The Burma Effect (34 page)

*

Rawson had, on the face of it, given up. He was not in the hotel lobby when Delaney and Kate appeared the next morning, ready to set off for Ko Chang.Ted Green was not there either. Delaney expected they would have arranged some sort of subtle surveillance, if not of the six-hour drive to Trat and the ferry ride to the island, then at least of their stay there. Delaney had thought it sensible, given the dangers and the various interests they had offended, to at least tell Rawson where they were going and when they planned to come back.

Delaney and Kate did their best to avoid being followed because there was no telling whose faction might want to come along: Canadians, Thai police, Burmese agents, perhaps even a representative of the much aggrieved Australian businessmen.

There were car rental desks in the lobby but Delaney had arranged instead to get a car from Hualamphong Station. It might appear to those interested that they were taking a train south, and the sprawling station itself would give them opportunity to disappear into throngs of locals and backpackers hurrying for the platforms.

He looked behind them many times in the taxi as they headed from the hotel to the station but he saw no overt sign of interest. Certainly there was no white Land Cruiser in sight. The absence of any interest whatsoever seemed odd to him, but it would be equally odd to complain of no interest after complaining all week about too much. He settled back into the seat beside Kate and tried to relax.

At the station, they signed out their Toyota Corolla and retrieved it in the station's vast underground car park. The dim coolness there gave them a sense of privacy for the first time that day.

“Alone at last, lover boy,” Kate said as they put bags and Delaney's laptop computer into the car. She smiled at him across the metallic roof.

“Looks like it,” he said. “We may just be able to pull this off. I would have expected more of an escort.”

“Lucky,” Kate said.

Getting out of Bangkok by car was always arduous. It was almost an hour before they were on open road heading toward Chon Buri and, beyond that, the coastal highway along the Gulf of Thailand to Trat near the Cambodian border.

It was a typical Southeast Asian highway: narrow, rutted in places, choked with belching trucks and swarms of motorcycles and three-wheeled vans. After Chon Buri and Sattahip, they were truly in the Thai hinterland. Few villages, traffic thinner, heavy rainforest on both sides of the road.

Delaney had always liked a long car journey in rural Asia or South America. It brought you out of the international cocoon of airports and aircraft and taxis and business hotels. The sounds and the smells of a country came cascading over you on a road trip and Delaney revelled in them as he drove. He also revelled in the presence of a good-looking woman at his side, with neither of them in any hurry to get anywhere and problems left behind.

They had lunch at a truckstop noodle house just past Rayong. From there, if they wished, they could have gone over to Ko Samet but Delaney knew the island had been badly overdeveloped. They would carry on to Ko Chang, where they had a reservation at a hotel on at the northwestern tip that Delaney knew would give them what they wanted: quiet, solitude, beach time and a place where he could produce the Asia Weekly article by deadline.

They were the only farangs in the truckstop. A dozen heavy vehicles idled outside. The drivers clearly appreciated the presence of a good-looking Western woman, but they expressed their appreciation with restraint. Delaney knew of a lot of cultures where Kate would have caused a stir in a place like that, perhaps trouble. Mexico came to mind.

The afternoon had become very hot. They were both sweating after their lunch and the walk back to the car. Perspiration beaded on their foreheads and they shivered as the car's air conditioning kicked in and cooled their skin. As they waited, a massive khaki-coloured Bedford dump truck moved out just before them, spewing diesel fumes and groaning angrily as the driver changed gears.

“I'll have to get past this guy if we want to breathe this afternoon,” Delaney said, sleepy from his pad thai lunch and a large beer. “No hurry,” Kate said.

The truck moved at a snail's pace, even though it carried no load. Delaney tried a couple of times to get around, but the driver, apparently just as sleepy as they were, was swaying back and forth across the middle line, so passing was a challenge.

“Lucky there's not much traffic out here this afternoon or he'd be a road statistic,” Kate said.

“The guy really seems to want to drive on both sides at once,” Delaney said.

He looked in his rearview before making another attempt to pass and knew instantly they were in trouble. A white Land Cruiser was immediately behind them, appearing as if from nowhere. He could not see the driver through the vehicle's dark windshield, but he had no doubt it was the same one that had been trailing him in Bangkok.

“Kate, I think we're got a problem here,” he said. “Our friends in the Land Cruiser are with us all of a sudden.”

She saw him looking in the mirror and looked back herself.

“Where on earth did they come from? Do you think it's the same car?”

“I really do, Kate. This is not good.”

“Let's go back to the restaurant.There are a lot of people there.”

“Hard to turn around here, Kate. If we stop we may be in even more trouble.”

“Maybe they're just following us to see where we're going.” “Maybe.”

Delaney tried again to pass the dump truck ahead but could not squeeze by. “Christ,” he said.

The Land Cruiser drew up closer behind them. The truck ahead slowed even more. Delaney realized suddenly what was happening and knew that trouble had truly come.

“Kate, quick now, get me that gun out of my bag. They're going to squeeze us in, maybe put us off the road.”

There was very little shoulder to pull onto and deep concrete culverts on both sides of the road. Kate moved fast, a policewoman in an emergency. She reached back to open Delaney's sports bag and rummaged quickly around to get the pistol and bullets out of a bundled T-shirt. She expertly loaded eight rounds into the Walther's magazine and set it firmly into the handle, slapping the bottom to set it. She pulled the action and placed the gun down on the seat between them.

“Good to have a police officer along,” Delaney said grimly.

“This doesn't look good at all, Frank,” Kate said.

