Escape
THE TRUE STORY OF THE ONLY WESTERNER EVER
TO BREAK OUT OF THAILAND’S BANGKOK HILTON
DAVID McMILLAN
A Random Chronicle of Traces: the balance of the year from some letters
The young Thai girl with long nails at the check-in desk had just walked away to her supervisor, losing her automatic smile as she gripped my ticket and fake passport. Across the hall, men in dark suits began retreating to unmarked doors. At the airport’s exits, local uniformed police eyed each other, seeking initiative. Two rows away I saw an old acquaintance and fellow smuggler at another airline counter. He was on a different mission yet had caught enough of what was going on to edge his suitcase away with one foot and step back into his queue with the other. It was a bad airport day, and would get worse. Now, after three days in Thailand and with months’ planning and my new identity clearly blown, I had about six minutes to get out of Bangkok airport and to disappear completely.
Turning towards the exits I tried to appear casual, miming thirst as I headed for a soft-drink counter. Instead of drink I took to the nearby stairs, descending to the arrivals hall. From there, out and past the first taxi rank into the gloom of a covered car park where fifty drivers waited and dozed in the fumy heat.
The driver I woke was pleased to get a job out of turn. After we bumped out of the darkness and ramped up to the freeway leading to the city, I was certain no one had followed. The metallic wind of the taxi’s straining air conditioner failed to cool a head ablaze with frustration. Otherwise I might have given more thought as to the cause of so many police waiting for me at the airport.
An hour later at the bar of the Sheraton Hotel, I listed my losses and remaining assets. The small bag at my feet held a pristine passport. Even the most zealous investigators would have problems identifying and circulating its name in less than seventy-two hours. My pockets held US$12,000, with a further US$32,000 hidden in the bag’s lining. At the airport, the Westlake passport had been taken and was of no importance now despite its link to the Oriental Hotel and my stay there. Before technicians could have tapped family telephones, I should have called to say I would not return for Christmas—then five days away—and would perhaps be absent for many more. But then, no one had known I’d left home.
Calling a Chiang Mai contact from a payphone, I was directed to a travel agency in Chinatown from where I would phone beyond the roar of Bangkok’s traffic. It was rush hour so traffic was at a standstill.
Why was I being pursued at such cost? Plainly, I was a drug smuggler, and those against me were doing their jobs with government agencies. Yet, over the years, the contest had dropped below that elementary arrangement. My stubbornness had heightened their desire for the pursuit and the chase was all that mattered. The rules were now defined only by what worked. On both sides the expense, identities, the drugs and any greater purpose had been secondary in this war for over a decade. Any combatant could operate or appear as any other. It no longer interested me what they called themselves, only what they did.
The sun was setting as I stepped through alleyways, rode
tuk-tuks
and motorcycle taxis toward Chinatown. There I would spend an hour making calls before the final retreat to a forested house beyond the city.
As I walked the last few metres through a jangling arcade to the glass door of the shabby travel agency, I dismissed those eyes upon me as merely the usual curiosity directed at foreigners. Standing inside before Large Raj, the Indian proprietor, I sensed movement behind me as he spoke.
‘David, you’re here to use the phone?’
Four Thai men stepped in quickly. One older and confident leading three younger but uncertain. They wore guns close to hand, visible yet undrawn. That meant they were not robbers. They began speaking English but I knew that their words would not be helpful. They were policemen with accomplices outside the shop. A shop I knew had no back door and this was Chinatown, where the Thai Narcotics Suppression Division had its headquarters. I was led away with one man carrying my bag. They took me to an underground car park. There, handcuffed and defeated, I was held against the front side of one of their cars while they opened the doors. The engine was cool. They had been waiting for some time.
In the final years of our second millennium, many thousands of men and women, young and old, would fly to Bangkok, that reclining navel on the world map and capital of Thailand, making the underground pilgrimage of the smugglers’ trail. They would come from the cities of the Asian tigers and just as often, from the rich West. Most of them would be couriers, guided by kind or calloused hands, and all hoped to cruise silently from that city, their cargo white and hidden, to then thank the gods for their safety and vow: never again. Until next time.
In the departure lounges there would be trembling bachelor gamblers from Lahore, adventurous girls from Leeds, broken fathers from Chicago and alcoholic dreamers from Pretoria. Staring from a chair opposite might be a stoic matron from Kiev, a numbed addict out of Berne or a silent smoker from Nairobi. Soon they would be airborne, returning home to fair or ruthless settlements. Yet beneath them in the city barely rising above its watery veins, and confined in the great city prisons of Bangkwang and Klong Prem, were those who had fallen or had tripped at departure. Those who would not die in confinement would be changed forever. A few might be released as grains of sand drop from the grip of a brute hand. Those who waited in the humidity of sweating concrete for an end sometimes found the energy to dream of escape. This dream would always be futile as no one had ever survived an attempt.
