Sea of Lies: An Espionage Thriller (78 page)

JOANIE LAM SHAO YIN
: Mrs. Bob Nolan, Singapore

MEI LING NOLAN
: Nolans’ daughter, real estate investment banker, Marin County, USA

BERTRAND (“BERT”) NOLAN
: Nolans’ son, University of Washington undergraduate student, Seattle, Washington State

DAMIEN BARLING
: Head of DEA, Singapore office

RICHARD (“DICK”) CONSTANTINE
: Chief of station, CIA, Singapore

GERALD (“JERRY”) FLYNN
: Head of security, CIA, Singapore

YU KAILI
: Deputy Head of Counter Intelligence, Minister of State Security ("MSS"), China; Head of station, MSS, Singapore

YI XIUBAO
: Secretary of the Central Commission for intelligence; Politburo Standing Committee member, Beijing

LIU ZHENCHANG
: Vice Minister, Ministry of State Security, Beijing

GAO XIANG
: Leader of China; General Secretary of the Communist Party of China, Beijing

REAR ADMIRAL ZHAO ZHIYUAN
: Head of People's Liberation Army Unit #61398; China's liaison to Iran on Operation Menander, Shanghai

LISA FINEGOLD
: Director, South Asia policy analyses, CIA Singapore

MELISSA SHOOK
: Head of MH370 task force, CIA, Singapore (temporary assignment)

COLONEL HASDRUBAL GILANI
: Operation Menander supervisor and Revolutionary Guard Special Forces officer, Beirut (temporary assignment)

DR. FARIBORZ FARROKHZAD
: Head of Iran’s nuclear weapons program, Tehran, Iran

SPECIALIST 4 TONY JOHNSON
: US Army Ranger, Forward Operating Base Chapman, Khost, Afghanistan; DEA "Wild Bunch" member in Rangoon; CIA interrogator

FRANK COULTER
: Ex-SEAL; former Associate Deputy Director of Covert Operations ("ADDCO"), CIA, Weaverville, CA

CHARLES T. BURNS
: Head of CIA Asia Pacific, Tokyo

GRAND AYATOLLAH ALI KHAMENEI
: Supreme leader of Iran, Tehran

ARSHAD "MORMOROTH" MAZDAKI
: Lead software programmer of Iran’s Operation Menander team, Beirut (temporary assignment)

GENERAL HKWANG
: Chief of staff, Burma Army

MAURY SHOENSTEIN
: General counsel, CIA, Singapore

REAR ADMIRAL JONATHAN "JON BOY" COCHRAN
: US Navy head of Sembawang base, Singapore

SHELDON HOWARD
: US Department of Energy, nuclear decontamination specialist, Fukushima, Japan; informally seconded to DEA, Rangoon

DING TAIPING
: Succeeded Liu Zhenchang as Vice Minister and head of the MSS on Tuesday, March 11

GRETCHEN DOYLE
: Chief of station, CIA, Colombo

WILBUR WOLLAM
: Ex-Australia Secret Intelligence Service ("ASIS") case officer, near Truscott Field, Western Australia

MICHAEL "BIG DUCK" MCGIRTY
: Best friend, fraternity brother and roommate of Bert Nolan at University of Washington, Seattle, Washington

BORIS VLADIMIROVICH USTINOV
: Driver and FSB bodyguard for Anatoly Chumakov

MARY JO LAVIGNE
: Head of compliance Asia, CIA, based in Tokyo

MARTIN POSNER
: Head of legal Asia, CIA, based in Tokyo

DAVID LEUNG
: Chief of station, CIA, Hong Kong

LT IAN "MACCA" MCCULLOUGH
: Australia Special Air Service ("SAS") Regiment, Tactical Assault Group leader, Perth, Western Australia

BARACK OBAMA
: 44th president of the United States, Washington, DC

To Jim Hawes,

Never out of the fight!

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks to my wife Lai Fan for her unstinting encouragement, some of it backhanded (“I knew you could write, but I didn’t know you could write fiction”); son Max for editorial input, particularly in respect to grammar and syntax (earning him the epithet “Comma drama queen”); and younger son Bart for helping me appreciate the potential appeal of the book to young adults.

Mentor, friend and American hero Jim Hawes deserves to have his life story told straight up and not in a fictionalized fashion. To Jim and the other warriors of the jungles and shadows, a heartfelt thanks for keeping the US and allies safe.

To my brother Chris, props for suggesting a visit to Rangoon in March 2014. If not for the keg of Myanmar Beer, Diane Shelton wouldn’t have seeded the idea of an MH370 Burma destination, and I wouldn’t have met “Sam” and “Travis” either.

Technical advice received with thanks from Fanton Chuck (aviation), Henry Dubois (satellites) and Marc Bradley (computer security and cyber warfare). The remaining errors are my own, however.

A fist bump to the first reader, too, Robert Hecker—although I did have to name a major character after his son to induce him to pick up the book.

Aneirin Flynn designed the book covers; laid out the book in electronic and print formats; and created my author website. This young man is a gifted painter and sculptor, and I’m grateful he’s lent his eye and skills to this more pedestrian cause.

