Sea of Lies: An Espionage Thriller

by Bradley West

  * * * * *

  At exactly 10:25, the driver stopped the stolen concrete mixer at the top of the Racquets Club’s sloped driveway. The wrought iron gate was a relic of the colonial past, a twenty-foot-wide monstrosity that the septuagenarian guards labored to swing open in the morning and shut at night. Balendra signaled for the driver to park the truck as he closed the gate against the protests of the ancient security man. Nine hundred pounds of fresh concrete slid out the rear spout. The driver opened the hood, sabotaged the engine, pocketed the keys and disappeared up the driveway and onto Galle Road. No one was driving in or out of the Colombo Racquets Club for a very long time.

  Balendra’s jog back to the main building changed to a sprint as he heard two shots in short succession.

  * * * * *

  Kaili was leading Watermen and Pit-stain toward the front of the stopped locomotive. Chumakov was shouting in Russian. The henchman let go of Watermen just as Nolan raced past. Kaili took off her hairnet and reached back to fumble with her bun.

  Watermen’s head disintegrated, showering Nolan with blood and brain tissue. Watermen tumbled to the ground in slow motion just as the noise of the shot reached them. A suppressed cough coincided with the death of Pit-stain, a crimson blossom spreading at the neckline of his Oxford cloth shirt. Nolan kept running and rounded the locomotive with Kaili. Another shot sounded. He expected himself or Kaili to fall over, but the victim was an SBS commando who lay dead twenty yards down the beach, submachinegun beside him. More shots came from behind, but Nolan couldn’t tell if they’d found targets. They climbed onto the motionless train. It was bedlam with passengers crouched down between the seats or on the floor, screaming and shouting.

  “Give me the grenade!” he shouted. Kaili already had it in her hand. He looked for a target and saw Chumakov hunched up against the seawall, a bleeding Yuri flat on his back next to him. A bloody drag mark showed where Chumakov had pulled him to shelter. Pit-stain was sprawled facedown on the beach, a discarded rag doll. Fernando was earning his money. Nolan pulled the pin out of the grenade but kept the lever clenched.

  Pathmarajah came back into the first passenger carriage and yelled, “The driver has been shot dead! I’m getting out of here!” He pulled out the yellow thumb drive secured inside a small plastic bag and taped to a cricket ball. He went to a train window, but before he could pitch the ball, Nolan used his left hand to grab his arm and leaned in to shout, “Throw it near the seawall, twenty feet in front of that fellow with the gun!” Pathmarajah made a good toss, within Chumakov’s view but far enough away from the seawall to give Fernando a shot.

  Chumakov looked up, and Nolan leaned out the window holding the grenade below the interior windowsill. The Tartar looked as if he would take a shot, but instead bear-crawled the short distance to the cricket ball without exposing himself to the snipers. Nolan raised his arm, released the handle and breathed, “One-one thousand, two-one thousand, three—”

  He lobbed the grenade toward the prone Russians, but it exploded closer to the train than the FSB agents. The shock wave staggered and deafened him. Cowering Lankans cushioned his fall as he collapsed backward. The passengers were now in full cry, the screams of the wounded comingling with the shouts of the terrified. He pushed himself up and looked for Kaili, who was similarly horizontal atop writhing passengers.

  “Bob, you’re hurt!” she said, but he couldn’t hear.

  Was Chumakov dead? He had been completely exposed in front of that wall, but the grenade had detonated too soon. Nolan used the seat back to pull himself upright, a mix of Watermen’s brains, blood and his own gore decorating his scrubs. A glance out the train window showed the Russian down and unmoving. There was no time to empty Pathmarajah’s pistol at the prone body, particularly with a sniper around. “We have to get to the boat!” he shouted, though his ringing ears registered no sound. She followed him down the steps.

  Pathmarajah was in front of them, running toward the inflatable manned by the surviving Navy commando. The sniper’s bullet hit the hacker off-center on the right shoulder blade, spinning him around and leaving an exit wound the size of a teacup saucer. Pathmarajah was conscious on his back, but they had no choice but to keep running if they wanted to avoid his fate.

