Sea of Lies: An Espionage Thriller (2 page)

“Kyaw, drive back toward Einme five to six miles. Head south and let’s approach the road from below, just here.” He pressed his finger against the GPS screen. It was past three o’clock and hotter than the hinges on the gates of Hell. The sweat and generous slugs of water restored Nolan’s analytical abilities. Even with a clear head, it still seemed like a wild goose chase.

That Malaysia Airlines flight 370 had disappeared wasn’t in dispute. The planned nonstop flight from Malaysia’s capital Kuala Lumpur to Beijing departed just after midnight on Saturday, March 8. Vietnam air traffic control lost contact at 1:15 a.m. and by sunrise there was a full-scale international search in progress. The CIA was well aware of China’s territorial aspirations in Burma’s northeastern Shan State. Nolan recalled from Millie’s brief that the last thing the US wanted was the People’s Liberation Army sending a division south of the river to protect China citizens at risk in Shan State, including any survivors from a hijacking or crash. Northern Shan was where the full-time Agency operatives and analysts were headed to check out every piece of asphalt at least mile long in a straight line. The Pentagon and CIA were in rare agreement that China’s external espionage arm, the Ministry of State Security, could have orchestrated the hijacking with a landing in Shan or maybe the adjacent Kachin State. Once in Burma, the PLA might never leave, annexing resource-rich territory and inching closer to the day when Burma became a client state.

Agency short-timer Nolan had been assigned to the least-likely destination, the swampy center of an infertile patch of the massive Irrawaddy River Delta. At least he didn’t have to operate in stealth mode. About the only place the US intelligence community could send a fifty-four-year-old white-collar worker to hunt a missing commercial jet would be in the swamplands of southern Burma. The Army wasn’t around, and from the aerial photos, neither was much of anything else.

As the Sonata hit a pothole, the jolt rekindled Nolan’s hangover and he reconsidered the situation. The Burma Army didn’t like prying eyes. If they’d been in on the hijacking, whoever had paid them off had surely also given instructions to protect the landing site. That was the challenge Matthews’s men faced across Shan and Kachin States, with China supplying extra excitement. But if by chance the plane was out in the delta, then the Army would be there, too.

Kyaw and Nolan feinted and jabbed as they probed for a way around the end of the toll road to approach it from the south. When they stopped for a leak, they watched a convoy rumble out of a side lane with eight-foot-high shrubs and stunted trees lining each side. The road was barely wider than the vehicles. Fronting this group was a dark-windowed battleship-gray SUV bristling with antennae and macho adornments. Three prime movers followed, hauling brown containers with “K-Line” logos flaking off their rusty sides. The vehicles accelerated and roared out of earshot.

Nolan played a hunch. “Take that same side road.”

Within a quarter mile, they were back in the salt marshes where outlines of abandoned rice paddies were evident. One mile later, they came to a heavily rutted, muddy turnoff with a guardhouse and a gate maybe eighty yards away. A ten-foot-high chain-link fence stretched on either side. Kyaw bounced the Hyundai through the mud for about fifty yards. Nolan noted the razor wire atop the fence as they approached the guardhouse. “Protected Area” signs in English and presumably Burmese squiggles were illustrated with silhouettes of attack dogs and armed men. “Ah, the international language of fear: German Shepherds and tactical rifles,” Nolan said aloud.

The scrawny Kyaw said nothing as he wrestled the Sonata over the ruts. When they were within seventy feet, two men stepped out of the sentry box and casually leveled their assault rifles. Kyaw braked to a stop.

“Roll the windows down, Kyaw. Put your hands outside. Stay inside.” Nolan knew the drill from his six months in Iraq in late 2006 and early 2007.

The soldiers wore brown and green camouflage uniforms without insignia. As they approached, one strode straight at them while the other walked obliquely to maintain a clear field of fire. Whatever these short guns were, they weren’t AK-47s.

“Kyaw, these are serious people. Translate for me if they don’t speak English.”

“Y-yes, s-sir,” Kyaw managed, terror adding another ten years to his lined, fiftyish face.

The first soldier halted two steps away from Nolan’s door, assault rifle on a sling pointed through the open window. He had one hand on the trigger. Nolan noted the half-fingered leather shooting gloves favored by Spec Ops. Gunman One smiled broadly behind his mirrored sunglasses. With his other hand, he reached up and took a bite of a half-peeled baseball-sized fruit.

