Gunmetal Gray

CHAPTER FORTY

As far as Nattapong Chamroon was concerned, he ruled the world. Well… he and his brother did. He was twenty-eight years old and handsome; his father owned a transnational criminal enterprise that raked in over 240 million U.S. dollars a year, plenty of money to keep Nattapong and his older brother, Kulap, knee-deep in the best cars, clothes, houses, booze, and friends.

And women—lots of women, but Nattapong wouldn’t count the girls in his life as expenses; in fact, he considered them revenue generators who just happened to provide additional benefits whenever he desired.

He was the cold and cruel son of a cold and cruel father, and he used the foreign girls in his stable as accessories in public, and as toys in private. And tonight was nothing out of the ordinary for him. He’d had six of the nicest-looking women delivered to his house, and from there they had all traveled to the Black Pearl in a stretch SUV limo braced by a pair of SUVs filled with capos and bodyguards of the Chamroon Syndicate. The girls had spent the last hour sitting with him while he drank and got in the mood, and now he’d taken them up to the spa’s wet area on the fourth floor: an ornate and massive marble-tiled pool and hot tub facility larger than a basketball court and designed to look like an opulent Roman bath.

Here Nattapong would really get this party started.

He lay shirtless on a lounge chair in front of the pool; large stone statues of lions and nude figures surrounded him, ornate marble columns lined the pool in front of him and ringed the hot tub behind him, and fountains shot streams of water in arcs from one side of the pool to the other in front of him. The lighting in the room was a moody dim blue haze, and a simulated starscape was projected on a ceiling above the pool.

The music piped into the room was ethereal and atmospheric, bouncing around the tile in the windowless space.

The six women sat or knelt on the marble floor in front of Nattapong in a semicircle. Some drank champagne, one snorted some coke, another popped pills. A couple of the ladies looked uncomfortable, but others appeared as relaxed as Nattapong himself.

He knew that the ones who’d not been drugged or demoralized into submission — the three new girls — would rather shoot themselves than have sex with him, but the eight bodyguards positioned around the Roman bath were always ordered to keep an eye on Nattapong’s orgies: partially for Nattapong to get a few extra kicks by demonstrating his sexual prowess to his underlings, but primarily to make certain none of the girls tried to bite his manhood off. All his personal bodyguards were armed with Uzi Pros, a micro-sized 9-millimeter select-fire machine pistol that could dump 1,050 rounds per minute, but for the girls the guards rarely needed more than a hard look or the back of a hand.

Nattapong Chamroon regarded this evening’s selection of entertainment appreciatively, and he knew this was indeed a special night. While he sometimes found some eights or even an occasional seven snuck into his orgies, this night every one of his girls was a ten.

It was clear to Nattapong that this group had been selected for both their beauty and their dissimilarity from one another. Tonight’s potpourri included a short redhead from Poland with ample curves; an impossibly tall raven-haired Ukrainian with a runway-model body; an athletic platinum blonde from Hungary with muscle rippling from her tanned bare arms, shoulders, and legs, and dramatic eye makeup that made her look vaguely Middle Eastern. Next to her lay a spectacular ebony Namibian, a true rarity in Thailand and a top earner for Chamroon; then a brunette Moldovan with her hair in a short bob who looked no more than eighteen but might have been even younger. Lastly in the semicircle was an auburn-haired stunner from Russia whose distant dead eyes reminded Nattapong that she’d been working for him for a while, but he saw this as a plus, because that meant her skills had been properly developed.

The crime boss smiled at all the choices in front of him, then lifted a hand mirror off the floor and snorted two lines of coke from it. He rubbed his nose and his eyes, downed a shot of whiskey from a crystal shot glass, and called for his girls to come to him.

This was going to be one hell of a night.

Court slid open a second-floor window on the east side of the building and looked out to the fire escape. It had a retractable ladder so no one at ground level could reach up and grab it, but from here at the second floor he could ascend to the higher levels of the four-story building, or even the roof if he wanted to.

