The Spy's Little Zonbi Read online

  Chase’s pulse was checked and other vital signs were shouted in some unrecognizable language. His world again wavered, shifting from gray to black, as they climbed higher into the night sky, rotors screaming, beating down the thick air and taking them from one alien tropical place to another.

  “Good night,” Chase whispered with a smile to anyone nearby.

  Chapter 14

  Beth Flanagan was famously known as the Bat Girl in this rugged land where the helicopter touched down. She and Chase were roughly disembarked and deposited in a harshly lit subterranean room, which may or may not have originally been a cave.

  Chase would soon find that the entire structure was carved into a mountainside by rainwater and by machinery, thousands of square feet of chambers and connecting tunnels. Unleashed from the backboard, he had woken with the driest mouth possible and a rolling nausea from the poison. He sat up from the army-style cot and gingerly dropped his legs over the side. Nearly palpable waves of blackness threatened consciousness then slowly retreated.

  “Sorry about the poison.” Beth was perched cross-legged on an olive green blanket spread over the concrete floor. And here again with her were small children, although these were more subdued. The three young, barely school-aged girls lay across Beth in different directions, all holding one of her hands and nuzzling at her lap and belly. “I promise it wasn’t my idea. It’s just their way of bringing certain visitors up here while keeping the location a secret.”

  “No blindfolds in this part of Thailand?” Chase rubbed his forehead and eyes with his palms.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You’re Bat Girl.”

  “I didn’t mean to be Bat Girl.” She slowly stroked the hair of each girl, one after the other. They nuzzled closer in their sleep, like a litter of kittens.

  There was just a single desk with a blank yellow legal pad, a pen, and a paper cup on top. Next to the desk was an empty, dust-covered water cooler and a vinyl chair covered in duct tape patches. The cold light emanated from long, fluorescent light tubes. About half were flickering. The door was solid wood and Chase assumed it was locked. There were no mirrors, and he didn’t see anything that might be a video camera or listening device.

  “It doesn’t make a great first impression, does it?” She followed his gaze around the room, but probably meant the drugging and kidnapping. This was the second time he’d heard her voice with the joy gone, sullen and tired. “The first time they brought me here the same way. I think they like the theater of it. You missed the high-fiving.”

  “So what’s this about? What is this place?” Chase stretched his muscles, but wasn’t ready to test his legs. “Have I been kidnapped? What do they want from me? What did they want from you?”

  The mountain complex rose above a network of limestone caves west of the Ubonrat Reservoir, south of Nong Bua Lamphu. If he’d been conscious during the flight, he’d have enjoyed a scenic thirty minute ride. Beth explained the important central location of this place when it came to its bat population.

  “It’s all about the bats. It’s why I’m here, and why you’re here. It’s why they brought the girls here.”

  “Go on.”

  “This is where bats are being collected and stored by induced hibernation,” she said. “There are cold storage units for more than a half million bats.”

  She paused, looking down at the small brown children who were now sound asleep in her lap. She continued to stroke their hair. They wore what looked like old uniforms, just slightly different than those of Beth’s school.

  “These guys are the jihadists of Lukman Lima,” she finally said, almost in a whisper. “Do you know what a jihad is?”

  “A holy war.”

  “Yes, right, a jihad is a holy war.” Beth spoke the word jihad as if it tasted bad. “And these are called PULO, which stands for the Patani United Liberation Organization. These soldiers are the fighting wing, the New PULO fighters, or something. Their goal is to create an independent Muslim state out of the southern Thai provinces. Down where all the tourist spots are.”

  “I’ve seen stories about them in the papers.”

  “They demand a free and independent Patani,” Beth continued quietly, almost wistfully. “No matter whom they hurt.” She was having a hard time looking at Chase.

  According to Associated Press reports, PULO fighters were being trained in al Qaeda camps in Pakistan and Afghanistan, then returning to Thailand to set off roadside bombs and commit drive-by shootings. Their targets were mainly groups of Buddhist monks wandering the southern countryside to receive alms.

