The Burma Legacy Read online

  Contents

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Geoffrey Archer

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Fifty-five years after the end of World War Two, Tetsuo Kamata is a wealthy businessman, but he was once an interrogator in a Japanese Prisoner of War camp. One of his victims, Peregrine Harrison, recognizes him. Harrison never got over his maltreatment at Kamata’s hands and has dreamed of killing him ever since. Now he has his chance.

  But if Kamata dies, so do the livelihoods of hundreds of car factory workers. MI6 officer Sam Packer is diverted from his hunt for an ex-SAS drug trader in Thailand and given the order to stop Harrison. The search takes him deep into Harrison’s past and to the poppy fields of the Golden Triangle. To save Kamata from execution Packer must penetrate an alien and hostile world, a quest which brings him face to face with the very drug lords who have sworn to kill him.

  About the Author

  Geoffrey Archer’s gripping thrillers are inspired by a deep knowledge of international intrigue gathered during more than 25 years of reporting for ITV’s News at Ten. The Burma Legacy is the third novel featuring MI6 agent Sam Packer, who first appeared in Fire Hawk and The Lucifer Network. It follows his other international bestsellers: Java Spider, Scorpion Trail, Eagle Trap, Shadow Hunter and Sky Dancer.

  ALSO BY GEOFFREY ARCHER

  Sky Dancer

  Shadow Hunter

  Eagle Trap

  Scorpion Trail

  Java Spider

  Fire Hawk

  The Lucifer Network

  Dark Angel

  THE BURMA LEGACY

  Geoffrey Archer

  To Eva, Alison and James.

  Acknowledgements

  I am indebted to several authors whose books helped me to understand present day Myanmar and the Burma of the past.

  Aung San Suu Kyi’s Letters from Burma, Rory Maclean’s Under the Dragon, and Shelby Tucker’s Among Insurgents provided potent illustrations of life under military rule in the 1990s.

  Richard Rhodes James’ Chindit, Philip Stibbe’s Return Via Rangoon, George Macdonald Fraser’s Quartered Safe Out Here, Eric Lomax’s The Railway Man and Theodore F. Cook’s Japan at War – An Oral History all, in their different ways, revealed the suffering of those who fought the Second World War in Burma.

  I also owe a debt of gratitude to the Burma Star Association and to Arthur Titherington for sharing his painful memories of being a prisoner of the Japanese. Sincere thanks too to Martin Smith for his invaluable advice and assistance prior to my research visit to Myanmar.

  One

  The Andaman Sea, Thailand

  Thursday, 30 December 1999

  A gleaming motor cruiser carved a white scar across the vivid blue sea, its throttles wide open. The man and woman on the bridge gripped the grab-handles as it hammered through the curling wake of a white-hulled ferry on passage from Phuket to the paradise islands of Phi-Phi. Scanning the ship’s decks through binoculars they saw passengers watching them with envy. But the image the tourists had of them – a relaxed, well-off couple enjoying a vacation in the privacy of their own boat – was a lie. This was no pleasure cruise.

  The real name of the bare-chested man at the wheel was Sam Packer, but his business card described him as Stephen Maxwell, a Singapore-based investment adviser. In reality he worked for British Intelligence. Beside him, wearing a yellow bikini, was Inspector Midge Adams – cover name Beth – a narcotics officer with the Australian Federal Police. They’d met for the first time that morning and were still wary of each other.

  After a day of searching, they’d finally located their quarry, but the man they were after was an hour away from them. Fearing he might move on before they had the chance to catch up, they were squeezing every ounce of speed from their craft.

  Their target was a man called Jimmy Squires, a former sergeant in the SAS, who’d turned to narcotics trading after leaving the Queen’s employ. It was the Australians who were leading the operation to catch him – the market he served was in their backyard, the druggie hangouts of Sydney and Melbourne. MI6’s offer to help put Squires out of business was in part the returning of a favour owed to the Australian Federal Police, but it was also to do with national pride. The SAS, the jewel in the UK’s military crown, had a reputation to maintain. If one of its dogs went feral, the beast had to be culled.

  Packer had been scrambled to Phuket that morning. Only when he landed in Thailand had he discovered the ‘Inspector Adams’ he was to work with was a female. And despite her petite shape, attractive blond hair and dark brown eyes, he hadn’t welcomed the arrangement. The last time he’d worked closely with a woman, she’d nearly got him killed.

  The Australians lacked the evidence they needed to put Jimmy Squires behind bars. The purpose of this operation was to find some. Cash was the key. If they could trace its passage from the addicts back to the supplier, Midge Adams would have her case. The usually effective, electronic systems for money tracking had failed to come up with the goods, so now they were trying the direct approach. Hoping to trick Squires into telling them where he banked his loot.

  The scheme was entirely Midge Adams’ idea. Packer considered it dangerously naïve and almost bound to fail. In the few hours he’d spent with her, he’d been troubled by the intensity with which she talked about the drug-runner. He suspected a personal motive behind her need to nail the man. And when self-interest intruded in a case, mistakes tended to follow.