The bus from the court took two hours to jerk through the traffic to reach the prison. The last of seventy-five prisoners had been squashed into the van by ill-tempered guards at the courthouse. Now on the road, the prisoners’ faces pressed into the iron mesh that served as windows. Their thin brown uniforms were soaked with sweat and their leg irons pounded bare feet with every lurch. Being a newcomer, I was still dressed in civilian clothes.
The bus turned from the airport road through some patchy grass, then over two bridges of a swampy moat. Forty-five-centimetre pipes curling from the prison wall pumped lumpy brown water into the surrounding canals. This was Klong Prem, the sprawling complex that held 12,000 inmates. I was heading for the drug-remand section called Bumbudt, a name that meant ‘the Cure’.
Inductions of new prisoners took place around five each afternoon when most of the other inmates had been put to bed. After six busloads of returns had been run through, about fifty newcomers waited with their bags on the empty, wide roadway between the three-storey accommodation blocks. I was the only foreigner. One chair was placed in the roadway. As the sun sank low, a rangy, bald-headed guard with a long cane took this seat. Two other guards stood by while a dozen trusty prisoners in short trousers fussed at tables nearby ready to do the drudge work with pens, knives and fat registry books.
With exquisite boredom, the boss drew long fingers from around his eyes, dropped a hand to the cane resting on his lap and tapped the ground for the show to begin. The trusties stood tall and ordered us to remove and pile all our clothes on top of our other possessions. Then to squat naked and wait to be called to the throne.
A trusty moved from pile to pile, hacking off shirtsleeves and trouser legs using a rusty knife. Over the next hour prisoners would present themselves, still naked, before the chief guard called the Skull, to suffer his welcome while trusties chopped soap bars into quarters, squeezed toothpaste onto torn newspaper fragments and confiscated items of value.
One newcomer half stood to take his newly fashioned shorts. The Skull swatted the prisoner’s ear with one practiced swipe of his cane.
‘Did I tell you to stand up?’ Then turning to his number one trusty, ‘I told you we’d have trouble with this lot.’ The trusty grinned and nodded at the sagacity of his boss. The troublemaker was allowed to duck-walk, clutching his rags and dripping shampoo paper, to the guard conducting anal inspections. The Skull began working up a drill-sergeant’s banter as he served his next customer.
‘So, Ox-head, where do you come from?’
‘Klong Toey, sir.’
‘Oh yeah, a bit of a sailor are you?’ sneered the bald chief as he used his stick to flick clothes at his trusties.
‘No, I—’ The cowering prisoner’s response was immediately halted by a wide slap to the back sending him to the ground.
‘Don’t argue with me, idiot! I know a sailor when I see one. Now get over there.’ The Skull gestured to the roadside where another guard stood, flabby faced and leering, hands at his side and wearing one knitted woollen glove, the tips of two fingers a muddy brown against the original pink colour. ‘The doctor there will tell us how much of a sailor you are. Next!’
Next was a young man I’d befriended at the Chinatown police station where I had sat for a week before a brief court appearance. His name was Nong, an easy-going junkie with an understanding wife of forty who worked in one of the lesser massage parlours. Six kids, none of them his own.
‘You’ve been here before.’ The Skull, as was usual with prison guards, never forgot a face. ‘I’m sure. What’s your name?’
‘Nong, sir.’
‘Nong, eh?’ The Skull jerked a half-hearted slap to Nong’s neck. ‘Welcome home. Looks like you’ve still got the same pants you left with.’ The Skull’s fingers drew along every hem and reversed every pocket. At a loose seam he tore a wide gap. ‘There, I’ve given you another pocket. Can’t have enough pockets, eh?’
‘Thank you, sir.’
When my turn came, the Skull turned to another guard.
‘What have we got here? More white trash?’
Then to me in English, ‘Where do you come from?’
The question meant: Is your embassy strong? Dead foreigners in jail always resulted in a Thai foreign ministry enquiry. Embarrassment if a consular official called. Embarrassment was much bigger medicine in Thailand than in Europe where it is mere entertainment.
‘My name’s Westlake. Australian.’ I gave the nationality of the passport taken at the airport.
‘Ah, Australia.’ The Skull worked his fingers along the collars of my shirts before picking up my new shorts. That morning I had folded two 1,000-baht notes, made damp, into the top seams. ‘Why do you come to Thailand?’ His firm grip passed over the hidden notes. ‘Drugs?’