  Most people in Thailand viewed the roaming monks as a calming, stabilizing influence, the stories had said. They’d always been welcomed and were constantly posing for pictures with chubby-kneed tourists in Bermuda shorts. Mostly offerings of food, the alms allowed mere mortals to forge a symbolic, spiritual connection to what the monks represented. But the monks’ bright orange robes were like great bulls-eyes to PULO. The targeting of the monks caused trepidation among the villagers, who had always welcomed the roaming religious men in the past. Some villagers blamed the Buddhists when their own village people were killed or injured in the attacks.

  “The Thai government began cracking down on PULO in the south,” Beth continued. “Lima put out a call to all Islamic nations for help. It’s pretty clear that when an Islamic fighter cries persecution in a non-Islamic country, money pours in from Arab nations.”

  “I couldn’t place the language in the helicopter,” Chase said. “I knew it wasn’t Thai.”

  “This was once a limestone quarry, but Lima used the Arab money under the guise of a bogus corporation to buy it for a training camp two years ago. There are natural barriers because of the terrain, so the only way in is by helicopter or by foot.”

  “How many jihadists are here?”

  “Four hundred, maybe.”

  “Why are you helping them? And why do they call you Bat Girl?”

  “I’m not helping anymore,” she said defensively, and pulled the girls tighter into her lap. “When the first commanders tried to use some of the deeper, more elaborate caves as their headquarters, they had soldiers try get rid of the bats. They used smoke bombs and fire and finally hoses to flood some of the chambers. Nothing worked. Bats are like rats and cockroaches in that way. They even tried machine-gunning the streams of bats as they left the caves at dusk, but they’d just kill a few hundred out of millions and were left to clean up a disgusting mess of dead and dying bats. They had this great, geographically secure location for training, but were being driven off by bats. Imagine a commander sending that message back to his leaders.”

  “So what did they do?”

  “About six months ago, Lima came up with a crazy idea to use the bats instead of trying to exterminate them.”

  “Use them how?” Chase was getting to the heart of Bat Girl’s involvement.

  “The first idea was to have them carry a biological weapon, something like anthrax. But setting anthrax-contaminated bats free in urban areas didn’t do much killing. The bats would fly into the building crevices and die. That’s when one of the commanders in charge of explosives training came up with the idea of attaching small bombs to the bats.”

  “And it worked?” Chase already knew it had.

  “Yes, it worked better than they could have imagined. They netted a few dozen Wrinkle-lipped Free Tailed bats, which are the main species here, tied miniature hand grenades to them, pulled the pins and set the bats free. In four seconds, the delay material burns up, igniting the contents in the detonator and the whole thing explodes.”

  “Who would’ve thought?”

  “Well, it wasn’t perfect, because they needed a longer delay, and the bats could only carry a tiny amount of weight. But it was enough to convince the people with lots of money that they were on to something good. Or something really bad.”

  “So why did they need you?”

  And she reminded Chase of her reputation a
s the bat expert of Bua Yai. She was the white American bat expert who had helped save a town from malaria by using her ingenuity to revitalize the bat population. Beth had been proud of her success, sending home the original copies of lovely thank you notes from the grateful mayor of Bua Yai, along with letters from rice farmers. There were also the adoring portraits of her, drawn by peasant children who had been told of this white woman’s magical power over the bats. In many of these pictures she had wings. Not the rounded, sweeping wings of an angel, but leathery, stretched membranous wings, usually including details like the thumb and three small fingers. Despite the creepiness, Beth considered these especially touching because so much time and effort had gone into them. They were drawings of the Bat Girl.

  “The entire story had reached all the city papers in Bangkok and they did what jihadists do.” Tears filled her eyes, spilling out and splashing down on the sleeping children. “They came to my school at night and kidnapped me and three girls from the orphans’ dorm.”

