by Sam Powers
He rose from his bucket bench and moved quickly to the rear of the sixteen-foot skiff. He primed the outboard motor, then pulled the starter chord.
Nothing. It whirred back into place.
He looked to his left, where the black dot had grown to the size of a small radio speaker. The boat bobbed more from his movement, water slapping the hull, sloshing. It had to be large, he knew, nothing like the small missiles he’d see on the wings of military jets that sometimes flew by. He pulled the chord again, and again, and once more. The motor made a wet, squelching sound.
Flooded. He’d flooded the engine. He looked desperately to his left once more, where the black nose cone of the missile was the size of a large ship, and just a few miles away. If it passed right overhead? He didn’t know. There had to be a jet wake, he knew, and this was some sort of small rocket, judging by the size.
There was no time to wait for the motor to clear. He moved back to his bucket seat and reached down to each side, finding the boat’s oars on the floor, then slotting them into their oarlocks, the small metal hook-like guides on port and starboard.
He began to row, trying to maintain his calm, the oars arcing through the water as he pulled with all his might. Despite his advanced years, he was wiry and strong, without an ounce of excess fat, and he had decades of experience; nonetheless, he was nervous, the tension etched across his leathery face. The boat began to move north, out of the missile’s path.
But it wasn’t fast enough, he knew. He gazed to his left again and this time, thought he could hear it over the rush and hiss of the roiling waters. He pulled the oars frantically; the hissing of the ocean spray was overwhelmed by the roar of the rocket’s engines growing ever louder. He pulled the oars and prayed, prayed that he’d make it back to shore, prayed that he would see his wife and pregnant daughter again.
It began to turn... toward his vessel, a sliding arc that made Fujiwara think it was tracking his small boat. Instead, the nose cone suddenly jerked to the right, a trail of blue flame and smoke visible for a second; then it jerked to the left, hard, the nose veering upwards, the sheer size of it obvious to the old fisherman in the moment. The rocket began to sputter, the flames cutting in and out, smoke billowing from its tail as it roared past, perhaps fifty yards from his vessel. The wake from the jet created a cresting of high swells, and for just the barest of moments, Fujiwara expected the boat to tip over. Instead, before he could regain his balance and look around, he heard the crashing rush of the gigantic weapon as it smashed into the ocean.
His boat started to accelerate on its own in the direction of the crash, the rocket’s rapid descent into the water creating a vortex behind it, like water going down a drain. The old man grabbed the oars once more and pulled with all his might. It had gone in at least a hundred yards away, but it was still all he could do to control the small boat, and he prayed once more that he would make it home that night.
2/
KOWLOON, Hong Kong
It was just before midnight, and the count was short.
Tony Lo was a Deputy Mountain Master and had been a Red Pole before that, an enforcer for the White Crane Triad. He usually stood to one side of the faux wood table and watched the procession that occurred on the second-to-last day of every month, while the administrator, a bald and bespectacled man in a blue suit, sat behind the table and handled the count.
But he had been watching over the handling of tribute for a decade, whether in this broken-down, empty apartment or one of a dozen like it, each ideal for keeping foot soldiers away from people’s places of business; and when Siu Fen, a young soldier from the docks, placed his bundle in front of the administrator, Lo didn’t even have to ask for a recount.
‘You’re short,’ he said. He left it simple, to give the kid a chance to explain. Soldiers – or ‘forty-niners’ – like Siu never had the balls to simply hold back cash. Lo was a huge man, his chest more than fifty inches across. In his dark-blue silk suits and black dress shirts, he was a menacing presence to even those on his good side.
‘That’s… what they gave me,’ Siu said. His eyes danced around the room. Lo had been on one side of this discussion before with others and knew the kid was probably terrified.
‘Who did the count? By my estimate you moved… how much, administrator?’
The administrator, or ‘White Fan’, turned to his left slightly so that he could tap on the laptop keyboard a few inches away. ‘Six kilos, deputy’
‘You moved six kilos. There should be at least fifty grand more in there.’