  “Stay near the train!” Nolan cried. At the last car, Kaili dodged between fleeing passengers and angled down toward the waterline and the boat. Nolan followed, waiting for the impacts that would end one or both of their lives.

  * * * * *

  Prior to this flight, Sam Hecker and Dick Constantine hadn’t spent more than a cumulative ten minutes in conversation. They made up for lost time, speaking obliquely about MH370, Teller, Matthews and Nolan. Constantine kept to himself his suspicion that Nolan and the DEA were right about a hijacking operation, but dead wrong about the Company being the sponsor. Nolan would be long gone very soon, and Hecker wasn’t from their tribe. The assignment of culpability for MH370 would be a delicate subject best handled internally. Hecker told him most of what he’d already learned from reading the transcripts of Barling’s phone calls, but it was good to get the information from a legitimate source, too.

  Three rows up, Matthews was working through a bottle of decent Chianti. He’d picked up snippets of their conversation twice when he’d gone to the john. They’d avoided his eye and didn’t even bother to pretend they weren’t conspiring against him. Whether anything would stick in Tokyo tonight was unclear. Hecker and the DEA had disobeyed orders, crossed turf lines and most importantly, had unilaterally undertaken a US Army-staffed mercenary operation in a foreign country. In addition, Matthews had secret recordings of two phone conversations where Burns had spoken about Teller’s tenure with Golden Elephant. If someone wanted to get pissy about Robin Teller hiding under a CIA umbrella, then Matthews would not take the fall alone.

  On the negative side, the MAS logo on the packing crate and the radioactivity both pointed to a hijacking with high-value cargo offloaded. Matthews and his people had nothing to do with either of them as far as anyone could tell. Handling low-grade security issues for Mr. Jay Toffer didn’t make him complicit in anything Robin Teller may have done on his own. With Teller dead, that avenue of inquiry wouldn’t yield results. Matthews could be found guilty only in the court of CIA internal opinion. Those were the sorts of rumors that could retard, if not derail, a career. He tapped his empty glass to get the hostess’s attention. He might as well drink a few more glasses; this would be a crappy trip any way he sliced it.

  * * * * *

  “There you are, machan.” At last Aja Fernando spied the competition, perched on a corner low down in the Grand Hyatt’s concrete shell. His shots would be at less acute angles than he’d anticipated. On the whole, this was good news, but now he had to move the bipod and rifle onto the balcony. With two shots already fired and a light haze above the stepladder, it was no longer a secret where he was hiding. He figured since no one had come after him, he would be safe outside the shelter of the overhang. That same instant he heard an automatic bark twice in the corridor, and whirled around with his Colt .45 at the ready. No one came through the door, so that rugby player must have done his job.

  Turning his attention back outside, he balanced the bipod’s legs on the balcony railing. The Hyatt snipers were intent on their targets and paid him no heed. The elevation was approximately ninety feet, and the spotting scope read two hundred ninety two feet to the target. The breeze was four knots based on the actions of the flags flying on the poles lining the lap pool. He would only get two shots. Fernando’s first effort was inch-perfect and took the shooter through the throat. The second sniper on the spotting scope rolled right, but couldn’t move far because of his comrade’s corpse on top of him. In the moment it took him to push the body away, Fernando’s round impacted him behind the left armpit. Fernando could tell from the bloody mist that it was a solid hit. The shock of the fifty-caliber bullet would take the second man out of the fight even if the wound wasn’t fatal.

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sp; Fernando turned his attention out to the back of the club where the moderate surf and wind competed with the distant screams and shouts. He couldn’t hear any more gunshots, and saw an inflatable boat zigzag away from the beach at high speed. Through the scope, he saw two of his people in blue-green hospital wear with a man on the tiller. Only three instead of six: they’d lost half their number, including his hacker nephew.

  * * * * *

  Burns was in a muddle. Carrier-based recon flights suggested Japan’s ten-man Senkaku garrison had suffered air and sea bombardments followed by an amphibious assault. This was overkill, as the lightly armed Japanese garrison had flown a white flag from the outset. There might have been a Keystone Kops aspect to this senseless invasion if Japan hadn’t lost a pair of frontline fighters in air-to-air combat, while shooting down or damaging three of its adversary’s jets. China had offered no official comment—not even a denial—and Japan had now formally invoked the mutual defense obligation of the US to protect the islands as sovereign Japan soil. Burns was a spectator at the possible outbreak of WWIII, and yet was sourcing his information from unsecure lines, the BBC and, believe it or not, decrypted one-time pads that an old-timer had pulled out of the storeroom.