  And Chase realized this was just a young Irish-Catholic woman from a town in Western Massachusetts who had been dealing with all this subterfuge alone, the weight of the world on her shoulders. The weight of knowing she was, in a fairly direct way, helping fashion a terrorist attack that could kill thousands of people.

  “The kids are scared but okay.” She softly stroked the sleeping children. “It’s amazing what children will adapt to. They’re locked in a room all day, have to ask for a bucket to relieve themselves, and are fed only rice and water, yet they laugh and play and argue. They forget they’re in prison. Half a year to you and me is nearly a lifetime to a child, you know?”

  “Why these kids?”

  “The jihadists are evil but not stupid,” Beth said, showering the girls with more tears. “They stole orphans because they knew the school would only search for so long. There wouldn’t be parents holding vigils, drumming up outrage until they got answers. They took the children to hold me hostage to their demands.”

  “And the principal doesn’t want any trouble,” Chase said. “Not from bad guys and not from the government.”

  “That’s right. The principal is a good man at heart. He wants what’s best for the kids and the school. When I was brought back and released, I was told to explain the soldiers and helicopters were from the Thai government. That it was all part of the search for the girls.”

  “He knew that wasn’t true.”

  “I don’t know, but he allowed me go on teaching. I look him in the eye, maybe for help, maybe to have him tell me what to do. But he looks away.”

  “And these guys let you return to the school because a missing American girl would get our government involved?”

  “Yes, exactly, they let me go until they were ready, until the bats were collected and set to go. Bua Yai is isolated, but government welfare trucks come through with supplies every couple of months or so.”

  The same notoriety that got her kidnapped had also kept her alive. A famous American Peace Corps volunteer being killed by Islamic jihadists would bring the entire Thai military into the region, followed closely by the U.S. State Department and the world press corps.

  Instead of taking the risk of locating and importing a bat expert, the insurgents found their own in Beth, who knew enough from her Peace Corps training to be useful. She’d been taught how to induce an artificial hibernation that would allow for the safe examination of a specimen—an important step in collecting and storing enough bats to create havoc in the Thai capital.

  Lukman Lima had read the wonderful Bangkok Post article about the magic farang, and ordered her capture.

  After explaining to the reporter how she and the villagers had constructed dozens of new bat houses from wood bravely salvaged from homes occupied solely by ghosts, she’d gone on to describe how they were able to examine and even tag some of the pregnant females.

  “Bats can easily be induced into an artificial hibernation,” she explained to the Post reporter, who had traveled to the Wat Prachamimitr School to meet the American Bat Girl. “And as the body temperature is lowered and the heart-rate is slowed, a bat can survive on only a few grams of stored fat during a six-month hibernation. We experimented and put the caged bats in the school kitchen refrigerator and, sure enough, they entered a deep sleep from which we later woke them. All our bats survived and were returned to their roosts, tagged and perfectly healthy.”

  “Hear that droning noise?” Beth asked. “If you listen closely, you can hear the generators running the freezers from anywhere in the mountain.”

  Chase could feel the humming in the metal edge of the cot he was sitting on, could hear them over the gentle snoring of the three children.

  “So why did they grab me?” He hoped it had something to do with his job as a journalist and not as a DB6 agent. He was really concerned about receiving the gun, that at least one student had been trusted with the knowledge that he might be more than just a reporter.

  “You were in the wrong place at the wrong time, I suppose. They’re getting ready for the final phase of this plan, just as an important American journalist arrives to do a story on the school. It was their good fortune that you came at this time.”

  Did they really believe he was just there by coincidence? What about the gun they’d found and taken from him while he was unconscious? Whatever was about to happen, his role would be much easier if they didn’t suspect he could cause them any problems.

  “So if not anthrax or tiny hand grenades, how are they arming the bats?” Chase got up to stretch his legs.

