Tidal Rage Read online

  TIDAL RAGE

  David Evans

  LOUDHAILER BOOKS

  All Rights Reserved

  Copyright © David Evans 2021

  This first edition published in 2021 by:

  Loudhailer Books

  13 Lyminster Avenue

  Brighton

  BN1 8JL

  www.loudhailerbooks.com

  This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents in this book are either the product of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events, is purely coincidental.

  Contents

  Preface

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Preface

  No day is a good day to die, especially when you are young, vibrant, and beautiful. The fact that it was not a single killer, but two independent killers unaware of each other made her chance of survival zero.

  Elisa Cutler radiated the youthful self-confidence that comes with the knowledge that men and women admired her, both for her intelligence and her personality. Her flawless skin would flush bright red when admiring eyes cast over her face and body. Elisa was a virgin; she had just discovered boys, well one in particular.

  Elisa stood at the stern of deck six of the cruise ship, to Skype her boyfriend. It was an area of relative privacy on a vessel with two thousand plus guests, and one where she could get a good internet connection for her iPad. She carried her tablet in a pink cover which matched the colour of her short dress

  The day was on the verge of turning, the red tinge on the horizon announcing dusk. The day had unusually for the area been rainless and cool. The air was crisp as the sun dropped below the mountains that appeared as giant ice-cream cones. The cry from a bald eagle broke the steady hum of the wake of the propeller. The eddies had been the playground of a pod of orcas for the last hour.

  Stretching from Puget Sound, Washington, through the British Columbia coast and into the Gulf of Alaska, the Inside Passage includes more than a thousand islands, seemingly endless shoreline, and a multitude of idyllic coves and bays. The ship had visited Icy Strait earlier that day, and was now just a little south of Juneau, Alaska.

  2,043 guests, less 1, would depart the following morning on excursions. Many would go whale watching, others to view the magnificent Mendenhall Glacier, a sizeable minority no further than the well-stocked local bars. Juneau was the capital of Alaska and established before the big Klondike Gold Rush of 1898.

  The scenery and the ambience meant little to the assassin. He hid in the shadows at the stern of deck six. He was a man, and like any other man, he admired the beauty of his victim, even feeling a little lustful. He was too much of a professional to let these thoughts get in the way; he had a job to do. She would have to die, and it was her brother's fault for meddling in his boss's affairs. 'A distraction' was how he described it; her brother and parents would call it devastation.

  Elisa had spent the early evening dining in the stylish Swallow restaurant on deck three, followed by a drink in the music bar, as the excellent pianist plied his trade. Elisa was connecting the settings on her iPad to the ship's Wi-Fi system. Elisa had waited patiently to connect with her first and only boyfriend, whom she had met at college several weeks earlier.

  The assassin began to move silently and stealthily, then rapidly moved back into the shadows, as his acute senses warned him someone else was approaching.

  The captain was at the wheel, the chefs in the galley, and the ship's orchestra playing the theme to Phantom of the Opera to support the cast in the Seaward theatre. The pianist had finished his early stint in the music bar and was not due to play again for a further forty minutes.

  Elisa turned, and ceased dabbing her fingers on the tablet, to see who was approaching her. It was a windless night, but the massive hulk of the ship displaced the air in front of it which created a gentle breeze. Elisa's hair wafted on the breeze, which only enhanced her youthfulness and beauty.

  To the assassin in the shadows, it appeared that she knew the approaching man. He pondered whether he would have to kill them both. The man who was approaching was small in stature; the assassin considered killing them both quickly and silently.

  For eleven years, the assassin had plied his trade. Not many things could shock him, but the events of the next thirty seconds did. Shock may be too strong a word, but he did feel admiration and surprise at the tradecraft of the individual with Elisa.

  “Good evening, Maestro.”

  Elisa smiled as you would to an acquaintance, and died. The demure figure rabbit-punched her in the throat, and she let out one last gasp, before slumping dead on the deck. He rapidly pulled out a chunk of her scalp, carefully placing it into a plastic bag. He was much stronger than the assassin in the shadows had assumed. The executioner lifted her over the back of the boat in one fluid motion.

  Job done, thought the redundant assassin; money for nothing. He rapidly moved back into the dark shadows of the stairwell.

  Elisa's murderer walked past the assassin, and stopped for a second, as though he sensed another human being in the vicinity. He sniffed the air, but any trace was lost in the gentle breeze, and he walked off. It had taken less than forty seconds from arrival to disposal.

  Elisa dropped like a stone, six decks into the wake. There were no windows, balconies, or open spaces on the five decks below, and no CCTV. The killer had picked his spot well. With only a single bald eagle as a spectator, the pod of orcas played with their new toy. They flipped Elisa's cadaver from one to another. Finally one submerged, with Elisa between its teeth. Elisa did not resurface, lost forever to the ice-cold depths of the Inside Passage.

