‘Six men to cover the insanity inside,’ Spears mumbled as they followed Campon out of the car to where he stood like a ramrod, waiting for his entourage to get in position. He was over six feet tall, making him an easy target, and with the medals on his chest there was no way to miss him.
Campon was hotter than boiling water. The president was browbeating everyone in Congress to approve a $50 million appropriation to back Campon’s planned overthrow of the leftist government that had deposed him. Campon was biding his time, lobbying influential friends with phone calls by day, raising hell every night, while his army, or what was left of it, was cooling its heels across the border in a neighboring country. ‘To throw off his enemies, the Feds had leaked lies to the press: that the general was supposed to be in the Bahamas; that he had moved on to Canada; that he was hiding out n a ranch in the Far West.
At times Spears and Hedritch felt like Campon’s pimps, rounding up women, checking their backgrounds, paying for his sex and for secrecy. But this behavior, appearing in public this way, was a violation of all the rules.
So, what else was new? Hedritch ordered two of his men to go in ahead and work the stage at the back of the dance floor. The other two he sent to the balcony. Spears looked around the shopping center, checking the rooftops, while Hedritch checked out the line. Hell, thought Spears, if they want to get him, they’re going to get him. But they were sure they had not been followed, and that reduced the odds a little. They moved to the door.
‘Names?’ asked the king of the portals.
‘Campon,’ the general said.
The doorman’s finger ran down the list and stopped. ‘Yes, sir, General,’ he said, unsnapping the red cord.
Spears looked at Hedritch with panic as the entourage moved into the club.
‘Did he make a reservation?’ Hedritch asked incredulously.
‘Yes, sir, yesterday,’ the doorman answered.
‘Shit!’ he snapped as they rushed after the general. They caught up with him as Campon was about to enter the main room, a sprawling semicircle of tables crowding up to the dance floor.
‘General, at least go upstairs, please,’ pleaded Hedritch. ‘You can see better from up there and we can cruise the room a lot easier.’
‘The action’s down here,’ Campon answered curtly, following his four beefy men into the club. Spears and Hedritch trotted along behind hum, looking frantically, futilely, around the club as the deposed dictator walked to the edge of the dance floor where he stood watching the madness. He was a stationary target.
‘Shit city,’ Spears yelled in Hedritch’s ear, ‘keep your head on a swivel.’
The general’s gaze swept the dance floor, stopping once on a woman dressed like a giraffe with her bosom swelling over the top of her striped costume. Beyond her, on the far side of the floor, the yellow stork jerked weirdly through the crowd, blurred by the flashing lights. It raised its yellow-feathered wings and turned in a slow circle, bobbing to the beat of the music. Campon laughed and applauded the stork, although it was hard to see it because of the lights flashing in his face.
The stork’s alert eyes checked the general’s entourage, the two men in the balcony, the two men behind it on the stage, as it turned slowly, making a 360-degree survey of the club. The stork was so bizarre, so visible, the security men ignored it.
Campon clapped his hands again and chuckled gleefully at the spectacle. It was the last sound he ever uttered.
Well concealed amid the feathered wings attached to its arms, the stork held a silenced mini.-Uzi. Only a foot long and weighing six pounds, the submachine gun held a thirty-two-round clip and was equipped with a plastic cup to catch the casings. The stork was an expert. It squeezed off three three-round bursts, watching in the slow-motion flashes of the strobes as the rounds splattered into their target. Campon’s head jerked forward as the first three rounds exploded in his chest; his arms swung out in front of him and then he arched backward as two more rounds ripped into his head. The third struck a waiter behind him in the spine and took down two of the bodyguards.
Spears and Hedritch were caught totally by surprise as Campon seemed suddenly to have a seizure. The music continued to thunder. One of the bodyguards spun around and fell against Hedritch.
Oh my God, it’s happening! Hedritch thought.
The stork swung its feathered arms in a slow arc and sent another burst into the crowd. A young woman and her date spun around as the bullets ripped them. She screamed. Somebody else joined the scream. Nobody was aware yet of what was happening Then suddenly the woman yelled, ‘I’m shot!’
Pandemonium.
The second attack created more confusion in the room.
The security men had no idea where the shots were coming from. They saw the young couple fifty feet away go down. The girl started screaming. Campon was on the floor on his back staring up into the darkness above. Guns appeared in the security men’s hands. Hedritch dropped over Campon, felt his throat for a pulse. The screams swept the room like a hurricane blowing through. There was a rush for the door. A table went down. Glasses broke. Panic seemed to explode like a bomb in the room.
The men on the stage jumped into the crowd and raced toward the general’s group. In the balcony the other two men stared down at the figure of the general. In the confusion nobody could tell where the shots came from.
The stork sat down on the stage, pulled off the stilts and whirled behind one of the big speakers. It snapped the back open, dropped stilts and gun into the speaker casing and snapped it shut, then dashed through a nearby fire door. It led to a catacomb of tunnels below the dance floor. As the stork bolted down the stairs, it pulled off the wig and stripped off the wings. It ran to a small door that led to a room full of electrical equipment. The stork jumped inside, still undressing. It peeled off the yellow body stocking, grabbed a garbage bag secreted behind an electrical panel and began stuffing the feathers into it. In seconds the stork was transformed into a young man in jeans and a blue T-shirt. He took a towel soaked in cold cream from the garbage bag and wiped his face clean. Then he rushed down the labyrinth of corridors and back up another set of stairs. When he reached the top, he opened the door a crack and looked into the kitchen. The employees were crowded at the end of the large stainless steel room, peering into the main room.
‘My God,’ one of the cooks said, ‘somebody’s been shot!’
The assassin slipped into the kitchen, stuffed the garbage bag into a large can, slipped a dolly under it and wheeled it out the back door. The chaos had not spread outside yet. He shoved the garbage can among a dozen others, took a quick look at his watch, and walked off into the darkness.
Three and a half minutes. Not bad.
THE HIT
The big, stocky black guy turned off Suriwong Road and headed through Patpong toward Tombstone. At nightfall the city of Bangkok was transformed, as if by some perverse genie, from a frantic, crowded, noisy business hub into a blazing neon jungle. Topless tigresses stalked the jungle, performing in nightclubs, whorehouses, massage parlors and storefronts. Promising everything and delivering a great deal of what it promised, the frenetic section known as Patpong exemplified the attitude, catering, in a bizarre distortion of American rowdiness, to European and U.S. tourists. Patpong was for the farang, the foreigners, who flocked to the area every night seeking out the legendary sexy naughtiness of Bangkok as part of their ‘Thailand experience.’