Sea of Lies: An Espionage Thriller (10 page)

“What proof do you have of anything? After midnight there are more planes landing and taking off without flight plans than fly during daylight hours.”

Nolan’s silence softened Hecker’s tone as the DEA boss shifted perspective. “Look, Bob, I’m not saying you’re wrong. After all, the international airport closes down from 1 to 6 a.m., and they shut off their commercial radar between 2 and 5 a.m. daily, sometimes longer. Burma’s military radar is arrayed in the northwest toward India and the north and northeast toward China; very little in the east toward their partners in crime in Thailand, and none at all to the west toward Bangladesh or out to sea to the south. If MH370 flew into Burma air space, as long as it didn’t overfly Thailand or come within two hundred miles of either the Thailand or China borders, it would have been invisible.

“A Boeing 777 could have flown into the delta, landed and took off in the early hours and no one would be the wiser. I’m just saying that because it might have happened doesn’t mean it did happen.”

Nolan’s jaw dropped. “You have to be kidding. Turn off the radar at the international airport?”

Hecker gave him a tight-lipped smile and raised his eyebrows a fraction in feigned amazement. “Over a year ago after our brothers at the embassy grounded the DEA overflights, I was sufficiently pissed off I compared after-midnight radar tapes with ghost flights out of Air Force bases. The US and UN put the heat on the government to crack down on the armed forces’ involvement in drug shipments. Did you know that a C-130 carries a 45,000-pound payload? That’s a lot of money at $700 a pound for opium and $9,000 a pound for heroin. No radar traces means maybe another undetected $100-million-plus flight. So the radar is now switched off in the name of energy conservation, and the generals’ sons drag race their Italian sports cars up and down the runway all night.

“You have to think about the audience, Bob, before you start down this path. What is Matthews going to say? A big plane may have landed and taken off early Saturday morning a few hours after MH370 went missing and suddenly we’ve found Amelia Earhart? That won’t convince many people. We need to come up with something other than Teller is a mean roller skater who may or may not have ordered several people hacked or burned to death.”

Nolan reluctantly concurred. “Agreed that we shouldn’t tell Matthews until we know whether he’s protecting Teller. So let’s leave it at
Toffer
in the briefing session. I’ll shut up about MH370, too, but we need to receive the real-time search feeds as they come in. It could shed light on what we need to be doing.”

“The DEA will be privy to anything the CIA gets or brings in on this. Plane crashes, hijackings, terrorist attacks and the like are more or less free to view across the board. Disasters are one of the few times when everyone shares.”

“I’ll go along, but if Millie spoke with Matthews, we’re already blown out of the water.”

“I called her an hour ago and she’s on board. She hasn’t spoken with Matthews as he wasn’t at the office.”

“That’s strange.”

“My thoughts exactly.”

Hecker was back on the phone. “Travis? Yeah. We’re almost at Dubern Park. You coming up with anything yet? Crap. Here’s one for you to think about. Can you cook up a story that would justify re-tasking one of the imaging birds to look for containers on the road today? It’s a Sunday, and traffic should be light. Mmm hmm . . . yeah, well, maybe we can make that stick. Talk to you later.

“Bob, we’ll ask Matthews to request that an NRO satellite take a few snaps of the major roads between Rangoon and Thailand. Maybe we get lucky and spot those containers en route, but if there’s any cloud cover, we’ll be SOL. We’re only going to get a photo op every ninety-plus minutes, which leaves us blind most of the time. We’ll earmark the boxes as arms shipments destined for caches over the border. The Thai generals do good business in leasing bunkers to anyone in need of discreet storage on short notice. They also rent their military airfields by the hour. The really expensive bit is having the radar archives doctored.”

“Does a suspected arms shipment still make it a DEA case?”

“Ah, good point. Most of the time it would be OK, but with Matthews potentially dirty, he could pull this back to the Agency on a technicality. So let’s re-badge the suspected contents as acetyl anhydride, destined for a heroin lab along the Thailand border.”

“Do the traffickers typically fly in the chemicals before loading them onto trucks?”

 “Hell, no. That stuff’s trucked end-to-end from India across Kachin and into Shan State. There’s a tidy collection business up there that keeps the Army brass in new golf clubs. We need a DEA angle, though, and that’s the best I can come up with on short notice.” The guard shut the Dubern Park gate behind them.

