Left for Dead

by Sean Parnell

  Kruvalt found Ingo Ferreti crouching behind a fire truck, where the firemen were still hosing down the remains of the smoking generator. Ferreti stood up. His hands were trembling and he was lighting one cigarette with the butt of another. Kruvalt snatched both from his surprised mouth and crushed them out under his SWAT boot. There was too much fuel around.

  “Well, Captain?” Ferreti whined. “Well?”

  “There wasn’t a fucking soul aboard, Ingo,” Kruvalt said. “It’s a ghost ship.”

  Chapter 16

  Lebombo, Mozambique

  Rod Kruvalt headed west from Maputo to Siteki, late in the afternoon.

  He’d left his team at dockside to supervise the PRM cops and cordon off the Windhoek, where the dead ship was now gently bumping the ravaged pier in the swells of a rising tide. Ferreti had given him a lift back to the station at Avenue Kim Il Sung, chattering his frets all the way, whereupon Kruvalt had squeezed Ingo’s bony shoulder and promised he’d solve the mystery. He knew that soon he’d have to have a conversation with the chief of SERNIC, the National Criminal Investigation Service, but for the moment there was only one man he wanted to see.

  He changed from his SWAT gear into khaki bush shorts and a safari shirt, stuck his Sig in a waistband holster, got into his truck, and drove.

  Kruvalt cherished his old 1993 Land Rover Defender 110 Spectre. He kept its spearmint-green skin in perfect condition. It had a 5.7L rebuilt Chevrolet engine, thirty-seven-inch Maxxis Trepador tires, a puma hood, fire and ice steps, and a powerful winch. It was a four-door beast and long for a bush car, but he could stuff a couple of handcuffed perps in the back, or if need be, a corpse.

  The way to Siteki was fifty kilometers, but Kruvalt didn’t mind the drive. Once he crossed the Matola River and wound through the sprawling huts of Boane, the EN2 byway emptied out, and he spooled up “Mama Cass,” as he’d named the truck—he was a diehard The Mamas and the Papas fan—and cruised through the rolling green hills, past steaming palms and the perfectly thatched huts of villages where the women sauntered with impossible loads on their kerchiefed heads. As his CD player pumped out “California Dreamin’” he turned left through Siteki, downshifted, and climbed south into the Lebombo mountains toward Mabuda Farms, whose name meant “Place of Dreams.”

  The farms were a magnificent tourist enclave, with quaint pastel-colored guesthouses, bird sanctuaries, hiking trails, a swimming pool, and wonderful native food. George Wheelwright worked there occasionally as a horseback riding guide, which Kruvalt thought strange for an older man who’d clearly once been a soldier or mercenary of some sort, but Rod asked few questions. He knew many men like George, who spoke very little, knew so much, and kept their pasts to themselves.

  At Mabuda, the stable manager told him that George had gone home for the day, so Kruvalt turned the Land Rover due east again, onto a narrow dirt road, and climbed higher, much higher, up to one of the highest green peaks of the Lebombo in Mozambique.

  Twenty minutes later, he honked the Land Rover’s horn as he pulled up and stopped outside Wheelwright’s teakwood cottage. It was in fine condition, especially considering the assaults of hard sun and pelting rains on the peak, but Wheelwright had built it himself, and he was an orderly man with talented hands. The screen door creaked open and Wheelwright stepped out onto his front porch.

  He was tall, yet still muscular, with thick bristling gray hair, a sharp nose and square jaw, like that legendary old American actor Lee Marvin. He wore a white African collarless dashiki, old blue jeans, and leather sandals, and he was smoking a pipe.

  Kruvalt got out of the Land Rover and offered a casual salute. Wheelwright smiled with closed lips.

  “You should have called first, Rod,” he said in a voice that sounded like sandpaper on rusty iron. “I would’ve cooked you a rhino fillet.”

  “I tried to, mate, but the line was busy.”

  They both grinned widely. Wheelwright didn’t own a phone.

  Wheelwright turned and went back into the house. Kruvalt followed. They’d dropped the niceties long ago. They’d first met six years before, when Kruvalt had arrested George after a bar fight in Maputo. Three young stevedores had thought they could roll the old American for his cash, and Wheelwright had knocked them out cold. Kruvalt had torn up the charge sheet and let him go, and they’d been fast friends ever since.