  Today was not a good day to die; it was destiny of a sort. Her life cut short; Max Cutler would never see his sister again.

  Chapter One

  Sebastian was conceived in the sex pit of Patpong, a chaotic tangle of market stalls, shops, restaurants, and drinking dens in the heart of Bangkok. The mainstays of business were alcohol and sexual encounters. The demand for underage girls was constant, and many of them were either dead or diseased by the age of twenty-five.

  Those that survived were much cheaper to purchase by the hour or for a night. In some cases, the boys had their Adam's apples shaved and their penises strapped tightly between their legs. Most times, you could not tell the boys from the girls. Some of the less discerning customers did not care, and some preferred their boys to look like boys.

  The acrid aroma of sex was everywhere: the sickly stench of sour flesh and bodily fluids. The smell intermingled with the scents of dried shrimp and coconut milk emanating from the heady mix of food stalls that lined
the streets.

  A man (or indeed a woman) could have all their primal needs satisfied within this area: food, shelter, and sex. Not just any sex; there was a whole menu of the type, gender, transgender, size, and age, all of questionable quality, but copious quantity.

  The sex workers of Patpong worked mainly from bars, controlled by a pimp who was primarily a bar owner. In some bars, they sat around the tables; in others, they were corralled together like cattle in pens, waiting to be picked by the multitude of lustful beings that passed them by.

  Some men would choose the cheapest sex workers, who were generally unkempt, infested, walking skeletons, apparently afflicted by sexually transmitted diseases. These customers were playing Russian roulette with their lives; sometimes due to economics, other times by choice.

  Somewhere beneath the neon lights in Silom Road, an overweight sex tourist, between visits to the Emerald Buddha Temple and the water market, heaved and sweated Sebastian into existence.

  Sebastian's mother, Kim, was originally from a small village on the outskirts of Chang Mai, to the north of the country along the Burmese border. Kim was twelve when her father sold her to Luau Wan. He wanted her to work in his factory in Bangkok sewing teddy bears; that was the lie he had told her father. As soon as Kim's mother was diagnosed with breast cancer, he needed to decide. Kim's father needed money for an operation, and the 700 US dollars he received for Kim would pay for the initial treatment. He had no option but to sell his only daughter, who was not worth as much to him as her brothers; they could earn their keep in the fields, harvesting rice.

  Kim never had a chance to work in a factory or a shop. Not yet a teenager, she lost her virginity to a US three-star general on leave from Vietnam. Luau Wan received 500 US dollars—the market rate for a confirmed virgin.

  Unfortunately for Wan, he could only sell Kim as pure for the first year. Within twelve months, the heroin she was hooked on started to take its toll. To the discerning customer, it was noticeable that, although only thirteen, she was no longer fresh.

  After two years, Kim had been moved by Luau Wan down to Pattaya, to his bar on Walking Street, preferring fresher meat for his establishment in Bangkok. Kim would sit on the wooden veranda one floor up, which jutted out over Walking Street. The street consisted of a multitude of two-floor wooden buildings facing each other, some five yards across over a dusty mix of tarmac and grit. The alley consisted of bars, money exchangers, Thai boxing venues, even more bars, and brothels.

  From Kim's vantage point on the veranda, she could see the multitude of European sex tourists and American soldiers. The lustful intermingled with curious visitors. Kim was the near-nude centrepiece, and they would cheer as she was goaded into pole dancing to entice even more clients.

  Kim had to make money to pay for her habit. She needed the heroin to survive and could no longer live without the white powder, even for a day.

  Like most pimps, Luau Wan kept most of Kim's takings, leaving her with just enough for the drug and basic food. Kim would get laid or offer other services at least seven times a night. To fall short would mean a beating, but even worse was the withdrawal from the heroin she so craved.

  Kim was sixteen years old when the scented condom burst, and she conceived Sebastian. The father was a twenty-stone German car worker from Hamburg called Fritz. Had the rupture happened twenty minutes earlier, the father would have been Joachim from Sweden. Had it been an hour earlier, it could have been Karl from London, or Gregg from Washington. These two had met in a bar and had agreed to share her and the price.

  The magnetic appeal of child sex for some of the world's lowlifes was clearly apparent in this area of Bangkok.

  Kim had been forced on the pill since she was twelve and had no idea how she became pregnant. After the first beating, Luau Wan had allowed her to have the child. Wan's parents had been religious, and although he had no qualms about dealing with child sex slavery, he could not cross the line into killing unborn children.

  Sebastian was born on a hot and humid New Year's Day, the first day of 1972. Not the beautiful baby she had hoped for, but a heroin addict's child, with a defined harelip. Sebastian was an ugly child by any standard.

  Kim rented an apartment situated above a Thai fighting arena, just off Walking Street and located next to Baby Doll night club. A neon Coke bottle flashed on and off continuously from the Spanky's bar opposite, filling the room with light and then plunging it into darkness just as quickly. Sebastian's crib was dark for two seconds, then illuminated for two seconds, and so it went on from 9 pm until 5 am.

