Retirement Policy

By M.M. Rumberg

Garth Anderson, a reporter for the New York Times, has been marked for murder, but he doesnt know why. All he knows is that someone is trying to kill him. Garth turns to his friends, CIA agents, for help, but the pursuit is relentless. Someone has a murderous agenda and is leaving a trail of dead bodiesand Garth is next.

Retirement Policy is a sweeping adventure story that begins in Asias Golden Triangle and ends in Washington, DC. Although Garth tries to escape the evil pursuit, the horror continues. In a final confrontation with the murderer, Garth finally finds out why he was marked for murder. But is it too late to save himself?

A fast-moving thriller, Retirement Policy delves deep into the drug trade, taking the reader on an adventure that unravels one unusual twist after another.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Mar 29, 2012
• ISBN: 9781469171487

M.M. Rumberg

Mort is a retired U.S. Air Force Officer who served as a Rescue and Survival technician teaching escape and evasion and survival techniques to aircrew members. He survived a tour of duty in Vietnam and barely survived two tours in the Pentagon as a computer systems action officer. He was also an information technology consultant and a manager with a large international health care insurance company. He earned a Doctorate in Education and has been an adjunct professor of computer sciences for several universities and community colleges in the Washington, DC, area. Mort was a volunteer with the Alexandria, Virginia, Police Department and the Animal Welfare League of Alexandria. His novel, CodeName: Snake, The Evil We Kill, won a national award and several of his short stories have won national recognition. Now residing in California, he is busy working on several new novels and many short stories. Visit the author’s website: mmrumberg.com

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Retirement Policy

M.M. Rumberg

Copyright © 2012 by M.M. Rumberg.

Library of Congress Control Number:       2012903337

ISBN:         Hardcover                               978-1-4691-7147-0

                   Softcover                                 978-1-4691-7146-3

                   Ebook                                      978-1-4691-7148-7

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Retirement Policy: Desperate to understand why he is marked for murder, a reporter writing about the drug trade seeks help from friends in the CIA

1. CIA—Fiction

2. Drugs, Drug Lords—Fiction

3. Southeast Asia, Golden Triangle—Fiction

4. Murder—Fiction

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Contents

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I’ve been fortunate to have some wonderful friends, writers who are skilled in their craft and have freely given of their expertise: MaryLou Anderson, Westley Turner, Ron Smith, Tom Hessler, Robert Pacholik, Gene Munger, Morgan Mussell and Sandra Stedronsky. I have learned so much from them.

Thank you guys, I am grateful.

I am also so delighted to have Susan, my wife, at my side. She held my hand through it all.

M.M.R.

April, 2012

1

The Present

Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

Garth Anderson sat in the large walk-in closet where his laptop PC rested on a makeshift desk, the lower shelf. He had just finished writing an analysis of the latest political turmoil in Asia, and Vietnam in particular, and would email it tomorrow from his downtown office—he had no phone or wireless network in his small apartment. It was just a living room with a small kitchen to one side, a bedroom and bathroom. Its only redeeming features, aside from the very reasonable rent, were a huge closet and being on the ground floor. After so many years living in tropical and semi-tropical Southeast Asia, he was accustomed to the temperature and humidity and didn’t mind the unscreened windows or lack of air conditioning. The mosquitoes didn’t bother him, and besides, sleeping under mosquito netting made the air too still and stifling, even with the slowly rotating ceiling fan, which barely kept the air moving. But tonight he was scared. Someone was coming to kill him.

The repressive heat and humidity that most westerners hated and never adjusted to, no longer bothered him—he had physically and mentally adjusted to them, just like a native. He took some satisfaction in the fact that he no longer sweated much, having spent so much time in Asia that he was fully acclimated. Most westerners, after ten minutes in the tropical environment, looked like they just came out of the shower. To them it typically felt like they had run a race in 100-degree temperature and 100 percent humidity. But not Garth—he looked fresh even after a full day outside. He lived a little on the primitive side, going native, he liked to say, except for the extraordinary communications capability he had at his office, all state of the art telecommunications for transmitting his articles. He did have a cell phone that included international capability, but he couldn’t use it for transmitting long articles. And of course, he had his office phone. For email, his cell phone could easily transmit and receive brief text and video, and his PC had wireless remote satellite capability. He loved his technical toys, and was very proficient with them.

