Sea of Lies: An Espionage Thriller by Bradley West Page B

homegrown firms fueling Asia’s economic rise was the true testament to her quality. Every country in Asia was much the same: women made the place run and men posed for the PR photos.
    He dried off with the still-damp towel, his second shower in seven hours. He mused that he needed lower hygienic standards and more sleep. Hecker’s people had checked Nolan out of Rangoon’s Traders Hotel and his duffel bag was by the bed. This time he enjoyed all of a half hour’s rest before Hecker shook him awake. His mind was as fuzzy as his teeth. The conference table now doubled as a breakfast spot. The BBC was off mute, but they learned nothing from the incessant droning other than the addition of more planes and vessels to a search of empty seas and skies.
    Hecker sauntered up while Nolan was buttering a piece of toast. The DEA boss’s fresh-shaven face, dimples and clean clothes made him look office-ready for Silicon Valley, save for the pistol now in a nylon cross-draw holster . “Let’s roll,” he said as he wrapped two muffins in a napkin.
    Nolan took Ryder’s relatively clean spot in the back of the Range Rover while regarding his former perch with a mixture of disgust and grudging admiration; mud, blood and mire obscured all but a few swaths of blue fabric. Nolan still ached everywhere and his fatigue was such that the motion of the vehicle hypnotized him every few blocks until the driver's next evasive maneuver snapped his head upright again.
    “No matter what that idiot ambassador or conniving bastard Matthews say, don’t share the MH370 Burma hijack hypothesis or the Teller idea. Not if you want the DEA to run the investigation,” Hecker said.
    “Do you still think Matthews is tied up in this?”
    “I don’t know, but we can’t afford to take the chance. Let’s keep the focus on Airstrip One.”
    “If we don’t tell them that the plane probably landed in Burma, then half a dozen satellites, thirty ships and a hundred aircraft will keep looking in the wrong places.”
    “What proof do you have of anything? After midnight there are more planes landing and taking off without flight plans than fly during daylight hours.”
    Nolan’s silence softened Hecker’s tone as the DEA boss shifted perspective. “Look, Bob, I’m not saying you’re wrong. After all, the international airport closes down from 1 to 6 a.m., and they shut off their commercial radar between 2 and 5 a.m. daily, sometimes longer. Burma’s military radar is arrayed in the northwest toward India and the north and northeast toward China; very little in the east toward their partners in crime in Thailand, and none at all to the west toward Bangladesh or out to sea to the south. If MH370 flew into Burma air space, as long as it didn’t overfly Thailand or come within two hundred miles of either the Thailand or China borders, it would have been invisible.
    “A Boeing 777 could have flown into the delta, landed and took off in the early hours and no one would be the wiser. I’m just saying that because it might have happened doesn’t mean it did happen.”
    Nolan’s jaw dropped. “You have to be kidding. Turn off the radar at the international airport?”
    Hecker gave him a tight-lipped smile and raised his eyebrows a fraction in feigned amazement. “Over a year ago after our brothers at the embassy grounded the DEA overflights, I was sufficiently pissed off I compared after-midnight radar tapes with ghost flights out of Air Force bases. The US and UN put the heat on the government to crack down on the armed forces’ involvement in drug shipments. Did you know that a C-130 carries a 45,000-pound payload? That’s a lot of money at $700 a pound for opium and $9,000 a pound for heroin. No radar traces means maybe another undetected $100-million-plus flight. So the radar is now switched off in the name of energy conservation, and the generals’ sons drag race their Italian sports cars up and down the runway all night.
    “You have to think