Betrayal

Chapter 20

“Happy to see me?” Rob asked.

“Ecstatic.”

He motioned to the duffle. “You have everything in that?”

“Yup. Let’s roll.”

It was two a.m., and they’d gotten word from the surveillance team that Pu had departed his club half an hour earlier, but instead of returning home, the car had headed north. Rob had picked her up near Nana and was haring up the expressway, trying to catch up. The signal had slowed near Don Muang airport, and they were closing the distance when Rob’s phone rang. Edgar told them that the car signal had returned to downtown, but the watch signal was now headed north again.

“How long until you’re at the airport?” Edgar asked.

“Five minutes,” Rob replied.

“He’s on highway one headed north. I instructed the surveillance car to stick with him until he either stops or you catch up to them. If you’re five minutes from the airport, they’re still around fifteen miles ahead of you, so I’d put my foot into it,” Edgar advised. “They’ll hand off the tracker once you’re close to them. They’re in a white Jetta with a frog decal on the back bumper.” He gave them the license number.

“All right. I’m signing off. I’ll call you once we’re in sight.”

The speedometer climbed until they were doing ninety miles per hour, racing along the nearly deserted freeway into the hinterlands. After they had passed the airport, the lights of Bangkok faded in the rearview mirror, replaced by the haphazard illumination of the smaller towns and convenience stops along the freeway.

An hour later, they saw the Jetta as they were approaching Ban It. Rob called Edgar, who instructed them to pull off at the next exit and do the swap.

The handoff took seconds, and soon they were back on the road, the signal blinking bright on the handheld tracker Edgar had arranged for them.

“Looks like he’s about a mile and a half ahead,” Jet said. “I’d get to within a mile of him then settle in for the duration.”

“This is going to be a long night. The last team tailed him all the way to the Myanmar border before he crossed over and ditched the car. That’s many, many hours of driving.”

“Want to bet he’s not driving himself?”

“I think that’s a given.”

“Why wouldn’t he fly?” Jet asked.

“Good question. Best we could tell, he doesn’t want any record of his coming and going. Even a private plane would create a record, these days. It isn’t like it was ten years ago. Automation isn’t the smuggler’s friend.”

“And yet he didn’t have any problems getting Lawan to Bangkok, so it can’t be that foolproof,” she said.

“I didn’t say it was perfect. I said it was harder than it used to be. Anyway, that’s my guess. Or maybe he’s afraid of planes. Who knows?”

“No point in speculating.”

Rob nodded. “True. What do you think the chances are they try to hit us on the road?”

“Nil. Why would they, when as far as they know, we’re coming right to them? Assuming it was this group that was after us, I’d wait until we were on their turf. Wouldn’t you?”

“Sure, but what do you mean assuming it was them? Who else would it be?”

“I don’t know. I just know something about all of this isn’t adding up,” she said, then sank into silence for a minute. “How rested are you?”

“I’m fine. If he’s going to drive straight through, we should switch off in around six hours. I can easily make it till then,” Rob assured her.

“Then you take the first shift.” Jet adjusted her seat into a fully reclined position and closed her eyes.

When she awoke, they were at a fuel stop in Mueng Tak. The warm light of morning was beaming through the windshield. She looked at her watch.

“Eight thirty?” Jet asked.

“Yes. They stopped a quarter mile away. Probably grabbing something to eat.”

“Sounds like a good idea.”

“How about an energy bar and some fruit juice?”

“You read my mind. I’ll take over driving now. How far are we from the border?”

“Eight hours. The roads will get more squirrely the farther north we go,” Rob warned.

“So we’ll get there before dusk?”

“We should.”

“Sounds like someone is hoping to make a night crossing.”

“How unexpected.”

“What if he has an ATV waiting for him somewhere in the jungle? I think you need to call Edgar and arrange for something, just in case.”

“Already ahead of you,” Rob said. “We’ve got two horses waiting for us at Mae Sai. They can have them wherever we need them if we give them enough lead time.”

“Sounds like you’ve thought of everything. That scares me,” Jet muttered.

Rob smiled. “Occasionally we can do something right, as hard as that is for you to believe.”

“Yeah. Like bury your dead.”

She walked around to the driver’s side and got behind the wheel, then reached over and unwrapped an energy bar while Rob paid for the gas and got their drinks.

The road became curvier as they proceeded north, and Rob had a hard time resting as they swung around the turns. The day ground on inexorably, and at three o’clock, they switched again.

