Launch Pad

by Shelly Bryant

  But today, the solitude one usually found this far south had been disrupted. The equipment he’d volunteered to carry on his runs was picking up some strange readings. He wasn’t ready to let anyone know yet, not until he was sure what it was.

  Anyway, he knew what the men said about the equipment. Not a single one of them bought the rationale he’d repeated so many times—that it was his civic duty to carry it, being captain of one of the few vessels that regularly plied these waters. Even his first mate, Azrul, was sceptical, though he never mentioned it. Hamasaki figured Azrul believed what he had heard the other crew members whisper, “You ever hear of a captain of a merchant ship that had any motivations that weren’t completely mercenary?”

  Hamasaki shrugged and refocused his attention on the readings. These definitely weren’t pings—another reason not to alert Azrul yet. He didn’t want to get his first mate’s hopes up, thinking they’d stumbled across a part of that missing plane. These readings weren’t consistent with the sort of pings Azrul was hoping for, but that might not stop the first mate from jumping to that conclusion all the same. Finding a piece of MH370 would send him home a hero.

  These sounds weren’t pings. It wasn’t the elusive black box. It wasn’t whale song either. In fact, if Hamasaki was reading this correctly, these sounds weren’t coming from underwater at all. Whatever was out there, it was above the surface, in the air somewhere.

  But that couldn’t be right. Not this far from land. Any aircraft would have to be carried here on a ship equipped with a launch pad or runway. They were too far from land for any aircraft to make it this far alone, and his radar was not detecting any ships that size.

  “What are you?” he said aloud, thumping the coordinates of their present location where it was marked on his charts.

  He pulled the headphones on again and listened. It was unmistakable. The equipment was picking up a stream of sound that kept an irregular rhythm. It had been tailing them for hours. But when Hamasaki had gone on deck for a look, he saw nothing.

  Gradually, the sound began to take a more regular shape. That wasn’t just a random series of tweets and blips. It was a tune.

  Suddenly, it struck Hamasaki that the tune was familiar. Azrul whistled it all the time when he was distracted.

  “Azrul!” Hamasaki shouted, bursting from his cabin. The men he passed in the narrow corridor shuffled out of the way as he stormed towards the deck.

  “Azrul!” he shouted again as the blast of cold wind hit his cheeks. It was freezing, but it was sunny.

  “Yes, captain,” the first mate called.

  “Why are the instruments picking up your song?”

  “My what?”

  “Your song. The one you’re always whistling.”

  “Wasn’t me, sir. I was busy yelling at the new Indonesian fellow you picked up in Melbourne. I wasn’t whistling anything.”

  “Anybody else whistling it?”

  Azrul shrugged. “‘Rasa Sayang’? Sure, could be anyone. Everybody knows it.”

  The whistling came to them again, the tune of “Rasa Sayang”.

  “Where’s that coming from?” Hamasaki asked.

  Azrul shrugged. He looked around, then shrugged again.

  Hamasaki looked up. “It sounds like it’s coming from up there.”

  “Can’t be,” Azrul said. “No way any bird could fly this far away from land.”

  Hamasaki held out a hand, indicating Azrul’s binoculars. The first mate handed them over.

  Hamasaki focused in the direction the whistling was coming from. After a moment’s search, he saw something white fluttering in the distance. He looked more carefully, watching the movement. “There you are,” he whispered.

  “What is it?” Azrul asked.

  Hamasaki passed him the binoculars. “Tell me what you think first.”

  After several minutes, Azrul said, “It looks like a bird.”

  “It does.”

  “But it can’t be. We’re too far from land.”

  “I know. Let me have another look.”

  Azrul handed him the field glasses. Hamasaki watched the slow, steady flapping of the wings. “It looks like a bird,” he said.

  “Yah,” Azrul agreed. “Sir, do you think it might be something mechanical? A probe or something?”

  “A probe? Probing for what? There’s nothing to probe out here.”

