Ada and Sun Li's wives crouched in the dark DC-3 airplane cabin, holding tightly to and shushing the frightened wailing of children. The women and older children—the ones who knew that the real danger wasn't having been swallowed by a big silver bird—held their breaths as the airplane banked out over the Gulf of Siam, waiting for discovery and the dreaded rat tat tatting of antiaircraft guns. Ada had been surprised by the luxurious appointments of the two-engine commercial workhorse craft. The plane obviously was owned by someone of importance. This only added to her confusion of who her rescuer was and how this would get her home. Home to Wolf Creek. She was conflicted. She ached to be home in Wolf Creek and far away from the reality of the world—the greater world that she had pursuing all of her adult life. But, at the same time, she ached to be back in the Genting Highlands of Malaya, home there in Sun Li's arms.
The DC-3 touched down in the darkest hour of the morning on a remote stretch of tarmac on the Ban Muang airfield outside of Bangkok, Thailand. The gods were with them. A blinding squall was going through the area as they landed, and there was little danger that the Japanese guards in the control tower had any idea an airplane had landed, although the Thai controllers certainly knew about the plane and that it was coming in for a landing. They had no idea who was on the plane, but it was a plane they were able to account for no matter where in the world it was.
The visibility was so limited and the rain so drenching that Ada experienced the quick deplaning as a mere blur of activity and pounding raindrops before the DC-3 took off again to make another approach and an innocent landing right in front of the control tower. A line of black limousines was parked just steps away from the ramp to the plane, and Ada was smothered in a tarp and a huge umbrella was held over her head as four slightly built, olive-skinned men with determined and concerned looks on their faces bundled her into the lead limo. She was able to glance around only long enough to catch a partial view of Sun Li's wives and children being similarly bundled into the other cars. It was the last time she ever saw any of them.
The limousine drove into the night, a military jeep in front and another behind, at a speed that was far in excess of safety in these weather conditions. The vehicles were driving without lights, and it was only by the miracle of the storm raging about them that they didn't sweep bicycles and ox carts off the road into the water-filled canals on either side of the badly worn road.
Ada was alone in the back of the limo. She tried making out what was alongside the road in passing, but it was all a dark blur until she saw a glow of a large city ahead through the slackening rain. They entered the suburbs of an Oriental city. They were passing a blur of concrete compound walls, above which peeked the tops of palm and other lush-leafed trees and high-peaked wooden roofs with shiny tiles and turned-up corners. Every few hundred feet, the road would rise and they'd cross a canal on which long-tailed boat traffic was increasingly evident the farther they penetrated into the city. The traffic on the canals seemed much heavier than on the road, but now that Ada focused on the road traffic, she could see that all of the bicycles and sampan drivers ahead were looking back at the convoy as it swept down on them and that they then pulled immediately to the side of the road and lowered their faces, almost, it seemed, in homage to the cars. As she gazed over the hood, Ada saw that the limo she was in was flying a solid-yellow flag from the corners of its bumpers—the color reserved for Thai royalty. It looked like this is what those on the road ahead were focusing on when they drew aside as quickly as they did.
They were in the center of the city now, following the sweep of a wide river, already busy with road traffic this hour before dawn. And the limousine carrying Ada and the two military jeeps that had been preceding and following her car had detached from the rest and no longer was part of the convoy carrying Sun Li's household. The buildings in the section of the city Ada's limousine had entered were larger and more grand and more colorful then where they had been driving before. The buildings were all a variation on the steep-roofed pagoda style that were in Sun Li's mountain fortress and on the buildings behind the walls in the suburbs, but they were made out of more expensive-appearing, brightly painted wood or concrete and their roofs were tiled in shiny colored tiles and had elaborate dragon- and snake-tail style curlicues on their corners. Also, the lawns were broader here and were covered with grass.
Ada's diminished convoy pulled across the small end of a huge oval parade ground, around which were clustered a breathtaking array of magnificent temples and ceremonial buildings, and turned sharply to the right, sweeping into large iron gates in a high compound wall that opened, almost by magic, upon the convoy's approach and clanked shut almost as quickly in their wake.
They were in a large, crushed-seashell covered courtyard before one of the tallest, most ornate pagoda pavilions Ada had seen in her various trips through Southeast Asia. The steps leading up to it and the platform on which it's white-painted, gold-leaf topped columns stood was well-scrubbed white marble. And its roof was of golden fish-scale tiles with borders of emerald green and sapphire blue tiles.
And standing at the foot of the stairs up to this structure was a diminutive Thai man, short and thin as a rail, a monocle in one eye, but decked out in an exquisitely tailored dark suit, his eyes intently on Ada as she was handed out of the limousine and escorted toward him. He was holding a bouquet of long-stemmed yellow roses, and, at last, all of Ada's questions about this fairytale escape were beginning to come into focus. But only just.
The tiny man stepped forward. "Hello, Mrs. Walker," he said in impeccable British English. I am Pridi Phanomyong. Welcome to Bangkok. These roses are for you."
"Hello. Thank you. Thank you for everything," Ada said. "But the roses . . .?"
". . . Are from your good friend, Prince Seni Pramoj, our emissary to the United States."
"I surmised as such," Ada answered, remembering the roses that the Thai ambassador had brought to her New York departure six years earlier. "And do I have him to thank for all of this . . .?"
"Partially, only partially," Pridi responded with a smile. "But we must not linger here long. We must get you inside."
As they climbed the steps and moved into halls of incredible opulence, Ada gave voice to the burning questions.
"Where am I, if I may ask. And who is responsible for getting me here? And where do I go from here. This wouldn't seem any safer from the Japanese for an official American than Malaya was."
