Death in the Kingdom

by Andrew Grant

  ‘Given that Chekhov doesn’t know where Dan is at this time, we’ll set up a basic perimeter defence tonight,’ Karl told us when the Special Ops man had finished. ‘Tomorrow Alex and his team will load for Russian bear.’

  The upshot was that once all of this had been done, the waiting would begin. I confirmed that I would be phoning home in the morning and the party broke up. There was to be a briefing at our evening meal. For Sami, Jo and I that was it for the moment. The A Team dispersed to where their equipment was neatly laid to one side of the landing zone. Several of them proceeded to carry green, hard-shelled cases into their designated HQ, while others began to open the other containers and assemble their high-tech weapons of war. I recognised two long cases amongst the pile of gear.

  ‘Stingers,’ I muttered to Sami. ‘Nothing but the best!’ He nodded his agreement. The ground-to-air shoulder-fired missiles were probably the most sought-after technology of their kind by bad guys worldwide, and we had two of them at about a squillion dollars apiece.

  ‘Just in case Chekhov’s got a Hind or two,’ Sami replied, referring to the Russian’s flying battle tank. Even that would be no match for our missiles. ‘Let’s sort out our accommodation,’ he continued. ‘Three of my guys will sleep up in the lab, the others will be on watch, while we three will share a hut.’ We detoured to where our packs were stacked and Sami led the way to the hut he had selected.

  In the shade it was at least fifteen degrees cooler than out in the sun. I still wasn’t used to the humidity. There wasn’t a sea breeze or any breeze of any kind to stir things up. Nights could be cool up there but the days stayed hot unless there was a blessed breeze. Sami and I found spaces and angles to sling our hammocks, while Jo elected to use the hut’s sleeping platform. ‘The old men have gone soft,’ he joked.

  ‘But wiser,’ Sami replied.

  ‘Absolutely,’ I agreed, stripping off my shirt, kicking off my sneakers and trying my hammock for comfort. It would do, I concluded. Jo vanished outside again and Sami went to stand at one of the window openings while I just sprawled out where I was. The perspiration beaded on my skin and the air was like breathing water. Despite that I lit a cigarette and lay looking out at the world from deep in the shadows.

  In the bright afternoon sun and the intense heat, chickens continued to scavenge for morsels of food while dogs, smarter or just lazier, merged with the shadows under the huts and trees. It was a peaceful Thai hill village dozing in the sun, but for how much longer?

  Several of The A Team troopers bearing what looked like brutally heavy packs passed across my line of vision heading for the jungle below. I stubbed out the remains of my cigarette and closed my eyes.

  Dinner was a communal affair held in the lean-to off the cookhouse set just behind the designated HQ. A huge wok was suspended over a large gas burner. It turned out that one of the lab guys had been a chef in another life. In my experience Thai cooks, like many other nationalities in Asia, could produce such a lot from such limited ingredients, and this was another case in point. The rich, spicy pork curry was served with rice and vegetables and washed down with beer. It was an excellent meal. Just about as good as it would get.

  The six members of Alex’s team not on watch loosened up a bit after the food and beers. They talked in general terms about their experiences in the mountains of Pakistan and Afghanistan. They said it was a tough, dirty war as they hunted down Al-Qaeda. Now the team welcomed the chance to fight a different fight and the change of venue, even if it were just for a week or two. I realised that these guys were young, very young, most in their early twenties. They still had a lot of learning to do in many things, but not when it came to killing.

  The A Team members left and Karl produced a briefcase the size of a pilot’s document case. He opened it and handed out communication headsets to Sami, Jo and yours truly. The unit was pretty standard comprising an earpiece, stem microphone and a small battery pack with a switch and a dial, all attached to a simple adjustable elasticised headband. ‘Essential you keep it with you at all times,’ the CIA agent was saying. ‘Four channels selected by the dial. Stay on four unless told otherwise. Three-position switch on the battery pack and a pressure button on the microphone stem,’ Karl explained. ‘First position on the switch is off, the second is stand-by mode which is monitor-only mode, so when any other individual so equipped presses the button on the mike stem, you will hear but can’t join in. Three is full live, send and receive, just push the stem button to speak but release it when done.’

