China Star Page 10

  “Only from a distance. You say you escaped from Turtle Island?”

  “I could not have done it alone. I was working on the periphery of the fields in an out-of-the-way place, and with the help of a friend was able to construct a raft.”

  “How did you get away on a raft?” Matt asked. “There are strong currents around that island.”

  “As a man of the sea you would know this,” Yang said. “But my friend and I found a part of the beach shielded from the strong currents by a natural sea wall. There we were able to push off at night and get away.”

  “What happened to your friend?”

  “We were hit by a storm three days ago, he was washed away. Very sad.”

  “A PLA Navy helicopter flew over this morning,” Matt said. “They appeared to be searching for something.”

  “Yes, I saw the helicopter. They’re searching for us.”

  “Why didn’t they see you?”

  “We had a gray blanket we pulled over the raft to disguise it from the air.”

  Made sense. Still, something bothered him. Traveller sauntered in, sniffed the air, and growled at the stranger. Matt shushed him by stroking the dog’s ears.

  “Life in a forced labor camp must agree with you,” Matt said, nodding at his muscular chest. “The food must be good.”

  Yang Zhi made a face. “The food was execrable. Steamed buns and salty noodle soup twice a day. Everyone is emaciated. I was only there a short time, but I had to get away. I knew that if I stayed, I would die like so many others.”

  Matt nodded. If he was only there a few days, that would explain his condition.

  “Rest now, my friend. You’re in safe hands.”

  The man took a deep breath, let out a long sigh, and closed his eyes.

  “He’ll probably sleep now,” Matt said. “Let’s leave him alone. Check on him later, will you, Doc?”

  Sam returned to the bridge and Matt to his sea cabin, thinking about his unwanted guest. He might be able to get some lemonade out of this lemon. If the man knew a section of the beach that was shielded from the strong currents, he might have other useful intelligence about the island and the prison. After he’d slept for a while, Matt would find out what else he knew.

  He pulled off his shoes and lay down. He felt tired again. Those damn capsules . . .

  Something brought him awake, a change in the rhythm of the ship. He glanced at his watch. He thought he’d just closed his eyes, but he’d been asleep for over two hours. The phone on his desk rang, the light from the bridge line blinking. When he sat up, he could tell by the vibration in his feet that one of the engines was down, probably the number four. Goddamn Scootchy. He slipped into his shoes and pressed the button on his speaker phone.

  “Captain.”

  “Number three’s down, Skipper,” Sam said.

  “Not the number four?”

  “No sir, the number three. Engine room’s not responding.”

  “Damn it.”

  “You want me to go down with you?”

  “No, stay on the bridge. Adjust the props to compensate. I’ll take care of it.”

  Matt hurried down the ladder to the engine room. He paused at the entrance: Something didn’t feel right. As noisy as the engine room was, there was always the sound of voices over it, quarreling, good-natured bantering, something. This time there was only the out-of-balance clatter of three diesel engines.

  He stepped inside. The lights were out. An emergency battery-powered lantern cast ominous shadows against the port bulkhead. He pulled a flashlight from a clip by the door and walked toward the engine room console, playing his light around.

  The beam flashed on a pair of feet by the engine room console. Closer now, he saw Scootchy Carter lying face down, his head in a pool of blood. With a head wound that severe, he had to be dead. He glanced at the console. The number three engine had been shut down. He shined the beam of his light toward the console and reached for the black telephone handset.

  The shadow of an arm rose above his head. He ducked instinctively and felt a glancing blow behind his right ear. He went down to his knees and rolled over on his back. He looked up, head splitting with pain, and saw the fuzzy image of Yang Zhi standing over him with a wrench in his hand.

  Wearing only a loincloth, the escaped prisoner straddled Matt. He raised the wrench over his head and brought it down in a sweeping arc intended to be the final blow. At the last instant, Matt rolled to the side. He felt the wind of the swing and heard the clang of the wrench on the steel deck plate. Darting out from between his attacker’s legs, he scurried backward. He had to get to his feet. Another blow from that wrench and he’d be finished.

