Ling-Ru added two orders of sticky rice and drank a shot of baijiun.
She poured me a glass and I sipped at it as she threw back another shot like an expert.
A little while later, a huge plate of fried banana flowers arrived and I ate a few of the red leathery petals. I was surprised at how tasty they were. But I could tell pretty quickly that I was going to regret eating them, as my stomach was already starting to churn.
I was still sipping my first baijiun as Ling-Ru was on her third shot. “By the way, we already know you can drink me under the table.” I held her shot glass. “Don’t you want to slow down?”
“If I stop, the party’s over.”
“Would that be a terrible thing at this point?” I looked around at the diners in the other alcoves and asked, “Who’s watching anyway?”
“We have to at least stay for the first set of dances.” Ling-Ru poured us another round and downed hers.
“Okay. While we’re waiting for the dancers, why don’t you explain what the deal is between you and Sam?”
“There’s nothing to tell you.”
“But you said—”
Ling-Ru cut me off. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“But I want to hear about it.” I watched her drink another shot. “It’s clearly bothering you.”
She held her drink with both hands. “Look, it was a moment of weakness, that’s all. I should never have mentioned it.” She downed the shot.
“Don’t brush this off.” I moved her glass to the side. “We can keep the drinks in front of us without emptying them, right?” I was worried that Ling-Ru was going down the same path that she had gone down during our dim sum date. I touched her hand. “I want to help you.”
Ling-Ru pulled her hand away. “You can’t help me.”
“Why do you say that—like I couldn’t possibly help you? That’s kind of insulting, you know.”
“Oh yeah, well, why don’t you tell me about Sam?”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re the one who was alone with him.” She looked at me in disgust.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Come on. Jon shows up to find Sam in your hotel room. You must have hit it off at the White Swan.”
“How did you—don’t be ridiculous. Absolutely nothing happened.” I didn’t want to say these next words, but I couldn’t help myself. “He was showing me the five stances.”
She snickered. “Ah, the delicate new pupil.”
I grabbed Ling-Ru by the shoulder. “This is important. You have to believe me. Nothing happened!”
She pulled away.
I looked her straight in the eye. “I never would have let anything happen. Especially after you told me that you had feelings for him!”
“You don’t owe me any loyalty.”
“How can you say that? Of course I do. You’re my best friend.”
Ling-Ru couldn’t look at me.
“You’re keeping something from me and I can’t figure out what it is.”
“Men always preferred you.”
“Is that what this is about?”
“All throughout college, whenever I liked someone, sure enough, they liked you better.”
“That’s absolutely not true.”
“You know it’s true.”
“You never told me that.”
“What difference would it have made?”
“Come on, Ling-Ru, you act as if we had no relationship whatsoever. My friendship with you was sacred—no man was more important to me than you. And anyway, come on, let’s look at some data. The last time we were together you went home with that cute chef. He had no interest in me. He hadn’t looked at me the entire night.”
“Oh yeah, well, guess whose name he shouted out in ecstasy while we were making love?”
“Bullshit!”
“Yup. I’m afraid it’s true. Men only liked me to get closer to you.”
“That’s pretty harsh, you know that.”
“The truth hurts.”
The banana flowers had now ignited a volcanic eruption in my gut. “Fuck you, Ling-Ru. I’m going to the restroom and then I’m leaving.”
As I got up to leave the table, the waiter returned and set a new dish in front of me. I looked down at the strange oval piece of red meat that had two holes in the middle—like nostrils.
The waiter nodded. “Compliments of an old friend.”
I had never thought about what an elephant trunk would look like sliced into a steak and served on a plate, two nostrils staring up at me. I felt the urge to scream as I shook my head. “What old friend?” I looked around the other private alcoves and didn’t see anyone I recognized.
“My apologies.” The waiter bowed. “He did not give me his name.”
Ling-Ru looked at my plate. Her expression implied that I had to at least try a bite.
“No way.” There was absolutely no way I was going to eat an elephant’s trunk. Not even if my life depended on it. “We need to leave.”
“Not yet.”
“What are we waiting for?”
Ling-Ru eyed three men as they approached the table with another chilled vessel of baijiun. Ling-Ru introduced them as her customs associates. I didn’t catch their names as I was desperate to get to a toilet.
I excused myself and looked for the closest bathroom. The cultural dance show was taking shape as I searched the back of the banquet hall for the ladies’ room. An erhu player warmed up onstage as the host introduced a Dai cultural dance.
I passed table after table of lavish seven-course meals that nobody seemed interested in consuming. Copious quantities of sautéed and deep-fried food in different-shaped bowls and platters, some with elaborate presentation, sat in front of Chinese tour groups as their eyes were now trained on the stage.
I wound my way in and around tables as fast as I could and found myself past the point at which the roof of the hall stopped and a makeshift temporary annex began. It was raining, so getting to the bathroom required that I navigate around the gushing gutters and through deep mud and uneven ground dotted with open troughs of food waste, some of it still looking like the contents that I had just seen on a number of tables. I assumed it was from the diners from an earlier show. I dodged large puddles and lots of ducks as I navigated around the waste.
