Everything would be neatly wrapped up and all traces of Bob Humphrey and Ralph Callaway would be gone.
Santos climbed behind the wheel of the Land Cruiser and MacMurphy climbed in beside him with his GPS and a Thai roadmap spread out on his lap. “Let’s roll,” said Mac.
They reached Nong Khai early the following morning. After a huge breakfast at one of Mac’s favorite floating restaurants on the bank of the Mekong River, they drove to the home of Police Colonel Chatchai Sunthonwet to make arrangements to cross the border into Laos.
The Colonel was already at work when they arrived, but his wife remembered MacMurphy fondly and invited them in for tea while she called her husband.
After a brief meeting where Mac and the Colonel became reacquainted, Colonel Sunthonwet personally escorted Culler and Mac to the border, supervised their passage through Thai customs, and drove them in the Land Cruiser across the Friendship Bridge into Laos. He dropped them off at the beautiful French colonial Settha Palace Hotel in the center of Vientiane, and returned to Thailand in the Land Cruiser with two .45 caliber H&K pistols, suppressors and holsters, and $1000 in US currency in his pocket.
Chapter One Hundred-One
Ft. Lauderdale
Maggie met them at the airport in Ft. Lauderdale and drove them back to the offices of Global Strategic Reporting on Las Olas Boulevard. They briefed Maggie on what happened in Thailand – for security reasons, the rest of the GSR staff was kept entirely out of the loop. The briefing was complete with screw-ups, anecdotes, warts and accomplishments, but without, of course, any mention of Mac’s trysts with Charly Blackburn.
Maggie in turn briefed them on her conversations with Edwin Rothmann. The DDO was effusive in his praise for what they accomplished, but fearful of reprisals by Khun Ut, particularly regarding Charly Blackburn, who was laying low on his orders.
She informed them the front company was beginning to pay for itself and subscriptions to GSR’s “CounterThreat” publication were continuing to rise.
Back in Northern Thailand, Vanquish and the kid delivered the tainted shipment of heroin bricks to the warehouse in Mae Chan along with the body of bandana guy tied across the back of one of the donkeys.
Vanquish’s explanation of the cause of death was accepted by a simple shake of the head and a tongue clucking “tut-tut” by Ung Chea.
A few days later the three hundred and twenty kilogram shipment of tainted heroin was included in a five hundred kilogram shipment that moved by truck, secreted in the midst of a load of bagged charcoal, from the warehouse in Mae Chan to Samut Sakon, a small fishing port in the Gulf of Thailand, south of Bangkok. From there the heroin bricks were loaded onto a small coastal freighter where it made its way to Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.
In Ho Chi Minh City the shipment was secreted in a concealed compartment in the bilge of a Hong Kong registered nineteen hundred ton bulk grain carrier named the Ruaha. The ship was pumped full to the gunnels with rice from the Mekong Delta and sent on a three day voyage to the port of Hong Kong.
In Hong Kong the heroin bricks were transferred in a mini-bus to a state of the art refinery located in the basement of an old colonial mansion in the hills overlooking Tsim Sha Tsui and Hong Kong harbor.
There the ricin laced heroin bricks went through the most delicate forth and final refining process, turning the heroin base into heroin hydrochloride, a fine white powder, ready for packing and shipping to distributers in cities around the world. The process also had the affect of spreading the deadly ricin equally throughout the five hundred kilogram batch.
The bags of white powder were then secreted in a container load of rough cut teak lumber destined for The Decorator’s Furniture Warehouse in North Carolina. Several of the four inch by six inch solid teak planks had been carefully split, hollowed out and glued back together with the bags of pure heroin filling the void inside. The concealment was unnoticeable to all but the most trained eye.
A huge Mersk Line container ship carried the teak lumber to the Port of Miami, arriving on the third of September. From there the lumber container was shipped by rail to Fayetteville, North Carolina and unloaded at The Decorator’s Furniture Warehouse three weeks later. By that time the pure white heroin had a street value of $175 per gram.
