by Mark Ellis
The two men swiftly scuttled across the dock and jumped aboard the boat. When the engine started and the mooring line was cast off, Kavanaugh turned toward Mouzi and Crowe. “Un-fucking-believable.”
“Think that’ll be the last we hear from them?” Mouzi asked.
“We can hope that Chinnah didn’t have any influential family or friends.”
Mouzi nodded, and then smiled almost shyly. “Thanks for covering for me, Captain K.”
“It’s my job,” he replied gruffly. “You’re part of the Horizons Unlimited crew.”
Crowe snorted. “She’s the only Horizons Unlimited crew. That reminds me—I’ll need you tomorrow when I tear apart the Krakatoa’s bilge pump. It’ll be a good excuse not to take Flitcroft out fishing.”
The Krakatoa was a thirty-six foot converted trimaran motorized sailboat, built by Denmark’s Quorning Company. It had served as Crowe’s home for the last couple of years. They could see the boat in her customized berth, lovely and clean-lined. The scrubbed deck was as white as her furled canvas, the teak railings polished to the color of old honey.
Mouzi put an index finger to her nose and snapped it away in a short salute. “Aye, aye, Captain.”
Gaze fixed on the EAC launch cutting a foaming wake toward the distant bulk of Mindanao’s Folly, Kavanaugh remarked absently, “Two captains but with a single crewman between them.”
“Crew-woman,” Mouzi corrected testily. “If you can’t tell the difference by now, you’ve been here way too long.”
Kavanaugh favored her with a slit-eyed glare. “You’re about half right.”
Crowe finally managed to strike a match into flame. As he applied it to the end of his cigar, he said, “Not much like the old days, is it?”
Kavanaugh nodded gloomily. “Nothing is. See you tomorrow. I’m sure Howie will expect a breakfast meeting.”
Crowe regarded him, blowing twin streams of gray smoke through his nostrils. “He’s not the boss of me.”
“Not anymore,” Kavanaugh replied turning away. “He’s just one of our landlords…and we owe ‘em all big-time back rent.”
Sunset made a pale rose haze against the dark humid sky, dimly lighting the footpath Kavanaugh followed to his stilt house. A bamboo handrail and six steps extended up to a small porch. Behind the house was a concrete landing pad with a tall stone wall protecting the area from the storm surges that occasionally boiled in from the bay.
Secured to the pad by a webwork of steel guy-wires and eyebolts was a six passenger ASTAR B2 helicopter. A peeling red and yellow decal on the portside door panel declared the big chopper was the property of Horizons Unlimited Tours, Little Tamtung Island, a Subsidiary of Cryptozoica Enterprises.
Kavanaugh walked up the short flight of stairs and opened the screen door. He hadn’t bothered to lock it. Like the exterior, the interior of the house wasn’t very memorable. He did not turn on the overhead lights. There wasn’t anything in the room he cared to see. There was a daybed, an old TV he almost never watched because the reception was so problematical, a bookcase, a couple of wicker chairs along with a few odds and ends that might have been junk or rare objet d’art.
The grinning, bleached-out skull of a Deinoncychus he used as a paperweight could have been both. It rested atop a scattering of Horizons Unlimited promotional brochures, advertising package tours to the Cryptozoica Spa and Living Laboratory.
The house felt like a furnace, despite the cooling rain shower. Even after five years in the South Seas and two and a half on Little Tamtung, he still suffered from the heat. He stayed because the island had become his home as well as his prison, his own Elba.
Kavanaugh had never quite managed to think of the house as his home, even though he had paid too much for it. Raised in a big old Indiana farmhouse, his idea of a home was three stories high with a ceiling full of junk cast off and forgotten by four preceding generations.
He unclipped the Bren Ten’s holster from his belt and put it on a shelf above the day bed. Taking off his sweat-soaked shirt was like stripping away another layer of skin. He tossed it over the back of a kitchen chair, ignored the two cockroaches that shook their feelers at him indignantly, and opened his small, college-dorm size refrigerator. It wasn’t much cooler than the rest of the house, but the bourbon bottle was still on the top shelf.
He poured an inch into a nearly clean glass and slid the Blue Train CD into the player. With the haunting notes of Coltrane’s trumpet as an accompaniment, he carried the bourbon out to the porch.
