Escape (39 page)

Now don’t worry Chas, Mir Noor-Jehan is on my side. If any stranger came to our town asking about a foreigner within earshot of his Lordship’s bodyguard, there’d be a game of head-polo set for the afternoon.

On our way home we stopped at what I took for a fishing village. The car door opened and air conditioning met heat carried by the smell of 20,000 drying fish. The town is built right at the water’s edge on top of low rocks. The quayside buildings have been constructed from those dead ships’ finer interiors
—
but used for the outside. Stately wooden columns, curved banisters and bar room panelling form the external walls of these thoughtful and accidental houses along the dock. Rare colours for this part of the world. This is a smuggling village
—
they just like to fish.

When we’d neared the village we’d turned on to the first smooth-tarmacked road I’d seen for miles. It ran from the near-coastal road through scrubland and ended as if in error on the beach. I asked Noor-Jehan what was up. ‘Who made it? I mean, who paid for it?’

‘A big smuggler owns all this. His dhows sail from Oman every week.’

When I said something about this road looking a bit obvious, my protector drew his arms wide and grinned at the wonders, standing back toward the hills that, like N-J, resist all change.

Kamran had been playing music of the Sufi poets during our journey out. I hoped to please them in return with Coleman–Dudley’s
Victorious City
songs. Everyone other than N-J appeared baffled at that Western homage to the East.

Tuesday

In a few days I must leave this calm zone to join my friends at the Frontier, so will post from Peshawar.

Today I was allowed out with a car on my own (against the head-shaking of my guardians) and I drove back to stand with the steel bones of those discarded carriers at the shoreline. Something serene about the grand fleets of the West reduced to ignominy and scavenger food. Along the coast road toward Pasni I found a deserted pavilion weathering before the sea. In the style of a 1920s Brighton beach house. Though, I later learnt, it is a remnant from the ambitions of the 1970s when businessmen imagined this former sultanate might become what Dubai is today. The would-be Casino des Balouches entertained no ghosts and its warped floors and crumbling plaster denied any odour of human occupation. Perhaps never used. Yet its taps ran water from a town that has yet to be built.

Drive inland from the coast and the weight of the land is pressed upon all travellers. It’s hot. Beneath the disk of an implacable sun the earth becomes a giant altar. A dry handful may be held only temporarily, any tightening of the grip merely speeds its return to the ground. Biscuit crumbs too coarse to leave even a handprint. Here there are unposted graves where travellers
—
separated soldiers, thoughtless traders and simple strangers
—
are mummified in airless spaces not so very deep. The shoreline smugglers are intolerant of those who disturb. When
jihadi
pause here on their catastrophic pilgrimages, they may be served sweet tea, praise and blessings for their holy cause yet be entombed by these sons of the soil, as the local tribesmen call themselves.

It is night now at Mir Noor-Jehan Magsi’s. The menfolk are meeting in secret conclaves; servants are crouched, sweeping the floors. Two of the dozen telephones of this township are in this house and that with the loudest and oldest ring is never answered. I’ve been thinking about muffling the bell. The family are watching TV. I set up a satellite dish to poach signals from space. The children are mollified, at least (they sleep where they will), and the elders sit similarly transfixed while silently mouthing dutiful condemnation at the colourful images of Western decadence.

On my bed lies my new documentation. Passports fanned out as a winning poker hand. We’ll see. My Western clothes lie next to an open suitcase.

So must close now.

With warmest wishes

D

6th October 1996

Greetings D

Good to hear that you are in high spirits despite the notoriously foul weather. Were you calling from Baker Street? I suppose your senses are still overloaded in the real world. That’ll pass. We don’t want you becoming overexcited. No need for names, no need to explain. You know that.

Your Swedish chum has been thrown in chains and sent to high security. Same place though, according to his embassy. He’s okay. Leave it to me. Reminds me, I read a quote in the Post from an Oz embassy drudge: ‘There’s always one who spoils it for everyone else.’ That’s a laugh. You’ll have to let me know sometime about all the good stuff that got spoiled by your sudden departure.

No need to answer this. Our dispatch rider will carry all the news that’s not fit to print.

Adios amigo

M

PS I modestly draw your attention to the brevity and anonymity of the above.

Wednesday 12th December 1996, Annecy

Dear M

I’m writing this from a curved window facing a frozen lake. The sitting room of a modest suite in an
hôtel du charme
below the Rhône Alpes. I’m not alone.

I left London three days ago, not wanting to leave the new house so soon: painters are still working, deliveries arriving and things to be installed. The agents say they’ll supervise. I’m turning the garage into a workshop. No interest in a car. A car in London is a gift to the Forces of Darkness. Not that they’ll know, I’m blissfully unknown there. Over fifteen years now since the Heathrow thing. The mews house is more of a try at permanence than is usual for me, I’ll admit. Don’t read too much into that. Only that I can afford to buy and lose some ground as most of the biscuit tins were intact, although some needed the application of a sturdy tin opener.

