Combat

by Stephen Coonts

  She said it was. “What would you know about it?”

  “I’ve seen how balsa is used in high-tech panels. The stuff is graded by weight per cubic meter and it varies from featherweight, which is highly prized, to the density of pine. In other words, pallets could vary by a factor of three or so.”

  “Well, damn it to hell,” she said. “Excuse me. Scratch one criterion. What’s the significance of its being sawn?”

  “Just that it may make it easier for you to see whether some of it’s been cut lengthwise with a very fine kerf and glued back.”

  “What’s a kerf?”

  “The slot made by a saw. Balsa can be slitted with a very thin saw-blade. It occurs to me that it might be the lighter timbers you should be checking for hollowed interiors. Bags of white powder aren’t that heavy, Dana.”

  I think she cussed again before she sneezed. She said, “Thanks,” as if it were squeezed out of her.

  “But I don’t think you’ll find anything,” I said.

  She demanded, “Why not?” the way a kid says it when told she can’t ride behind the nice stranger on his Superninja bike.

  “I just feel like whatever’s being delivered, if anything, hasn’t been. The monkey wrench your people threw into their schedule didn’t delay those pallets—gesundheit—but they’re behaving as if you did delay something. They’re waiting, apparently with patience.”

  She said she’d get back to me and snapped off. To kill time, I played back our conversation on StudyBabe. Dana had a spectral analyzer with her? I had thought they were big lab gadgets. Right, and computers were room-sized—once upon a time.

  While I was still muttering “Duhh” and thinking about possible uses of Dana’s gadgetry, Quent came down out of a stairwell in a hurry. He motioned for me to drive, pocketing his phone. “You love to drive like there’s no tomorrow, and I don’t. Please don’t bend the Volvo,” he begged. “Just get us across the bridge to Jackson and Taylor.”

  While I drove, he filled me in on his fresh lead. He’d struck out again upstairs, but had just taken a call on his cell phone from Ali Ghaffar. His buddy Hong, said the Paki, had returned. Ghaffar had asked about Park. Oh, said Hong, that was easy; back at the gin mill, Park Soon had said he was considering a move to a nice room in San Francisco for the rest of his time ashore. Corner of Jackson and Taylor.

  “Smack-dab middle of Chinatown. Didn’t say which corner, I suppose,” I said, overtaking a taxi on the right.

  “No such luck. But there can’t be more than a half dozen places with upscale rooms on or near that corner. We can canvass them all in twenty minutes.”

  I tossed a look at Quent. “You speak directly to Hong?”

  “Watch the road, for Christ’s sweet sake,” he gritted. “I asked, but Ali said he was gone again. Very handy.”

  “That’s what I was thinking,” I said, swerving to miss a pothole on the way to the Bay Bridge on-ramp.

  Quent closed his eyes. “Just tell me when we get there.”

  To calm him down I played my conversation with Dana. It pacified him somewhat, and I turned down the Volvo’s wick nearing Chinatown, which was a traffic nightmare long before the twenty-first century.

  I chose a pricey parking lot near Broadway, and we jostled our way through the sidewalk chaos together. By agreement, Quent peeled off to take the two west corners of the intersection. Because some of the nicer little Chinatown hotels aren’t obvious, I had to ask a restaurant cashier. When she hesitated, I said I had a job offer for an Asian gent and knew only that he’d taken a nice room thereabouts. I said I hadn’t understood him very well.

  Evidently, Asiatics have their own privately printed local phone books, but she didn’t hand it over and I couldn’t have read what I saw anyhow. She gave me five addresses, and three of them were on Quent’s side. I tipped her, hoping I’d remember to jot it down, and found the first address almost next door.

  If there’s a small Chinatown hotel on a street floor, it’s one I never saw. I climbed three narrow flights before I saw what proved to be a tiny lobby through a bead curtain. A young Asiatic greeted me, very courteously, his speech and dress yuppily American. He heard my brief tale sympathetically. Sorry, he said, but no young person of either gender had registered in several days. Would I mind describing the employment I had to offer?

  I said it was a marine engineer’s job, and I swear he said, “Aw shit, and me a journalism major,” before he wished me good day, no longer interested in my problems.