Kavanaugh stood and sipped at the tepid liquor and absently traced the scar tissue along his right rib cage, then fingered the weal curving down from his hairline that pulled the outside corner of his right eye slightly out of line.
The scars had matching saddle-stitch patterns. A couple of times, women in the Phoenix of Beauty had remarked about the symmetrical way the scars lined up along his body. He knew they were hinting to hear the story of how he had incurred the injuries, but he never told them, for several good reasons.
The memories of the attack were hazy, like a dimly remembered nightmare from childhood. Primarily, he didn’t talk about it because he knew no one would believe the culprits were a pack of vicious Deinonychus. Even pointing out the skull of the creature that had sunk its fangs into his right side wouldn’t have convinced them.
Kavanaugh sat down on the porch railing. He heard the flapping rustle of wings overhead and he reflexively jumped, biting back a curse. The trilling cry of a night bird did not comfort him. He half expected to hear the clacking screech of the archeopteryx, flying out of the darkness to bite off his nose. It wouldn’t be the first time Huang Luan had attacked and inflicted scars on him.
During the struggle to cage the feathered monster, it had latched onto his thumb and damn near gnawed off the top joint. Recollecting the incident, he stared at the black peak rising above Big Tamtung, wishing he had the courage to take Huang Luan back there, but the archeopteryx had become accustomed to being pampered and dining on the occasional dead sailor.
Memories tumbled over each other in his mind, as they always did when he looked at the pinnacle of volcanic rock while his belly was full of bourbon. After resigning from the Air Force eleven years before, he had gone into partnership with Augustus Crowe and formed an exclusive travel agency that specialized in guiding people with stratospheric credit ratings to very exotic, very off-the-beaten path locales around the world. The more money a certain type of person had, the more they yearned for rare and unusual experiences.
Very often, those experiences involved the outright breaking of international and sovereign laws. Kavanaugh knew the world’s back alleys, the places most people wouldn’t think of visiting, even if they knew they existed.
Crowe could sail any kind of vessel, from a tugboat to a three-masted schooner. He had made his living piloting motor sailers through the Panama Canal to the Caribbean and back again. Several times he’d brought craft over from the Shanghai and Singapore boatyards.
In the Krakatoa, Crowe escorted seekers by sea and in a second-hand Cessna, Kavanaugh conveyed them by air. Sometimes they combined the modes of transportation. The Upper Amazon, the Himalayas, the Congo and even the interior of New Guinea—no place was beyond the reach of Horizons Unlimited, as long as it was not out of the reach of a client’s bank account.
One of Horizon’s repeat clients was Howard Flitcroft, a man who had amassed several fortunes through real estate development. Even while on vacation, the man was always tuned in to the opportunity for profit.
When the tsunami decimated coastlines along the Indian Ocean and South China Sea, Kavanaugh and Crowe turned their skills and vehicles to delivering aid on behalf of several international relief agencies, coordinated by Howard Flitcroft and his companies. During that period of chaos and suffering, Kavanaugh made the acquaintance of the beautiful Bai Suzhen, a former nightclub owner turned representative of the White Snake triad, one of the twenty-four affiliates of the United Bamboo Society.
As he had with Flitcroft, Kavanaugh found enough commonalities on which to build a friendship of sorts. Although Bai Suzhen could not have been more different from Flitcroft than if she had fallen from another planet, the two people shared a disquieting similarity in their ability to sniff out rare business opportunities.
Kavanaugh and Crowe fervently wished they possessed the same talent. After the tsunami, all they thought about was money and ideas of how to make more, but they were fast running out of both.
Then, when a storm squall drove Kavanaugh’s Cessna far from the shipping lanes, instead of thousands of empty miles of ocean waiting in the darkness, he'd found the rarest of business opportunities. Flying over a pair of islands all jungle green with occasional black outcroppings of volcanic stone, Kavanaugh and Crowe realized they had rediscovered what was the left of the Tamtungs, originally charted nearly three centuries before, but never explored.
He wasn’t overly surprised to find the islands. He knew that many clusters of tropical mud heaps existed between the Celebes and Sulu Seas. There were hundreds, maybe even thousands of them. No one really knew how many.
