Fire And Ice Page 22

  "Before you bring in our guest. I hear your British bulldog screwed up again."

  Moss's jaw dropped. How in hell had he found that out? "I'm real sorry, Mr. Jack. It won'

  t happen again." "Goddamn right it won't happen again."

  Moss didn't know what to make of that. Mr. Jack told him to bring in their "guest" and to stand behind his chair.

  Unlike the generals who visited by boat, Mr. Yu had boarded from the pier. He was a tough-looking heavyset guy, like a Chinese mafioso. And he had some attitude, until Mr.

  Jack broke him down with a mad-dog stare and a string of Chinese that sounded like a firefight in the Lincoln Tunnel.

  Chinese were supposed to be a hard read, but this guy's face said a lot. He went from attitude to angry to scared shitless in about thirty seconds.

  At that point, Mr. Jack looked up at Moss, ignoring the mafioso in the blue suit. "I've just explained to Mr. Yu—who's got a nice little racket on the docks—that I've been told he's poaching on our territory. Mr. Yu started to mouth off until I informed him who our friends are. Now he's having second thoughts."

  Moss took the hint to add his own mad-dog stare to the Chink boy's worries.

  "I'm about to explain to him how disappointed our

  friends will be if he doesn't do something real soon to undo the mess he's made."

  When Mr. Jack was done, Mr. Yu ran backward from the room, bowing like a man ducking bullets. Moss said, "Can I ask something?"

  "You learn with questions, Moss. What is it?" "What'd the guy do?"

  "The son of a bitch gave a goddammed sampan to the doctor's husband so he could look for us."

  "How in hell did the husband get here?"

  "Hooked up with some two-bit Hong Kong Triad."

  "So you told Mr. Yu to take care of him?" He had an awful feeling Mr. Jack was going to pull an end run, and do it himself.

  "No, no. Just told him to stay out of the way. Old friends'll handle it."

  That was worse, thought Moss. With all these old friends, what did Mr. Jack need him for? "Why not let him find us? Bang him when he walks in the door."

  "Moss. " Mr. Jack's patience was wearing thin. "Look out the window, Moss. Wha'dya see?"

  Moss looked.

  Mr. Jack said, "Last thing I need is that son of a bitch drawing attention to my ship."

  STONE SLIPPED OUT OF THE OLD PEDDLER'S TENEMENT BE-

  fore dawn, into the vanguard of the men and women streaming down the Nanjing Road to practice tai chi by the river. The loudspeakers in the park weren't blaring music yet, but early risers were already warming up. They were joined by numerous western tourists in jogging suits, but, as he had noted the previous mornings, only the Chinese stepped off the paths to talk to the trees. Stone chose his for its view of the embankment steps, pressed his forehead to the soot-caked bark, and watched for an ambush.

  If he couldn't find the ship today he would have to admit that he had figured wrong, that Kerry was wrong, and that the Dallas Belle/Amy Bodman was elsewhere in the world.

  One last try. Provided whoever had tipped the Brit last night hadn't laid a trap where he boarded the coal sampan.

  He was half surprised to see it chugging out of the dark, and relieved when the captain's sons jumped up on the coal carrier's bow and scanned the embankment, expectantly. He'

  d been watching for fifteen minutes. It looked safe. His spine prickling, he hurried through the swelling crowd and down the steps.

  The elder son grinned a welcome and handed Stone aboard. The younger helped him down into the waist of the boat. In the wheelhouse, their sister was waiting shyly with a covered mug of tea; her mother parted the curtain to smile a toothless greeting; even the captain offered a

  friendly nod as he backed the sampan into the stream. Stone pointed downriver, and the diesel yammered a rapid note.

  Mr. Wang watched from the shadows, aloof as a crow in his black suit and chauffeur hat.

  But William Sit greeted Stone effusively. "Here we have good weather for searching for the yachtmen's marina." As usual, he was dying to practice his English. "Are you pleased with this weather, sir?"

  The weather had finally given him a break. Yesterday and the day before, thick fog had blotted out the harbor until ten o'clock. This morning the wind had backed to the northeast. Visibility was the clearest Stone had seen in the city, and he felt a renewed hope that banished the despair of the terrible night.