He passed the third floor after looking through the window and finding a single bodyguard walking down the hall, a headset over his shaved head. Court imagined the bodyguards were not on the same channel as the bouncers in the nightclub, which came as no surprise. Court flipped the dial on his stolen radio and found Chamroon’s security channel.

Even without speaking Thai, he’d derived enough from the radio transmissions in the nightclub to figure out that the bouncers had found the unconscious man in the bathroom. Perhaps they could tell he’d gotten his lights knocked out by another patron, but either he hadn’t come to yet or hadn’t mentioned that someone had stolen his pistol, because the radio traffic didn’t seem overly excited. Court felt certain he’d made it up the stairs without anyone alerting the bodyguards, because otherwise he was sure there would be a lot more agitation out on the net.

As soon as Court made it to the fourth-floor landing of the outdoor fire escape, he looked in the window and saw a dark hallway. A doorway across from him had a sign on it, so Court took a chance and shined his flashlight through the glass so he could see what it said.

Two words in Thai and then their English translation:

ROMAN BATHS

Court had no idea if Chamroon had decided to take his ladies for a swim, but he decided he’d have better luck picking a door lock on the roof than trying to get through this window quickly and silently, so he continued ascending.

Seconds later he arrived at the dark roof, took a look around, and found it unguarded. He moved across the flat roof to the door, only now drawing the Glock pistol he’d removed from the bodyguard, because he was certain he wouldn’t be able to talk his way past anyone who found him skulking around up here.

As he arrived at the door to the stairwell, he saw a large form lying to the left of the closed door. He pointed his gun at it, thinking it to be roughly man-sized and man-shaped, but when he got close enough to get a good look he lowered the gun.

A young man, clearly one of the Chamroon bodyguards, lay facedown with glistening blood surrounding a hole in the back of his head.

In an instant Court realized the SVR man downstairs had not been alone. The paramilitaries he’d run into in Hong Kong and Vietnam were here, as well.

He stepped to the door, found it locked, then went back over to the guard. He checked the man over and found a set of keys, then slipped his pistol in his belt and started trying the keys in the door, rushing through the process and cussing under his breath each time he failed to get in.

The first four Chinese arrived fewer than five minutes after Colonel Dai hung up his call with Gentry, because they had been close by in the Royal City Avenue neighborhood, staking out a bar owned by another group of Thai gangsters.

Despite Gentry’s demand that the men stay outside the club, Dai ordered them to go straight in and perform recon for the larger force racing into the neighborhood, but when the four tried to get into the Black Pearl they were confronted by a bouncer who demanded to frisk them. The men turned away before causing a scene, not wanting to endanger their cover before they had the guns in play to make a real stand. Instead, they backed off and took up positions around the large building, each covering a side of the building.

Three of the men were armed with pistols, but one carried an HK UMP submachine gun under his suit coat. He stepped into a poorly lit narrow alley on the west side of the building, tucked himself between a row of garbage cans near a kitchen entrance to the club, and squatted down in the dark.

The fourteenth key on the chain of fifteen unlocked the door to the stairwell. Court turned the latch and held it there, pocketed the keychain, and drew his Glock 17 again, then knelt down on one knee. He pulled the door open slowly, his gun in front of him, but on the other side he found only a well-lit and empty stairwell.

He considered whether he should descend or call this entire thing off, knowing now he was moving towards a team of well-trained killers and a group of less well-trained but numerically impressive armed Thai gangsters. He wasn’t certain how far he was going to take this, but the fact that he knew of the existence of his opposition, while they had no idea he was even here, gave him the confidence to push on.

Nine additional plain-clothed employees of China’s Ministry of Defense arrived on the streets around the Black Pearl in four different vehicles from three different locations around the city. Like the first four men to show up, these were not special operations paramilitaries; they didn’t work as a tactical team and wear body armor and night vision equipment. Rather they were individual operators, accustomed to working with a small team on some missions, perhaps, although they didn’t fight as a unit.

