Invasion USA 3 - The Battle for Survival (29 page)

“The bridge, Mr. Wang,” smiled Marie.

He took mental pictures of where everything was. While trying to figure out what USCGC stood for, he knew the ship was American and closed the engine room door after turning off the light. The light was battery-fed, he noticed. It had the yellowish color of a low-amp light. “I bet the light is brighter down there when a generator is working. She must have a large group of batteries somewhere.”

“Did you see the steel door in the wall, forward of the engine room? They must be stored in there,” suggested Marie.

“It looks like this level runs throughout the ship,” added Mo.

“They returned to the lounge area and found all the girls waiting for them. Mo hadn’t heard a single footstep above them. It showed how well built this ship was.

He went forward and walked down the short corridor to the front area, next to the stairs and up to the control room, or bridge as Marie wanted him to call it.

Mo found three well-appointed bedrooms, each with a head. The first bedroom must be the owner’s room, he thought, as it was bigger than the other two which both had twin beds in them. Opposite the owner’s bedroom he found the door to the galley which faced onto the bar, dining room and lounge area aft. Well-appointed, it had a gas range with oven, an old military-looking fridge, two large chest freezers and behind them in the corridor, a sliding door opened to a washer and dryer. He tapped on the wall directly below the control room; it was metal. He tapped in the owner’s room and again found metal. He went to the most forward wall which was still ten feet before the bow of the ship and it sounded like fiberglass.

“This wall has been especially placed here,”
he thought. Mo then returned to the lounge on the same level and tapped the lounge walls; again fiberglass.

Suddenly Mo Wang knew what the owner had done and it was he who slapped the bar this time, startling the girls. “Feel the walls, Marie. What are they made of?”

“Fiberglass,” she replied.

“OK, follow me up into the control room. What are the walls made of here?”

“Steel!” she replied. “How can that be?”

“The owner took a military vessel and added extra space to make it look like a yacht. I did not see any mast below in the engine room, like a sailing ship should have, but there are two masts going through this upper deck only.”

“I see it now,” Marie stated, excited that she was figuring out the ship. “He has added two reasonably short masts to turn her into a ketch, a twin-masted yacht, and he has fixed the masts to the metal of the military ship and added this level to support the masts. That’s what I was wondering: the ship’s mast height would not give her much forward speed for a sailing ship, maybe under full sail, six to seven knots, with just fiberglass in a stiff breeze, but less than five knots with all this steel. And this sail structure could not survive a bad storm. I don’t think this ship could sail in a storm with more than forty-knot winds, the whole structure would collapse.”

It’s all for show, I bet,” stated Mo. “But that’s fine. This boat, whatever it is, is useless to us unless we can get an engine started. As he said that the rain returned and started pelting the ship. “Good. The rain will hide any noise.” They headed back up to the bridge.

He looked at the keys and found one which would fit into the slot in the middle of the control panel. He switched it on and all the electrics came to life. Miraculously, everything worked. The fuel gauges all registered full and the entire control room started to hum under battery power. He saw a start button under each set of caterpillar controls and he pushed the starboard one. Nothing happened.

“Push the four starter buttons for the generators first,” Marie suggested. One by one he felt a slight vibration as one after the other the generators started two floors below him.

“Marie, please go down and tell me what is working in the engine room,” he directed. She returned up the two flights of stairs a minute later saying that all four generators were running.

This time he decided to start the smaller engine first and he pushed the single “start” button separate on the one side of the console. He felt a slight rumble and he checked to make sure that the control arm was in neutral.

“The little engine has started!” shouted Marie loudly, again down the stairs with her head poking through the engine door. “Make sure it is still in neutral.”

“I did!” he shouted back, at the same time checking that the two bigger control arms were in the neutral position.

He let the single engine run for five minutes, turning the four generators on and off and finding out what powered what. It was certainly a sophisticated system. He then turned off two of the generators and the small engine.

“The last two generators should start the bigger diesels,” he shouted at Marie who went down the second flight of stairs again to check what was going on. “Starting large starboard engine!” he shouted and pushed the button. He didn’t need Marie to tell him the engine had started when on the third try the steel plates underneath him began to rumble and vibrate and he felt the ship come alive. He started the port engine which took longer, but the rumbling increased and he felt the whole 1,600 horsepower of both engines vibrate through the ship.

Again, he let them run for five minutes before he turned them off. It was silent inside once the engines ceased; only the heavy rain outside still pelting the ship could be heard.

“Merde, Merde, Merde!” stated Marie walking up to him and patting Mo on the back. “This ship isn’t a yacht. I knew it! It is a bloody warship!”

“It is a United States Coast Guard Cutter,” replied Mo turning around and gave the excited woman a hug. “Go down and read the sign in the engine room.” She did and returned a couple of minutes later, her face white and beckoned him to follow her.

She led Mo to the door he hadn’t opened and still speechless she motioned to him to open it. His shock was nearly as great as hers.

Inside the room and surrounded by batteries were a hundred cases of what looked like different types of ammunition. He walked through and opened a second door on the forward wall. He calculated that now he was underneath the forward berths. It was a heavy watertight door and inside was a heavy single-barreled military-type machine gun with steel protection panels. It stood on a pedestal and ready to fire. Next to it was a vertical barrel, which looked to Mo like a mortar. “What are they doing down here?” he thought aloud until he saw a small control panel. He pressed the button and suddenly realized what the fourth generator was for. It automatically started from the start button and an entire panel above the machine gun slid back and a hydraulic pump began moving the whole pedestal upwards, the rain falling through the hole. He quickly pressed the button again and the hum stopped and then started again, the pedestal reversed downwards and the steel door shut itself.

