by Sean Parnell
She felt safe here, although defecting to the Americans would be even safer. Yet perhaps she would stay, if Gengi Phon and Mistra would have her.
Their son, Ganbaatar, seemed a good boy. He was the much younger and slimmer version of his father, though it was easy to see what he’d soon become. Ganbaatar didn’t speak Mandarin like his father, and Ai Liang had no knowledge of Khalkha, so all of their interplays were nods and smiles. But Ganbaatar was rarely there, as his tasks for the village, such as selling pelts or precious goods that Gengi Phon seemed to acquire somewhere, took the boy far away. On one of those journeys, early after Ai Liang’s rescue, he’d gone off to a place called Zuunbayan, and returned with the Tibetan monk called Tenzin.
Ai Liang didn’t know why. Tenzin was unlike any monk she’d ever seen or met. He spoke many languages, including English and German, often to himself, as if he were practicing. He was bald like a monk, but he wore a Russian fur hat with earflaps, a leather jacket, and blue jeans. He chain-smoked. He cursed under his breath. He hummed prayers to Buddha, in between asking her, even while she could still barely speak, what she was doing there, and how, exactly, she’d come to be wounded, and who were the mercenaries or soldiers who’d done this to her and her comrades, and had destroyed the laboratory. It made no sense that the CCP should do such a thing, he said. What was in that lab? That question he’d nearly shouted, as if he were interrogating her, and had been taught to do so by someone else—it was surely not something he’d learned at a holy monastery like Shaolin.
Then he’d disappeared, mumbling about being so foolish and forgetful, and had borrowed a horse and ridden off. Ai Liang wondered if in fact she had dreamed the entire appearance of Tenzin.
This morning she was sitting on the hard wooden edge of her bed, dunking torn chunks of sesame flatbread that seemed very much like shao bing into a bowl of Mistra’s wonderful soup. Gengi Phon had left very early, and Mistra was outside hanging her wash. It was a clear cold day, the sun made the canvas cap of the ger glow as it rippled in the wind, and Gengi’s fire roared and crackled in his potbellied stove, with most of the sweet-scented smoke curling skyward through the roof’s apex hole.
The door to the ger suddenly flung wide open and Ai Liang jolted and nearly spilled her soup. The monk Tenzin filled the doorway, with his fur hat, jacket, and jeans encrusted with snow, as well as his black cowboy Roper boots. He was carrying a large leather satchel, and he pulled the door closed, yanked off his cap to reveal his shiny bald pate all pink from the cold, and exclaimed, “Yooreekah!”
Ai Liang had no idea what this expression meant, or that it was Tenzin’s version of “eureka,” Greek for “I’ve found it!” She watched him as he gingerly placed the satchel on the hard dirt floor, then tore off his fur mittens and rushed to the stove to warm his frozen fingers. Atop the iron belly was a ceramic teakettle. He poured himself a draught in a steel mug, pulled a small pewter flask from his pocket, added a pinch of some kind of clear alcohol, sipped and said, “Ahhh, mama de niunai,” which meant “Ahh, mommy’s milk” in Mandarin.
Tenzin grabbed a three-legged stool and placed it to one side of Ai Liang’s feet, facing her bed. Then he fetched his leather satchel, sat on the stool, put his steaming teacup on the floor, placed the satchel on the bed, and carefully unbuckled the straps, as if it contained some ancient artifact lifted from a museum. And indeed, when he removed the contents, it looked like some kind of electronic relic from the previous century. But Ai Liang recognized it right away, because she’d studied such things at military school. It was an olive-green, American military, long-range, multiband radio, with a collapsed whip antenna and some sort of keying device that folded down from its face beside a mechanical frequency dial.
“It is beautiful, Colonel, is it not?” Tenzin exclaimed in Mandarin as he rubbed his hands together.
“It is very . . . interesting, Tenzin,” she agreed. “Where is this from?”
“Oh, about 1985, as I recall.”
“No, not when. Where?”
