Court returned to Po Toi on the ferry, arriving shortly after seven p.m. There were many more fishing boats out in the bay now as the sun began to set, but the bartender he’d caught looking out to the bay had been gazing out farther than any other vessel had moored or anchored, so Court didn’t suspect that anything bobbing in the water now was related to Fan Jiang and the missing Fitzroy assets. He walked off the public pier with the rest of the light load of ferry passengers, then continued through the little village. There were a few Westerners and other tourists walking around, taking pictures, and drinking beer in simple cafés a few blocks inland.
Court imagined Po Toi couldn’t have been on any travel publication’s list of the top one hundred things to do in Hong Kong; there wasn’t much to see here at all, but there was just enough tourist action around that he didn’t look completely out of place walking the streets.
After strolling through just a few blocks in the village, he found himself climbing a winding trail that led up a wooded hill, past a few tin shacks, and then quickly into a steeply graded path that wound through granite boulders and thick brush.
After a ten-minute walk, he found himself at the summit, which offered an excellent vantage point on the bay below. Here he sat on a flat boulder and surveyed the entire area, from the beat-up little bar he’d visited earlier in the day in the distance below him on his right to the village and public pier directly below him, and then, to his left, a rocky beach in front of a higher hill devoid of any man-made structures. In the water directly in front of him he saw nothing but fishing boats and other small craft. He spent the remaining moments of daylight scanning them carefully with his high-power binoculars, until the sun set fully and darkness enveloped the island.
He called Brewer back and found out that of all the ships of the type she’d seen on sat images at Po Toi earlier in the week, eighty-one of the ninety-one known to be operating in Southeast Asia were displaying their AIS identification information. She listed the names and registry information of the ten that were not transmitting, but Court only wrote down the ones that were truly off grid, as four of the ten were known to be in shipyards at the moment.
She had one other piece of interesting information, although he didn’t know exactly what to make of it. Checking older satellite images of the area, she determined that the cargo ship they were trying to identify had been showing up in Po Toi every five to ten days for the last several months. On all other occasions except for this week, it had remained only a few hours. Brewer had been trying to find it on other sat images to tell Court where it came from, but these were the most congested shipping lanes in the world, so this had proved tough going.
Court hung up with Brewer and then decided he’d spend the night right here, watching the area down below, trying to spot any evidence of interesting activity here in or around the bay. If one of the ships matching a name on his list showed up, he’d swim out to it if he felt he could do so in a low-profile manner; if not he’d just call it in to Brewer, have her look into the vessel if he could find anything for her to look into.
Other than this thin plan, he had no clear picture of what he was going to do here, but he knew what he was not going to do. He told himself he wasn’t going to try to Sherlock Holmes his way through this. Fan Jiang could be getting farther and farther away from him, which would mean his op for the CIA would fail, and it would put his old handler Fitzroy in mortal peril. He was here to find a clue, and if he had to rush headlong into the situation to get the information he needed, that was just what he was going to do. He’d strong-arm, he’d break teeth, he’d do whatever was necessary to get answers.
At eight fifty p.m., a paramilitary operator working for Russian foreign intelligence lay in the overwatch position to the southeast of the bay, his eye in the scope of his suppressed sniper rifle. Slowly he moved his arm off the butt stock, then triggered his interteam radio headset with the push-to-talk button on his chest. He spoke without taking his eyes out of the scope of his VSS rifle.
Softly, the Russian said, “Anna Seven for Sirena, over?”
It was quiet in the dark hide, other than a warm evening breeze rustling the dry scrub brush around the prostrate man, occasionally blowing enough to wave the wide brim of his dark green camo boonie hat. The hat, like the rest of his gear, had been purchased at a hunting supply store in HK, so there were no tags or brands that would associate him with Russia.
A reply came through Anna Seven’s earpiece, delivered in Zoya Zakharova’s unmistakable intelligent and sultry voice.
“Go for Sirena, Seven.”
Anna Seven was a thirty-one-year-old operator named Mikhail. “She’s right on time.”
Through his scope Mikhail watched the Tai Chin VI approaching the island up the sea lane from the southwest. It was already slowing, heading towards its normal anchoring position at the mouth of the bay.
“Ponial,” replied Zakharova. Understood. Then she said, “Alert me instantly if anyone leaves for shore.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Court finished a bag of crackers, swatted at a fly, then stood to loosen his tight back muscles. He couldn’t fully stretch out; his three-and-a-half-week-old gunshot graze to the right side of his rib cage, while fully closed and mostly healed, still stung like hell when he reached over his head with his right hand or did anything that involved twisting or rotating his torso. Still, Court Gentry was a man who had grown accustomed to dealing with pain in his life, to the point where it felt almost jarring for him to wake up in the morning without noticing an immediate ache somewhere on his body.
After he sat back down he reached for his binos to scan along the bayside, but before he brought the optics to his eyes he noticed something new. In the dark distance, the lights of a cargo ship moved slowly and silently around the southwestern tip of the island.
This vessel was certainly no massive tanker or dry-goods hauler, but it was much larger than anything else he’d seen around here.
It appeared to be the one from the image Brewer had sent him earlier.
Quickly he scanned the restaurant directly below him. It was closing down; the last of the patrons were leaving, and they began walking to the public pier to catch the last ferry of the night to Hong Kong proper.
Court then swept his binoculars to the right and pushed them up, where he found the derelict bar he’d dropped into before noon that day. It was nearly full now, with the opposite vibe he’d experienced when he’d sat at the bar.
He didn’t know where all these patrons had come from. Some were certainly locals, and others would be fishermen staying on their boats; he could see the dinghy dock floating in the water ten feet below the railing of the establishment’s deck. It was half-full with rubber dinghies and wooden tenders. But looking into the little open-air dive, he saw easily fifty people, all apparently men, sitting around at tables or at the bar. He didn’t think they could all be from the village and these boats. He wondered if other boats were docked offshore at other points on the island.
He watched while the cargo hauler came to a stop, then dropped anchor in the same general spot the bartender at the dive bar had kept eyeing earlier in the day.