Mo said a few words in Chinese and looked at Marie. “This is certainly a handy vessel to steal. I want to see where that gun comes up on deck. It must be at least ten feet forward of the control room and directly in front of the bedrooms. There is nothing between it and the metal roof of the ship above and I think I know why there was a fiberglass wall in the front of the bedrooms.”

“Bridge is a better word than control room and cabins are a better word than bedrooms on a ship,” suggested Marie. “Let’s close down the ship for tonight and we can continue our search tomorrow. I feel uncomfortable down here, a bit scared, and I expect that German lady to arrive at any moment. But I think your escape plan has borne fruit, Mr. Mo Wang.”

The rain stopped outside as they turned everything off and closed up the ship to make it look like nobody had been aboard. The pier was wet and slippery as they all ran to the end and climbed the stairs to an empty and darkening house.

The sun had already set and the house stood foreboding in front of them until the first girl turned on the porch lights.

Dinner was a quiet affair later that evening. Everybody was mulling over the future and the unknown boundaries all of them were going to have to cross: new challenges for the three teenagers and crossing boundaries of right versus wrong for the two older ladies. One thing that Mo had noticed was that he had become the man at the head of the table. He wasn’t the unknown guest anymore; he was part of their future.

Later, when Mo was sitting on one of the couches and reading a western lady’s magazine about vacation destinations, Beatrice sat down beside him. Very faint wisps of her expensive French perfume tantalized his senses. She had showered and wore an expensive dressing gown, her long hair wrapped in a towel.

“Want a whiskey?” she asked. “I would love one. I need to sleep deeply tonight, or I’ll be awake thinking about all the horrors we talked about.”

Immediately Mo got up and headed over to the drinks trolley and poured two large single malts, each with one cube of ice, his favorite way to drink this exotic beverage. He walked back, handed Beatrice one and sat down. It was the first time she actually sat next to him.

“Is something on your mind?” asked Mo, and for several minutes she told him about herself. She was 42 and she had been a sports reporter for a French television station. She had been married for ten years when her husband was killed in a boating accident a decade earlier, when Virginie was only eight. After her husband’s death, a large insurance policy paid out and her parents looked after her. She never had to work another day in her life. Her life apart from sports, like skiing in winter and sailing in the summers on the French Riviera was empty. Her husband had been a very good man and was a very big part of her life. She had not remarried and spent her time looking after Virginie. She missed her best friend, Marie, when she was in New York and often spent months at a time visiting her in the States. Virginie had been in a boarding school in the Provence area of France for the last three years and this gave her an opportunity to visit New York for longer periods between the school vacations.

“You must be very lonely,” Mo surmised.

“Yes and no,” she replied. “I love my independence, but I miss my husband still and sometimes wish for company. Now our old world is gone and I am at a loss what to do. Suddenly, I really have an empty feeling. Mo, tell me about you and your life in China.”

“I was born in Nanjing, a small city outside Shanghai, in 1948, three years after the Second World War ended.”

Marie entered the room dressed like Beatrice with her hair also wrapped in a towel, helped herself to a Cognac from the drinks trolley and sat on the other couch to listen to the conversation.

Mo noticed that no matter how these ladies were dressed they looked regal, beautiful, and dangerous, like beasts of prey. He looked around and saw the three younger girls outside on the porch, two playing a game of chess and one of the twins reading a magazine. They also looked bored and he then realized that the time to escape the island was soon, very soon.

“My parents were also wealthy compared to many around them,” he continued now talking to both ladies. “My father was a general in the Chinese army which had defeated the attacks by the Japanese during the war and he was remembered by the government. I went to a boarding school at the age of seven in Beijing, a very powerful school where only the sons of upper government went. My father was an active part of the Communist party when it came to power and in charge of the army under Mao Tse Tung. He retired from military life and joined his older brother several years later when I was fifteen. In every government there are always enemies. His older brother was a prominent figure in the Party and he wanted my father to watch his back. My father did this for many years. In my last year of school I was joined by my older cousin, my father’s older brother’s first son, who was two grades above me and in his last year. He was a very controlled person and totally ignored me. Two years later I joined him at the same engineering university in Shanghai where we studied the same courses. He was two years ahead of me and spoke to me only once. My cousin considered me to be his inferior because he believed that my father was his father’s servant and my father followed his father everywhere. In my last year I was joined by a third family member who was starting his engineering studies. This young man, Lee, was extremely clever. The whole family knew of his aptitude for mathematics and science. I helped him settle into university life without telling him that I was family. I left, became a good engineer in Shanghai studying much of what was being designed by the west. Often stolen parts or pieces of modern electronics were brought into the laboratories of our company to study how the west, countries like Germany, America and later Japan were designing the first working computers and electronic control parts for just about everything.”

“What year was this?” asked Beatrice.

“I had just turned thirty in 1978 when I saw my first computer in parts. It was the size of a car and Chinese people living in America had smuggled it in piece by piece. It had taken two years to get it there and another two years for us to get it working, in 1979. I got married in 1980 in Shanghai and wanted to start a family with my wife, but in 1981 I was transferred back to Beijing to work for my father on some project to do with government security for two years. I was allowed back to Shanghai only twice during this time for a month at a time. I completed the project and returned to my wife who was waiting for me. We spent a year together before I was ordered by my older cousin to join his new company Zedong Electronics in Nanjing, where I was born. I did not want to leave Shanghai but my father ordered me to. My wife had an important job with the City of Shanghai and was not allowed to leave her job to join me, so I visited her as often as I could, still with no children arriving. For four years I travelled back to Shanghai as often as I was allowed, but unfortunately in the last year my wife was not there to meet me anymore; our apartment was empty of furniture and a note told me not to return.”

“Did you ever see her again?” asked Marie.