Pattaya 247 by Christopher G. Moore

Author:Christopher G. Moore
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: thailand, asia, bangkok, christopher g moore, vincent calvino, pattaya 247
Publisher: HeavenLakePress

TWENTY-FIVE

COLONEL PRATT SAT on a blanket spread on the sand, playing the tenor sax. The sea lapped at the shore a few feet away. A white spume bubbled in the wake. The water was close enough to smell the brine. The colonel lowered his tenor sax, drew the sea into his lungs and expelled the air all at once as he brought the sax back to his lips; he poured the sea mist into his music. He remembered this deserted beach from the old days when Pattaya was a fishing village. Pattaya was fifty kilometers away. In the sixties Pattaya didn’t qualify as a city. It was another village with a thin string of fluorescent lights. By the time of the R&R decade starting in the mid-sixties, Pattaya Beach Road and Pattaya 2 Road had transformed the fishing village with strips of neon. And the fishermen were replaced by men with a past that mostly didn’t include a boat. Not everything from the old days had changed. What remained constant was the presence of powerful men whose orders summoned up a mixture of envy and fear. The colonel never underestimated such dark influences standing like a cobra in the tall grass ready to strike a lethal blow.

He played the sax as if to cast away the shadow that fell across his soul. Veera’s shadow which, like that of all strong-men, ensured those within his power lived in fear. There were no oaths sworn or loyalty pledged except to him. Justice and right were his to decide. Forces in Bangkok had decided Veera’s time had to end. They suspected but lacked sufficient evidence to establish a clear connection with terrorists in the south. There was a wisp of smoke. That was enough to signal that the time had arrived to remove Veera. But arresting Veera would not be an easy battle. The strongman continued to have a strong political base. He was fortunate to live in a world squarely divided between those who lived by instinct and those who appealed to the instincts in others. To react was to survive; to reflect was to survive with wisdom.

Colonel Pratt sensed, though, that much of the world had entered an age of reaction and survival. When he stepped back, what Colonel Pratt had were two fragments of a large puzzle. Veera, the long-time provincial godfather, and intelligence reports suggesting that a terrorist named Hasam had slipped into the province months ago. Could this have happened without Veera’s knowledge and consent? Terrorists like Hasam wanted a return to the world of the clan and tribe, and the strongman. If he succeeded, on the surface their victory was one for all the Veeras. The colonel wondered if Veera was wise enough to understand what lay beneath the surface. Men like Hasam possessed a ruthless, single-minded vision. They had shown they possessed a certainty of mission: finding and destroying soft targets. Would Veera have been so blinded by money that he’d fail to grasp that Hasam

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