by Alex Ryan
“It’s a Conex box,” he said. “This is the top corner of a shipping container.”
This could be it, he told himself.
If this container had broken loose from the deck of a cargo ship leaving Hong Kong in the storm, it could have drifted here in the current. Of course, cargo vessels lost containers overboard all the time, many incidents going unreported. This Conex box could have been at sea for months, or years, and could have come from almost anywhere on the planet. He glanced at his watch again—ten minutes to sort it out.
“Spread out a bit,” he said.
The four divers spread out over the large box, and now their combined lights showed much more clearly the rectangular shape of an orange cargo container, floating at about a forty-five-degree angle and listing another fifteen degrees to the left. A small trail of bubbles dribbled out from the topmost corner and danced upward until they disappeared. Zhang finned along the top of the box, moving deeper and checking his depth gauge as he did. There were no corporate markings on the top of the box nor on the right side that he could see with the light from his mask.
“Safety divers, maintain depth here. Watch our backs as we examine the container more closely.”
“Roger,” one of the divers responded.
Chung finned along behind him as he explored the length of the container. So far, he had not seen any holes or penetrations in the walls of the container. When they reached the deep end, he looked at Chung. Chung nodded, and they pulled themselves down and around the edge to inspect the loading end of the container. As expected, the cargo box had hinged double doors. The doors were shut but not locked, which was fortunate, since they did not have any cutting equipment. A ten-digit serial number was painted on the upper corner of the left-hand door. Zhang nudged Chung and pointed at it.
“Commit that number to memory,” he said.
“Yes, sir.”
Zhang grouped the numbers—31 29 937 224—and created a singsong mental pneumonic and rehearsed it three times in his head. Then, he checked the time: five minutes left on the no-decompression timetable. He looked at the door handles and then at Chung, who raised his eyebrows behind his Plexiglas dive mask.
“You said we weren’t going to open the doors,” Chung said.
“No, I said nobody goes inside,” Zhang said. “We’re here. It’s unlocked. I think we’re obligated to take a peek inside.”
“Shouldn’t we just get a cable on it? What about the air bubble?” Chung said.
Zhang nodded. “By the time we rig for a cable we will be out of time on our no decompression limits. If we wait to make a second dive, we might lose it. We need to have a look while we can. We’ll open the lower door. All the air will be trapped in the top half.”
“Copy that.”
Chung swam beside him, and together they grabbed a metal handle that operated as a lever. When rotated, the handle lever shifted a linkage connected to upper and lower locking bolts, which, in theory, would allow the lower door to drift open.
“Easy,” Zhang said as they pulled down on the handle. An air bubble the size of a soccer ball burped out as the locking bars began to shift.
Zhang froze. “Careful. Be ready to clear quickly in case the container loses buoyancy.”
“Check,” Chung grunted.
Zhang reapplied pressure to the handle. It moved ten degrees and then stopped. They both pushed, but it wouldn’t budge.
“It’s stuck,” Chung said.
Zhang looked up and then down, his headlights illuminating the top and bottom junctions of the two-point locking mechanism. “The upper locking bolt is out, but the bottom one is still engaged. Just a little more.”
Chung nodded. Zhang pushed hard and heard Chung grunt over the comms circuit. The handle barely moved. They tried again, finning and pushing harder. With a metallic tang, the handle suddenly shifted as the bottom locking-bar popped free. Aided by gravity, the massive steel door swung open much quicker and with more force than Zhang expected. The edge of the door clipped the top of his mask, knocking it crooked on his face. Greasy salt water instantly flooded his mask. With both hands, he straightened and repositioned it. With the seal reestablished, he looked toward the surface and pushed hard on his regulator purge valve to clear the water from the mask cavity. As air evacuated the water, the stench hit his nostrils, triggering a reflexive gag. Acutely aware that vomiting in his mask at thirty meters below the surface would be a serious problem, he fought back the urge.
A panicked, static-filled scream echoed over the comms circuit.
