Lethal Redemption Read online

  “Your father and Charles McKean worked together?”

  “From time to time.”

  He went silent, looking out the opening of the cabin.

  “Hunting lost planes?”

  “Yeah. And other things.”

  He didn’t seem to want a conversation but she was hungry to know who she was going to be dealing with. Blindly trusting another person was not her habit. Her journalist instincts never stopped and she was determined to get more information from Porter, though she had a feeling she needed to tread carefully. “How’d they hook up?”

  “My father was transferred with an Intel unit to Phnom Penh after the initial pullout of American forces. Charles McKean was sent to help with the evacuation here weeks before Saigon fell.”

  “The fall of Phnom Penh came first?”

  “Yes. Operation Eagle Pull. Much smaller then Saigon’s evacuation. A couple of runs by CH-53 choppers took everyone who was going to go to carriers out in the Gulf—the Hancock and Okinawa. They became friends.”

  “They worked together after?”

  “Dad went home for a few years. North Carolina. Then came back after he and my mother divorced. McKean, on the other hand, never went any further than Bangkok. When the Pol Pot era was over, and the Vietnamese finally left, he came back to Cambodia. He would have moved to Laos, but the Communist regime wasn’t tolerant of someone like him.”

  They were silent for a moment, the only sound the soporific drone of the boat’s motor as they headed up river. Kiera finally felt she was getting him to open up and wanted to continue finding out who this guy really was beneath the hardcore exterior.

  She said, “You pretty much grew up here?”

  “Since I was about ten.”

  “You’re leaving your home.”

  “You might say that.”

  “That can’t be easy.”

  “It’s time.”

  She sat between bags of rice, the boat smelling of fish and oils and herbs she couldn’t recognize, pressed against a man who undoubted wished he were in a bar with his friends, or just about anywhere other than here with her.

  The boat slowed. Lights stabbed through the fog.

  “Could be trouble.” Porter grabbed a tarp, pushed her down and pulled it over them.

  “Police?” she whispered.

  “Maybe. Maybe worse. Just relax and be quiet.”

  She felt him move around and realized he had a gun out. Christ, she thought, quiet I can do, relaxing isn’t going to happen.

  She could feel the sweat building in her armpits and inner thighs as the heat built under the tarp.

  To break the tension building in her she whispered, “You take all your girls here on your first date?”

  “Only the ones I’m trying to get rid of.”

  She smiled. “I bet it usually works.”

  “It always works, now shut up, I need to hear what’s going on.”

  Kiera listened to the boatman talking to men from another boat. She expected that they’d be boarded and it would all be over, ending in some sort of bloody shootout. An appropriate ending, given what her life had been like over the past couple of years.

  But they weren’t boarded. Instead the other boat’s engine came alive and they were moving again.

  She waited there under the tarp with Porter, listening, wondering if they were being led back somewhere, or were free.

  After a few minutes of silence, their boatman said something in Khmer.

  Porter reached over and pulled the tarp back. “I think we made it. You can breathe.”

  She took deep droughts of cooler, fresh air as they untangled from each other.

  He got up and moved out on the deck, then turned to look at her. “You can come out.”

  Out on the narrow deck Kiera glanced back down the river. No sign of any boats. The storm had cleared enough that the lights of Phnom Penh were momentarily visible, but they quickly faded into the night, like a sparkling pendent dropped into a dark pool.

  The river rolled solemnly on beneath the boat, so swollen it smothered the banks. It looked and felt like it must have thousands of years ago.

  Porter and the one-legged boatman talked and laughed lightly.

  “We got through without an inspection for a measly forty dollars,” Porter said, turning to Kiera. “Pretty cheap.”

  “Yes. Thankfully. I take it that was a police boat.”

  “River cops.”

  “We’re now on the Mekong?”

