Power and Empire

by Marc Cameron

  “Hold up,” Jack said, his hand on the ignition. “I got an idea.”

  “They’re coming up on either side,” Clark said.

  He could see the man on his side moving up now, almost at the back of the Taurus.

  Ryan looked across the center console at Midas. “Fling your door open on my mark.”

  Midas grinned. “I like your style.”

  Ryan turned the key as the image of a man filled his side mirror. He used his left hand to push his door wide open while at the same moment using his right to throw the Taurus into reverse.

  The engine roared to life. Tires chattered on the grimy asphalt and the car shot backward down the alley. The open doors acted like wings catching the two approaching men, knocking them off their feet and dragging them along with the car. Ryan stomped the brakes just after impact. Physics and inertia kept the doors traveling rearward, slamming them shut and pinching the two men between the unforgiving pieces of steel.

  Ryan and Midas bolted out of the Taurus on top of their respective assailants. Ryan’s was unconscious but still breathing. The broken shaft of a golf club stuck from his right thigh. Midas’s man was a little more coherent, but the retired Delta operator solved that by bouncing the man’s head off the doorpost.

  Ryan and Midas each secured the pistols and did a quick pat-down for other weapons before calling “clear.”

  “No movement from Casita Roja,” Clark said, his voice cool and detached, as if they were still on routine surveillance. “Ryan, Midas, pull those guys back behind the sewing-machine shop. Ding, you and Adara check on the girl.”

  Gravel crunched as Chavez rolled up with Adara Sherman and loaded an unconscious Asian female into their ratty four-door Silverado. Adara’s sure voice came over the radio. She’d served as a Navy corpsman in a past life and had seen more than her fair share of wounds and death. “The girl’s still alive, but that asshole broke her nose. Pretty sure her orbital bone is shattered. Good chance she’ll have some swelling in her brain.”

  “Parkland Hospital is just south of us,” Dom Caruso said. It was his job to keep up with things like emergency rooms and police stations during this rolling surveillance. He gave the complete address of Parkland.

  “Roll up to the emergency department,” Clark said. “Watch for surveillance cameras but drop her off by the door and haul ass out of there before anyone sees you. They’ll be used to it around here.”

  “Roger that,” Ding said.

  Adara climbed into the backseat with the unconscious woman and the pickup backed out of the alley, taking a quick but quiet left toward Parkland Hospital.

  “Don’t forget to grab her ID,” Clark said. He didn’t have to say it would come in handy to build their picture of Eddie Feng’s web of associates.

  “Way ahead of you, boss,” Adara said. “No ID, but she does have some kind of brand on the side of her neck. It’s covered with blood, but I’ll get a photo.”

  Clark came over the net again. “You about done, Jack? We could have company anytime.”

  “Just about,” Ryan said.

  Both he and Midas donned blue nitrile gloves and leaned the unconscious men against the graffiti-covered back wall of the sewing-machine shop. Neither man carried ID, which was not surprising. Tattoos identifying them both as Tres Equis affiliates were clearly visible on their necks and shoulders.

  Ryan and Midas took the rolls of cash from each man’s pocket to make it look like a robbery and jumped back into the Taurus. They’d voucher the money and turn it over to Gerry Hendley, who’d find some charity that needed it. Four and a half minutes after Ryan first saw the men coming up behind them, wind whistled through the bent doorframes as he sped toward Harry Hines Boulevard.

  “I’ll be right behind you,” Clark said. “We’ll stay up on the phone and check in tomorrow. This guy has an inside scoop on a terrorist action in the PRC and now he’s involved with drug cartels and the Sun Yee On triad. Something’s going on here, boys and girls. I don’t know what it is yet, but it’s enough to do some more digging into Eddie Feng.”

  2

  Captain Leong Tang, a thirty-two-year veteran of China Global Shipping Lines, pressed the small of his weary back against a leaning post on the bridge of Orion. It was dark outside, but his running lights pushed back the night and illuminated the expansive deck of the great ship.

