Fire And Ice (23 page)

"So you don't want the ship?"

"I no say that. I want ship real bad. Bad as you. But thanks to cover story, I not so thin on Shanghai ground—That remind me, Katherine stay till you find ship. Bodyguard your back. Watch for Brit."

"Here?"

"I'm here. You here. Why not Brit?"

"What do they want from me?"

"Looks like they want your life, sailorman."

"But why? All I want is Sarah and Ronnie."

"Relax. Wang take you to boat."

"I don't get it," said Stone. "What in hell are they up to?" But Ronald had already slid into the crowds converging on the Yu Garden gate and disappeared. William Sit caught up at the car.

"Ask Mr. Wang for a map of the area around the city," Stone requested. When Wang obliged, Stone studied the large-scale map and pointed to a road that ran along the coast of Hang-chou Bay. "How long?"

"One hour."

"Fast as he can."

Chinese newspapers had come aboard the ship, and when Sarah and Ronnie joined Mr. Jack for his late breakfast, they found the old man ranting about the Japanese. He rattled the paper and spread it over the plates. "Look at that." In among the long columns of characters was a photograph from the New China News Service of a warship flying the Japanese Rising Sun. "The sons of bitches are rearming. Just launched themselves a new helicopter carrier. So much for your 'most peaceable people on the planet,' Doc." He glared up at Sarah. "What do you suppose they need an attack carrier for?"

"Aren't helicopters used primarily for rescue?"

"Sure thing, Doc. Handy too for attacking the capital

cities of their former colonies in southeast Asia." "That sounds a bit farfetched, Mr. Jack."

"Then what do they need it for?"

"I guess it's inevitable, with the United States Navy cutting back its presence."

"Yellow bastards."

Sarah touched the newspaper. "What," she asked, "do the Chinese say about it?" Mr. Jack gave her a look. "Yeah, I read Chinese—don't push, Doc. I warned you not to get out of line. That includes curiosity."

Ronnie cringed beside her, frightened by his tone. Sarah apologized, trying to smooth it over. "I'm sorry. I was merely curious how the Chinese feel about it." Mr. Jack gave her another probing look. Then he said, "Says here the Japs' actions are, quote, 'provocative and threaten to unsettle the balance of power in Asia.' " He stood, walked painfully to the window, and picked up his walkie-talkie. "Captain, where the hell are those tugs?"

The captain responded immediately. "Radar just picked them up out on the bay. They're heading this way, Mr. Jack."

"Tell 'em to step on it. Cloud's breaking up. The sooner we're under cover the better."

"Sir, you've got some more visitors just coming on the pier."

"Send 'em up. Tell 'ern we're sailing, but they can get off on the pilot boat. And tell those tugs to get the lead out."

Stone's taxi driver knew shortcuts out of the massively congested city. And as the Old Town was relatively near the western suburbs, they were, within twenty minutes of crossing the river, heading briskly through diked farmland which was lively with new construction despite the gray day and the muddy winter fields.

"Rich peasants," explained William Sit. "Now farmers build their huts of brick." Wang gunned the taxi around what looked to Stone like old-fashioned three-wheeled Gravely lawn tractors pulling trailers heaped high with construction materials. Ahead, on a flat horizon broken by leafless trees standing like feathers on the dikes, he saw high-tension power lines. When they reached where the power lines crossed the road, Stone motioned for Wang to take the gravel road that ran beside the pylons.

"No," said William Sit.

"It'll run straight to the power plant."

Wang and Sit both shook their heads, and the translator pointed at the large Chinese characters on a sign hanging from the nearest pylon.

"Restricted area. It is not allowed."

Wang spoke and Sit said, "Is safer on coast road."

In another twenty minutes they attained the coast road and headed south beside a broad alluvial plain that spread to the indistinct shore of the bay. For the second time that day, Stone had the eerie impression of sailing on dry land. He was reminded of Holland on an enormous, bleak scale. Road traffic was sparse and the bay, though dotted with small craft, was devoid of ships.

"There!" said Stone.

