Tu slapped Fan on the shoulder, knocking him back on his heels. “We have been fighting for one hundred years. It is in our blood. To die in battle is every man’s dream.”
Fan didn’t know what to say. He was a soldier himself, in that he was a sergeant in the People’s Liberation Army, but he’d never met anyone who much wanted to get shot in the leg and then slowly bleed to death in a rusty cargo ship.
Tu smiled now, as if a dying man had not just passed by. “You look like you could use some food, a beer, a shower.”
Fan bowed again. “Thank you, sir.”
“Tomorrow you will begin this computer magic you have promised us. Tonight you eat and rest.”
“I will fulfill my end of our arrangement,” Fan said as he was led into an SUV in the center of the motorcade.
Fan’s ultimate goal was Taiwan, not Vietnam, but he had to get out of Hong Kong, and this group had helped him do just that. Taiwan still felt like a long way off, but Vietnam would work for now, and he didn’t think either the mainland Chinese or the unknown Westerners who had attacked the ship three days earlier just before they set sail from Po Toi Island would find him here.
He could not have understood the scope of the hunt for him, and he could not have been more wrong.
CHAPTER
ELEVEN
Court could have done without the four assholes trailing him from the hotel this morning.
Shortly after beginning the operation on his second day in Hong Kong he’d performed a quick SDR: entering and exiting a few electronics shops along the way, looking out into the street through the store windows. He bought a couple of items — Court was a kid in a candy store with all the low-cost and high-tech gadgetry on offer — but mainly he was in countersurveillance mode.
He picked up the tail quickly, cussing under his breath as he made them.
The men tracking him up the road traveled in a pair of small four-door sedans, and he assumed they were MSS. With just a quick evaluation of their procedures he could tell they were cut from the same cloth as the two men he’d killed at the Peninsula, and a similar ilk to many he’d seen at Dai’s safe house the day before.
Court stepped back out of an electronics shop with his purchases in his cargo pockets. In his hand he held a new mobile phone, and as he started walking north he dialed Dai’s number.
The call was unencrypted, but Dai didn’t seem to give a damn. “Yes?”
“It’s me,” Court replied.
“What is this phone you are calling me from?”
“Doesn’t matter. It’s a burner. I’ll be using a different number each time we talk.”
The PLA colonel answered, “Suit yourself. What have you learned so far?”
“Only that you are not a trusting guy.”
“What does that mean?”
“Four guys on my tail. Two vehicles. Do you have more ready to follow me into the MTR, or will the passengers in these two cars have to bolt out and catch up if I go down an escalator?”
Dai did not reply to this.
Court said, “I work alone. I can shake these guys, or you can call them off. It’s up to you.”
Dai said, “I am impressed with your abilities. I will recall my surveillance team.”
“If you send others, I’ll see them, too. But if I see them, it might mean the people holding Fan see them, and I don’t think that’s what you want.”
“No one wants that. Remember, Sir Donald’s life depends on your success.”
“I’m here for the payday, Dai. Not for the old British guy. I’ll kill Fan Jiang for you, as long as I’m not the front end of a block-long parade of mainland Chinese gunmen.”
Court hung up and kept walking towards the Prince Edward Metro station and then, as he began to take the stairs down, he turned and looked behind him. The two vehicles had peeled off somewhere in the past block, and he saw no one on foot who looked overly suspicious, although there were easily three hundred people moving along with him here on the wide sidewalks on Prince Edward Road, so it was impossible to be sure.
Satisfied he had done all he could do to ID any persistent surveillance on him, he descended into the MTR station, keeping his eyes peeled at all times for anyone who seemed interested in his movements.
After a thirty-minute transit across waters almost as crowded with maritime traffic as the sidewalks of Hong Kong had been with foot traffic, passengers on the Stanley — Po Toi ferry disembarked at the public pier on the southwestern side of the little island. Court Gentry moved down the boat ramp along with a mix of tourists, fishermen, and trinket merchants, then lagged back on the dock, letting everyone continue on ahead of him.
Court had spent some time looking over every cove of Po Toi on Google Earth, and to him it didn’t appear like there was much of anything going on anywhere else on the scrub-covered rock other than here, in the little bay in view from the pier. His research convinced him he was right; the total population of this island was only two hundred.
He gazed out across the placid water of the bay as the other passengers kept walking. Ahead on his right was an open-air seafood restaurant with a wooden roof; in front of that, men who rented kayaks and boats sat in the sand next to their little vessels, looking expectantly but with noticeable frustration at the small number of tourists disembarking from the ferry and moving in their direction.
Court noticed a few buildings along a poorly maintained road that ran near the beach. On the far end of the bay, on the opposite side of the water from Court, a footpath ran along the waterline, past a smaller restaurant/bar that looked derelict and closed. It was open-air, as well, with a tin roof and a deck that hung out over the water’s edge. Shacks ran up the steep hill above the bar, and the path continued to the left where, out of Court’s sight at the end of the trail, he knew a Buddhist temple sat alone on a little cliff over the water’s edge. He’d read that tourists visited the temple not because it was all that special in itself, but rather because of the nice pictures one could take of the ancient site in the foreground, and the turquoise water of the South China Sea in the background, along with tiny rocky islands jutting up in the distance.
Court pulled his binos out of his cargo shorts and focused them on the derelict building on the far side of the little bay from the public pier. The walls were open so he could look all the way into the dark dive, and he didn’t see anyone at the tables inside. Panning up, he noticed the sign was in Hanzi, standard Chinese lettering. There was no attempt to draw tourists to the establishment, and it was half covered in scaffolding made of bamboo lashed together with rope. Initially it seemed like the place was closed, but now he noticed smoke from the kitchen rising out of the chimney and hanging over the shacks above it on the hill. The place looked like a dump; most anywhere else, even in Hong Kong proper, it would probably be condemned, but despite its outward appearance, it seemed to be open for business.
Court walked down the pier towards the beach road, trying to put himself inside the heads of Fitzroy’s three men who had come here four days earlier. What were they looking for? And who would they go to in order to find it?
Fitz had written in his notes that his three operators reported following a speedboat full of Wo Shing Wo men here from the Kowloon Peninsula, but they didn’t know if Fan was with them or what the Triads were doing here on the island. It had been eleven at night when Fitz got the call from them, so Court surmised Fitz’s men hadn’t taken the ferry, and this meant they must have had a boat of their own. The public pier was really the only place to dock on the island that he had seen from Google, although without knowing how large Fitzroy’s men’s boat was, it was hard to know if they’d just driven right up on some stretch of beach and landed themselves, or even anchored offshore somewhere.