Sea of Lies: An Espionage Thriller Read Online Free Page A

and they were on their way back the way they’d come, last glimmers of sunset over their shoulders. He looked back a hundred feet later to see the farmer standing in the middle of the road, staring at them. 
    Nolan handed Kyaw one of the large bottles he’d liberated from the Hyundai. “Drink. You’ve lost a lot of blood.” Kyaw ended up spilling a quarter and drank most of the rest. Nolan finished it. Fishing around in his cargo pants, he came up with a clean handkerchief in a baggie and gave it to Kyaw to sop up the blood oozing from under the reapplied tourniquet.
    “We aren’t safe yet, but short of a roadblock or ambush around Einme, we’ll make it back to Rangoon. I don’t know where the hell I am, so don’t fall asleep.” Neither headlight focused on the road, the twin beams askew. There were no side mirrors, and the rearview mirror wobbled every time they pounded through a pothole.
    The drive back wasn’t as complicated as Nolan had feared. With the white pickup providing cover, he stuck to the bigger roads. Within forty minutes, they were on the outskirts of Einme. What had been a hick hamlet at 2 p.m. now felt like Manhattan after the Yankees had won the World Series. Even so, when the single stoplight turned red, Nolan’s heart stopped for the thirty seconds it took the light to change. He kept scouting left and right for the green SUV to barrel down on them, guns blazing.
    The fuel gauge was down to three-eighths, so he bought four gallons on a side street from a kid who siphoned gas from a barrel. He decided he’d rather take the chance of contaminated gas than fuel up in a modern gas station under bright lights. Then they were back on the good road. Rangoon lay eighty miles due east. There was much less traffic than on the way out, although half of the vehicles were unlit. The grim game of dodgem-for-keeps continued. Kyaw passed out. Nolan wasn’t surprised given how much blood was in the cab and on his clothes.
    Nolan’s thoughts turned toward their adversary. The incongruous reappearance of long-dead-to-the-Agency Robin Teller was a shock. Teller had to be sixty-five years old, but he was still menacing. “What was Teller doing hiding out in Burma?And what explanation could there be for his presence at an abandoned toll road site on a Saturday afternoon with two Special Forces troops in tow?” Nolan spoke aloud to combat his fatigue.
    He looked over at the driver, who had his head against the passenger window. Kyaw’s brown skin was now a pasty olive. The tourniquet looked like it had finally staunched the flow. Nolan wondered if he should loosen it a little so Kyaw didn’t lose his hand. Instead, he kept driving fast.
     Teller went even deeper into the dark in 1973 when CIA supremo William Colby handpicked him to head Phoenix’s successor, the super-secret F-6 unit. Pursuing much the same agenda as the Phoenix Program, F-6 was headquartered in the Mekong Delta and survived to the bitter end of the Vietnam War. Teller was one of the original hard men, an action junkie who couldn’t get an adrenaline fix behind the desk, so he insisted on leading reconnaissance squads and fronting the nighttime door-kicking the Phoenix/F-6 boys specialized in. Teller was one of the best at sniffing out Viet Cong collaborators in the delta. His Army of the Republic of Vietnam Rangers worshiped him. After the fall of Saigon, through force of personality, Teller convinced three South Vietnam Spooky gunship pilots to fly the surviving ARVN Rangers and their families to Thailand minutes before the NVA rolled in. Teller had never gone back to the US, staying on in Bangkok and getting into ever more CIA-inspired mischief under the aegis of Double Llama Trading.
    Everyone Nolan knew back in Bangkok in late 1984 and early 1985 had given Teller a wide berth, especially if he was drinking or something went wrong in his day. Double Llama Trading employees were delighted that Teller had relocated out of Bangkok in