Four immensely tall and remarkably narrow chimneys had materialized as a rain shower thinned to mist. Closer, and he could see the outline of a squat generator building and then to the left, on the water's edge, a tank farm

sparkling like aluminum cookware in the thin light. He took out the binoculars he had liberated from Ronald's yacht and traced the piping that served the tanks to a pier that jutted far into the bay. The end of the pier was lost in a rain squall. Far ahead, the road dipped under a massive pipeline that carried fuel from the tanks to the power plant. When they were two hundred yards from the pipeline, the squall blew aside. The pier was empty.

Stone told Wang to stop. The driver and the translator exchanged glances.

"Stop, dammit!"

He jumped out, focusing the glasses on the water beyond the pier. He felt drawn to the murky, indistinct middle distance and kept fine-tuning the superb glasses, trying to pierce it. His senses seemed unusually alive. He felt the cold damp wind and had a feeling of being watched. William Sit hurried up behind him, whispering, "Soldiers. On the pipe." There was a catwalk atop the pipeline and, on it, uniformed militia stared in their direction. "Not good," said Sit. "Not good. Thank you for coming. We go now." Stone lingered. He looked at the chimneys. Burning natural gas, the power plant emitted invisible smoke, visible only as heat waves dancing on the chimney tops. Why did he smell coal smoke?

He shifted the glasses back to the water. A squarish shape, less a shape than a hint of presence, seemed to hang in the distance. A ship in a squall?

Wang called urgently, and Sit's voice grew shrill as he pleaded, "We must go, sir." Wang did not wait for agreement. He shot the taxi ahead, and turned it around in the middle of the road, his gaze locked on the soldiers who had started down a stairway from the catwalk.

The squalls merged, a mile offshore, obscuring behind a bank of hard, dark rain whatever it was that Stone had sensed was out there.

"We go!"

"Okay, okay. Tell Mr. Wang, back to Shanghai. To the boat." Wang gripped the wheel with both hands as they raced down the coast, then inland through the farms, weaving among bicycles and tractors, dodging pedestrians, trucks, pigs. William Sit cowered, hands folded in his lap, as if not daring to look up for fear they would be flagged down by the People's Liberation Army. Stone, who was urging Wang to go faster, doubted either man would work for him tomorrow. He tried to collect his own spirit. He couldn't afford to panic, couldn't lose focus wondering whether the Dallas Belle had come and gone; or if the crew was heading out to scuttle her, having sold her cargo; or if Sarah and Ronnie's lives had ended days ago. He had to search the port of Shanghai as if he were convinced that the Dallas Belle was moored to one of its many piers. Experience offshore had taught him that it was almost impossible to see what you didn't believe existed. A boat, even a ship, remained stubbornly invisible until the observer accepted the possibility it was there; an unexpected landfall appeared with shocking suddenness.

He looked at his watch. It was still early—a gift—just one o'clock. He took out his chart, spread it on the back-seat. "Ask Mr. Wang where the boat is." Sit asked, then turned around and, puzzling over the chart, finally pointed to a coal yard on the near bank of the river, two miles upstream from the Bund. The taxi was already within the suburbs, and he said, "We will arrive in twenty minutes." Wang made it in fifteen, through the gates of a vast, drab coal yard, steering between gray-black mountains of soft coal to the wharfs. Hundreds of sampans were tied to the offloading docks and, rafted to each other, jutted ten deep into the river. The coal was being unloaded from the sampans by shovel and primitive conveyor belts. Mr. Wang got out of the car with a brusque gesture to follow, ending any doubts that he worked for the Triad and had recruited his friend William Sit instead of the other way around. The schoolteacher lingered by the taxi.

Stone reached to take William's arm, then remembered that the Chinese did not like to be touched by strangers.

He said, "William, I'm very grateful for your help. I'd be lost without you."

"No, no. My English is improved already. It is I who is helped."

"I'm sure it was frightening, earlier, with the soldiers. I appreciate your sticking by me." William looked trapped, which is what Stone had intended, in case the poor guy was thinking of ducking out. Mr. Wang called impatiently.

"Shall we?" asked Stone.

William nodded, reluctantly, and they hurried after the driver. Wang led them along the wharf, past the unloading operation, to a slip where an empty coal sampan was tied. The crew, a middle-aged man and wife and three teenaged children, were sluicing coal dust from the deck with buckets of river water.

