“I don’t know. You might come to resent him if you end up holding this all inside.”
“I might change my mind but I’m trying not to think about him right now. I need to focus on catching Nigel. I can’t sleep at night knowing how many elephants are slaughtered every day.”
“Has it gotten that bad?”
“At the current level of poaching, elephants could go extinct in a few decades.”
“Is that even possible?”
“According to current estimates.”
“Estimates that you trust?”
“I wouldn’t be talking about them if I didn’t. Whole families of elephants are being gunned down, some say almost one hundred a day, not to mention the ones being poisoned at waterholes in Zimbabwe. And the increased demand is driving up the price, making it all the more tempting to poach.”
“How much is it per kilo?”
“It shot up from about one hundred and sixty U.S. to about seven thousand dollars after the legal sale to China from southern African countries.”
“Seven thousand? I thought it was more like one thousand.”
“The price has dropped, but it’s still high enough to attract warlords to finance war in northern Africa. I’m sick about it. It’s not right, Ling-Ru. We can stop this.”
We walked quietly for a while as we reached the end of the ridge and entered a bamboo grove. “Can we sit in the shade for a minute? I’m not feeling very well.”
“Of course.” Ling-Ru sat down next to me. “It’s pretty hot, isn’t it?”
I took a small twig of bamboo and twisted my hair up on top of my head. “It’s the humidity.”
“You okay?” Ling-Ru looked at me delicately.
“I’ll be fine. Just need time to process this.”
Light penetrated the forest in long shafts through a thick canopy of neon-green leaves far above us. The densely packed yellow trunks glowed in dappled patches. I took a few deep breaths and took in the stillness of this place. “This would be a great place to meditate.”
“Yes, it would.”
I picked up a piece of bamboo and tapped the ground with it and then threw it down. It was too short. I picked up another longer piece that looked like it would be a nice walking stick. I stood up and tested out my stick. “All this time, I was thinking I had to escape urban China and get back to the wilds of Africa. But there are absolutely spectacular places right here. I just need to spend more time outside the city centers.”
Ling-Ru stood up. “It is peaceful, isn’t it?”
As we walked on, the bamboo grove gave way to a dense broad-leaf tropical forest that dripped from above and smelled like damp earth. Nestled within the thick vegetation, we came upon huge iron gates that closed in a series of old buildings and a large stone tower. An old sign read, TRAPPIST HAVEN MONASTERY. And a newer sign read, OUR LADY OF JOY ABBEY.
“Our Lady of Joy?” I looked around the forest. “This place is kind of creepy.” There was a mooing sound in the distance. “Is that a cow?”
“The Trappist monks used to run a dairy here.”
“A dairy? Seems like a strange place to keep cows.”
“It started about fifty or sixty years ago. They moved the dairy in the eighties, but it still runs as a monastery.”
I looked past the gates at an eerie-looking old building choked by vegetation. There was another plaintive mooing sound in the leafy vicinity. “Sounds like they left a few cows behind.”
“Trappist Dairy. That’s what it’s called. Pretty good milk, I’ve heard.”
“They make great beer, so I guess I’m not surprised.” I put my hands up to my face in karate position. “But are the Trappists as good as the Buddhists at karate? What do the monks call it? Shaolin style?” I turned to face her, holding my hands stiffly out in front of me in the only martial arts pose I could think of. “This looks like the perfect place to learn some kung fu sparring moves from my BFF.”
I started dancing around her, singing, “Everybody was kung fu fighting.” I laughed and then jabbed at her. “Remember how much you loved that song?”
Ling-Ru smiled and returned the next line of the song, “Those kicks were fast as lightning!” she said as she expertly threw her heel up above my hands, just clearing my forehead.
I ducked. “Wow, how did you do that?” I held up my hands again. “Can we condense five years of training into a few weeks?”
“There are some things you could learn quickly,” Ling-Ru explained. “Since you’re up to speed on handling guns and tightening your body, having quick responses should be second nature.”