  “Clara or Preta?” Wheelwright asked. They were the pale and dark versions of Laurentina beer.

  “Preta, mate.”

  Kruvalt sat down in a rattan chair in Wheelwright’s salon, on one side of a glass-topped coffee table made of candlenut wood. He looked at the whitewashed walls, which had no photographs of any kind, only a few framed watercolors painted for George by the kids at Mabuda Farms. Wheelwright came back from his small seaside kitchen with the iced bottles and sat down across from him in another rattan chair. They clinked the bottles and swigged. George set his pipe in an ashtray made of polished morganite, and the smoke curled toward the thick-beamed ceiling.

  “So, what’s the skinny, copper?” Wheelwright said. “It’s a long way up here for a beer.”

  Kruvalt leaned forward and told George the story of the Windhoek, from the first alarm at HQ, to the moment he’d driven out of town. By the time he was done, Wheelwright was squinting over Kruvalt’s head, streaming pipe smoke from his weather-scarred lips, and he’d put down his beer.

  “A ghost ship, you say,” he said. “Nobody aboard. Like something out of the Bermuda Triangle.”

  “That’s correct.”

  “And you didn’t find anything on it that might be a clue?”

  “Just this,” Kruvalt said. He reached into his bush shirt pocket, and placed a gleaming brass empty shell casing on the glass.

  Wheelwright picked it up, turned it over, and looked at the base where the primer was gone.

  “You expect me to know what this is?” he said.

  “If anyone does, you do, mate.”

  “Not sure the compliment’s warranted.”

  “Take a guess.”

  “It’s Chinese.”

  Kruvalt cocked an eyebrow. “State your case.”

  “Seven six two by thirty-nine. Head stamp, eighty-one over seventy-one.” Wheelwright shrugged, as if such knowledge were common. “That’s a Norinco lot, PLA issue, probably at least twenty years old. Did you see any bullet strikes anywhere on board?”

  “Nothing at first glance, but we were only aboard for twenty minutes,” Kruvalt said. “We’re going back. I’d like you to go with us, George.”

  Wheelwright dropped the shell on the table, as if it were infected with something contagious, and sat back in his chair.

  “Why me, Rod?”

  “I think it’s obvious, mate. You’ve already made this little trip worthwhile. My guess is you’ll save me straining my brain.”

  “Well, we wouldn’t want that.” Wheelwright smiled. “It’s already weak.”

  Kruvalt ignored the quip. “Consider it?”

  “Consider. Not promise.”

  “Bloody fair enough.”

  Kruvalt downed the rest of his Preta, rose from his chair as Wheelwright did the same, and they shook hands.

  “I’ll fetch you tomorrow at ten,” he said.

  “I might be busy with the horses.”

  “Eleven, then.” He wasn’t going to be dissuaded.

  “Might be available. Might not.”

  “We’ll see,” Kruvalt said, and he walked out to his Land Rover and drove away.

  Wheelwright didn’t follow him to wave goodbye. Instead, he pursed his lips, sighed, and walked out of the salon, through his small kitchen, and out onto his seaside veranda. He’d made it out of bamboo, and at night when the wind blew hard, it whistled and moaned. He stood with his hands in his jeans pockets, with his straight-stemmed pipe clutched in his teeth, squinting into the distance and far away at the glittering buildings of Maputo and the sea.

  In a heavy mortar ammunition crate beneath the fl
oorboards of his house, he had some items of equipment that he only used when he was certain he was alone. One of them was a Celestron Ultima 100 spotting scope. It was a very substantial instrument with 66x magnification power and a field of view of fifty-two feet at a thousand meters. He thought about fetching it from the crate, mounting it on its tripod, and taking a look at the pier where the Windhoek lay in its berth, but he changed his mind. He wasn’t going to see much from here.

  He’d have to go down there with Rod in the morning. He owed him and he couldn’t say no.

  He turned to walk back into the house, then looked at the dusty old mirror he’d hung on the wall of the veranda. It was there because he liked shaving outside with a ceramic bowl and a straight razor, an old habit from days in the field gone by.

  He took a long hard look at the man in the glass. But he didn’t see George Wheelwright.

  The man he saw was Hank Steele.