The journey to France was to meet Sharon. Eurostar to Paris for me and then to Lyon to wait. From Oz to Zurich for Sharon and then a pick-up at Geneva. An old chum drove her across the border just in case she had unwelcome company. None. Then to the lake. That was two days ago. Right now she’s sitting on the floor, listening to music.

We walked around town today. Heavy lined coats and a firm grip on each other. We’d just come from the patisserie, wouldn’t you know. Walked over stone bridges and to the big hotel, not ours. Into the warmth, shedding coats to be thawed in the salon by brandy and firelight. Brandy’s for the evening, I think. Too sad for the night. Too sweet. There was a black piano near our chairs, open for someone. We both looked at it but shied away. Sharon’s a singer, you might recall. The salon was wide with tall ceilings. My mind was elsewhere.

As you’ll soon find we’ve business with a former captain of the PK army. Inexperienced, in our way, yet with contacts. In many ways PK is
all
contacts.

This afternoon as Sharon and I sipped, we were silent and I was thinking of my time in Baluchistan with the His Lordship. I was watching a movie there, sniffed from Asiasat, TNT. Old, black-and-white:
The Santa Fe Trail.
Starring a future American president and a cryptic Australian. And Raymond Massey playing evangelical John Brown, fiercely calling up hellfire against those who would not see his vision of God. You’d know it; two generations of children have been chilled by that savage puss while sitting cross-legged, half a metre from the tube on Saturday mornings. Massey’s carved, dark features, glowing white eyes, untouchable beard and rock-breaking nose. Rather like some of the zealots I met near the border in that dry land. Deserts
—
do you think that growing up unable to take a relaxing bath produces religious head-bangers? Well they’re of no account, although some will be our guides as we cross the tribal areas in the New Year.

Before I forget, there’s no need to follow up on Dean Reed. I was all hot under the collar for a while but Chas talked me out of it. As he said, it does everyone a little good to be conned every so often. Keeps us in touch with our inner selves, he said. And I guess Dean did something of a service to a few poor saps in the Cure. He gave them hope where there was none. Kept them away from the wheels of the sand trucks until the clouds lifted.

Sharon is humming under her headphones. She is stretching now
—
back arching, folding her arms over her head. Her toes wiggle in consensus. I’ll not have long at this desk. She’s likely to pounce.

On Friday we’ll hire a car in Lyon and drive back and on to Italy. She never asks about business
—
she’s a tenderfoot in this still. We’ll keep to the surface, travelling north and on to London. Then peel off before Christmas. I’ll be careful (I’m still superstitious about this time of the year) and, of course, I’ll tread softly near the complete felicity of her heart.

Ouch! Didn’t see that coming.

As ever

D

Nor would I see coming those reversals of fortune that were being seeded in the North–West Frontier Province by people I’d yet to meet.

The closed communications above and similar postings remain the only written record of my times following the escape.

Only confinement and singular need allow any history to coalesce and, from a distance, appear well defined. The David who was Daniel Westlake had, of necessity, been smothered in the Cure. As Christmas passed with contentment and comforts anaesthetising my nerves, Daniel’s spirit would reincarnate: an untroubled prospector seeking Utopia, a truster of destiny, and in doing so assure the inevitable consequences of such hubris. Yet first I would have to become accustomed once again to all things too precious to lose.

Melburnian David McMillan’s first arrest was for breaking into a Richmond match factory to enlarge his matchbox-label collection. At 12, putting crime aside, he then began presenting TV’s ‘Peters Junior News’ for the Nine Network. Newsreading and the straight life didn’t stick however and McMillan was thrown out of two of Melbourne’s best schools before returning to crime and becoming one of Australia’s most notorious smugglers, leading a group that developed the bag-swap system at Sydney’s Kingsford-Smith airport.

Following a State–Federal taskforce operation, massive police raids and one of Victoria’s most expensive trials, which lasted six months, McMillan was sentenced to seventeen years in prison. While awaiting trial, McMillan again made the headlines after attempting to escape Melbourne’s high-security Pentridge Prison by helicopter using former SAS personnel.

Following release from prison on parole, surveillance immediately resumed leading McMillan to return to the life from which escape appeared impossible. Under false identities, he fled to Bangkok where he was promptly arrested and jailed. Following his dramatic escape from prison in Bangkok, the story of which is retold in this book, McMillan slipped to the Afghan border and again onto the smuggler’s trail. In the years that followed, he avoided a life sentence in Pakistan and serious time in Colombia before a stretch in Scandinavia brought an end to his most dangerous life.

In the late 90s, he retired to London, where he now lives.

“Once McMillan puts his daring plan into place, the action rips along like a thriller … breathtaking stuff”
News of the World
, UK