Death in the Kingdom (4 page)

I glanced at my Seiko. It was already 15:30. Nan's ministrations aside, I had slept for about fifteen hours straight. I shook my head. ‘He's flown back to Bangkok. We're meeting at Sakura's place in Phetchaburi the day after tomorrow.' I didn't tell Geezer that Tuk Tuk was already working on what was to come. I had outlined the basics of my plan to him, sitting up there in the pergola on the hill as afternoon had started to turn to night. I didn't elaborate for Geezer's benefit.

The timetable I'd given Tuk Tuk meant that I would hire a car and drive up the Gulf the next day. Phase two of the operation would come into effect at the palace of the beautiful Sakura. My last memory of Tuk Tuk's mistress was of a breathtakingly stunning, graceful, humorous woman of indeterminable age. If pushed to describe her I would liken her to an oriental Audrey Hepburn. To say I was looking forward to seeing her again would be an understatement.

I took Geezer to dinner. Yin, his long-term live-in woman, declined the invitation, citing urgent household duties. ‘She's shy in public,' was all Geezer said as we walked down to the road to pick up the cab he had called. He didn't drive any longer, and maintained that motorcycles ‘were for fools'.

Safely on board a late model Toyota with an icy air-con, Geezer directed the cab to a small restaurant high on the hill that separated Patong from Karon. The meal was, as expected, absolutely sensational.

Of all the cuisine on the planet, the broad palette of the Thai kitchen was my favourite and I pigged out. As we ate, Geezer and I put away copious quantities of beer along with a couple of bottles of good wine. When I paid the bill it only amounted to the equivalent of about fifty quid, and most of that went on wine. In a restaurant back home I regularly blew that much on a very ordinary meal sans wine.

‘No wonder you love this place,' I said to Geezer as we made our farewells to the restaurant owner and started down the hill on foot. We'd both agreed that some exercise was more than a little necessary. The alcohol had loosened us both up in the brain as well as the joints. Geezer was almost gregarious. As we made our way down the steep street he actually put a hand on my shoulder, either in friendship or to steady himself.

‘No other bloody place in the world I want to be,' he replied. ‘You know, I went back last year for my brother's funeral. I'll never go again. Mean fucking streets, meaner people.'

Never in the years we had known each other had he ever called England ‘home'. For him, Thailand was home. England, specifically the backstreets of Birmingham, just happened to be the place where he had been born. It had never been his home. At seventeen, eager to escape, he had become a soldier and left.

We stopped on the bridge at the southern end of Patong Beach, where the river crept into the sea. There were a couple of dozen long-tail boats and the bigger shrimp boats moored upstream, but not as many as there'd been the last time I'd been there. Most of the trees that had lined the banks were gone and on the true left of the stream there was a row of new concrete cabins, replacing the fishermen's shacks that used to be there. ‘The tsunami blew right in here,' Geezer said. ‘Took out just about everything. Put boats up into the jungle. I lost some good friends,' he added. A few of the local fishermen were sitting eating, drinking beer and smoking under one of the few remaining big trees on the riverbank. Their conversation and laughter drifted down to us over the noise of the traffic from the town. ‘I go out with them every so often,' Geezer volunteered. ‘Hard cases, most of them. Good blokes. Always have a laugh.'

Looking at the boats riding the current above us, I couldn't help thinking of what was to come. There would be a shitload of ‘mucking about in boats'. There would be pirates to dodge, and the Myamanian or Myamese or whatever navy. Shit, like all of the old school I still called it Burma. Some habits die hard, if at all.

Fact was that, apart from the pirates, Thai boats fished the southern Burmese waters with impunity. The pirates, however, were a grim reality and they had a million hiding places in the archipelago and on the mainland itself. In the south, Burma was not exactly a populous place. Roads and anything other than villages were few and far between, so travel was mainly by boat. Sea gypsies could be found there and the nomadic Moken were constantly on the move through the archipelago with its thousands of islands. However, few permanent settlements existed. Many of the islands were home to tigers, elephants and all sorts of poisonous and dangerous beasts. It was a place that man had left alone, for the most part. How long it would remain that way, only time, tourism and the Burmese military rulers would tell.

