Page 81 of Cry Havoc (Tom Reece #1)
Bangkok, Thailand
“DO YOU THINK SHE’LL warn 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 through in 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.
Tran 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 the Thairath newspaper 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.”
“Let’s go over it again,” Tom said.
“Ella tells us that Dvornikov doesn’t travel with security,” Serrano said, taking a seat on the couch. “Attracts too much attention. He comes in via a flight from Japan or India. Both countries have airlines that service Moscow.”
“That’s a trek.”
“He flies from Hanoi to Moscow. Then from Moscow to India or Japan. From there he can catch a flight to Thailand, where he meets with Ella and gets the paperback. He then reverses the route, going from Thailand to India or Japan and then to Moscow where he delivers the paperback to the GRU before returning to Hanoi. Meanwhile, Ella can get here directly from Saigon. She said Dvornikov stays at the Oriental but always in a different room, which is why we don’t have eyes or ears on them.
When Tran spots Dvornikov in the lobby, he will ring us here in the suite. Then it’s Ella’s show.”
The plan was for Ella to spike Dvornikov’s drink with chloral hydrate, a white power hidden in the false bottom of a round compact makeup case.
When the sedative-hypnotic drug was combined with alcohol it would incapacitate the target.
After Dvornikov was sedated, Ella would go to the lobby and hand Tran her key.
Tran would then get Tom and Serrano and the three would go to Dvornikov’s room to carry their drunk friend to the car for a drive to Takhli Royal Thai Air Force Base.
There, a CIA-affiliated Southern Air Transport Boeing 727 out of Tainan, Taiwan, was standing by to get them out of the country.
The longtail water taxi would be their secondary means of extract if the car was not an option.
The water taxi would take them to a CIA signals collection ship disguised as a trawler and then into international waters for transfer to a Navy ship.
“And now, it’s a waiting game,” Tom said.
“A lot of the work on this side of the fence involves waiting, Tom.”
“Terrific.”
“Just stay focused.”
“Why are you doing this, Nick?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, what’s in it for you? You are taking a lot of risk here.”
“The paramilitary side of the Agency is all about risk and providing plausible deniability for the Directorate of Operations. It’s part of the job.”
“That’s it?”
“Well, if you want to psychoanalyze, I didn’t give you the full family history.
One of the uncles I told you about when we first met, when I said I had uncles who served in World War Two, well, one of them didn’t come home.
He was held in a camp in what became the Soviet sector after Yalta.
He’s still listed as MIA. And he’s not the only one.
The government has done next to nothing to find Americans caught in the Soviet sector.
There are thousands still MIA. The government is too worried about political fallout to exert the proper pressure.
Here, I am in position to do something about it, in this war. ”
They were interrupted by a ringing phone. Serrano answered.
“Yes.”
It was Tran from the lobby.
“He’s here.”
“Good.”
“But he’s not alone.”
“What?”
“He’s with another man. Tall. Short black hair. Looks military. Our man got a key from the front desk. It looks like his friend checked into a different room.”
“All right. Stay on station.”
Serrano hung up and looked at Tom.
“Dvornikov has a shadow.”
“What was that you said about no plan surviving first contact with the enemy?”