Zhang blinked, trying to clear his blurry vision, but then realized it wasn’t his eyes that were the problem. A thick, greasy film now coated the inside of his mask, robbing him of clarity. He couldn’t tell what the hell he was looking at. He was seeing double, now triple . . .
“Chung?”
But as a fourth body came into view, he understood.
A dozen corpses had now drifted out of the Conex box, and Lieutenant Chung was thrashing about in the middle of a throng of bloated bodies—eyeless sockets wide, mouths gaped open in silent screams. As Zhang strained to identify which body was Chung, he noticed that something else was wrong. The momentum of the swinging door falling open had caused the container to rotate on its axis. Zhang watched in horror as an enormous bubble of air and buoyant oil burped out from the top corner of the now open doorway.
“Swim clear,” he shouted at Chung, but it was too late. The cargo container began to sink, falling toward them at a steeper angle as it began a death slide to the bottom of the South China Sea. Zhang saw Chung’s legs disappear into the container. A heartbeat later, an edge smashed painfully into Zhang’s shoulder as he too was engulfed in the coffin’s maw. Zhang knew that the container was falling toward him, but the sensation that the box of corpses was breathing him in overpowered all logic. He heard the desperate, futile cries of the safety divers over his headset, but he couldn’t speak. A swarm of rotting corpses converged on him, their loose, wrinkled skin reflecting a ghostly gray in his headlights. Flaccid arms and legs were everywhere, ensnaring his own. An eyeless face pressed against his mask. He pushed it away, his fingers tearing off a hunk of hair and rotten scalp. He kicked hard, trying to propel himself backward, away from his undead assailants, but he was surrounded.
“Chung!” he screamed. “Where are you?”
His fingers sunk into the gooey face of a female corpse, and he watched in horror as it disintegrated under his touch. Panic was taking over now as he desperately tried to clear corpses out of his way to find Chung. Then he felt something firm, something rubbery; he grasped it and realized it was Chung’s dive fin. He tugged at it.
“Chung, is that you?”
“Commander?”
“I got you Chung. Hang on.”
The pressure in his ears was building rapidly with their descent, but he didn’t dare free a hand to use his mask’s equalizing assembly to plug his nose and equalize. He pushed another dead body clear and kicked with all his strength against the momentum of the sinking container. Dragging Chung behind him, he worked his way through the mass of corpses—their bellies flayed open wide, their eyeless sockets mocking him in the devil’s dim light—toward the open door.
Zhang reached out his left hand, and his fingertips found purchase on the edge of the container. His ears were burning with pain now, and he wondered how much longer until his eardrums would rupture. With a primal howl, he hauled Chung out of the container by the fin, all the while praying it would not slip off. He heard a thunk as Chung’s tank smacked against the container door while the young officer sailed past him. Grinning triumphantly, he hoisted himself out of the opening, flipping himself upside down, over the edge, and out. He watched a blur of orange sail past him as the cargo container plummeted toward the bottom of the sea.
Zhang felt a hand grasp his calf just above the ankle.
He looked down and met Chung’s wide-eyed gaze. “You all right?” he asked.
The young
officer stared back at him, catatonic.
Zhang reached down and grabbed Chung by the straps on his BC vest and pulled him up until they were staring at each other mask-to-mask.
“It’s over,” Zhang said. “You’re okay. We’re safe.”
Chung nodded, his mind in another place.
Zhang checked his depth gauge—they had plunged an additional ten meters, to a depth of nearly forty meters. He imagined the additional nitrogen in his body, saturating his blood, waiting to bubble out on the ascent and cause embolisms in his brain, joints, and lungs. “Listen to me, Chung. It’s time to go up.”
Chung nodded.
Only now did he register all the chatter on the comms circuit, with the dive coordinator and safety divers frantically calling for status reports.