  The big low-pressure system whirling up from the southwest had chased Orion across the 124 line and into the mouth of the Strait of Juan de Fuca two hours before. The Canadians controlled the separation of shipping traffic up to roughly the 124th meridian of longitude, but when inbound traffic passed Cape Flattery, U.S. Coast Guard Vessel Traffic Services took control. Seattle Traffic already knew they were coming, even before they took over from the Canadians. Like every legal commercial ship on the seas, Orion’s automated information system broadcast a unique identifier. Much like an air traffic controller, the vessel traffic coordinator called in periodically to make Orion aware of other commercial vessels, logging tugs, or some other such hazard. Shipping was an around-the-clock business, but Captain Leong could relax and sip his coffee here, even amid the blow outside. Compared to Shanghai, the strait was comparatively dead this time of night. The young woman working VTS was all business but cordial enough. She understood Leong’s English—which many other people didn’t, no matter how much he studied.

  Leong consulted the electronic chart plotter above his console, leaned in to make out the numbers, then nodded to himself. They’d make Ediz Hook in just over an hour. There, they would pick up the pilot who’d drive the ship the rest of the way into the Port of Seattle.

  He took a sip of Sumatran coffee from a ceramic mug that bore the image of a blue-and-silver Dallas Cowboys football helmet. He was not a fan of the team or the game. He only kept the mug because, though it signified something so uniquely American, it had MADE IN CHINA etched on the underside. Culturally, Captain Leong should have been drinking tea, but the rigors and travels of a sea captain’s life had simply taught him to know better. Chinese tea had a place among women and gentle souls, but sea captains needed coffee, and Captain Leong preferred beans from Sumatra, made even smoother when drunk from his made-in-China Dallas Cowboys mug.

  He’d departed Dalian fifteen days before, steaming his way down the eastern coast along the Yellow Sea to make stops in the ports of Tianjin and Qingdao. He topped off his ship at the frenetic Port of Shanghai with six thousand more TEUs filled with buttons, eyeglasses, smartphones, dinnerware, and countless other shiny trinkets bound for American consumers. There were, no doubt, a few drugs and an illicit weapon or two hidden in some of the containers, but the captain was a freight man, not a smuggler.

  Anything illegal on board was the fault of the shipper, not the ship.

  Captain Leong and his crew of thirty-one souls—seven officers and twenty-four “ratings,” or able-bodied seamen—had steamed Orion out of the busiest seaport in the world at precisely midnight. Navigating the heavily used sea lanes was made easier for the monstrous ship by a harbor pilot and two tugboats. They left under cover of darkness, not because they wanted to hide anything, but because that’s when the last TEU was secured to the deck and the final piece of paperwork was signed and stamped by port officials. Captain Leong wanted his ship loading, unloading, or sailing. Anything else was wasted time—and money.

  At 165,000 tons, and fifty meters longer than an American Nimitz-class aircraft carrier, Orion required a great deal of space for the basic maneuvers of simply stopping and turning. Two tugboats worked in concert with the Shanghai pilot on board to assist her in negotiating the crowded waters of the harbor, one ready to bump the side, the other with a steering cable off the ship’s stern. They cleared the entrance in less than an hour. The pilot exited through the bunker door below the bridge castle and hopped onto one of the tugs, leaving the huge vessel to her own devices and the crew’s good sea
manship.

  Orion’s powerful Wärtsilä diesel pushed her northeast on glassy seas at a steady twenty-two knots. The design of his mammoth container vessel made it impossible for Captain Leong to see the water directly around his ship, but he could imagine Orion’s bulbous bow pushing up a frothy white wake on either side. A British sailor would say she’d “taken the bone in her teeth.”

  The crew had watched the sparkling lights of Shanghai grow dim and finally wink out behind them, leaving them alone in the purple night. Shortly after sunrise, Orion sailed below the southern Japanese island of Kyushu to catch the dark waters of the Kuroshio Current. Similar to the Gulf Stream of the Atlantic, the Kuroshio flowed up from the equator, pushing her warm waters north and east—and saving Captain Leong and his company precious fuel.