  “A drone I mean? Maybe some military equipment.”

  “Okay, I know what you mean, but still…for what? There’s nothing out here to observe or spy on.”

  “Maybe it went rogue—got away from its developers. Maybe it’s lost.”

  Hamasaki lowered the binoculars and looked at Azrul. “You’re joking, right?”

  “Er. Not really.”

  “But you know it sounds crazy?”

  “Crazier than a single bird out here in the middle of nowhere?”

  “Singing ‘Rasa Sayang’…” Hamasaki couldn’t help but smile. Azrul grinned too, then started laughing. “That’s crazy either way.”

  Hamasaki laughed too, long, loud and hard. When they fell silent, they again heard the thing tweeting “Rasa Sayang”. Hamasaki wiped his eyes and lifted the binoculars again. The chorus seemed to be repeating on an endless loop, steady as the flapping of the creature’s wings. It was mesmerising.

  “What do you think it is, sir?”

  Hamasaki took a deep breath, keeping the lenses focused on the thing overhead. “I really don’t know,” he said at last. “But it looks like a bird.”

  Through the binoculars, he watched the obscure white object flittering along in their wake, almost as if it were intentionally following the Peregrine’s route. Before his mind could quite grasp what he was seeing, a cloud floated across his field of vision, hiding the thing from view. Lowering the binoculars, Hamasaki stood beside Azrul, both of them silent as they waited for the wind to blow the cloud away. From the middle of the fluffy mass, strains of “Rasa Sayang” came to them. Before long, Hamasaki was whistling along, keeping time with the unknown creature’s song. Azrul looked at him, shrugged, then turned back to look towards the horizon. As he waited for the cloud cover to pass, the first mate started whistling in counterpoint, while the low rumble of the engines and endless miles of rolling waves formed a pleasing bass line beneath the melody carried by the captain and the unknown object flying in their wake.

  October 2016, a true story

  There was no more joking when we got back into the car this time, not even about the sign we had seen a half-hour before we reached this town, the one reading “青海外星人遣址”, with “Alien Relic Site, 30km” written below. Even that had lost its humour after the third rejection from as many hotels.

  “I think we should go to the next town,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Leng agreed reluctantly. “So sian. I was ready for a shower and a good night’s sleep.”

  “And an early start tomorrow to see the aliens,” Joyce said from the back seat. We didn’t laugh.

  “Obviously a hoax,” I said, sighing. “Aliens clearly aren’t welcome here.”

  That at least elicited a weak smile from the other two.

  “Who knew they wouldn’t take foreigners? We haven’t had any trouble in any of the other towns.”

  “Maybe Qinghai is different from Gansu.”

  “We could ask that one guy to take us to the police post.”

  “Hm. I don’t know…” I said.

  “Yeah,” Leng agreed. “He seemed a little shady.”

  “I still think we push on.”

  “Well, whatever you say. You’re the one driving,” Leng said, resigned.

  “But we should get you some tea first,” Joyce said. “And a hot meal.”

  “Yeah. Let’s go to that fake KFC,” Leng agreed.

  We drove on the long stretch of road beside the canal, now much less interested in the flashing neon on the other bank. The countless hotels were useless to us, now that we knew how unwelcome we were. All the a
ppeal they had earlier held for us, after so many hours of driving from the edge of the Gobi Desert and across the first steppes of the Tibetan Plateau, had vanished as one hotel after another refused to house us. It might have looked like Las Vegas from a distance, but we were clearly not going to be big winners in this city.

  After a meal of local fast food fried chicken and a hot cup of tea, our spirits were lifted a little. We took turns going to the washroom, the cleanest facilities we’d seen since checking out from our hotel in Dunhuang eighteen hours earlier.

  “All set now,” Joyce said, returning. “Did you get directions?”

  “Yep. Let’s go.”

  We got back into the car and followed the directions we’d been given. Reaching the gantry beneath a sign reading “G6 Xining”, we found all the tollgates blocked and a long queue of lorries waiting.

