The Spy's Little Zonbi (16 page)

Beth stopped the scooter at the edge of a wide, muddy lake. Children were swimming and diving from the banks. A man walked neck-deep, about fifty feet from shore, dragging fishing nets. In the distance was a Buddhist Temple built on pilings. Monks bathed in the setting sun, crouched in the water, still wearing bright orange robes.

As Beth stepped off the little scooter, the children flocked to her. Most were young, pre-school age. They were the children of these farmers, still too young to work in the fields. A tiny girl haltingly made her way up to Beth, who crouched so the girl could stroke her cheek and feel her white skin. It was easy to tell which children hadn't seen Beth before.

“
This is my special place,” Beth told Chase, as he snapped a few photos even though the light level had dropped too low. The first stars had broken through the purple sky as dusk engulfed the flat land, the sun sinking toward the horizon as though into quicksand.

“
Every once in a while I need to get away, and it's so beautiful and peaceful here,” she said, the sounds of belly-flops and unseen chickens close by.

As Beth talked to the group of children nearest her scooter, Chase found a patch of grass on the bank with the least amount of Buffalo dung and lay back on his elbows. The long trip and exotically passive scenery had him off guard and suddenly sleepy. His stomach, working on the burning food, seemed the only restless part of his body.

But the sudden sleepiness was tinged with something else. There was a swirling, narcotic sensation taking Chase beyond just tired. He tried sitting up but couldn't. His arms and legs weren't cooperating. He turned to Beth, tried to focus. She looked back at him with sympathy. Chase was certain she knew what was happening.

He had found the Bat Girl and now he was poisoned. The two thoughts were crystal clear. Now what?

Was that popcorn he smelled? Chase imagined he was in a theater for a movie. The darkness swept aside like a giant curtain that opened to intense action. He could almost feel the wind from a giant helicopter swooping in. His body might have been plastered with spraying water and stinging dust. The noise was too much, too loud. Three soldiers hopped out of the chopper carrying a red backboard, black straps flapping violently in the downdraft. They rolled Chase on his side, slipped the stretcher underneath, then carried him back to the hovering craft. He felt the chopper dip slightly from the weight as they climbed aboard.

Then the Bat Girl was kneeling over him, her pale face vibrating close, as the chopper powered up, surging forward and away from the swirling dust and spray. He tried to ask for her help, but the poison was closing his throat. He struggled to keep his eyes open and focused as Beth was pushed away. One man tore at Chase's shirt and attached blurry electrode patches. Another grabbed a handful of hair and forced his head back while jamming a turkey baster into his dry throat. The soldier squeezed the bulb, emptying the contents. When it was removed, Chase tasted oil and then leaned to one side and vomited.

His toes and fingers, which had moments ago been in some other distant room, were now back—cold, and tingling. He tried pulling against the straps with no success, so he concentrated on breathing the good air, watching the helicopter ceiling.

Chase's pulse was checked and other vital signs were shouted in some unrecognizable language. His world again wavered, shifting from gray to black, as they climbed higher into the night sky, rotors screaming, beating down the thick air and taking them from one alien tropical place to another.

“
Good night,” Chase whispered with a smile to anyone nearby.

B
eth Flanagan was famously known as the Bat Girl in this rugged land where the helicopter touched down. She and Chase were roughly disembarked and deposited in a harshly lit subterranean room, which may or may not have originally been a cave.

Chase would soon find that the entire structure was carved into a mountainside by rainwater and by machinery, thousands of square feet of chambers and connecting tunnels. Unleashed from the backboard, he had woken with the driest mouth possible and a rolling nausea from the poison. He sat up from the army-style cot and gingerly dropped his legs over the side. Nearly palpable waves of blackness threatened consciousness then slowly retreated.

“
Sorry about the poison.” Beth was perched cross-legged on an olive green blanket spread over the concrete floor. And here again with her were small children, although these were more subdued. The three young, barely school-aged girls lay across Beth in different directions, all holding one of her hands and nuzzling at her lap and belly. “I promise it wasn't my idea. It's just their way of bringing certain visitors up here while keeping the location a secret.”

“
No blindfolds in this part of Thailand?” Chase rubbed his forehead and eyes with his palms.

“
I'm sorry.”

“
You're Bat Girl.”

“
I didn't mean to be Bat Girl.” She slowly stroked the hair of each girl, one after the other. They nuzzled closer in their sleep, like a litter of kittens.

There was just a single desk with a blank yellow legal pad, a pen, and a paper cup on top. Next to the desk was an empty, dust-covered water cooler and a vinyl chair covered in duct tape patches. The cold light emanated from long, fluorescent light tubes. About half were flickering. The door was solid wood and Chase assumed it was locked. There were no mirrors, and he didn't see anything that might be a video camera or listening device.

“
It doesn't make a great first impression, does it?” She followed his gaze around the room, but probably meant the drugging and kidnapping. This was the second time he'd heard her voice with the joy gone, sullen and tired. “The first time they brought me here the same way. I think they like the theater of it. You missed the high-fiving.”

“
So what's this about? What is this place?” Chase stretched his muscles, but wasn't ready to test his legs. “Have I been kidnapped? What do they want from me? What did they want from you?”

The mountain complex rose above a network of limestone caves west of the Ubonrat Reservoir, south of Nong Bua Lamphu. If he'd been conscious during the flight, he'd have enjoyed a scenic thirty minute ride. Beth explained the important central location of this place when it came to its bat population.

“
It's all about the bats. It's why I'm here, and why you're here. It's why they brought the girls here.”

“
Go on.”

“
This is where bats are being collected and stored by induced hibernation,” she said. “There are cold storage units for more than a half million bats.”