  I crossed the street and began to search for the second address when my phone clucked. “Bingo,” Quent said with no preliminaries. “But no joy. Meet me at the car in ten. Until then you don’t know me.” No way I could mistake the implication.

  He didn’t sound happy, and when I saw him on the street he had turned away, heading down Jackson. It’s a one-way street, and he walked counter to the traffic flow, something you do when you suspect someone may be trying to tail you in a car.

  So I did the same on Taylor, which is also one-way, doubling back after a long block to approach Quent’s car on Jones—again counter to one-way traffic. If anyone followed me on foot, he was too good for me to make him.

  I had paid the lot’s fee and was waiting in the Volvo when Quent appeared. “Oakland it is,” he said, racking his seat back to disappear below the windowsill. As I sought an on-ramp he said, “A man calling himself Park Soon rented a room for a week, not two hours ago; one flight up, quiet, expensive. Told the concierge he might be staying with a friend for a night or so but please to hold his messages and take names.”

  “He’s not hard up for cash,” I said.

  “He’s also about my height and age,” said Quent, who was five-eight, pushing forty.

  I’d had Park’s description. “The hell he is,” I said.

  “The man who rented that room with a cash advance is,” Quent said. “Unless the lady was pulling my leg. And why would she if she wanted me to think it was Park? Park Soon is five-three. What’s wrong with this picture, Harve?”

  “I might know if I got a look inside that room.”

  “That was my thought, but it’s a risky tactic in a subculture that’s understandably wary, so I didn’t even try. The Feds can do it if they want to. They know how to lean on people to, ah, I think the phrase is, ‘compel acquiescence.’”

  “Our own little Ministry of Fear,” I observed.

  “Everybody’s got ’em, Harve. I even have one,” he said with a half smile, and pointed a finger at my breast. “And if I had to choose between Uncle’s and the ones run by people who call him the Great Satan, I choose Uncle.

  “Meanwhile, we don’t know who’s pushing our buttons, waiting for us to show up, and watching us flail around all over hell. But I’d bet someone is, and I’d just as soon they didn’t pin a tail on us.”

  I nodded, pointing the Volvo onto the Bay Bridge. “You don’t think Park could somehow be in on this,” I suggested.

  “Not in any way he’d like. I don’t think Park is where anyone will find him anytime soon,” Quent replied grimly. “Whoever tried to create a fresh trail for him would probably be pretty confident he’s not leaving his own trail of crumbs. I really don’t like that idea, Harve. Well, maybe I’m wrong. I hope so.”

  “When are we gonna drop that one on Dana?”

  He levered himself and his seat erect; opened his phone. “Right away. She’s probably still in the field. I will bet you a day’s expenses Mr. Ghaffar knows who took that room for Park; the description fits Hong, of course.”

  I nodded. “Should we go back and have a talk with him now?”

  “Not yet, I want to be very calm for that, and at the moment I am peeved. I am provoked.”

  “You are royally pissed,” I supplied. He nodded. “Me too,” I added, as he punched Dana’s number.

  It was nearing rush hour by that time, but with a few extra twists and turns, I managed to satisfy myself that we weren’t tailed while Quent spoke with our pet Feeb
. She said she’d meet us in twenty at the boathouse on Lake Merritt, in residential Oakland.

  She was as good as her word, looking as frazzled as she’d sounded earlier but even more interesting, which irked me. No Feeb had the right to look that good. She took the perimeter footpath and we caught up to her, two visitors hitting on a cutie. When we found a park bench, she plopped her shoulder bag next to me. “If that specimen’s bagged, stuff it in here,” she said.

  “And if not, where do I stuff it?”

  She simply looked toward my partner. “While he figures out the answer to his own question, Quent: We’ve still drawn blanks at every bus terminal, airport and rail connection between Vallejo and Santa Clara. What’s your best guess on Park?”

  Quent told her while I put my evidence in her bag. At his bidding I let her review the video I’d made. He described the timing of the connections we’d made and blunted the conclusions he and I had reached together. “Wherever Park is, and for whatever reason, I just have a suspicion he won’t surface again in the Bay Area,” he said. Then he described the Chinatown lead and told her flatly why he believed it was fugazi, a false trail.