  “Yeah. Where we got on the boat we were at the crossroads of the Tonle Sap, Bassac and Mekong. They call it the chat o muk, the four faces of the city where the rivers cross like an X. Here the Mekong is called the Sweet Serpent. In Vietnam it’s the Nine Dragons. The river of many names, depending on where you are on it. It’s the carotid artery of Indochina, but for some time it’s carried fifty percent less water because of the dams being built in China. That’s coming back some.”

  They leaned on the gunwale and looked at the river flowing under them. She finally had this guy talking to her which helped her feel as good as the fresh air she pulled into her lungs. “That can’t be good,” Kiera said. “Less water must have a huge effect on everything.”

  “Everything China does has an exaggerated impact. As one of the local sayings goes: China farts, the buffalo run.”

  “I’d run too,” Kiera said.

  “When the Chinese finished the sixty-six story Xiaowan Dam, that basically gave them effective control over the entire twenty-seven hundred mile-long river. Hopefully, when their reservoirs are filled and they’ve taken what they want, it’ll ease up. There are nearly seventy million people in Indochina who need this river.”

  They rode upriver against the current, the flow of the river heavy beneath the boat.

  For a time the rumble of the boat’s engine was the only sound. Kiera felt the scary thrill of heading toward Laos, toward her grandfather’s secret.

  She confessed to Porter how, ever since finding the journals and diary and discovering he knew the whereabouts of the plane all along, she’d become fascinated and then obsessed with finding it. Her grandfather’s goal to return the statue of the golden elephant to the Buddhist sect that had given it to him had become hers. “But,” she added, “there’s something else up there. A reason he never went back.”

  After a few minutes of silence, Kiera turned to Porter. “You’ve been up in the Laotian mountains where we’re going?”

  Porter nodded. “Close to there.”

  “Doing?”

  “We were looking for a former NVA camp. Might have been a burial ground nearby. Ran into a nasty fight with some tiger poachers who mistook us for competition. They get ten thousand a head so they take competition seriously.”

  “They can’t be stopped?”

  “The Lao government troops stay well out of there. It’s too costly and dangerous for them so that’s one thing we have going for us. We can maybe fly in to one of the old Special Forces landing strips your grandfather used when supplying the soldiers and the Hmong.”

  “McKean’s plane?”

  “Yep. Flies all over. Knows how to cross borders without being detected. He can get us in and out fast. He’s in contact with a Buddhist monk who lives in a village near the border. If the statue is there, and is the real thing, he’s the one who will handle getting it back to its mountain home. Then, with any luck, I can be in Bangkok in a day or two.”

  “Is there a girl waiting for you in Bangkok?”

  “There are a thousand girls waiting for everybody in Bangkok. They have one really great trait.”

  “Which is?”

  “They don’t ask a lot of questions.”

  She emitted a soft chuckle. She had no doubt he had women wherever he went and they probably didn’t ask a lot of questions. She wondered if there was anyone particular, but kept that to herself.

  Then she said, “I’m sorry I dragged you into this.”

  “Don’t apologize for succee
ding in getting exactly what you came for.”

  “You pretty much hate me, don’t you?” The words slipped out before she could stop them.

  “I reserve hate for evil people. If you get me killed I might change my mind. Until then you’re just a real pain in the ass.”

  She smiled.

  ***

  Porter glanced at Kiera Hunter in the frail moonlight. It would be a hell of a lot better if she was ugly or fat and at least just unattractive in some way. She wasn’t.

  And it didn’t improve things that she appeared to be a pretty tough, highly motivated lady. All in all, she was one of those females with all the characteristics he found attractive and dangerous. The kind that usually got him in trouble.

  They rolled along steadily up the bored, swollen Sweet Serpent. The banks were as submerged as much as Porter could remember in the last few years. Some trees were underwater with only their tops showing.

  But the possibility of finding that missing plane was too enticing to ignore. In the dark world it had a special allure, rumored to carry secrets, millions of dollars, and the most important icon of them all.

  Porter knew he was now hooked into this girl’s mission. It was bad enough where they were going, but having attracted attention from a powerful and nasty couple of carpet-bagging former Intel agents didn’t help matters. Burma was going to have to wait.