  “They tried a whole bunch of different things while I was back at school. The girls told me a lot of scary stories about burning and exploding bats, things that gave them a lot of nightmares. Some of the bats took off like rockets. I believe the formula they decided on came from a Pakistani bomb expert. Tiny hearing aid batteries are wired to blasting caps. The electrical charge is temporarily interrupted by insulation at a point where it’s tightly wrapped around the hibernating bat’s leg. Once the bat is released, it comes out of its sleep pretty quickly and its first instinct is to find shelter in some high-up crevice.”

  “It wakes up and finds a place to hide.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Once in a safe spot, the bat would begin to gnaw at the foreign object, chewing away at the insulation and freeing the electrical charge into the blasting cap. That would detonate the small casing packed with plastique C-8 explosive. They’ll also explode if they hit something hard enough to rip the insulation, so it’s no place to be when they wake up.”

  “Each ounce of C-8 would create a one meter blast radius.”

  “You know about explosives?”

  “Things I’ve read. I know a lot of people would to die from half a million bat bombs.”

  Just then, the door banged open and an armed soldier in the same uniform as those on the chopper strode toward Chase and stuck an AK-47 in his face. It was apparently time to find out exactly what they wanted.

  Beth and the children were left behind, as he was prodded down a carved natural stone corridor lit at intervals by mesh-encased light bulbs. It was cool and damp, as water dripped here and there into small black pools. The passageway opened into a large cavern, maybe thirty feet high and twice that at its widest. It was a little more festive looking in here, as they’d strung hundreds of feet of the white Christmas lights designed to resemble twinkling icicles around the highest perimeter. It was a merry little cave—if you ignored the row of coffin-like freezer chests chock full of sleeping bats.

  The floor of this space was crammed with seven large Maytags, side by side, with narrow passages on either side. A great tangle of extension cords came together in a heaped mass, like an exhausted rubber-band ball at the far end of the room. The wires disappeared through a small round cut in the stone, which had to lead to the generators.

  “This is one of five such rooms,” came a man’s voice from behind. Chase was greeted by the head jihadist himself, Lukman Lima, with
a clasped-hand bow of the local custom. “Lukman Lima.” He reached out to shake Chase’s hand Western-style, his Domke camera bag slung over his left shoulder.

  “Chase Allen, Associated Press.” They shook hands. “Now that you’ve poisoned and kidnapped me, what can I do for you, Mr. Lima?”

  Lima handed over his camera bag, which must have been snatched up by one of the helicopter pilots. He motioned for them to continue out of the cavern and down a narrow corridor. Despite the friendly greeting, the rifle muzzle never left the small of Chase’s back. They turned left into what was apparently Lima’s cave headquarters.

  Maps on walls, radio equipment, and laptop computers made for an interesting juxtaposition to the clump of bats hanging from the farthest corner of the ceiling. They were like a bunch of fuzzy gray bananas, there as if to say, “You humans may have taken over our home, but we’re sticking around over here in one nasty, throbbing ball, just so you know it’s not over.” They’d left a dark cone of guano beneath them.

  “They are beautiful.” Lima smiled toward the huddled, throbbing mass. It was a statement, not a question. He stepped behind his compact desk covered in more maps and notes written in elegant Arabic, and took a seat in a swiveling red vinyl office chair, which rolled noisily on the stone floor. “Please have a seat, my dear Mr. Allen.”

  “It seems you’re interested in a reporter for an upcoming exclusive.” Chase rummaged through his bag, pulled out a pen and a reporter’s notebook. His passport and other credentials were gone.

  “Miss Flanagan has provided you with the background of our situation, am I right?”

  “You plan to attack the government and people of Thailand with bomb-laden bats.”

  “We are a peaceful people of the Nation of Islam.” Lima removed his wire-rimmed glasses, wiped them on the coarse material of his untucked uniform. He wore a plain black Muslim prayer cap and the same olive drab uniform of all the other soldiers Chase had seen. There were no decorations on his chest or arms, no bars or brass on his collar. In this army, you were either in charge or not in charge.