Blood & Tacos #2 (12 page)

They parted, wary looks on their faces.

"He’s all yours," I said as I passed.

I could hear Lefebvre’s screams as the guard unlocked the rusty door
to the holding cell and let me out.

Three days earlier, I’d been sitting at the bar of the Sunrise Club,
the joint I own on Soi Cowboy. A quiet night, monsoonal rain and rumours of
another military coup keeping all but the most persistent punters off the streets
and out of the bars.

Not that I minded. Hank Williams was on the turntable—there’s no
disco in my bar—and I nursed a cold beer. The lull also gave me an opportunity
to concentrate on more important matters, like my newest waitress, Lek. She
was a fresh-faced little thing from the North with an eye for making a buck
in the big city and a firm arse you could bounce a five baht on.

Might have even tried my luck if it weren’t for the fact that I was already
exhausted after a day of lovemaking with Elise, a German Lufthansa stewardess
who always paid me a visit when she was in town. She moved her body with the
finesse of a panzer commander manoeuvring across the Russian steppes.

I was contemplating taking down the "Happy New Year 1981? banner in tinsel
slung across the bar when a Western man walked in. He was older than me by at
least a decade but still in good shape. His snow-white hair was cut military
style and he wore an immaculately pressed tan safari suit. I hope he wasn’t
trying to be incognito because he stank of old school spook.

The man glanced around the club and walked towards me. "Bruce Kelly?"
he said with a Midwestern American accent as he shook my hand. "My name’s
Rex Bannister, I have a proposition for you."

"That’s a turn for the books. It’s usually me doing the propositioning."

He didn’t smile. I drained my beer, burped, and motioned across the bar
to Tiger Lily, my bar manager.

"Hey baby, get me another beer. Make sure it’s cold." I looked
at Bannister. "Want one?"

He gave me a curt shake of his head. I peeled the tab off the can of beer and
took a long drink.

"I was hoping we could talk somewhere in private."

I led Bannister to my office, a small back room that doubled as a change space
for the waitresses, sat behind the desk strewn with papers, and swigged my beer.

Bannister sniffed, gave the room a slow one hundred and eighty degree sweep,
as if trying to locate the source of an unpleasant odour.

"I hear you’re a veteran," he said, his eyes on the centrefold
of Miss April pinned to the wall just above my right shoulder.

"I’ve been around." I re-adjusted the patch on my right eye,
the legacy of a Russian-made land mine in central Vietnam in 1969. "You?"

"Korea." He threw me a defiant look. "A real war."

I shrugged and sipped my beer. He might have been a soldier once; now he was
just another desk jockey employing others to do the killing. I’d met plenty
like him, uptight, church going Langley types. I’d even done some work
for one or two of them in the past, which I presumed was where Bannister got
my name.

"Let me make it clear, I don’t like you, Kelly. I don’t like
your bar, your drinking, and your taste in wall decorations. But you’re
supposed to be good at what you do and we need your help."

"Like’s got nothing to do with it, Bannister," I replied
between sips. "If I only took jobs from people I liked, I’d be a
poor man. Just tell me what you want, and let’s see if we can do business."

Bannister swept a pair of black lacy underwear off the wooden seat in front
of the desk, sat, and gave me his best man-to-man look.

"For some time now, the US government agency I work for has been tracking
the activities of a highly organised drug syndicate operating in Bangkok."

I put my legs on the desk. "It’s not like Uncle Sam to give a toss
about a few hopheads overdosing on cheap junk."

"This outfit is different." Bannister leaned forward. "It’s
headed by a former Chinese Communist Red Guard, known only by the code name
Scorpion. He’s smart and cunning, got links with the cops, the military
and Bangkok’s Sino-Thai elite. Now he’s expanding his operation,
making connections with Communist regimes in Laos and Vietnam, opening up new
trafficking routes.

"Conventional policing activities don’t work against him, and he’s
eliminated every agent we’ve tried to infiltrate into his organisation.
Fortunately, we have a new President in the White House, one who understands
the threat posed by Communism in all its forms and is prepared to take whatever
steps necessary to combat it."

Jesus, what was next, a rendition of the Stars and Stripes? I raised the beer
can to my lips and gazed at Bannister.

"Let me guess: that’s where I come in."

"Precisely. Find Scorpion’s Bangkok headquarters and take it off
the grid using whatever means necessary. We’ll pay you twenty thousand
US dollars, half now, half after the job is complete, plus we’ll bankroll
any expenses. Totally off the books, mind you. Maximum deniability."

"That’s a pretty tall order, mate," I drained my beer. "Bangkok’s
a big city. Any idea where I would start?"

"Scorpion works through cut-outs. One of these is a Frenchman called
Lefebvre. He’s a veteran red, got his start organising dockworkers in
Marseilles, spent time in Peking. Like all Europeans, Lefebvre has a weakness.
Thai police busted him a couple of nights ago with an underage hooker in a short-time
room off Sukhumvit, threw him into the main holding cell of Bangkok’s
Klong Prem Prison to await trial.

"Nothing that a bribe in the right place couldn’t usually fix,
had Lefebvre’s file not come to the attention of a corrupt but observant
police colonel who knew how much he was worth to the reds. And to us. While
the Commies negotiate his release, we’ve cut a side deal with the colonel
for someone to pose as an inmate and get to him first."

"And you want that someone to be me."

"Correct. Get in there, make contact with Lefebvre and find out what
he knows about Scorpion’s operation. Then do what you bastard mercenaries
do best."

"And what exactly do you think that is, Bannister?"