Hecker introduced Nolan to Agatha, the COS’s matronly secretary. She confirmed that the debriefing was in the Vault. The embassy and annex were layered in anti-snooping devices and checked weekly for bugs. The offices of the senior Agency officers and the most secure meeting rooms were swept daily with sophisticated anti-eavesdropping countermeasures. The Vault was one such extra-secure room. It was invariably a source of wonder to Nolan that anyone was surprised when counter-surveillance found a listening device on embassy premises. Hell, in the old days, when he ordered a room bugged, he made certain at least two microphones were easy to locate to take the pressure off the opposition’s team to find others.

The Vault’s conference table sat fourteen down a long rectangle illuminated by underpowered fluorescent lights. Dark paneling, stained mahogany, black desk chairs and thick brown carpet contributed to an atmosphere that only lacked stale cigar smoke, brandy decanters on the sideboard and a stock ticker in the corner to be the picture of a 1929 Wall Street club meeting room.

They were among the last to arrive. Half a dozen CIA types, including the curvaceous and demure Ms. Millie Mukherjee of yesterday morning’s delightful acquaintance, were already in place. Nolan picked out Captain Abrahams from his demeanor, but couldn’t avoid the obligatory knuckle-crunching handshake. From the two vacant chairs at the head, he surmised that the ambassador and station chief were still expected. Millie plugged the laptop into the projector and waited for the blue screen to morph into her Crab Nebula home page. With a few clicks, she set up the slideshow and put the laptop on standby. Hecker and Nolan looked up as the stars arrived.

Lloyd Matthews, dressed to play bridge with English peers, entered with a portly, red-nosed contemporary of Nolan’s, attired in the IBM sales uniform circa 1978: blue suit, white shirt and red tie. The only modern touch was the post-9/11 American flag lapel pin. The two conversed in hushed tones. Nolan thought it strange that the recently arrived station chief didn’t get a last-minute briefing from his own troops prior to meeting the ambassador.

Everyone sat at the imperial wave of Martin’s arm, which demonstrated his authority while failing to deflect attention from the beads of sweat on his brow. The update from upcountry Shan and Kachin was neither long nor illuminating. Almost half the agents hadn’t been heard from. Three were under arrest for trespassing, the Army’s way of discouraging people from standing near fences where money was being made on the other side. Several reports of unlogged flights had been received, but nothing on runways or roads with the requisite one-mile straightaway and one-hundred-foot easements on each side. No rural folk had admitted to seeing a commercial airline overhead or on the ground. The investigation was ongoing, with the northern Shan and Kachin State investigators yet to report in. Matthews assured the attendees that the Agency would complete their inquiries in the next thirty hours.

The ambassador interrupted to ask what the difference was between the NRO and the NGA. Didn’t they both operate satellites? One of the Agency analysts patiently explained that the National Reconnaissance Office designs, builds and operates imaging, infrared and telemetry satellites that produce imaging (IMINT), electronics (ELINT) and much of the signals (SIGINT) intelligence. The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, or NGA for short, is the arm of the Department of Defense that interprets the NRO data and in turn supplies its customers at the National Security Agency, Defense Intelligence Agency, CIA and a dozen others. From Martin’s perplexed face, his mind had shorted out with an overload of acronyms. The Company analyst gave up and went back to working on his crossword puzzle.

Eyes turned to their special guest star, known to a few as the former head of Southeast Asia cryptography and cybersecurity, and to the rest as the old salt who had tried to make the suicide of a part-timer into a homicide back in 2012. Nolan’s continued existence within the Agency was proof that the CIA was too bureaucratic to fire anyone for any offense short of capital treason. In a monotone, Nolan told Saturday’s story of his exploratory drive with Kyaw. He omitted a few details; the audience was already aware of Kyaw’s wound and grisly fate, punctuated by the fiery end to an embassy Hyundai and its custodians.

Matthews didn’t say a word, while Martin interrupted nonstop in an attempt to regain stature after his loss of gravitas over that alphabet soup satellite business. None of the ambassador’s loopy comments or inattentive suggestions forced Nolan to do more than pause before one underling or another parried the concern. His narrative ended early Sunday morning at the unnamed DEA safe house.

