Nine Dragons

by Michael Connelly

  Bosch moved to the boat’s control center. There were several different dials and switches but all were marked in Chinese. Finally, he zeroed in on two side-by-side switches with red button lights above them. He turned one switch off and immediately heard the hum of the engines decrease by half. He had killed an engine.

  He waited five seconds and turned the other switch, killing the second engine. He then moved to the rear corner of the room and onto the lower bunk. He pulled the curtain closed halfway and crouched and waited. He knew he would be in a blind spot for anyone coming up the ladder from the hull. He returned his gun to his belt and took the switchblade out of his coat pocket. He quietly opened the blade.

  Soon he heard running steps from below. This told him the meeting of the men below was in the forward section of the hull. He counted only one set of approaching steps. That would make it easier.

  A man began to rise through the hatch, his back to the bunks and his eyes on the control center. Without looking around he moved quickly to the controls and looked for a reason for the double engine stall. He found nothing wrong and went through procedures to restart the engines. Bosch quietly crawled out of the bunk and moved toward him. The moment the second engine trundled to life, he put the point of the switchblade against the man’s spine.

  Grabbing him by the back collar, Bosch pulled him away from the control center and whispered in his ear.

  “Where’s the girl?”

  The man said something in Chinese.

  “Tell me where the girl is.”

  The man shook his head.

  “How many men are below?”

  The man said nothing and Bosch roughly yanked him out through the door onto the deck. He moved him over to the rail and bent him over the side. The water was twelve feet below.

  “Can you swim, asshole? Where’s the girl?”

  “No…speak,” the man managed to say. “No speak.”

  Keeping the man down over the rail, Bosch looked around for Sun—his translator—but didn’t see him. Where the hell was he?

  The momentary distraction allowed the man to make a move. He swung an elbow backwards into Bosch’s ribs. It was a direct impact and Bosch was knocked back into the sidewall of the pilothouse. The man then spun around and raised his hands to attack. Bosch prepared to cover but it was the man’s foot that came up first, kicking Bosch’s wrist and knocking the knife into the air.

  The man didn’t bother tracking the flight of the knife. He quickly waded into Bosch with both fists, striking with short, powerful impacts to the midsection. Bosch felt the air explode out of his lungs just as another kick came up and hit him below the chin.

  Bosch went down. He tried to shake off the impact but his eyesight started to close into tunnel vision. His attacker calmly stepped away and Bosch heard the switchblade scrape on the deck as he picked it up. Struggling for consciousness, Bosch reached behind his back for the gun.

  As the attacker approached, he spoke in clear English.

  “Can you swim, asshole?”

  Bosch pulled the gun from behind his back and fired twice, the first shot only ticking the man’s shoulder as he narrowed his aim and the second catching him in the center left of the chest. He went down with a look of surprise on his face.

  Harry slowly pulled himself up onto his hands and knees. He saw a line of blood and saliva dripping from his mouth to the deck. Using the wall of the pilothouse, he started to get to his feet. He knew he had to move quickly. The gunshots would have been heard by the men in the boat.

  Just as he got to his feet, a riot of gunfire erupted from the direction of the bow. Bullets zinged over his head and ricocheted off the steel wall of the pilothouse. Bosch ducked around the corner and behind the pilothouse. He came up and found a line of sight through the windows of the structure. He saw a man on the bow advancing toward the stern with pistols in each hand. Behind him was the open hatch through which he had climbed out of the front hold.

  Bosch knew he had six rounds left and had to assume the approaching gunman had started with full clips. Ammunition-wise, Harry was outnumbered. He needed to go on the offensive and take the gunman out quickly and efficiently.

  He looked around for an idea and saw a row of rubber docking bumpers secured along the rear gunwale. He put the gun into his waistband and then grabbed one of the bumpers out of its receptacle. He edged back to the rear window of the pilothouse and looked through the structure again. The gunman had chosen the port side of the pilothouse and was preparing to move to the stern. Bosch stepped back, raised the three-foot-long bumper over his head with two hands, and hurled it high and over the top of the pilothouse. While it was still in the air he started moving down the starboard side, pulling his gun out as he moved.

  He got to the front of the pilothouse just as the gunman was ducking away from the flying bumper. Bosch opened fire, hitting the man repeatedly until he went down on the deck without getting off a single shot.

  Bosch moved in and made sure the man was dead. He then threw his empty .45 over the side and picked up the dead man’s weapons—two more Black Star semiautomatics. He stepped back into the pilothouse.

  The room was still empty. Bosch knew at least one more man was below in the hold with his daughter. He popped the magazines on both guns and counted eleven bullets between the two.

  He stuck them in his belt and took the ladder down like a fireman, locking his feet around the vertical bars and sliding into the hull. At the bottom he dropped and rolled, pulling his weapons and expecting to be fired upon, but no more bullets came his way.

  Bosch’s eyes adjusted to the dim light and he saw that he was in an empty bunk room that opened on a central passageway running the length of the hull. The only light came from the overhead hatch all the way down in the bow. Between Harry and that point were six compartment hatches—three on each side—going down the length of the passageway. The last hatch down on the left was standing wide open. Bosch got up and stuck one of the guns back in his belt so he would have a free hand. He started to move, the remaining gun up and ready.