Tenzin pulled a pack of Dubliss Black Mongolian cigarettes from his pocket and lit one up with an old American Zippo. He opened a hatch in the back of the radio set and inserted some sort of large square battery. Then he rubbed a thumb and one finger together, flicked a toggle switch, turning the transmitter on, and slowly spun its frequency dial, as if he were cracking a safe. A small red activity bulb glowed, and he looked like he might pee from excitement.
“It was gifted to me by an American spy,” he said, “many, many years ago. That’s when they still cared about Tibet, before those filthy Chinese flooded the American markets with their cheap coffeemakers and dildos, the fuckers.” He seemed not to realize, or care, that Ai Liang was herself Chinese as he slipped a pair of ancient earphones from a canvas pouch attached to the radio and pulled them onto his ears. “Listen to that!” he shouted in English and shot a finger at the ceiling. “Fucker works!” Then he went right back to Mandarin. “Anyway, this man from the CIA supplied us with guns and equipment and money. Then the shit hit the paper fan, the ring was blown, and most of us were caught by the Commies. Some even died, but not me. My handler had to haul ass. However, he swore to me that he’d always be out there, listening somewhere. Now we shall see, won’t we?”
Ai Liang blinked at Tenzin’s profile as he worked on the radio set. He looked like one of those old World War II operators summoning a British airdrop, but he was so damned weird she still wasn’t sure he was real.
“Tenzin,” she said in a measured tone, as if talking to a mental patient. “May I ask, how do you know this man is even still alive?”
“That motherfucker?” Tenzin waved his cigarette hand in the air. “He had his leg blown off at the Battle of Hue, then fought his way out on the back of a rickshaw with a .45 pistol in each hand. Believe you me, he’s alive.”
Ai Liang didn’t say anything else. She watched as Tenzin took off his wristwatch, an old Breitling special forces model circa 1984. As he lay the watch down beside the radio, she saw that its worn black rubber band was stamped with the letters of the English alphabet, plus ten Arabic numerals, and beside each one were the corresponding dots and dashes of the old Morse code. Then he took out an iPhone, thumbed the side switch, and said, in English, “Siri, you twit, what’s my current GPS location?” When the metallic voice responded with the lats and longs, he grinned like a child. Then he removed a book from the radio pouch, along with a pencil, flipped to a random page and began circling words, one after the other throughout the text. Ai Liang noted that the book was a well-worn paperback copy of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night.
“Tenzin, what exactly are you doing?” she asked.
“Saving your sweet ass, Colonel,” he said as he kept on circling. “Book code. Old school. I have a copy, he has a copy. We keep them till the day we die. If I wanna send him a message, or the other way around, I choose a page, relay the page number, then create the message using words from that page, and each one gets a number, depending on where it is on the page. Get it?”
“No.”
“Fuck it. Doesn’t matter.” Tenzin pulled down the Morse code keypad, looked at his notes, and started tapping away.
“Tenzin,” Liang said. “Did you even know your handler’s real name?”
“Of course not.” He was concentrating intently now. “Called himself Hua Chang Mao.”
Liang thought about that. Hua Chang Mao. Her English was close to fluent from all of her academic studies, but she could think of no English equivalent to “spear of the flower” . . . except for perhaps . . . thorn.
Tenzin tapped away on his Morse code key for an hour. It seemed to Ai Liang that he was repeating his message, over and over again. He smoked nearly half a pack of those foul Dubliss Blacks during that time and kept asking Ai Liang for more tea. Mistra came back into the ger and saw the monk hunched and pecking furiously like some wild tech nerd. She and Ai Liang exchanged smirks and shrugs, and Mistra retreated to the far nook
that served as her kitchen and started chopping ingredients for curried lamb stew.
Then Gengi Phon barreled into the ger. He was dusted with fresh snow, carrying his old Enfield rife, and demanding to know why his son, Ganbaatar, wasn’t there. Tenzin stopped tapping because the Mongol’s presence demanded full focus. One never knew with these kinds of men.
The door opened again soon after and Ganbaatar stepped inside. He too was slathered in snow, yet his demeanor was calm. He was also slinging a rifle, and he slipped its strap from the shoulder of his camel fur jacket, propped it on the floor rack next to his father’s, and removed his conical Mongol hat.