  The massive ship moved through several squalls as it reached the halfway point of the journey. Then, for the next three days, Captain Leong watched the radar above his helm as a giant blob of low pressure brought cooler temperatures and confused seas. Exposed to the westerlies of the open Pacific, the strait offered little protection from the wind and waves. By the time they crossed the 124, gusts were forty knots and sustained winds had reached thirty. Waves were three and four meters high, but that was okay. Leong’s ship was big, and cut through four-meter waves like they were barely even there. It was too dark to see the shore of Washington’s Olympic Peninsula or his starboard side, but he could almost pick up the hint of sawdust and sap from the endless mountain forests. He liked the Pacific Northwest. There was a quietness to the place that calmed him, even in heavy seas.

  Safely tucked inside the heated bridge, the captain yawned in spite of the nasty blow outside. Any fool could drive a boat on calm waters. It took a real seaman to save fuel in a storm, aboard a box carrying boxes that were filled with boxes.

  Leong Tang supposed boys in every country that was bordered by a sea were somehow beckoned by the lure of salt and wind and adventure. But there was no lure in boxes. The captain hardly even noticed them anymore. They were merely gray or blue or red blobs that he looked over and around to try to catch a glimpse of the horizon or the lights of the next port.

  He had no idea what was in any of the containers. There was, of course, a manifest, but the modern ship’s master found himself buried under mountains of paperwork between ports, and Leong simply didn’t have the time—or the inclination—to read it. Dangerous goods were noted, refrigerated containers were stowed together—and, unless another dozen Fujianese stowaways had hidden themselves away in one of the TEUs as they had the year before, there shouldn’t be anything alive in any of the containers.

  While the TEU had changed the nature of shipping, progress had changed the inside of the modern seagoing vessel. Orion’s helm was not the beefy wooden wheel of Leong’s seafaring forefathers, but high-impact plastic—and most of the steering was done through the computer and a small bump lever. A bank of screens above the helm displayed the radar, the EDCIS electronic charts, a depth sounder, radio frequency, a tachometer, and the AIS. This Automatic Identifications System broadcast the ship’s name, speed, and heading to port authorities, passing ships, and if they were savvy enough to have the app for their smartphones, pirates.

  Fortunately, Seattle had no pirates, but for the company that pumped the shit from the ships’ holding tanks. Their prices were outrageous.

  With all the soulless plastic, the only nod toward a more traditional helm was the half-sphere compass, its magnetic correction noted on a metal plate affixed to the plastic beside it.

  It cost just over one American penny to ship a can of beer across the Pacific, but with that efficiency came the loss of soul. Lightning-quick unloading and loading made it impossible for Leong to give his men liberty in all but a very few ports. And even then, most of them would not be able to make it past the razor-wire fences that cordoned off the MARSEC area of the docks.

  It seemed to Captain Leong that he’d sailed out of one port when sailing had provided him an exotic life of adventure, and then, over the course of that single voyage, while he was not paying attention, it had become a job. Storms like this at least made him feel like a sailor.

  And still, the job did have its good points. He did have a few quiet moments to read. The Chinese government frowned on organized religion, but a decade earlier, a zealous dockworker in the Philippines had gifted him a small copy of the King James Bible—and he’d read it many times.

  “Better to dwell in the corner of a roof than in a wide house with a brawling woman,” the Proverb said. And when Captain Leong thought about his sniping wife, his life at sea seemed less like the corner of a roof than it actually was.

  • • •

  Leong heard the squeak of the hatch behind him and turned to see Goos, the Balinese steward, enter with a platter of fresh doughnuts. At seventeen, Goos—short for Bagus, meaning “handsome” in Bali—was by far the youngest pair of hands on the ship. In Leong’s estimation, he was also the brightest.

  “Captain,” the boy said in English, giving him a polite nod.

  “Goos,” Leong said, toasting the air with his Dallas Cowboys mug.

  The boy spoke passable Mandarin, but he was attempting to learn English—the international language of commerce—and it helped Leong and his first officer to try to teach him. It was good practice for the times they needed to communicate via the radio with VTS.