“We are okay,” he said, giving a thumbs-up to the safety divers hovering ten meters above. “I repeat, we’re okay, but we exceeded the no-decompression limit, so we’ll need a slow ascent and decompression stop to avoid the bends.”
“Roger,” the dive coordinator said. “It’s still pretty rough up here. I’ll lower the dive platform to fifteen meters. You can decompress there and not have to worry about station-keeping.”
“Copy that, and much obliged.”
Dragging Chung behind him, Zhang began the ascent.
“If you don’t mind me asking,” the dive coordinator said, “what the hell happened down there, Commander?”
Nightmarish imagery from their battle for survival inside the sinking, corpse-filled container flashed across his mind’s eye. “I’ll spare you the gory specifics . . . Let’s just say we got our asses kicked by a box of dead people.”
CHAPTER 9
Officers’ shower room
CCG-1115 Hai Twen
1300 hours local
Commander Zhang shuddered despite the steaming-hot water raining down on his ocean-chilled skin.
If Dazhong could see me now, shaking like a child, what would she think?
The time in the cargo container had felt like an eternity, but in actuality, he’d been trapped with the corpses for less than a minute. Dazhong, on the other hand, had probably logged over twenty hours of autopsies with the dead in the chilly basement of the Gun Club Hill Barracks. Would seeing him like this shatter her image of him as the fearless, unflappable Commander of China’s elite Snow Leopard Counterterrorism Unit? Or would she empathize? Would she wrap her arms around him and comfort him as a kindred spirit also ensnared in this most morbid of investigations? Or would she gaze at him with his father’s eyes—disappointed eyes for a son who never measured up—no matter how high the bar was raised?
He silently chastised himself for being so weak.
He’d seen plenty of blood. Plenty of death. This is no different, he told himself.
But it was different.
There was a twisted malice at work here—mutilation, exploitation, and punishment. The mind behind this operation was sick and callous. A sociopath, he surmised. Someone even more deranged than the butcher of Kizilsu, Chen Qing, and that was saying something. Whoever was behind these murders had to be stopped, and Zhang was going to be the one to do it.
He wasn’t sure how long he lingered in the shower, but it was long enough to stop his shaking. Long enough to exceed the hot-water ration for a dozen sailors. Long enough to scrub the skin of his face and neck until it was red and tender, trying to rid himself of the oily residue of the decomposing corpses. Still, the smell—or at least his paranoia of the smell—persisted. He leaned his head against the wall, took one last shuddering breath, and then turned off the water. Reaching for his towel, he pulled the shower curtain open and came face-to-face with Major Li.
“What the hell are you doing?” he snapped, wrapping the towel around his waist and wondering how long the Army officer had been standing outside his shower.
“I need a briefing on what you found during the dive,” the Major said, his hands clasped behind his back. “You promised me you would brief me as soon as you surfaced.”
“You want to be briefed right now?” Zhang said, gesturing sarcastically to his towel. “Would it please the Major if I made the report naked?”
“Your state of dress or undress is irrelevant. You promised me a report, and I’m still waiting.”
“You’re unbelievable,” Zhang muttered, shoving his way past Li into the officers’ locker room. He let the door slam closed on Li behind him, but not surprisingly, the Army officer pursued him, unfazed. Zhang sighed, tossed his towel into a bin by the door, and opened his locker.
“What did you find?” Li persisted.
“We found a cargo container,” he said, stepping into a pair of boxer briefs.
“And?”
“And what?” Zhang said smugly, turning to look at his agitator.
Li flushed with irritation. “Tell me about the bodies inside. What was their condition? Were they like the others? What identifying marks were on the container? Why was it hovering submerged like that? Where did it come from? Must I spoon-feed you the obvious questions that need to be addressed in a proper report?”
Zhang’s pulse quickened; he’d had enough.
“Be careful, Major,” he said and stepped toward the Army man until their faces were inches apart. He towered over Li, but the Major did not flinch. “I am the ranking member of this task force now. This is not an Army operation. I do not report to you. I will share the details of my investigation of the container when I please, as I please. If that arrangement is unsatisfactory to you, then I am happy to request your replacement on the grounds of insubordination.”