The ricin laced heroin was cut further and repackaged at the furniture factory. It began hitting the streets in cities along the entire southeast coast of the United States by mid-October.
Chapter One Hundred-Two
Santos and MacMurphy slipped back into the routine of life in sunny Ft. Lauderdale.
They worked out in the mornings, Santos mostly in the weight room and MacMurphy with long runs along the Intracoastal and ocean. The rest of their days were spent in the GSR offices, working to turn the company into a profitable business to enhance its cover.
Mac, Culler and Maggie continued to debate the ethics of the operation in the Golden Triangle, but they tried not to let the disagreement affect their business relationship. As weeks turned to months, Khun Ut and Ung Chea and Charly Blackburn and Northern Thailand seemed very far away.
As part of their daily work, under the cover of doing research on the effects of drug overdose on heroin users for a large government “think-tank” customer, Maggie had put the whole GSR research team to work digging up statistics on the subject of heroin overdose.
They found that across the country drug overdoses killed about thirty-five thousand people a year, making it the second leading cause of accidental death, right behind motor vehicle accidents and ahead of deaths caused by firearms.
But some of the information they uncovered through confidential interviews with coroners gave them pause. It indicated deaths caused by poisoning might be masked, and falsely attributed to simple heroin overdose. Whenever a coroner’s autopsy detected any kind of illegal drugs in the body of a corpse, the autopsy was usually stopped right there, and the death was declared to be caused by an accidental overdose.
So their concern was, if people started dying from the ricin laced heroin, and their deaths were attributed to simple drug overdose, the results of their operation could be in jeopardy. If no one found out that the heroin was poisoned, then there would be no blow-back on Khun Ut and the trail of suppliers between him and the local street pushers.
They worried about this, and reported their fears back to Rothmann, who did not appear to be overly concerned. He just told them to wait and keep researching – something would happen.
But nothing did.
By early November their research began to show a definite rise in heroin related deaths in the southeastern United States, but no one outside of GSR seemed to notice, and not a word was written about ricin or any other related reason for the deaths.
All of the deaths appeared to be individual overdoses. Some were caused by inhalation (snorting), others by injection. And all of them were of known heroin addicts.
And then, finally, it happened.
On Thanksgiving Day, the Palm Beach Post ran a headline story about eight members of the violent Palm Beach County Haitian gang, Top 6, dying from an apparent heroin overdose in a run down smack-house on Sappodilla Avenue in West Palm Beach.
With so many deaths occurring at the same time, police suspected foul play and immediately jumped to the conclusion that the deaths were somehow related to reprisals by a rival gang. The Top 6 gang controlled a corridor of territory that ran roughly along the railroad tracks from Riviera Beach to Boynton Beach, but another Haitian gang called the Tru Haitian Boyz had recently been infringing on its territory. They became the main suspects.
The police collected syringes, spoons and heroin residue from the scene, and when the toxicology and autopsy reports came back they showed clear evidence that the heroin was tainted with ricin poison.
Two days after the press published the news of the ricin poisonings, two well-known drug dealers, twenty-three year old Berno Chalemond and twenty-five year old Tite Sufra, were shot execution style in the back
of the head on Southwest Second Street in Boynton Beach.
Two suspects, identified by eyewitnesses as eighteen year old Jeriah “Plug” Woody and twenty-five year old Jesse Cesar, were arrested a day later. Under interrogation they admitted they had killed the two drug dealers because they had supplied the ricin-laced heroin that had killed their eight Top 6 brothers.
Aware now of the possibility of ricin tainted heroin, toxicologists began reporting an epidemic of apparent overdose deaths caused by ricin tainted heroin spreading throughout the gang controlled areas of Palm Beach County, Florida.
These deaths were followed by other assassinations of known drug suppliers in Folk Nation territory in Boca Raton, Latin Kings territory in Belle Glade, and Bloods and Crips territory in Jupiter and Palm Beach Gardens.