  Meanwhile, the MH370 disappearance was beginning to look more and more like the work of the late Robin Teller. Despite the antics of that wacko Bob Nolan, the DEA agent’s photo of the Malaysia Airline logo on the crate containing a radioactive device supported a hijack theory.

  At the very minimum, Burns had to create separation. Matthews had long been complicit in concealing Toffer/Teller, but there was nothing to tie Burns to Teller other than Matthews’s word. There was no way Charles Tecumseh Burns was going down for this trifle. He called out to his secretary, “Get someone from HR up here. I’m suspending Lloyd Matthews, effective immediately. I need a letter. Get legal in here, too, to massage the wording.”

  * * * * *

  Kaili and Nolan hung on the rope ringing the interior of the inflatable as they bounded from wave top to wave top. They hit the peaks with wrenching jolts; clenched teeth prevented them from speaking. Nolan found his left grip useless, which doubled the stress on his right forearm and slammed him into a prone Kaili as the boat swerved back and forth. After another minute, they were out of sniper range, and their tiller man reduced evasive moves while adding throttle. Nolan’s eyes stung from the salt spray, and his glasses were covered in spatter. They headed south down the coast, mercantile Colombo on the left and the Indian Ocean on the right. His eyes wouldn’t focus and his brain was scrambled. He was also in shock from his godson’s death and increasingly cognizant of his own wounds. The buzzing in his ears was subsiding, and he could now distinguish the roar of the outboard from the slap of the waves. They started toward shore, running with the wind and waves so the bouncing halved. Nolan stared at the bloody stains on his smock. For starters, his left forearm looked like a Doberman had given it a rip.

  * * * * *

  Gretchen Doyle was frantic. “We need eyes on the Racquets Club! What in the hell is happening?” The venue switch from the Cinnamon Grand Hotel to the club was on too short notice. Following Pat Long’s murder and Perkins’s “Do not touch Nolan” directive, Doyle had no option but to move carefully. The best she could do was assign three men to the Grand Hyatt construction site to cover over forty floors. Once the shooting started, they concentrated their efforts on the lower levels. The show was over by the time all three arrived on the podium block, out of breath.

  * * * * *

  The sniper finished packing the dismantled components into the foam cut-outs nestled in the custom case. He clicked the latches down and picked up his Colt .45. Once again he was on the balcony, intending to exit into the corridor from Kaili’s room where he was less likely to be surprised. The last FSB man was waiting on an adjacent balcony. Fernando took the first two shots to the torso and staggered, gun case crashing to the tiles. He brought the Colt up on target, but his assailant shot him between the eyes before he could fire.

  Hearing the blasts, Balendra ran across the hall, stepped over the dead FSB agent he’d gunned down minutes before and kicked down the door to room 109. Fernando was dead on the balcony, the drapes flowing in the breeze. He turned to leave when he saw the giant’s raised gun in the entryway. “Holy hell!” Balendra dropped his weapon and was raising his hands when the man shot him twice through the heart.

  The gunman turned and ran downstairs, across the veranda, past the pool, and up the seawall steps to the beach beyond.

  * * * * *

  The train was stationary, shots had been fired, and there had been an explosion. Bodies were strewn outside the passenger cars and on the beach, but Doyle didn’t have a single Agency asset within the Racquets Club. The front gate was blocked, forcing them to run across the beach. Chumakov didn’t answer the local number he’d provided the night before. A Zodiac had streaked past the embassy headed south only ten minutes previously. Five minutes ago, the shooting had stopped.

  Her phone rang. It was Peter Allen, the first Company man on the scene. “Chief, there’s one gunshot Lankan on the beach, a dead Navy commando, at least a dozen civilians suffering shrapnel injuries, and four bodies between the train and the seawall.”