The truck in front of them suddenly stopped dead. Delaney hit the brakes and skidded to a halt less than a metre from its high hulking cargo box. The Land Cruiser raced up and hit them from behind with its steel bumper bars, shaking them up and shoving their light Japanese rental car right up into the truck in front, wedging them in.

“Let's get out Frank,” Kate said.

“No cover between here and the trees. And that ditch will be tough to cross fast.”

The passenger door of the Land Cruiser opened and a wiry Asian man in his thirties climbed out, moving fast. He wore a dark blue tracksuit, wraparound sunglasses and a black baseball cap. He was carrying what looked like a vintage Colt automatic, holding it low against his thigh.

“Not good, Kate, not good,” Delaney said. “Get down low.”

Kate slid lower in her seat, hand on the door handle.

“Careful, Frank, careful,” she said. “Let me have the gun. I think I can take him through the glass.”

“No, no, not from that angle. And when he sees the weapon he'll start to shoot. I'll wait until he comes around to the side.”

The gunman went around behind his car, and came up cautiously on the driver's side of theirs. Delaney cradled the gun. He knew he would have only one chance.

“At that range the rounds will go straight through him, Frank,” Kate said. “You'll need to get off more than one to take him down.”

Delaney said nothing. The gunman was at the window, gun visible but still held low at his thigh pointing down. He looked briefly behind him to the road and then motioned for Frank to lower the window.

As the electric window wound down, Delaney got ready. As soon as the glass disappeared into the car door, he raised the Walther and fired three quick rounds into the gunman's chest. The man reeled immediately back into the road, one hand clutching at crimson wounds, the other hand firing off a useless round of his own into the blacktop.

“Out out out, go go go,” Delaney shouted to Kate.

He leaped with her out of the passenger door and down into the stinking weed-choked drain culvert. They scrambled up the sloping concrete on the other side and ran for the rainforest. Delaney looked back briefly and saw the driver of the Land Cruiser running over to his partner's body on the road. He saw the truck driver climbing out of his cab, carrying an AK-47 assault rifle.

No cars on the far side of the road appeared to be stopping, but a short line of traffic had slowed on their side had to move past what probably looked like an accident scene with a trio of vehicles pulled onto the shoulder.

They plunged, breathless and sweating, into the deep green cover of trees and vines, slipping on the damp red earth as they went. Despite the danger, despite the need to move fast and without distraction, Delaney's mind was suddenly flooded with intense memories of the last time he ran for his life with a lover through trees, seeking shelter from gunmen. The way that time had been heavy with snow and the outcome disastrous.

In the aftermath of Natalia's death in the Quebec woods, Delaney had sworn never to put someone he loved in the way of danger again. He had also, with out realizing it quite so clearly, sworn never to fall in love with anyone again, sworn he had had enough unhappy endings for a lifetime. Now, not in the snow of Quebec but in the heat and humidity of Thailand, he had already been responsible for Ben Yong's death and very possibly, if he did not act quickly, Kate would die because of him as well.

She ran expertly ahead of him, head low, arms brushing aside vines and branches as she went.There was no track through this forest as there had been through the snowy woods in Quebec. Delaney tried to devise a plan as they ran, but none, at this stage, seemed as sensible as simple flight.

Eventually, they threw themselves behind a large boulder all but hidden with vines and low hanging branches. They stopped there and listened. They were panting with the exertion and the heat and the fear. Delaney put a finger to his lips.They strained to hear the sound of someone in pursuit.

After a long anxious wait, Delaney said finally: “I never should have brought you over here, Kate. This is craziness.”

“It was my choice to come, Frank,” she said. “How would you know it would turn out like this?”

“Because it was already like this. Because of what happened before, to Ben and to Kellner and to the mercenaries. These people absolutely do not fool around. This story is not over yet and I should have never gotten you into it.”

He brushed damp hair from her forehead.

“We'll get out of this, Frank,” she said. “They'd be crazy to come into deep cover like this knowing we have a gun.”

Delaney remembered coming to that exact conclusion in Quebec, minutes before Natalia was shot. He said nothing.

They decided to stay exactly where they were until nightfall. Delaney knew now that in such situations it was better to stay put, to listen and to watch, rather than to move into what could at anytime become an armed confrontation.They leaned against the boulder, Delaney's arm around Kate's shoulder, and, despite the danger, fought sleep in the afternoon heat.

It appeared that their opponents had decided not to chance armed pursuit in the Thai rainforest. After darkness fell, after hours of waiting and listening, Delaney and Kate made their way clumsily back the way they had come, to the edge of the trees near the road. They found themselves about two hundred metres back down the road from where they had been stopped that afternoon.

Delaney peered cautiously out. It was very dark but a half-moon lit the scene faintly. Occasionally, a lone car or a truck would move by but there was very little nighttime traffic. He saw their car still pulled over on the shoulder. The Land Cruiser, the dump truck, and the gunman's body had all disappeared.

“I'll have to go over and see what's what,” Delaney said.

“They could be watching,” Kate said.

“There's no car except ours,” he said.

“It's dark, they could be anywhere around,” she said.

“We've got to try to get out of here with the car,” he said.

They made their way under cover to a break in the trees directly across from their car, probably the very spot where they had broken into the jungle and started their flight hours ago.

“You wait here, Kate,” Delaney said. “I'll go see what's happening with the car.” He gave her the gun. He'd done that once before in a situation like this, with another woman, now dead. “Watch as I go.”

She took the Walther, knowing they had little choice. They could not find their way elsewhere through rainforest at night. The road was the only way and the car was their best option.