She paused, looking down at the small brown children who were now sound asleep in her lap. She continued to stroke their hair. They wore what looked like old uniforms, just slightly different than those of Beth's school.

“
These guys are the jihadists of Lukman Lima,” she finally said, almost in a whisper. “Do you know what a jihad is?”

“
A holy war.”

“
Yes, right, a jihad is a holy war.” Beth spoke the word jihad as if it tasted bad. “And these are called PULO, which stands for the Patani United Liberation Organization. These soldiers are the fighting wing, the New PULO fighters, or something. Their goal is to create an independent Muslim state out of the southern Thai provinces. Down where all the tourist spots are.”

“
I've seen stories about them in the papers.”

“
They demand a free and independent Patani,” Beth continued quietly, almost wistfully. “No matter whom they hurt.” She was having a hard time looking at Chase.

According to Associated Press reports, PULO fighters were being trained in al Qaeda camps in Pakistan and Afghanistan, then returning to Thailand to set off roadside bombs and commit drive-by shootings. Their targets were mainly groups of Buddhist monks wandering the southern countryside to receive alms.

Most people in Thailand viewed the roaming monks as a calming, stabilizing influence, the stories had said. They'd always been welcomed and were constantly posing for pictures with chubby-kneed tourists in Bermuda shorts. Mostly offerings of food, the alms allowed mere mortals to forge a symbolic, spiritual connection to what the monks represented. But the monks' bright orange robes were like great bulls-eyes to PULO. The targeting of the monks caused trepidation among the villagers, who had always welcomed the roaming religious men in the past. Some villagers blamed the Buddhists when their own village people were killed or injured in the attacks.

“
The Thai government began cracking down on PULO in the south,” Beth continued. “Lima put out a call to all Islamic nations for help. It's pretty clear that when an Islamic fighter cries persecution in a non-Islamic country, money pours in from Arab nations.”

“
I couldn't place the language in the helicopter,” Chase said. “I knew it wasn't Thai.”

“
This was once a limestone quarry, but Lima used the Arab money under the guise of a bogus corporation to buy it for a training camp two years ago. There are natural barriers because of the terrain, so the only way in is by helicopter or by foot.”

“
How many jihadists are here?”

“
Four hundred, maybe.”

“
Why are you helping them? And why do they call you Bat Girl?”

“
I'm not helping anymore,” she said defensively, and pulled the girls tighter into her lap. “When the first commanders tried to use some of the deeper, more elaborate caves as their headquarters, they had soldiers try get rid of the bats. They used smoke bombs and fire and finally hoses to flood some of the chambers. Nothing worked. Bats are like rats and cockroaches in that way. They even tried machine-gunning the streams of bats as they left the caves at dusk, but they'd just kill a few hundred out of millions and were left to clean up a disgusting mess of dead and dying bats. They had this great, geographically secure location for training, but were being driven off by bats. Imagine a commander sending that message back to his leaders.”

“
So what did they do?”

“
About six months ago, Lima came up with a crazy idea to use the bats instead of trying to exterminate them.”

“
Use them how?” Chase was getting to the heart of Bat Girl's involvement.

“
The first idea was to have them carry a biological weapon, something like anthrax. But setting anthrax-contaminated bats free in urban areas didn't do much killing. The bats would fly into the building crevices and die. That's when one of the commanders in charge of explosives training came up with the idea of attaching small bombs to the bats.”

“
And it worked?” Chase already knew it had.

“
Yes, it worked better than they could have imagined. They netted a few dozen Wrinkle-lipped Free Tailed bats, which are the main species here, tied miniature hand grenades to them, pulled the pins and set the bats free. In four seconds, the delay material burns up, igniting the contents in the detonator and the whole thing explodes.”

“
Who would've thought?”

“
Well, it wasn't perfect, because they needed a longer delay, and the bats could only carry a tiny amount of weight. But it was enough to convince the people with lots of money that they were on to something good. Or something really bad.”

“
So why did they need you?”

And she reminded Chase of her reputation as the bat expert of Bua Yai. She was the white American bat expert who had helped save a town from malaria by using her ingenuity to revitalize the bat population. Beth had been proud of her success, sending home the original copies of lovely thank you notes from the grateful mayor of Bua Yai, along with letters from rice farmers. There were also the adoring portraits of her, drawn by peasant children who had been told of this white woman's magical power over the bats. In many of these pictures she had wings. Not the rounded, sweeping wings of an angel, but leathery, stretched membranous wings, usually including details like the thumb and three small fingers. Despite the creepiness, Beth considered these especially touching because so much time and effort had gone into them. They were drawings of the Bat Girl.

“
The entire story had reached all the city papers in Bangkok and they did what jihadists do.” Tears filled her eyes, spilling out and splashing down on the sleeping children. “They came to my school at night and kidnapped me and three girls from the orphans' dorm.”

And Chase realized this was just a young Irish-Catholic woman from a town in Western Massachusetts who had been dealing with all this subterfuge alone, the weight of the world on her shoulders. The weight of knowing she was, in a fairly direct way, helping fashion a terrorist attack that could kill thousands of people.

“
The kids are scared but okay.” She softly stroked the sleeping children. “It's amazing what children will adapt to. They're locked in a room all day, have to ask for a bucket to relieve themselves, and are fed only rice and water, yet they laugh and play and argue. They forget they're in prison. Half a year to you and me is nearly a lifetime to a child, you know?”

“
Why these kids?”

“
The jihadists are evil but not stupid,” Beth said, showering the girls with more tears. “They stole orphans because they knew the school would only search for so long. There wouldn't be parents holding vigils, drumming up outrage until they got answers. They took the children to hold me hostage to their demands.”