  The Andaman Sea shimmered in the relentless December sunlight. A bimini over the bridge protected them from its afternoon heat. The area they were powering through was a playground of turquoise waters and white sand beaches, which drew millions of tourists a year escaping from cold northern winters.

  Packer altered course a few degrees to avoid a long-tail skiff which was slicing through the waters towards them, its slender lines at odds with the lumpy V-8 engine thundering away on its steering pole. The Thai boatman had two Europeans as fares. He nursed his craft through the waves, helming it towards some dream island, with the panache of a gondolier.

  ‘You married, Steve?’ Midge had spoken little in the last hour. Her accent was broad and she eyed him from behind dark glasses. Steve. From the moment they’d met she’d been meticulous about using cover names.

  ‘No, Beth. I’m not.’

  ‘Partner? Live with someone?’

  He half smiled. ‘Getting personal all of a sudden …’

  ‘Always like to know the score.’

  ‘Well, for the record, I have a girlfriend back in London.’

  She stared ahead again. ‘But you’re living in Singapore.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Tricky. Wh
at’s her name?’

  ‘Julie.’

  ‘Ever see each other?’

  ‘Not often enough.’

  A few days ago Julie had threatened to give up on him unless he relocated to London soon.

  ‘Offering to fill the gap?’ he asked.

  ‘Tcchh!’ She turned away, opened a bottle of sun cream and started applying it to her shoulders.

  ‘What about you?’

  ‘I live with someone in Sydney.’ It was a woman she rented a room to, but she wasn’t going to tell him that.

  ‘Can I help?’ He pointed at the bottle.

  ‘No thanks.’ She gave him an old-fashioned look. ‘And, just for the record – and since my assessment of the accommodation arrangements on this little ship tells me we’ll be sharing a bed tonight – when I work with guys it’s strictly no touching. Under any circumstances. Okay?’

  ‘Just trying to be helpful.’

  ‘Yeah, well, as my old granny used to say, give a man an inch and he’ll stick the rest in.’

  Sam smiled. ‘Some granny.’

  ‘Opened beer bottles with her teeth.’

  He laughed. ‘That you’re making up.’

  Midge pulled a tense smile. It was the first one he’d seen on her. And it was an improvement.

  Sam Packer’s knowledge of the Golden Triangle heroin trade had been superficial until this morning – his normal focus being the profits from arms, not drugs. Midge had briskly filled him in on the ethnic-Chinese Wa tribes who controlled the Shan border area of Myanmar – formerly Burma – shipping heroin through China and Thailand to the wider world. And in particular she’d told him about a man called Yang Lai whose distribution network they suspected Jimmy Squires was attached to. Suspected. That was the problem with the Australians’ case. They had nothing strong enough to convince a jury.

  The event a couple of days ago which had triggered this attempt at entrapment was the opening of a small suitcase containing wads of cash. The yacht broker in Phuket, who’d received the $280,000 in payment for a luxury powerboat, had tipped off Thai Customs and they’d called the Royal Thai Police money laundering squad. The cash itself had proved clean, but when the name of the boat purchaser – Vincent Gallagher – was fed into a database at the Narcotics Suppression Bureau, it had come up as a pseudonym used by Jimmy Squires.

  The sun disappeared behind a line of cloud, turning the sea slate-grey. As they raced towards the main island of Phuket, the water had become less open. Dark humps dotted the surface now, limestone outcrops jutting from the water like thumbs, and longer, flatter islands of finely ground coral where night fishermen had bamboo huts under the coconut palms for sleeping in during the day.

  ‘Tell me,’ Sam probed, ‘the name Midge – is that on your birth certificate?’

  ‘No way. And I never let on what is.’

  ‘So how come you’re called that?’

  ‘Because when I was little, I was small for my age. And nasty with it. Anybody got in my way, I bit them.’

  ‘Charming …’ He pursed his lips. ‘Grown out of the habit I hope.’

  ‘Don’t bank on it.’

  She leaned over the chart. There was a warm, oily smell to her, which Packer found irritatingly arousing.

  ‘Where are we?’

  He touched a finger to the paper.

  ‘This the fastest we can go?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘How fast’s Jimmy’s boat?’

  ‘No idea.’

  They’d picked up the chartered craft from the same marina Squires had motored from the day before. Midge had confessed that although she spent a lot of time in water back home, being on top of it was alien to her. Sam had given her some basic instruction in crewing.

  She leaned back in the white leather seat beside him, placing her feet on the rail. Nice feet, Sam noticed. Slender and straight-toed.

  ‘Your boss wasn’t lying when he said you liked boats,’ she commented. ‘I’ve been watching you.’

  ‘Wanting to be sure you were in safe hands?’ He glanced sideways at her and raised an eyebrow.

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘Sailing’s my thing, not power.’

  ‘You own a yacht?’

  ‘Used to have a fifty per cent share. But I had to sell it. Work. You know …’

  ‘Never leaves you time for the things you want to do. Would you do more of it, if you could? Big time cruising, that sort of thing.’

  ‘Like a shot.’