  Matt crabbed backward another few feet and managed to pull himself upright by clinging to the engine room console. Yang Zhi walked slowly toward him. He seemed to be supremely confident that he could kill him at his pleasure. Matt looked frantically around for something to fight with, then remembered the pistol. He still had it in his pocket. Backing up, he shook the darkness out of his eyes, ears still ringing from the blow, and probed for the weapon with his fingers. Somehow he managed to get the pistol out, upside down. He righted it and leveled it at Yang.

  “That’s far enough,” Matt said. His voice sounded distant.

  Yang shook his head. “You’re not the type to keep a gun cocked and ready to fire.”

  Oh, shit. Matt fumbled for the slide with his left hand. Before he could cock the pistol, Yang grabbed his wrist in a lightning move and wrested the pistol from his hand. It slid down between two deck plates and disappeared into the bilge.

  “Why are you doing this?” Matt said in Mandarin.

  Yang smiled.

  “Tell me,” Matt said, buying time for his head to clear. He felt the back of his head. Blood was gushing from a wound at the base of his scalp.

  “You have your destination, and I have mine,” Yang Zhi said, advancing.

  That was why he’d shut down only one engine. If he’d shut them all down, the whole crew would have been down there. He didn’t want the whole crew. The son of a bitch was going to pick off one or two men at a time, then commandeer the ship with what was left.

  Yang lunged and swung the wrench.

  Matt raised his arm to fend off the blow and felt a sharp pain in his forearm. Grimacing, he allowed his attacker to back him toward the ladder leading to the catwalk around the engine room. He had to clear his head before he engaged this guy. Gripping his arm, Matt backed his way up the ladder with Yang Zhi advancing as though he had all the time in the world. As they emerged onto the catwalk, Matt lunged for the wrench. He grabbed Yang’s arm and slammed his wrist against the handrail. The wrench went clattering to the deck below.

  Unfazed, Yang spun around with a kick that caught Matt under the chin.

  Dazed, Matt went into a fighter’s crouch and swung with his right. He scored a direct hit on Yang’s jaw, but the man moved with it, avoiding the full impact.

  Yang smiled again. He crouched and swung upward from his center of gravity, catching Matt in the stomach.

  Matt felt the wind go out of him. Yang came up under Matt’s chin with his bare knee, knocking him backward. Matt shook the clouds out of his head. He feinted with his left and swung with his right, catching the man with a direct hit that made him stagger. Yang shook his head and smiled. They fought back and forth, exchanging blows for several minutes. Who the hell is this guy? He took straight shots to the head that would knock a mule down and kept on coming. He’d said he was in prison for speaking out against the government, but Matt didn’t think so. He looked and acted like a professional killer, someone who loves his work.

  Over the noise of the engines below, Matt heard the horn on the engine room console blare, indicating that the phone was ringing. Yang Zhi looked down at the blinking overhead light, pulsing in unison with the horn. He had to know that an unanswered phone would bring people to the engine room, so he moved in to make the kill. He charged and spun Matt around. Matt f
elt his neck being twisted to one side. He recognized it as the move Sam had taught him when they were fooling around one day. It was an old SEAL tactic, a way to kill a man with your bare hands.

  Sam had also taught him how to break it and throw your attacker off balance.

  He slammed his left elbow in Yang’s ribcage and reached over his head, grabbing him by the back of his neck. He tucked his body in and pulled, flipping Yang over his head. Yang’s back landed squarely in the center of the handrail. Matt could hear his spine snap over the noise of the engine room. He lay dangling over the steel rail, screaming in agony. Matt placed his fingertips under Yang’s head and flipped him forward, over the handrail. He watched him fly twenty feet down into the engine room in slow motion and land face up on top of the number three engine.

  Matt leaned against the handrail, gasping for breath. He stared down on his attacker, sprawled across the yellow Caterpillar engine. Looking closer, he saw a steel rod protruding from his stomach, blood seeping up around it. The sight of a man impaled alive sickened him. Yang shuddered. His arms twitched, and then he stopped moving. Matt felt like vomiting, but he was grateful to be alive. Another five seconds and it would have all been over.

