“Excuse me, Baron,” Lee said. “I had not realized that you would, of course, know about such devices. Can you make arrangements to make the military look the other way?”
“Of course. I just need to know the estimated time and at which spot Madman Cheng will be landing. I’ll make sure that the military is not looking.”
“I’ll get the details from Madman Cheng and call you,” Lee said.
“My man from Russia is coming into Taipei tomorrow and will be with you on the shore to meet them when they arrive. You will escort them in a lorry to a Russian ship that we have chartered at the shipyard. The Russian will know what ship to go to. You will tell them that they must hide out on the ship in its hold for several days until everything is arranged. Stay with them long enough to be sure that they have everything they need before you leave. When the ship is ready to go, the Russians will take over. Understood?”
“Yes, sir.”
“All right, and now we must discuss money.” Although the amount was insignificant to Baron, especially since the ship and fuel that was taking them to Russia would cost two hundred fifty thousand dollars, he had to sit with Lee for a while, negotiating over the amount that would be charged, as was the Chinese tradition.
Lee asked for what Baron called an insultingly high amount and offered half that. More tea was poured and the negotiations continued. But if it had not been done in this manner, Lee would have suspected that there was something bigger going on, as he had not been informed about where the five Chinese were headed or why they were wanted.
Finally, after fifteen minutes of nego-nego--the name, taken from English, used in Taiwan as the term for negotiations--Baron, acting reluctant, agreed to pay the sum of two thousand five hundred dollars for the fee of Madman Cheng and another two thousand to Lee, but only upon the safe arrival of the five Chinese to the hold of the Russian ship--less the five hundred dollars, of course, that the five Chinese were going to pay Lee as the fee to be taken to Taiwan.
As Lee was shown out by Mei Ling, Tak said to Baron, “It was very exciting to watch you negotiate.”
“Here it is a process,” he said. “If I did not do it, he would have been suspicious and would have begun making inquiries to see how he had been cheated.”
***
Under the bright moon in high Tibet, a prison guard opened first one and then another cell door in a Chinese military prison, located inside a Chinese military base. The base was not prestigious as compared to those in Mainland China. It was just set up to have troops ready for crowd control, rioting, insurrection, and any other problems that the Tibetans caused, which were mostly on the anniversaries of various Tibetan events, which had all been banned by the Chinese government.
The jailer had been given orders from his commander, which in turn came from a general in the Chinese Army in Beijing. The orders stated that Tibetan prisoners Neema Lhamo and Jamyang Gyamtso, being held pending an unspecified trial date for anti-government activities, were to be taken to a Hong Kong prison and then to be deported from China. General Lee Dai Kwok signed the orders. Unbeknownst to anyone at the jail, he had been provided with fragrant oil by Baron for the turnover of the two Tibetans.
Neema Lhamo and Jamyang Gyamtso saw each other for the first time in months. Jamyang had been beaten a number of times during interrogation, more so at the beginning of his incarceration. Neema had regularly been used sexually by several of the jailers.
They looked at one another but were afraid to speak, for fear of a beating for talking. Led to a desk, they were put into prisoner-escort chains around the waist, with handcuffs on either side of their waist chains, and a detachable chain in-between them so as to tie them together.
“You have been ordered deported from the country for your subversive activities,” the soldier at the desk told them. “You are being taken to Hong Kong to be deported.”
They looked at each other in shock and disbelief. Deported? Where would they go? What country would have them? Were they being sent to the Dalai Lama in exile in India?
The transport guards came in from a truck waiting outside and motioned for them to come. They had no idea where they might go or what would become of them.
***
“Nikolay! It’s so nice to have you here in Taipei.” Baron got up from his chair to greet the resourceful man, which he did not normally do for subordinates. But since Nikaloy had come such a distance, Baron stood.
Nikolay came in and sat in front of Baron’s desk. Tak was present, so they conducted the meeting in English for her benefit.
