The Brittle Limit, a Novel (25 page)

*******

Jeremy was furious. He and Hakk had made a
deal. A deal! Now he’d been sent upriver with a bomb. He sat on a
golden chair and fumed, muttering about teaching Hakk a lesson.

“I’ve got to get the statues out of here,”
Jeremy said to himself. He had worked so hard, had sacrificed for
this. He would not be thwarted by some two-bit local gangster.

From the beach, Severine and Frank watched
him. “What’s wrong with your friend there?” Frank asked.

“His plan has gone awry. He doesn’t like it
when things don’t go his way.”

“Well, our boys are gonna try to disarm the
bomb. In the meantime, we need to get everyone out of here, in case
they don’t.”

“How? We won’t all fit in those canoes and
even the fishing boat.”

“Our buddy Bob has it all figure out.” Frank
said. “Tell the lady your plan.”

“The lights, the power here, are from a
submarine we brought upriver about thirty years ago now. It’s about
out of juice…”

“And so are we…” Frank added helpfully.

“…So we’re gonna hop in and take a ride,
maybe head into town, to see the sights. Figured now’s as good a
time as any,” he added, nodding at the bomb, surrounded now by all
the men, one of them on his knees trying to read the timer.

Frank clapped his hands together. “All right.
Best let everyone know we’re outta here. How’s the bomb disposal
going Harry?”

Harry looked up. He’d pulled off a metal
plate and was staring at an imposing tangle of wires, red and green
and blue. In his hand he held a pair of metal clippers, his bent
arthritic hands shaking as they gripped the yellow rubber
handles.

“It’s a doozy!” He shook the tool in the air.
Ed, next to him, grabbed the extended clippers and said, “Let me
try. You don’t know what you’re doing anyway.” The two men set to
bickering.

“Here she is.” Bob said, looking upriver.
Severine followed his gaze.

Around the bend, a long black line appeared
on the river. Severine had never seen a submarine up close. Samnang
hung by her side, frightened of the metal creature that neared the
beach.

The submarine creaked as it approached the
beach from up river. Severine watched, fascinated as the sub came
into better view. It was actually dark grey, not black. It slowed
and with a quiet whirring sound it stopped in the deepest part of
the canal. A metal portal on top flipped open. Stuart popped his
head out of the portal.

“Alright, I got her on stand-by. Let’s go
folks! I don’t know how much juice this old tin can has got left in
her!”

The people on the beach walked to the river’s
edge, where Frank ferried them in the canoe to the waiting
submarine. One by one, they climbed onto the deck of the old
submarine. The fellows with canes left the bomb reluctantly, Ed
glancing back at his handiwork. The clock continued to count
down.

Once on the submarine, the men tap-tapped
their way along the deck. Harry gave the boat a sharp jab with his
cane.

“Is this thing solid?”

Bob grinned. “We better hope so!”

By now, only one person remained on the beach
watching all this departure activity. Jeremy paced along the shore,
staring first at the field of gold figures then back at the
submarine.

“I’m not leaving this. It’s millions of
dollars of gold. I’ll load this into the fishing boat. Or I’ll go
out the other way.”

Severine glanced back at him. She turned to
Frank, “Should we force him to leave?”

Frank shrugged. “He’s a grown man, he can do
what he likes.” Frank glanced at his watch. “And if he stays here,
by my calculations,” he nodded at the bomb, “He’s got about an hour
left in which to do that.”

Severine glanced back once more and then
shepherded Samnang down into the submarine’s hold.

“Is that everybody?” Bob yelled down into the
tin can about to be their home for the next several hours.

Severine looked up, as the round portal door
closed and the hatch was sealed. She felt her chest tighten.

Frank patted her arm. “This is gonna be a
wild ride, little lady. Hang on.”

Bob yelled out to his first officer, the
checkers-playing cane-wielding Ed.

“Full speed ahead. We’re on the move.”

Outside, Jeremy stood amidst the gold
statues, watched the submarine move away down the canal. He started
to drag the closest gold statue in the direction of the beach,
where the bomb counted time in fleeting seconds.