At six, the red dot slowed four miles south of Mae Sai, the border town that was the major crossing point into Myanmar, and then came to a stop.

“What’s he doing?”

“Looks like he’s stopping.”

“Why?”

“Probably plans to cross into Myanmar over in the hills. There are temples and dirt roads up there, and the patrols are lackadaisical, to say the least. What do you want to bet some army troops are paid to be anywhere but there when he crosses?”

“Makes sense. I guess we’ll find out soon enough whether he’s got an ATV or a horse, or if he’s going to do it on foot.”

“From what I know about this area, it will be a horse. The mountains here are nearly impassible in large sections. Think very low tech. But what puzzles me is that this isn’t really very close to where we lost our teams. It was a lot further north, in the jungles surrounding the Me Kong river. This is still jungle, but more hill tribe country.”

“Are there any roads?”

“Not really.”

“Maybe there’s your answer. Not a bad place to disappear, I’d guess.”

Pu’s red dot stayed stationary until it got dark. Rob’s cell had no reception, so he called Edward using the satellite phone and gave him their position. Edward called them back five minutes later and told them that he would have the horses there within an hour.

“Looks like it’s going to be a long one,” Rob observed.

Jet ignored him, thinking through their next step. She didn’t like that he seemed chatty. That didn’t bode well. A talkative assassin was one with dim survival prospects. He apparently took the hint, got out of the car and busied himself with his gear, preparing for the night to come.

An old farm truck arrived, towing an ancient trailer with a makeshift railing that had two medium-sized horses, already saddled, tethered to it. Rob handled the discussion with the tiny man, who jumped from behind the wheel to get the horses unloaded. Jet continued watching the glowing dot, two miles north of them. Pu was waiting for nightfall. She handed Rob the baggie containing the two GPS chips and murmured terse instructions, which he repeated to the old man in Thai. The man nodded and put the chips in his shirt pocket before climbing back into the truck and pulling away. He would toss them into the backs of two different trucks as he drove back through town, so anyone tracking them would think they had separated and were looking for Pu, having lost his trail. Anyone watching would be expecting visual surveillance, not a tracking device in Pu’s watch. All the better to lead them on a goose chase, at least for a little while.

Fog rolled over the mountains as the sun sank into the hills, and before long they were enshrouded in an eerie netherworld, blanketed in white, unable to see more than fifty yards. At eight o’clock, the dot on their tracking device began moving.

Jet leapt to her feet. “We’re on. He’s mobile.”

“Let’s watch his speed. That will tell us everything we need to know,” Rob suggested.

After a few minutes studying the screen, she looked up at him.

“He’s walking.”

“Then that’s what we do.”

“Yes, but we’re bringing the horses. He might have one waiting across the border. We don’t know how far he’s traveling, so we should expect that he’ll have a guide on the Myanmar side.”

Jet moved to the trunk and pulled her gear out. Rob pointed at a long, flat, black nylon case.

“Is that what I think it is?”

“Depends on what you think it is.”

“You know how to use it?”

“Do I look like I’m in the mood to experiment?”

She tossed him a smaller case. “This is for you. Idiot proof.”

He opened it and peeked inside. “Very nice. Thanks.”

They hastily packed their kits into the saddlebags and mounted up, then made for the northern summit of the mountain, taking care to have their night vision goggles ready. The thickening fog provided a cloak of muffled silence. After a mile of easing along a trail, Jet dismounted.

“What?”

“Shhh. I want to walk them from here on out. We’re only about a mile behind him. I don’t want to get any closer. One stray whinny or snort will give us away.”

“Okay,” Rob whispered, aware that voices would carry once all the background noise of civilization faded. He dropped to the ground and reached into his bag for the goggles, but Jet shook her head.

“Battery life is going to be an issue. Only one of us at a time with the night vision gear. I’ll go first.”

“We have several spare batteries.”

She spun to face him. “Rob. Don’t question me, or imagine that you have a better idea. You’re here to support me, against my will. Now, please, do as I say without a hint of anything but complete approval, or you’re out, right here, and won’t be going any further. Do you understand?”

He balked, then nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”

“That’s better.”

She flipped her goggles into place and switched them on, and the coalescing gloom suddenly illuminated in neon green. The fog still limited their visibility, but at least she could make out the trail.

“Follow me,” she said, taking her horse by the bridle and leading it forward into the darkness.

They would be over the first crest within half an hour at their current speed: in Myanmar, traveling through an area of the country where heroin traffickers and slavers prowled the jungles, and death was as sudden and common as the fog that enveloped them.