U.S.S. Seawolf

by Patrick Robinson

  “Ah, Yushu…you are seeing too many Americans.”

  “Am I?”

  “Well, a few days ago you did decide to rebuild an entire jail at Chongqing, just in case the U.S. elected to storm the island of Xiachuan and release their men.”

  “Yes, I did,” said the C-in-C. “And I have proceeded on that basis. The Americans will stop at nothing…we both know that, to our cost.”

  “I realize that, Yushu. But I have tried to reason it all out on the basis of military probability. Ask yourself, how many people do you think it would take to overpower our forces? And how on earth would they get here? And how would they ever know the crew of Seawolf was even on the island in the first place?

  “And you could add, and how would they get everyone away? They’d need a major warship, and the water is too shallow, and anyway we’d know it was trying to come inshore hours and hours before it got here. In my opinion you are staring at a military impossibility. And Yushu, as always, you are staring very hard.”

  “It’s my job to stare very hard, Jicai. That’s my mission on behalf of the Chinese people. And this drowned naval guard, I don’t much like it…allow me to look at that last paragraph once more, please…”

  Zu Jicai handed over the fax once more, and again the C-in-C read it through, pacing the floor, a deep frown on his wide, stern face.

  “First of all, I would like you to get a full report on the drowned man; his home, his family, his background, his length of service…just to see if there is one tiny shred of evidence that he could have had contact with Americans.”

  “Very well. I think most of the guards are attached to the Southern Fleet, which means his complete record will be here at Zhanjiang. If that is so, we will have it in fifteen minutes.”

  Admiral Zu summoned an assistant, gave him the fax and instructed, “Call Xiachuan and get the name of the man mentioned in the last paragraph, then pull up his record.”

  The two admirals sipped some more tea and waited. Twelve minutes later the missing guard’s record came in. Admiral Zu scanned it, mentioning information as he read. “Well, he’s twenty-eight, married, with a young son. They live in Guangzhou…next of kin listed as his wife…parents live in your hometown of Xiamen. He was born and brought up there…served at sea in destroyers…so far as I can see, never been out of Chinese waters.”

  “How about his wife?”

  “Same. Comes from Xiamen. Not much education. Moved to Guangzhou when he received his last posting. No applications filed for any future career changes…he wouldn’t be a classic CIA spy candidate,” he added, an edge of wryness in his voice.

  Admiral Zhang smiled for the first time. “No. I agree there. However, something is worrying me. That report lists his clothes on the beach in some detail, right down to his socks. But it makes no mention of his military jacket or uniform shirt…”

  “So?”

  “Who goes for a swim in their shirt and jacket, having taken off their boots, socks, trousers and cap?”

  “Well, he may not have been wearing his jacket.”

  “True. And if that’s the case, it will be in his room.”

  “And if it’s not, what might you then assume?”

  “Nothing, really. Except that he could have been shot or stabbed, covered in blood, and the murderer dumped some of his clothes on the beach and then got rid of the body and the incriminating evidence of the bloodstained clothes.”

  “Sir, not even Lee Chang,” Admiral Zu said, referring to the famous Chinese film detective, “was as imaginative as you.”

  Admiral Zhang laughed. “I am only half playing the devil’s advocate,” he said. “But I really do wonder why a man goes for a late-night swim wearing his uniform jacket.”

  “Perhaps he wished to commit suicide, Yushu. And kept it on to help weigh him down.”

  “If he had wished to end his life, surely he would have tried to swim with all of his clothes on. Why take off his boots and trousers?”

  “Well, yes. I suppose so. But these are all just assumptions.”

  “I understand that, Jicai. But let’s get a call in to Commander Li…and have the man’s room searched…see if his jacket’s in there and maybe his shirt, too. Perhaps he just took those things off and walked out into the hot night down to the beach.”

  “Certainly, I will do it, sir. But I still cannot believe he was a CIA agent, nor that there is a homicidal maniac lurking in the jungle of Xiachuan Dao, killing armed, trained Chinese soldiers.”

  “Unless the Americans have already landed, Jicai.”

  “Landed!”

  “Well, stranger things have happened. And of course I know there is little chance of these things being true. But they could be, and we must run our checks on that basis. Not on what is likely to happen. But what could happen.”

  A further 15 minutes went by before Lee returned with a fax that read, “Room search completed. No uniform jacket. No uniform shirt.”

  “Then he died with his shirt and jacket on,” said Admiral Zhang. “Either in the water, or at the hands of a murderer. Perhaps from a foreign power?”

  “Of course, he could have been murdered by one of his colleagues, sir.”

  “Yes. He could.”

  “And so, what would you like me to do about it now?”

  “My friend Jicai, nothing more. However, this disappearing guard is on my mind, and it is likely to stay there. I am thus making all haste to have the American prisoners removed from this vulnerable island.”

  “You mean you really did activate the renovation of the jail in Chongqing?”

  “I did. Six days ago.”

  “And the jail is ready to receive prisoners?”