‘Deputy, I…’
‘Explain,’ Lo demanded.
‘I cannot,’ Siu said, lowering his eyes to the floor. Then he raised his head again, looking determined. ‘But I can find out.’
‘What is the ten oath, Fen?’ Lo demanded. ‘The tenth of the thirty-six oaths we all swear?’
He lowered his eyes again. ‘I shall never embezzle cash or property from my sworn brothers. If I break this oath I will be killed by myriads of swords.’
‘Someone in your district has stolen from his brothers,’ Lo said. ‘Find him. Find him and bring him to me. But be sure, because even if it is one nearest and dearest to you, no brother may break his sworn oath to us. You know the consequence of failure.’
Fen bowed quickly, keeping his eyes raised so that he could watch the room, gauge whether he was, in fact, being given a second chance. He backed away and then turned, leaving as quickly as he could.
‘That’s the second this week,’ the administrator murmured.
‘A poor precedent if they are not both quickly dealt with,’ Lo said. ‘The longer we both do this, the more I worry that honor is truly a thing of the past.’
The administrator barely smiled, but he chuckled slightly on the inside. The old guard, guys like Tony Lo, just didn’t understand how much times had changed. They still had soldiers handing out envelopes of ‘tribute’ instead of just transferring the money electronically, via encrypted account. And the hierarchy in the gang was still so top-heavy that those at the bottom were left with scraps. No wonder they stole.
Either way, honor had never had much to do with any of it. ‘Just keep in mind that leaving a messy trail of messages attracts the wrong attention,’ the administrator reminded his younger associate.
Lo snorted slightly. ‘That is why you are a White Fan and were never a Red Pole, my old friend. You were always too squeamish.’ Lo knew it was also the reason he would eventually inherit the mantle of Mountain Master; the leader had to be seen to be strong and potentially ruthless, and a number cruncher would never fit the bill.
Lo’s deputy had taken a call in the kitchen but walked into the living room with a concerned look on his face. He studied the three men waiting to drop off tribute envelopes then went over to his boss and leaned in. ‘You have a visitor on his way up. A Charlie Pang? He says it’s urgent and you go way back, but I don’t know the name.’
The larger man’s eyes widened. ‘Charlie… Gods, it’s been years.’ Charlie had been a foot soldier as a teenager before his parents had moved him to a private school in the Philippines. The last Lo heard, he’d been working for the government in some capacity. But they were brothers from early childhood, in spirit if not blood.
The front door opened and the guard leaned in to announce him. Lo waved a hand to acknowledge the request. A moment later, Charlie walked in. He was twenty years older and maybe twenty pounds heavier, his shoulders broad. But he still looked like Charlie.
Lo got up and met him halfway across the room and the two embraced. ‘Little Tiger! I thought you were long gone from these parts.’
‘Nearly twenty years,’ Pang said. He eyed the crummy apartment. ‘It doesn’t look like much has changed… except you’re behind the table now.’
Lo smiled. ‘I’ve come up in the world. You should have stuck around; maybe you’d be here beside me instead of Pei…’ he said, nodding toward the administrator.
‘Things got pretty weird af
ter Manila,’ Charlie said. ‘Can we talk alone?’
Lo nodded to the White Fan. ‘We’re going to talk for a few minutes. Yell if you need me or we get any shorter counts.’
In the kitchen, Charlie sat at the small, square table while Lo got them each a coffee. ‘After we moved to the mainland for my father’s government job, we were set up in this big old colonial mansion from the British days in Harbin. My father was being rapidly promoted and the prestige and acquisition was swift.’
‘Sounds great.’
‘It was,’ Charlie said. ‘And then I met this guy, this old-time player from back in the day, from the seventies.’
‘The bad old days.’
