Free No Survivors by Tom Cain Page B

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
    M ission 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