Page 163 of Cry Havoc

“Unless?”

“Unless you play ball with us.”

“What do you want?”

Serrano pushed the photo of Dvornikov back toward Ella.

“We want the man who orchestrated the death of your father. And you are going to give him to us.”

CHAPTER 58

Bangkok, Thailand

“DO YOU THINK SHE’LLwarn him?” Serrano asked.

“Not sure,” Tom said, his hand on the Croix de Lorraine rosary in his pocket. “I’d say it’s fifty-fifty.”

“Not the greatest of odds.”

“No.”

The two men stood on the balcony of Tom’s room at the Oriental hotel in Bangkok overlooking lush gardens and a beautifully manicured lawn that led down to a dock where water taxis waited patiently to ferry visitors across the Chao Phraya River or take them north to the Grand Palace, home to the Emerald Buddha Temple. One of those water taxis belonged to the Central Intelligence Agency and was on standby as a secondary extract platform.

The river was Bangkok’s main artery, flowing south into the Gulf of Siam and north into Bangkok proper. The canal-based city, known as the Venice of the East, was crowded with floating markets and distinctive long-tail, flat-bottom boats, characterized by long propeller shafts extending from their sterns, powered by repurposed car or truck engines. Even from the balcony, Tom could hear vendors shouting from the water below. The scene reminded him of the turmoil of the street markets he had walked throughin Saigon, but instead of dirt or asphalt, these avenues were paved with water. Dilapidated boats converted to floating kitchens were situated next to ramshackle wooden rafts that acted as homes for families dressed in rags. Topless mothers cradled babies under ragged tarps, their only protection from the sun and rain. Every craft on the water seemed to be decorated with multicolored wreaths or painted flowers to honor Mae Ya Nang, the patron goddess of boats, giving the scene the ambiance of a surreal psychedelic dream state. The Oriental hotel was a refuge from the chaos of the canals, canals that were the very lifeblood of a city that never slept.

“?‘No plan survives first contact with the enemy,’?” Serrano said.

“Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke.”

“I think I underestimated what they teach you in SEAL training.”

“A friend of my dad’s told me that once.”

Rather than escort Ella on her Royal Orchid flight from Saigon to Bangkok, in case Dvornikov had eyes at Bangkok’s Don Mueang airport, Tom and Serrano had flown into Takhli Royal Thai Air Force Base the night before on a twin-engine Convair CV-250 belonging to CIA-affiliated Continental Air Services, Inc. They had then driven the two and a half hours southeast to the Oriental hotel in a 50-horsepower four-door French 1964 Panhard 17 that also belonged to the Agency. They checked into rooms 201 and 210 and went to bed just before midnight.

Trân took Ella’s flight in the morning and tailed her to the Oriental, where she checked in to room 213. He checked into room 226 just down the hall and was now on the lookout for Dvornikov, sipping spicy Darjeeling tea and reading that day’s edition of theThairathnewspaper in the hotel’s magnificent lobby.

“You gamble, Tom?” Serrano asked.

“On occasion.”

“You lucky or good?”

“I’ve always been lucky,” Tom said, walking inside and opening his suitcase.

Tom moved some clothes to the side and extracted a Walther MPL submachine gun. He unfolded the rubber-coated wire stock and locked it in place.

“Borrow that from the arms room?” Serrano asked.

“I did,” Tom replied, as he inserted the thirty-two-round double-stack magazine. He left the bolt forward, where it would stay until the weapon was needed. “Time to stop relying on luck.”

“Tom, if it gets to the stage where you need that, we haven’t done our job.”

“If this doesn’t work, it will not be because I wasn’t prepared.”

Tom set the sub gun on the bed.

“We’re going to get him, Tom. And then we are going to trade him for any POWs the Soviets have taken from Vietnam.”