Choke Point

When Wu Ling heard the knock on her door in Beijing’s Haidan District, it was near midnight, and she feared it was the Gong An Bu. Instead it was a neighbor, an elderly woman who had lost a son in the fighting against the terrorists in Kazakhstan. A member of the PLA Corrections Service, she came to Wu Ling in civilian clothes and gave her a well-worn postcard. The card, Wu Ling thought, looked as if it had been carried around for some time, an assumption borne out by the fact it had been postmarked two weeks earlier. Wu Ling gave the uninspiring picture of one of the Forbidden City’s 9,999 rooms only a cursory glance.

The corrections officer left quickly, disappearing into one of the maze of hutongs.

The note from Chang wasn’t long: twelve lines. He wrote that he was fine, the prison food bad, and the Central Committee blaming him for the setbacks the army was experiencing in Kazakhstan. Li Kuan’s terrorists had more sophisticated weapons than anyone had anticipated. He missed her, but he had friends, “and tell as many of them as you can what’s happened to me.” He was sure his 12th Army and the other PLA divisions would soon regain the offensive, and then they’d have to let him out of jail. He missed her and “bamboo in the wind,” the last a sexual reference to something he’d taught her when she first became his concubine, then his lover.

It was his writing, all right. She made a photocopy and sent it to Charlie Riser, Cultural Attache, U.S. Embassy, Xiu Shui Bei Jie 3, Chaoyang District, Beijing. Maybe Mandy’s father could use the information to embarrass Beijing and the Nanjing Military District into admitting the ridiculous lie that her lover and protector wasn’t in perpetual conference but was being used as a “scapegoat”—she remembered the word from Mr. Riser — for Beijing’s failures in Kazakhstan. She wasn’t a fool — she also sent copies of the postcard, in good quality, opaque envelopes, to those who were still General Chang’s friends in the Politburo.

Riser took his copy straight to the military attache, Bill Heinz. “Bill, I knew they were lying,” he said. “Look at this.”

Heinz didn’t immediately look, preoccupied as he was with the two-China war. It still wasn’t possible to nail it down — who’d actually started it. Not that it mattered now that the typhoon’s atrocious weather put pay to the idea of any ChiCom invasion of Taiwan, at least for the foreseeable future. But Beijing now had a foothold on Penghu as well as Matsu, a fact that for now the United States, preoccupied as it was with the catastrophe in its own waters, wasn’t disposed to remedy. The home front had priority.

Finally he looked at Riser’s copy of the postcard sent to Wu Ling. “So?”

“Well, it proves I was right. Chang is in jail. And if I can see him — I mean he talks about Li Kuan being in Kazakhstan — and get more details about—”

“You want me to use my connections to find out what prison he’s in.”

“Yes.”

“We’ve got to use our informants sparingly, Charlie. It’s like capital. You can’t spend it on—”

“You think it’s frivolous?”

“No, no, no. Hell, no. But right now we’ve just had a war across the strait.”

“Which one?”

“Exactly. I’ve got orders from Washington to spend 24/7 on future PRC-ROC relations. Nothing else.”

“You won’t help?”

“Of course I will, Charlie; but it’s gonna have to be on the fly. Can’t promise more than that. I can ask questions about Kazakhstan.” There was an awkward pause. He knew Riser was still hurting over Mandy, but Riser would always be hurting, and the reality was, Riser would never see Li Kuan. Never get near him.

“I’ll ask questions,” he told Riser. “Something might come up.”

But Riser could tell his embassy colleague held no hope, and the truth was, despite his own resolve to see Li Kuan brought to justice, he felt hopeless too.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

“Eti three minutes,” advised the Skate’s third mate.

The Port Townsend — Keystone ferry was five miles from the Keystone dock. “Still no radio response, Admiral,” Skate’s captain reported to Jensen. “We’re going to siglamp.”

“Very well.”

Only a handful of Skate’s thirty-five officers and crew had ever seen a signal lamp in action, the brisk, sharp, louvered flashes of light in Morse alien and amusingly old-fashioned in their nanotech computer age. Still, a young able seaman who’d volunteered for the course in signal lamp communication — or “dinosaur blinking,” as it was derisively referred to by Navy nerds — suddenly found himself the center of attention on Skate. If the ferry skipper — they were almost always retired Coast Guard captains — understood the “dinosaur blinker” and hove to as he was being ordered, it might prevent some ugly stuff.

As Skate’s signal lamp flashed golden above the blue of Admiralty Inlet and the patrol ship drew closer, only a quarter mile from the ferry, several gunners checking their laser-aiming point boxes were surprised to see that there were no vehicles on any of the ferry’s three decks. And no one on deck.

“Damn ghost ship!” said a starboard gunner.

“On autopilot,” suggested an increasingly nervous second mate, the third mate organizing the boarding party.

“Damn peculiar!” conceded Skate’s captain. “Slow to twelve knots.”

“Slow to twelve knots, aye, sir.”

The sudden decrease from dash speed to twelve knots created a surge of water from the stern that broached the afterdeck. But there was none of the gusto of a wave breaking over the bow, exiting quickly, foaming through the scuppers. Instead, the water sloshing against Skate from astern seemed markedly lethargic.

The starboard door of the ferry’s bridge flew open and a heavy, bearded individual stepped out, bullhorn in hand. “What in hell are you doin’?”

“What is your cargo?” asked Skate’s captain.

“Classified,” came the reply. “Headed for Keystone.”

“Stop your engines and prepare to receive a boarding party from USS Skate.”

“What in hell for?”

“Prepare for boarding,” Skate’s captain instructed the first officer, who gave the winch man the signal to lower the RIB.

Few reporters had qualms about using their sex appeal and charm to get a story, but Marte Price did it better than most. She had even bedded the formidable Freeman once because, she’d confided to a friend, she liked his gruff intelligence and manly disposition, so much more attractive than the petty, self-indulgent young studs of the entertainment world. Most were more interested in their coiffed hair and makeup than what was going on in the real world, where men like Freeman and his Spec Ops warriors were at the sharp end of things. So that Bel Air brats could pout over multimillion-dollar contracts, she thought, and America’s kids could go to school without living in the perpetual chaos of hatred that marked the totalitarianism of much of the non-Western world.

Compared to Douglas Freeman, the fiftyish captain of the Port Townsend — Keystone ferry was a pushover for her. He redirected his stare from the tightly sheathed orbs of her Angora sweater to his radar, amusing the third mate, who, standing behind Marte as the Skate first hailed them, gazed without embarrassment at her curvaceous derriere enveloped in a pair of tan microfiber pants that seemed no thicker than Saran Wrap. The ferry’s captain, annoyed that the Skate was making such a “big deal” of his radio being out, reverting to a signal lamp, lifted his bullhorn again and told the Skate he was on a tight schedule. “I’m transporting highly classified personnel to Keystone.”

“Who are they?”

“None of your business.”

This retort snapped the ferry’s third mate out of his reverie with Marte Price’s anatomy. Aware of the guns bristling all over the Skate, he dared suggest to his captain that he should welcome the boarding party, which was now bobbing up and down in their RIB immediately aft of the