  “Aiyoh,” I groaned, thinking it was time to turn around and backtrack, to hit the expressway where we had left it. But that was at least an hour away.

  Someone knocked on my window, a man in uniform. I lowered the glass.

  “Where are you going?” he asked in thickly accented Mandarin. He peered in at the other two women in the car.

  “Xining,” I said, kicking myself after hearing how obvious my own Singaporean accent sounded in the unaspirated Xi in the name.

  “You don’t have to wait. Go on.”

  With that, he walked to one of the gates and removed the barrier.

  “What do you think?” I asked.

  “Guess it’s just lorries that have to wait?” said Joyce.

  “Yeah.”

  I inched forward. Leng was removing my wallet from my bag, preparing to pay the toll. The officer waved us through, not stopping us for the toll fee.

  Without stopping to ask why, I sped onto the empty highway. The open road felt good, and we moved along at a quick pace.

  The first sign we saw said “Xiarihazhen, 143km”.

  “Alamak,” I said.

  “Another hour and a half,” Leng said, dejected.

  “Not necessarily,” I replied, pushing the needle on the speedometer just past 150kph. “The road’s empty. I think we can get it down to an hour.”

  “Yeah, not another car in sight,” Leng said.

  “A little scary,” Joyce said.

  “It’s just late,” I replied, worrying only about the road, and trying to ignore the nagging doubt about how welcoming the next town would be towards foreigners. It was much smaller, not even showing up on any of my maps.

  An hour later, just as the clock hit midnight, we reached the exit. “Finally!” I said, veering towards the right.

  “We made good time,” Leng said.

  “Yeah.”

  Joyce leaned on the back of my seat. “We haven’t seen a car in ages,” she said.

  I slowed down as we followed the curve of the exit ramp, then suddenly slammed on the brakes.

  “Aiyoh,” I muttered.

  A roadblock stood in front of us, a high mound of sand with a single concrete block in front of it, flanked by two warning fences with orange and white stripes reflecting the light of my headlamps back at me.

  In red spray paint, I saw the two characters for Xining, with an arrow pointing left below them. To our left, hints of a narrow dirt road could be seen just on the other side of a shallow ditch.

  “I wonder if it’s like that spot we hit a few days ago, after Jiayuguan. Remember how we had to follow that dirt path around the construction?” I said.

  “Yeah,” Leng said, “but that was daytime.”

  “And there were plenty of other cars,” Joyce added.

  “Shall we see how it looks?” I asked.

  “How? It’s so dark!”

  I reversed and pulled to the right, then yanked the steering wheel to the left as we inched forward. In the headlights’ glare, we could see tyre tracks crossing the ditch and connecting to the path.

  The air in the car thickened. Without speaking, we could each feel the others’ reluctance.

  “Well, let’s check it out.”

  I pulled forward slowly. The path on the other side forked. I opted for the right side, following the direction we had been travelling on the highway.

  After less than a minute, the road stopped at a sharp drop-off. There was just space for a sharp left turn, leading us under the highway, where a new path seemed to join this one. I followed it, only to find that the right-hand option led to the same sharp drop we had just left, while the left seemed to go back the way we had come in.

  “What do you want me to do?” I asked.

  “Go left,” Joyce said.

  “But that’s where we came from.”

  “Boh pian,” Leng said. “Look at that drop. And you can’t reverse.”

  Sighing, I turned left. We ended up at a spot with the same little ditch, and a signboard reading “Siting, 75km” pointing the way to the exit in one direction and “Delingha, 143km” in the other.

  “Another half-hour to Siting,” I said.

  “Where’s Siting?”

  “No idea. None of this is on any of my maps.”

  “So how?”

  “Let’s go back over there one more time,” I said. “We must have missed something. The sign says Xining is that way.”

  I turned left, this time moving more slowly along the path, hoping to spot something missed before.