“It’s always good to see you, Baron, and you, Baroness. Thank you for having the driver meet me at the airport.” He had arrived the day before, and Baron had sent Driver Chen to fetch him from the Taiwan airport.
“You look well and rested,” Baron said. “How is the hotel?”
“Splendid. And so were the girls!”
“Ah, I’m glad you were pleased,” Baron said. He knew Nikolay’s propensity for young girls, and so he’d had Madam Su, who had the very best prostitutes in Taipei, send over two of her newest additions. Su had assured him that she had two new girls who had only just begun in the profession, were just eighteen, and could please. Apparently, she was right, as usual.
“And so, when are the Chinese coming?” Nikolay asked.
“Tonight, after midnight. Is the ship ready?”
“Yes, I have set up living quarters in the hold. How many again?”
“There will be five Chinese, a mix of males and females.”
“They are prisoners, right? It should not matter if they have to stay together.”
“Yes, this is a one-way journey, but they must arrive healthy. You make sure that they are kept warm and have plenty of food. I don’t want them to arrive all beat up and injured either.”
“Done.”
“Good. Now, I have two more prisoners for you to take. I told you that I would be sending over two Tibetans, if you recall?”
“Yes. Where do I get them?”
“In Hong Kong. They were imprisoned in Tibet by the Chinese for dissident political activities. I bribed a high official in the military and he arranged for their release and expulsion from the country. I’m told that they are young, probably in their early twenties. You had better put them in different quarters than the Chinese. I don’t know if they will get along with the Chinese after what the Chinese have done to them.”
“All right. Is there anything special I should know? The food will be coming from the ship’s Russian cook. Do they have a special diet?”
“They’ll do fine. But I don’t want these political dissidents to try to martyr themselves by discovering they are going to die and assuming that they must die beforehand to promote their belief in the Dalai Lama or their homeland. Don’t forget what I’m paying you for, which is their safe delivery in Stepnogorsk. Make sure that these Tibetans, who have already shown that they will risk jail rather than give up their beliefs, don’t go on a hunger strike or start acting crazy. You might tell them that they have been brought out because they’re on a mission to further the causes of Tibet, which is true, and then deal with them as a ship security matter on the ship as opposed to letting them get the idea that they are prisoners. You work it out. As for the Chinese, they will eventually figure out that they are leaving Taiwan, so you better keep an eye on them. They won’t try anything like a hunger strike, but the less they know the better.”
“Understood.”
“Next I want you to start arranging the tour group to go to Tibet. I’ll advise you when the material is ready, hopefully within a few weeks after you make your delivery of people to Stepnogorsk, according to Dr. Dorogomilov.”
***
Upon returning from Europe, Ralls met with Hauser in his office. Ralls had sent his report in advance in case the director wanted to review before the meeting. As it turned out, he did.
Hauser started off with, “What is this about not being human?”
�
�I know, I know,” Ralls said. “Winger had it checked three times at the lab, and then I sent samples to another lab. Same conclusion in all cases.”
“If she is not animal, then she must be vegetable or mineral,” Hauser said, still disbelieving,
Ralls smiled at the joke. “Well, perhaps a freak of nature?” He began summarizing what he had. “The mystery woman in the hypersonic craft may or may not have been the one that Baron Von Limbach drove from the salt mine in Poland to the hotel. He stayed at the Forum Hotel with a red-headed woman and took her to dinner in downtown Krakow. They left in his car to go to Germany, with me a few days behind. There was one strange thing along the way on the road they took, which was a hole in the highway, ten feet deep, with none of the dirt or debris that was removed from the hole anywhere to be seen. When I got there, highway repairmen were filling in the hole. But I could find nothing connecting the baron or the woman to it.