  “Tuesday. But I have decided to move them at first light on Monday morning, that’s tomorrow. They will travel by road and it will take two days to get there, up through the mountains. And then my worries are over. Because they will be in a place where no one will ever find them. Not in a hundred years.”

  9

  Two days before the SEAL reconnaissance team took off for Xiachuan Dao, the first half of Admiral Morgan’s two-pronged attack on the Chinese Navy had moved into operational mode.

  It was Wednesday, July 12, 12 noon, the precise moment the SEALs began to arrive on the flight deck of the Ronald Reagan. But this was 8,000 miles away, in a time zone 16 hours earlier, in the sunlit Southern California city of San Diego. John Bergstrom was going to the zoo.

  Deep in the sprawling cultural center of Balboa Park, less than three miles from his Coronado base, the King SEAL had already paid his respects before the great Veterans War Memorial. And now he strolled along Zoo Drive

  , heading essentially for the monkey house, directly opposite the bears.

  He wore white shorts, a dark blue tennis shirt, no socks and expensive-looking boat shoes. In his right hand he carried a plastic shopping bag in which there was a brand-new cassette player, still in its original heavy white cardboard packaging. A deeply tanned man with smooth, just graying hair, Admiral Bergstrom was an imposing figure, lean and confident, the kind of man accustomed to being obeyed.

  Sitting on a bench outside the monkey house, surrounded by tourists, was not a natural setting for him. But that was his position right now, in the great scheme of the upcoming attack on the Chinese Navy. And he sat impassively, awaiting the arrival of Richard White, a 43-year-old investment executive at the Bank of California in Hong Kong. Richard White, like the admiral, was not quite what he seemed after 20 years of covert operations for the CIA in the Far East. Not even the board of the California Bank knew anything of Mr. White’s activities.

  When he arrived, the admiral knew, there would be a third party, Mr. Honghai Shan of the China International Travel Service. He and Richard White were traveling back to Hong Kong together, but it would be the Kowloon native who would carry the cassette player through the notoriously difficult Chinese customs at Hong Kong International Airport.

  The rendezvous would take place on the be
nch, beneath the swaying excitement of the zoo’s Skyfari, the aerial tramway that trundled through the treetops above the lions every 20 minutes. Here Richard White would accept the package and introduce Admiral Bergstrom to the brave American agent whose work for the official “external arm” of the Chinese tourist industry made him immune from the Hong Kong customs.

  Honghai Shan’s parents, both schoolteachers, had been murdered by Madame Mao’s Red Guards in the Cultural Revolution, and he had worked as a CIA liaison man since he was a boy. Three years from now, he and his wife would retire to a hillside house in La Jolla, courtesy of a grateful intelligence agency.

  They arrived separately, the American first, sitting on the bench immediately and starting to read the Wall Street Journal. He said softly, from behind the newspaper, “Hi, Admiral. Rick White. Shan’ll be here momentarily.”

  John Bergstrom made no indication of recognition. But three minutes later, a perfectly dressed Chinese businessman, wearing a light cream suit in the 90-degree heat, walked slowly forward and joined them, sitting on the far end of the bench, studying his zoo guidebook, presumably searching for pandas.

  Still behind the wide pages of the newspaper Rick White spoke again, almost in a whisper. “Admiral, this is Honghai Shan, a deeply trusted man. We are traveling back to Hong Kong together. I will take the package all the way, but when we disembark the aircraft, Shan will go alone, carrying it with him. He will drop it off to me at my office.”

  High above them, the Skyfari moved slowly by; the CIA agent, photographing the three men on the bench, blended in perfectly with the crowds watching the other lions.

  Admiral Bergstrom said nothing. He just stood and walked away, leaving the plastic shopping bag behind. Then Richard White too stood up and left, carrying the bag. He walked slowly back through the zoo entrance, back toward the Veterans Memorial, but before he reached the huge edifice, he slipped into a black sedan that sped him across the city to Lindbergh Field, home of San Diego’s International Airport.

  Honghai Shan used a different car, a dark green limousine that took him away from the city straight up the freeway, north to Los Angeles International Airport. The next time the two men saw each other, they were in adjoining seats on the United Airlines flight to Hong Kong. The cassette player was on the floor, right next to Rick White’s left leg.

  The flight took off at 10:00 on this Wednesday evening, but because of the 16-hour time difference, they would actually arrive in China at 6:00 P.M. Friday. The journey itself was 16 hours, like flying from New York to Paris and back, and the two American intelligence agents spoke quietly about life in Hong Kong, about the old days of British rule, and about the continuing buildup of the Chinese military.

  They were old friends and had faced danger before, but to each of them there was something lethal about the package they must get into Hong Kong at all costs. Shan was not worried. As the senior Chinese overseas tourist executive he was responsible for bringing millions and millions of American dollars into the People’s Republic every year. He was a privileged traveler, with many friends in the highest reaches of the Communist Party. Most of the customs officers knew precisely who he was, and it was literally years since anyone had asked him even to open a bag, much less search it.

  The chances of someone asking him to open the plastic bag were remote. Requesting him to break open the packaging to the cassette player, and then ordering it to be dismantled, were odds too great to calculate.