Lael Stanczak edited the book not once, but twice, and helped in many other ways as well. Ivan Tan lent his eagle eyes to a review of the galleys.

Leah Wohl-Pollack of Invisible Ink Editing is a clever and capable copy editor.

Mother Jewell proved an eagle-eyed copy editor as well, despite working off a tiny laptop screen.

Thanks to Amali Fernando for expert legal and contract advice.

A big thanks to the readers of the
True Lies
blog on bradleywest.net. This is where I get the inspiration to research and fictionalize contemporary conspiracies.

Bradley West

June, 2016

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Explanations of conspiracies fascinate me, but only plausible ones. My fiction addresses various conspiracies or unsolved mysteries in what I hope is a believable fashion. Of course, I’m not offering a definitive solution to riddles such as the disappearance of flight MH370. Do I think hijackers landed MH370 in the Irrawaddy Delta? No. Do I think mechanical malfunction caused a pilotless MH370 to fly along a Doppler-defined arc only to disappear forever in the Southern Ocean? No. More than two years after the disappearance, there is still plenty to be learned about MH370’s fate. I hope
Sea of Lies
prompts others to ask the governments leading the search efforts—the US, Australia, France and Malaysia come to mind—to share all their findings with the public. Recall that “None of is smarter than all of us.”

Nevertheless, I started writing the
Lies
thriller series—the next installment,
Pack of Lies
,
is in the works—to entertain rather than persuade the world of the rightness of my interpretations of otherwise unsatisfactorily explained sequences of events or calamities. These books are works of fiction and not investigative journalism.

*  *  *  *  *

I’m originally from Ohio but was always interested in living and working abroad so I did my undergraduate degree at Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service. My first job after an MBA from London Business School lasted less than two months before my boss shipped me to Singapore for a four-month project to keep me away from head office (rather than undertake anything momentous in the Far East). That short-term project is now in its thirty-third year. Along the way, I’ve been fortunate enough to live mostly in Singapore, but also logged many years in Hong Kong with stops in Kuala Lumpur, Bangalore and Colombo.

Sea of Lies
is the culmination of nagging doubts dating back over thirty years. In 1985 a leading Asia newspaper alleged that my Singapore housemate was the Singapore CIA chief of station. This came as news to both of us. I have questioned appearances versus reality ever since. MH370’s disappearance spurred me to write this first novel. In 2014, I traveled to Burma three times to research
Sea of Lies
, meeting helpful people who became very loose models for several characters. I crafted the plot from these people’s and my speculations, public research and my Asia experiences since 1983.

I live in Singapore, where I’m a keen mountain biker, former baseball coach and avid fisherman. I enjoy red wine, dark chocolate and raucous friends around the table. If you’d like to connect, I’m on Twitter @TrueLiesBlog. I’m also on Facebook under Bradley West, Author and have an author website at
www.bradleywest.net
.

Bradley West

A FAVOR TO ASK: PLEASE LEAVE A REVIEW

If you have a few spare minutes, please post a
Sea of Lies
review on a retailer’s website, blog or reading collective. Honest reviews help readers choose from millions of similar books. It’s the principal way independent authors of e-books differentiate themselves from the pack. Even reviews that aren’t four or five stars establish credibility, particularly when the reviewer shares specific thoughts. Detailed reviews also help authors improve subsequent novels.

Amazon is the 800 pound gorilla in this space, and their ranking algorithms weight reviews 5x-8x more heavily if the person posting the review actually downloaded the book from Amazon. So if you are willing to write a review on Amazon, let me know and I’ll arrange for you to download the book via Amazon if you haven’t already done so.

You can visit
https://www.amazon.com/review/create-review?asin=B01F9PRR9M
for
Amazon
, and
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30126225-sea-of-lies
for
Goodreads
, to leave a review.

If you wish to post directly, my author website is
www.bradleywest.net
, my Facebook page
www.facebook.com/bradleywest.net
.

Thank you very much for reading
Sea of Lies,
and a double thank you if you find time to write a review.

Sign me up for the periodic
True Lies
blog posts from
www.bradleywest.net
, frequent giveaways and the
Insider’s Guide to Sea of Lies
featuring over 135 topics and 100 images spread over 88 pages that appeal to both the casual reader and hardcore conspiracist.

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TRUE LIES
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COPYRIGHT AND DISCLAIMER

Bradley West

www.bradleywest.net

Copyright © 2016 by Bradley Alan West

Singapore

Published in 2016 by Bradley Alan West

Cover art, layout and design: Aneirin Flynn

Editing: Lael Stanczak

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.

Disclaimer: On March 8, 2014, Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia to Beijing vanished from radar screens, and neither plane, nor people have been seen since. Sea of Lies addresses many real-life topics, starting with MH370's disappearance, but the characters and events depicted are fictitious and the reader should draw no factual inferences from the story that follows.

Sea of Lies / Bradley West – 1st ed. June 2016

ISBN: 978-981-09-8866-1 (paperback)

ISBN: 978-981-09-8968-2 (ebook)

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Road to Nowhere

Let’s Make a Deal

Help is on the Way

Club Avatar

The Sting

Back and Black

The Fourth Policy