  Act II

  Chapter 17

  Manchuria, China

  The fortress of the Swords of Qing was in the northwest wilds of Manchuria, and so far from the lives and loves of Shenyang that only the wheeling hawks knew it was there.

  Shenyang was the provincial capital of Liaoning, a sprawling metropolis of twenty-three million souls, which still held the ancient Qing dynasty’s great Mukden Palace, now merely a disgraceful museum. But if you traveled far west of the city, across many kilometers of winding roads where the suburbs disappeared and the bamboo villages sprouted near Chifeng, and if you dared ride northwest into the much higher mountains from whose peaks you could see Dariganga deep inside Mongolia, that’s where the last of the Qings had chosen to make his stand.

  Zaifeng, the forty-year-old commander of the Swords of Qing, had built the fortress in the lee of twin forested summits, between which a rushing ten-foot-wide waterfall tumbled through a paddlewheel electric generator. His headquarters building was an exact replica of the Dazheng Hall of Mukden Palace, a magnificent octagon of bloodred walls, matching exterior columns, a double capped sloping roof of terra-cotta tiles and green jade, and golden dragons perched and slithering everywhere. From the wings of this zŏng bù, his men had constructed a ten-foot-high perimeter wall of granite stone that circled a pitch the size of a football field.

  In the middle of this courtyard sat three Harbin Z-20 assault helicopters, covered by artillery camouflage netting and so many additional woven leaves that not even a Keyhole satellite could have picked them out. The helos were the same ones that Zaifeng’s men, following his orders to the letter, had used to slaughter every living soul at the Level V laboratory called Toqui 13.

  But Zaifeng did not think he was a killer.

  He thought he was an emperor.

  Born in the squalid sewers of Shanghai, his mother, Wang Li, was an affable whore who worked the two-star hotels along Nanjing Road, riding male tourists on their lice-infested beds and leaving them breathless and stripped of their yen. Wang Li had, in turn, learned her trade at the feet of her own mother, Wang Jing, an imperial Chinese consort who’d screwed half of the Japanese high command while they occupied Manchuria during World War II.

  They were beautiful, brazen, clever women, and Zaifeng was the product of their quiet power.

  Zaifeng was the epitomical latchkey child, often left to his own devices while his mother bedded foreigners for clothing and food. He was small-statured but quick, often bullied, but resilient. He was brilliant, yet eschewed school for Shaolin kung fu, and whenever truant, which was often, ran betting chits for older gang boys and broke fingers for grateful pimps when their johns refused to pay for desultory fellatios. He had thick unruly black hair like a Manga character, penetrating eyes, a small scarred nose, and a smile that could mean either mirth or murder. If Zaifeng had been wronged and stepped into the street carrying his Wushu bo, the long wooden staff of the Shaolin warrior, the whole street cleared.

  Zaifeng’s grandmother, Wang Jing, died when the boy was sixteen. It was then that he finally asked his mother, Wang Li, about the origin of their names. After all, Wang Li meant “beautiful monarch” and Wang Jing meant “quiet monarch.” It seemed a bit haughty for whores.

  “Your grandmother,” Wang Li said as Zaifeng carried the old woman’s still warm ashes in an earthenware urn, “was the consort of Aisin Gioro Puyi, the last emperor of the Qing dynasty of our beloved China. I am his bastard child, and you are his bastard grandson. You were named after Emperor Puyi’s father, Zaifeng.”

  Zaifeng didn’t believe his mother, not for a very long time. But while completing three dreary years in the People’s Liberation Army as a special forces close-combat instructor, he found himself studying the history of his supposed ancestry, even though he thought the tale of lineage was a fantasy. His alleged grandfather, Emperor Puyi, had been a virtual prisoner of the Japanese in “Manchu” until 1945. Then, after the war when the Chinese Communists had taken over, both Puyi and his brother, Pujie, had spent a horrific decade in a reeducation prison, the Fushun War Criminals Management Centre.

  Puyi had died a stateless pauper. The Chinese Communist Party had decimated Imperial China’s last great dynasty, and the family’s fortune and honor.

  There was no concrete evidence of this ancestral connection, except for one thing. Zaifeng’s mother kept a bequeathed keepsake from his grandmother, a thick lock of hair in a small glass box, allegedly cut from the end of Emperor Puyi’s queue, the traditional braided Qing ponytail. Zaifeng took the hair, and along with his own blood, had them tested by a DNA laboratory.

