Zero Trust In Zamboanga

The afternoon sunlight sparkled on the blue-green water of the Strait of Malacca. Ships of all sizes made their way from one point to the next, usually the port of Singapore.

One of the ships sailing away from Singapore was a Chinese junk. It had come originally from Hong Kong, sailed by an Australian.

   Now it had a Thai flag flying proudly from it and the junk's skipper was an American named John Harwich.

   Harwich stood on the deck of his junk, freshly re-christened Realia, near the bow. He wore a baseball cap to protect his sunburned face from the sun's further damage. He was especially worried about burning the top of his head which had been crewcut down to the scalp against his will. Nor was that the only physical annoyance he had. His neck still throbbed from where it had been hit by a rubber ball the day before. His wrists hurt, his ankles hurt, his stomach hurt, his balls hurt, his head hurt. He had been through the mill in the last couple of days and was very happy to stand on the deck of Realia with the wind brushing against his face and the salt air in his nostrils. He was on his way to being on the mend.

   Life had gotten very interesting for Harwich in the last couple months since he had returned after thirty years to Southeast Asia...

   Harwich had joined the US Army at the tail-end of the Vietnam War, being one of the last members of the Special Forces to be sent to Vietnam before the pull out. He did time with the 5th Group there and was "hired" by the CIA to work in Laos and Cambodia. He also did tours with the 46th Group as a training adviser to the Royal Thai Army Special Forces and the Border Patrol Police at Camp Narai in Lopburi, Thailand. While there, he fell in love with the Thai--their language, their customs, their food, their women--and he became a Buddhist. Thailand helped him flush the killings and betrayals of Indochina out of his system. When it was time to return to the States, he was ready to go.

   Back home in his native Massachusetts, on the sandy shores of Cape Cod, he had re-established himself in his community. He got jobs, girlfriends, bought a house. A steady, secure, normal life.

   That changed when he got a phone call from a friend of his, Glenn Lucas, who was calling from the Oriental Hotel in Bangkok. Glenn, an old Flying Tiger and CAT pilot in China, needed Harwich's help in Laos. Glenn, a Cape Codder like Harwich, had been threatened by a Hong Kong Triad and that's why he was in Thailand calling Harwich.

   Harwich had agreed to go back to Thailand where he helped Glenn in Laos with the assistance of expat buddies of his in Bangkok and Chiang Mai.

   When the mission was finished and Harwich was well-paid by a grateful Triad organization, he decided to stay in Chiang Mai. He wasn't married, had no children and back on Cape Cod, life had been turning shitty just before Glenn's call: he had to put down his dog Mr. Rex after the canine had been struck by a cement mixer, he'd lost his job as a restaurant day manager after punching out an obnoxious customer and he broke up with his current girlfriend. His reliable old pickup was paid for, as was his house, so he said "Mai pen lai!" and began being an expatriate in Thailand.

   This peace and quiet was interuted soon after by a job he ended up doing in Cambodia for a Golden Triangle opium warlord obsessed with jade. When that insanity had ended, Harwich went south to Koh Samui to relax and basically screw off. He'd enjoyed the place he'd stayed at, the beach, the saltwater and the general tranquility of the island. And then Seth Trent had shown up.

   He had been eating in the same restaurant at the same resort Harwich was staying at--a loud, rude SOB who threatened to beat up a waiter because the lobster wasn't satisfactory. Harwich had intervened and found out that Trent, an Australian living in Singapore, was specifically looking for him. Trent had purchased a Chinese junk in Hong Kong and was sailing it, along with two cargoes and three beautiful American girls, to Singapore. He wanted Harwich to come along and act as a bodyguard for the girls and the cargo. Against his better judgment, Harwich had agreed to go. He sent e-mails to his expat friends asking them to check out Trent's background before sailing off on the junk with the awful name Bitchin' Joss. It had turned out to be a colossal mistake.

   Seth Trent was really a black marketeer from the Vietnam War named Oscar Taggart. Recently, he was a member of a smuggling ring that pirated motor yachts in the Gulf of Thailand and brought them to a little known island called Koh Dum. The three girls, all from Massachusetts (they had come to Asia to vacation because one of them had met Harwich at Logan Airport in Boston when he was on his way back to Bangkok), were the reason Trent had brought the junk to Koh Dum. Because the island had customers who came to buy yachts or parts, there was also a brothel to serve them. As bad as the three girls being sex slaves was the obscenity known as The Men's Show--a gladiatorial setting where working male prisoners from the captured boats fought for their lives against wild, starved beasts--and lost.