The plan I'd cooked up with Tuk Tuk had been simple. He would arrange for a fishing boat, a biggish prawn boat probably, and a team of divers. He would also enlist a bunch of his goons and a second boat to act as a deterrent to the pirates. I hadn't told him where we were going in any detail. I'd just said Burmese waters. We'd join the boats at Ranong, the nearest Thai port to the Burmese border.

Then, while Tuk Tuk went after his buddha and his near sainthood, I was going to be looking for my metal box, and not on or in the wreck of the freighter. I had another destination, albeit adjacent to the sunken cargo vessel. I knew the exact where and what, right down to the precise physical dimensions of the damned thing. In fact the box would fit precisely into the tailored cavity in the bottom of my leather holdall which, with its wire-mesh reinforcement and wire-cored handles, had been made specifically to carry it. Weighing twenty-three pounds the sealed, lead-sheathed box measured twelve inches along each of its sides and was four inches deep. I wasn't privy to its contents, and I sure as hell didn't want to be. It was clear that knowledge could prove to be a fatal distraction.

Bernard's parting words at my final in-car briefing, delivered as the department Rover pulled up outside the terminal at Heathrow, had given me a distinctly uneasy feeling. ‘Collect the box, Daniel. Get to the embassy. Kill anyone who tries to stop you. Under no circumstances is it to fall into anyone else's hands. Progress report to me daily without fail.' That had been it. No goodbye or good luck! The car door had thudded shut and I was on my own, standing on the pavement looking like a slightly dazed mullet.

‘What's in the fucking box?'

‘What box?' Geezer wanted to know. I hadn't realised that I had spoken the question aloud. Alcohol could do that sometimes.

‘Just a box,' I replied. ‘A box no one has opened since the end of the war.'

‘Oh, one of those boxes,' said Geezer as he lit another cigarette from the one he was finishing. ‘You watch your skinny arse, boy. Those sorts of boxes are nothing but grief.' He dropped the remains of the first smoke down into the tide and we started to promenade our way the length of Patong Beach. As we walked and talked, his words automatically replayed themselves over and over in the back of my consciousness. He was damned right. What could be so important about a sealed box left over from the tail end of the war? A hundred tons of gold and the Ruby Buddha were, in my book at least, a hell of a lot more important than whatever was in the box. Or were they?

There was a series of questions I had been asking myself over and over since Bernard had briefed me. What the hell was an unidentified and un-flagged British submarine doing rendezvousing with a Japanese freighter off the coast of Burma during the last year of the Pacific War. Had it been mere bad luck that a flight of three carrier-based Grumman Hellcat fighter-bombers, carrying out nuisance raids on Japanese shipping in the Andaman, had just happened by?

Maybe it had been fate or damned good flying that had dropped a lone 1,000-pound bomb right on the torpedo room of the sub. The resulting massive explosion had sent both vessels down to the bottom in seconds. It may have been pure fate, too, when the Hellcats had been caught in a monsoon gale as they had attempted to return to their carrier. All three aircraft and their pilots had been lost.

Point was, at the end of the day, given the combination of high explosives, sharks and monsoon seas, no one from either vessel—or, as it turned out, from any of the aircraft—had survived to tell the tale. A short broken radio signal from one of the aircraft gave news of the sinking but the atmospheric conditions caused by the approaching storm had cut communication before the carrier operators had been able to get the co-ordinates. Exactly where the two vessels were lying had remained a big fat mystery for decades. Not that anyone, except perhaps Whitehall's secret squirrels, had actually been looking. After all, my guess was that no one but a few top-secret British Government departments and presumably the Japanese hierarchy had known about the operation, whatever that had been.

However one aspect of this whole thing bothered me. How the hell did anyone know what happened out there in the Andaman if no one had survived to tell the tale? Undoubtedly Bernard had been selective with the truth when he had briefed me. But then his kind always were secretive. Truth to guys like him was always relevant or irrelevant, depending on the position he and his puppet masters wanted to maintain.