Hecker picked up the tale, leaving out the assistance provided by Police Major Zaw and his men. As per plan, he further omitted mention of the samples from the burned shed. Ambassador Martin’s inanities reached new levels of absurdity. Was this the makings of a coup? Could they justify landing US aircraft on Airstrip One to conduct their own investigation? Why didn’t they call the local police and have them visit Toffer’s home to arrest him at once?

This last question merited an answer, to which Hecker replied, “We’ve already put in an urgent request and are awaiting a reply. It’s Sunday, so it’s hard to reach people, much less get them to act quickly. We are doing our best, Mr. Ambassador.”

Millie revived her laptop and showed yesterday's array of photos of possible airfields in varying degrees of clarity. There were several proper military runways bristling with buildings and activities juxtaposed against what looked to be unpaved airstrips more familiar with Cessnas than Boeings.

Up last was the grainy snap of Airstrip One. Everyone agreed that Millie had done good work in identifying a building under netting, given the poor resolution. It seemed like a big-time smuggling operation in a part of the country not known for clandestine activities. Perhaps just a stillborn infrastructure project in the delta, but likely something more.

Matthews was waiting at the other end of the banal discussion. Nolan remembered two more reasons he disliked Matthews. The station chief dressed like a Brooks Brothers mannequin and when he spoke, every third word had a mist of saliva floating above it. Talking with Matthews at close quarters made Nolan want to stick his face under a hand disinfectant dispenser.

The COS said, “This is all well and good coming from our very own Ancient Mariner, but in a country where processing and exporting narcotics is the number one business, no one has explained why another smuggling operation—even a new one evidently costing several million dollars—would resort to extreme violence once it had been detected. Toffer didn’t need to threaten Nolan or kill an embassy driver, much less those rural people. Irrespective of whether Golden Elephant is involved, he’s head of security for the children of the world’s former preeminent heroin smuggler. They know where to make the phone calls that stop these investigations cold. As Hecker has told us many times, this is why the DEA never gets convictions in Burma.”

Everyone tensed for Hecker’s retort. “Contrary to what you just said, the DEA has enjoyed considerable success in Burma, and would be doing even better if we were mounting joint overflights once again with the national police. Thanks to your efforts, we are not, but that’s a topic best left for another time. We had informers in Golden Elephant for years until late last year. It’s clean. Toffer has gone rogue and he’s scared of being found out. Therefore, he’s trying to kill or intimidate anyone who might tell his boss what’s he’s been up to.”

Matthews pounced. “What he’s been up to?
Toffer’s built a damned two-mile-long runway using Golden Elephant’s money and equipment! So don’t tell me no one at GE knows what’s been going on.”

“Let’s not confuse the construction project, which obviously was preapproved, with what Toffer’s been doing
with
the strip. Since it finished a month or so ago, there have been late-night flights in and out. We’ll ask what the locals know, but I’ll wager that these flights were probably Toffer’s—or his patron’s—personal shipments. At some future date, GE is going to hand the airfield over to the Army, get paid and go away. The new owner will take over and maybe the Army stays on to provide security.”

Millie surprised herself—as well as everyone else in the room—with the sound of her voice. “If you were making a passenger plane disappear, Burma might be the single best place in South Asia. The ordinary people live under a near-Stalinist dictatorship. The government tells the people when they can see something and when they can’t. Aid agencies can’t get eyewitnesses to speak even after military vehicles roar through villages and run down children playing in the road.

“Added to the above, China also wants direct access to a port on the Indian Ocean. Occupying Shan State gets them another two hundred miles closer, while natural resources keep flowing north. As a bonus, once in-country China will burn the poppy fields, opium stores and meth labs that are addicting their citizens. Maybe even shell the Burma Army as payback for all those junkies in Yunnan and Kunming.”

While winning top marks for chutzpah, Nolan doubted that anyone in the room other than Martin had been enlightened by young Millie’s minor oration. Even so, whether by accident or design, Matthews and Hecker fell silent. Nolan found himself fixated on her perfect smile, pleasant face and earnestness as she looked down and fiddled at her laptop keyboard, face burning at the silence that greeted her outburst.