World of Trouble (9786167611136) (24 page)

“General Kitnarok doesn’t care about three
provinces in the south. He’ll give them an Islamic republic if he
thinks it will help him achieve his real goal. What Kitnarok wants
to do is stir things up. He thinks he can tie the government down
fighting the Muslim separatists, then come at us from a different
direction.”

“What are you talking about? What other
direction?”

Kate glanced over at Shepherd again.

“General Kitnarok is arming the red shirts,
too,” she said.

“Arming the red shirts? You can’t really
think—”

“There have been two weapons shipments so far
that we know of,” Kate interrupted, “both from Blossom Trading and
both delivered to an airstrip in the south that is under Muslim
control. We missed the first one, but we got the second one when
they tried to move it to Bangkok for distribution. Two hundred
AK-47s with ten thousand rounds of ammunition. We think the one we
missed may also have included some rocket launchers and incendiary
devices. We don’t know where it is now.”

Shepherd said nothing. Kate was wrong about
Charlie. He was pretty sure she was. But, he had to admit to
himself, he wasn’t
absolutely
sure.

“What time is your flight?” Kate asked.

“Not until 2:00
A.M.
”

“Good. Then there’s something I want to show
you. It won’t take long.”

Kate blew past a pickup truck in the inside
lane. Shepherd glanced over at her as the truck’s lights washed
through the BMW, but she was as expressionless as if she were
waiting for a bus.

A mile or so further along, a highway
interchange appeared out of the darkness although there didn’t
appear to be a highway connected to it. There were only entry and
exit ramps that went nowhere and an overpass arching high over the
Bangna-Trat Road. Shepherd had seen senseless pieces of
construction like that scattered all over Thailand, the product of
a public works system designed primarily to generate payoffs to
politicians rather than to provide anything of value to the
country.

Kate swung off on the exit ramp, U-turned
across the overpass, and re-entered the elevated roadway heading
back the way they had come. She punched on the CD player and
adjusted the volume and a moment later one of Bach’s Brandenburg
concertos filled the car. Shepherd had no idea which one it was,
but as they listened to it together Shepherd could see Kate’s whole
body relax.

The asphalt glistened in the headlights and
the lights of Bangkok beckoned in the distance. As suddenly as it
had begun, the wind died and the rain stopped. The moon appeared
from behind the clouds off in the west. It was as bright and white
as a flame.

A LITTLE LESS than an hour later Kate turned into a
parking garage next to a hospital. She drove to the top floor,
nosed the BMW in against the wall, and cut the engine. She got out,
walked behind the car, and opened the trunk. Shepherd got out, too.
He looked around at the largely empty parking garage.

“What are we doing here?” he asked.

Kate didn’t say anything. Instead, she took a
pair of powerful-looking field glasses out of the trunk. She handed
them to Shepherd and pointed to the waist-high concrete wall that
surrounded the top floor.

“Have a look,” she said. “Tell me what you
see out there.”

Shepherd took the field glasses and walked
over to the wall. They were just south of the old Bangkok airport,
Don Mueang. It had been shut down when Suvarnabhumi Airport opened
a few years before and now, except for the Thai military and an
occasional private flight, the field was mostly deserted. The
predictable scuffle within the bureaucracy had been rolling on for
some time, rival ministers each seeking control over the process of
disposing of the land. The bribes generated by selling off hundreds
of acres of prime urban land near the center of Bangkok would
eventually be a prize cash cow for some politician.

“Look right below us. That building with the
flat black roof.”

Shepherd focused the glasses and swung them
back and forth until he found the building Kate was talking about.
It was roughly square, perhaps a hundred feet on each side, and
looked to be the equivalent of three or four stories high. It had a
mirrored surface that appeared black or dark blue in the fading
light. He could see no specific source of illumination and the
walls reflected the building’s surroundings so perfectly that it
was both there and not there at the same time. Neither of the two
sides he could see appeared to have any windows or doors, but he
supposed they were there and the mirrored surface just made them
difficult to pick out.

