“Whatever you say, General, but plenty of folks say otherwise. Fact remains, you need a Pearl Harbor of your own, somethin’ spectacular, a moment of revelation that’s gonna make the whole world sit up and focus on the threat we face.”
McCabe was focusing the entire weight of his personality on Vermulen, bringing to bear all the persuasive, almost seductive powers of negotiation acquired over a lifetime of buying low, selling high, and always coming out on the right side of the deal.
“You know, General, you’ve got me thinkin’-heck, you’ve inspired me. We’re gonna do somethin’ great, you an’ me, and I’ll tell you when it’s gonna happen: Easter Sunday, the day we celebrate the conquest of evil and death. If you’re lookin’ for a time to strike back at the Antichrist, go ahead and name me a better one.”
McCabe did not wait for a reply before he went on.
“Let me see,” he said, pulling a slim black appointment book from a jacket pocket and flicking through its pages. “Here we go… this year, Easter’s April the twelfth, more’n two months away. So I suggest you think awhile on what I said. When you figure something out that can suit both our purposes, come and tell me about it. If I like what I hear, I’ll pay whatever it costs to make it happen.”
As he showed Vermulen to the door, McCabe said, “We’re gonna work well together, General, I can feel it. That Sheikh’s about to find out he ain’t the only dog in this fight.”
McCabe had said his final words with a grin, and ended them with a wheezing cackle, but as he closed the door behind Vermulen, his good humor vanished as if it had never been.
Alone in the room, with nothing and no one else there to distract him, the darkness fell on him again. His mind was filled with a secret terror as powerful as anything he had experienced as his plane fell from the Canadian sky.
Just a few weeks before, unable to shake the cough that had dogged him all winter, he had finally gone to see his doctor. Within hours he’d been referred to an oncologist at the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. By the end of the week he’d got a second opinion, just to make sure, from the top man at Sloan-Kettering in New York.
Both said the same thing. McCabe had two inoperable tumors on his lungs. The cancer had also spread to his brain. The doctors weren’t certain, but they thought the cancer might have been caused by the chemicals he’d inhaled inside that burning plane. McCabe could see the bitter irony in that: His assassin had got him after all. He had only months to live, nine at the outside, but he’d be hospitalized in six. He was heading downhill toward a yawning grave. And so the fear that gripped McCabe’s heart and ate away at his mind was that he might pass before the great day came.
Of course, he believed in the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting. He reaffirmed that faith every week in church. But his faith was no defense when the thought of his own nonexistence gripped him in the darkest hours of the night. Despite the comforting words of the creed, he could not be certain of being woken from that last, great sleep. He wanted, more than anything else, to be alive, with his eyes wide open, on that great day when the Lord returned to His people. He longed to see the holocaust of which the Reverend Ezekiel Ray had spoken, when Christ would crush the grapes of wrath and the blood of His enemies would fill the valleys of Israel to the brim.
If that holocaust wasn’t going to happen of its own accord, well, Waylon McCabe was damn well going to make it happen, even if it cost him every last dime he had. And Lieutenant General Kurt Vermulen, whose passionate conviction and desperate need to be believed had left him hopelessly vulnerable to McCabe’s manipulation, was just the man to help him do it.
19
Mission Date: September 25, 1995
Location: Riverview Towers, Charoen Nakorn, Bangkok, Thailand Target: Wu Chiu Wai, alias Tony Wu
Mission Statement: To eliminate a major drug trafficker, with established ties to U.K. and European heroin trade
Operative: Samuel Carver (Fee: US $350K)
Report: The target was known to play a regular weekly mah-jongg game with three of his closest associates, gambling for significant sums of money, with US $1m or more regularly changing hands in a single night. The participants also laid six- and seven-figure bets with one another on the results of soccer matches in Asia and the English Premier League, and horse races in Bangkok, Macao, and Hong Kong. It can reasonably be inferred that both match- and race-fixing took place as a direct result of these wagers.
The location of the game was a luxury penthouse apartment, on the twenty-fifth floor of a newly built apartment complex overlooking the Chao Phraya River, chosen by Wu for security purposes. It was the sole property on the top floor of the complex. The only internal access to the apartment was provided by a non-stop express elevator, with armed guards at both the ground and top floors. The apartment also possessed its own private water, power, and air-conditioning facilities, separate from those of the complex as a whole.
Freelance operative Carver determined that these security measures in fact made the apartment more, not less, vulnerable. He made his assault via the roof of the building, at approximately 1:45 A.M. on the morning of September 25. The weather conditions that night were severe, with thunderstorms and torrential downpours. These made the initial stages of the operation far more hazardous, but also provided useful cover.
Carver made his initial approach via helicopter (see separate accounts sheet for detailed cost breakdown of this and other expenses). It hovered over the Riverview Towers for less than five seconds. Using an SBS-standard two- inch hemp rope affixed to the roof of the helicopter, Carver descended to the roof at high speed, braking with his hands, clad in heavy-duty leather gloves, immediately before impact. Donning protective equipment, he then proceeded to the rooftop vent used to feed the apartment’s air-conditioning system and inserted a canister of fentanyl gas, a fast-acting opium-based sedative.
Allowing five minutes for the gas to take effect, Carver climbed down to the external terrace running along one side of the penthouse and, having checked that Wu and his associates were sedated, used a glass cutter to break in through the plateglass doors leading from the main living area, where the men had been gambling.
The only armed men on the premises were Wu, who carried a Glock 22 pistol, and his bodyguard, who was
