The Amok Runners

by Colin Cotterill

  ‘He said, “We’re here night and day to protect our Thai brothers and sisters. Just give us a call. Word would get to us almost straight away.” And before they left, the other one looked back and smiled. “We’ve still got her. The boys have taken a liking to her, if you know what I mean.”

  ‘What could I do?

  What could I do?’

  Chapter 27

  “Truth hurts. Maybe not as much as jumping on a bicycle with the seat missing, but it hurts.”

  The Naked Gun 2½ (1991)

  That night, Sissy looked up an old friend. He’d always had a thing for men in uniform but recent events had made him wary. The meeting had gone on till the early hours and only time would tell as to whether he’d made a serious error of judgment. It wouldn’t have been the first time. He’d gone directly to the airport and met up with Bunny and adorable Gus. They’d taken the 6:30 Thai Airways flight to Chiang Mai, first class on Bunny’s credit card. Sissy had never travelled first class on a fifty minute flight before and he didn’t really have much of an opportunity to appreciate it.

  They ate a speedy breakfast and following the new policy of sharing information with as many people as possible Bunny told Gus all about the subterfuge in Fang. They didn’t expect him to have any insights or even to understand it all but if they needed his bulk for stopping bullets at least he’d know to stand facing the police rather than behind them.

  They reached the Swiss accountant’s house by eleven. Khin was there to meet them. She’d arrived on the eight o’clock bus. OB and Kuro had left for the shoot much earlier but there was a note attached to Sissy’s pillow.

  ‘Calling a meeting of the troops at lunch time. My trailer. New info. OB.’

  They drove out to the site in the Lexus. They’d been expecting the place to be rocking with activity. The air was comparatively clear and the new cameras were behaving splendidly. So it surprised them to see everyone sitting around locked into a state of ennui. As they left the car they wondered what new disaster had lit upon Siam this day.

  Gus escorted Bunny to her trailer and Sissy and Khin went off in search of me. They found Arny and me in dialogue with Kuro passing on the information Sissy had phoned through the previous night.

  ‘Hi, guys,’ said Sissy.

  ‘Did you stop off at the house?’ I asked.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘I guess you didn’t see OB?’

  ‘No. He’d left a note. Why? What’s happened?’

  ‘He and his car did not arrive here,’ Kuro told him. ‘He reft thirty minutes before me. I don’t see him broke down on the road but when I come – he is not here. He does not answer the phone.’

  ‘Oh, shit,’ said Sissy. ‘What are we doing about it?’

  ‘His gofer called the cops,’ said Arny.

  ‘Gr-eat!’

  ‘They got here faster than the speed of light. The major himself was up here strutting around.’

  ‘I bet he was,’ said Sissy. ‘Oh, man. I hope they haven’t done anything to OB.’

  ‘We cannot understand this at all, Sissy San,’ said Kuro, running his hand through his hair. ‘We cannot work out what is the benefit of stopping this movie. And what is the advantage to murder international cerebrity?’

  ‘None at all as far as I can see,’ Sissy decided. ‘But that just means we haven’t got the first damned idea what’s going on here.’

  ‘Khin, my sister,’ I said.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘What do you say you, me and Arny go chat with some mysterious extras?’

  ‘Lead the way, mistress.’

  ‘And we’ll see you two at OB’s trailer at twelve just in case he got himself lost deliberately.’

  The secret of getting the extras into a space and mood where they could speak freely was to locate the foreman then pick out stragglers at the other side of the herd so he couldn’t see. We found the tall man at the administration tent filling in forms and immediately picked our way through the idle non-Shan almost to the edge of the city wall.

  ‘They are most certainly Wa speakers,’ said Khin.

  ‘You worked that out without talking to anyone?’ Arny asked.

  ‘I have ears, young man. I have picked up enough to know. The Wa language is very different from any other. It has Khmer origins. The Wa people have been forcibly relocated from the north of Burma by the junta in order to work the land.’

  ‘You think they’re in this country illegally?’

  ‘Indubitably. I cannot for one second imagine two thousand Wa securing temporary work permits. Given their background in opium production I imagine the American embassy would nix such an arrangement.’