  13

  Cole sat in the backseat of the Mercedes as they sped through Phnom Penh. He was in a high state of agitation. He hated incompetence, yet seemed perpetually surrounded by it.

  That the police hadn’t picked up the Hunter woman put Cole in the worst of his foul moods. He ran into this bullshit all the time. Even when you owned these bastards, paid their goddamn gambling and whoring expenses, you still couldn’t expect a reasonable level of competence.

  In the front seat next to his security chief/driver, Besson yapped away constantly on his phone as the driver negotiated rain swamped roads and barely moving traffic.

  A police car, bar lights flashing, led the way.

  “Don’t worry,” Besson said, putting his phone away and turning to Cole. “We will have them soon.”

  “I’ll believe it when I’m holding hands with her,” Cole said.

  Cole saw the future of Southeast Asia and he wanted to be a big player in that future. He and Besson were well positioned.

  No centerpiece in his planned massive casino/hotel complex outside Angkor Wat would be able to touch the ultimate icon, the Golden Elephant. The tens of millions that might be on that plane were attractive as well. But the real interesting coup would be finding the documents and the connections of some global banks. That plane was potentially the mother lode of them all.

  The driver pulled up to a small, innocuous building and they piled out and went inside and into a room where five men hovered around a single chair.

  In the chair sat a frightened and bloodied Khmer who looked about half dead.

  “Miloon,” Besson said with contempt.

  “He the one drove her around?”

  Besson nodded. He spoke with two of the interrogators.

  “He says he dropped her at Chenla Theater and maintains he doesn’t know anything other than she was robbed when she arrived this morning.”

  They weren’t there five minutes when Besson got a call.

  They left the bloodied driver with his interrogators and drove to the quay on the eastern edge of the city where dozens of houseboats were moored.

  At the quay they learned from Besson’s men that a fisherman saw a tall westerner and a tall white woman leave by boat. Maybe an hour or so ago.

  Besson turned to Cole. “My guess is they’re headed up river to the village where Michael Vale’s former partner lives. Charles McKean.”

  “McKean is still alive? The Special Forces guy?”

  Besson nodded as he lit a cigarette. “Lives up river with his Khmer wife.” Besson made another call. Took awhile to get an answer.

  “My pilot’s about half an hour away at a girlfriend’s,” Besson finally shared.

  Cole said, “Get the fastest boat on this river over here and let’s go. We need to stop this now. Can’t let them get out of Cambodia with somebody like McKean. We lose her out in the boonies it’s going to be a real problem.”

  Cole stared into the darkness. He was very unhappy to hear that an old Special Forces hand like McKean, one of SOG’s best, was possibly involved. That would just potentially make things different. They absolutely had to stop them before they got into Laos.

  “I’m not losing her,” he said. “You make sure everybody understands. I’m not losing her.”

  Ten minutes later they were aboard a speedboat with Besson’s security team heading up the Mekong at high speed.

  Cole had a strange sense of déjà vu.

  He was once again chasing ghosts. But this time he was going to catch them.

  14

  “Look at all the fireflies,” Kiera said. “Must be a thousand of them.”

  As they closed on the shore, Porter said, “You came here ten years ago the place was lit by millions of fireflies to guide you in. Like stardust, an explosion of sparks, fantastic. What you see is nothing compared to what was.”

  “What happened to them?”

  “Us.” He said it with a bit of resignation.

  They slowed. A village on stilts appeared in the darkness perched precariously above the floodwater, like a colony of fat cranes standing among huge water lilies that turned out to be a tangle of fishing boats.

  An apparition emerged from the gloom on the bank of the river.

  “That should be Charlie,” Porter said. “One of a kind.” The boat slipped in among the village fishing boats.

  “How much does he know?”

  “I told him pretty much everything. He’s the guy will know how to get us up there. The area is where the Hmong are at the moment, so that’s a very good thing. He has contact with a Hmong group hiding in the area. They might be of help to us when we get up there.”