  We all played with it for a moment, setting the channel and adjusting the headband. ‘Stay on stand-by,’ Karl instructed. ‘If the shit hits the fan you’re on four. Control is in there,’ he said, indicating the HQ hut in front of us. ‘Call anything in to them, anything at all, and because we’re a mixed lot of military and civilians we’ll talk in plain English, no military speak or codes. That puts everyone on the same page. Some of Alex’s people will be on another channel at times,’ he added. ‘Range is ten clicks line of sight and good for three in the bush.’

  Jo was delegated the task of instructing Sami’s men how to use the headsets. It was decided in the end that, because Alex’s squad spoke no Thai, Sami’s two English speakers alone would get the units and share the watch.

  When it came time to turn in, I went outside into the cooling night for a last smoke and to empty my bladder. The moon was as bright as an ice-cold searchlight, sending its white light down to bathe the plateau. As I ground out my cigarette, two of The A Team left their hut and walked towards the point where the track crested the plateau. The pair were tooled up with M16 variants complete with all sorts of fancy optics, plus a 40 mm grenade launcher under the barrel. They also had night vision glasses on their foreheads and between them they carried a tripod-mounted device that looked like a cross between a video camera and a large pair of binoculars. I guessed it was an image enhancer of some sort. I hadn’t been briefed on the technology the specialists had brought up there with them.

  Karl came out of the HQ hut to where I was standing watching The A Team setting up their equipment by the head of the track.

  ‘That’s X-ray,’ he said. ‘Our eyes in the night!’

  ‘I’d love to play with some of their toys,’ I said. ‘What’s that stuff inside?’

  ‘You mean the stuff Alex won’t let you, Sami or Jo near?’ Karl said with a teasing hint to his voice.

  ‘Yeah, that stuff,’ I replied.

  ‘Okay,’ Karl hesitated. ‘One of the conditions put in place when they agreed to lend it to us was that there was no nosing around the equipment. However, I can give you an overview.’ The CIA man paused a moment, either to get his thoughts in order or to engage his mental censor.

  ‘There are high resolution, low-light video cameras in the bush, not infrared which can be detected. There are listening devices, movement detectors, distraction pyrotechnics and remote Claymores, all controlled from in there,’ he hooked a thumb over his shoulder. ‘The plan is to hear Chekhov’s men, see them, distract them and hopefully hit them hard before they get to us. Then we go and hunt down the remnants,’ he said.

  ‘Simple as that?’ I replied.

  Karl laughed. ‘Yeah. Simple as that,’ he answered, clapping me on the shoulder before heading off towards the drug lab, probably to check that Jo’s briefing had been successful. I took the communicator from my shirt pocket and fitted it on. Having all of us wired for sound made great sense. The cynic in me muttered, ‘Great, now we can all tune in to hear ourselves die.’ I didn’t really mean it. In fact I was beginning to feel a bit more confident about the way things were going, particularly when it came to Karl’s team-mates. They seemed to know exactly what they were doing. They’d probably done shit like this a dozen times before. I was also relieved that, despite the fact we hadn’t broadcast our location yet, they weren’t taking any chances with sneak attacks.

  I held my communicator to my ear and switched it from stand-by to listen mode in ti
me to catch some of the chatter. ‘How’s the picture down the valley?’ The voice was that of Alex back in the HQ hut. He was obviously checking in with the guys on the imager.

  ‘I could count the hairs on a whore’s pussy at five clicks,’ came the operator’s reply.

  ‘Leave the whores alone until R&R, then you’re buying,’ Alex replied with a snort. I guessed that somewhere under that stone-faced exterior lurked a sense of humour. I flicked the headset back to stand-by. It was time to sleep and hopefully not dream of headless friends and mad Russians. I stripped to my underwear and crawled under the mosquito net, laying my Walther and communicator beside me. Because I didn’t have my old-faithful holdall to use as a pillow, I had to make do with my borrowed pack. Sleep found me very quickly that night.

  34

  After our breakfast of rice and pork soup, Karl, Sami and I moved to the wide porch of the big house. Karl and I lit up and had coffee while Sami went off towards his iron lab, which I figured wasn’t a bad defensive position at all given that iron didn’t burn like thatch and was probably capable of stopping a bit more bullet than bamboo. I’d noted the sandbags lining the inner walls when I’d got the grand tour of Chez Somsak the day before.