I sang more lines of the song extra poorly to tease her.
Ling-Ru repositioned my hands. “Let’s start by at least looking the part.”
I pushed my stiff hands at her. “Come on, show me how to break a board.”
Ling-Ru rolled her eyes. “Don’t embarrass yourself.”
“Come on.” I looked around the debris outside the monastery gates and picked up an old wooden shingle. “What’s the secret?”
She took the board and inspected both sides. “It’s actually easier than you might think.” She tried to flex it. “It’s not perfectly dry, but you should be able to break this.”
I held my hands stiffly in front of my face. “Okay, then show me.”
She clutched each side of the board and held it up to me at eye level.
I looked past my karate-chopping hands at her. “So, what do I do?”
She pushed the board toward me. “You break the board.”
“Seriously, how do I break the board?”
She lowered the board and thought for a minute. “Okay, here’s the deal.” She held her hand out, and in one quick motion she extended the length of her arm toward me. “Tameshiwari is all about momentum.”
“What’s tameshiwari?”
“It’s the term for breaking stuff in karate.”
“Oh, okay, like those guys that break concrete blocks with their skull and crazy shit like that?”
“Exactly.” She held the board in front of her face. “You have to push through the board. Think that you are intending to hit me rather than the board.”
“What do you mean?”
“The classic mistake people make is to slow down as they approach the object rather than following through with momentum just beyond the object.”
“And what about the yelling thing, or whatever you call that?” I approached her with my bad karate chop. “Hiiiii-yah!” I said, teasingly.
“Okay, now you are really embarrassing yourself.”
“Come on, what’s that all about? I see it all the time in the Bruce Lee flicks.”
“For some people, kiai helps them focus. Making a noise keeps the body tight and focused. At least that’s what people say who like to use it. And apparently it also serves the purpose of getting rid of carbon dioxide to increase oxygenated blood flow to the extremities.”
“Isn’t there supposed to be some kind of spiritual energy involved as well? Chi, or whatever you call it?”
“If you believe in ki, the external harmonizing of ki energy is called kiai, as opposed to the internal harmonizing of ki energy, which is called aiki.” She held the board back up. “Come, try it.”
I approached her with my karate-chopping hands. “What’s the word I’m supposed to emit while breaking the board?”
“Ya!” Ling-Ru yelled in an unexpectedly deep voice.
“Hey, that sounds very professional.”
“Go for it. Remember, follow through with the motion as if you’re hitting me and not the board.”
I tightened my stomach and let out a “Ya!” as my hand broke through the board.
Ling-Ru smiled as she held two half boards in her hands. “Now that’s the Catherine I remember.”
I was stunned. I had never done anything like that before and hadn’t expected it to work on my first try.
“You want to try again?”
“No way.” I wiped my hands
together dismissively. “I’d rather leave this lesson on a high note. But I can see that kung fu will require a 24-7 commitment.” I squeezed her biceps. “Until then, you’ll be my muscle, right?”
She slapped my hand away. “I’m hoping you can be your own muscle.”
“Me against the Sun Hee Un. You saw how defenseless I was.”
“You’ll be more prepared next time. Craig told me how great you were in the Caprivi.”
“I’d still rather you be my Cato.”
Ling-Ru laughed as she tossed the broken shingle on the ground. “You’re nowhere near as clumsy as Clouseau.”
We kept walking. “Sometimes I am.”
“You used to say that I always doubted myself. That’s one thing I always admired about you. You never did.”
“That’s when I was young and naive and hadn’t encountered anything life threatening yet.”
“Grizzlies aren’t life threatening?”
“You remember that?”
“How could I forget it? Summer of our junior year, was it? Yellowstone, just north of Slough Creek, I think you said. Stumbled upon a mother and cub?”
