Big Mango (9786167611037)

“THE BIG MANGO is as good as it gets.”
--
The Bangkok Post

“No clichés. No BS. Thrillers written with a
wry sense of irony in the mean-streets, fast-car, tough-talk
tradition of Elmore Leonard. Needham has found acclaim as one of
the best-selling English-language writers in Asia.”
-- The Edge
(Singapore)

“Mr. Needham seems to know rather more than
one ought about these things.”
-- The Wall Street Journal
Asia

“Needham is Michael Connelly with steamed
rice.”
-- The Bangkok Post

“Needham is Asia’s most stylish and
atmospheric writer of crime fiction.”
-- The Straits Times
(Singapore)

“Jake Needham has a knack for bringing
intricate plots to life. His stories blur the line between fact and
fiction and have a ‘ripped from the headlines’ feel. Buckle up and
enjoy the ride.”
- CNNgo

“THE BIG MANGO is a witty, inventive, and
most of all thrilling thriller; a heady, bloody, luxurious, sordid
fictional romp.”
-- The Nation (Thailand)

A novel

by

Smashwords edition published by
Half Penny Ltd.
Hong Kong

THE BIG MANGO, copyright © 2011 by Jake
Raymond Needham

This e-book is licensed for your personal
enjoyment only. It may not be re-sold or given away to other
people. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it or it
was not purchased specifically for your use, please purchase a copy
for yourself. Thank you for respecting the work of the author and
the publisher.

Excerpt from LAUNDRY MAN, © 2011 by Jake
Raymond Needham

Smashwords ISBN:
978-616-7611-06-8

English-language print publication
history

First edition: Asia Books Co Ltd, Bangkok,
1999, ISBN 974-8237-36-2
Second edition: Chameleon Press, Hong Kong, 2002, ISBN
962-86319-4-2
Third edition: Marshall Cavendish International, Singapore, 2010,
ISBN 978-981-4276-60-3

All e-book editions published by Half Penny
Ltd, Hong Kong

Smashwords Edition October 2012

Dedication

Epigraph

Prologue

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-One

Twenty-Two

Twenty-Three

Twenty-Four

Twenty-Five

Twenty-Six

Twenty-Seven

Twenty-Eight

Twenty-Nine

Thirty

Thirty-One

Thirty-Two

Thirty-Three

Thirty-Four

Thirty-Five

Thirty-Six

Thirty-Seven

Bonus Preview of LAUNDRY MAN

The Jake Needham Library

What the Press Says About Jake
Needham

Meet Jake Needham

Voltaire
Candide, 1759

ON
April 21, 1975, sometime
late in the afternoon, Nguyen Van Thieu abruptly resigned as
president of the Republic of South Vietnam and abandoned to the
North Vietnamese what little was left of his weary and wasted
country.

Just before dawn the following morning, a
C-118 belonging to the South Vietnamese Air Force rolled almost
unnoticed down a darkened runway at Tan Son Nhut. The plane was
heavy, crammed with boxes and crates that had been trucked to the
airfield from the Presidential Palace during the night. Gaining
altitude and turning its back on the approaching dawn, the big
plane crawled slowly into the moist early morning darkness and
lumbered away.

Four nights later, on April 25, an aging
DC-6 provided by the American Ambassador flew Thieu and nine of his
confederates quietly out of Vietnam. Each of them was carrying a
document personally signed by President Gerald Ford authorizing
their entry into the United States.

By daybreak on April 26, the rumors were
racing through Saigon. Thieu and his cronies had fled, the whispers
went, but they had not gone empty-handed. The vaults of the Bank of
Vietnam were bare. Thieu had secretly spirited all the bank’s
reserves out of the country before he left.

It made a good story, but it wasn’t
true.

The C-118 that departed Tan Son Nhut in the
early morning darkness of April 22 carried only a few of Thieu’s
personal possessions and some government archives he hoped might
win him sympathetic treatment from future historians. The Bank of
Vietnam’s gold and foreign currency reserves were still there in
South Vietnam.

The rumors did have one thing right,
however. The reserves were no longer in the vaults of the Bank of
Vietnam. They were in the basement of a nondescript warehouse on
Phan Binh Street, a narrow, shell-cratered road just north of the
American Embassy. The currency and gold were there and not in the
bank’s vaults because the CIA had launched an operation to get them
out of the country before they fell into the hands of the North
Vietnamese.