The building appeared dim and deserted, but
Shepherd doubted it was. There was a razor wire fence all around it
that separated it from the rest of Don Mueang, and a single gate
with a guardhouse. The windows of the guardhouse were made of the
same reflective material as the building and it was impossible to
tell if there was anyone inside. The gate was closed and inside the
fence about thirty parking places were striped out in white against
a blacktopped surface. Half of those parking places were occupied,
mostly by new looking pick-ups and SUVs.

“It looks like it was built recently,”
Shepherd said.

“It was.”

“Why would anyone build a new hanger at a
closed airport?”

“It’s not a hanger.”

Shepherd lowered the field glasses and looked
at Kate. “Why don’t you just make this simple and tell me what I’m
looking at?”

“Look just to the left of that building,” she
said instead of answering him. “What do you see there?”

Shepherd gave Kate a long stare, but after a
moment he lifted the field glasses again. There was an aircraft
parked where she told him to look. It appeared to be a 737,
probably a cargo-only conversion since it had no windows. The
entire aircraft was painted white and had no logo on its tail or
any other visible markings.

“I call it Harvey,” Kate said.

Shepherd lowered the glasses again and looked
at her. “You give airplanes names?”

“Not all airplanes, just that one. You never
saw the movie?”

Shepherd said nothing.

“It was back in the fifties,” Kate said.
“Jimmy Stewart had this imaginary friend called Harvey. Harvey was
a six-foot tall white rabbit that went everywhere with him. Only
nobody else could see Harvey.”

“You’d think it would be pretty hard to miss
a six-foot tall white rabbit.”

“You’d think it would be pretty hard to miss
a white airplane with no markings, too. But that’s exactly what
everybody seems to be doing.”

Shepherd hadn’t seen a registration number
anywhere on the aircraft, but it had to have one. Every aircraft
flying anywhere in the world carried a registration number. It was
often called a tail number since it was usually painted on the
aircraft’s vertical tail surface, but the 737’s tail surface was as
white and clean as new snow. He raised the glasses again and
examined the airplane carefully.

“Where’s the registration number?”

“Look above the forward door.”

He shifted the glasses. Sure enough, there it
was. In black letters so tiny he had missed it.

“A6-NSU,” he read. “Where is that from?”

“The United Arab Emirates. Dubai, to be
precise.”

Shepherd lowered the glasses again. “You’re
not going to tell me this plane belongs to Charlie, are you?”

“No.”

“Okay, so I give up. Who does Harvey belong
to? Some rich Arab who just loves the local massage parlors?”

“Unfortunately, no. The plane is registered
in the UAE, but it’s chartered to a company called Trippler
Aviation. Trippler is based at a private airstrip in central
Florida. You ever hear of them?”

“It sounds familiar,” Shepherd said, “but
right off the top of my head—”

“Trippler Aviation is a CIA proprietary, a
front company for the CIA. Trippler got a lot of public attention
when they were running guns into Angola for the CIA in the late
1980s and one of their planes crashed.”

“This plane belongs to the CIA?”

“It’s being operated by one of their front
companies. That’s more or less the same thing.”

“What’s it doing here?”

“For the last five or six years, Trippler
Aviation has been in the torture taxi business.”

Torture taxi was a catchy expression somebody
had coined for the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program. The
program involved the moving of high-value prisoners, mostly Muslim
extremists, among so-called black sites to prevent interference
with their interrogation.

“You’re telling me this airplane I’m looking
at right here is used by the CIA to transport secret prisoners to
secret prisons?”

“Yes,” Kate nodded. “Along with a lot of
other things.”

“Then what is it doing in Thailand?”

But before Shepherd had finished speaking the
question, he figured out the answer on his own.

“The new building?” he asked. “
That
building belongs to the CIA?”

“That’s right,” Kate said. “The CIA has very
close links with the Thai military. The CIA needed a secure place
to put a new interrogation facility and the Thai Air Force was
happy to provide it.”