  ‘Can you speak to them?’ Arny asked.

  ‘At a rudimentary level.’

  ‘Cool. Then we have to make friends with one or two.’

  ‘If I may beg to differ, I’d like to suggest a more plausible alternative,’ said Khin.

  ‘Shoot,’ I said.

  ‘Despite their relaxed attitude at present, I am getting a subliminal feeling that these chaps are not entirely confident about being on foreign soil without documentation. I would be terribly surprised if we could enter into an enduring friendship based on a ten minute conversation.’

  ‘What do you have in mind?’

  ‘Bullying.’

  ‘You sure?’ asked Arny.

  ‘It is the tried and tested Burmese method of extracting information from minorities. They expect it of us.’

  ‘Then go ahead,’ I told her.

  ‘Thank you.’

  We found a timid-looking middle-aged archer readjusting his uniform as he returned from the tree line. Like most of the extras, he’d ignored the well-equipped but claustrophobic Porta-johns and done his business in the bushes. This soldier was a sun-blackened man with a fine head of hair but Khin identified something subjugable about him. The man lowered his head as we approached.

  Khin barked at him and he mumbled a response. I was impressed. The Burmese had risen to her full height and thrown forward a chest that I couldn’t recall having seen before. Khin had clearly been a very keen student of military oppression. She marched the little man around the polystyrene edge of the city wall and found a nook. She ordered him to stand at ease with his back to the parapet while she prowled back and forth like an over-acting Gestapo officer. The poor Wa trembled.

  ‘Steady Khin,’ I warned. ‘We don’t want him having a heart attack before we get anything out of him.’

  ‘Plenty more where this came from,’ she said. ‘Should I kick him?’

  ‘Khin!’

  ‘Yes, I’m sorry. What do you need to know?’

  But before Khin could ask, the man blurted out a rapid stream of uninvited dialogue.

  ‘What’s he saying?’

  ‘It’s a little fast but the gist is that he wants us to know why he didn’t use the plastic water closet as he’d been instructed.’

  I kept my face straight. ‘Tell him he’s in a lot more trouble than shitting in the woods.’

  Khin obliged.

  ‘And tell him I’m from the immigration department and I know he’s planning to migrate to Thailand illegally.’

  Khin managed to stretch that one sentence into ten. When the point was finally made the little man reacted strongly. He had a lot to say and it was all Khin could do to put the brakes on him. The Wa was obviously nervous. To my uneducated ears it appeared a whole cauldron of beans was in the process of being spilled. With a little clarification here and there from his interrogator the man finally reached the end of his defence. Khin nodded and turned to us.

  ‘And there we have it.’

  ‘What do we have, Khin?’ Arny asked.

  ‘It would appear that neither he nor his brothers have any interest or ambition to stay here beyond the duration of the film. They were coerced by an agent of the United Wa State Army on the Burmese side who told them they’d be sent to Thailand to do two weeks ‘legal’ work for which they’d be recompensed.
They were ferried to the border. Everything was cleared by the border patrol and Thai Immigration.’

  ‘A.K.A the Fang police,’ I said.

  ‘Precisely. Most of the extras have family back in the Wa relocation zone and humble farms to go back to. With Burmese troops around it is particularly dangerous to leave ones wife and daughters unattended, if you know what I mean. They are afraid their family would suffer if they failed to go home. And believe me, the Wa already know a good deal about suffering.’

  ‘So, it’s not about trafficking.’

  ‘It would appear not.’

  ‘So how…?’ And then it came to me. I slapped myself on the forehead so loud they probably heard it back in Tha Ton. ‘Oh, man!’

  ‘You are having some kind of brainstorm?’ Khin asked.

  ‘I should have known better,’ I said. ‘This is a police scam, Khin. There we were trying to turn it into something brilliant – some complicated mystery.’

  ‘But it’s not?’

  ‘I’ve been so stupid. I need you to ask him just one more question but I think I already know what the answer’s going to be.’

  Chapter 28

  “What is ten times a thousand?”