Several weeks earlier, a United States
marine captain trusted by the CIA’s Saigon station chief had been
given the task of secretly preparing the reserves of the Bank of
Vietnam for shipment to safety, and he had done his job well. That
was no surprise to the station chief. He knew the officer to be a
reliable man, a bit of an oddball perhaps, but well educated,
intelligent, and resourceful. It was even said by some that he
wrote poetry, but the station chief had never read any of it
himself and he had never asked the captain if that were true.

That the man did have an intellectual bent,
however, was readily apparent from the code name he selected for
the undertaking. He called it Operation Voltaire. No one ever asked
him why.

Two American members of the CIA’s Saigon
station packed a total of almost 20,000 pounds of currency, mostly
American dollars, as well as a small amount of gold bullion into
wooden crates. Some embassy employees, locals who had no idea what
was in the crates, then trucked them to the warehouse on Phan Binh
Street. The captain organized a small detachment of marines to
guard the building and settled back to wait for orders to fly the
crates to safety outside of Vietnam.

Those orders never came.

As the noose around Saigon tightened, the
CIA pressed what was left of the South Vietnamese government to
approve the implementation of Operation Voltaire and allow them to
ship the Bank of Vietnam’s reserves to Switzerland, but the
frightened men abandoned by Thieu dithered. They clung to their
daydreams like drowning men to driftwood.

Maybe the North would accept a negotiated
settlement, they hoped against all reason. If it did, then letting
the Americans fly the Bank of Vietnam’s gold and foreign currency
out of the country would suddenly look like a very bad idea. After
the North Vietnamese took over, they would certainly tag anyone who
had been rash enough to endorse such a plan as a traitor, a label
that would undoubtedly prove fatal.

Then April 30, 1975, came, and it didn’t
matter anymore.

North Vietnamese artillery pounded the city
remorselessly, Saigon began to burn, and the population spiraled
into an ugly panic. The State Department ordered all remaining
Americans in Saigon evacuated, but it took a cordon of American
marines on the walls of the embassy compound, bayonets fixed to
their M-16s and thump guns popping canisters of tear gas into an
angry mob of Vietnamese, to make it possible.

By the time the last helicopter load of
Americans lifted off the roof of the gutted embassy building and
clattered through the dense smoke to the aircraft carriers waiting
in the South China Sea, the crates of currency and gold stored in
the warehouse on Phan Binh Street had become nothing but 20,000
pounds of excess baggage. Operation Voltaire was forgotten.

As the years passed, the few people who had
known about Operation Voltaire retired or died and the more
informed speculation about what happened to the Bank of Vietnam’s
reserves disappeared along with them. Within a little more than a
decade, the colorful story of a vast hoard of gold and currency
abandoned by the fleeing Americans in the flames of Saigon was
reduced to a footnote in the rich annals of Washington folklore.
Only half-believed at most, and even then only by a few, the tale
was filed away with Deep Throat and the grassy knoll and largely
forgotten.

Then, in 1995, reconciliation became the
flavor of the day. Vietnam and the United States resumed diplomatic
relations, reopened their embassies, and exchanged diplomatic
personnel.

The newly appointed second secretary at the
American Embassy in Hanoi, a position frequently reserved for a
senior intelligence officer, was a man who had begun his career,
not coincidentally, with a brief tour in Saigon in 1975. That
posting had been minor, he had been listed on the embassy personnel
roster as nothing more than a junior cultural attach, but the
second secretary was one of the few people still in public life who
knew for certain that the story of tons of money and gold left
behind in the ruins of Saigon was not folklore. And he had not
forgotten.

As far as the second secretary knew, no
trace of that 20,000 pounds of currency and gold had ever surfaced
anywhere, so the first time he found an excuse to travel from Hanoi
down to Saigon—now known as Ho Chi Minh City in what he thought a
particularly graceless brutalization of history—he naturally took a
stroll around to Phan Binh Street.

The warehouse was gone.

The second secretary glanced at the empty
space where it had once stood; he took in the mounds of broken
concrete and the rusting rebars that were all that remained; and he
walked on without stopping.

As nearly as the second secretary could
calculate with any certainty, the ten tons of gold and currency in
that warehouse in April 1975 would now be worth at least
$400,000,000. Since plainly the money was no longer where it had
been left, the second secretary thought he might ask around,
diplomatically of course, to find out what the North Vietnamese had
done with it after they rolled into Saigon.