somehow connected with the attack on Jefferson last night. The
questions he asked of our people point to that, certainly. But we
cannot link Hsiao to the coup, except circumstantially.”
Tombstone thought about that. He was certain that Hsiao was tied to the
coup somehow because of the That soldiers he’d seen. There was a common
factor, and it tied Hsiao in with both the communist rebellion and the
That military coup. Some factor, some person …
Tombstone’s eyes opened wide. The connection had been staring him in
the face all along, and he’d not seen it. Neither had anyone else.
Tombstone raised his hand. Neil nodded toward him. “Commander?”
“This is a little embarrassing, sir,” Tombstone said. “But I think I
know what the link might be. Who the link might be.”
There was a buzz of murmured conversation around the room. Tombstone
waited for it to die down. He should have seen the link earlier, should
have been able to pass it on to Neil and his people that morning. It
was obvious, now that he thought about it.
“What do you mean, Tombstone?” Neil asked.
“Bayerly and I were captured and interrogated by this Hsiao character.
It only just now occurred to me … how did he know where to find me?”
Neil frowned. “You told us during your debriefing that you were with
the news correspondent, Pamela Drake. In her hotel room …”
“And the only other person who knew I was there was Colonel Kriangsak,
our liaison with the That military command.”
There was stunned silence in the room for several seconds.
“You’re sure of this, Tombstone?” Admiral Magruder asked. He was
standing to one side of the room, his arms folded across his chest. “I
think we’ve been assuming you were picked up at random. Anybody at that
hotel could have been an agent for Hsiao.”
“Positive, sir. Kriangsak called me, after I’d been getting a
bureaucratic run-around from his office all day. He had me meet him at
the Americana.” Tombstone felt embarrassment coloring his face, not so
much from the admission of where he’d spent the night, but from the
realization of how easily he’d been trapped. He’d been as trusting as a
sailor on first-time liberty getting rolled for the change in his
pocket. “I told him I would be at the Dusit Thani, but I didn’t tell
anyone else. Later I called him to cancel a car he was sending for me.”
Tombstone shook his head. “Now that I think about it, he could have
picked up Commander Bayerly at the same time. Some of his people helped
the commander out of the Americana. And Colonel Kriangsak was the only
person who knew where I was … who knew I was staying at the Dusit
Thani in … a certain hotel room.” He glanced at Neil. “Sorry,
Commander. It just now came together for me–But the pieces fit. It’s
too much of a coincidence that both Commander Bayerly and I were grabbed
at random.”
Neil appeared to be digesting the information. “If that’s true, Hsiao
is playing both sides of the game, helping the rebels and organizing the
coup.
He’s also behind the attack on Jefferson, since he could have put that
together through Kriangsak, who in turn could have been in on the coup.”
“What’s the point of organizing both a communist rebellion and a coup
which wants to take more effective measures against that rebellion?”
Admiral Magruder asked.
“Confusion,” Master Chief Buckley volunteered. “Maybe they figure the
United States won’t intervene if we don’t know what’s going on.”
“That never stopped us before,” someone else added, and there was a
round of subdued chuckles. The tension in the room seemed to have been
broken.
Neil looked hard at Tombstone. “My guess would be that the Burmese
incidents, the communist insurrection, the attack at U Feng, all of
those were engineered by General Hsiao to create the proper conditions
for a military coup. Kriangsak and any other traitors Hsiao was able to
recruit with promises of money or power were brought in to organize the
coup, to get it rolling. If he could start a war with Burma too, that