‘You don’t know the half of it. He had a story to tell. And I believe it was one that could be worth a great deal of money to both of us. I spent the last five years trying to find out enough to actually do something with it, but if we can get just a little more proof, it will make us both very, very rich.’
‘I’m already rich,’ Lo said.
Charlie shook his head. ‘Not like this. This… this is information everybody wants.’
Less than fifteen feet away and through the plaster wall to the next apartment, CIA field agent Adam Kwok listened to the patter from the two men who’d just entered the kitchen.
He’d been annoyed at drawing short straw on the stakeout, taking the tap on the west side. Each relied on a thin fibre-optic line for sound pickup, inserted through a pin-sized hole in the wall, so small as to be near invisible to the naked eye. But the east side tap was directly into the living room, and that was where all the action had been for two days.
It wasn’t that he hated the assignment; Tony Lo was a major player in the Triad’s smuggling operations into the U.S., and he did business with everyone from white slavers to spooks. It was the first time in years they’d had a solid location more than a few hours before tribute, and with the talk being of modernization, perhaps one of the last chances for a while to have both high-ranking and low-ranking guys in the same room as dirty money. The National Security Agency
I couldn’t get anything off regional signals intelligence partners and there was bound to be important intel discussed, stuff that could lead to actual shipments and real, tangible progress.
But the kitchen tap had been silent for two days, a procession of footsteps over to the coffee machine every hour or so the only sign it was even picking up sound.
Until today. Today, Kwok quickly realized, something big was going down.
As soon as they started talking in muted tones, he knew it was important. For one, he recognized Tony Lo’s voice right away, and Lo didn’t take people aside for chats over nothing, even though the second voice was completely unfamiliar. He picked up his walkie talkie, left on the secure channel, and hit up his partner in the east-side apartment. ‘Starling to Raven, over.’
‘Go ahead Starling, over.’
‘You get any of what was said before Lo left the room for the kitchen over?’ he whispered.
‘Yeah, something about a visitor,’ the voice came back quietly. ‘Guy named Charlie Pang familiar to you, over?’
‘Never heard… shhh, gotta go.’
Lo had finished pouring coffee and gone back to the table, his footsteps faintly audible through the wire. Kwok pushed the headset tight to his ears and craned his neck forward, as if it might help the clarity.
‘... realize there’s no way for me to confirm any of this without spending serious money,’ Lo said. The wire was inserted next to a picture, on the wall behind the breakfast table. The pickup was suddenly clear and strong, as if both men were seated right there.
‘I get that,’ the odd-man-out named ‘Charlie’ replied. Kwok took cramped, pencil-scribbled notes as a matter of veteran habit, even though multiple digital recordings were running. ‘But we’re talking about making it back a hundred times more with Project Legacy.’
There was brief pause. ‘How much are we talking about?’ Lo asked.
‘Eight figures. Maybe… depending upon the entirety of it and what we can get for the various intelligence agencies… maybe nine.’
‘Nine fig…’ Lo let the thought hang there. A hundred-million dollars for what amounted to information?
‘Surely that’s not possible…’
‘Really?’ Charlie said. ‘Think of the consequences. Untold lives lost, untold billions gone…’
Kwok felt his heartbeat increase as the digital recorder and laptop nearby recorded it all, his adrenaline rising. It was something big. And who the fuck was this guy? Tony Lo took him seriously and Lo was a major player. And this guy was talking about something worth that much money?
This was an immediate priority. He needed to…
The blast thundered through the apartment and the fibre optic connection like a cannon shot in a bus shelter; Kwok tore the headphones off and grabbed reflexively at his ear drum, the rumble subsiding to a high-pitched whine. A few seconds passed and it, too, disappeared. He grabbed for the walkie talkie but before he could press the button to talk, heard shouts and voices.
Someone was taking down the apartment.
He rose and grabbed the clip-on pistol holster from his makeshift workstation, the top of a short-but-wide chest-of-drawers in the apartment’s rear bedroom. Another crime family? No, there would be gunfire, and plenty of it. This had to be police.