  The results shocked him and rocked his world. Now he had that string of laboratory test result numbers, which no one but he understood, tattooed on the inside of one muscled forearm.

  Puyi was not the last emperor of China.

  He was.

  Inside his headquarters, the zŏng bù, he sat at a massive fifteenth-century desk stolen from the Forbidden City in Beijing, which he regarded as his birthright rather than theft. Much of the surrounding decor in the large conical interior space was antique Chinese furniture, some purloined and some purchased, while heat was provided by a huge iron woodstove that flickered and spit from the center of the polished teak floor. But Zaifeng himself was not a traditionalist in terms of fashion. He wore an up-collared black leather motocross jacket, black tactical trousers and boots, and the only nod to his regal heritage was a crimson turtleneck underneath the jacket, with small crossed swords and a golden dragon embroidered below his throat.

  Zaifeng was writing in a leather notebook of parchment pages with a pheasant quill pen and inkwell. He never used computers, ever. Without looking up, he queried a young man standing before his desk at parade rest.

  “Do you have a body count, Po?”

  “We estimate eighty-two, Xian Sheng,” Po said, using the formality of “sir.” He had the form of an Olympic gymnast and was dressed in similar fashion to Zaifeng, but there was also a snow-dusted villager’s burlap wrap thrown about his shoulders. Whenever outside in the fortress courtyard, all the men camouflaged themselves against prying eyes in the sky.

  “You estimate?” Zaifeng stopped writing and looked up at Po, who held the rank of first lieutenant with the Swords of Qing. That was the highest rank Zaifeng allowed his officers. Loftier promotions fomented dangerous ambitions.

  “The action took place very quickly, Xian Sheng. Miko did his best to count.”

  “But no one escaped?”

  “No one.”

  “You are sure?”

  “No one, Xian Sheng. They were shark-infested waters.”

  “Tai hao le.” Excellent.

  Outside the headquarters’ thick double doors the baritone sound of a brass gong thrummed the wood. Zaifeng nodded at Po, who turned and snapped, “Come.” The doors swung open and one of Po’s long-range scouts entered and bowed. He wore a thick brown quilted jacket over a traditional yi tunic and hemp shang skirt, above high leather boots encrusted in snow. He removed a fur hat coated in ice and advanced, though
not too far.

  “Make your report, Feng,” Po said.

  “Xian Sheng,” the scout said to Zaifeng. “The woman is alive.”

  Zaifeng’s mouth turned down. “You are certain? The one who escaped from the laboratory.”

  “I am certain, sir.”

  “Where is she?”

  “She is being cared for by a Mongol smuggler, in a village southwest of Ulaanbadrakh.”

  “What is your proof, Feng?” Po challenged his scout.

  “Sir, I witnessed the woman outside of a ger. She fit the description provided by Bao, who pursued her into the laboratory sub levels.”

  “And that is all?” Zaifeng asked.

  “No, Xian Sheng.” Feng reached into his tunic and showed his commanders a pair of long-range Zeiss binoculars, camouflaged white. “Her PLA uniform was also drying on a line.”

  Zaifeng nodded with a tight smile. “I am impressed, Feng. How did you infil and exfil?”

  Feng returned his commander’s smile. “Leather personnel carriers, Xian Sheng.”

  Now all three men smiled. The slang expression meant “boots.”

  “Excellent soldiering,” Zaifeng said. “Go warm yourself, feed yourself, and offer blessings to Buddha.”

  Feng bowed again and withdrew. When he was gone and the doors closed, Zaifeng tapped his quill on his ledger.

  “Assemble C-Squadron,” he said to Po. “It is far, so prepare the horses.”

  “Yes, Xian Sheng,” Po said. “What are your orders?”

  “My orders are to kill her. And everyone in that village.”

  With his headquarters empty again, Zaifeng rose from his desk, removed a large iron key from a drawer, walked through a small maze of walnut wood Qing dynasty Fushouyi armchairs and a Hongmu recliner, and opened a lock in the floor. He pulled on a large square hatch and descended a narrow, curving stone stairway, illuminated by small electric bulbs. He was thoughtful as he carefully picked his way down, as the stairs were slick with moisture.