Can’t go too native, can I? he’d say repeatedly to anyone who would listen and was always willing to demonstrate a new piece of equipment. He took joy not only in his writing and astute analyses of Asian political affairs, but also with all the latest technical communications gear he could acquire. If not for his job with The New York Times, he readily agreed he’d be a computer nerd.

The house was dark, the other residents of his apartment building fast asleep. It was 11:45 p.m., and the surrounding area was still, the neighborhood at rest, silent except for the crickets and the hooting and cawing of local night creatures: tropical owls, the occasional pet howler monkey and various cackling birds. Anyone gazing out the window could see bats framed by the moon as they soared through the night sky, feeding on an endless supply of airborne insects. At this time of night no one walked about. The streets were deserted. Occasionally a skinny dog, its ribs looking like they were about to protrude through its skin, would slink by in a constant, almost fruitless search for food. If one listened carefully, the creatures of the night could be heard scurrying about. Earlier, Garth had glimpsed a rice rat the size of a cat rummaging through a garbage heap.

Garth’s bedroom was dark. Sleep had been difficult coming, and under the circumstances, he decided it was best to wait and see what developed.

The tip he had received earlier this morning said he was marked for immediate assassination.

2

Not just assassination— immediate assassination. He wanted to discount it as an irritant, similar to others he’d received in the past, but…this time he really was worried, more so than he usually was when he received a tip. He considered this threat serious, and even though this one seemed different because of its extremely reliable source, he initially wanted to pass it off as just another threat among many aimed at westerners in general. But it had burrowed into his mind and he was paying attention to the warning. I need to trust my instincts more . He glanced at his bed. In the gray semi-darkness and shadow, it looked like someone was asleep in it. He’d arranged the sheet, several towels and thin blanket to look as if he was still in bed, quietly snuggled under the sheet.

The heat and humidity of the night felt mild to him, quite comfortable actually. The single overhead fan twirled, making a scarcely discernible tick, tick, tick, and labored mightily to barely keep a current of the heavy air moving through the apartment.

The dark shadows of the closet rendered him almost invisible to anyone in the other room. He sat deep into the large, windowless room-like closet, his few hanging garments partially blocking any view from the doorway. He flexed his arms and took a deep breath. I’ve got to relax, can’t let this get to me. Still, he was worried. Fifty-four years old and back in Saigon, or Ho Chi Minh City as it was now called. How many times had he been here?

He was here thirty-two years ago during the war in the 60s as an Army Lieutenant, and again as a reporter in the late 70s and again during the 80s and 90s. He was known at The New York Times as the Asia hand—the expert on Asia. Anything you wanted to know about Asia, especially Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and Myanmar (he still called it Burma), he was the one to ask. If you needed an introduction, he was the one to see. His sources were many highly placed and extraordinarily exceptional individuals. And that’s what worried him so much. The assassination tip had come from someone he valued highly. Very trustworthy. He had to heed the warning.

He turned off the laptop, stretched as he watched the dim glow fade from the screen. Minutes that seemed like hours passed slowly as he waited in the dark—waited to see what might happen, waited to be killed. There was a noise outside. Not unusual, he thought. Dogs or rice rats sometimes scurried past. Sometimes, although rare, one of the locals would be awake and out walking. But this noise somehow sounded different. It was a quiet sound, more like someone brushing against the side of the house. He couldn’t quite place the sound and tried to let it go, but inwardly he tensed. He listened harder, more carefully. Nothing to be concerned about. Or was there? He envisioned someone crouched over, sneaking along the side of his house, wearing a patch over one eye and carrying an array of weapons. A knife in his teeth like a pirate, a pistol in his belt, a holster on his side, a large machete in one hand, a submachine gun in the other, bandoleers of shells strung across his chest with hand grenades hanging from it. A formidable foe. He smiled uneasily at the absurd mental vision.

