The Dragon proudly boasted onboard holding tanks containing live sharks and more than sixty kinds of sea creatures. There was even a UV light seawater sterilization system to ensure freshness and maintain hygiene. No expense had been spared. No detail had been overlooked. General Moon had seen to that. There was no reason a police station couldn’t return a handsome profit.
The Golden Dragon was, in the tourist guides, or the eyes of thousands who passed through her portals each year, a glittering palace. But, there were many sections not open to the public. These included a number of private dining rooms and banquet halls on the uppermost levels, but they always seemed to be fully booked. In fact, these rooms were bustling Te-Wu communications centers, bristling with high-tech gear and busy twenty-four hours a day. One deck was reserved for the general’s private quarters.
The Dragon had been Sun-yat Moon’s brainchild.
Under General Moon’s direction, the PLA, the People’s Liberation Army of China, had begun the multimillion-dollar construction in a Tianjin shipyard three full years before Britain ceded Hong Kong back to China. Engineers had assured Moon that at least five years would be needed to complete such an undertaking. He gave them three. Mainland Chinese workers at the construction yard at Tianjin on the Gulf of Chihli were sworn to secrecy about the massive undertaking on pain of death.
A great wall of secrecy immediately went up surrounding the project. All anyone in HM Government Hong Kong knew was that a very wealthy Chinese businessman was creating the most magnificent floating restaurant imaginable. The HK leadership was informed that at some point the great barge was to be towed from an unspecified location on the coast of mainland China and moored in Hong Kong Harbor. And that its arrival would coincide with the turnover.
Finally, on the historic day of the turnover to China, the Dragon miraculously appeared in the middle of Kowloon Harbor. Shrouded in canvas and secrecy, she had been towed into place by three tugs the night before. The harbor police looked the other way and patrol boats were mysteriously absent that night. The insidious power of the Te-Wu was already spreading its tendrils throughout the great city.
So, bright and early the next morning, the Golden Dragon, gleaming in the sun, was surrounded by sampans and private yachts, all hooting to celebrate her surprise arrival. Amidst a flurry of water-borne celebration, she was surrounded by fireboats that aimed great jets of water over her roofs and pagodas, sirens wailing. After sundown that night, a great fireworks display erupted from barges nearby.
The magic kingdom of General Sun-yat Moon was officially open to the public. And, unofficially, the new secret seat of power in Hong Kong was now open to the eager masters from Beijing.
The dreaded Te-Wu now had its long-coveted nest in the former Western stronghold.
“Welcome to the Typhoon Shelter Bar,” another pretty boy said as the elevator doors parted to reveal the dazzling sight of Hong Kong at night.
“I believe Major Tang is expecting me?”
“Indeed he is. Right this way, madame.”
Chapter Fifteen
The Cotswolds
HAWKESMOOR HAD PASSED DOWN TO ALEX WHEN HIS grandfather died at age ninety-one. The old Cotswolds pile, with countless chimneys and sweeping Corinthian south loggia by Robert Adam, stood against a backdrop of rolling green parklands in the heart of Gloucestershire. It was an idyllic setting for the somewhat terrifying tale now being told to Hawke by the director of the CIA. A black Bell Jet Ranger helicopter with no markings had swooped in and deposited Brick Kelly on a wide lawn, surrounded by lakes, streams, and temples de l’amour.
Two days had passed since Hawke’s rescue of Harry Brock in the South of France. Hawke was shaving in his upstairs dressing room when he heard the big helo blades batting the air. He looked out his window and smiled. Summer days were always full of promise when a big black helicopter arrived on the lawn. He had dressed hurriedly and run downstairs to greet his old friend Brick.
At six o’clock that evening, Alex and Brick Kelly were seated in a library smelling richly of old leather and tobacco and countless decades of furniture wax. The ancient plane trees standing sentry outside the tall windows were black against a pale yellow sky. Pelham had laid a fire against the damp chill of the twilight hour. Hawke was sipping his customary Goslings rum, neat, while Kelly nursed a short whisky and soda.
The two men had just returned from a long afternoon’s walk. The gorse and bramble on the hillside had been still damp from the morning rain. They’d carried a brace of twenty-bore Purdeys to the field but the birds weren’t flying. Too wet. In their rambles they had covered, both literally and figuratively, a lot of ground.
“What else can I tell you, Alex?” Kelly said, settling deeper into the pale rose damask of the fireside sofa.
“A lot. Tell me more about this new French Foreign Trade minister Bonaparte,” Hawke replied. “With every passing year he acquires a more Hitleresque persona.”
Hawke, like everyone else, had long been reading newspaper and magazine accounts of Luca Bonaparte’s miraculous ascent to power in France. His fiery speeches, his vision of a “New France,” his visits with Castro and Chavez in Venezuela. His rumored secret ties to Beijing. But now Hawke wanted to hear the director’s personal impressions.
The lanky red-haired Virginia gentleman laced his hands behind his head and stretched his long legs out nearer the fire.
“Luca Bonaparte,” Brick said with a sigh, “is a goddamn time bomb. Your Hitler allusion is not that wide of the mark. The Foreign Trade minister’s climb to power in the last few years has been nothing short of supernatural. He’s got a magic name. He’s good-looking, charismatic. But he’s also had a lot of outside help. Our long-held suspicions on that have been confirmed. According to Harry Brock, he’s getting it from the Chinese.”
“Assassinations, rumor has it.”
“They’re not rumors. Brock is saying Chinese agents killed at least two of the ministers who stood between Bonaparte and his race to the top. We can’t prove it, yet, but we will. That’s today’s real news flash. The French and the Chinese are not only in bed together, they’re screwing each other’s brains out.”
“I’m not sure I can handle that image,” Hawke said.
“No choice. You landed smack in the middle of this unholy romance when you grabbed Brock without asking permission. The Chinese are going to be gunning for you soon enough. Bonaparte already is.”
“What’s in it for the Chinese?”
“Oil. We think France, now that she’s going it alone, is going to make some kind of move in the Gulf. China will back her. If the alliance proves successful there, Bonaparte will run France at China’s pleasure. That’s President McAtee’s view, and most folks in Washington share it.”
“The Chinese get a toehold in the Gulf and the French people get a direct descendant of their glorious emperor. It makes perverse sense.”
“You bet. The name Bonaparte translates to priceless political cachet with the populace of France. France is sick to death of being marginalized politically. The last half of the twentieth century wasn’t kind to them. The French people, and Bonaparte, despise being lumped in with ‘Old Europe,’ as the press now calls them. That’s why they voted against the EU constitution.”
“So the new France is really the old France.”
“Exactly. Believe me when I tell you that Bonaparte uses this current nostalgia for past glory to full advantage. The man generates enormous excitement wherever he speaks. Verging on hysteria at times. Even the ancien noblesse seem to go all giddy about him. Aristocrats, farmers, academia. The whole country seems to see him as the second coming.”