Li hesitated a beat, and when he spoke again, his tone had lost its edge. “Very well, Commander. As a task force team member, my only wish is to assist in the investigation. I can’t do that in the dark, but I should have waited for you to share the information when you were ready. I heard your experience down there was . . . difficult. I apologize for disturbing you. I should have waited.”
Zhang nodded and returned to dressing in silence. Maybe he had overreacted. Maybe Li was really trying to help. The man had connections in circles that Zhang did not, and he could marshal the vast resources of the Army if necessary. A man like Li was far better to have as an ally than as an adversary. The only trouble was, Li was smarter than him. The man was cunning and insidious, and he was playing a game that Zhang didn’t quite understand. One misstep on this operation, and Li would be back in front of the Central National Security Commission, whispering slander and hyperbole in Deputy Chairman Hu Zedong’s ear, this time about Zhang as well as Dazhong. As much as it chafed, he had no choice but to play the game he hated most—the game of politics.
“The Conex box contained at least fifty bodies, probably more,” Zhang said, his voice measured and professional. “The warm ocean-water environment was hard on the corpses, so they already looked much worse than the corpses we retrieved from Tung Wan Beach two days ago. That being said, I suspect they are from the same source as the others, based on similar traits.”
Zhang sat on the room’s only bench to put on his boots.
Li took a seat beside him—annoyingly close. “Similar traits?”
“Yes, like missing hands, empty eye sockets, missing noses. I think some had the forehead tattoos as well, but it was dark, and I had other concerns to deal with.”
“Why was the container floating in the first place? With all that weight, why didn’t it sink to the bottom?”
Zhang remembered something a pathologist had told him years ago when he had recovered a body floating in the Yangtze River. The doctor had explained that after death, the bacteria in a body continued to flourish. If unchecked, the bacteria produced gas, which resulted in the bloated appearance and the eventual “floating” of a corpse that had once been submerged. He imagined the gases from all those bodies filling the container with air. As the buoyancy of the container increased, it began a slow ascent up from the bottom. He had neither the energy nor the inclination to explain any
of this to Major Li, so he simply said, “A large air bubble was trapped inside.”
Li nodded. “In that case, do you think there are more containers out there stuffed with corpses and drifting around?”
“Your guess is as good as mine.”
“Do you think the container was carried out here by a ship and sunk on purpose to dispose of the bodies?”
“That’s one possible theory, especially if the people wanting to dispose of the corpses didn’t know the decay process would produce enough gas to float the box,” Zhang said, rubbing his chin. “Then again, there’s also the possibility that this and other containers were washed overboard from the deck of a cargo vessel during the storms.”
“Is there any way to identify the container and where it came from?”
Zhang repeated the serial number he had committed to memory, reassuring himself that he still remembered it. Then he said, “I didn’t see any serial numbers or markings. It doesn’t mean the container didn’t have any. They may have been painted over, or maybe I just didn’t see them. Everything happened so quickly.”
“That’s unfortunate,” Major Li said, holding Zhang’s gaze and probing for more behind the words.
“No matter,” Zhang said and checked his unmarked uniform in the mirror. “We know the container sank at this location. We can mount a second expedition using pressure suits or even a submersible to recover it. But hopefully, that won’t be necessary.”
“Why so?”
“Because the DNA samples that Dr. Chen collected from the corpses at Tung Wan Beach should yield the information we need to get this investigation moving.”
Li sniffed but said nothing.
Zhang made a decision in that moment and put it into play. He needed time to track the serial number from the container, and he wanted to do it away from Major Li.
“I’m glad you insisted on coming, Major,” he said and clasped the Army officer’s shoulder. “At least a half dozen bodies, maybe more, escaped the container and are slowly floating their way to the surface. I need someone to remain behind onboard to head up the collection and evaluation efforts.”