“You are very late,” Gengi Phon said to his son. “It does not take an extra day to return from selling hogs in Khangi.”
“It does, Father, if you have seen what I have seen.”
“Tell me.”
They were speaking Khalkha. Ai Liang did not understand, but Tenzin did and had turned from his radio, all ears.
“A man, father, in the hills by the south river.” Ganbaatar swept his long arm toward somewhere southwest, outside. “He thought he was hidden, but I saw a gleam from something he had and I tied Uli’s horse and climbed closer. He was watching our village, with the kind of spyglass you do not buy even in Ulaanbaatar. He had a weapon as well, nothing like our rifles. I saw it, Father.”
Gengi Phon nodded, slowly, then blew a long breath through clenched teeth. “Precious boy,” he said as he reached out, squeezed his son’s shoulder, then looked at his own boots, where the melting snow was puddling his earthen floor. He chewed his lip as Ai Liang flicked her eyes from Gengi to Mistra, who was now standing close by with her camel bone spoon. Their faces were telling a story, and it wasn’t a happy fairy tale.
Gengi Phon turned to Tenzin.
“Call your gods, monk. Call them quickly. These men are coming. They will come soon.”
Chapter 21
Maputo, Mozambique
The Windhoek was still dead in the water, silent and mysterious, its irons creaking as it gently bumped against the splintered quay, offering no clue as to the fate of its crew. But Rod Kruvalt knew that the abandoned vessel had a ghostly tale to tell, and George Wheelwright might just be his ship whisperer.
Kruvalt had shown up at Wheelwright’s mountaintop house the morning after their chat. It was just after sunrise when his big Maxxis tires crunched on the gravel, a presumptive act, given that his American friend had begged off until at least late morning, with no promise to come along then either. Yet George ambled out of the house, barefoot, in baggy red boxers and a half-open chambray shirt, gray hair askew, and smirked.
“Ambush technique, huh, Rod?”
“That’s right, mate,” Kruvalt said. “Hit ’em at dawn, before they can melt away into the jungle.”
“All right, you dirty merc. You win.”
Now they were winding back down through the hills toward Maputo in Kruvalt’s green Defender, with Wheelwright more properly dressed in an epauletted bush shirt, jeans, and French desert boots, no socks. Kruvalt was in his SWAT utilities, The Mamas and the Papas were crooning “Monday, Monday” from his CD player, and he had all the windows open to the sweet humid African air. They were sipping black coffee that Kruvalt had brought along from Café Acacia, because he knew George liked it. Wheelwright was smoking his pipe, and they didn’t say much.
It wasn’t the first time that Kruvalt had asked his mysterious friend for assistance. Over the past eight years there’d been some occasions when the PRM’s homicide division was stumped and the detectives had turned to SWAT Captain Kruvalt, mostly because they knew he had a background in mayhem. On one such instance, Kruvalt, stumped over a case himself, had consulted with Wheelwright.
“I just can’t figure it, mate. They’ve got this gangbanger bloke, drug dealer type, shot in an alley behind the Southern Sun Hotel. Point-blank, big caliber, close range in the chest, but no friggin’ exit wound and no bloody bullet.”
“Who were his clients?”
“Street trash. The usual.”
“Who were his suppliers?”
“Russians, or so the detective constable reckons.”
Wheelwright had thought about that for a moment, and then said, “Ice.”
“Excuse me?”
“It’s an old Chechen technique. Twenty-gauge shotgun, cut down, with blank ammunition. The ice slugs are made in a mold, like Popsicles. You just have to keep them in a cooler till right before the hit. Then you chamber a blank, drop a slug in the barrel end, like a musket, and it’s goodbye Charlie. No bullet, no ballistics to trace. Betcha that shotgun’s in the drink somewhere.”
Kruvalt had been stunned. “George, you’re a bloody genius. Medical examiner said the only thing he found was powder burns and water.”
“Nah, I just read a lot of Agatha Christie.”