“Do you speak English? We’re looking for the Yangon-Chaungtha toll road.” Nolan’s voice sounded calmer than he felt.

“No road here,” came the reply. Taking another bite, he grimaced and spat out white pulp as he brought his left hand onto the forestock and gestured with his weapon. “Go. Now.”  Kyaw put the car in reverse, spun the wheels until they caught and juddered through a harried three-point turn.

Nolan pulled his hands in and swiveled to watch the motionless Gunman One. The guard wasn’t smiling anymore, his weapon casually trained on them as long as they were in view. Nolan saved the waypoints on the GPS.

“Kyaw, turn left here and keep going.” They drove another two miles across an undulating landscape. Long grass, dusty small trees and fetid water marked the terrain. Wading birds hunted. The odd hovel marked the otherwise featureless track. Millie was right. Rice didn’t grow well in this part of the giant Irrawaddy Delta. No rice meant few people. So what was the point of having a guardhouse, professional soldiers and a razor wire–topped hurricane fence protecting a road project in a depopulated part of the delta? Something wasn’t right.

Their southwest course gradually took them away from the GPS coordinates for Millie’s blob. Kyaw was driving fast enough that the Hyundai was bottoming out every fifty yards or so, risking a broken axle or punctured fuel tank.

“Slow down, Kyaw. There’s no one after us.” They passed another narrow lane headed north. “Stop! Turn here and drive slowly. We don’t want any noise.” Kyaw slowed to fifteen miles an hour. Within three-quarters of a mile, the track ended at the base of a hillock. The GPS showed another mile to go before they reached the feature highlighted on the sat photo.

Nolan applied bug repellant and drained the better part of a big water bottle. Kyaw turned the car around. Nolan weighed duty versus common sense. The oath he’d sworn to uphold the Constitution. The good people he’d served with for over half his life. The frustration of not doing anything meaningful in the past eighteen months. The wish to impress Millie, that vivacious young woman from California with fluency in Burmese and a deep desire to find a way into Clandestine Services. All of that stacked up against the prospect of getting shot investigating something that was none of his business. What he needed to do was drive back to Rangoon, file a report when he was back in Singapore and let Matthews’s people take a proper look next week. He’d be blowing out candles on his combination fifty-fifth birthday and retirement cake soon enough.

However, he'd been motivated to solve problems his entire life. He’d broken unbreakable codes, designed unstoppable computer worms and conquered almost every professional challenge. The phantom road, armed guards and a missing airliner begged for answers.

“What would Bob Nolan do?” he said under his breath. The Nolan his younger colleagues idolized was a man they counted on, a leader. He had conceptualized the master plan for Operation Olympic Games and personally convinced the heads of the Mossad and CIA that it was viable. The result was Stuxnet, the evil genius computer worm that wiped out eight hundred of Iran’s U-235 enrichment centrifuges and set back their bomb-building program three years. Stuxnet won Nolan a citation and earned him a transfer to Singapore, where his wife so badly wanted to live. Then there was the Anti-Nolan, the Bob who nearly ended his marriage with a disastrous inter-Agency affair, followed a year later by Prentice Dupree’s death in a sex-free, but doubly dangerous debacle that had nearly ended his career. So who was it behind the sunglasses and under the long-billed fishing cap, the expert with thirty-three years inside as a latter-day CIA renaissance man—code breaker, cybersecurity expert, competent electronic surveillance field man—or the plodding hacker outsourcer of the last year?

“Sometimes you have to live up to your own press clippings,” he said in a resigned voice. Kyaw looked at him curiously. Nolan said, “I’m going to take a look. It will be a couple of hours, so just relax here. Do you have any cell reception?” Kyaw shook his head no. 

He marked their location on the GPS and set off uphill through knee-high grass that hid shoe-shredding sharp rocks. The moist soil stank and much of it sported the telltale white gloss of salt. It was obvious why little grew here.

Nolan hadn’t been on even a mock field operation since SERE training in Harvey Point, North Carolina, back in 1982. He’d been a twenty-three-year-old whippersnapper back then, fresh from the tradecraft classrooms of Camp Peary, Virginia, a.k.a. the Farm. Here he did a combination of duck walks, hunched-over dashes and low crawls to avoid detection. He’d look ridiculous to anyone standing on one of the swales in the vicinity, and hoped no one was peering at him down the barrel of a rifle. His shoes, knees and hands were muddy and reeked of methane.