  Just before we reached the drop-off, I saw it. A path veering to the right. I turned as much as the narrow path allowed. What we saw in the headlights’ glow was intimidating. Another ditch, this one much deeper than the first we had crossed.

  “Not sure this little car will make that,” I said. “I wish we were in a four-wheel-drive vehicle.”

  “Or at least in daylight,” Leng said.

  “True.”

  “I don’t know…” Joyce said.

  “I think we turn back,” said Leng.

  “Shall we try the Siting exit?” I asked, not wanting to return to Delingha.

  “Up to you. You tired?”

  “Not too tired to give it a try.”

  “Okay, then.”

  As we crossed under the highway again, Joyce and Leng said, “Sure you don’t want to go back to Delingha?”

  “I don’t ever want to go back there.”

  “We could see the aliens tomorrow morning…”

  “We will. All we have to do is look in the mirror.” I could hear the tinge of irritation creeping into my voice. I had gotten to the point that such reminders of my alienness in China came up less frequently. Years of working there had taught me how to mask it, despite the obvious physical markers. But out in such rugged parts of the country, things were sometimes different. And anyway, there was little we could do to mask our passports, which we had to show at every hotel.

  Leng heard my irritation too. “Okay,” she said softly.

  So we followed the Siting exit. It led us onto a large, brightly lit entrance ramp, aglow with promise.

  And then we promptly ran into another roadblock, this one on the highway.

  Leng drew in a sharp breath, then said, “What is that?” She was clearly struggling to control her anxiety too.

  “Never mind, I’ll turn back,” I said.

  We turned back, again seeing signs for Siting. “Oh, we must have missed a turn,” I said following the sign.

  After a long ramp, we were faced with the same roadblock we had first encountered. About fifteen minutes had passed by this time.

  “I feel like I’m in the Twilight Zone,” Leng said.

  “Well, I don’t feel so bad about missing the alien relics, then,” I said.

  We all laughed, sitting for a moment in the unmoving vehicle.

  “We could sit here until morning, then head along that dirt path to Xining,” I said uncertainly.

  “Yeah…” The agreement seemed equally doubtful.

  “Honestly, I think that’s the idea I like least.”

  “Yeah, me too.”
/>   “Same.”

  “Okay, then,” I said, “let’s head back to Delingha.”

  “You sure?” Leng asked, knowing turning back was never my style.

  “I think so.”

  So, I put the car in reverse, turned left, crossed the ditch, and went through the whole routine again. I drove slowly, not wanting to miss any signs. We followed the Delingha exit carefully. And within a few moments, we ended up at the same roadblock, which was now beginning to feel like an old familiar friend.

  “Seriously lah! Twilight Zone!” Leng said.

  We could not help ourselves. We had to take half a minute to laugh at the crazy situation.

  “Shall I try the right turn on the dirt path?” I asked.

  “It doesn’t look very promising,” Joyce said.

  “Or safe,” added Leng.

  “But maybe it’s the road out of the Twilight Zone,” I said.

  “Up to you.”

  And so we tried. The car groaned as we crossed the larger ditch, but proved rugged enough. We could not see much around us, only a view of what was lit in the narrow space before my headlamps. I imagined large expanses of green fields around us, like we had seen earlier in the day, while driving for hours across the vast grasslands on the edge of the Tibetan Plateau. The thought of what surprises all that space might hold was much less romantic now.

  The car crept forward. I hunched over the steering wheel, on high alert. There was another large dip in the path, then a sharp left turn. The path after the turn was refreshingly straight, but very long. I felt a hint of discouragement creeping over me.

  “If you keep going, there’s nowhere to turn back,” Leng said.

  She was right. The road was slightly elevated, with what appeared to be steep drop-offs on either side. It was a uniform sight for as far as my high beams reached.

  “What does that sign say?”

  We all leaned down for a clearer look at the large red signboard just above us. It had a long stretch of white characters against a red background—the kind of sign I generally ignored when making my way around Shanghai. I was less inclined to ignore it in this instance.