Sean Bunzick
John Harwich, an American expat living in Chiang Mai, is on Koh Samui for relaxation after deadly times in the Golden Triangle and Cambodia. He'll just hang out at the beach and relax, right?
Wrong.
The Vietnam vet gets challenged by an Australian expat into going to Singapore and then the Philippines aboard a Chinese junk loaded with Chinese antiquities that has just sailed down from Hong Kong. Harwich only agrees because three American girls are also on the junk and it's their very first trip to Asia.
He soon finds himself on an island dealing with human taffickers, pirates and a gladiatorial game where "contestants" are filmed for video sales as they are slaughtered.
Either Harwich goes to war with this system or he and the girls will be killed once their "entertainment value" is gone.
Sean Bunzick is from Cape Cod, Massachusetts but he has been calling the Kingdom of Thailand his "second home" for almost twenty years now. When he's in Thailand, he lives in the beautiful mountain city of Chiang Mai where Burma and Laos aren't very far away at all.
He has had many unique experiences in Southeast Asia that have given him a firm appreciation for this part of the world and a deep love for it.
He is very much looking forward to living permanently in Thailand where he can do further writing overlooking the rice paddies, mountains, temples and general intriguing atmosphere of the Orient.
He can be e-mailed at: seanb6@hotmail.com and welcomes all contacts
The sun was setting on another near-perfect day over Chaweng Beach on
Koh Samui, an island in the Gulf of Thailand.
Sitting in a beach chair in the strip of sand owned by the Baan Samui Resort, John Harwich watched the sunset, contemplating it and enjoying its crimson beauty. He compared it mentally to the hundreds of sunsets he’d seen on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, his native home. It was different here in the Gulf of Thailand, not the same as the sunsets had been on Cape Cod Bay. Not more picturesque or less. Just…different. And he liked it. It made him mellow, put him at peace.
It was a peace he’d been enjoying for a couple weeks now since he’d flown down to Thailand’s second largest island from Chiang Mai and Bangkok. A friend of his in Chiang Mai had recommended both the island and this hotel, Baan Samui Resort. Both had been a big hit with Harwich. Peace, quiet, no rushing around. He spent his days lazing around reading, swimming, getting a great tan and his nights nursing drinks in the bar. The breezes under the tropical stars were warm and relaxing. Harwich was under a spell of maximum bliss. And Koh Samui was fully responsible.
Bliss was something that had been in short supply for Harwich of late. And that was a monumental understatement!
Once upon a time, it had seemed so simple…
Harwich had enlisted in the US Army towards the end of the Vietnam War, joined the Special Forces and was among the last of the men in green berets to serve in the clusterfuck known as Vietnam. Before his first tour was up with 5th Group, Harwich was “hired” by the CIA to “work” in Laos and Cambodia. While serving there, he was made part of the 46th Group based out of Lopburi, Thailand. He did two tours in Thailand and fell in love with the kingdom. The people, the country and Buddhism helped him to come to terms with what the “secret wars” in Indochina had turned him into--a killing machine. Thailand made him human again.
When it was time to return to the World, he was ready and willing.
He came back to the Cape and got on with his life.
It was an unexciting but satisfying life that he was happy to have until the day, almost three months earlier, when his dog was hit by a cement mixer and had to be put down. Harwich, upset over this, punched out an obnoxious tourist from NYC at the restaurant where he was a day manager. He also punched out his patronizing, asshole boss and got himself fired. The day ended with him burying his beloved pet, getting totally plastered and having a Ragnarok-esque argument with his younger, beautiful girlfriend before
throwing her out of his house.
And then the real trouble began!
It started with a phone call from an old friend, Glenn Lucas, an ex-Flying Tiger, calling him from the Oriental Hotel in Bangkok. It continued with Harwich returning to Thailand to set up a mission to go into Laos to rescue a former Nationalist Chinese general and his treasure that had been aboard an old C-47 flown by Glenn as China collapsed to Communism in 1949. The route had been Kunming to Vientiane to Bangkok but a severe monsoon storm had forced the Gooney Bird down in Laos before it could land at Vientiane. Glenn had assumed the general was dying when he left the wrecked C-47 behind in the karst hills.
The reality was that the general, Yen Ching Kung, survived and had been in a very long-term coma, a POW of a Lao opium warlord who, despising all Chinese, had kept Yen as a comatose “pet” at his HQ. When another POW was there for Yen’s “awakening”, he was given a Chinese necklace and Glenn’s dog tags and told whom to contact in Bangkok and Hong Kong after he escaped the camp.