Right. Kruvalt reckoned there was a lot more to Wheelwright than that, but he’d worked the jungles and slums all across the continent for most of his adult life and knew when to ask, and ask not. Africa was still the land of diamond smugglers and ivory poachers, warlords and slaves, the wealthy and the destitute, clashing in violent surges. In the course of one day, you could run across a village of missionaries slaughtered by ISIS fighters, and before sunset come across the same Islamist maniacs slaughtered in turn by French special forces. It was still a place where soldiers of fortune came to live and let die, and sometimes disappear. George Wheelwright certainly seemed like one of those types, but friendships between men of their particular talents could be ruined by too many questions.
Yet after a couple of more cases about which Kruvalt had asked Wheelwright for his opinion, and had again received the sort of responses that only a widely experienced professional could proffer, he’d quietly inquired about the man’s background. He still had his photo and fingerprints from the barroom brawl arrest, as well as the charge sheet with a few personal details. He ran him through INTERPOL and EUROPOL, and had a SWAT team support geek check all social media and the internet. Nothing. It was as if George had been born the previous decade and hadn’t gotten around yet to carving the scars that all hard men leave in their wake. But he decided not to dig any further, because his inquiries might set something in motion that could do George harm, so instead he asked him point-blank.
“So, what’s your background, mate? Throw us a bone.”
“Special forces. Don’t make me lie past that.”
“Figured as much. You retire, or get the boot?”
“Neither. Sometimes you get left for dead, and it’s better that way.”
“All right, mate. As long as you’re not wanted for murder. . . . Are ya?”
“No, but I’m wanted for breaking a few hearts, worldwide.”
George had made that remark without a smile, and Kruvalt had decided to just let it go. . . .
They arrived at the docks, where a cordon of PRM uniforms were still keeping onlookers away from the Windhoek, backed up by eight of Kruvalt’s SWAT team, but the assault truck was gone, and a wooden gangway with rope handrails now lay from the tarmac to the ship’s gunwales. Port activity was returning to normal, with the tipped-over vehicles righted back on their tires, the latrines back in place, and a new gas generator sending power to pneumatic bolt drivers that hissed in the air down the quay. The early sun was already steaming the port, the harbinger of a hot day, yet what Kruvalt noticed was its glint off the zoom camera lenses of a couple of guys in the crowd of gathering civilians. Word of the ghost ship had gotten around.
He parked the Defender inside the cordon, pulled a flexible mask of black mesh material over his head and around his throat, and handed one to Wheelwright.
“You skittish about the plague?” George said.
“No. The reporters.”
Wheelwright nodded, but instead pulled his bandanna on and over his nose, then fetched a pair of Ray-Bans from his pocket and donned them.
“Is this Lone Ranger enough for you, Tonto?”
&
nbsp; “Who’s that?” Kruvalt asked.
“Never mind.”
They got out of the truck. Wheelwright left his pipe in the ashtray. Ingo Ferreti hurried over from somewhere, fiddling with an unlit cigarette in his pudgy fingers. He was trailed by a fat black man in a seersucker suit, a chief inspector from SERNIC called Boondo, who didn’t have much use for SWAT types.
“First one’s the harbormaster,” Kruvalt muttered. “Second one’s a dick.”
“Not his given name, I’m guessing,” said Wheelwright.
“Correct.”
“Good morning, Captain!” Ingo was almost doing a jig. “This should be exciting.”
“Hello, Ingo.”
Boondo pushed past Ferreti, puffing his slabby chest out. There were food stains on his parrot tie.
“I’m going aboard with you, Kruvalt.”
“Your call, Inspector.” Kruvalt shrugged. “But my boys think there might be a bomb in the engine room. We’re taking the sapper with us. Is your life insurance paid up?”
Boondo thought about that for a moment, chewed his big lip, looked at the ship, then said to Kruvalt, “All right, we’ll wait for your all clear.”
“Seems wise.”
“Captain,” Ingo said. “We spoke to the gentlemen at Ocean Africa. There were eighty-two men on the manifest.”
“Distress calls?” Kruvalt asked. “Lifeboats?”
“No.” Ingo looked up at George Wheelwright and grinned. “And who is this masked stranger?”
“My maritime clairvoyant,” Kruvalt said. “He reads the minds of empty ships.”
“Oh.”