Goddamn it. Now things were going to get harder, just when something big was shaking loose, something important and deadly. He opened the apartment’s front door and peeked out into the floor’s corridor. Tactical officers from the HKPD armed with assault rifles were pushing waiting tributes down to their knees, a line of young gangsters with their hands behind their heads, envelopes on the floor in front of them like some grotesque mockery of prayer. Police streamed into the apartment, commands screamed at the men inside, telling them to get down, to drop their weapons.
Kwok ducked back inside quickly and closed the door again. He radioed his partner. ‘Starling to Raven.’
‘Come in, Starling.’ The voice was hushed, nervous and breathy.
‘This place is way too hot; the locals are going to go nuts if they run into us. You clear out at first opportunity; maybe they’ll say something else about this alleged intel before the local PD haul Tony Lo in for…’
The call was effectively interrupted, drowned out by three loud machinegun bursts of fire, then three more. And then it was silent, the walls of the small apartment enough to hold out the normal sounds of the day, absent breach blasts, and battering rams, and screaming tactical officers.
Shit.
He wasn’t sure if the shots had taken down his surveillance targets or if Tony Lo was singing like a bird in the next room. Either way, there was every chance he could be discovered in short order. But he had to know what was going on. Kwok hurried to the back bedroom, grabbing the headset and listening frantically.
He turned up the volume on the small blue gunmetal preamp box that sat next to the wall, until the emptiness of the sound from the kitchen devolved into a static hiss. In the background, he could just faintly hear someone talking from the next room.
‘… were resisting and had to be taken down. Do we have an escort to intake yet?’
Kwok listened for the static of a walkie talkie response but there was none. A mobile call?
Twenty seconds passed. ‘Sure, a quick sweep. We’ll know…’
The door to the apartment exploded inward, the frame wood splintering under the impact of the police battering ram.
3/
Superintendent Winston Chen had been on the job for three decades and was long past the point of being surprised by the pitfalls of bureaucracy. Cops that didn’t talk to one another were more common, he’d found, than those who did. So crossed wires at a stakeout or bust weren’t that uncommon.
But the man seated across from his desk, though Chinese American, was most definitely not police. Chen leaned back slightly in his office chair and pursed hi
s fingertips together like a church steeple as he studied Adam Kwok.
‘What to do, what to do…’ Chen muttered in Cantonese. ‘Mr. Kwok, you have diplomatic papers identifying you as part of the American consulate security staff here in Kowloon. And yet you were discovered next door to a major gang member who belongs to a Triad with broad American interests, with recording equipment and a fiber-optic tap.’
Kwok said nothing. A veteran field hand, he followed a series of protocols for capture that included volunteering as little as possible.
‘Of course, Hong Kong is somewhat more… enlightened, shall we say, in the latitude we have when dealing with such matters.’ Chen threw the idea of co-operation out there early; he didn’t expect the American agent to bite, just perhaps start thinking that the superintendent might be marginally more sympathetic. ‘If you were even just to share unofficially your reasons for such a specific interest in the White Crane gang…’
Kwok remained silent. Chen was beginning to suspect the man would say nothing at all unless provoked. ‘You should be aware that your recording materials were accidentally destroyed during the raid and therefore cannot be returned to you,’ he said. ‘Additionally, you will not be allowed to contact your consular colleagues immediately.’
‘Why?’
Finally, a response. ‘Why? Because you were engaged in espionage activities, Mr. Kwok, and in China, such activities are punishable by methods up to and including execution. Your diplomatic immunity extends a privilege to you with respect to criminal activities. But espionage is a state security matter, not one for the criminal courts.’ It was a bluff; Chen himself had no pull in the intelligence community and he doubted the HKPD would have any say in what happened to their guest. On past experience, there was every chance they’d be ordered to return him to the American consul, which would then be politely asked by the government to transfer him out of China.