  ‘Half past nine,’ Karl said glancing at his watch. ‘Want to start the ball rolling?’

  ‘Might as well,’ I replied. The mobile phone was sitting beside my communications unit. I switched it on. There was a strong signal but that didn’t surprise me because Sami had chosen this place. Probably the Vientiane mobile phone link was within range and ever-present communications satellites were floating around in the ether.

  ‘I presume there’s a GPS bird up there?’ I said to Karl.

  ‘Count on it,’ he replied as he poured us both another coffee.

  Bernard answered immediately, despite the fact it was a late winter’s night where he was. I told him I was safely installed in my temporary lair. ‘Just a little village up by the border,’ I explained. ‘Farmers, plantations. Right out of the way. I’ll stay here until things quieten down.’ For obvious reasons I didn’t give him a hint that I wasn’t alone. He didn’t ask what the village was called. He was getting sloppy or excited. He was no longer playing the game of concerned Mr Need-to-Know-Everything.

  ‘My battery is low, Bernard,’ I said. ‘There’s no power to recharge it here. I’ll need to save it so I’m switching it off. Will call you in a day or so.’ I flicked off the phone before he could reply. It was hard being civil to the man who was orchestrating my death. Anyway, the deed was done. In a few minutes Chekhov would have the co-ordinates of my new home and he would assume I wasn’t alone. Point was, if the spies he probably had in the village below didn’t picked up the choppers, especially the one carrying The A Team, we might have a huge advantage. Time sure as hell was going to tell on that one.

  ‘Strategy meeting in two,’ Karl was saying into his communicator. I looked around for The A Team as he spoke and couldn’t see any of them in view. Then a couple of blinks later six of them were converging on us from all points of the compass, all heavily armed and looking very, very businesslike. No doubt the others were standing watch.

  Karl had the chair given that he owned The A Team by association. If I heard something I didn’t like, I would speak up, otherwise this was a CIA gig from here on in. Sami and I were just the sacrificial goats, although I hoped that by the end of the day, the sacrificial tag would be dropped, from my perspective at least.

  The satellite image was back up on the wall and Karl ran through the situation. ‘It’s absolutely vital that we don’t provide any aerial hints that we are in occupation with some heavy hitters. He now knows we’re here but he doesn’t know our numbers or the make-up of our crew, even if the choppers are spotted. There will no doubt be a reconnaissance fly over,’ Karl added. ‘Sami, have four of your men dress as women, men only with weapons in sight as is usual up here,’ he gave Sami a tight grin. ‘Get them out in the gardens and walking about. Everyone else has to stay out of sight as much as possible.’ Sami nodded. He turned to Jo who faded away to pass on the order, while Karl turned the show over to the Special Ops man.

  Alex sent his crew off to do whatever it was they did and then proceeded to bring Sami and I up to speed. All the sophisticated gizmos were already positioned at strategic points in the jungle and on the track. They had a two-man ambush in place to take out any vehicles and personnel attempting a frontal raid up the track. The remainder of the team would concentrate on providing perimeter cover in Sami’s earthworks. The village guys would be deployed amongst the buildings as a second defence with Jo as their main man. Sami, Karl and I would be the last line of defence along with the two guys working the high-tech gear in the big house. ‘We’re just preparing the big stuff now,’ said the Special Forces boss. ‘Getting ready for a siege,’ he added with a hard smile that suggested he didn’t mind a bit. Tough cookie!

  ‘The Siege of Bang Sai Deng,’ I mused aloud. ‘Just like it must have been in Vietnam.’

  ‘Damn right!’ Karl replied. ‘Only we haven’t got the howitzers.’

  I didn’t do the maths. Karl was one of those guys of indeterminable age, but I guessed he could have been in Nam as a very young man. ‘No howitzers, but we’ve got the next best thing,’ replied Alex, nodding towards two of The A Team members as they emerged from one of the huts carrying the unpacked Stingers. Another pair followed, one carrying a tripod, the other a squat multi-barrelled weapon.

  ‘Minigun,’ Sami said.

  ‘We call it the mincer,’ said Alex. I almost laughed, or applauded.