There, he heard it again. A scraping sound near the window. A shadow crossed the open window and stopped. Someone was at the side of the window, peeking in, probably standing on a box since the bottom of the window was about five feet from the ground. A Vietnamese would need some assistance to glance in the window. The shadow stayed for several seconds, then moved away. Garth sat still, his breathing shallow, straining to hear another sound. Shit! It looks like the tip may have been true.

A barely discernible click was the only indication that the front door lock had opened. When he finally heard a footfall in the living room of his apartment, he reached over to the shelf where he had placed his laptop. Next to it was a double crossbow, an unusual gift to himself, purchased during one of his many trips to Thailand. Assembled earlier that evening, it was a modern version of the ancient crossbow, but a very cleverly designed, completely break-apart, compact weapon, specifically constructed to avoid detection when going through x-ray equipment at airports. It was created to look innocuous when the unassembled parts were stowed in the supporting frame of the special attaché case it came in. The arms of the bows became an integral part of the case supporting the handle, the thick wire shoulder brace formed part of the case’s frame, and the wire forearm stock became a support arm for the case’s hinges. He’d purchased it only because of its uniqueness. The storeowner swore it was one-of-a-kind, and Garth never suspected it would be used as intended, although he had practiced using it many times on cardboard targets. He gently picked up the crossbow and pulled the first bowstring into position, then the second. Next, he reached over and removed two of the short bolts from the leather quiver, placed them in their launch trays, and slipped each into its cocked string. He removed several more bolts and placed them on the lower shelf that acted as a desk, just in case. Each bolt looked like a short arrow, the arrowhead small and razor-sharp. At close range they would be devastatingly effective. His earlier training in the Army came back to him. His nerves stiffened and his eyes turned to slits. Ice formed in his veins. He suspected, no, he knew, he would kill tonight.

As silently as a shadow passes over still water, a man entered the bedroom and walked around the foot of the bed to the other side. A second man followed the first and stood by the bed’s side nearest the doorway. Garth watched as both men raised their arms and brought them down in arcs over the rumpled sheets where he supposedly slept.

He watched as glints of light from their knives flickered in the dim light, and the blades stabbed deep into the blanket and mattress. He raised the bow, sighted at the first target’s chest, and released one bolt into the man nearest the door. A soft twang sounded as the bolt was released. The power of the bolt at close range was such that the man was literally nailed to the wall. It happened so quickly that the man didn’t even have time to gasp as the shock of the bolt hit and sliced into him. Pinned to the wall as he died, his arms moved up slowly then dropped along his sides. To a casual observer in the dim light, it looked like he just stood up and simply leaned against the wall.

Garth immediately aimed the bow at the second man who, so far, was oblivious to what happened to the first man, but had paused because of the lack of a body on the bed and the other man suddenly doing nothing—just leaning against the wall. As the man straightened and cursed the empty bed, the second bolt hit home. It sliced through his chest and came halfway out his back. The impact bounced him against the wall, over onto the side of the bed, finally falling to the floor with a dull thump, dying within seconds of the first man. Garth immediately pulled the strings back into cocked position and slipped in two more bolts.

The dull noise from the man’s fall brought a third man to the window. He looked in and urgently whispered, Mau len! Mau len! Hurry up! Hurry up! The soft, singsong melody of the Vietnamese language barely disturbed the heavy silence of the night air.

As the man outside leaned his head in slightly for a better view, he noticed one of the men leaning against the wall.

Ong noi xong chua? he asked, softly, barely above a whisper. Ong mat roi khong? Li dau? Are you through? Is he dead? Where’s Li?

There was no response except for the sound of the bow’s soft twang as the released bolt slammed into the side of the man’s head. The last thing the man saw was a flash of white light, as the bolt penetrated halfway into the side of his skull. He was dead before he hit the ground. His body made a few involuntary convulsions, then became still.

Garth pulled back the loose string and reloaded the crossbow. He waited a full minute before moving. It seemed like an hour. Blood pounded in his ears. The assassination tip was correct—he had been marked for murder. But why?