  She turned to me. “You’re uncharacteristically silent. What do you think?”

  “Much the same. And I think Quent ought to borrow your spectral analyzer, if it’s small enough to put in a Bianchi rig.”

  “Mine won’t fit in any shoulder holster I’ve seen,” she said, “but some will. The covert units are slower, though. Encryption-linked to a lab in Sunnyvale, which is why they can be so small. I’ve seen one implanted in a LOC-8. And they are very, very expensive,” she added. A LOC-8 was one of the second-generation GPS units with two-way comm and a memory just in case you wondered where you’d been. Combined with a linked-up analyzer it would be worth a new Volvo.

  “You want me to ship out on the Ras Ormara or something,” Quent said to me, amused.

  Dana turned to him again. “Better you than King Kong here. You look the part, and you could talk with the crew more easily.”

  Quent: “You’re not serious.”

  Dana: “Not actually shipping out, but you might try getting aboard while the new cargo is being loaded. A spectral analyzer needs no more than a whiff to do its job, and I’d hate to try to guess all the ways a cargo can be falsified.”

  Quent was silent for a time. Then, “I’d never get aboard without the rep’s authorization, or the captain’s. There goes one layer of our deniability but yes, I could try it. Or Harve could, in a pinch.”

  We kicked the idea around a bit, and then she excused herself and walked off a ways to use her phone while Quent and I watched boats slice the lake’s surface under psychedelic bubbles of sail. When she turned back, she was nodding. “You’ll need to learn how to use it,” she said.

  Quent said if it was anything like the one she carried, she could show us using the specimen I’d collected. She simpered for him and said she should’ve thought of that herself. We found a picnic table and, sandwiched between me and Quent, Dana pulled a grey, keyboard-faced polymer brick from her bag and opened my evidence baggie next to it.

  She stuck her forefinger into a depression labeled CRUCIBLE in the brick and pressed the CRU key. When she withdrew her finger its tip was covered by a filmy shroud, which she quickly stuck into my soggy tissue. Then she pushed the fingertip into another depression and pressed SAMPLE, and the brick whirred very faintly for an instant. Dana withdrew her finger, stripped the film off, and let it drop to the tabletop, an insubstantial wisp. Then after a silence, the brick’s little screen began to print gibberish at a rate too fast to follow.

  “Essentially, a carbon ribbon wipes a bit of the specimen off the film—don’t ask me why it’s called a crucible—and analyzes it,” Dana murmured.

  “What if you’re testing the air,” Quent asked.

  “Wave your finger around for a moment. They say the crucible has microscopic pores on its surface,” she explained.

  “And how many of those little mouse condoms are inside,” I asked, unrolling the discarded wisp for a better look.

  “Rackham, you are a piece of work,” she said under her breath. Then more loudly, “A hundred or so. By that time the battery needs replacing.” When the little screen quit printing Martian, it showed a line with several numbered pips of varied height. She showed us how to query each number, which could be shown as chemical symbols or in words.

  The biggest pip was for water, the next was for a ketone solvent, then cellulose, then something called Biopol.

  I put my finger out and touched the screen. “Bad actor?”

  “No. A polymer from genetically altered canola,” she said.

  “How in the hell would you know that,” I demanded.

  She let me stew for a moment. Then, “Customs. Biopol was the plant extract on the manifest. Quent would’ve figured that out and told you anyway,” she added grudgingly.

  The trace of C10H18O, according to the screen, was eucalyptol. Dana pointed out that the heavily aromatic tree hanging over us was a eucalyptus. “So you see it’s pretty accurate.”

  I said no it wasn’t, or it would’ve told us what the little condom was made of. She said yes it was and positively beamed, explaining that the analyzer knew to ignore the crucible’s signature. I gave up. The damned thing was pretty smart at that.

  “At least we know the cargo was as advertised,” Quent said.

  Dana nodded. “Including those pallets of wood. We ’scoped enough of it. So now we focus on the next cargo because no one has come ashore with sizable contraband, and the incoming cargo was clean.”