  Mr. Wang was studying him thoughtfully. When he returned the driver's gaze, Wang glanced away.

  They passed the piers below the passenger terminals, the Shanghai Shipyard's dry dock—which held the container ship he had mistaken for the LNG carrier—and crossed the river to the Shanghai Shipyard East.

  "Ask the captain to slow down to four knots."

  The Chinese exchanged questioning looks: surely the American understood that such a busy shipyard had no extra land to lease to yachtsmen, unless, of course, his friends were extraordinarily well connected.

  There were ships on ways, ships alongside piers, and ships in slips cut into the riverbank.

  He scrutinized each with the binoculars, regardless of color. By now they would have had time to camouflage her tan hull with a coat of black paint. But none was the Dallas Belle.

  The chemical factory downstream, host to a number of tanker types, received the same careful study. When the sampan had passed it, Stone was confident none of them was the gas carrier. He scrutinized the neighboring factories, though most of their piers were occupied by freight and container vessels instead of tankers.

  The refinery lay downriver from the factories—an enormous sprawl of pipelines, fume-belching crackers, and holding tanks. Every vessel alongside was a petroleum ship—crude carriers arriving with raw material and various specialized tankers loading up with finished product. The refinery offered ample space and natural camouflage to hide a gas carrier. He had, however, already searched it twice.

  And yet it drew him again because it was so logical a site. The power plant on Hangchou Bay had exerted the same pull and he had gone back again—to no avail—in a very reluctant Mr. Wang's taxi.

  He studied each ship with the binoculars. As the Huangpu was shallow, the crude carriers came in partially laden, riding high, flashing their bottom paint, and scything the river with propeller blades partly out of the water.

  The smaller gasoline, diesel, and kerosene vessels that carried off the refinery's output were bound, the sampan driver said, up the Yangtze River to supply the hinterland. Stone focused on each, however, as he didn't completely trust his sense of scale against the immensity of space and structure. Seen from a Pacific atoll so low it was nearly awash, the Dallas Belle had loomed mightily. But in Shanghai, he kept reminding himself, little would distinguish it from a thousand other drab steel edifices in the port.

  Reaching a marshy bank, he ordered the boat to the other side. The expression on the captain's face seemed to shout: any fool—even a clumsy landsman like the translator of English—could see that this shallow, unused stretch of river would be an ideal site for barbarian yachtsmen; even the gangster-taxi driver in the fancy hat could see that yachts moored here would be happy—close to the mouth of the river and therefore less likely to get in the way of coal sampans whose families had trouble enough trying to earn a living.

  Stone wanted another look at the big breaker's shed. But halfway across the river, the captain growled a throaty version of his wife's "aiyyeee," and changed course. Stone thought he was afraid of the execution ground hidden somewhere out past the railroad tracks.

  "William, tell him to take me closer."

  But the captain pointed, and now Stone saw what he had missed while he was studying the breaker's yard in his glasses. Patrol boats were cruising a sort of picket line in front of the breaker's yard. Running slowly on opposite courses, they paralleled the frontage of the ship shed, turned around and passed each other again, clearly standing guard.

  "Tell him to st
ick to the middle." He raised the powerful binoculars and studied the shore. The cruise ship had company, a vessel in the slip beside it. The new candidate to become scrap metal was acquiring a bamboo framework around its hull. All he could see was its stem and the back of its house. Oddly, the men on the scaffolding appeared to be painting the hull black.

  Stone tightened his grip on the binoculars.

  "Yacht!" said the sampan captain.

  "The captain says he sees a yacht," said William Sit.

  Veronica lay in shadow, between the ship they were painting and the pier. He tried to fine-focus the glasses and only gradually realized he first had to dry his eyes.

  Her sails were furled and covered and she was tied expertly with spring lines and tide-tensioned bow and stern lines. Studying the boat for signs of Sarah and Ronnie, he saw that the bow and spring lines were tied off aboard, which, if his eyes weren't playing tricks, meant that whoever had tied her had prepared to get under way instantly. Sarah.