According to Bernard, the discovery of the wrecks had come about when a sonar reading from an oil-exploration vessel licensed by the Burmese Government had identified the remains of two vessels lying close together in the area known as the Loughborough Passage. The captain of the survey ship was former ‘old school' British Navy. He sat on the information until his return to the UK on leave in 2003, when he visited a former shipmate who was still on the Navy payroll in an intelligence capacity. The information obviously caused a few ructions in the basements of Whitehall.

It had taken some time to arrange a charter scuba-diving expedition into the area using some of The Firm's divers posing as enthusiastic amateurs. The tsunami and the second Iraqi war caused the project to be temporarily shelved. It seemed that a couple more years weren't going to make any difference. In late 2005 the covert expedition went ahead and divers identified both of the vessels. One was HMS
Victor
, the other, an old former Dutch freighter,
Ziderzall
, captured by the Japanese in Singapore and thinly disguised by being renamed
San Tao
, a supposedly Philippine-registered cargo tramp. The vessels lay within a hundred feet of each other on the bottom of the Andaman, fifty miles off the coast of Myanmar. The time window the divers had available and the presence of Burmese naval vessels in the area, plus uncertain weather, had made them pull out before they had achieved any of the additional objectives they may have had on their agenda.

Now, all things being equal, I, within a week or two, was going to be somewhere out on the bloody Andaman with a bunch of Tuk Tuk's cut-throats. I was a trained scuba diver, but I hated boats at the best of times, and stinking fishing boats and rough water were not my idea of fun. However, that was the only alternative as I saw it.

As for Bernard, well, he would get his daily call while I was on the dry, but I wouldn't be telling him my plans in any detail. I didn't trust long-distance communication, coded email or satellite mobile phones, scrambled or not. I'd also learned that the closer to your chest you played your hand, the less chance you had of a screw up.

4

I enjoyed the drive up the Gulf. It was a trip of 500 miles or so from Phuket to Bangkok, a big hit in one stint but perfect with an overnighter. Despite the popular misconception and generalisations many in the West make regarding Asian drivers, Thai's are not that bad. It's just the sheer numbers that give the illusion of chaos—that and the constant sound of vehicle horns. The horns aren't saying, ‘Piss off, Noddy', or worse, as we do in the West. Here they are instead saying, ‘I'm here, look out for me.' Driving in Thailand is a matter of self-defence and anticipation; it can be fun if you have the right attitude.

I cruised on up the highway in the rented Nissan. I stopped at Chumphon for a street-stall lunch and then carried on with a full belly, lips tingling from spices.

I didn't head straight on up into Phetchaburi. There was no point if Tuk Tuk wasn't there yet. I wasn't about to presume and crash Sakura's palace. Instead, I stopped in Cha-Am mid-afternoon. I anticipated a few hours to enjoy the sun and sea, followed by a relaxing evening. The summer tourist season was still building, and I had no trouble picking up a room at the Golden Sands. In the bar I picked up Suzie from Boston overnighting with her coach party. She found my accent ‘kinda cute'. I found her body definitely cute.

In the morning Suzie left my room before her tour checked out of the hotel. I showered and went down to one of the restaurants where I just managed to keep down a breakfast of essential grease and black coffee. Someone should ban Jack Daniels—it's just too damn easy to drink.

I powered up my mobile phone. I'd ignored my instructions and not called Bernard the previous day. He was not amused. After copping the usual load of crap, I cut in as he began to reiterate. I was feeling shitty-livered. ‘Bernard, I've heard it all before,' I snapped. ‘Just let me get on with my job.'

‘It's my job to know where you are in case things go wrong. And I am your superior,' he replied primly.

‘I'm going to Phetchaburi to see Tuk Tuk. I will touch base tomorrow. Over and fucking out!' I flicked the power off and pocketed the phone. I didn't want him calling back. Bernard was as queer as a two-bob watch. Maybe that was why he was such an old woman. A fucking vicious old woman! I always talked to him like that when the booze had got to my liver. His S&M side seemed to enjoy it. I risked a cigarette as I took a constitutional along the beach. The sun was up and smiling and it was getting warm. Today would be an ideal day to spend doing a lot of nothing. Unfortunately I had a date. I checked out and at a few minutes past nine I started for Phetchaburi Town, a forty-minute drive up the coast. Tuk Tuk and I were meeting at ten.