“That’s some memory.” I took a moment to think back to that mother and cub eating berries. One was supposed to walk in groups of four or five in that remote area, but I’d been following the tracks of a wolf pack and really wanted to see it. After finding fresh feces, I lost track of how far off the trail I had gotten and was walking through some pretty dense bush and there she was with her cub. Apparently, no one told her that the jingle bell I was carrying in my pocket was supposed to intimidate her.
In an instant, she towered over me on her hind legs and I immediately curled into a ball and lay there frozen, trying to breathe as slowly as possible. My rifle was loaded but it now lay next to me. There was no chance of scaring her off by firing a shot. And there were no trees. My only hope was that she’d determine that I wasn’t a threat and move on, which she did—her cub padding off behind her.
“Well, yes, but that was just dumb luck. Turns out that sheer terror can seem like sheer calm. If that had been a black bear, I could have been in serious trouble freezing up like that. Playing dead can actually work for a grizzly.”
“I’ll have to remember that the next time I’m sent to Siberia.”
“You’ve been there?”
“No, I was just kidding.”
“Where’s the ivory that you’re seizing at the borders coming from, anyway?”
“Not much is coming through the borders where I’ve been posted. It’s either being flown in to the main airports from flights originating in Africa via Bangkok or Singapore, or brought in by boat, through Vietnam and Laos. Or through the mountains from Myanmar.”
“Who handles those busts?”
“Usually the secret police. We collaborate.”
“How do they patrol the river?”
“It depends. By boat normally.”
“And the mountains?”
“That’s a tough one. It’s pretty treacherous, and no one wants to get stuck in a shoot-out on elephant-back.”
“Elephant-back? Really?”
“The smugglers are doing it. The police are reluctant to go that route, but I think it’s the only way to catch them in the act.”
“That would be pretty hairy.”
“I hope I’m not involved. You’re the horsey girl.”
“I can ride a horse, yes. Not sure riding an elephant is the same thing, not that I have any intention of riding an elephant.”
“I’m sure it would be just as easy for you. I couldn’t ride a horse if it were destined for the glue factory.”
“You’re not that bad.”
“Whatever.”
“So there’s the Kwan Woo Dun from Guangzhou and the Sun Hee Un from Hong Kong. Where does the term ‘triad’ come from?”
“Triads began in the 1700s as a resistance to the Manchu emperor in the Qing dynasty. They were actually very patriotic and wanted a return to Han rule. One of them became known as the Three Harmonies, referring to the union between heaven, earth, and man, hence the term ‘triad.’ But eventually triads turned to criminality, and ultimately organized crime and extortion. I have to deal with them fairly frequently.”
“It’s funny. I never intended to have a dangerous occupation. Did you?”
“No.”
“How did you end up in customs?”
“It just seemed like the only place where I didn’t feel like a victim of the system.”
“What do you mean?”
“We actually have some autonomy, surprisingly enough,” Ling-Ru explained. “I feel like we’re doing something rather than just watching and feeling powerless.”
“Even though the triads seem to be above the law?”
“Not everything is controlled by triads.”
“That’s encouraging. I guess carrying a gun helps one feel less vulnerable in such a dangerous setting. Do you use it much?” I asked.
“All the time,” Ling-Ru replied matter-of-factly.
“And how often do you physically have to wrangle smugglers?”
“A lot.”
“What kind of stuff are they smuggling across the border of Yunnan?”
“Illegal wildlife meat for the restaurant industry,” Ling-Ru offered. “That’s a big one.”
“Like what?”
“Monkeys, snakes, pangolins. Whatever they can get their hands on. Elephants, even.”
“And those people carry guns?”
“Sure. They are usually smuggling other things as well. Used to be opium, but now it’s whatever drug is currently hot. Meth. Some weapons. Some diamonds. Some rhino horn. Ivory, of course.” Ling-Ru looked at me. “But, how did you get where you are? I thought you wanted to be a field biologist.”