Chapter 31

The helicopter flew low along the shoreline,
the thup thup thup of its rotor muted by the crashing surf. An
approaching typhoon had kicked up the seas of the Gulf of Thailand
and spray spattered the cockpit windows. The winds would only
increase. In this rough weather, the chopper had a short timeframe
to be out safely. Once the heavy winds hit, it would be forced to
ground.

The helicopter held two occupants: The young
pilot that had ferried Andrew home from Mondulkiri and a woman
beside him, who stared hard at a map as if her life depended on it.
Flint, her eyes squinting, her mouth in a worried frown, looked out
into the night.

She’d flown from Dulles to Singapore while
Andrew had been in Mondulkiri, once her team had confirmed Mey Hakk
as the source of the Ch’kai email. She’d also heard some disturbing
rumors about an Embassy attaché gone missing. She’d flown onward to
Phnom Penh when Andrew had insisted on chasing Hakk down on his
own. Now she was doing her best to track her man.

In her hand she held what looked like a smart
phone. It was a secure tracking device, picking up a coded signal
from a chip in Andrew’s body, implanted four years ago, unbeknownst
to him, during a routine surgery, before he went deep undercover.
For each agent, the chip was placed in a different location, based
on body type, gender, and height. Flint never told her agents when
she had them implanted or where the device was. Of course, the
Agency didn’t tell their agents many things. For their own
protection.

The display showed latitude and longitude
coordinates. A digital compass changed slightly every few seconds.
They ha missed Andrew on the beach by an hour. Since then he’d been
drifting southwest with the current and the wind. If he’d had a
motor, it had long since died. He was under the power of the
elements. Which were about to get nasty.

Flint spoke into her headset to the pilot as
they flew swiftly along the shoreline.

“He’s a few miles out, south, southwest,
based on this calculation. Can you make it?”

“Sure can.”

The helicopter veered sharply away from the
shoreline and headed out over the Gulf of Thailand. It traveled
over open water, a quarter mile above the sea, to avoid the mist
kicked up by the heaving whitecaps.

There were almost no boats out, as fishermen,
men who live and die by the sea, had called it a day, with the
typhoon predicted to hold sustained winds of up to 150 mph. It was
not a time to be on the water.

Flint calculated that Andrew had been out
there for 9 hours. She felt both guilt and anxiety. She’d put him
in this position. She should have done better due diligence on this
entire operation.

She watched the tracking device: It showed
Andrew about three miles off shore in the Gulf of Thailand.

She looked out the window at the choppy sea
below them. Angry waves grew bigger. She hoped wherever Andrew was,
he was afloat. And alive.

*******

Andrew had slept deeply. Bound and tied, he’d
tried to stay awake but the fatigue and rocking waves had lulled
him to sleep. When he woke, he was soaking wet and freezing, in
three inches of water that had seeped into the hole in the hull.
Andrew wondered how it was possible to be cold in an equatorial
climate. But he was.

He was also stiff from lying in the same
position for hours. Heang had tied him underneath the front and
back seat slats, as if he were to be roasted on a spit. As best he
could, Andrew stretched, his hips achy, his calves cramped.

Stretched out to full length, Andrew’s legs
reached to the end of the dinghy. His bare feet, pointed, reached
the hole through which seawater was splashing.

He poked his big toe into the drilled hole,
wedging himself into a secure position. The seepage stopped. Andrew
sighed. Well, that’s one problem solved. He’d bought himself time.
Not a lot, not with the storm. But some time.

He started working on the bindings on his
wrists.

*******

The weather grew worse farther out to sea.
Rain plastered the windows. Heavy winds stirred the already
frenzied sea. It was nearly impossible to see, even with the
spotlight shining down from the helicopter.

Flint peered out of the window at the
churning sea but could discern nothing in the dark. The pilot was
the first to see the boat.

“There!”

The pilot sighted the boat about a hundred
off. The helo drew closer and Flint pressed her nose against the
glass. Andrew was one of her best. She didn’t want to lose him.

Through the mist, she could see the white
bobbing dinghy, drifting with the current. It was half-full of
water and would soon sink.

Most importantly, she could see Andrew wasn’t
in it. She checked her tracker, which she’d forgotten once they’d
spotted the boat. Sure enough, Andrew was on the move.