  The Full Monty (1997)

  Sissy and Kuro and Bunny Savage were sitting around the comfortable lounge area in OB’s trailer. Lizzie the gofer was back from an unsuccessful search of the area. Through an interpreter she’d received a very calm, ‘Don’t worry. This will all be resolved,’ from the police major.

  ‘I called the embassy,’ she said. She was speaking at neat-coffee speed. ‘They’re sending up some of their security people. They’ve contacted the government. Oh my God. This is a disaster. How could something like this happen?’

  We arrived at the open door in time to hear her squeeze out four more clichés. We climbed up the steps and sat together on the sofa. I winked at Sissy with a broad, self-satisfied smile on my face. When Lizzie allowed a very brief gap in her stream of anxiety I took the opportunity to jump in.

  ‘He’ll be back,’ I said.

  ‘She turned to him, ‘What?’

  ‘OB – he’ll be back.’

  ‘You’ve heard from him?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Then how could you know?’

  ‘It’s a hunch.’

  ‘Oh, great. Then we can all rest easy,’ she said, pacing again. ‘There’s a psychic in the house.’

  Bunny crossed the trailer and wedged herself between me and Sissy on the sofa. She looked up at the gofer who was wearing a groove in the trailer floor.

  ‘Lizzie, babe. Take an angst break. I want to hear what my girl here has to say for herself.’

  ‘Me too,’ the samurai king agreed.

  ‘Okay, let’s hear it,’ Lizzie stood with her hands on her waist. ‘When can we expect the boss back?’

  ‘Ooh, I’d say mid-afternoon,’ I said. ‘Early evening at the latest.’

  ‘And this is based on …?’

  ‘Like I say, it’s a hunch. But it’s an intelligent one. It’s based on the fact that whoever’s scuttling this production isn’t trying to close it down. In fact they’re doing everything they can to make it last as long as possible.’

  ‘How so?’ Sissy asked.

  ‘Well, look at the fires,’ I said. ‘Sure they could have been accidental, but let’s imagine they were lit deliberately. As it was, they burned through a valley parallel to this one. The smoke spilled over in this direction and clung to the hills but the fire wasn’t likely to cut back on itself. What if it had been set on the road side of the location? It would have destroyed the set – the walls, the palace, every damn thing. End of production. The producers would have pulled the plug. The arsonist could have scuttled the movie right there. But this way we just lost two days of shooting.’

  ‘And that explains why OB will be returning this afternoon?’ Lizzie said sarcastically.

  ‘Oh, do shut up,’ Bunny snapped. The gofer gave her a killing look.

  I continued.

  ‘It was the same with the cameras. I don’t have any idea how you’d put a spanner in the works there but it was just enough to lose another day-and-a-half of production, not to shut it down. They want this movie to hang on here in Fang for as long as possible. Lizzie, do you know off hand what the overrun period is? How many days over the schedule can the budget absorb?’

  ‘It’s usually no more than a week before they’d cut their losses and see what they can do in a studio back in the states,’ she said.

  ‘Okay, then, by whatever means they’ll get those seven extra days.’

  ‘But, what for?’ Kuro asked.

  ‘The oldest crime in the world, Kuro san.’

  Khin raised her eyebrows and smiled.

  ‘No, Khin, even older than that. It even got a mention in the Ten Commandments. Good old-fashioned stealing – theft – grand larceny.’

  ‘Who’s stealing from whom?’ Bunny asked.

  ‘The Fang police are stealing from those extras out there.’

  ‘That is a considerable amount of effort for a few dorrars a day,’ Kuro decided.

  ‘That’s what I thought, till I got out the calculator,’ I said. ‘Lizzie, how much is the movie paying extras?’

  ‘Well …’

  ‘I need the actual figure, not what the unions tell you to pay.’

  ‘Thirty bucks a day plus meals.’

  ‘Hmm, lucky they didn’t get around to joining actor’s equity. But anyway, thirty dollars is a good day’s work for someone whose annual income’s no more than three hundred. Do you hand it to the extras directly?’