“The two went on to Germany. I could not find them, initially. They may have stayed with friends, or if at a hotel, possibly one of those small places, like on the Romantic Road, but I could not confirm that. He may have paid cash for the room and there was no computer record of it. The two were definitely in Berlin next, where their marriage was recorded. It looks as if this baron must have fallen in love with whoever he was traveling with, as it was not a church wedding, but a civil ceremony. I have been unable to find out anything about her background, which is, in itself, very odd.
“One theory is that she came from someplace in Russia with a very poor economic background. The baron might have found her through some dating or marriage service and had her sent down to Krakow. This is very easy for a Russian woman to do as the airfare is cheap, although paid for by the potential mate. But the main thing is, that young women can go freely to Poland, whereas trying to get a visa to the US, for example, is very hard. After Berlin, their next stop was Paris. They took a commercial airline to Paris from Berlin.
“Our CIA connection got me the information that Baron and Baroness Von Limbach booked tickets on the French Train a Grande Vitesse, but they weren’t passengers aboard this same train when it was de-railed by terrorists south of Paris in protest for the law not allowing women to cover their faces in public. The CIA hacked into the French surveillance cameras at the train station after the sabotage and found the two sitting at a café table. There is a picture of them in the file, but it is low quality as it was taken by a surveillance camera some distance away. It seems clear that they intended to take that train but missed it. From there, the CIA found them in a hotel in Paris. Winger at the CIA sent one of their operatives into the Paris hotel for DNA and fingerprints, which she was successful in getting.”
The director found the picture in the file. It was of the baron and baroness in the Paris train station, but it was not very good, as Ralls had said. Their faces were grainy and the number of fingers could not be ascertained.
“So what about the seven fingers and the fingerprints?” he asked.
“Extra fingers isn’t so rare as you might think,” Ralls said. “Or so I am told by a doctor friend of mine. Having six is fairly common, and more than five is called ploydactyly. If a baby has an extra digit at birth, and it is deformed at all, they usually cut it off. As for the bizarre skin pattern on the fingertips, it’s a dead end. She has no record anywhere that we can find, including Interpol, and we can find no background information on her at all.
“As for the strange rocket craft, we were utterly unable to find any trace of it, who built it, or even who might have built it. We cannot find any motive for the trek the pilot took across the US. The only law the pilot broke was a misdemeanor of not filing a flight plan for any pilot going over eighteen thousand feet in US airspace. Can you imagine trying to extradite her? We go to a federal judge and say that we have a single sighting of a red-headed female from a nearby pilot through his canopy, but no rocket was found, and we have no other evidence, other than DNA and fingerprints that were probably taken illegally under French law. ‘But judge, we would like you to issue an extradition order for the misdemeanor of flying too high without a flight plan.’”
“That would be rich,” Hauser said. “We would be the laughing stock.”
“What do you think about whether or not she was the hypersonic pilot?” Ralls asked. “I have a gut feeling that it could be her, but I do not have any hard evidence. I have tried to run down all possibilities, but I’ve found no sign of any involvement by anyone else. I’m reminded of a Sherlock Holmes quote from the Sign of Four, ‘Eliminate all other factors, and the one which remains must be the truth.’”
“I cannot let a potential threat to the US, by someone having a manned craft that can go that fast, just lie,” Hauser said. “Even if they, or whoever made it, did not have sophisticated guidance systems, a suicide bomber could Kamikaze one of our cities with a dirty nuclear bomb and we could not stop it. I deal with actual or potential terrorist threats all the time and, to me, this has the potential. Keep on it.”
CHAPTER 18
The hands of Madman Cheng’s knock-off waterproof wristwatch were all pointing up as midnight arrived. He was waiting in a dark cove on Mainland China for his passengers. The commotion of people coming down the trail could be heard, and he hid, in case it was not the people he expected. As they approached, he could see there were six people, and then he recognized the man who worked for him. Madman stepped out of his hiding place in the bushes and turned on a flashlight to lead them to him.
He greeted his helper and then the five passengers. The average age appeared to be early twenties, and none were married. They were all ambitious, trying to get to Taiwan for a better life.
