Without Warning

by Darrell Maloney

  All because they were on record performing homosexual acts when they were avowed heterosexuals. Or checking into a hotel with a prostitute in a foreign country and then asking the prostitute and her friend to tie them up and urinate on them.

  Or even worse…

  Like Wally, sometimes they performed even more heinous acts.

  Yes, the Chinese were remarkably thorough.

  When the first prostitute failed to leave the estate, they knew they’d hit the jackpot.

  Four days later, when Wally was at work, they broke into the estate and planted hidden cameras in the ceiling vents.

  When the dog poop photo put Wally into a zombie-like trance Yao paused the slide show and asked him, in a calm and almost friendly voice, “Have you seen enough? Would you like for me to stop?”

  Wally said nothing.

  He was wondering what the front page in his hometown of Clovis, New Mexico would say.

  Perhaps:

  LOCAL MAN GETS LIFE

  FOR HOOKER KILLINGS

  Yao misinterpreted Wally’s silence to mean that Wally didn’t want him to stop. Actually, it was quite the contrary. Wally wanted it all to stop. He wanted the photos to go away. He wanted Yao to go away. He wanted to wake up in a cold sweat and realize that this was all a terrible dream.

  But Yao didn’t know that. For all Yao knew this sick freak was enjoying the show.

  So he restarted the slide show.

  The next slide showed Wally leaning into his bathtub with a large knife, dismembering a woman’s corpse, a bone saw on the floor at his side.

  The one after that showed him standing in front of the kitchen stove, a large stewpot boiling away, dropping pieces of bones into the pot.

  Next, a photo of him removing chunks of human flesh from a metal bucket and feeding them into his meat grinder.

  After that he saw himself removing a human skull from a now-cooled stew pot, after all the flesh had been boiled away, and placing the skull into the same metal bucket at his feet.

  The last photo showed him pulverizing the skull by lifting and then dropping a sixteen-pound sledge hammer into the bucket repeatedly.

  And lastly, the coup de gras: A photo of Wally handing a dog bowl full of human flesh and ground bones to an eager Zeus, who appeared to have loved the stuff.

  Because, after all, humans are made of meat. That’s the real reason dogs love us so much.

  The next slide was the last one.

  It read, in English:

  Murder in the People’s Republic of China is punishable by public hanging or life in prison at hard labor. Hard labor in China does not mean the same thing as hard labor in America. Hard labor in China means prisoners swing hammers and dig rocks until they fall over dead, regardless of how old they are. Then they are thrown on the trash heap where they fit right in with the other garbage.

  Whoever made the slide show did an impressive job. But then, that shouldn’t have been a surprise. The Russians had taught them all the tricks of the trade.

  They had Wally by his scrawny little neck. They knew it, and now Wally knew it.

  He finally found his tongue.

  “I want a lawyer. You had no right to invade my home and hide cameras to take pictures of me.”

  Yao smiled before speaking again.

  “Oh, I’m afraid you’re mistaken, Mr. Wahlberg. These are not photographs. They are stills taken from videotape. We don’t just have evidence of you dismembering the bodies. We have video of you courting your victims, then transporting them to your residence, then having sex with them, then murdering them, then having sex with them again.

  “We have video evidence of your crimes, from beginning to end. Over eight hundred hours of video. It’s quite an impressive collection.

  “Of course, you are rather unique. Most of our visitors don’t murder and dismember our citizens, after all.

  “As for your rights, you are not in America anymore. The only right you have is to swing back and forth in the wind from that hangman’s noose. Or to break rocks all day in one of our labor camps.”

  “I can’t break rocks all day. I’m forty five years old, for Christ’s sake.”

  “You’re missing my point, Mr. Wahlberg. My point is that you no longer have a choice. You made a choice to cut the throat of Lui Sola, your first victim. From now on the choices are ours.

  “And if, by chance, you’re lucky enough to avoid the hangman’s noose, you will break rocks until the day you die. It doesn’t matter whether you’re forty five or ninety five. You’ll break rocks until you fall over dead.”

  A very desperate Wally didn’t know what to say or do.

  He started crying. Soft sobs at first, but within a couple of minutes he was blubbering like a baby.

  “Surely,” he wailed, “there’s some other way…”

  There was a chill to Mr. Yao’s voice when he calmly and matter-of-factly said, “Of course, Mr. Wahlberg. There is always another way.”

  -8-

  That nightmare which was Wally’s initial meeting took place long before. In 1997, in fact.

  Wally had been a Chinese asset ever since.

  It was so long ago now that Wally was occasionally able to put the whole sordid incident out of his mind. But not for long.

  Mr. Yao was dead now, and Wally had a new handler who contacted him every few months to remind him of his commitment to the People’s Republic.

  But it was Mr. Yeo’s smiling face that Wally always saw in his nightmares. He could put the sordid affair out of his mind sometimes. But the nightmares always brought it back.

