Apsara Jet - Softcover

Merriweather, Nicolas

3.71

7 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0970886209 ISBN 13: 9780970886200

Publisher: Apsara Publishing Group, 2001

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Apsara Jet - is a powerful, erotic, politically incorrect story of love, lust, betrayal, death and revenge, in the high stakes world of narco trafficking, in the skies of South East Asia.

John Jackson Jr, an unemployed Vietnam veteran and former Eastern Airlines Captain, had fallen to the depths of his alcoholic depression. Convicted of felony drunk driving in Miami...Divorced, homeless, and living in his car...he is given one last chance for redemption... To return to Indochina for the mysterious Alexander Chen, and into the cockpit of a McDonnell Douglas DC-8 cargo jet... Jackson, unaware at first, recruits two of his old friends, who rush to join up with him in Thailand. Later suspecting their mission cloaked in secrecy was far from legit, yet feeling that there was really no way out, they sink deeper into the dark world of Burmese Drug Lords, Ecstasy (MDMA) and The Russian Mafia.

Betrayed, they survive a fiery mid-air collision, nursing their crippled jet at night across Burma & Laos and finally home to Cambodian airspace, where they deliberately crash land in the San River, near the remote village of Phum Krom, in Northeastern Cambodia. There, Jackson and his only surviving partner, ex-CIA pilot and mercenary, A. P. Scott, recuperate, to later train and equip a small guerilla force, of mostly sex-crazed young Kreung native girls. Later, they lead their motley commando unit back to Phnom Penh to seek an apocalyptic revenge on Chen, their treacherous former employer, for millions of dollars in cash.

Those savvy readers, familiar with the Bangkok and Phnom Penh nightlife scene, will invariably recognize similarities between some of the locations described in the book and some of the most notable true-to-life institutions such as; Thermae, Patpong, Nana Plaza, Soi Cowboy, Clinton Plaza, Soi Zero and Martinis Disco.

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From the Author:

Although this story, set in present-day Cambodia, is purely fictional, my personal involvement with Cambodia and her people began back in March of 1975. I was then a thirty-one-year-old pilot/flight engineer, employed by Flying Tigers, the Los Angeles-based cargo airline. A call went out for volunteers. Those pilots, flight engineers, and mechanics who would be willing to operate an emergency airlift into Phnom Penh, Cambodia, known at that time as the Khmer Republic. The airlift was one of the first mobilizations of the relatively new Civil Reserve Air Fleet(CRAF)program for the United States Air Force. Within hours of volunteering, I found myself aboard a Pam Am jet on my way to Saigon. There, I joined up with several other Flying tigers who were soon to fly the renowned "Cambodian Ricelift." We quickly discovered that this would become one of the most terrifying and intensely gut-wrenching emotional experiences of our entire lives, as we daily, were targets for NVA, and Khmer Rouge gunners, rockets and artillery.

Cambodia's suffering was playing out as a tragic subplot, masked by the main story of America's chaotic exodus from Vietnam. Nevertheless, all volunteers put forth a maximum effort, as Flying Tigers lived up to its "can-do" reputation. It quickly was realized that this was going to be one of the most hazardous missions civilian aircrews had been called upon to perform, perhaps since the airdrops to the French, at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. The ill-fated "Cambodian Ricelift" was terminated, when it was reported that KR forces, had overun Phnom Penh's Pochentong airport.

From the Inside Flap:

Author's comments contd. I returned to the Thai/Cambodian border in 1979. Again as a volunteer, but this time, for an NGO in the sprawling United Nations refugee camp north of Aranyaprathet, Thailand that came to be known as "Khao-I-Dang". There I linked up with other volunteers, and was assigned to assist in the camp's orphanage. Looking back now, years later, I suppose I was somehow trying to make some kind of penance for the festering guilt within me... wondering if any government's intervention, or anybody, or anything could have changed the course of events back in April of 1975. The faces of those Cambodians I had worked with daily, under the constant threat of rockets, artillery and heavy mortars... and who were left behind... abandoned on the tarmac at Pochentong, visited my dreams for years. As you might well imagine, I heard many horrific stories at Khao-I-Dang, some actually humorous, yet some so disturbing they should not be printed... but nothing quite so moving as a young Khmer girl's explanation of the krama.

"The Krama" "That checkered cotton cloth we put on our heads is called a krama. The Khmer people are familiar with it from birth, and make it serve in many ways... To keep the sun off them, when working in the rice fields. To carry home food, such as corn, and fresh fruit. To cover the body when washing in a stream, for the sake of modesty. A man may wrap it around his middle, for comfort in an evening breeze. A young girl may give it to a young man, as a token of her love. He will hold it and kiss it, and think of her. And then came the time when people used the krama to hang themselves, to escape the hell on earth, that was life in Pol Pot's Democratic Kampuchea."

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