When I finally made it to the women’s restroom, my urgent need for a toilet forced me to overlook the abhorrent conditions of the bathroom and the lack of plumbing. The toilet was backed up and looked like it hadn’t been flushed for some time. A hose was draped between sink and toilet.
I removed the hose from the toilet and was grateful that I could sit down rather than having to squat over a hole. After relieving myself, I noticed that there wasn’t any toilet paper. I dug around in my pockets for the small amount I had stashed for such occasions.
As I was leaving, I heard a loud scuffle outside the bathroom door. When I opened it, Ling-Ru grabbed my arm, just as she took down two men right in front of me with her antique Glock. The noise of retaliation quickly arose.
“We’ve got to get out of here! Now!” Ling-Ru said emphatically as she steered me toward the exit, while my eyes were still glued to the two dead men lying in a heap.
Ling-Ru had a scrape on her jaw and her shirt was torn. “Ling-Ru, what’s going on?”
“I’ll explain later,” she whispered. “Keep low.” She wielded her Glock in a crouch, moving between tables and dodging fleeing patrons.
I followed her lead. “This is the last time I’m letting you drink so much.”
“Shhh.” Ling-Ru pulled me down behind an upturned table. Her body was tense. She breathed in short breaths.
We were positioned just outside of another alcove, outfitted with a sliding door with large opaque windows for a more intimate dining experience. The sliding door was partially opened, and we could see a dinner host peering out from the door. He ducked his head back in and tried to reassure his small d
inner party as a waiter held a large knife over the center of the table.
Chained underneath the table was a gray monkey—a macaque, it looked like. As soon as the waiter touched the gray centerpiece, the monkey started to scream. That’s when I realized that the centerpiece was the top of the monkey’s head, poking through a hole in the table.
Instinctively, I leapt up. I couldn’t allow what was about to happen.
Ling-Ru pulled me back down. “No!”
“I can’t just sit here and watch this.”
“You can’t draw attention to yourself. In two seconds, we’ll be out of here.”
In one quick motion, the waiter had sliced off the top of the monkey’s skull and poured hot oil onto the brain. The screams that emanated from beneath the table were bone chilling, but the silence that followed was even worse.
As I watched the dinner guests pick up their forks to dine on monkey brain, I churned with rage. Ling-Ru pulled me away. She had mapped out a safe escape route and we made a run for it.
Premonitions
When we got back to our hotel room, Ling-Ru and I were barely speaking to each other and got in bed without saying good night. I was so mad at her for taking me to that place and for getting so drunk that she started a bar fight that ended in her murdering two men. She had said it was an execution, but it was hard to see it that way. It didn’t even seem like she had met up with the person she had intended to meet. She had been acting so strangely.
A few minutes after I got into bed, Ling-Ru had found her way over to my bed and wrapped her arms around me. I turned to face her. Her alcohol breath was overpowering. “Ling-Ru, what the hell are you doing?”
Ling-Ru had a grave look on her face. “Did I ever tell you about my Auntie Zong?” she slurred as she petted my hair.
“No.” I pushed her off of me. “You never mentioned having an Auntie Zong. And you’re too drunk to make any sense, now go to bed!”
She returned to her spoon position against me and started twisting my hair around her finger. “I spent a lot of time with her growing up in Guangzhou. She ran an apothecary booth at the Guangzhou market.” I turned to watch her staring at my hair with wide eyes. “She read palms in her booth.”
I grabbed her hand to stop her from playing with my hair. “Why are you telling me this?”
She looked at me intently. “She had telepathic powers.”
“Bullshit.” I pulled my hair out of her fingers. “Now I see why you never mentioned her. Go to sleep!”
“I’m serious.” She twisted my hair again. “I didn’t think you’d believe me, but she saw stuff in her dreams, and then those things would actually happen. Sometimes not right away, but they always did happen eventually.”
“Like what?”
“You know, the typical stuff. Fire in a building, plane crashes, weird weather.”
“She must have been popular with the police.”
“Oh, she was. The local police would often get her involved in their investigations.”
“Was she able to help?”
“Yes.”
“Interesting, now get out of my bed and go to sleep.”
“Listen, I’m only telling you all this because as I get older, I feel like some of my dreams come true, just like hers,” she explained in a slurred tone. “I have premonitions, Catherine, just like she did.”
I looked at her skeptically, wondering what she was getting at.
“Can you promise me something?”
“What?”
“I’ve gotten more and more superstitious since I moved back to China.” She shifted uncomfortably. “And I don’t know what it is about this flight tomorrow that makes me so nervous, but I am.”
“Good thing you’re not going to be in the plane.”
“Can you just listen to me for a second?”
“I’m trying, but you’re not making any sense.”
“Can you promise me that you’ll check your parachute cord?”
“Parachute cord? What’s gotten into you? This is a routine surveillance flight.”
Ling-Ru looked down at her opened palms and started drawing on the life line on her palm with her index finger. “Like I said, sometimes I get these visions—waking dreams that won’t go away. I’ve been having one all day about this flight.”
“You never talked about this before.”