He took out the binoculars and looked around. Nothing moved save for a circling bird of prey. “You’d better not be a vulture,” Nolan said. The bugs were ferocious even after the generous application of DEET-based repellant. What had even more of his attention was a smattering of rats, parade of frogs and a pair of black cobras he was sharing the lowlands with.

The sun remained relentless despite it being after four o’clock. Nolan was happy for the hat, yet annoyed he’d forgotten sunblock. Like most Chinese women of status, his wife Shao Yin equated a suntan with poverty. When he came home looking like a lobster, there would be an ass-chewing. He grinned at the thought of his wife. Joanie Lam Shao Yin was quite a nagger, but she had a good heart.

He cursed the sharp-edged grasses, the vermin, the heat and his aching quads, knees and elbows. As he reached the top of the last mound, the discomfort fell away. Down the hill, two hundred yards distant, was a ten-foot razor wire cyclone fence stretching as far as the eye could see in either direction. Beyond the fence maybe another eighty yards was the tarmac. After the road, more fence: this was an expensive project.

“Damn, I should have brought a camera with a telephoto lens,” he said. He brought the binoculars up and gave the pavement a careful scan. The Yangon-Chaungtha toll road was a fraud. This wasn’t a highway; it was a runway. The six lanes were laid out side by side with no center guardrail, just a double yellow line down the middle without any road signs in view. All the vegetation for over fifty yards on either side of the make-believe road was burned away.

The entire scene was devoid of life. Up the runway another one hundred fifty yards was the object of Millie’s fascination. A single-story corrugated iron shed under camouflage netting within one hundred feet of the putative road wasn’t Highway Department standard issue.

He clicked off a few shots with his camera phone, but they might be too grainy to be of much use. The sun was setting. He reversed course, taking less time to conceal himself than on the way in, given the failing light. He wanted to get back to town.

Forty minutes later, he was back almost to his starting point. As he came down the last hillside in the high grass, he saw the midnight-blue embassy Sonata blocked by a hulking forest-green Escalade. Kyaw knelt by the front of the Hyundai, head bowed and hands over his groin. The driver rolled over and writhed on his back.

“Oh, shit,” Nolan exclaimed. He recognized the brown-green uniform and familiar stance. At this distance, the single gunman looked just like the US soldiers in Iraq who had covered him when he tapped junction boxes. Nolan raised his own arms an instant later when the second uniformed man entered his peripheral vision from the left rear, tactical weapon at his hip. God only knew how long Gunman Two had been tracking him. Nolan took a closer look. Those weapons were the same issue as the Rangers carried in Fallujah. Even the web gear looked identical.

While Nolan walked the last thirty feet toward the car, Kyaw staggered upright. Immediately Gunman One barked, “On knees. Hands on head!” An unseen third person bent over in the back of the SUV. He backed out, straightened up and closed the passenger door without turning around. He had on a dark blue shirt and a black baseball hat. Broad-shouldered, but well below Nolan’s 6’1” height. The man turned around and revealed himself to be an old Caucasian. He stepped toward his two prisoners, giving Nolan the eye as he did so.

Nolan didn’t wait for further instructions; he knelt down near Kyaw and put his hands on his head.
My cargo pants are ruined
ran through his numb mind as he stared at the tattered knees.

He looked up at his captor. Mirrored wraparounds shielded a creased, deeply tanned face offset by thin white hair. The boss growled through thick lips, “Get over there,” his hand indicating the hood of the Kia. Nolan stood up and complied, noting an American accent as he awaited further orders. The Old Man with Attitude spoke again, “OK, pal. Your driver already told us you were from the US embassy. So what the fuck are you doing out here?”

Nolan recognized that voice. That
face. “Rob? Robin Teller? It’s Nolan . . . Bob
Nolan.
Bangkok, 1985.
CIA
.”

“I don’t know you. I have no idea who Teller is. So drop the ‘best buds’ angle or you’ll be digging your own graves in one minute.”

Nolan was pleading for their lives now. “Rob, it’s
Bob Nolan
from the Counterintel Division in Bangkok. I worked with Ned Windham, Frank Coulter and you on the Double Llama Trading
clean-up in 1985
.
I delivered the passport you used to get out.”