The epidemic of gangland killings and deaths by ricin-laced heroin caught the attention of the national media, which fueled the frenzied killing of heroin suppliers across the entire southeast coast of the United States.
Chapter One Hundred-Three
Culler Santos tossed the newspaper across the conference table to MacMurphy. “It couldn’t happen to a better bunch of lowlife. Talk about culling society of its undesirable elements! I couldn’t have done it better myself.”
Maggie looked at him crossly across the table. “You did do it, Culler. Have you already forgotten?”
“No, I haven’t forgotten, but as much as I love you, Maggie, I can’t understand your stance on this issue. The world is a better place without those assholes…”
“The ends don’t justify the means, Culler. Never. And what about the collateral damage? What about the innocents who will die?”
“I haven’t seen any evidence of that. At least not yet I haven’t…”
Mac stood up and stretched. “Okay, okay. No more squabbling. What’s done is done. The moving hand, having writ, moves on…as the poet says. We can’t go on worrying about things we can’t control. These animals know nothing more than swift retribution. And that’s a good thing. Let’em keep on killing each other. Culler’s right about that. The world will be a better place without them.”
Maggie stood up and walked to the door. She pulled the door open and turned back to face them, legs apart and breathing heavily, chest rising and falling under her light blouse. “Until the first innocent kid, or father or mother dies. Will it be worth it then? I don’t think so…” She slammed the door behind her.
Mac sat back down at the table. “I don’t know, Culler. I don’t know.”
Culler said, “I’m sorry she feels that way, but this isn’t going to stop any time soon. It’ll travel all the way up the daisy chain to Khun Ut and his cohorts. Those who aren’t killed in the fury of mass retribution will go broke and be put out of business. Now that it’s in the press the entire heroin trade in the U.S. will suffer. Looks like our version of Operation Eldest Son has been a resounding success. It’s what we wanted to happen and it’s happening. And that’s a fact and I’m happy about it.”
Mac stood up. “You’re right of course. The operation worked.” He reached out his hand to Santos and they embraced, shoulder to shoulder. “But hell,” he snickered, “people will now probably just switch to cocaine. We may have just done the Colombian and Mexican cartels a huge favor.”
Chapter One Hundred-Four
Cindy and Mac were awakened early the next morning by the ringing of Mac’s throwaway cell phone.
“Sorry to bother you so early, Mac, but I managed to wrangle a trip down to Miami to meet with the station and I wondered if we could meet for a few minutes while I’m in the area.”
Mac recognized Rothmann’s deep, gravely voice immediately and sat up straight in bed. “Sure, just tell me when and where and I’ll be there.”
“I’m leaving for the airport now. Should be done with business by about three o’clock. Pick me up in front of the Borders Book Store on San Lorenzo Avenue in Coral Gables at exactly three forty-five. Ça va?”
“Okay, three forty-five, Borders, Coral Gables. Got it. I’ll be there.”
“Good…” The phone went dead.
They were both fully awake and sitting straight up in their bed. Cindy rubbed the sleep out of her eyes and regarded him with a wide questioning look. The sheet had dropped down to her lap revealing luscious breasts and capturing Mac’s gaze. “Who was that?” she asked.
“Potential client,” he lied, “He wants to meet later this afternoon.” He reached out and caressed the nearest breast with the back of his fingers, causing the nipple to harden.
“Stop it!” she giggled, brushing his hand away.
He moved toward her and nuzzled her neck and whispered into her ear. “Now that we’re awake, can you think of anything to do?”
She slid into his arms and pulled him down on top of her. “I’m sure we can think of something.” His hand moved over her hip and around the soft inner part of her thigh and then up...
Chapter One Hundred-Five
The Borders Book Store was located only a few blocks from the CIA’s Miami station.
Edwin Rothmann’s interest in books was legendary in the Agency. Wherever he went he always visited the local bookstores. He had a voracious appetite for reading and usually read two or three books at a time. Although history was his passion, historical novels, as long as they were accurate, were his second love.