  The child suffered constant stress from interrupted sleep patterns, disturbed by the gasping, throaty noises of men in the throes of sex, men that Kim brought home each night.

  Sebastian's existence was, from his earliest memory, all about survival. Other children suckled at their mother's breasts for milk. Sebastian was fed milk from an unsterilized bottle. The constant pulling, tugging, and bites from the men she entertained left her too sore.

  Kim would feed him his eight ounces of formula with a tiny amount of heroin mixed in. It was the only way to quiet him down, or he would scream all night long.

  Sebastian was the name his mother had called him. An English client insisted on bringing a video cassette along. He pressed play before heaving himself up and down on top of her. He watched episodes of the English drama Upstairs Downstairs. Kim heard the name several times over his grunting. She liked the name, so she called her half-Thai, half-European child Sebastian.

  Events took a turn for the better in 1975. Sebastian was three years old, and his mother, Kim, was nineteen. Several sex workers moved away from the pimps and bars and bought in muscle to assist them. Needing to continue to work required developing a new marketing strategy; well, not new, but redefined. It was the time when the American GIs came to Bangkok; battle-weary and looking for beer, and lots of sex.

  Sex workers waited outside the gates of the barracks that housed the American soldiers on respite from the terrors of the Vietnam war.

  Kim found the GIs too rough; some liked to beat up their women, and they were often high on one drug or another. Kim used Don Mueang International Airport.Along with another dozen or so sex workers, she would wait for the flights from Europe, Australia, or America.

  Kim's clients were usually overbearing Europeans, Australians, and a few Arabs who had a penchant for the likes of Kim. The rent boys at the airports would target lithe Nordic travellers, who preferred the ladyboys. Clients were predominantly men, some middle-aged, some positively ancient, some young, some married, some with wives in tow, and almost all wanting one kind of sexual encounter or another.

  Kim, like many Thai women, appraised men differently than their Western counterparts. A paunchy belly in the US or UK is not the ideal shape for a man. Many women assume the man likes too many beers or does not work hard enough, whereas a Thai woman sees a paunch as a sign of wealth.

  Hank McKenzie was such a man. He had been born in Portland, Oregon, in the United States, some forty years earlier. Hank was a victim of fast-food chains; it would kill him in the end, but not because of the food. He was a big man in every way, over six feet two inches tall, with a broad chest, and a more expansive waist and stomach. He was big, he was bald as a newborn, and fat. There was a reason he was in Thailand. Hank wanted to purchase a companion, and if it worked out, a wife. He had been here twice before and knew the lay of the land. He was determined this time was the right time.

  On the day Kim and Hank crossed paths, she had her little Eurasian son in tow. Some men liked this; she knew. They thought that if a woman had a child, she would be drug- and disease-free, but this was not true in Kim's case.

  "No waste time looking for other girls, they no good. I clean, no disease, we do fucky-fucky all night long. Then I clean and bathe you, I cook for you and then again, I love you long, long time."

  Hank wanted a wife so badly. He was sick of going to work functions as one of an insignificant band of men wh
o could not get a date, no matter how hard he tried. Hank had been to many social occasions where he stuck out as a lonely bachelor, the type the lonely ladies do not want. Unfortunately, his size and looks left him in the also-ran stakes of romance.

  Hank was desperate and driven, and this may have clouded his vision as far as Kim was concerned. He could see she was young but had been at this game for a few years. He knew she would be drug-dependent and in need of more than a few doses of antibiotics, but as long as she was AIDS-free, he could get her assistance. The child was a bonus, a ready-made family.

  Hank bought her for four weeks and told her she had to do anything he wanted in those four weeks. Hank showed Kim a $500 bill; she gasped. Kim had seen thousands of dollars cross the palms of the bar owner. The most Kim had ever held in her hands at the end of the month was $40. She had never seen so much money, nearly all of hers had gone to pimps. Hank ripped the bill and gave her one-half, he promised the other half in four weeks if she had pleased him.

  Kim was no fool. These opportunities only came along once in a lifetime, if you were lucky, and she agreed to the contract. You can imagine her surprise when Hank had her and Sebastian go to Chiang Rai, 800 kilometres north of Bangkok. She asked no questions, as Hank had made it clear he was footing the bill, so it was his party. After landing, he drove in the hired car some twenty miles further into the interior to a large camp, which looked like a military base.

  Hank, in the two days prior, had done his homework well. He had used his contacts from previous visits to arrange the treatment. Kim had no idea what she was going to be undertaking.

  The camp was eighteen acres, surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards posted every forty yards. The recovery unit was an open secret. Colonel James Fallon had seen the drug abuse first-hand in Vietnam. Fallon knew wherever there was substance abuse, the military would need rehabilitation units. Men who had left home as fresh-faced GIs could not be sent back as gibbering drug addicts.