“We’re about twenty miles behind the Maus. We’ve already talked to them, establishing procedure for passing a drydock under tow. In about ten minutes we’re going to launch an unmanned aerial drone with a low-light camera to take a peek into her open hold. I do have a boarding party standing by if we need to send over some Mark-one eyeballs.”
“Sounds good. What’s the weather? It’s raining here.”
“Fine. No moon at all. Seas are only a couple of feet, and the wind’s light. Listen, the reason I called is we have some information for you.”
About time, Cabrillo thought but kept it to himself. “Murph tracked down who owns the Maus?”
“No, he’s still working on it. Julia came up with something during her autopsies of the Chinese folks we plucked from the container. I’m passing her off to you.”
“Thanks. E-mail the feeds from the UAV to my phone. I’d like to take a look at the Mausduring the flyover.”
“You got it. Here’s the doc.”
“Chairman, how’s Tokyo?”
“It’s all warm sushi and cold geishas.”
“I bet. I think I found something about our immigrants. They’re all from the same village, a place called Lantan in Fujian Province. Most of them are part of the same extended family.”
“Did you do a DNA test?”
“No, I read the parts of a diary that hadn’t been destroyed when the container went into the drink. A lot of the journal was illegible, but I scanned everything into the computer and let the translator take a crack at it. The guy who wrote it’s last name was Xang. With him were two brothers, a bunch of cousins, and distant blood relatives. They had been promised work in Japan by a snakehead who called himself Yan Luo. Each of them had to pay this Yan Luo about five hundred dollars before leaving the village and would have to pay back about fifteen thousandonce they reached a textile mill outside Tokyo.”
“Does he talk about the Kra? Was that the boat taking them to Japan?”
“He doesn’t say, or that part of the journal was too damaged to read.”
“What else were you able to get?”
“Not much. He wrote about his dreams and how one day he would be able to afford bringing his girlfriend to Japan with him. Stuff like that.”
“What was the name of that town?”
“Lantan.”
“If we can’t backtrack the Kraor the Maus, maybe we can backtrack the immigrants.” Cabrillo glanced at Eddie. His chief of Shore Operations had heard enough of the call to understand what was coming. It was in his eyes. “I’ll call you right back,” Cabrillo said to Julia and cut the connection.
“China, huh,” Eddie said with an air of the inevitable. “I had a feeling it would come to this as soon as I saw them.”
“Can you do it?”
“You know my cover was blown just before I got out the last time. I’ve already been sentenced to death in absentia. I can name a dozen generals and party officials who would like nothing more than for me to step foot in China again. It’s been a few years, but last I knew, my picture had been sent to every police department in the country, from Beijing and Shanghai to the smallest provincial outpost.”
“Can you do it?” Cabrillo repeated.
“My old network is long gone. I was hustled out of China fast after everything went down and couldn’t get a warning out. I’m sure some of them were rolled up by the state police, which means the rest are compromised. I can’t use any of them.”
He went silent. Cabrillo didn’t ask a third time. He didn’t need to.
“I’ve got a set of credentials in a safe-deposit box in L.A., one the CIA doesn’t even know about. I had them made before Hong Kong was handed over to China in case I needed to get back in to help a couple of friends. They’ve since immigrated to Vancouver, so the identity is still viable. I’ll contact my lawyer first thing tomorrow and have them sent by courier to Singapore. From there I can catch the Cathay flight to Beijing.”
“Shanghai,” Juan corrected. “Julia said the village is in Fujian Province. If my geography is sound, the closest big city is Shanghai.”
“Oh, this gets better and better,” Eddie said as if his mission wouldn’t be difficult enough.
“Why’s that?”
“The people of Fujian have a dialect all their own. I don’t speak it very well.”
“Then we’ll call it off,” Juan decided. “We’ll just have to get some leads from the Kraor the Maus.”
“No,” Eddie said sharply. “It might take you weeks to track these bastards through shipping records and corporate pyramids. If illegal immigrants somehow fit into the pirates’ scheme, we need answers now. You and I both know that the ones dumped over the side of the Kraaren’t the only ones who’ve been taken.”
Juan nodded, a curt, decisive gesture. “All right. Make your arrangements.”
On the main display screen along the front wall of the operations center, the picture was a weirdly distorted view of the ocean, where the foam topping the low waves looked like green lightning forking across the black water. The camera’s optics made the rhythmic pulse of the sea look like a beating heart. The image jerked slightly, and George Adams swore.
Adams was the pilot of the Oregon’s Robinson R-44 helicopter as well as the pair of matching UAVs, or unmanned aerial vehicles, that could be launched from an open space along the freighter’s port rail. Although the U.S. military spent millions on their Predator drones, the Corporation’s UAVs were commercially available remote-control airplanes fitted with low-light cameras. George could sit at a computer workstation inside the operations center and fly the model plane using a joystick within a fifteen-mile radius of the ship.
One of the few aboard the Oregonfrom the army, George “Gomez” Adams had earned his reputation flying special ops teams into Bosnia, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Unmarried at forty, Adams cut the figure of a fighter pilot. He was dark-haired and dark-eyed, tall and lean with a charming cockiness that never failed to make him a center of attention with women. His good looks had been used in more than one past Corporation mission. He’d earned his nickname after one such mission when he seduced the mistress of a Peruvian drug trafficker who bore a striking resemblance to the television character Morticia Addams.
The telepresence given to Adams through the video link allowed him to see what was in front of and below the gimballed camera in the UAV’s nose, but he couldn’t feel the subtle updrafts or crosswinds that affected the five-foot-long airplane. He adjusted for the sudden gust that hit the plane and eased back on the stick to gain a bit more altitude.
“What’s the range?” he asked Linda Ross, who was monitoring the radar picture.
“We’re four miles astern the Mausand three miles to port.”
The UAV was too small to be seen by even the Oregon’s powerful search radar, but the massive drydock and the pair of tugs towing her showed crisp on her repeater screen.
Adams used a thumb control to pan the camera mounted in the model plane’s nose. The ocean was still streaked with eerie green lines of sea foam, but a few miles ahead of the UAV a bright emerald slash cut the otherwise dark water.
“There,” someone called unnecessarily.
The glowing wedge was the Maus’s wake as she was hauled southward. Just ahead of her were bright, glowing points, searchlights mounted at the stern of the towboats to illuminate their ponderous charge. The thick hawsers securing the vessels looked as fine as gossamer from five thousand feet. There were a couple less powerful lights along the side of the drydock, but her cavernous hold was completely dark.