  He touched the wound on the base of his skull and looked at the blood on his fingertips, his mind racing. Nothing about this guy added up. Was he really an escaped prisoner, or was he something else? Was the Chinese helicopter really searching for him, or had they flown over the horizon and dropped him in their path, knowing that an American ship captain would automatically stop and render assistance? The man didn’t look like someone who’d been drifting at sea for very long. Maybe he came from that helicopter. If he did, if he was a plant, then that meant the Chinese were on to him. And if the Chinese were on to him, he should abort and get the hell out of there.

  He told himself to calm down and think. There were only a few people who knew about the mission: Senator Grayson, himself, Gray Wolf, and a handful of government agents. There was simply no way for the Chinese to know, and if they did, they wouldn’t do something as idiotic as this. The guy was probably a hit man for one of the triads who’d had a taste of prison and wasn’t about to go back.

  No, if the Chinese were on to him, they’d send the PLA Navy out to sink him and be done with it, not pull some stupid trick like this. He would proceed as planned. Clutching his arm, he inched his way down the ladder, toward the ringing telephone.

  Elizabeth hoisted her wicker basket to her shoulder, let out a sigh, and trudged up the row of plants toward the collection bin. She blinked into the breeze coming from the ocean. Her eyes stung from the acid in the peppers, but she’d learned not to rub them. She glanced around the fields, looking for the man who called himself Charlie Chan. She’d been trying to spot him among the prisoners since their meeting at breakfast, but he was nowhere to be seen. The sun hung low on the horizon, not much daylight left. How did he manage to evade the guards all day?

  She placed her basket on the scale. Old Wu, the tally man, an ancient prisoner with a gaping hole where his right eye should have been, flicked the counterweights back and forth, squinting at the indicator marks on the brass bar. He grunted, then entered her contribution on a sheet of rice paper.

  Elizabeth turned her head sideways to read the total scrawled in Chinese characters on the tally sheet. Nine kilos. About twenty pounds. She’d met her quota. She could coast for the rest of the day. The tiny red peppers didn’t weigh anything - it took a million of them to make a kilo - but she was now determined to meet her quota and stay out of trouble. When the time came to leave, she didn’t want to be beaten so badly she couldn’t move, or hung from the rail, or locked up in one of the steel boxes that ringed the fields.

  Old Wu peered at her with his one good eye.

  “Your quota has been increased to twelve kilos per day. It is only two hours until dusk. You must work harder, or you will be beaten.”

  Elizabeth felt her face flush. Every time her quota was increased and she met it, it was increased again. It was torture to meet it, and it was torture to refuse. She glanced at the periphery of the fields. Two prisoners who hadn’t met their quotas, or had simply collapsed, were hanging by their hands from a wooden rail that resembled a goal post. They’d been hanging there all day, twitching and moaning, excrement running down their legs, a living example for all to see. Which would be worse, being hung from the rail or being bent over nearly double in one of the claustrophobic steel boxes with only a tiny hole for air? After a day of either, the prisoners were often dead. She forced a smile and dipped her head.

  “There is nothing this lesser person would rather do.”

  “I do not think you are sincere.”

  “No shit,” Elizabeth said in English.

  She made her way back to the spot in the row where she’d left off and squatted down behind the plants to rest for a moment. Americans had never been good at stoop labor, and she was no exception. The pain in her back became unbearable after ten minutes or so. She couldn’t work on her knees. They’d be scraped bloody, and the moist black earth was permeated with night soil. God only knew what strains of bacteria were lurking in there. She steeled herself and went back to work, duck-walking down the row of plants, pulling her basket behind her. No doubt she’d have the best-developed set of glutes in Cambridge, Massachusetts, when she got back home.