  ‘What has to happen to make it more than a dream?’

  ‘Enough money, enough time and the right woman to crew for me.’

  ‘Julie …?’

  Sam shrugged, not wanting to get into that again. ‘Tell me about Jimmy Squires. Everything you haven’t already told me.’

  She looked away, staring at the horizon. ‘Oh, he’s straight out of a casebook. A boy who never knew his father. Brought up in an orphanage, then by foster parents. A right tearaway when he was a teenager. The file said he created a one-man juvenile crime wave in his home town.’

  ‘Where was that?’ The background file Packer’s own employer had provided had been woefully sparse.

  ‘Somewhere called Ripley? Yorkshire, I think. He did car theft, vandalism. The usual. Then some kindly probation officer steered him into the army to keep him out of jail. He was a tough nut, but they found he was bright too. Demonstrated a readiness to kill and a talent for survival. A shoe-in for special forces, I guess. But then he turned bad.’

  ‘And bought a quarter-million-dollar ego-trip with the proceeds.’

  ‘Amongst other things.’

  It’d be a bloody great stamp in the passport, Sam realised. Barnado’s boy makes good. An ‘up yours’ to every bugger who’d ever tried to put him down. The question was whether he’d be stupid enough to brag about it when they caught up with him. If they did …

  ‘Remind me – when did he leave the SAS?’

  ‘Two years ago when he turned forty. Been in uniform since the age of seventeen. His marriage broke up a year before that.’

  ‘SAS men don’t get home that often.’

  ‘Then you and him’ll have something to talk about …’

  ‘Thanks.’ He didn’t need reminding. His affair with Julie had been relatively new when he was posted to Singapore nearly a year ago. Going three months. And he’d only seen her twice since then.

  He asked Midge what had brought Squires to this part of the world.

  ‘The Thai military recruited him – they were looking for men with jungle experience to show Karens living near the border how to spy on drug caravans.’

  ‘Why bother with Brits? They must have dozens of their own who could do that.’

  ‘One reason was historical. The Karens fought with the Brits against the Japs in World War Two and still have a high regard for them. The other, would you believe it, was integrity.’ Midge’s voice was heavy with irony. ‘They thought SAS men were incorruptible.’

  ‘Christ. How many did they hire?’

  ‘Two. The other guy alerted the Thais to the fact that Squires wasn’t playing by the rules anymore.’ She shook her head in amazement. ‘I thought those fellers were loyal to each other unto death.’

  ‘Shows you haven’t read the books they write. How did you lot get involved?’

  ‘When the Thai’s Narcotics Suppression Bureau put a watch on Squires, they logged frequent trips to Australia. So they alerted us. We put him under surveillance in Sydney and Melbourne, but the bastard was too good. Gave our watchers the slip. However … by some remarkable coincidence his visits always seemed to be followed by an influx of Burmese heroin.’

  Sam glanced to port. The sea was dotted with pleasure craft now. He looked enviously at a yacht under full sail. Midge noticed.

  ‘More your style?’

  He nodded. They were nearing a large land mass.

  ‘Phuket island?’ Midge asked, pointing.

  ‘S’right.’

  She lea
ned forward, moving a finger up the chart. ‘The marina’s here, right?’

  ‘You’ve got it.’

  A Thai narcotics officer on the quayside had radioed thirty minutes before to say that Squires’ boat the Estelle was coming in to have a dodgy water pump replaced. A tip-off they’d desperately needed. Until then, they’d spent the day rushing from one sun-baked anchorage to another in a fruitless search for him.

  Suddenly a beep shrilled from the console in front of them.

  ‘Shit!’

  ‘What’s that?’

  Sam grabbed the throttles and yanked them back to neutral.

  ‘Oil pressure.’ He pointed to the gauge. The needle had sunk to zero.

  ‘What’s that mean?’

  ‘Don’t know, yet.’ He pulled the stop button and the engine died.

  ‘For Christ’s sake, Steve! What’re you doing? We’ve got to get to that marina.’

  ‘No oil, no can do.’ He spun from his seat, slid down the companionway steps and stomped into the saloon. Before leaving harbour that morning he’d been given the briefest of tours of the boat’s machinery space. He unclipped the engine covers and peered inside.

  Midge followed him down. When she reached him he was reading the dipstick.

  ‘Bone dry.’ He opened the spares locker. ‘But we’re in luck! There’s a five-litre can here.’

  ‘They forgot to top up before we took the boat?’

  ‘Or else there’s a leak.’ He leaned into the engine space again. There were black oil smears down the engine block. ‘Could be that the rocker cover wasn’t screwed down properly.’

  ‘Meaning …?’

  ‘That I might be able to fix it with a spanner.’ He looked in the locker, found a large, long-handled wrench and applied it to the loose securing bolts. ‘Better get back on deck and keep watch. Make sure nothing runs us down.’

  He poured the fresh oil into the engine, cleaned up and restarted the diesel, checking there were no more leaks. Soon they were on their way again.

  ‘Fix you a drink, skipper?’ Midge asked, her eyes betraying a trace of admiration.