  Goos held up the doughnuts. “Mr. Hao . . . cook . . . doughnut,” he said.

  “Good English,” the captain said. “I like doughnuts.”

  Goos smiled. “I like doughnuts.”

  The captain closed his eyes to breathe in the heady smell of the fried dough. He opened his mouth to speak but was cut off by a loud pop. At first he thought some piece of gear had fallen outside, but a violent shudder ran through the length of entire ship, as if they’d run aground.

  Leong’s eyes shot open. He set the coffee mug in the slot beside his leaning post and scanned the instruments. The depth sounder showed 119 fathoms—more than seven hundred feet. Perhaps they’d hit something. Countless TEUs went overboard each year. Most sank shortly after hitting the water, but some lurked just below the surface like drifting reefs. Perhaps Orion had struck one of them, or even a flotilla of logs. Her hull was thick and made to withstand such an impact, but any strike was reason to worry.

  Half a breath later, a massive explosion rocked the aft decks. The bank of windows along the rear of the bridge castle shattered from the oncoming shockwave. Bits of glass peppered the men like a shotgun blast. Leong grabbed young Goos by the collar and dragged him behind the captain’s chair, out of the path of flying debris. First Officer Su was already there.

  Outside, heavy containers shot skyward like so many children’s toys, disappearing into the darkness to fall into the sea or crashing back down on the rail to burst and spill their clothing and electronics into the water. Leong couldn’t feel the blood from the wounds running down his cheek, but he saw tiny cubes of shatterproof glass embedded in Su’s face. Goos’s black hair was covered in the stuff.

  Windows gone, the gale outside moaned in, whipping through the cabin, lifting papers and ripping away the warmth. The smell of burning plastic and the sharp, acidic odor of molten metal flowed in on the back of the wind.

  The aft deck lights had gone dark, but Leong watched in horror as a pillar of white fire five meters wide shot like a geyser from among what was left of the TEUs, illuminating the ship as if it were midday.

  The captain looked away from the stunning brightness and clapped his hands to clear First Officer Su from his stupor.

  “Call Engineering and get a report,” he said. “There will surely be injuries. Goos, get on the intercom and tell Mr. Huang to stand by in the galley.” Huang had trained as a medic in the PLA Navy and was the closest thing to a doctor on board the ship.

  Alarms sounded amid the moaning gale and the sh
outs of terrified men. Stack after stack of shipping containers listed heavily to starboard. Lashing rods snapped, cracking like gunfire, and the boxes toppled one by one into the angry sea. Wind whipped the heavy black smoke, at once making it easier for Leong to see the carnage and fanning the flames.

  The white pillar continued to roar upward from the bowels of the ship.

  Warning lights on the console changed from green to red, flashing urgently as system after system failed.

  The ship’s intercom broke squelch and the breathless voice of Jimmy, a Filipino deck rating, filled the bridge.

  “Captain,” the man stammered in English. “I . . . need help, sir . . .”

  Goos reached up for the microphone and passed it off to the captain.

  “Where are you?” Leong asked.

  “Engineering . . .”

  “I must speak with Mr. Duan.”

  Leong’s English was good, but in times like these, he preferred to talk to a native of China. Duan was the engineer, the man with the training to understand the questions Leong needed to have answered.

  “That . . . that is not possible,” the deck rating said. “Mr. Duan is . . . gone.”

  “Gone?” Leong whispered. He put a hand on top of his head in dismay. Outside, containers continued to fall over the rails on both sides and a fearsome groan ran the length of the ship. Leong imagined some awful beast had escaped a TEU and was now running rampant down below.

  Jimmy grew more breathless with every word, choking back sobs. “I . . . I was helping him change a filter . . . then it . . .” He coughed, probably from smoke. “There were many explosions from above and then . . . the most terrible noise. Captain, do you believe in Hell?”

  “I do not,” Leong said, willing himself to remain calm. It did no good to scream at times like this. He prodded the terrified man. “What happened, Jimmy?”

  “A ball of white fire . . . It just dropped.”