Wu stubbed out his weed and walked back to his desk.
He thought about what the Americans knew, thought about bureaucracies, about the friction and jealousy and incompetence that infected them all, including the Chinese ones. Could the American intelligence apparatus, even if given a peek, understand its significance? Would they devote the time, energy and money necessary to derive more of the picture? Would they understand it even if they did? Or would the tidbits they knew merely become more noise in a noisy universe?
Wu thought he knew the answer. But just in case, he would be ready. Enormous stakes required heroic efforts. He would leave nothing undone. Nothing!
Choy Lee lived in an apartment house on the seaward side of Willoughby Spit, a long arm of sand that stretched like a finger from the north side of the mainland that contained Norfolk out into the James-Chesapeake waterway. A crooked finger, because it was pointed northwest. The interstate highway ran along it and at the end, old Fort Wool, disappeared into the tunnel that led under Hampton Roads to Hampton and Newport News, on the northern side of the James River estuary.
At one time the north shore of Willoughby Spit was lined by huge, ramshackle wooden boardinghouses standing shoulder to shoulder. They were gone now, demolished to make room for apartment and condo complexes. It was progress, maybe.
From his small balcony that faced Hampton Roads, Choy Lee could watch U.S. Navy ships coming into and going out of the Norfolk naval complex. Going in, the ships had to go around Willoughby Spit, over the tunnel, then turn ninety degrees to the south and go up the Elizabeth River to the Norfolk naval station, or, farther up, the Norfolk naval shipyard at Portsmouth. Going out, they rounded the spit and headed east for the exit from Chesapeake Bay into the Atlantic.
On blustery or rainy days Choy Lee would often drive out to the public parking area on the end of the spit, adjacent to the tunnel entrance, and fish. He was an avid fisherman and caught more than most of his fellow anglers did. Choy Lee also had a boat, an aluminum runabout with an outboard engine that he pulled around on a trailer behind his SUV. On good, calm days he often motored out into Hampton Roads or down the Elizabeth River adjacent to the naval piers, there to fish and drink beer all day. It was a pleasant life.
As it happened, Choy Lee was also an enthusiastic amateur photographer. He used a Sony Cyber-shot, very reasonably priced, with a nice zoom capability. He shot pictures of fish that he caught, sunsets, sunrises, storms over the water, rainbows, other fishing boats … and occasionally a passing warship. The backgrounds of the photos often contained ships sitting at piers. He sent a lot of these photos to his sister as attachments to long, chatty e-mails and posted some of the more innocuous ones on Facebook.
Unfortunately, Choy Lee didn’t have a sister. The person in San Francisco who received the e-mails encrypted them and forwarded them on to an address in Beijing. The system avoided routine NSA scrutiny because the unencrypted e-mail was to an American address, not a foreign one. His bland Facebook posts went all over the world. The encrypted e-mails were merely drops in the raging river of data that flowed through the Chinese cyber-espionage system.
A friendly fellow, Choy had a girlfriend, Sally Chan, whose father ran a Chinese restaurant that Choy liked to visit. They went to movies together, or to dinner at other modest restaurants in the Norfolk/Virginia Beach area, and occasionally Choy took Sally out in his boat to fish. She didn’t like to touch the live bait or fish, when he caught one, but she laughed like an American and was pleasant and breezy.
Her presence made Choy feel happy. Life was good. Choy wondered how long it would last. Did he really want to go back to China? He thought about it occasionally, and somehow found himself thinking about life with Sally, in America.
In early August another Chinese American joined Choy, or so his cover story ran. The man was really Lieutenant Commander Zhang Ping of the PLAN. Five months had passed since Zhang had planted the nuclear weapon in Norfolk. The two seemed like old friends, or new friends in a strange land. Zhang found an apartment he rented by the month in a building near Choy’s. The two were soon fishing together and running the boat down the Elizabeth River. Zhang took many photos of Choy with Choy’s camera, shots that were e-mailed on to Choy’s apparent sister. Some of them, but certainly not a majority of them, had as the background the carrier piers of the Norfolk Navy Yard, usually empty. In late June a carrier came in, then another. Huge ships: Zhang had never seen anything like them. Although some tankers exceeded the carriers in gross tonnage, those ships rode low in the water.
The carriers, with their huge flight decks and sides rising sixty feet above the waterline, were visually stunning. Their islands, which rose another seventy or eighty feet above the flight deck, topped by a collage of antennae, appeared small from any distance, like a lonely house surrounded by endless rice paddies. The deck of one of the carriers was full of airplanes parked cheek to jowl. The tails of the planes stuck over the sides of the flight deck.
Zhang Ping was impressed by the sight. He knew, of course, the mission of these ships: power projection. They controlled the surface of the ocean within a thousand miles of wherever they happened to be and projected power onto the land. Their planes could hit targets anywhere within a thousand miles of saltwater, which was a great huge chunk of the earth’s surface. America had ten of these ships, all nuclear powered, all at sea about half the time, in all the major oceans of the earth. Three more were currently under construction right across the James River at the Newport News Shipbuilding Company, which was, incidentally, the only shipyard in the world capable of constructing these monster warships.
Zhang thought it delightful, relaxing, to boat up and down the Elizabeth River or along the Chesapeake coastline, or to sit on the end of Willoughby Spit on summer evenings drinking beer and looking at a carrier or two berthed at the navy base while watching and listening to helicopters buzzing about and tactical jets roaring into or out of the base’s airfield, Chambers Field.
Zhang Ping and Choy Lee tended their hooks, kept fresh bait on, watched their bobbers and listened to the jets and choppers. Life that summer was very pleasant, for them both, but Choy was worried. He knew nothing of the bomb, of course. He suspected he had been ordered to nursemaid Zhang because his English skills were nearly nonexistent. Certainly Choy’s control wouldn’t order him home suddenly and leave Zhang stranded in a country where he didn’t speak the language. Yet why was Zhang here? The question gnawed at him.
Of course he told Sally that Zhang was here, a cousin, he said, from the mainland. Here on a tourist visa.
In September the days began to cool. More fronts moved through, morning fog became more frequent, and often the days became windy. On windy days the Elizabeth River and James Estuary became too choppy for Choy’s boat. In October frontal systems with low clouds, copious rain and high winds moved through the area, followed by balmy, beautiful days with lots of sunshine.
Ships came and went. A carrier battle group came in, stayed a week, then went back out.
Zhang Ping became more withdrawn. He was smoking more now, watching the naval base for an hour or so morning and night. He watched the tugs, other harbor craft, fuel barges, became familiar with the rhythm of activities in the naval base, looked for anything out of the ordinary. And didn’t see it.
There was nothing to do but wait. Still, with every passing day the waiting became more difficult.
Choy Lee picked up on Zhang’s mood. He ascribed it to the fact that Zhang was alone in a strange land and could only speak to Choy, and other people with Choy’s help. Cultural shock, Choy thought.