nobody but a few ex-pats read the paper anyway!

  The five soldiers arrived at Ali’s at exactly 8:00pm and went straight into the room at the rear of the restaurant. Azeez carried a briefcase. They sat in silence waiting for Azeez to speak. There was an air of excitement and anticipation. Azeez was a natural born leader of men. He never got excited and he remained calm in his delivery to his men.

  “Any problems?” he asked. The men sat in silence and shook their heads.

  “Okay, good. In three days’ time the Queen of England’s grandson, and a future King of England, Prince William, will arrive on a state visit to Myanmar. In five days’ time we will kidnap him when he is on his way to the city of Mawlamyine, near the southern coast of Myanmar. Tomorrow Maaz, Kabeer and myself will go to Myanmar by fishing boat. We have contacts there already waiting to meet us. Kahlam and Haadee will go into south Thailand where we have brothers waiting to help us. After the kidnap we will take the Prince by fishing boat to south Thailand and he will be held in a safe house in the jungle near the border with Malaysia. The Prince will be held as a political negotiating tool until the West agrees to a new peace plan for Syria. We have a virtual army of brothers in Myanmar who are going to help us and they are going to use the mission as a spring board for their own uprising against the Myanmar regime. At the same time as the ‘snatch’, explosions will occur in several of their major cities, at police stations, at army barracks and at all government TV and radio stations. Kabeer this is your job. Maaz, tonight I need you to grab a hostage here in Phuket. I want him to look like Prince William. He will be used as a decoy after the attack and you will drive him north through Myanmar towards Laos. You will kill him and dispose of his body in the jungle before making your way back into Thailand and then onto the south of Thailand to meet up with the rest of us. Maaz and myself will lead the attack on the Prince’s convoy. I will take the Prince to south Thailand by fishing boat….”