  On the bright side, the whole incident cured Wally of his need to brutalize and murder prostitutes. The shock of being caught convinced him that further exploits of that kind would be a losing proposition. He was lucky in that he escaped hanging or imprisonment once. He certainly couldn’t risk it a second time.

  He wasn’t scared straight, exactly. He still had the impulses to kill. He still fantasized about it.

  He was just too terrified to act on those impulses now.

  And in that regard, Asian prostitutes, be they in China or on American streets, were much better off.

  Wally didn’t like betraying his country.

  He didn’t like agreeing to do whatever the Chinese government told him to do, then and forever, until he finally drew his last breath. He knew he was selling his soul to the devil, and he hated himself for it.

  But Wally was a man who put his own well being above all else.

  To save his own rather expansive backside, he’d sell out his country in a hot minute.

  The agreement was simple.

  “We will allow you to return to the United States,” Yeo told him way back then. “And we will contact you periodically to remind you of your commitment to us.

  “Sometimes we will give you orders to do something. It may be something simple, like mailing a few packages for us or procuring a firearm for one of our agents.

  “It will never be anything you cannot handle.

  “But I will warn you now… our instructions to you will be non-negotiable. You’ll either comply or you won’t.

  “And if you don’t we will contact your country’s justice department. We will show them our videos and request you be extradited to China for trial.

  “And you will never be free again.”

  For many years after his meeting China never asked him to do anything – not a single thing.

  Wally finished his work in Beijing and returned to the United States, where he got on with his life and was more or less an upstanding citizen.

  It might be said he led a normal life, except for the quarterly visits he got from his new handler, a man named Mr. Wu.

  And, of course, those pesky nightmares. The ones which always ended with an unnerving vision of Mr. Yao, repeating his words of so long ago… “and you will never be free again.”

  That all changed in 2012, when Wally decided to retire.

  The Chinese, as usua
l, were on their toes. The day after Wally announced to his co-workers he was hanging it up, Mr. Wu paid Wally a visit.

  “But how did you find out so quickly?” Wally asked rather incredulously.

  “We have spies and informants everywhere,” came the reply.

  “We want you to move to San Diego or one of its suburbs. It’s a nice place to retire. Close to Mexico, close to the beach, lots of prostitutes with Asian faces.”

  The last sentence stung Wally just a bit. He was fighting hard to resist his urges, and he didn’t like being reminded of his past.

  He’d been to San Diego. It wasn’t his favorite place to be. Too damned hot. But he knew that to argue would be futile. And he didn’t want to rile the Chinese by trying to get out of doing the only thing they’d ever asked of him.

  “Okay,” he said.

  “Be sure you purchase property with several acres and loose zoning restrictions. I need to see the property before you agree to buy it.”

  “Okay. But why do I need such a large property? I’m a single man.”

  Wu took on a look of a man dealing with a petulant child.

  “Because we told you to. That’s why.”

  Wally did what he was told, purchasing a ranch property in Winter Gardens. It was a suburb of San Diego and was approved by Mr. Wu.

  The next time Mr. Wu came to call Wally asked him, “Now what?”

  The Chinaman curtly answered, “Now… you wait.”

  Wally waited several more years. In 2016 his handler changed once again.

  His new handler was a woman, and an attractive one at that. Since China still wasn’t exactly known as a progressive nation, Wally assumed putting a pretty woman over him was a means of torturing him.

  Miss Xin looked remarkably like the prostitutes he used to murder and dismember, after all. That couldn’t be just a coincidence, now could it?

  Two weeks before, just before Christmas, Miss Xin paid him an unscheduled visit.

  “The time for waiting has ended,” she told him.

  “What do I have to do?”

  “Relax, Mr. Wahlberg. Your part is easy.”

  He suspected otherwise.

  “All you have to do is allow a truck driver to park a shipping container on the back of your property. He will arrive on January 5th. He already has a satellite photograph of your property. He already knows where to drop his container.

  “Just let him in and let him out.

  “And… this part is important. Don’t ever go near the container he drops. If you do it’ll be the biggest mistake of your life.”

  -9-

  Wally was just a bit leery.

  And a little bit suspicious.

  He said, “What’s this all about?”

  She rolled her eyes and wondered to herself, why did American assets have to be so stupid?

  “All you have to do is to watch out for him on January 5th, let him onto your property, and allow him to leave his container behind.”

  “Once again, you must not attempt to break into the container. In fact, you are to stay away from it. If anyone should ask what’s in it or why it’s there, you are to make up something to satisfy them. If they get curious enough to contact the authorities, you will be on your way back to China to face murder charges. I would suggest you have a good story to satisfy your friends.”

  “That’s not a problem. I have few friends. And none of them will have access to my property. How long will the container be here?”

  “That is not your concern. Consider it a permanent fixture of your property.”

  As he waited for the mysterious truck driver to arrive, Wally relived the whole ordeal in his mind. All of it, from the feeling of raw power he felt when he killed his victims, to the disgust he felt when handling his victims’ intestines. He’d never known how many disgusting parts the human body held, or the sickening smells associated with some of them.