  And so it proved. Honghai Shan walked straight through customs at Hong Kong International, receiving a nod and a bow of greeting from the officer in charge. Rick White’s suitcase was routinely opened but not searched. And both men were home by 8:00 A.M.

  At 9:30, Shan left his office on the 10th floor of Swire House along Chater Road

  , and walked briskly through the Central District to the offices of the California Bank. There he met Richard White in the lobby, and handed over the package they had transported halfway across the world.

  The two men smiled and shook hands, and the American hurried back to his office on the sixteenth floor, where he instructed his secretary Suzie Renrui, a Chinese-speaking divorcée from San Francisco, to render him unavailable to anyone.

  He locked the door and unpacked the cassette player. Then he took a small screwdriver and began to undo the slim holding bolts that locked the outer casing together. Inside there were no electronic working parts, just two sealed black plastic bags, ingeniously fitted into place, one of them containing a heavy six-inch-long box, about four inches wide and an inch deep. The other felt as if it held a five-inch-square box plus a round camera lens of some kind, plus wiring, plus screws or bolts that rattled against each other.

  Rick White did not know what was in the bags, and he never would. Meanwhile he took from a shopping bag a fine-looking melon, which he had cut in half and then spent a half hour hollowing out before he came to work. He had dried it carefully, and now he placed the two plastic bags carefully inside. When he put the upper half of the melon on top of the lower half, it fitted perfectly and the contents were completely hidden.

  He had another look inside the hollow cassette and found what he needed, a small length of inch-wide plastic adhesive tape, black and yellow in color. He spread it out, ripped the protective covering off the sticky part and wound it carefully around the circumference of the melon, binding the two halves together. The words around the melon now read SOUTH CHINA FRUIT.

  He repacked the parts of the cassette player into its original box, and with the melon in a separate plastic bag, he slipped out of the office, told Suzie he would be gone for less than 30 minutes, and headed for the elevators. On the way, he dumped the box down the incinerator.

  Once outside he moved fast, walking quickly between the skyscrapers, and then heading into more intimate streets, toward the market stalls down between the teeming shoppers in Li Yuen and Wing Sing streets. It took him 10 minutes to find the stall he wanted, Jian Shuai Fruit and Vegetables, which comprised three long barrows, containing every possible kind of produce. At one end was a pile of melons, several of them bound with the black and yellow plastic tape of the South China Fruit Corporation.

  Mr. Jian himself came toward him. “Good morning, Mr. White. Hold open bag, please,” he said, picking up two of the melons and placing them carefully inside. Even Rick hardly noticed him remove the other one and deposit it back next to the till, so swiftly did the fruit seller operate. Then he came forward with a handful of Hong Kong dollars. “Your change, Mr. White, thank you…thank you very much…next, please…you like some snow peas, madame?…ah…good choice.”

  Rick White vanished into the crowd, heading back through the streets into the skyscrapers. Back on the sixteenth floor he made Suzie a gift of the two new melons and settled down to work, his task on behalf of his government now complete.

  Back in the narrow throughway off Li Yuen Street

  , Jian Shuai temporarily handed over the fruit-selling operation to his wife and daughters. Then he packed a box full of mixed produce, cherries, snow peas, peppers, rice, lichees, spinach, broccoli and one melon. Still wearing his white apron, he stopped a passing taxi at the end of the street and had the driver take him down to Aberdeen Harbor, a couple of miles away on the southwestern coast.

  The sheer impossibility of finding anyone here in the crowded madness of this waterborne community, where 80,000 people make their homes on floating sampans, did not daunt Shuai. And he hurried through the insane commerce of the place, past the floating restaurants, looking out at the gentle chaos of the East Lamma Channel, dodging trucks and delivery boys, searching for the big fruit and vegetable junk owned by his friends Quinlei Zhao and Kexiong Gao.

  These two were familiar traders on these waters, buying fruit from all of the remote farmers on the fertile islands in the area. Their boat was a big heavy-sailed 40-footer, and with a decent quartering wind they could slice along at 10 knots. They were expert seamen, and careful buyers of the best produ
ce. They had also worked for the CIA for years, yet still moved busily through the trading channels, no suspicion of any kind attached to either one of them. Zhao and Gao, both fortyish, were the consummate field operators in an area swarming with Chinese spies.

  And now they waited, scanning the dockside for the sight of Shuai, carrying his box along the waterfront, watching for the familiar figure of the CIA’s most successful messenger. Gao saw him first, and stood up, yelling, “Over here, you idiot…you’re late and we’re in a hurry…SHUAI! OVER HERE!”

  In the frantic race for sales that kept Aberdeen Harbor in a daylong turmoil, this was normal banter between traders. Perfectly normal. Just the way Zhao and Gao liked it.

  Shuai came on over, carrying his box, and handed it over, shouting, “All right! All right! Who you think you’re yelling at, hah! You don’t order till yesterday—you think you own my company? Here, take it…and mind you pay on time, for a change.”