Kavanaugh piloted his plane over the deep-shadowed valleys of Big Tamtung, and although the scenery was beautiful, he wasn’t inclined to linger—not with a cargo compartment full of perishable and exceptionally valuable antibiotics.
Then, as the treetops streaked by beneath the shadows cast by the Cessna’s wings, he glimpsed another pair of wings. Huge and leathery, they were attached to a body that for an insane instant reminded Kavanaugh of a plucked turkey, but the creature didn’t look like a turkey in any other particular.
The long beak that snapped at his passing plane was spiked with a mouth full of sharp, conical teeth and he knew he looked at a pterosaur, flapping down an unmarked back alley of the global village. He also realized he looked at a fortune.
Upending the glass, Kavanaugh drained it of bourbon. Thunder rumbled faintly in the distance, but he didn’t see lightning reflected on the surface of the sea. On some nights he painfully felt the absence of the sounds of civilization—the rumble of trains, the blare of car horns, the distant drone of jet airliners.
The dead heat and silence touched him with the shuddery feeling that life itself had melted and poured into the gutters of Little Tamtung. Vague tendrils of mist coiled along the shoreline, writhing like souls trying to escape the dark purgatory of the sea.
He knew how they felt.
CHAPTER THREE
Four kilometers off the coast of Sarawak, Borneo
Bai Suzhen stood on the pitching mahogany deck of the launch as it approached the Bao Kù Chan. The treasure ship of the United Bamboo Society reminded her of a gigantic jeweled water bug, bobbing on the dark surface of the Sulawesi Sea. Colored lights and paper lanterns flared incandescently from the rigging of the big craft.
Although a junk like her own vessel, the Bao Kù Chan was twice as broad in the beam and length as the Keying. The ship had very high poops and overhanging stems, looking somewhat top-heavy because of the exceptionally tall pole masts and huge sails with batten lines running entirely across the fore and afterdecks. The three masts held huge sheets of ribbed sailcloth, folded up as neatly as paper fans.
The evening breeze sweeping over the flat surface of the ocean held a cool touch, but it was far from chill. The setting sun cast streaks of copper and gold over the hulls of the motorized sampans, launches and water taxis clustering around the four boarding ramps that extended down from the ship’s starboard side.
The sight of so many watercraft was a familiar one to Bai Suzhen. Although Chinese by birth, she had grown up around the open canals and klongs of Bangkok, which were always crowded with fishing boats, sampans and dugouts.
The pilot of her launch expertly ran the boat alongside a VIP ramp, so close that the hull scraped the aluminum edge. Then he reversed the engines, backing water into a smother of foaming spray.
Bai Suzhen stepped from the deck to the foot of the ramp, waving away the proffered hand of an attendant. Her two bodyguards, Dang Xo and Pai Chu followed her. They wore European-cut black business suits and narrow black neckties over spotless white shirts. Double-edged, flat-bladed jian swords rested in lacquered scabbards strapped across their backs. They wore their weapons openly, as was the custom of Ghee Hin soldiers.
Bai Suzhen went up the steps of the ramp swiftly, her stilt heels tapping out a snare drum rhythm on the metal risers. She was slim of build with the soft, matte tan skin of the northern Chinese. Her face was smooth and calm, with high cheekbones under contemplative almond eyes. A touch of lipstick outlined her wide mouth, damp now with a misting of salt spray. Her straight black hair was drawn up into a thick chignon on the crown of her head and made her appear taller than five foot six.
She wore a satin kimono jacket of scarlet and a black silk sheath skirt slit up to mid-thigh. The high military collar of the jacket did not detract from the elegant column of her throat. Bai Suzhen could feel the eyes of the ramp attendant upon her. Although the glimpse of her leg visible between edges of the skirt’s slit alone was tantalizing enough, she also knew the serpentine tattoo that writhed up from the ankle and slithered around her small kneecap riveted the man’s attention. The delicately detailed scales were edged in gold ink and the twisting body itself colored in tints of blue and green, with white highlights.
She knew the men she would meet with might be offended by her mode of dress, particularly by the golden imperial dragon of old Peking embroidered on her jacket, but she didn’t care. Nor did she fear their disapproval. Beneath her jacket she carried a CZ75 autopistol, snugged in a nylon shoulder rig.