Wang jumped down into the waist of the boat and gestured Stone and William aboard. Stone surveyed the sampan. It was about sixty feet long, with a squat wheelhouse aft and a capacious, open coal hold. Perfect: he much preferred concealment to using his letters of introduction. The grimy wooden boat looked identical to thousands plying the river, while the wheelhouse would hide a bearded American who was bound to draw the attention of the PLA navy boats patrolling the river.

The captain nodded brusquely to Wang, but he and his wife and his coal-smudged sons and daughter carefully avoided looking Stone and William in the face. There was barely headroom in the wheelhouse. A half stair led down to the idling engine, which Stone recognized as a General Motors 4-71 that had to be forty or fifty years old. Behind the stair hung a curtain, and when the daughter, a startlingly beautiful child a couple of years older than Ronnie, slipped through it, he glimpsed mattresses and a cookpot on a gimballed coal stove.

"So many children," whispered William, clearly astonished that the sampan captain had twice circumvented the one-child-one-family laws.

The daughter passed through the wheelhouse again, sneaking a shy glance at Stone. She returned within a minute. Her father spoke sharply, and she ran out on deck to help her brothers cast off the lines, while he moved the long shift lever into reverse. The thumping diesel started, rattling the windows, and the boat backed into the stream. Stone took out his chart, which he folded to display this upper section of the river, and showed the captain two dry docks he wanted to see—the coal yard's immediate neighbor and the second a mile upstream.

Neither dry dock, nor the deepwater piers between them, held the Dallas Belle.

"Okay," he said. "Downriver. There!"

The empty sampan swung through a broad turn. Stone indicated the long curve of the river from the coal yard past the Bund, and had the captain hug the right bank where numerous large ships were docked. Once past the Bund and his hotel, and the Suzhou Creek, he had the captain cross the river and continue down the left bank, which was lined with piers, including the Waihongqiau passenger terminal where the Tin Hau was still docked, looking, as Stone had predicted, like a Maserati in a junk yard. The weather was cooperating. The rain had stopped and the lower clouds had lifted. With the glasses Stone could see three or four miles. But the winter sky loomed heavy, and there remained, at most, two hours of daylight. They motored along another mile of piers: Gaoyanglu, Gonpinglu, Huishan, Huangpu. Suddenly his heart raced. Just past the Huangpu Pier was the dry dock of the Shanghai Shipyard West, and in it, a tan ship, sand-colored, square and boxy.

The dry dock gates were closed. The ship stood high and dry, covered in scaffolding. He focused the binoculars with shaking hands. It seemed the size he remembered the Dallas Belle. Then Stone groaned.

"Are you well, sir?"

Stone shook his head. It was not the gas carrier, only a container ship with the square lines typical of modern freighters.

Past the dry dock lay shallow water, the channel shifting east. "Other side." The sampan crossed to the right back, where the Shanghai Shipyard East sprawled along the shore. The captain

hugged that bank for several miles, stopping the sampan suddenly for another false alarm. By now the night was coming down hard and lights were burning on the piers and in the yards and factories that lined the shore.

The hitherto-silent captain spoke.

"Dark," William translated.

"Keep going."

The boat made about eight knots and they covered four more miles in the next half hour. He got a good look at the refinery, which he had missed in the rain. But no gas ship. " Other side!"

Again they crossed the channel, dodging ships and tugs. They were nearing Wusong when Stone saw the cruise ship under the shed that he had seen from the yacht early in the morning. He motioned the captain in closer. The berth beside the cruise liner was still empty. Arc welders and cutting torches lit the cavernous shed like black light in a discotheque. The sampan continued downstream past the yard, by which time it was pitch-dark.

"Okay, let's turn around and work our way up this side." They retraced their wake, passed the liner again. It was a breaker's yard, he realized, where retired ships were cut up for scrap. Behind it were busy train tracks with switch engines shuttling boxcars and gondolas. Stone wanted to get closer, but the captain shook his head, and his wife, who had popped out from the curtain, looked grim and uttered a shrill, "Aaaiiyaa."

"What's the matter?" asked Stone.

William seemed reluctant to answer.

"What is it?"

"Shanghai Supreme People's Court Project Eighty-six." "What's that?"

"The execution ground. Where prisoners are shot for being . . . convicted." Stone peered where he pointed. A dark space in the middle of nowhere, out beyond the railroad tracks. Appropriate neighbor for a breaker's yard.