“It’s too rough now, we have to turn back,”
the pilot said, as he turned the helicopter back toward shore.

Flint swore under her breath and nodded. She
looked at her tracker. He was out there, somewhere.

Chapter 32

A brash Cambodian fisherman, who believed his
boat unsinkable, steered his fishing boat through the night and
surging seas of the Gulf of Thailand. Over many beers, on evenings
in Sihanoukville bars, he would brag to his fisherman friends that
there was no storm his boat could not vanquish. So far he had been
right.

It wasn’t much to look at, a wooden junk like
many others. But it was solid and tended to with love. It had been
his father’s boat before him.

The fisherman had one net still out and then
he would call it a day. As he pulled the net in, which was filled
to his delight with flapping fish churned up from the storm, he
spotted in the water near the boat, lit from the spotlight on his
net, white limbs slicing through the waves. He thought it was an
albino octopus caught in the maelstrom. Then he saw a man’s head
bob up between waves, and after a few moments, one of the white
arms grabbed onto the boat’s edge, the hand gripping the wooden
railing. The whole man followed the hand, as the man pulled himself
up on to the boat. He stood, naked, staring at the fisherman. He
was white as a bone and breathing hard.

“Help me.” The man slumped against the side
of the boat, exhausted.

The fisherman had seen many American movies
and he was especially fond of Meryl Streep films. His English was
from Hollywood films bought for pennies at the local market.

“Yes. Yes.” The fisherman left his net and
the flapping fish hoping to return to the sea. He gave Andrew water
from his own bottle then rummaged inside the small cabin for an old
woven blanket. Some calm nights he slept on the open water, under
the sky. The night air always carried a chill that permeated the
bones.

As he wrapped Andrew in the rough blanket, he
saw the red marks on Andrew’s wrists and ankles. They were not
deep, rope burns only, and would be fine from the salt water. But a
man lost at sea for any amount of time is a man at risk of dying,
from exposure, dehydration, and hypothermia.

“Here. Drink. More.” Andrew drank again
deeply and then proceeded to throw up much of what he had
swallowed.

“Good, good.” The fisherman said, “Salt
water. Good on outside, bad on inside.” He gave the bottle again to
Andrew. “Drink. Again.”

As Andrew drank the water, wiped his mouth,
the fisherman started his engine.

“How far are we from shore?”

“Far. You strong swimmer. But not that
strong. Where is boat?”

Andrew leaned his head back against the wood.
“By now, at the bottom of the sea.” The fisherman, pondering this,
felt proud of his small but seaworthy craft. He patted the boat’s
side.

The winds continued to pick up and a gust
knocked the boat hard. Andrew caught himself, his hand reaching for
an edge. The fisherman simply adjusted his stance. His sea legs
were on auto-pilot.

Andrew wrapped the blanket around himself
tighter. “I need to get to shore. To Cambodia. Can you take me
there?”

“Yes, yes. We go now. I take you.” The
fisherman studied his unexpected passenger. “Kampot?” Most tourists
wanted to go to Kampot.

“No. Anywhere but Kampot.” Kampot was the
site from which he had been launched.

“OK. I take you Sihanoukville. Very fun. Many
parties. Much drinking.” The fisherman opened the engine and the
boat picked up speed. He pointed at the heavy night skies.

“Now, the storm comes.”

Andrew looked out into the night. “Yes. It
does.”

Chapter 33

Andrew stood on the edge of the clearing,
leaning against a thick tree. The rain pelted down in the thin
morning light, pushing its way through the jungle canopy and
pattering on the dense leaves. The sun, thwarted by the thick low
clouds of the fast-moving storm, was nowhere to be seen. It would
be a dark day.

The camp in front of Andrew consisted of five
wood-framed huts with thatched roofs and walls. Tall straight trees
surrounding the clearing swayed in the heavy wind. Light shone from
the largest hut. Several men stood under a large tree smoking. In a
rustic bamboo stable by the edge of the forest near Andrew, animals
shifted about in the darkness, waiting to be fed.

Andrew counted ten motorcycles. And the
helicopter he’d passed a quarter mile back could hold one person,
maybe two.