Fateful Encounter (Completed)

Chapter 32

A/N - I did promise a quick update. ❤

Four days ago at the ongoing Chinag Mai Mini Hydro Power site;

The over head crane operator checked the cables one last time before joining the mechanical engineering team at the machine floor. The electrical engineering team was watching the progress from the panel room cum office room, joined by Monty and San. Kongpob was also at the machine floor overseeing the placing of turbines on the machine floor.

The overhead crane would lift the 20 ton turbine off the loading bay and bring it down to the machine floor where it had to be placed on top of six metal posts. These metal posts were previously aligned with 0.01% error and would be concreted once the turbine is placed and aligned with 100% precision.

The activity may sound overly simple but is one of most crucial jobs of the entire operation. So far the team had successfully placed two other turbines of the same weight in the machine floor and it had taken them four days each to complete the task up to concreting. Similarly it's now the third day of trying to place the last turbine unit on the machine floor. The civil engineering team was waiting to batch and place concrete once the mechanical team had cleared the placement and alignment of the turbine.

San's head was literally touching his knees when an exhausted Kongpob and the team climbed up from the machine floor and opened the door to the office room. Monty slapped San on the back, hard enough to wake him from death it self. Taking few seconds to shake off the bone rattling effect of the ex-marine slap. San checked his watch to see the time at 03:00 hours.

'Good morning young master.' He greeted Kongpob who'd sat down for a moment. Kongpob smirked and took the checklists another engineer handed over to him.

'Are you complaining right now?' He asked while checking the files. San was startled.

'Of course not. It was just a greeting.' He hastened to add.

'Hmm... Good then. Send the team away first, I should be done by then.' Kongpob said, not looking up from the file in his hand.

The project team was stationed in temporary quarters that were either built or rented from the local villagers. To get to their residences the newly built roads took about two hours. But the project team preferred a short cut which took them only about 45 minutes to get to their residence.

The short cut would be risky for a first timer but the project team was used to it and could make there way even at night with just flash lights. It was a foot path used for a long time by the villagers and began from the power house site. It then lead them up a steep climb then a rather narrow patch of road with with a gentle slope that ended with a hanging bridge. Crossing the hanging bridge would bring them to a dirt path where the site vehicles would pick them and drop them off at their residences.

The climb was easy. What was tricky to cross was the narrow patch of the foot path. On one side there was a rock wall and on the other a drop of about 20 - 30 feet right on to the river. After everybody had left the power house site, save for the security personnel, Kongpob and his body guards made their way through the short cut.

The three had taken the now familiar road back and forth from the site a numerous times. Same as before, Monty and San kept their young master between them. Since the beginning of the project there had been few troubles with the local gangs and two days earlier few items had been missing from the store. All four bodyguards had been carrying weapons with them whenever they had to visit Chiang Mai.

However on that day, what Monty did not expect was, just 15 minutes after they left the power house, for those bastards to blast an entire section of the hill effectively leading to the collapse of the very ground the three of them had been standing on at the moment.