As she reached the deck above, the smells of incense, burnt grease and human sweat became more pronounced. To her, the odor symbolized greed and therefore profit. It was a fitting scent for a treasure ship like the Bao Kù Chan.
The vessel combined the best elements of a floating bank with that of the classic den of iniquity, while maintaining the fine Asian tradition of organized criminality. Over a century before, pirates plying their trade in the South China Seas and Indian Oceans rarely headed for land after successful raids.
Instead, they deposited their plunder in an offshore bank owned by one of the Tongs. Soon, the concept of a floating vault was blended with that of a seagoing pleasure palace pandering to all tastes, however mundane or perverted. The United Bamboo Society had further streamlined the template and turned the Bao Kù Chan into the primary vault and money-laundering center for all triads with interests in east Malaysia.
Bai Suzhen hated the ship, knowing that too often young girls and boys were lured onto it with the promise of employment, only to end up addicted to drugs and forced into prostitution.
A huge pavilion built like a pagoda arose from amidships. Double rows of colored light bulbs illuminated the wide entrance, which blared forth with a cacophony of Cantopop music. Bai marched down the passageway, wincing at the volume and the incomprehensible, screeched-out lyrics. She still found it difficult to believe that the tawdry palace of pleasure was anchored only four kilometers from the port city of Sarawak. Although modernized, the Bao Kù Chan was still little improved from an opium den and gambling hell from the old Tong days.
Dong Xo and Pai Chu shouldered a path through a crowd of elegantly dressed Arabs and Japanese businessmen on holiday. A French woman with a sun-pinked face shouted angrily at the three people but closed her mouth when Bai Suzhen cast her a cold glare.
Flanked by her bodyguards, Bai climbed up a short flight of stairs to a balcony that ran around all four walls of the pavilion. She looked down into a casino decorated with Chinese lanterns and rotating mirror balls that reflected distorted birds-eye views of the blackjack, roulette, Pai-kow and Fan-tan tables. The beeps, burps and bells of electronic slot machines added to the clangor.
Barely audible over the noise rose the murmur of a dozen languages, as varied as the clothing styles worn by the men and women clientele—white dinne
r jackets, saris, Malay sarongs and bajus. She also glimpsed young men and women in Western-style garb and fashion—Chinese girls with breast implants, bleached blond hair, made up to resemble Paris Hilton and boys who affected the dress and swagger of American gangsta rap stars. She didn’t understand the intercultural mimicry, nor did she care to. She classified everyone who patronized the Bao Ku Chan’s as mental dwarves, hopelessly stunted by avarice and desperation.
Bai Suzhen moved around the balcony. On the walls were cages filled with parrots, cockatoos and birds of paradise. She felt far more pity for the captive birds than the people who gambled away their savings at one of the rigged games in the ship’s casino.
The balcony led to a carpeted hallway decorated with delicate Chinese porcelains behind glass cases. At the security checkpoints, the uniformed guards greeted her with deferential bows. The corridor ended at a door of teakwood. Seated on facing benches were the bodyguards of the other members of the conference. The soldiers of the Ghost Shadow and Blue Lotus triads were dressed identically to her own Ghee Hin, except they didn’t carry swords.
Bai Suzhen didn’t need to tell Dong Xo and Pai Chu to remain behind. Silently, they took seats on the benches, hands resting on their knees. She pushed opened the heavy slab of wood and entered a formal indoor garden, lit by glowing lanterns with sculpted shrubbery surrounding a central court. When she closed the door, the din from the casino became little more than a faint mutter.
In the center of the court rested a long, low table of black enamel. The surface was intricately carved and inlaid with ivory and jade figures depicting pagodas, tigers and elephants. Seated on cushions around the table she saw Zhou Zhi, mountain master of the Blue Lotus triad, and Jimmy Cao, vanguard boss of the Ghost Shadows.
“Chi dao.” The harsh, whispery voice sounded like it bounced around inside a cast iron throat and then passed a pair of rusty steel tonsils on its way out into the world. Bai Suzhen ignored Zhou Zhi’s observation that she had arrived late. She bowed toward the woman who sat at the head of the table. Lady Hu, the wáng hòu of the White Snake triad was very old, incredibly wrinkled, her bone-white hair tied back in a bun. She wore a layered silken robe of burgundy, embroidered with gold thread in dragon forms and tiny figures of Manchu nobility.