“Do you really expect me to believe that the
CIA is torturing people right here in the middle of Bangkok?”

“Believe what you like, Jack. All I know for
sure is that your Central Intelligence Agency—”

“It’s not
my
Central Intelligence
Agency.”

“—is housing prisoners in that building down
there as well as conducting other operations out of it. I have no
idea what they do with the prisoners, but I doubt they’re teaching
them English.”

“Even if you’re right—”

“Oh, I’m right, Jack. That’s what I do around
here, remember? I gather intelligence. I may not know what they are
doing in the goddamn building, but at least, by God, I know who’s
going in and out of it.”

“Okay, calm down.”

“This
is
calm.”

“Even if you’re right,” Shepherd repeated
slowly, “why are you showing this to me?”

“Because I want you to understand what you’re
into.”

“I guess I just don’t get it. Why does this
have anything to do with me?”

Kate rested her palms on the wall and looked
out at the 737 parked on the airfield beneath them.

“We know that Harvey sometimes flies into a
field close to the Malaysian border that’s under the control of the
Muslim separatists,” she said. “We know that it has flown weapons
there for the separatists. And we also know that at least twice it
has flown weapons into that field that were then moved on to
another location. It was after the second flight that we
intercepted the cargo of weapons I told you about, the one that was
moving north toward Bangkok. The load from the first flight has
disappeared.”

“I thought you said that the weapons going
into the south were from Blossom Trading.”

“They are from Blossom Trading. The CIA is
transporting them.”

Shepherd took a deep breath and thought about
that. He turned around and leaned back against the wall.

“This is all a little hard for me to believe,
Kate. The CIA isn’t normally in the business of arming Muslim
separatists.”

“Oh no? How about the Taliban in Afghanistan
when they were fighting the Russians instead of you? The CIA even
gave them shoulder-fired Stinger missiles. Stinger missiles for a
bunch of rag-tag fighters bent on dragging their country back into
the sixteenth century? Good God, what were you people
thinking?”

“I imagine somebody was thinking they could
hang a killing defeat on the Soviet Union. They were thinking they
were getting something valuable enough to make the risk worth
taking.”

“And exactly the same thing is happening
again right here in Thailand. Your guys think they’re getting
something pretty valuable this time, too.”

“They are
not
my guys.”

Kate shook her head and looked away, but she
didn’t say anything.

“Okay, I’ll bite,” Shepherd said. “What does
the CIA think it’s getting by helping Blossom Trading run guns to
your Muslim rebels?”

“General Kitnarok is in bed with the Thai
military and the Thai military is in bed with the CIA. Kitnarok
supplies guns to the rebels through Blossom Trading and uses the
profits to pay for weapons to arm his red shirts, which he then
brings in through areas in the south controlled by the rebels and
ships north. In return for the Thai military permitting the CIA to
operate a secret facility here, the CIA provides transportation for
the weapons.”

“But why would the CIA want to help Charlie
start a civil war in Thailand?”

“Because they don’t like this government.
They’d much rather have Kitnarok and the military running things
again. If a strong civil government can endure in Thailand, they’re
afraid that will be the end of their cozy little deal with the
military and they’ll get thrown out on their asses.”

“Is that possible?”

“Oh, I hope so. I really do hope so.”

Far off in the distance, Shepherd heard a
siren start up. It was a European siren, one of those with the kind
of
whoop-whoop-whoop
sound that always made him think of
late night black-and-white movies about Nazis searching for Anne
Frank. He listened until it stopped as abruptly as it had started.
That was when a question occurred to him that he should have
already asked Kate.

“You said Trippler Aviation operates Harvey
under a charter deal and that it’s registered in the UAE. Do you
know who actually owns the plane?”

“Yes, I do. It took a while to find out, but
eventually we traced the charter payments Trippler is making. For
nearly three years, the CIA has been paying about a million dollars
a month through Trippler to charter it.”