  ‘We don’t walk around with suitcases full of cash, if that’s what you mean. We make daily bank deposits into the Northern Thai Castings account.’

  ‘Alias the Fang police force.’

  ‘What? You’re saying they aren’t passing the money on to the extras?’

  ‘The extras are getting a hundred and twenty baht a day from Northern Castings. That’s if he ever turns up with the cash. That’s about three dollars fifty. That means twenty-six dollars fifty goes into the pocket of the police. And that’s why they recruited people who couldn’t speak Thai or English and why they told them not to talk to anyone apart from their foreman. Because, now we see how the bucks start mounting up. Two thousand times twenty-six fifty is … Khin?’

  ‘Fifty-three thousand dollars.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘You’re welcome.’

  ‘Originally, they were hired for nine days – contribution to the police retirement fund …’

  ‘Four hundred and seventy-seven thousand dollars,’ said Khin without pausing.

  ‘And, let’s assume they get their full seven days of overtime …’

  ‘A grand total of eight hundred and forty-eight thousand dollars,’ said Khin.

  ‘Add to that the police helicopters and limos and drivers, and their cut from the elephants and etceteras, and we’re well on the happy side of a million bucks.’

  Everybody but Khin said, ‘Shit’.

  I continued. ‘Now, I know a million is but a peanut to a forty million dollar movie production but it’s a hell of an incentive to a Thai police major on an annual salary of under ten-thousand dollars. So, you see? They don’t want OB dead. I imagine they hired some local thugs to kidnap him and ask for a ransom. The police will bravely raid the kidnappers’ lair and overcome them. Major Ketthai shows up here on his white horse with OB holding on behind him. The studio’s extremely grateful and show’s its gratitude – perhaps pays for a new bridge or an airport. The director’s shaken but not damaged. A day of shooting is lost but the show goes on.’

  I turned to Bunny. ‘I imagine around next Tuesday you and Jensen would have contracted food-poisoning or some other debilitating illness for a day just to keep things slowed down.’

  ‘Wow!’ Bunny smiled. ‘You’re Sherlock Holmes.’

  ‘Elementary,’ said Khin. ‘All but for the fact that the actual Mrs.
Holmes would now take her findings to Scotland Yard and leave the arrests up to the constabulary. We, on the other hand are in a country run by an illegal military junta and our complaint is against the Royal Thai Police force. I’m at a loss as to with whom you are intending to share this astounding revelation.’

  There passed a few seconds of silence.

  ‘I know,’ said Sissy.

  ‘Know what?’ I asked.

  ‘I know who to tell. I know a guy. I went out with him. We kept in touch. He works for the Counter Corruption Commission in Bangkok.’

  ‘That’s the military,’ I said.

  ‘Not really,’ he replied. ‘I mean, yeah, they have military connections but officially they’re independent. They have investigators and undercover people. And, don’t worry. There isn’t a lot of love lost between the army and the police. If we put together the evidence I reckon he can help us out.’

  ‘In a hurry?’ Bunny asked.

  ‘He has people based in Chiang Mai.’

  ‘Then go get him, boy,’ I said.

  ‘Can I get a fast ride into Tha Ton?’ Sissy asked Lizzie.

  ‘You just want to phone?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘We’ve got satellite in the command tent.’

  Chapter 29

  “But we only have fourteen hours to save the Earth!”

  Flash Gordon (1980)

  It was evening. The national and international press had been tipped off about the disappearance of OB and they’d swarmed like rain ants to the movie sight. They’d spilled out of the roped-off observer area and were making a nuisance of themselves interviewing the crew and actors. The police had shepherded all the Wa extras to a field a kilometer away.

  Despite the fact that he didn’t have a clue what was going on around him, Dan Jensen had called an impromptu press conference. With Tony in his arms he maintained his rugged frontiersman demeanour whilst inadvertently releasing one small photogenic tear that lingered on his cheek. He described the father/son relationship he’d established with the director and had been praying to both God and the Lord Buddha for his safe return. With nothing to do but wait, we availed ourselves of the food and beverages in the canteen trailer until we heard a commotion outside. People were running, someone shouting, ‘He’s back’.