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| Photo by Lili Chambers |
Our guest this week is Diana Chambers, the author of Stinger,
a romantic spy thriller with a twist set in Afghanistan and Pakistan. In the
sequel, The Company She Keeps, CIA officer Nick Daley recruits a new
agent—“E” Walker—and sends her on a twisting trail that ends in Iran. In the
third of the series, Into The Fire, the characters will reunite on a
dangerous mission to rescue her kidnapped daughter from a powerful adversary in
southern China. Diana has traveled widely and recently returned from a research
trip to the Mekong region of Southeast Asia, visiting new and familiar places.
Her connections to the area run deep. Way back when, an importing business here
led to a Hollywood design career, which led inevitably to writing. She loves
spicy food and her bag is always packed.
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| Available from Amazon |
Sometimes in the dark of night I wonder if I became a writer as cover
for my secret passion: travel. Not that I don’t love sleeping in my own bed and
hanging out with my dog, but there is a world out there that draws me. I may
have spent another life on the Silk Road, for I am hard-wired to explore and
often find my stories emerge from these settings.
While researching my first Nick Daley spy thriller, Stinger,
I followed Marco Polo’s old route south from Kashgar in China’s Far West through
the Karakoram Mountains to modern Pakistan and Afghanistan. The sequel, The
Company She Keeps, took me and my characters on a twisting—and twisted—path
that ends in a part of the great Persian Empire that is now Iran.
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| Available from Amazon |
Another branch of the Silk Road led to India through remote,
semi-tropical regions of southern China: an area I’d never visited! So why
should I be surprised that my third Nick Daley thriller would be focused here?
In Into the Fire, Nick joins up with his former agent, Eve
Walker, to rescue her kidnapped daughter in a distant corner of China’s Yunnan
Province. The reason she is being held in this jungly Mekong locale is the mystery
at the heart of the story. And thus the heart of my research.
A wild river with parts still unnavigable, the Mekong is its own
mystery, descending from the mountains of Tibet through Yunnan and southeast
Asia. My scenes will take place in the upper Mekong, where the river defines
her people more than a passport. Where the Yunnan peoples are related linguistically and
culturally to those in Laos, Myanmar, and northern Thailand. In conducting
their rescue operation, Nick and Eve will encounter mixed loyalties and mixed motives.
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| Mekong view from Luang Prabang, Laos |
After finding her daughter, they will flee down the Mekong, known
as Lancang in China. Our journey will trace a reverse course, taking us upriver
to a small Lao port from which we will ferry west to Thailand. Nick has a
history here, with links to the “secret war” conducted during the Vietnam
conflict—which the Laos call the Second Indochina War, following their earlier anti-French
struggle. Thailand had its own communist insurgency at the time and the US
military and CIA were involved. In my story, a former Air America pilot based
in Thailand will provide covert support for Nick and Eve and drop them in
southern Yunnan.
Ready to explore, we meet our trim mahogany boat in Luang Prabang,
Laos, on the Mekong’s eastern shore. The river can be treacherous, especially
when high waters hide its jagged rocks and boulders. The waters are low now and
we can see the dangers our captain must navigate as he slips through a narrow
channel or hugs a bank to avoid sand bars or rushing currents. And maybe
even a rare Siamese crocodile.
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| Mekong river boat: Captain's wife and (great) cook |
Our hip young guide, Phang, navigates his own course, straddling
the traditional Lao and online worlds. Born to a rural family, he has leaped
generations already in his short lifetime and I sense he feels a bit dislocated.
Despite radical change, Laos remains a totalitarian state, like Vietnam and China.
However, Phang views the government as a fairly benevolent force, tripling
salaries of village teachers, opening the land to private ownership, the Internet—and
tourism. In an attempt to protect the culture, relationships between Lao
citizens and foreigners are forbidden, but people are free to get rich.
On our “slow boat” we have entered what Phang calls Lao time. What
is the rush, anyway? Pitying the speedboat passengers in such haste, I sink
into a rare luxury: quiet relaxation with nothing to accomplish. Nothing but
watch the world go by. And chat. Phang tells us of whiskey villages where
people ferment alcohol from sticky rice and yeast, later seasoning the brew
with scorpions, snakes, or centipedes. The blend is 65 proof: “Cheap and strong.”
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| Samples from "Whiskey Village," Laos |
The more I look, the more I see. Lives are lived on this river, in
every kind of vessel from rusty buckets to cargo barges. I look for my
characters’ escape boat, as well as others for their pursuers and various bad
guys. I see great boulders and hidden coves that may offer shelter—or danger.
As the story unfolds in summer, I think of the rain that will overflow these
banks of rice and corn, melons and peanuts. But there will still be the gold
miners sifting through muddy sediment, the fishing poles and nets, maybe even the
banned dynamite. The hillsides will be ever thick with bamboo, banana, mango, and
teak trees…a verdant, electric green that can turn almost black as steep cliffs
of impenetrable jungle press in upon us. Mysterious. Forbidding.
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| Mekong village, Laos |
The day ends abruptly at dusk as the captain can no longer navigate
without radar. We pass the first night in Pakbend, Laos. After climbing steep
steps up the mountain, we are shown just how high the mighty Mekong can rise!
Across the dusty road from our guesthouse, the restaurant owner greets us in easy
American English. We learn he spent ten years as a monk in the capital,
Vientiane, before marriage. As with Islamic madrassahs, Buddhist monasteries
provide education to boys with limited options. I think of my young monk
friend, Boun, in Luang Prabang. So hungry to learn.
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| Laos border post |
A river cruise is such a gentle way to travel and we are almost
disappointed at the end of the second day to reach Huay Xai, Laos just across
from Chiang Khong, Thailand. Here the Mekong becomes the international border,
as it does later with Laos, Myanmar, and China. We had wanted to continue up to
the Yunnan port of Jinghong, but following the murder of some Chinese sailors
last year—by Burmese and Thai drug dealers—China has closed its part of the
river to foreign traffic.
Refusing to concede defeat, we will spend a few days in north
Thailand, and then, like Nick and Eve, proceed with our mission to Jinghong. By
air.
But that’s another story.