Some of the men carried CZ pistols, others had Walthers, and three more of this group had fully automatic submachine guns with folding stocks hanging inside their jackets.

They saw the huge crowd milling around the entrances and exits of the club, the substantial size of the building itself, and the large number of security at the entrances. Immediately Major Xi, the lead operative of all Dai’s forces working on the Fan Jiang operation, put in a call to his control officer back in Hong Kong.

Colonel Dai Longhai stood on the balcony of his massive safe house in the Peak neighborhood of Hong Kong. He’d been up all night working with the Chinese embassy in Bangkok to try to find Fan Jiang, and when Gentry called minutes earlier he knew he would not retire to bed until he knew the status of the in extremis operation currently under way nearly a thousand miles to the west.

When his phone rang he snatched it up from a patio table where it rested next to his cigarettes, and he answered the call.

“Ni hao.”

“Colonel, this is Major Xi.”

“What is the situation?”

“We are outside the nightclub, but we won’t be able to get in covertly. There is a lot of security here.”

Dai growled. “Unacceptable.”

“We can enter into combat with the security if you wish, but the building is four stories and an entire city block in size. Without knowing where our target is, it will be difficult to clear the building before local police arrive in numbers.”

“Have you seen Gentry?”

“Negative, Colonel.”

Dai looked out at Victoria Harbor, the lights still twinkling even though it was just a couple of hours before dawn. He said, “The Russians are there. They managed to get inside.”

“Perhaps they are unarmed, sir.”

“I doubt that.” Dai thought a moment. “The building. Is it free-standing?”

“Yes.”

“Then force everyone out.”

A pause. “Fire alarm, sir?”

Dai did not hesitate. “No. A fire.”

“You want us to start a fire?”

“Correct. Something to get the building evacuated. Leave men to watch all the exits, and make entry yourself. If the Russians get information on Fan’s whereabouts first, then I will hold you personally responsible.”

“Xie de, lujon shangxiao.” Yes, Colonel.

“If Fan is sighted, kill him. If any member of Chamroon’s senior leadership tries to leave, take them. If no one important comes out… then you go in and find them.”

“Yes, Colonel.”

Major Xi and four other men walked briskly up the alley towards the western employee entrance of the nightclub, passing by their colleague with the UMP hiding between the garbage cans without even seeing him. A few men and women, employees of the club, were standing around on smoke breaks, a young man rolled garbage down a ramp towards the large bins in the alley, and an unarmed bouncer of the club sat on a little bench and played with his phone.

The Chinese drew their weapons when the man slid off the bench to confront them, and Major Xi slammed him in the side of his head with the butt of his CZ pistol, administering a severe concussion to the bouncer and knocking him out cold. Xi kept walking as the man fell to the ground, but a subordinate pulled off the man’s headset while the others pointed their weapons at the other employees of the nightclub, all of whom just shriveled out of the path of the silent men in business suits waving guns.

Xi and his small team encountered their first armed security man in the kitchen. He worked for the club, but he was a Chamroon Syndicate henchman, so he carried a pistol in a shoulder holster. He leaned against a wall next to the door between the kitchen and the front of the house. He’d been hitting on a pretty cocktail waitress, but when he glanced away from her he found himself facing four armed men in dark suit coats. He reached into his own coat to pull his own gun, but he thought better of it when a silencer pressed hard against his left temple.

He was led into a walk-in cooler, then dropped onto the floor with a blow to the back of the head.

One of the four Chinese men stood guard while Major Xi and two others got to work. They pulled out three massive rolling laundry bins full of soiled tablecloths and doused them with cooking oil, then set them alight, all under the stunned gaze of a dozen kitchen employees. While one of Xi’s men pushed the door to the nightclub open, Xi and the rest walked the bins through, shoving them hard through tables near the dance floor, catching several tablecloths on fire. One of the bins made it all the way to a wall curtain before it tipped over, and flames began licking up the curtain.