  Had to be Sarah.

  Suddenly frantic, he swept the dark pier for her and Ronnie, then the ship—the sand-colored ship they were painting black. He couldn't see her main deck behind the bulwarks, but he could see bridge wings and a sort of balcony on the back of the house one deck below the bridge.

  "Tell the captain to hold her right there."

  The captain replied, via William, that he was drawing the attention of the patrol boats by standing still in the channel.

  "Remind him that I've got papers," Stone said as he commenced a porthole-by-porthole investigation of the gas carrier's house.

  "The captain says, Not for those boats, you don't.' I believe you should believe the captain, sir. And Mr. Wang

  says he too believes so. With great respect, sir, we both believe the captain should steer away."

  "Slowly," snapped Stone, peering through the binoculars. The ship was less than a quarter mile away. He could swim to it.

  The captain rammed his throttle forward and the coal sampan hurried downstream. Stone stared astern. So close. In seconds the shed wall had blocked his view of the Dallas Belle. Moments more and the shed itself grew small, blending with the riverbank until it was indistinguishable from the ferry head, the gray flats, and the heavy sky.

  "We come back in one hour," William Sit translated.

  The captain caught Stone's eye and nodded reassuringly. Obviously, there would be no yachtsman marina in the breaker's yard, but just as obviously, the American cared deeply about something there.

  Stone unfolded the chart and studied the area again. Breaker's yard, bordered inland by the railroad. Further inland, the execution ground, which of course was not shown on the chart. He asked Wang if there was a road through the mud flats and marsh beyond. The taxi driver said there was. "But restricted," said William Sit. "Not allowed."

  The sampan proceeded downriver for several miles. To Stone each mile felt like a thousand. The captain's wife passed tea around. Stone's grew cold in his hand. Finally, the captain agreed to chance a run back up the river. But now the tide was going out. A strong current slowed the sampan, and she crept against it until Stone thought he would go insane from the waiting.

  The captain tucked his sampan under the stern of a rusty Hanoi freighter and directly ahead of a Huangpu River excursion boat with a stridently amplified tour guide. At last the breaker's shed came into sight. The tour guide fell silent as they neared the execution ground. The double patrol was still prowling the river.

  Stone raised his binoculars, his hands shaking in anticipation as his sight line cleared the wall of the shed. A corner of the Dallas Belle's house entered his field of vision, slowly widening until he could see the entire width

  of it. He focused on the upper decks. The bridge wings were still empty, as was the balcony below the bridge.

  He stole a quick look at the Swan—forlorn in the shadows, definitely unoccupied—then resumed his inspection of the deckhouse, scanning the round portholes and the several big windows on the uppermost decks. Lights were burning in some of the cabins. Not a sign of her.

  He glanced pleading at the captain. Would he stop? The captain eyed the patrol boats and shook his head. Too soon, as the sampan continued upstream, the cruise ship began to block his view of the gas carrier. She swarmed with workmen in hard hats. But the fiery cascades and the brilliantly flashing welders' outfits that Stone had seen earlier in the week had ceased—sensible in light of the new arrival's volatile cargo—and the yard workers were occupied stringing cable and shifting cranes that rolled on rails along the pier.

  He noticed that the liner was riding high—several feet below her waterline exposed—emptied of fuel, water, stores, and furnishings before her final voyage to oblivion. The Dallas Belle, he realized a moment after he had lost sight of her, had looked a little light, too, as if they had unloaded some of her liquefied natural gas in order to cross the bar.

  "William? Ask the captain if he knows why that gas ship is in the breaker's yard."

  The captain's shrug needed no translation.

  "Please ask him if he has ever seen gas carriers in that slip before."

  William asked. The reply was simultaneously baroque and blunt. "The captain says he is a family man, with many mouths to feed, who carries coal and minds his own business."

  "Tell him to drop me on the shore."

  "Here?"

  "By that ferry head—no, before it. On that old pontoon."

  William conveyed the order and the sampan swung out of the stream toward a pontoon apparently abandoned when a new ferry landing had been constructed two hundred yards upriver. The captain's sons ran forward and

  scrambled onto the bow, where they stood peering intently into the murky water. A frantic arm signal caused him to jink the boat around an obstruction. He spoke to William Sit.

