Tazuko lay down on the carpeted floor, placed a pillow beneath her head with her left hand and slid her right hand under her skirt and taut, white nylon panties. Very soon she was moaning softly, moving ever so slowly at first but then increasing the pressure until she was rolling back and forth in her mounting ecstasy. Suddenly her back arched, and it was as if she was suspended in time, her free hand clutching the air.
When she woke fifteen minutes later, she felt drained of all tension, her nerves calmed for the task ahead.
In the South China Sea, approximately halfway between the Spratly and Paracel island groups, the helo from the now sunken Chinese frigate ran out of gas and dropped like a stone into the sea.
Naked in his recliner, belching after draining another scotch on the rocks, Breem farted, told Mi Yin to “get the fuck outta the way” of the TV, and switched from the local Hong Kong station to CNN, where they were showing more shots of the PLA herding prisoners they’d taken from various “liberated” oil and gas rigs into a makeshift POW camp “somewhere” in China.
“More fucking losers,” Breem proclaimed, taking a handful of beer nuts, trying to pop them in his mouth one at a time and missing now and then, some of them rolling down into his crotch. “Fetch them, baby. Go on, fetch!” This was followed by laughter that rippled through his belly. “Hey hey hey!” he said, abruptly sitting up. An ABC “scoop” window was superimposed on the lower right corner of CNN pictures of the Chinese destroyer picking up “victims” of a “warmongering attack” in the South China Sea by what was believed to be an American submarine. Breem zoomed in on the superimposed ABC window, the New York anchor reporting that a “Sea Wolf SSN/SBN had been sunk off the Hawaiian island of Oahu by what naval sources were “unofficially” describing as an American- made Captor 60 mine or mines. It was suspected that the mine or mines that had gutted the U.S. sub had apparently been laid by a Chinese merchantman, the
“More fucking losers!” Breem proclaimed, his mouth half full of beer nuts. “Oh well, more yuan for B.I.” He was talking about Breem Industrials, listed on the Hong Kong exchange as one of the South Asia Industries group.
“How come?” Mi Yin asked.
“Come any way you like.” Breem thought this bon mot hilarious and laughed so hard, scotch and beer nuts sprayed the carpet. He tossed Mi Yin the empty glass. “Ice, my little juicy fruit. More yuan for me, my lovely, because who is the biggest seller of marine munitions — among other things — in the Near East?”
“You are,” Mi Yin said, handing him a glass of crushed ice turned golden with Johnnie Walker.
“ ‘Course,” he added, “manufacturers of Captors, et cetera, don’t know I’ve cornered the market. They only sell through ‘legitimate’ firms. Saps!” Breem knew he was drunk and that he was talking too much. “But hey, Juicy Fruit. What fuckin’ good is success if you can’t share it, right?” He meant “flaunt” it.
“Yes.”
“Right!” he bellowed.
“Right.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Danny Mellin couldn’t walk properly. Conditions on the PLA navy destroyer that had picked him, Sheng, and the guard from the raft along with other survivors of the torpedo attack against the Jianghu frigate had been so crowded that his right leg had gone to sleep. As he walked, or rather limped, down the gangplank toward the waiting POW trucks, he had little sensation in his right leg. He didn’t know where he was except that it was a Chinese naval port, given the number of destroyer frigates and fast-attack patrol boats moored there. As they parted company, Sheng said something to him, laughing at him, dismissing him with the contempt of a man who had been down a little while before but who was now clearly on the winning side.
“You prick!” Mellin said. “Should’ve let the sharks—” The next instant he was down on the dockside, his head numbed by the blow, blood oozing from the left side of his face. A PLA soldier clubbed him again with the AK-47’s stock, this time in the stomach.
Somebody, an Australian by his accent, helped Danny up. “Easy does it, mate. These jokers ‘ave no bloody sense of humor at all.” The same guard pushed the Australian in the small of the back. Both Danny and the Australian kept quiet, half climbing, half pushed up the tailgate of one of the three-ton trucks loaded with an assortment of captured rig workers. Two PLA navy guards, including the one who’d just struck him, rode at the end of the two benches of about ten POWs each, the AK-47s unslung, ready to fire. As the truck took off with a jerk that jarred everybody aboard, the Australian held up his hand. “Hey, Thumper,” he called out to the guard who’d just clubbed Mellin. “You got any water? Me mate here,” he indicated Mellin, “looks pretty badly dehydrated.”
“Up shut!” yelled the other guard. “You up shut!”
“All right,” the Aussie said. “Piss on you too.”
Mellin could see the guard starting to move toward the Australian, but the ride was so rough the guard stayed where he was, glaring at them, holding on to one of the truck’s two high roll bars. The Australian waited till the truck was climbing a hill, its engine in a high scream, the guards glancing at some peasant women walking along the roadside.
“Name’s Mike Murphy. What’s yours?”
“Mellin, Danny.”
“You a rigger?” Murphy asked.
“Yeah. You?”
“I tease Chinese.”
“Yeah, well, be careful.”
“Not to worry.”
“You been—” Mellin’s mouth was so dry he could barely talk. “—interrogated yet?”
“No,” Murphy said, and for the first time a shadow of alarm crossed the Aussie’s face.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CIA Langley’s fax to its Tokyo field agent, Henry Wray, was to the point: EXPEDITE SONGBIRD IMMEDIATE STOP MESSAGE ENDS.
Wray asked his JDF colleagues to bring in the Korean prisoner, Jae Chong, “and put him in the paper box.” It was three feet square, two feet high, and made of slotted cardboard that could be dismantled and reassembled in seconds. The suspect or prisoner had to squat in the middle of the square, and God help him if he moved.
“We may have to wait a long time till he talks,” one of the JDF agents said.
“We can’t wait too long,” Wray countered. He thought of the danger that one person, one mishap, could have on the complicated and vital logistics tail of Second Army that would stretch from Japan to Hanoi. “Give him an hour on his haunches,” Wray suggested. “If he hasn’t talked by then, beat the shit out of him. No bruises.”
That afternoon at a quarter to three they picked up Chong from his job as a janitor for an apartment complex not far from the Ginza strip. The timing was important for Chong, who knew that sooner or later they would get him. But had they arrested him an hour earlier, he probably would not have withstood the beating until the 2:38 departure of the Joetsu Shinkansen, bullet train, from Tokyo’s Ueno Station to Niigata on Honshu’s west coast, over