Men and women screamed, but their screams were drowned out by the loud music.

Only when a Chamroon Syndicate lieutenant in the VIP section pulled his Beretta and opened fire on one of the arsonists near the kitchen did others around the nightclub understand they were in danger.

The platinum blonde with the Middle-Eastern eyes hadn’t gotten into the action yet, nor had the black girl; Chamroon noticed this as he looked over the naked shoulder of the redhead from Poland. The Hungarian and the Namibian just drank champagne and looked on, sitting on the marble deck and dipping their hands into the shallow end of the pool while they did so. Nattapong almost called out to them angrily to demand their immediate attention, but the other four women were seeing to various portions of the Thai gangster’s body and doing it well, and frankly, Nattapong wasn’t sure where the other two would be able to push in.

So he decided he’d let the blonde and the African woman off the hook for now; they could drink and watch, and he’d save the best for last.

The sound of gunfire below did not make it up here to the fourth floor, but the eight guards all had earpieces in, so when someone called into the radio, “Shots fired,” Nattapong’s bodyguards immediately launched into action. They began hustling around the pool and the hot tub in the direction of their boss.

This happened every now and then at the Black Pearl; some gang member would get pissed off at a bartender or the boyfriend of a mistress, and he would fire a round into the floor or the ceiling, or occasionally into another patron. A gunshot three floors down wasn’t necessarily a massive threat to Nattapong Chamroon, but still they knew they had to surround their boss and get him somewhere secluded till the details of the situation could be worked out.

But as they raced into the orgy, a second call came over their headsets announcing that a fire had started, and to these men a fire in this building was worse than a gunshot three floors down, so they realized they had to get Nattapong the hell out of here now.

The bodyguards knew their boss would not want to be disturbed, but they knew their jobs, and they rushed around the pool, pulling young naked and nearly naked girls out of their way to get hands on their boss. They had just removed the Ukrainian and the Moldovan and started to shout over the spacey music and the moans of the Polish girl to tell Chamroon about the danger when the south-side double doors flew open, and a long shaft of light cut into the blue haze of the marble-tiled pool room.

The men and women turned to the disturbance on the far side of the pool and fountains, just as flashes of light came from the doorway.

Chamroon Syndicate security officers began dropping into the swimming pool, blood spurted over a headless statue, and marble tiles on the walls behind the orgy began cracking from bullet strikes and falling onto the floor.

Women screamed, Thai bodyguards returned fire, and Nattapong Chamroon struggled to yank up his pants, and then he grabbed the tall Ukrainian to use her for cover as he rushed to get behind something more solid.

Within seconds most of the women lay flat on the tile, trying to shield themselves with their hands, but the Hungarian blonde dove headfirst for cover around a marble column behind the hot tub, and the Russian with the auburn hair pulled a pool recliner onto its side and cowered behind it.

The young Moldovan with the bob haircut climbed to her feet and tried to run, but she was immediately caught in the cross fire. Her body spun and tumbled as she was hit by one of the Thai bodyguards’ Uzis, and she fell dead next to the swimming pool.

A guard grabbed Chamroon under the arm and pulled him back to the door to the changing area, on the far side of the hot tub at the opposite end of the room from the gunfire, but as he pulled on the door latch he found it was locked from the inside. Gunfire stitched the door, and the guard pushed Chamroon out of the way, but in the process the security man took a round to the small of his back and fell facedown, paralyzed instantly.

Nattapong Chamroon grabbed the man’s Uzi off the floor, then found cover behind one of the marble columns just four meters from the locked door. He saw the blond Hungarian girl had tucked herself behind the next column.

Nattapong reached around his column, and fired back in the direction of the attackers at the far side of the pool without looking.

Fifteen seconds after the door flew open, six of the eight armed Thai were dead or badly wounded, and the attacking force began bounding forward, closer and closer, using the columns, statues, and fountains as cover.