  “Unless they’d already pumped it out into those trucks I saw,” I said.

  “They didn’t,” said Dana. “One of the cleanout crew is one of ours. You don’t need to know which one. The Ras Ormara crew are watching him carefully enough to make us even more suspicious.”

  “I wasted my time then,” I said.

  “You proved the wharf isn’t all that secure,” Quent mused, and checked his wrist. “If you’re going to spring for a couple of those analyzers, ma’am, we should get to it.”

  She reminded him that it was a loan, and there’d be only one. Thinking ahead as usual, he said as long as we were going to show our hand overtly as a P.I. team, he’d feel better going aboard if I went along. That meant I could contact the Sonmiani rep myself for the authorization and save some time.

  “If you drop me off at my Toyota right away,” I said, “I might catch this Goldman guy before he leaves his office.”

  We quick-marched back to the Volvo and Dana agreed to meet Quent back at the Sunnyvale lab in the South Bay.

  I knew I was cutting it close for normal working hours but StudyBimbo found the Sonmiani number while Quent drove me to my pickup. I was in luck; better luck than Quent would find. One Mike Kaplan answered for Sonmiani Shipping, and put me through without rigamarole. That’s how my brief platonic fling began with my friend, Norman Goldman.

  Three

  When you first meet someone of your own sex that you like right away, no matter how hetero you are, you tend to go through something resembling courtship. When the other guy is equally outgoing, ordinary things sink into a temporary limbo: time, previous appointments, even mealtimes.

  That’s how it had been with me and Quent, and it happened again with Norm. The reason he and his staff assistant had still been at the office was that the Goldman suite and Sonmiani’s office were over-andunder, in one of the smaller of those old Alameda buildings respiffed in the style they call Elerath Post-Industrial. I guessed that Sonmiani did a healthy business because the whole two-story structure was theirs.

  It was a few minutes after five, but Goldman had said he’d leave the front door unlocked. Following the signs, I moved down a hallway formed by partitioning off a strip from the offices, which I could see through the glassed partition. One man was still in there, wearing a headset and facing a big flat screen. He looked up and waved, and I waved back, and he motion
ed for me to continue.

  The place must have once doubled as a warehouse to judge from the vintage—now trendy again and clean as a cat’s fang—freight elevator. I obeyed its sign, tugging up on a barrier which met its descending twin at breastbone height. It whirred to life on its own, a bit shaky after all those years of service, and a moment later I saw a pair of soft Bally sandals come into view under nicely creased allosuede slacks. A pale yellow dress shirt with open collar followed, and finally I saw a tanned, well-chiseled face looking at mine. Hands on hips, he grinned. I couldn’t blame him; I’d forgotten how I was dressed.

  We introduced ourselves before he jerked a thumb toward the glass door of what might have been an office, but turned out to be his digs. “Sorry about the time,” I said, as he ushered me into a big airy room with an eclectic furniture mix: futon, modern couch, inflatable chairs, and a wet bar. And some guy-type pictures, one of which had nothing to do with ships. I thought it would stand a closer look if I got the time. “I tend to forget other people keep regular hours,” I added.

  “Couldn’t resist your opening,” he said, with a wave of his hand that suggested I could sit anyplace, and I chose the couch. “Anyone looking for the same crew member I’m looking for, is someone I want to meet. Besides, I’ve never met a real live—ah, is ‘pee-eye’ an acceptable buzz phrase?” He had heavy expressive brows that showed honest concern at the question, and big dark eyes that danced with lively interest. “And if it’s not, would some sour mash repair the damage?” His accent was Northeast, I guessed New York, and in Big Apple tempo.

  “Maybe later,” I said. “But P.I. is a term always in vogue.”

  “As long as I’m on Goldman time, I’ll have a beer,” he said, and bounced up like a man who played a lot of tennis. He uncapped a Pilsener Urquell from a cooler behind the bar, dipped its neck toward me, then took a swig of the brew before sitting down again. “We’ve about given up on Park, by the way. Do you suppose the dumb slope has gotten himself in some kind of trouble?”