  Each hatch had a four-point locking system for storing and sealing the catch. Arrows stenciled on the rusting steel told Bosch which way to turn each handle to unlock and open the compartment. He moved down the passageway, checking the compartments one by one, finding each empty but obviously not used recently to haul fish. Steel-walled and windowless, each chamber was filled with a ground layer of detritus of cereal and other food boxes and empty gallon water containers. Wooden crates overflowed with other trash. Fishnets—refashioned as hammocks—hung on hooks bolted to the walls. There was a putrid smell in each compartment that had nothing to do with the catch the vessel once hauled. This boat carried human cargo.

  What bothered Bosch most were the cereal boxes. They were all the same brand, and smiling from the front of the package was a cartoon panda bear standing on the brim of a bowl that held a treasure of rice puffs sparkling with sugar. It was cereal for kids.

  The last stop in the passageway was the open hatch. Bosch crouched low and moved into the compartment in one fluid stride.

  It too was empty.

  But it was different. There was no trash here. A battery-powered light hung from a wire attached to a hook on the ceiling. There was an upturned shipping crate stacked with unopened cereal boxes, packs of noodles and gallon jugs of water. Bosch looked for any indication that his daughter had been kept in the room, but there was no sign of her.

  Bosch heard the hinges on the hatch behind him screech loudly. He turned just as the hatch banged shut. He saw the seal on the upper right corner turn into locked position and immediately saw that the internal handles had been removed. He was being locked in. He pulled the second gun and aimed both weapons at the hatch, waiting for the next lock to turn.

  It was the lower right. The moment the bolt started to turn Bosch aimed and fired both guns repeatedly into the door, the bullets piercing metal wakened by years of rust. He heard someone call out as if
surprised or hurt. He then heard a banging sound out in the hallway as a body hit the floor.

  Bosch moved to the hatch and tried to turn the bolt on the upper right lock with his hand. It was too small for his fingers to find purchase. In desperation, he stepped back a pace and then threw his shoulder into the door, hoping to snap the lock assembly. But it didn’t budge and he knew by the feel of the impact on his shoulder that the door would not give way.

  He was locked in.

  He moved back close to the hatch and tilted his head to listen. There was only the sound of the engines running now. He banged the heel of one of the guns loudly on the metal hatch.

  “Maddie?” he called out. “Maddie, are you here?”

  There was no response. He banged again on the hatch, this time even louder.

  “Give me a sign, baby. If you’re here, make some noise!”

  Again there was no response. Bosch pulled his phone and opened it to call Sun. But he saw he had no signal. He tried the call anyway and got no response. He was in a metal-lined room and his cell phone was useless.

  Bosch turned and banged one more time on the door and called out his daughter’s name.

  There was no response. Harry leaned his sweating forehead against the rusty hatch in defeat. He was stuck in the metal box and trapped with the realization that his daughter wasn’t even on the boat. He had failed and had gotten what he deserved, what he had earned.

  A physical pain shot across his chest, matching the pain in his mind. Sharp, deep and unrelenting. He started breathing heavily, and turned his back against the hatch. He opened his collar another button and slid down the rusting metal until he was sitting on the floor with his knees up. He realized he was in a place as claustrophobic as the tunnels he had once inhabited. The battery on the overhead light was dying and soon he would be left in darkness. Defeat and despair overtook him. He had failed his daughter and he had failed himself.

  37

  Bosch suddenly looked up from his contemplation of failure. He had heard something. Above the drone of the engines, he’d heard a banging sound. Not from above. It had come from down in the hull.

  He jumped up and turned back to the hatch. He heard another banging sound and knew somebody was checking the compartments in the same way he had.

  He pounded on the hatch with the heels of both guns. He yelled above the clanging echo of steel on steel.

  “Sun Yee? Hey! Down here! Somebody! Down here!”

  There was no response, but then the bolt of the upper right seal turned. The door was being unlocked. Bosch stepped back, wiped his face with his sleeves, and waited. The bottom left seal was turned next and then the hatch door slowly began to open. Bosch raised the guns, unsure how many bullets he had left to fire.

  In the dim light of the passage he saw Sun’s face. Bosch moved forward and pushed the hatch all the way open.

  “Where the fuck you been?”

  “I was looking for a boat and—”

  “I called you. I told you to come back.”

  Once he was in the passageway, Bosch saw the Mercedes man lying facedown on the floor a few feet from the hatch. He quickly moved to him, hoping to find him still alive. Harry turned him over, rolling him into the slop of his own blood.

  He was dead.

  “Harry, where is Madeline?” Sun asked.

  “I don’t know. Everybody’s dead and I don’t know!”

  Unless…

  One final plan began to work into Bosch’s brain. One final chance. The white Mercedes. Gleaming and new. The car would have all the extras, including a navigation system, and the first address in its stored data would be the Mercedes man’s home.