“I was a field biologist. Who knew that job would lead to this? I felt like I had to rescue the animal I wanted to study before I felt like I could study it.”
The forest started to peter out as the trail opened back out on the ridge. There was a welcome breeze in the air again.
“Yes, but how did it lead to this?” Ling-Ru asked. “And where did you meet Craig?”
“He hired me after we met at a conference in South Africa. He was based in the Joburg office at the time. I was presenting data on ivory-smuggling patterns in southern Africa. I came under fire when I suggested that there couldn’t be two economic policies in relation to a single global commodity. Craig was impressed with how I handled the situation. And I was looking for a way to get some distance. I kept having nightmares about Sean, and I needed a change.”
“So that’s how you got to the Caprivi?”
I nodded. “I was their elephant-census pilot. And spy, essentially.”
“Did anyone know that?”
“Eventually I had to tell Jon. But it was difficult for a while. He was really angry that I lied to him.”
“I bet.”
“And then I left. With a few dead bodies in between.”
The narrow footpath led into a series of switchbacks down the mountain.
I was about to go on when I caught sight of something down below us on the other side of the ridge. “Speaking of dead bodies.”
Abandon Ship
Ling-Ru and I looked down at the scalloped shoreline with sand strewn with plastic garbage along the waterline. An old dugout canoe sat against a mound at the far end of the beach next to a dock.
I stared at the mound. “Doesn’t that look like a grave?”
“It does look like a grave.”
There was a large wooden boat moored to the dock by the stern, while the loose bow banged up against the dock. “Is that Jin Jin’s boat?”
“That’s Jin Jin’s dock, but I doubt if that’s his boat,” said Ling-Ru. “He couldn’t afford a boat like that.”
“The place looks abandoned.”
Ling-Ru pulled out her phone. “I better call for backup.”
“Do you have any reception here?” I
looked at my phone. “Mine says no service.”
Ling-Ru inspected the top left corner of her phone. “Nope. Damn it.” She picked up the pace. “Let’s go see what Jin Jin is up to.”
We started down the switchback, and as we got lower, I could see that the mound was definitely piled in the shape of a person, including a head that was sticking out higher than the rest of the form. But there was something funny about the shape. The mound at the head of the body looked more like Anubis, the Egyptian god of death, rather than a person. “Why would someone be buried like that? They didn’t even dig a hole.”
“Used to be like that all the time with the ‘boat people,’ as we called them, the refugees from Vietnam. There were bodies everywhere. Every once in a while, someone would take pity on them and cover them up.”
“Or in this case, someone might have been in a rush.”
When we reached the beach, Ling-Ru signaled that we should walk through the bushes next to the beach. There was a little footpath and she led the way.
The boat was larger than it had looked from the ridge. It was an old diesel tugboat with a series of cabins inside. It banged and clacked against the dock as each wave rolled past.
I thought I saw movement from inside one of the cabin windows, though it could have been a reflection. “Ling-Ru, I think there might be someone in that boat.”
She put her finger to her lips and waved me on toward a dwelling deep inside the tree line. She drew her firearm and approached a house that looked even more dilapidated than the other overgrown properties we had passed earlier.
Ling-Ru knocked at the front door, which was slightly ajar. There were disintegrating screens hanging off window frames with most of the windows broken. Torn vinyl kitchen chairs surrounded a kettle sitting on an extinguished wood fire outside the front door. A child’s old shoe sat under one of the chair legs to balance out a missing rubber foot. There were recent tracks in the soil around the fire—tracks from shoes with the word KONG imprinted in the tread. Old tires housed puddles of wriggling mosquito larvae, making my skin crawl.
“Hello?” Ling-Ru knocked again. “Jin Jin, are you there?”
I lifted the empty kettle off the char and spat. My spittle immediately sizzled in the white ash. I took a half-burnt stick and dug around in the center of the fire. Coals were still smoldering.
White Gold Page 8