  "He says to get ready to jump. And to be careful because the pontoon is very old and rusted."

  "Tell him to pick me up in an hour. And if I'm not here, keep coming back every hour until I am." "Am Ito come in your company, sir?"

  Stone hesitated. Downriver, the patrols off the breaker's yard were converging. But this time as they met, they peeled out into the stream and headed in company upriver. He and the captain watched them intently, but they showed no interest in the sampan and continued past them, past the ferry, and on toward the center of the city.

  "Yes. And tell Mr. Wang we'll need him, too." "May I ask whether you believe you have discovered an important yachtsmen marina location?"

  Stone was already out the door, shrugging into his backpack. He ignored the question and said, "Grab Wang. Let's go!"

  When all three of them were perched on the bow, the captain's sons guided him in. The bow kissed the rusty steel and when, to Stone's relief, it didn't collapse, he stepped onto it and reached to help William. Mr. Wang boarded under his own steam. One by one they crossed the rickety bridge that connected the float to the riverbank, where a footpath pointed the way toward the breaker's yard through a field of leafless brush.

  It was nearing noon, the winter sun about as high as it would rise, the cold wind insistent.

  Far ahead loomed the gigantic ship shed. Inland at some distance across the flat ground rumbled the switch engines shuttling frdight cars.

  William Sit cast an anxious gaze at the bleakness and ventured a rare opinion: "It is not necessarily likely that the authorities will hurrah this place for a yachtsmen marina, because it is perhaps too close to Shanghai Supreme People's Court Project."

  "I'll leave that to the powers that be," Stone replied distractedly as he scanned the path.

  Wang, too, appeared less than thrilled with their landing, and even less inclined to follow him. "Okay, gentlemen, let's just check out this open ground between here and the breaker's yard. .. . William, please tell Mr. Wang we're going to have a look around."

  He plunged through the brush without looking back and was relieved a moment later to hear them crunching after him on the dead leaves and bro
ken twigs.

  He walked for a half mile. The path was on top of the bank, which was higher than the field, having been built up by repeated dredging of the river. Occasional higher humps offered views of the railroad tracks. From one such elevation he saw, with the binoculars, a wall of mud-colored brick which appeared to be topped with barbed wire. The wall was a full mile inland, and half a mile beyond the railroad.

  A rail spur curved into the breaker's shed. A train of gondola cars stood on a siding at the foot of a huge mound of scrap metal. A crane was loading the gondolas, swinging a magnetic hoist that bristled with scrap.

  Stone eyed the track. If they couldn't sail out of there on Veronica, the train offered the option of fleeing into Shanghai itself. Last ditch, but better than no ditch.

  The wind carried the bang and clatter of heavy machinery and pneumatic drills and hammers, and the thud of hoist engines straining. A steady stream of scrap issuing from the shed was added to the pile.

  "William, I want to have a look inside that shed. See what the neighbors are like."

  "Neighbors?"

  "We'll want our letters of introduction ready."

  Mr. Wang spoke, and William, already anxious, suddenly looked terrified.

  "Mr. Wang reminds me that it was in front of this shipyard that the patrol boats were . . .

  patrolling. He respectfully wonders whether a proper introduction to the managers of the shipyard would be a wiser way to visit."

  Stone saw that this particular party was over. Neither William nor the Triad driver offered the slightest indication that they could be persuaded, bullied, or even forced at gunpoint to enter the breaker's yard.

  "Okay . . . William, here's what I want you to do. Go back to the boat. It's just past noon.

  Tell the captain to

  come back to the pontoon every hour on the hour until you see me. Don't stop unless you see me. Okay?" "I am worried for you, sir."

  "I'm fine. See you in an hour. Or two hours. Or three hours. Every hour on the hour, right?"

  "Right."

  "Tell Mr. Wang."

  Stone turned away, ignoring Wang's protest, and hurried toward the shed, which loomed against the smoke-gray sky like an oversized jumbo jet hanger. There were numerous doors in its sheet metal side.