“No,” Court replied. “Dai needs to get me there. I called him already and reported. He’s making travel arrangements now. I needed to show him that I’m straight with him, reporting in like the good soldier, ready to take this to the next stage. I couldn’t be certain he didn’t know anything about Po Toi, and if I’m going to Vietnam anyway, the last thing Fitzroy needs is for it to look like I’m running from the Chinese. That would be signing his death warrant.”
“You’re right,” Suzanne Brewer said. And then she added, “Truthfully, I’ve never even heard of these Wild Tigers.”
“Me neither. Vietnam drug smuggling isn’t your regular beat, either, I guess.”
Brewer seemed so overwhelmed with it all she just coughed out a laugh. He thought he heard ice rattling in a glass. She must have gotten control of her momentary lapse of authority, because her voice switched back into business mode.
“That said, I’ll reach out to Director Hanley and have him pull in intel about this gang discreetly, from Southeast Asia assets and other sources. I’ll be up to speed, and you’ll be up to speed, well before you get there.”
Court added, “I’ll warn you now: if you blanket Saigon with CIA officers looking for Fan, or stir up any friendly assets at all there, these Wild Tigers might get word of it, or Dai might get word of it, and it will screw everything up. I just need you to get me all the intel on this group you can, and let me work the op.”
Brewer answered back forcefully. “Look, you knew the stakes on this op from the beginning. You were our best chance of getting intel on Fan, but you aren’t the only fish in the sea. That’s not going to change just because the geographic focus of the hunt has moved.” She paused a moment, and then her tone softened. “I know we need to keep all our activity low profile, not only to protect the activity itself but also to protect you and your mission. I will do my best to do just that.”
Court knew that wasn’t a promise. In fact, it was nothing he could hang his hat on at all.
He let it go. He had to. It depressed him a little to realize he was becoming a real team player.
CHAPTER
NINETEEN
Con Ho Hoang Da wasn’t the biggest criminal organization in Vietnam, or even in Saigon. Their actual strength in terms of active members numbered less than 350, but their real might was not in their membership; it was in their influence.
The group had originated a decade earlier, when five former officers of the People’s Army of Vietnam, members of an elite infantry jungle reconnaissance unit called the Tigers, were recruited to be high-profile bodyguards for a Saigon street gangster. For two years the five intelligent and capable ex-officers watched their uneducated boss oversee a stable of bandits who conducted nothing more than petty theft and pickpocketing. There was no real bodyguarding to do, but the gangster enjoyed the image of the team of polished ex — army officers shadowing him wherever he went. After a year of this work the five ex-Tigers decided their boss was small-time, and the only thing they had to protect him from was getting hit by a scooter as he staggered drunk out of a bar at night, so together the men devised a plan to have their employer arrested so they could take over his organization. They saw the potential for earning real money working in the underworld, but they couldn’t do it with him.
They made deals with corrupt Saigon officials, and soon their leader was in Chi Hoa Prison, serving sixteen years for his crimes.
The five former bodyguards immediately expanded the organization from overseeing pickpocketing and snatch-and-grab petty theft to extortion, counterfeiting, and drug distribution.
The former Tigers infantry officers became the head of the Wild Tigers, Con Ho Hoang Da, and they trafficked heroin from the nearby Golden Triangle of Myanmar, Laos, and Thailand into Hong Kong and Singapore, produced and smuggled fake designer goods internationally, and illegally transported workers and immigrants across the border of Cambodia and into Thailand from Vietnam.
From the beginning they received protection from members of the local government, due to payoffs to police and party officials, and their ranks swelled as they sucked in other poorly organized and less disciplined gangs. As they grew from a few dozen to a few hundred members, the national government in Hanoi learned of their activity, and at first they reacted forcefully. But larger and larger payoffs, as well as the national government’s realization that this was a criminal organization that would play ball with Hanoi on illegal international projects that helped the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, only strengthened the organization.
Chinese Triad groups operating in Vietnam were larger and more powerful on the streets, but when it came to raw influence, the Wild Tigers had become real players in the Southeast Asian underworld.
But all of this was in flux now. New leadership in the Ministry of Public Security in Hanoi had cracked down on all criminal organizations in the nation, including the Wild Tigers, and now of the original five leaders, one had been killed in a shoot-out with Triads in a restaurant in Saigon, a second was imprisoned in Cambodia, and two more had been detained in Hanoi.
One original member retained control of the organization. Tu Van Duc, a former army captain, now ran the Wild Tigers. The business hub of the organization was a medium-sized building on Nguyen Van Dau, in Saigon’s Binh Thanh District, less than a mile from Tan Son Nhat International Airport. The building was lightly guarded by a few men with pistols under their shirts and AKs, shotguns, and a single RPK light automatic machine gun all stowed in lockers and under desks near the entrance. A pair of hired and armed uniformed security, off-duty local cops, manned the guardhouse in the front of the building, and another pair operated the gatehouse at the parking garage entrance in the back.
The reason for the relatively lax security of the Wild Tigers was that they depended on the local government ties that still kept them operating more or less in the clear, despite Hanoi’s pressure. They knew the police here wouldn’t raid them, and even though there were larger Chinese gangs in the city, those gangs held on to their niches in the underworld — gun running, prostitution, meth — and they left the Wild Tigers alone, lest they be wiped off the playing field here in Vietnam.
But the Wild Tigers had other facilities and safe houses in the country, and none was more secure than a French Colonial villa on a farm ninety minutes west of the city, near the Cambodian border. The actual security setup at the villa there was just a few armed guards with dogs, but despite the perfunctory security measures, the Wild Tigers had a working relationship with the commander of the nearby military garrison, and it would only take one call by Tu Van Duc or any of his senior membership to bring out uniformed military troops to protect the compound.
Tu Van Duc was only forty-three, but he’d become a millionaire many times over. Since he’d received word about the attack on his ship by the three unknown Westerners, “Captain Tu” had lived in the French Colonial villa outside of town and beefed up his bodyguard force, but he still worked at the Wild Tigers building near the airport, so each day began with an early-morning commute to Saigon. This morning he arrived at the building in the back of his BMW 7 Series sedan, along with two armed bodyguards and a pair of police motorcycle “courtesy escorts” from the Ho Chi Minh City police department.
The sedan slowed in front of the steel barrier gates at the entrance to the underground parking garage at the rear of the facility, but only for an instant, because a uniformed guard in the rear gatehouse pressed a button and the cantilevered gate arm rose to let the vehicle pass.