  It figured that when Karl called in the cavalry they would come with the biggest and best hardware, but I hadn’t figured on this. ‘Nine barrels, .223 calibre, electric-powered, 3,000 rounds a minute on low, 5,000 on maximum. We also brought some tank busters which we will position around the perimeter.’ The A Team relay had laid six big fat green tubes on the ground beside the pair assembling the Minigun. ‘You’ve got good earthworks,’ Alex told Sami. ‘I’ll go and assign the ordinance.’

  With that, the briefing was over.

  ‘Want to see where we’ll be holing up if it all gets bent out of shape?’ Sami asked, beckoning us into the big hut. Karl and I followed. The two men sitting at the monitoring equipment in a nest of freshly filled sandbags looked up momentarily, but Sami led us away from their end of the hut and their top-secret gear. He pulled a grass mat aside and exposed a trap door in the centre of the floor. ‘Gentlemen, follow me,’ he said, opening the trap and dropping through it.

  The bunker was huge. Light came through slits spaced regularly along all four walls. The slits were covered with loosely woven mats that allowed the muted light to penetrate into the gloom. ‘We dug this and then built the house above,’ Sami explained. ‘We have a log roof with more than a metre of earth on top. The whole village can fit in here. If the building catches fire, we’re okay. We’ve got air vents and a 360-degree arc of fire. Outside you can’t see the firing slots.’

  I had to admit I was impressed. I hadn’t seen any evidence of the bunker from up above. ‘This is also my armoury,’ he explained. Along one wall I could see a long bamboo gun rack full of hardware with boxes of ammunition. There were also RPGs stacked further along the wall. Rocket-propelled grenades were common anywhere in the world where there was a scrap going on, mainly because they were cheap, crude, easy to use and bloody effective. I noted that there was also an open crate containing conventional fragmentation grenades. Sami Somsak was set for war.

  My eyes were now becoming accustomed to the low light and I could make out neatly rolled and stacked sleeping mats. Along another wall there were stacked cartons of what I presumed was food, along with water containers. There was even a toilet hole in one corner. Short ladders and exposed wooden panels set in the roof suggested that, if needed, the occupants could exit fast. ‘Home sweet home,’ I said.

  ‘I fucking hope not,’ replied Karl, his voice sounding more than a little
ragged. ‘Let’s get back up in the fresh air. I hate fucking earthworks. Saw too many in Nam.’ He’d answered my question for me. We climbed up through the trap door and went back up top.

  Outside I walked around the big hut and only then did I really notice that it was built on a small rise. Only up-close could I see the woven thatch panels that hid the deep firing slits. Clumps of grass, a tree stump, a water bucket and the remains of an old ox cart served as props to disguise the gun positions. ‘Pull a string and it all breaks apart,’ said Sami. ‘You saw the emergency exits. We can get out quickly if we have to or come up to fire RPGs,’ he added.

  ‘Impressive, Mr Somsak,’ I said, meaning it.

  ‘You are expecting a war,’ Karl said. It was a statement, not a question. ‘Always,’ replied Sami. ‘There are as many bandits up here as there have ever been.’ He gave a tight smile. ‘You pay the politicians for protection but that’s just from the police and the army. There are plenty of other guys who want what you’ve got.’

  ‘Ain’t that the truth,’ Karl muttered, fishing a pack of cigarettes out of his shirt pocket. Both Sami and I took one and Karl lit them with a battered old Zippo he’d obviously resurrected from somewhere. His non-smoking campaign, like mine, was obviously over.

  ‘When do you think Chekhov will come?’ I asked.

  ‘Tonight!’ came the reply, ‘and it’ll be a shitfest.’ Karl coughed and cursed but took a deep drag on his cigarette. He was going to enjoy his smoke even if it killed him. ‘In the meantime let’s get our fake women out and about and looking busy. Chekhov will have an aircraft over our heads in an hour.’

  Ten minutes later there was grumbling, laughter and cheerful but very crude insults as four of Sami’s guys made their appearance wearing broad hats and long women’s skirts. They picked up hoes and rakes and, implements in hand, they went to the garden plots to make a pretence of working. The other pair strutted about with their AK47s on their shoulders as if they owned the joint. The fact there were no kids about worried me momentarily but I filed it at the back of my mind. We couldn’t have everything.