“So? What do you think?” Zen asked.
The information was already on Zen’s screen — the ship was a Malaysian freighter.
“Looks pretty straightforward. Carrying tea. My thinking is we go over low and slow, find out. No big deal.”
“No big deal.” Zen nudged the Flighthawk toward the ship. The computer already had a dotted line plotted for the recon run; he authorized the flight and gave control to C3.
“You know how I got crippled?” he said to Kick.
“I heard some sort of accident.”
“Mack Smith and I were having a mock dogfight with the Flighthawks. I got too close to one of them. Sawed me in half. I was below five hundred feet. A lot below, actually. I don’t even remember bailing out.”
Kick was silent. Finally, he said, “Sucks.”
“Yeah, it does. But you move on. You have to.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Hey, you know, just call me Zen. You take the stick after this run, all right? I’m going to roll back on the deck there and grab myself a soda.”
“I can get it.”
Pity? Or just a young officer trying to please his superior.
Zen opted to believe it was the latter. He’d give the kid the benefit of the doubt until proven wrong. Same with Starship.
“That’s okay, Kick. I want you to get as much practice in the air as possible. Okay?”
“Great,” said the other pilot. “I appreciate it.”
The island of Taiwan measures only 396 by 144 kilometers. While Kaohisiung was on the opposite end of the country from Taipei where Danny and the rest of the team were, the flight south in a rented Sikorsky took less than an hour.
The first site they had to check was a large office building near the center of the city off Kusshan-1 Road. Danny took out his fancy opera glasses and slowly scanned the interior. Liu, once again acting as the liaison with the Dreamland team, declared the basement nearly empty; the only machinery on the floors above related either to the cooling system or to the elevators. Twenty-something stories filled with office workers and nothing more lethal than a letter opener.
Even so, Stoner and Danny went inside, going up to the fifteenth floor where a Taiwan magazine had its offices. They played tourist, Stoner claiming to work for a San Francisco publication Danny had never heard of but that somehow impressed the Taiwanese. After a few minutes it was clear to Danny that there was nothing of much interest here, and he practiced smiling and nodding. Stoner passed out a whole parcel of business cards; Danny realized from the looks he was getting that not having any was a serious faux pas.
“What’s with the cards?” Danny asked as they took the elevator down.
“Considered polite to exchange them,” said the CIA agent. “I have dozens for every occasion.”
He showed a few to Danny. They declared he was a magazine editor, electronics equipment buyer, engineer, and American trade representative. The backs of the cards had the information in Chinese characters.
“You sure you’re not schizophrenic?” said Danny, handing the cards back.
“Sometimes I wonder.” Stoner pocketed the cards. “Computer system is easy to access. They’re networked with an Ethernet. We can get in if we want.”
“You think it’s worth it?”
“At the moment, no. But now we can come back and get in easily. Once the system is bugged, the NSA whizzes can get into the printing plant.”
“Where’s that?”
“Our next stop.”
Neither the printing plant nor the warehouse they looked at seemed very promising; the printing plant was in fact used for printing, and the warehouse held vegetables. Stoner pushed on, aware that the last site on his list was the most promising — it had a pier on the harbor front and sprawled over nearly a hundred acres.
It was also well guarded by fences, men, and dogs.
“This would be a perfect place,” said Danny, looking at the site through binoculars from a dock diagonally across the bay. “What the hell do they do there?”
“Recycle everything and anything,” said Stoner. “Electronics mostly. That shed at the far left had car batteries. They strip away the outer casings, reuse the lead and the acid as well. Those drums there are filled with sulfuric acid.”
“Lovely.”
“Oh yeah. Real environmental operation.”
Stoner pointed to two buildings at the right side of the facility, fenced off from the others by a double row of razor wire.
“That’s where I think the operation might be, if it’s here. There’s a track up from the pier.”
“Pier looks shaky,” said Danny.
“Appearances can be deceiving. Can you get a scan?”
“We’re too far for the viewer. We have to get a lot closer.”
“Not a problem. We can get on that dock at night, go up to the fence. There’s no guard on the water side.”
“Not now, maybe,” said Danny. “What about at night?”
“We’ll have to find out,” said Stoner. “But if they’re not going to watch during the day, they probably won’t at night.”
“Man, I can smell the acid from here,” said Danny.
“Yeah. We stay away from the damn battery shed if we can.”
“I got to scan it.”
“Your call.” Stoner put down his glasses. “Hungry?”
“Starving.”
“Let’s go get some shrimp.”
“I thought we were getting something to eat,” said Liu when they stopped in front of the large warehouse building in the city’s southwestern district.
“We are,” said Stoner, getting out of the rental.
“This a restaurant?”
“In a way.”
Danny, Liu, and the driver followed Stoner up a set of cement steps to the side of the large metal building, passing inside to a small corridor lit by several rows of fluorescent lights. Tekno-pop boomed from beyond the plasterboard wall, the bass so loud the cement floor shook.
A woman sat on a stool in front of a large opening at the end of the hallway; at first Danny thought they’d been taken into a carnival. Stoner said a few words, first in Mandarin Chinese and then in English, before handing over some of the local money; in return, the woman passed out several fishing poles, empty baskets, and kids’ pails filled with what looked like small brown slugs.
“Bait,” said Stoner, handing a pail to each man. “Liver. I think. She had trouble with my Mandarin and I couldn’t quite get her Taiwanese.”
“What is this?” asked Liu.
“We have to fish for our dinner,” said Stoner.
The driver was smirking. Danny followed him inside, where a large pool of foul-smelling water was surrounded by pink lawn chairs, about a third of them filled by Taiwanese “fishermen.” The water was filled with six-inch-long shrimp; the crustaceans were easy to hook, though pulling them out required a bit of wrist action. There were several ways to do this, which the nearby fishermen were eager to explain; Danny found his small basket quickly filling up with shrimp.