So it was not unusual when Rothmann broke off his meetings with the station staff and announced that he was going to take a short walk over to the Borders Bookstore before heading back to Washington DC.
It was a bright, sunny day in southern Florida – just another day in paradise, as the natives would constantly remind the snowbirds from the north. A refreshing November breeze coming off the ocean rustled through the palm trees while the big man strolled the shady tree-lined streets, blue blazer thrown casually over his shoulder, limping slightly.
He arrived at the bookstore about ten minutes early and went inside to browse a bit before his pick-up by MacMurphy. At precisely three forty-five he walked briskly outside and jumped into the beige Cadillac that pulled up to the curb. He glanced at his watch. “Right on time, as always. But where did you get this car? I thought you told me you bought a BMW when you ‘retired.’”
“I did. This is a rental. In alias, of course. What would you expect me to do when meeting with the DDO?”
“Of course. Never slack up on the tradecraft, Mac. You never know…”
“Don’t worry, sir, I won’t.”
“I know, I know. Glad to see you back in one piece, Mac. It got a little hairy out there, didn’t it?”
“Yes, it did. We had a couple of close calls, but it looks like everything worked out as planned in the end.”
The big man shifted his weight in the seat and turned toward Mac. “That’s why I’m here, Mac. Khun Ut has gone berserk again. He’s totally lost it this time. Yesterday morning he and his men assaulted Charly Blackburn’s compound, killed the guards and grabbed Charly. He’s also got her Hmong asset. Intercepts tell us they’re both being held in the basement of his villa in Ban Hin Taek.”
Mac pulled the car over to the side of the road and stopped. He pounded his fist on the steering wheel. “Holy shit! You’ve got to be kidding...”
“No, I’m not kidding. And we’ve got to assume that Khun Ut now knows for certain what happened in the jungle that night when you guys injected that ricin into his shipment of heroin. Otherwise he wouldn’t have grabbed Vanquish.”
Mac rubbed his temples. “The fucking butcher! We’ve got to get Charly out of there. Won’t the Thais do anything?”
Two men in dressed in business suits walked past their car on the sidewalk and one of them glanced back over his shoulder at them. “We’d better keep moving,” said Mac, pulling back onto the road.
“Good idea. To answer your question, the Thais only know that Charly has been kidnapped. We’ve told them who we suspect is behind it and they agree, but they won’t take any action until they
have completed their own investigation. That could take weeks, and then…who knows. They’re not very cooperative these days. I wish General Chavalit was back in charge. The current leadership is made up of a bunch of pussies.”
Mac drove aimlessly through the residential streets of Coral Gables while they talked. “We can’t leave her with that maniac for that long. They’ll kill her.”
Rothmann pushed his bulk back into the seat, adjusted his seat belt over his girth and stretched out his bum leg. “That’s what I’m concerned about. That’s why I’m here.”
“You want us to go back.” It was a statement, not a question.
“Yes, go back there and put eyes on Khun Ut’s mountain villa. If you get the opportunity, take him out. You know how to do that. His empire is crumbling and with him gone we might be able to save Charly and Vanquish. But we’ve got to act fast.”
“Son of a bitch…”
“Yeah, my sentiments exactly. By the way, before she was picked up Charly cleaned out the safehouse of all your gear. It’s being held at the base. How do you want me to get it to you?”
Mac’s mind was spinning. “Damn, I don’t know. Is there anyone else? We can’t use General Sawat any longer…”
Rothmann shook his big head. “And we can’t risk exposing any more base personnel to you. You guys are toxic.” He scratched his head in thought. “But I can have someone drop it off someplace for you.”
“You’re right, Ed. How about bringing the stuff back to the old safehouse? If it’s still clean, we can stay there and avoid having to check into a hotel.”
“As far as I know it is. That’s not a bad idea. There’s one guy in the base I would trust to do this. He was close to Charly. A base communicator – big lanky, good ole boy Texan named Gene Garrett. I can chat with him securely offline through the communicator’s work link without alerting anyone else. That might work.”
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