  It was very dark under the monsoon sky and she didn’t see McKean until the flare of an inhaled cigarette pierced the darkness on the bank, revealing for a moment an aged, creviced face.

  As they drew closer Kiera saw that McKean wore shorts, sandals and a loose shirt and had a shock of corn silk hair, a wispy white beard and was every bit a scarecrow. Right out of Rudyard Kipling.

  She followed Porter off the boat, sidehilling up the muddy bank.

  “Charlie,” Porter said, “this is the woman I told you about. Neil Hunter’s granddaughter, Kiera Hunter.”

  McKean said, “So this is the lady stirred up the snakes.”

  “In the flesh,” Porter said.

  “Pleased to meet you,” McKean said, thrusting out his hand. He had a firm handshake and feisty, somewhat drunken eyes and whiskey breath. Then, before releasing her hand, he kissed it.

  “My pleasure,” Kiera said, retrieving her hand and thinking, This is who I’m flying into the jungles of Laos with?

  “You are even more beautiful than Porter said you were,” Charles McKean said. “Wait, come to think about it, he forgot to mention that.” McKean chuckled at his own sense of humor.

  Kiera gave Porter a wry glance. He shrugged.

  “Follow me,” McKean said. “I’m putting my gear together. We need to get moving. I want to see those pictures.”

  He talked fast, walked a little unsteady and led them to one of the thatched houses hidden in the palms.

  As he opened the door and ushered then into the wood slat house lit by oil lamps, he said, “Your grandfather, by the way, was a legend among the Hard Rice boys.”

  “Hard rice?”

  “Hard rice drops are what they called guns, ammo and supplies dropped into Laos to the insurgent force we created there. He was working with the crème de la crème.”

  A Khmer woman entered from a back room and greeted them with unbridled hostility. Either she didn’t like Porter, or knew
he was bringing trouble into her world. She said something in Khmer to McKean, before retreating through the curtain. He followed her and there was a sharp argument.

  “She’s upset,” McKean said, “but that’s normal. Getting worse, actually. Her family was killed by the Khmer Rouge. She got raised by some farmers and nearly starved to death and she’s always believed the Khmer Rouge are gonna come back and get her and everybody around her.”

  Ah, Jesus, Kiera thought. I’m taking this man away from a woman who’d gone through hell and was still traumatized.

  McKean returned, looking grim. He went to the cabinet and poured himself a stiff refill.

  “I’m almost ready. You folks like a drink?”

  They both declined.

  “You have some extra stuff?” Porter asked. “I have nothing. All my worldly goods have already shipped off to Bangkok.”

  “I can outfit a battalion. I got a couple extra backpacks and too much gear as it is.”

  The two men went off into a back room. Kiera sat at the small table and took out the pictures for McKean.

  She looked around at the room.

  His woman brought her tea and small, tasty treats and retreated, never making eye contact with Kiera.

  McKean and Porter returned with three backpacks. Porter had a lot of gear in his arms and started packing while McKean studied the photos and looked at entries in the diary Kiera had taken from her backpack.

  McKean tapped the photo on the table, glancing at it from time to time as he scanned the entries in the diary.

  The old soldier’s hands were veined, weathered and rough, his fingers gnarled and yellowed like they been broken many times. They had the slightest tremble at times. McKean’s lined face had skin like a cracked leather veneer.

  While he examined the diary he talked about her grandfather. How he’d been shot down maybe four times re-supplying Montagnards and Special Forces. How he and the others had to fly with unreliable radio beacons for navigation, rotten weather, overloads. “Good soldiers in a messed up war,” he said. “Kinda getting to be a habit with us. Porter tells me you are a war reporter. Been to Afghanistan, Syria.”

  “Yes.”

  McKean lit a cigarette. He looked more animated now. “I don’t know if you realize what the purpose of that plane was,” he said. “All that money, the golden elephant, it was going to be the means to launch a counter-insurgency that never got launched. Domini Canes.”