He was led into a walk-in cooler, then dropped onto the floor with a blow to the back of the head.
One of the four Chinese men stood guard while Major Xi and two others got to work. They pulled out three massive rolling laundry bins full of soiled tablecloths and doused them with cooking oil, then set them alight, all under the stunned gaze of a dozen kitchen employees. While one of Xi’s men pushed the door to the nightclub open, Xi and the rest walked the bins through, shoving them hard through tables near the dance floor, catching several tablecloths on fire. One of the bins made it all the way to a wall curtain before it tipped over, and flames began licking up the curtain.
Men and women screamed, but their screams were drowned out by the loud music.
Only when a Chamroon Syndicate lieutenant in the VIP section pulled his Beretta and opened fire on one of the arsonists near the kitchen did others around the nightclub understand they were in danger.
The platinum blonde with the Middle-Eastern eyes hadn’t gotten into the action yet, nor had the black girl; Chamroon noticed this as he looked over the naked shoulder of the redhead from Poland. The Hungarian and the Namibian just drank champagne and looked on, sitting on the marble deck and dipping their hands into the shallow end of the pool while they did so. Nattapong almost called out to them angrily to demand their immediate attention, but the other four women were seeing to various portions of the Thai gangster’s body and doing it well, and frankly, Nattapong wasn’t sure where the other two would be able to push in.
So he decided he’d let the blonde and the African woman off the hook for now; they could drink and watch, and he’d save the best for last.
The sound of gunfire below did not make it up here to the fourth floor, but the eight guards all had earpieces in, so when someone called into the radio, “Shots fired,” Nattapong’s bodyguards immediately launched into action. They began hustling around the pool and the hot tub in the direction of their boss.
This happened every now and then at the Black Pearl; some gang member would get pissed off at a bartender or the boyfriend of a mistress, and he would fire a round into the floor or the ceiling, or occasionally into another patron. A gunshot three floors down wasn’t necessarily a massive threat to Nattapong Chamroon, but still they knew they had to surround their boss and get him somewhere secluded till the details of the situation could be worked out.
But as they raced into the orgy, a second call came over their headsets announcing that a fire had started, and to these men a fire in this building was worse than a gunshot three floors down, so they realized they had to get Nattapong the hell out of here now.
The bodyguards knew their boss would not want to be disturbed, but they knew their jobs, and they rushed around the pool, pulling young naked and nearly naked girls out of their way to get hands on their boss. They had just removed the Ukrainian and the Moldovan and started to shout over the spacey music and the moans of the Polish girl to tell Chamroon about the danger when the south-side double doors flew open, and a long shaft of light cut into the blue haze of the marble-tiled pool room.
The men and women turned to the disturbance on the far side of the pool and fountains, just as flashes of light came from the doorway.
Chamroon Syndicate security officers began dropping into the swimming pool, blood spurted over a headless statue, and marble tiles on the walls behind the orgy began cracking from bullet strikes and falling onto the floor.
Women screamed, Thai bodyguards returned fire, and Nattapong Chamroon struggled to yank up his pants, and then he grabbed the tall Ukrainian to use her for cover as he rushed to get behind something more solid.
Within seconds most of the women lay flat on the tile, trying to shield themselves with their hands, but the Hungarian blonde dove headfirst for cover around a marble column behind the hot tub, and the Russian with the auburn hair pulled a pool recliner onto its side and cowered behind it.
The young Moldovan with the bob haircut climbed to her feet and tried to run, but she was immediately caught in the cross fire. Her body spun and tumbled as she was hit by one of the Thai bodyguards’ Uzis, and she fell dead next to the swimming pool.
A guard grabbed Chamroon under the arm and pulled him back to the door to the changing area, on the far side of the hot tub at the opposite end of the room from the gunfire, but as he pulled on the door latch he found it was locked from the inside. Gunfire stitched the door, and the guard pushed Chamroon out of the way, but in the process the security man took a round to the small of his back and fell facedown, paralyzed instantly.
Nattapong Chamroon grabbed the man’s Uzi off the floor, then found cover behind one of the marble columns just four meters from the locked door. He saw the blond Hungarian girl had tucked herself behind the next column.
Nattapong reached around his column, and fired back in the direction of the attackers at the far side of the pool without looking.
Fifteen seconds after the door flew open, six of the eight armed Thai were dead or badly wounded, and the attacking force began bounding forward, closer and closer, using the columns, statues, and fountains as cover.
CHAPTER
FORTY-ONE
Three floors down, bedlam and panic erupted in the Black Pearl. Flames licked up the walls of the club, young men and women knocked into one another racing for the exits, and over a dozen Thai gangsters, some armed with pistols but many only with knives, were in desperate combat with a group of men who’d attacked simultaneously from both the front entrance and the kitchen.
When the Chamroon men began shooting, Major Xi called for five of his men waiting outside to come through the front door, not knowing if he was in combat with Russians or Thai. Xi and the three others who’d entered the kitchen to start the fire were still at the rear of the club, near the stage, and they shot across the open VIP section and through the door to the stairwell there. One of their number had been shot through the leg, but Xi and two others began racing up the back stairs, thinking it likely the Chamroon gangsters would try to ascend to get away from the gun battle.
A pair of Chamroon gangsters stood on the second-floor landing. These were just young men here at the Black Pearl to party tonight — not official security men guarding the top brass of the organization. Consequently, they were only armed with revolvers, and they just managed to graze one of the Chinese assassins on the side of his head before both Thai men fell dead, killed by Xi and his two associates.
After passing the fallen men, Xi felt confident he was heading in the right direction. He used his handheld walkie-talkie to order more of his men to find stairs or elevators and to get to the top of the building, and he called his man hiding out in the west-side alleyway, telling him to keep an eye on the fire escape there, because the raging fire at ground level was already filling the stairway with smoke, and this might force anyone upstairs to use the exterior to descend.
Court had made his way from the roof to an employee-only area on the fourth floor of the building, taking a different route down than the Russians who preceded him, obvious to Court because they had blowtorched a locked door that led to a main hallway.
Court continued through the employee-only area and into a large labyrinthine part of the spa, essentially an extended bathroom/locker room with moody orange lighting and a warren of showers, saunas, massage rooms, and storage areas for clothing and towels.
He made a careful turn towards the sound of cracking gunfire and found a changing area with marble tile floors and walls and teak benches. A door on the far side of this room had a sign on it that said Roman Baths, and Court could hear screams and gunfire on the other side.