“It’s something that has evolved since I got back from the States. I can’t explain it, but it is very similar to what my auntie experienced.”
“Have any of the things you envision come true?”
“Not exactly.”
“Well then, not to worry, U.S. military jets are pretty reliable. And I’m sure their equipment is as well.”
Ling-Ru had a grave expression. “Please just promise me?”
I groaned. “If you let me sleep, I will.”
“Deal.” Ling-Ru rolled over. “By the way,” she whispered, “you can thank the banana flower for saving your life.”
“What do you mean?”
“Those bullets were meant for you.”
“What bullets?” I sat up to get an explanation. “You mean the ones that you planted in those two men as we left the restaurant? Who were they, anyway?”
“They were coming for you. I had to take care of them.”
“How did you know?”
Ling-Ru passed out next to me and started snoring almost immediately.
Spy Planes
Rattled by Ling-Ru’s behavior in the restaurant, and how she was acting before we went to bed, I demanded an explanation when she woke up the following morning. But every time I asked her a question, she complained of a bad headache. She acted as if none of the events of the previous night had happened. She even denied saying that the gunfight started because of me.
I was so frustrated, I didn’t want to leave her without getting answers, but I had no choice. Jimmy had sent a driver to take me to the U.S. military base. I had to leave.
After all of Ling-Ru’s talk of Auntie Zong and her telepathic powers, I couldn’t help focusing on the parachutes as Jimmy gave me the flight details. Sheepishly, I told him I was a squeamish pilot and had a hard time being a passenger. “Would you mind if we check the parachute cords?”
“Of course.” Jimmy looked at me strangely. “Every pilot has their superstitions. Whatever makes you feel more comfortable.”
Of all the things that I’ve worried about going wrong during a flight, checking a parachute cord was not one of them. Having never used a parachute in my life, the prospect hadn’t entered my mind.
Sure enough, there were faulty pulls on both parachutes.
Jimmy looked at me suspiciously. “I’ve never had a faulty cord before, and now there are two.”
I could almost smell the alcohol on Ling-Ru’s breath and hear her voice as she begged me to check my parachute cord. I’d grill Ling-Ru as soon as we were together again. She had to have been hiding something. There was no way she or her dead auntie Zong were channeling this event. “I’m just extremely superstitious,” I said flatly.
Jimmy looked at his watch. “Not sure how long it would take to have the fellas fetch us a replacement.” Jimmy pulled out a chute from under the pilot’s chair. “Packed this one myself. Always prepared for two. Anything goes wrong, we’ll fly tandem.”
“I like the sound of not jumping on my own. I’ve never used a parachute.”
We took off without event and it didn’t take long before we were flying over a well-worn jungle path made by repeated elephant-back safaris presumably transporting ivory and other illegal wildlife across mountains from Myanmar. But there was no sign of life—no person or elephant.
I breathed a sigh of relief. As far as I understood of Marcus’s suspicions, Nigel’s couriers wouldn’t have gotten a tip from Craig and they would have been on this path. Craig was in the clear.
As I thought about this prospect, Jimmy’s communications on the radio were getting more heated. The Chinese military was clea
rly not happy with his flight path, and thus, he was diverted toward the coast.
As we reached the coast, I noticed an aircraft flying way too close to us. It was a JMI 18 People’s Liberation Army Navy fighter. I had seen pictures of these aircraft when I read up on the Gulf of Tonkin. “Why do you think that JMI 18 is flying so close? He must see us.”
Jimmy looked over at the much smaller and nimbler jet as it flew closer and closer to us. “What the blazing hell?” he said as he tried to bank left to avoid a collision. The fuselage of the EP-3 was way too clumsy, and we were flying too slowly to get out of the way.
Jimmy looked into the cockpit. He seemed to recognize the pilot. “Shit, Chen, I knew you were a daredevil, but this is completely nuts.”
My breath shortened as the pilot maneuvered closer and closer to us. “It looks like he’s trying to hit us.”
Jimmy tried to evade the fighter jet, but it was just too close. It got drawn into our right engine and knocked it out.
“God almighty,” Jimmy gasped. He clutched the yoke with his hands and continued to bank left, trying to avoid an inverted roll.
I looked down and watched the Chinese fighter jet drop down out of the sky.
Jimmy tried to steady our cumbersome aircraft with only the left engine intact.
I trained my eyes downward, willing the pilot to eject, searching the sky for the ribbon of a parachute being pulled and then the instant burst of color as the pilot lofted up and away from danger, but there was no sign of a chute. Both pilot and plane disappeared into the South China Sea.
Now we were in danger of crashing, too. I could see it in Jimmy’s eyes.
He picked up his radio. “Hainan Dragon, Hainan Dragon, do you read me? This is RWB. RWB requests permission to land.”
Radio silence.
Jimmy spoke again. “This is Red, White, and Blue requesting permission to land. RWB raising Hainan Dragon. Do you read me?”
We waited for some time, but there was only a static crackle in response.
Jimmy tried his best to keep us level, but we were losing altitude fast. It was clearly getting harder and harder for him to control this giant skeletal craft.
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