"Unleash mayhem."

People like Bannister use the term mercenary as an insult. I wear it as a badge
of pride.

I’ve been killing for so long it’s like a second skin. Got my start
fighting Communist insurgents in the rubber plantations of Malaya in the late
fifties; then I was in the Special Forces in Vietnam. Stayed until the end of
the war, didn’t even bother going home to Australia. Now I sell the skills
acquired in her majesty’s armed forces to the highest bidder.

I don’t have anything personally against the reds. Capitalist, Communist,
I’ll happily kill whoever if the price is right. Christ, the whole stinking
world can blow itself up for all I care, as long as I have a cold beer in my
hand and get paid in cash before they push the button.

Lefebvre’s information put Scorpion’s base in an old warehouse
compound on the banks of the Chao Phraya that runs through Bangkok before emptying
into the Gulf of Thailand.

The warehouse was also the headquarters of an aggressive club of body chasers.
A lot of Bangkok is still made up of tiny sois or side streets on which most
of the city’s residents live their lives. But as the country’s economy
has grown, freeways have begun to crisscross the city, and the number of traffic
accidents has risen. Without much of an ambulance service, the job of picking
over the carnage is left to clubs of young men, often affiliated to Buddhist
temples, who prowl the city looking for accidents. Their exploits are depicted
in grisly colour photographs of mangled bodies and twisted metal prominently
displayed on public notice boards. Thai friends tell me the photos are meant
to reinforce the Buddhist precept that all physical matter eventually decays.

Yeah, it’s strange, but no more so than a lot of the shit I’ve
seen in Asia. I’ve watched a wizened old shaman possessed by a spirit
so strong he could bend a steel bar. In central Vietnam, I’d seen a detachment
of hardened Montagnard soldiers refuse to attack a hill they thought was inhabited
by evil spirits. Hell, it’s no different to the Dreamtime stories told
by my father, an Aboriginal bare-knuckle boxer who’d worked a travelling
circus in the Queensland outback and died broke and alcoholic years after my
white mother left him and took me with her.

Besides, a gang of body chasers was the perfect cover for Scorpion’s
trafficking operation. What better way to move the drugs than through groups
of young men who came and went at all hours of the day and night and moved across
the city without arousing suspicion?

I thought all this as I stood on the deck of the sampan moored in the middle
of the Chao Phraya, before turning my attention to the final weapons check being
undertaken by my unit.

Getting to Lefebvre had been a solo mission. Taking down Scorpion’s headquarters
required more firepower.

I’d come across O’Connell hiding out in Bangkok after he had killed
a high profile Republican commander in Belfast. In addition to his favourite
weapon, a World War Two British commando knife, tonight he packed an Israeli-made
Uzi submachine gun. Compact, able to fire up to six hundred rounds a minute.
Fitted with a silencer like all our weapons, it was perfect for the kind of
confined space we were about to enter.

Tiger Lily didn’t just tend bar at the Sunrise, she was also a professional
killer who’d learned her lethal skills from her father, one of Thailand’s
most renowned hit men. That’s saying something in a country where having
someone whacked is as acceptable a business practice as phoning a lawyer. She
made the last-minute adjustments to her weapon of choice, an M21 semiautomatic
sniper rifle, 20 rounds in the magazine, accurate over a remarkable distance.

I picked up my weapon from the deck, a Smith and Wesson M76 submachine gun.
Yank Special Forces had used the M76 for covert ops in Vietnam, which is where
I’d first come across it. The magazine held 36 soft point rounds, for
maximum impact. A six-shot Colt Cobra .38 Special, also loaded with soft points,
was in a leather holster strapped to my left ankle.

I had one other surprise for Scorpion. My boomerangs. Dad had taught me how
to use them when I was a kid. Holstered in a leather bandolier across my chest,
mine were custom-made out of lightweight carbon fibre reinforced plastic, edges
inlayed with razor-sharp metal.

The game plan for tonight was simple. Tiger Lily would be stationed at the
entrance to deal with unwelcome reinforcements, while O’Connell and I
went in and killed everyone we could find. Then we’d lay some Czech Semtex,
acquired through O’Connell’s contacts, set the timers, sit back
and watch the fireworks.

I cocked the M76, looked at my team of killers. "We all set?"

"Roger, boss," said Tiger Lily.

O’Connell flashed me a mouth of bad Irish dental work. "Aye, nay
worries."

The three of us stepped into an inflatable Zodiac tethered to the sampan. I
waved to Tiny, the dwarf captain of the sampan, that we were ready. The red
dot from the Krong Tip cigarette permanently hanging from his mouth bobbed up
and down, indicating we were good to go.

We cut through the black, foul-smelling water, the purr of the Zodiac’s
outboard motor smothered by the buzz of traffic in the distance. As we approached,
I could see two guards on an old wooden dry dock leading to the warehouse. Tiger
Lily dispatched both of them before they even had time to unsling their weapons.

A couple of minutes later, O’Connell and I were over the brick wall surrounding
the warehouse and into the compound. A row of vans used to ferry corpses was
parked on one side of the main warehouse. The accordion door to the warehouse
was open. We entered, our flashlights illuminating a large storeroom full of
wooden coffins and other tools of the body chasers’ trade.

Suddenly, the overhead lights bathed us in harsh fluoro. As I adjusted to the
light, I saw at least two dozen men—Thais by the look of them, clad in
pale blue body chaser uniforms that made them look like hospital orderlies—emerge
from behind the neatly stacked coffins. They held an assortment of weapons:
knives, machetes, crowbars, nunchakus.