Madman looked at his hand-written list of passengers and asked who was who.
“I’m Mee Noh Yew,” the youngest of the ladies said.
“Do you have the one hundred dollars?”
She handed Madman a crumpled one hundred dollar bill from her pocket.
Madman looked at the next person, a male. “What’s your name?”
“I’m Tai Won Ong.”
“Good,” Madman said to the young man. Tai gave his stack of Yuan to Madman, who looked at it disdainfully. “It’s supposed to be in dollars.”
“I could not get any in the time I had,” Tai said. “I had to get some of this at the last moment from friends, and I had no time to get to a money changer.”
Madman was unhappy about it, but it was too late. He took the Yuan and put it in his pocket. He turned to the next, a lady with short cropped hair.
“I’m Ma Tuyit To,” she said. She then gave her money to Madman and he checked off her name.
The next was an older man of thirty. “I’m So Su Mee.”
It was slightly unusual to see a Chinese man of thirty without a family, and these people were not supposed to have any family to leave behind in China.
“Where’s your family?” Madman asked him.
“My wife and son were killed in an accident, and I have nothing left. So I’m going to start a new life.”
There was no way to verify his story, but it really did not matter. Madman was going to take him anyway. He took the man’s money and checked off his name.
He turned to the last, a man of twenty two years.
The man held out his money. “I’m Sum Ting Wong.”
Madman completed the list. Everyone was accounted for and had paid. Madman would get the balance on the shore in Taiwan. It was not unusual for that to happen, as the Chinese had so little that they often did not have enough to pay the full fare. Relatives or contacts in Taiwan would pay the balance on those occasions. In this case, it would be Deng Lee, working for the baron.
“All right,” Madman announced. “Now, we’re going to cross the Taiwan Strait. It is very important that you do exactly as I say. If you do not, you will be knocked out of my boat and you will drown in the sea. To avoid being caught, we have to race across the sea.”
The five passengers stared at the
strange craft in fear and amazement. It was made of white, round, PVC drainage pipes, glued and tied together. There were two keels in the catamaran fashion, each fifteen feet long, made up of pipes a foot and a half in diameter. The front of the keels had tips made of cones that had the points turned up to cut through the waves. In between the large pipes was a flat platform of PVC pipes, each four inches in diameter, sitting out of the water the height of the catamaran’s hulls. The rear had a makeshift bracket holding an enormous, American V-6 outboard motor with two hundred and fifty horsepower. The huge engine looked very out of place fastened onto a boat that was made up of so few dollars in PVC pipe. The motor had come from a Chinese ring in Southern California that stole cars and put them in shipping containers bound for China. Madman had gotten the engine for one-fourth the price.
The entire purpose of the materials used in the boat was to minimize any heat signature, as the Taiwan military FLIR cameras on their helicopters and planes could easily pick out the heat signature of a human body or a motor against the cold sea. The PVC pipe gave no signature at all. The major heat came from the motor, over which he had installed a cold water bladder that sucked up water from the sea and drained it out quickly, cooling the outer surface of the motor case and creating a cold buffer of water and neoprene in between the hot motor and the radar.
There was an overall benefit to the makeshift boat, which was that it cost almost nothing, except for the motor. If the boat ever flipped over and sank in high waves, got shot up by the government, or was seized--all of which had happened to him previously--he would not lose a major investment.
The passengers would give off a heat signature themselves and, to reduce that, Madman had acquired several blankets that were made for forest fire fighters to cover themselves in case of a flashover while they were fighting a fire. The blankets were made from a fabric developed with a coating that resembled aluminum foil on one side and was designed to keep out most all heat. With the reflective coating of foil turned to the inside toward the body, the blankets kept the passengers’ heat signature contained and invisible to the expensive thermal imaging cameras and radar the Taiwan government had bought to monitor the Taiwan Strait.
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