But customs officials knew all that as well as any smuggler. They tore apart a large cross section of Chinese-made dolls and ripped the stuffing out of the bears. The first place inspectors looked for hidden weapons were the hollow walls of reefer units. Every up-and-coming customs inspector he’d ever seen was looking, not so much for contraband, as to make a name for him or herself — to find that big haul of illicit goods that would garner them a fat promotion. If those goods had something to do with terrorism, their hero status would be set in stone. In the East, customs officials looked for bribes. In North America, they wanted to make the news.
So, Dickey Ng followed Rule One and got himself and whatever he happened to be moving lost amid the thirteen thousand twenty-foot-equivalent metal containers stacked on the CCC Loadstar — all part of the eight million moved from Asia to the United States every year.
Ng was around the corner, still fifty feet away from the origin of the smoke and unit PVMU 526604-1, when he smelled cooking fish. He smiled to himself. Azmin, the skinny deckhand, was well known for never getting enough to eat. Ng rounded the stacks to find the young Malay squatting on his haunches beside a can of burning Sterno, grilling a flying fish he must have found on the deck.
Ng began to relax, until Azmin looked up and met his eye.
“You are a watcher,” the young man said, using the grease from his cooked fish to smooth his ridiculously sparse mustache. “I thought the smoke might bring you so we could have a talk. You don’t remember me, do you?” He looked altogether too smug for Dickey Ng’s taste. “But we met five years ago in Hong Kong. I was supposed to be on that ship but I got sick. You were a passenger then too, but you had a different name.” Azmin shook his head and rose to his full height, doing his best to intimidate Ng. “I can’t remember what your name was then, but it was different.”
“What do you want, Azmin?” Ng said, pretending to be frightened.
The young sailor grinned, showing tobacco-stained teeth. “I want a piece of whatever you are getting for whatever it is you are doing. My family is poor. I only do this sailing shit to support my wife and kid, you know. I figure you must have something big going since you travel with a fake name and all. What is it? Gold? Precious stones? Cut me in and your secret’s safe with me.”
“How was the fish, Azmin?” Ng asked, cocking his head to one side.
Azmin just stared at him. “The fish?”
Ng struck fast, slamming the web of his hand into the young Malay’s Adam’s apple, stunning him and making him lift both hands defensively.
“Fish bones,” Ng said. Shoving one shoulder at the same moment he pulled on the other, Ng spun the panicked sailor and snaked an arm around his neck, drawing him in like a constricting snake to squeeze the life out of him.
“I heard,” Ng said, holding the young man firmly while he struggled, “that some people are so embarrassed when they begin to choke that they wander off and die alone. Such a pity…” Ng jerked his arm tighter across the faltering sailor’s throat. “You were all the way out here in the stacks with no one to hear or see you or come help when you choked on a fish bone. It must have been awful to die… so alone.” Feeling Azmin go limp in his arms, Ng held him for another full minute, and then slammed his head backwards against the edge of a container, just to be sure. “It’s a violent thing,” he muttered, “choking to death.”
Ng stooped down beside the body and grabbed a handful of cooked fish from the makeshift grill. Prying open Azmin’s jaws, he shoved it in, using his finger to push it far back into the dead man’s throat.
Finished, he wiped the grease from his hands on Azmin’s filthy shirt and stood to make his way back to his cabin.
“Rule Five,” he whispered to himself. “Never enter into a smuggling agreement with a fool.”
Chapter 6
Minister of State Security Wen Shou folded strong hands in the lap of his navy blue suit and listened to the leader of China vent about the impetuous actions of the United States. Wen rolled his lips slightly, keeping a passive face. A bitter word or even a frown at the wrong moment could very well become the match that lit the fuse of war. General Sun, the commander of the People’s Liberation Army’s Second Artillery Corps — and thus, China’s ballistic nuclear missiles — and Admiral Jiang, commander of the PLA Navy Submarine Force, sat across the office from Wen, side by side in matching golden chairs to the right of the President’s desk. The two military men were among the few leaders not presently under investigation for some sort of graft. It was not the lack of technology, weaponry, or troops that threatened his country’s military. It was corruption.
The presidential office seemed meant to make visitors feel small. There was nothing to clutter the center of the spacious room — no busy coffee table or cozy couches as in the American President’s Oval Office — just thirty feet of empty red carpet, plush and smooth but for the faint outlines of footprints that had stood in exactly the same spot in front of the President’s antique huanghuali wood desk. Wen found himself wondering about the fate of the men who had worn those spots in the carpet. To stand in front of the desk of a man as powerful as the President — who simultaneously held the offices of General Secretary of the Communist Party of China and Chairman of the Central Military Committee — seemed a perilous endeavor.
As the leader of the Ministry of State Security — patterned after the former Soviet Union’s KGB — Wen had nearly unfettered power to jostle and manipulate the lives of a billion citizens if he’d had the notion to do such things — but President Chen Min could manipulate the lives of the manipulators themselves. And yet, the man appeared to like him, telling Wen he valued his “direct and unfiltered” counsel. Wen did not admit it, but when a wise man spoke to the paramount leader of The Peoples Republic of China, he always filtered his counsel. A consummate diplomat and spy, Minister Wen just did it better than the military men in the room.
Both General Sun and Admiral Jiang nodded thoughtfully at each word Chen spoke, as if they could not have possibly said it better. The President paused for a long moment, looking at his counselors over pursed lips, as if he had a touch of indigestion.
Taking the silence as a cue to speak rather than ponder, General Sun leaned forward in his chair to drive home his point. “My soldiers stand ready,” he said. A well-fed and jowly man, his thick fingers clutched a large dress hat above his belly, next to the ribbons festooning his chest. “As a proud nation, we cannot be expected to suffer the indignities and bullying from the United States.”
The minister kept a file on all of the most powerful military leaders. General Sun had not always been so fat. Before being promoted to the Second Artillery, he’d been fit enough to lead the Southern Broadswords, an elite group of special operations commandos based in Guangzhou. The pampered living of a general officer may have softened his body, but Wen had no doubt the man had retained his flint-hard resolve and tactical sensibilities.
“Perhaps,” Wen interjected from his spot across the room, “they mean to goad us into firing the first shot — to make us the aggressors in a devastating war.” He spoke to the President, unconcerned as to whether he convinced the general of anything or not. A sword, after all, was not meant to stay sheathed. Advice from the military would always contain a military option. It was the way of things.
“Zhŭxí Chen,” General Sun continued, using the word that had meant chairman during Mao’s day, but was now commonly translated as president. “The United States is well aware that it could not win a protracted war in our battle space. They are stretched thin with Korea and have neither the stomach nor means to occupy anything else east of Japan for any length of time, not with the world such as it is. They will try to utilize their carriers and submarine fleets to attack us from afar. So far, we have planned for little beyond denying them access to our waters. But Mr. President, national honor demands we take the fight—”