  They would go there. They would go to the home of the Mercedes man and Bosch would do what was necessary to find his daughter. If he had to hold a gun to the head of that bored little boy he had seen at Geo, he would do it. And the wife would tell. She would give Bosch back his daughter.

  Harry studied the body in front of him. He presumed he was looking at Dennis Ho, the man behind Northstar. He patted the dead man’s pockets, looking for car keys, but he found none and just as quickly as his plan had formed, Bosch began to feel it disappear. Where were the keys? He needed that computer to tell him where to go and how to find his way.

  “Harry, what is it?”

  “His keys! We need his keys or we—”

  He suddenly stopped. He realized he had missed something. When he had made his run on the pier and ducked for cover behind the white Mercedes, he had heard and smelled the car’s diesel engine. The car had been left running.

  At the time it meant little to Bosch because he was sure his daughter was on the crane boat. But now he knew different.

  Bosch stood up and started moving down the passageway toward the ladder, his mind racing far ahead of him. He heard Sun following behind him.

  There was only one reason why Dennis Ho would have left his car running. He intended to come back to it. Not with the girl, because she was not on the boat. But to get the girl once the storage compartment in the hull was ready and it was safe to transfer her.

  Bosch charged out of the pilothouse and crossed the gangway to the pier. He ran to the driver’s door of the white Mercedes and flung it open. He checked the backseat and found it empty. He then studied the dashboard, looking for a button that would open the trunk.

  Finding none, he turned the car off and grabbed the keys. Moving to the back of the car, he pushed the trunk button on the ignition key.

  The trunk lid lifted automatically. Bosch moved in, and there lying on a blanket inside the compartment was his daughter. She was blindfolded and gagged. Her arms were pinned to her body with several wrappings of duct tape. Her ankles were taped together as well. Bosch cried out at the sight of her.

  “Maddie!”

  He almost jumped into the trunk with her as he quickly pulled the blindfold up and went to work on the gag.

  “It’s me, baby! It’s Dad!”

  She opened her eyes and started blinking.

  “You’re safe now, Maddie. You’re safe!”

  As the gag came loose, the girl let out a shriek that pierced her father’s heart and would stay with him always. It was at once an exorcism of fear, a cry for help and the sound of relief and even joy.

  “Daddy!”

  She started to cry as Bosch reached in and lifted her out of the trunk. Sun was suddenly there and helping.

  “It’s going to be okay now,” Bosch said. “It will all be okay.”

  They stood the young girl up and then Bosch used the teeth of one of the keys to start cutting through the tape. He noticed that Madeline was still wearing her school uniform. The moment her arms and hands were free, she grabbed Bosch around the neck and squeezed with all her life.

  “I knew you would come,” she said between gasping sobs.

  Bosch didn’t know if he had ever heard words that meant more to him. He held her just as tightly in his own arms. He turned his face down to whisper in her ear.

  “Maddie?”

  “What, Dad?”

  “Are you hurt, Maddie? I mean, physically hurt. If they hurt you we need to get you to—”

  “No, I’m not hurt.”

  He pushed back from her and put his hands on her shoulders as he studied her eyes.

  “You sure? You can tell me.”

  “I’m sure, Dad. I’m fine.”

  “Okay. Then, we need to go.”

  He turned to Sun.

  “Can you get us to the airport?”

  “No problem.”

  “Then, let’s go.”

  Bosch put his arm around his daughter and they started to follow Sun off the pier. She held on to him the whole way and it wasn’t until they got to the car that she seemed to acknowledge the meaning of Sun’s presence and asked the question Harry had been dreading.

  “Dad?”

  “What, Maddie?”

  “Where’s Mom?”

  38

  Bosch didn’t ans
wer her question directly. He simply told his daughter that her mother could not be with them at the moment but had packed a bag for her and that they needed to get to the airport to leave Hong Kong. Sun said nothing and picked up his pace, moving in front of them and removing himself from the discussion.

  The explanation seemingly bought Harry some time to consider how and when he would give the answer that would alter the rest of his daughter’s life. When they got to the black Mercedes, he put her in the backseat before going to the trunk to grab the backpack. He didn’t want her to see the bag Eleanor had packed for herself. He checked the compartments of Eleanor’s bag and found his daughter’s passport. He put it in his pocket.

  He got in the front passenger seat and handed the backpack to her. He told her to change out of her school uniform. He then checked his watch and gave Sun a nod.

  “Let’s go. We’ve got a plane to catch.”

  Sun started driving, proceeding out of the waterfront area at a brisk but not attention-getting pace.

  “Is there a ferry or train you can drop us at that will get us there direct?” Bosch asked.

  “No, they closed the ferry route and you would have to switch trains. It would be better if I take you. I wish to.”

  “Okay, Sun Yee.”

  They drove for a few minutes of silence. Bosch wanted to turn and talk to his daughter, putting his eyes on her to make sure she was okay.

  “Maddie, are you changed?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Maddie?”

  Bosch turned and glanced back at her. She had changed clothes. She was leaning against the door behind Sun, staring out through the window while hugging her pillow to her chest. There were tears on her cheeks. It did not appear that she had noticed the bullet hole through the pillow.