  “Can you ID the victims? Bob Nolan? Mark Watermen? Anyone Asian?”

  “I’m standing next to the seawall. The first body is dressed in blue-green surgical wear, and his face is completely missing along with one side of his head. All I can tell you is that he was a white male with short brown hair. Probably shot with a high-caliber hollow-point sniper round. The other three are in business attire. I have a man next to the blue body wearing a white shirt and shot through the back of the neck. That’s the work of a pro shooter, for certain. Two other bodies are mangled at the foot of the seawall. Looks like a grenade, both males from their clothes.”

  “So you don’t know if Nolan and Watermen are dead or alive?”

  “No, no, I don’t.”

  “You’ll have to get your hands dirty. Nolan had a USB drive, SD card or disk drive on him with a copy of Watermen’s NSA files. He was trading the files to the Russians for Watermen. We need those files back. It could be on any of the victims, except for the locals and the commando. If you have time, email me a photo of what’s left of the face of the dead man in scrubs.”

  This was news to Allen. He didn’t fancy being elbow-deep in gore robbing the dead while the train tracks were covered in wounded, wailing civilians and the police were on the way. An arthritic retired defensive end type lumbered up and over the seawall. He had to be 6’6” tall and over two hundred fifty pounds. “Wait a second, Chief. There’s another man coming down from the Racquets Club. Huge and Caucasian, probably East European. Damn, he’s packing!” Allen hung up.

  Doyle didn’t have a chance to process that last bit as her phone rang. The Agency men at the building site were standing over two dead Asians, sniped from the CRC below. The man clutching the rifle lacked a throat. The spotter was shot on the left side with an ugly exit wound through his right ribcage. What did Doyle want them to do?

  “Get the hell out of there and don’t leave anything behind that puts you at the scene. Take nothing. Assume you’ll be searched or arrested as you leave. You went looking for snipers and saw nothing, did nothing.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  DEATH RACE RATMALANA

  FRIDAY MARCH 14, COLOMBO; EINME, BURMA

  Kaili and Nolan exited the inflatable as it glided ashore. With Nolan’s arm useless, Kaili stripped off his surgical garb. Their civilian clothes were soaked, but they didn’t stand out as much as in the turquoise scrubs. Nolan’s left forearm bled steadily, and his shirtfront looked like he’d done a belly slide down a gravel road. He could breathe and didn’t have any bloody foam in his mouth or seeping out of his chest, so he ruled out a perforated lung. His ears were back to normal, but his head hurt like hell. All in all, he considered himself fortunate to be upright and ambulatory.
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br />   Nolan handed a plastic-wrapped stack of hundreds to the SBC corporal. “Here’s the balance. I’m sorry about your friend. He died trying to save us. Please pass his share to his family.”

  The commando fixed him with an iron stare. “Who shot him?”

  Nolan didn’t have time for a rational assessment of the probabilities, but it wasn’t the Russians. It seemed likely to have been the Chinese, but the moment called for creativity. “Almost certainly the US killed your friend,” he said as he shook the man’s hand. “Do you want to help avenge his death? I know a way, but you’ll have to come with us.”

  “Let’s go.”

  Balendra’s driver waited in the boss’s SUV. “Only the three of you, sir?” he inquired respectfully, ignoring Nolan’s wounds.

  “Yes. We’ll need only two decoys.”

  The driver dialed and spoke in Sinhalese. As soon as the SUV was out of sight of the beach, the vehicle ducked into an underground car park as planned. Nolan, the commando and Kaili jumped into an Audi A6. A man and a woman, dressed in wet surgical scrubs identical to the ones they’d just discarded, took their places in the SUV. Two other men stood to the side and started taking off their own sodden clothes before disappearing into the pedestrian foot traffic of Galle Road. The decoy team was ready to head for the international airport.

  Nolan’s parting words were, “Drive fast, but not too fast. When they stop you, don’t resist. And thanks.”

  Their new driver was a Chatty Cathy of the first order. Whether it was due to a meth addiction, sugar high or brain damage, the fellow wouldn’t shut up. He was as thin as an anorexic and had the wild eyes of a Jonestown missionary to complement a maniacal grin. He drove like he spoke: fast and erratic.