  Home. She blotted out her surroundings and tried to imagine what her homecoming would be like. Her father would try to maintain his senatorial dignity, but she would fall into his arms, and he would melt as he always had. Her mother would be standing to the side, weeping silently before launching into another of her sermons about getting married and settling down. Looking at the mess she was in now, it’d be hard to argue with that. She had no problem with getting married and having children. She’d thought about it a lot, but the only men she’d met were soft academic types, all brains with no sense of adventure. None had held her interest for more than ten minutes.

  Lost in her reverie, she watched the daylight slip away. Then, parting the leaves to search for peppers in the waning light, Elizabeth caught glimpses of the prisoner working the row next to her. She appeared to be a woman in her mid-fifties, perhaps older. Unusual. Women made up only a small percentage of the prisoners on the island.

  They worked side by side for ten minutes or so, the only sound the dry rustle of the leaves and the mournful squawk of an occasional seagull floating overhead. Elizabeth reached behind her to pull the basket forward and heard a groan from the next row. She spread the leaves with her fingertips. The woman was on all fours, shaking her head.

  “What is it?” Elizabeth said in English.

  The woman’s head snapped to the side. She looked sick and frightened.

  Elizabeth switched to Cantonese. “Are you ill?”

  “Who are you?” the woman said.

  “Just another poor prisoner.”

  The woman peered at her through the leaves. “Are you a foreign person?”

  “I’m American.”

  “From the Golden Country? You look . . . different.”

  “My mother is Chinese,” Elizabeth said. “What is it, old mother? What’s troubling you?”

  The woman looked down at the dirt and shook her head. “I’ll never meet my quota.”

  “You’re too sick to work.”

  “I have to. If they hang me from that rail, I’ll die.”

  The woman began grabbing clusters of peppers, taking whole handfuls of leaves with her, throwing them toward her basket, missing. Elizabeth watched her, furious at the cruelty of a system that made people work even when they were deathly ill. The woman turned her head and coughed again, pink foam emerging from the corners of her mouth. She reached for another handful of peppers, lurched, and collapsed face down in the dirt.

  Elizabeth struggled through the dense row of plants, across to the row where the woman lay. Keeping her head down so the guards wouldn’t see her, she cradled the woman’s head in he
r lap and gently patted her face. After a few minutes, the woman moaned and opened her eyes.

  Elizabeth felt hot tears of anger stinging her eyes. “I’m so sorry, I don’t even have water to give you.”

  “Please don’t trouble yourself, my daughter. I’ll die soon.”

  “You’re not going to die,” Elizabeth said. “Not if I can help it.” She rubbed the woman’s hands and patted her face. “How are you called?”

  “I’m Wei Ling, from Guangzhou.”

  “I haven’t seen you before, Mother Wei.”

  “I arrived yesterday.”

  “Why are you here?”

  “I was arrested for being a member of the Falun Gong. They held me for two months at the Guangdong Province Number One Prison in Guangzhou. They beat me every day to make me renounce my faith, but I refused. They didn’t want me to die there, so they sent me here.” She put her hand over her ribs. “I think something is broken inside. If they hang me up like the others, pray that I die quickly. I don’t think I could bear the pain.”

  “Don’t worry, I won’t let them hurt you,” Elizabeth said, not knowing how she’d stop them. She scooped a pile of dirt under the woman’s head to make a pillow. “You lie here and rest. I’ll fill your basket.”

  “Please don’t make trouble for yourself.”

  “It’s no trouble, I’ve already met my quota for the day,” Elizabeth said. She began duck-walking down the row, picking peppers furiously, filling the woman’s basket. After a few minutes, she heard a commotion, shouting from one of the guard towers. The guard in the east tower was pointing in her direction. On the periphery of the field, Four Finger Tang came to his feet from his resting place and came crashing through the rows of pepper plants, running toward her, shouting.

  Oh, no. He was headed for the woman, lying nearly unconscious in the row behind her. Elizabeth left her basket and scrambled back to the woman in time to nearly collide with Four Finger Tang.

  Tang raised his foot to kick the woman. “Get up, you lazy whore.”

  Elizabeth darted between them.