3

Nervously, Garth stood and listened intently for any sound. Time moved so slow that seconds passed like minutes, the silence broken only by the cadence of the crickets and the constant ticking of the slowly rotating ceiling fan. Garth cautiously walked to the window, his mouth dry, and his breathing shallow. He was covered with a light sweat. It had been a long time since his old Army days in Vietnam, a long time since he had sweated in the night air, and a long time since he wondered if he would survive the coming combat against the VC.

Warily standing alongside the window, he glanced out. A man lay on the ground looking as if he had passed out and was sleeping it off. Garth could barely make out the small arrow imbedded in his skull. He hoped at this late hour no one would walk by.

Checking the man on the far side of the bed, he made sure the bolt had flown true. It had. The man was dead. The bolt had penetrated through the center of his chest, probably sliced through his heart. His knife lay by his side. Going around to the man impaled by the door, he checked him also. The bolt had entered his chest, certainly cut through his heart and exited part way through the back, probably slicing the backbone as it passed through him. The bolt had stuck into the wall holding the man in an upright position, as if he was drunk and leaning stupidly against the wall.

Satisfied that neither man posed a threat, he went outside and dragged the fallen man inside and removed the bolt impaled in his head. It wasn’t easy to get the bolt out; it had to be wrenched from the skull because of the bolt head’s backward flowing edges. The bolt head finally emerged, dragging brain matter with it.

Inside the bedroom, he pulled the man away from the wall where he was pinned, wiggling the bolt to remove it, and carried the dead man to the front of the apartment and put him next to the first one. Carrying the second man from the bedroom, he dumped him next to the others after carefully removing the bolt from him. Each assassin was very skinny and slightly built, typical of the Vietnamese male at five foot four and weighing no more than 135 pounds. He put the bolts in the sink and ran water over them, rinsing away the blood and tissue.

He went back into the closet, retrieved his penlight and searched each of them. None of them carried any identification. In the bedroom closet, he opened a box lined with foam rubber, and removed a small U.S. Army night scope he’d long ago purchased on the black market. The front door was still half open, so he sat down near the doorway, and using the scope, slowly scanned the neighborhood. The night scope focused the moonlight and starlight into his lens, penetrated the dark recesses of the night, and displayed a picture that glowed a light green. Nothing stirred. If people were there, they were extremely well hidden. All was still. He waited ten minutes, checking continually from his doorway and window, scanning every rooftop, tree, bush, alleyway, window and doorway. Every shadow was suspect, but nothing changed—nothing moved except a heavy rice rat on its nightly search for food. The soft breezes and chirping crickets did little to lift the heaviness of the night.

He slipped a knife into an ankle sheath and fastened it to his right ankle, letting his loose pant leg slip over it. Taking one of the assassin’s knives in his hand for whatever protection it would afford, he easily hefted the first man onto his shoulder and carried him through the yard and into the back alley, staying deep in the alley’s shadows. Less than a block away was a huge garbage pile, six feet high and twenty-five feet long, where the locals dumped their inedibles, hoping beyond hope that the government would one day haul it all away. During the Vietnam War in the 60s and into the 70s, the Saigon government could only manage, at best, partial collection about once every week or so. After the war, the north made great strides trying to return city refuse collection to a scheduled pickup, as well as restoring all utility services to normal, but soon, they too, returned to the old way.

During the day the garbage pile was inhabited by a couple of scratching chickens doing their foraging and children playing, while scrawny dogs and rats fought over available scraps by night. Oftentimes, rats foraged during the day as well. Many children sported rat bites as they reached out to touch an aggressive critter in spite of their mother’s yelling, or inadvertently, as they played a game like King of the Hill. Garth lived with this image daily. The stench of the garbage piles permeated everything. You lived with it; it became a part of the Vietnam adventure.

