Then, however, one of the armed men on the rooftop spotted the teens on the fire escape. He grabbed the arm of his superior and pointed up at them.
‘Oh no guys, they seen us!’ Paola wailed, her voice low with sudden dread. ‘Shit, they lookin’ at us! Shit, oh shit!’
The commanding officer caught sight of Daekwon filming, barked out a rapid order, and quickly spoke into a mic taped to his chin … and then he and three other troops swung their M-16 rifles up to their shoulders and took aim at the four children.
Before the teens could even react, or the soldiers could fire, though, an immense boom resounded with the brutal potency of an immediate thunderclap, splitting the very atoms of the air, it seemed, with its force … and that instant the teens were hurled back against the wall, and every window of the apartment exploded in a shower of glass shards.
5
ADRIANA
27th August 2020. Somewhere near the Thailand/Laos border
Sweating under the tarpaulin, the young Moldavian and Romanian women who were sandwiched between crates of liquor in the back of the truck sat in grim silence, rocking back and forth as the vehicle lurched and skidded over the bumpy dirt track. Adriana peered through the murky gloom at the odd one out of the group: a Japanese woman. She looked to be in her early to mid-thirties, and thus around ten or fifteen years older than herself. This made her by far the oldest woman present; the others were all in their late teens or early twenties. The Japanese woman could speak fluent Russian; she was obviously an educated individual, yet she had ended up here with the rest of this unfortunate working-class bunch. The colourful tattoos that peeked out from under the sleeves of both arms and which, Adriana had seen, covered most of the woman’s body, hinted that there was more to this mysterious stranger than met the eye.
The Japanese woman intercepted Adriana’s gaze and flashed her an intense look in response. Adriana couldn’t tell if it was menace or sympathy that sizzled in the woman’s eyes, but it wasn’t the first time that she and her had exchanged glances. They had only had one conversation over the course of this journey, but that was because the women had mostly not been permitted to speak to one another at all. The Japanese woman had been rather guarded about herself but had seemed quite interested in Adriana’s story.
Adriana glanced at a reflection of herself in a sliver of broken mirror. Staring back at her was a face that was a collage of features both bold and delicate; in deep sockets two large, striking eyes were set like polished jewels, and the dark, long eyebrows above each topaz orb sat like twin sabre blades, almost straight but with a subtle curve to them, and pleasantly sharp at their outer edges. Softening the visual impact of these attention-snaring eyes was a nose that was as long as it was unobtrusive in construct, and suspended below it a small but full-lipped mouth, placed as if carved in this exact spot by the precise calculations of a master mathematician who had measured every other of her features and worked out that this was exactly where a perfectly proportioned pair of lips should sit. The arrangement of her features gave her resting expression a look of approachable amicability, and her curved mouth seemed ever on the verge of breaking into a radiant smile.
She could not smile now, however, and for all the natural pleasantness of her neutral countenance, a haggardness had come over her face, a wan weariness that seemed to harden the angles of her full cheeks and sharpen the soft curve of her jaw. Indeed, she had not smiled for many days now.
The vehicle rumbled to a stop, but the grease-slicked bed of the truck continued vibrate beneath them as the clattering engine idled. The stink of diesel fumes was intertwined in an odorous cocktail with the pungent aroma of bodies that had been unwashed through eight days of hellish overland and air transit, a journey that would culminate in their arrival in Bangkok.
A voice speaking broken, heavily accented Russian crackled through a tinny speaker.
‘We stop for two minutes. Police come look in truck. You hide, no move or speak! Remember, police catch you, you go jail twenty years. No speak, no move!’
The women pulled the tarpaulin over themselves and huddled tightly together. The scent of fear was pervasive and almost tangible. Adriana peered through a hairline gap between the crates and watched as two Thai police officers swept their flashlight beam across the stacked goods, perusing the merchandise with suspicious eyes. One of them hauled out a crate, levered off the top with a crowbar and started digging around in it. He stepped off to the side, outside of Adriana’s scope of vision, and started arguing with the truck driver. Adriana listened with increasing alarm as the confrontation became more and more heated, and with every curse and yell her heart hammered faster while an insurmountable dread swelled with the persistence of rising flood waters within her.
A small hand groped softly for hers in the dark, and she gripped it with trembling fingers. It was Roxana, the fourteen-year-old, who throughout the journey had been in a constant state of fear and anxiety. Adriana, only twenty-three years old herself, and likewise awash with worry and apprehension, had nonetheless taken it upon herself to comfort the girl, and for her young companion’s sake she had attempted to maintain a façade of bravery in the face of the horrors that had unfolded before them on this trip.
She looked up