  He missed the power he had over his victims.

  He didn’t miss handling their guts.

  At five after eight a tractor-trailer combination pulled up to his security gate and honked.

  Wally pushed the electronic lock which released the gate and started it opening. Then he walked out his front door and headed down the drive to greet the driver.

  The driver had no time or inclination to receive any greetings Wally had to offer.

  He roared past the startled Wally, his driver’s side window rolled tightly to the top, and even glared icily as he drove by.

  Wally got the sense the driver would just as soon roll over him as drive past him, and was happy he stepped off the drive and into the grass while he had a chance.

  Miss Xin said the driver had been briefed, had a map of the property, and knew exactly where he was to drop the load. Apparently no conversation was necessary.

  Wally stood in his front yard and watched the rig as it disappeared past the end of his driveway and onto the acreage behind his house.

  It was an intermodal shipping container, bright orange in color, trumpeting the name “Hyuong” in eight foot high letters.

  Wally used to be in the business of international shipping.

  He recognized the container as a type he’d seen thousands of times before. It was the type of container which was filled with cheap Chinese exports and loaded onto shipping vessels for transport to America and every other country China did business with.

  At port the containers were unloaded and placed upon flatbed trailers, where they were trucked all over the nation.

  He was also aware that U.S. Customs inspections of such containers was woefully inadequate. That after the World Trade Center bombings government officials placed nearly all their anti-terrorism efforts on air travel.

  Go to any airport and you’ll go through scanners which can count the freckles on your backside. You’ll be asked to remove your shoes and belt and the earrings your Aunt Edna left you.

  The Department of Homeland Security says airport security is so strict because it prevents terrorism. And that’s partially true.

  The fact is, though, that there’s very little evidence that terrorists have even tried to pull another 9-11 style attack since 2001. Sure, there was the shoe bomber, but he was loony toons and a “lone wolf,” too crazy to claim by Al Qaeda or anybody else.

  Here’s another fact: An even bigger reason airport security is so strict is to give the impression flying is safe. And it is. Safer than it’s ever been.

  The aircraft industry is very rich and very powerful. If the flying public thought their airplanes were going to be hijacked they wouldn’t fly. Simple as that. The aircraft industry would lose billions upon billions. That’s why they pay millions to lobbyists, who pay millions to congressmen’s reelection campaigns; to make sure the Transportation Security Administration gets the funding they need to keep counting your freckles.

  That’s what gets all the attention, and that’s what gets all the bucks.

  Something TSA and the Department of Homeland Security never talk about are the abysmal security procedures at the nation’s ports.

  Those huge container ships which come in each and every day are under a big time crunch to be checked and unloaded.

  There are only a few ports which can accommodate such ships. They have to get them off-loaded and back out to sea so other ships can tie up in their spots.

  They’ve got trucks lined up, night and day, to take the intermodal containers from the ships and to truck them all over the place.

  Dock workers are under a lot of pressure to keep things moving, for a large part of the American economy depends on them doing so.

  And U.S. Customs?

  Well, most of their resources are tied up at the airports, where they’re closely inspecting the trinkets American tourists are bringing back from Paris.

  The sad fact is, only four percent of the intermodal containers coming in from China are actually opened up and inspected.

  The other ninety six percent? The ones that are never
inspected?

  Their manifests say they contain children’s toys, or cheap plastic dishware bound for sale in one of America’s dollar stores.

  In reality?

  They could contain, quite literally, absolutely anything.

  Wally knew this, and shuddered.

  Twenty minutes later the driver reappeared and exited the property, this time with no container behind him.

  He wondered what he’d just accepted from one of his nation’s most dangerous adversaries, but dared not try to find out.

  He knew he was being a traitor to his country.

  But he put his own well being before that.

  He decided to put the container out of his mind. He figured that was his best course of action; an action which would help him sleep at night.

  If Wally knew that he was far from alone he wouldn’t sleep at all. He’d run as fast and as far as he could, to a nation which didn’t have an extradition treaty with the United States.

  He wouldn’t even care where the country was, or what kind of political or religious nonsense he’d have to tolerate to live there.

  You see, Wally made a common mistake among Chinese and Russian assets in that he thought he was alone.

  He thought he was the only one being blackmailed by those rotten commies.

  And that he alone was betraying his country and his fellow citizens.

  He was able to convince himself that it wasn’t so bad. After all, just how much damage could a single man do? He certainly couldn’t bring down a whole nation by himself.

  He didn’t have a clue that China and Russia had hundreds of assets, just like him, who were American citizens living in America but doing the communists’ bidding.

  Or that dozens of American cities had shipping containers stored nearby, much like the one in his own back yard.

  Gathering dust and waiting…

  -10-

  Summed up in ten words or less, Kim Jong-un is a fat little man in ugly clothing.

  That’s it.

  That’s all one needs to know about him.

  Sure he’s the Supreme Leader of North Korea. But that’s like saying he’s the coolest kid in a room full of geeks.