Garth went back for the other bodies and with two more trips, unceremoniously dumped them with the first. When he got back in his house, he realized he was breathing heavy. His hands began to shake and he sat down, realizing he had just killed three men. It was justified, he knew, but still…. It took a few minutes to calm down. He washed the bolts again, dried and disassembled them, and put them and the now disassembled crossbow away in the frame of the special carrying case. Using a pencil-thin flashlight, he searched for bloodstains in the bedroom, wiping down the few he found, hoping to remove any telltale traces of blood, trying to avoid leaving fresh scrubbed marks on the dusty, stained floor and walls. He ignored the mark in the wall caused by the bolt. No one would notice it, or possibly relate it to anything other than one more wall gouge among many. He’d recheck everything again in the morning.

He lay down on the bed, but the excitement had been too much. He was no stranger to killing, having done so during the war, but now his stomach churned and he tried to swallow the metallic taste that rose in his mouth. Standing, he paced around the room, his mind in turmoil. There were too many unanswered questions. He noticed some dark marks on his shirt and, realizing it was blood from the assassins, changed his clothes, wrapping the bloody shirt and pants in a bag to dispose of later. Bile rose up and he the metallic taste roiled his stomach but he didn’t throw up. He rinsed his mouth with a warm beer.

Why did anyone want to murder him? He knew he’d made enemies, as all reporters knew that sooner or later they’d make enemies, but not severe enough to actually carry out the threat to kill. So, who were they? Again and again, he returned to the unanswered question—why?

4

The next morning, tired and disheveled from lack of sleep and trying to keep to his usual schedule, Garth left his house and walked toward the alley to see if the three bodies were still there. The garbage pile was still present and would be for several weeks, if not months. Several chickens scratched in the debris and an emaciated dog burrowed in the garbage searching for something edible. Hundreds or thousands of flies buzzed, and the stench rose in the warming sun. As people walked about, some glanced at him, since it was relatively unusual to see a westerner in this part of the city, but most ignored him knowing he was the resident westerner. Nothing seemed out of place, everything appeared perfectly ordinary, except for one thing: the three bodies were gone. He looked carefully at the heap of garbage as he walked past it. There was no trace of them. It never happened.

Thinking furiously about what happened, he caught a blue and cream-colored Renault taxi. Could it have been a dream? Could I have imagined it all? Did I hallucinate the whole thing? No, it really happened.

Garth knew he couldn’t call the police. He definitely didn’t want to get involved in some international incident. But now there were no bodies. Even if he called the police, they’d shake their heads and call him a crazy westerner.

Where are the bodies? they’d ask.

And what could he say? They disappeared, but I have these knives and some bloody clothes.

He could see the smirks on their faces.

The knives were in his attaché case along with his bloody shirt and pants, his bed had a mattress with knife slashes in it, and the apartment wall had a small gouge in it. He needed to dispose of the knives away from his house. He expected that the police would question everyone, perhaps even search his house, had they found the bodies. No bodies, no case. The crossbow was well hidden. Only by x-raying his attaché case and making some very educated guesses about the unusually constructed frame, would anyone be able to discover and assemble the cross bow. No airport inspector had even remotely questioned it. There didn’t seem to be anything special about the knives, but he felt they might be distinctive enough to raise questions. He had to get rid of them and knew exactly where to take them. To Hal Thorpe—Special Agent in Charge, the SAC, of the CIA’s Ho Chi Minh City office. He’d speak with him and give him the knives. Maybe Hal could provide some answers. No one was more knowledgeable about the dark underbelly of Asia.

Hal was the resident CIA rep at the embassy annex. It wasn’t called the embassy, of course, and Hal wasn’t generally known as the CIA SAC—he was called a Special Economic Envoy. The Vietnamese wouldn’t allow the Americans two embassies, especially one in Ho Chi Minh City when Hanoi was Vietnam’s capital. So it was an economic development conglomerate under the auspices of the Swiss that operated out of the building. But to anyone in the know, it was the embassy annex and Hal was the SAC.

Another problem crept into Garth’s mind. If the bodies were gone, then someone removed them. He had been seen dumping the bodies. That meant someone else knew, and they would surely try to kill him again.

Shit! he blurted out.

The taxi driver glanced at him in the mirror. Garth immediately felt embarrassed.

Co duoc khong? the driver said, and then in English,