Gunmetal Gray

CHAPTER TEN

If Fan Jiang had known how hard this would be, if he had any clue how many people would be put in danger by his actions, how many would lose their life because of him, there was no way he would ever have gone through with any of it.

Fan was not a violent man, not a hard man, and he was most definitely the wrong man to be in this place, enduring all this. But he was here now, far past the point of no return, and there was no turning back. He was on the run, and he would live or he would die, but pondering the wisdom of his decision was a ship that had long since sailed.

He had a birthday coming up, and he hoped he lived to see it. He’d be twenty-seven in a month, which meant he was young to die, but at the rate things were going he felt the odds were stacked against his survival.

Fan Jiang was hot and cold at the same time. The hot, dank air in the little compartment all but cooked his lungs, but the cold metal floor he lay on stung the exposed skin on his arms. He’d spent almost four whole days in the bowels of this cargo ship, and for the last day he’d been rocking and rolling and vomiting as this ship had taken to the open sea.

He lay in a tiny dry storage room no larger than a hotel bathroom, just off the kitchen, with men looking in on him from time to time from a hallway outside. He wasn’t a prisoner here — he’d readily agreed to come on this voyage, after all — but he got the impression he could not simply get up from the cold vibrating floor and walk up on deck whenever he wanted.

He’d eaten rice soaked in some chicken broth the ship’s cook had brought to him in a bucket, and to relieve himself he’d been handed a second bucket — he hoped it was a second bucket — but otherwise he’d had little contact with the crew.

The rest of his human interactions — if you could call them that — were with the men in the hall: his bodyguards.

If you could call them that.

The five men in the hall were on his side, officially anyway, but they were also angry, and they were taking their anger out on him. Initially there had been eight of them, but three had died in the gunfight four days earlier, and one of the survivors now lay in Fan’s sight on the cold rusty vibrating floor of the hallway, a bandaged bullet wound high on his thigh and a face that stared blankly ahead and turned whiter by the hour.

The man had been injured because of Fan Jiang, and others had died because of Fan Jiang, so Fan Jiang had no problem understanding their fury.

But Fan himself hadn’t done it; he hadn’t wanted any of this at all.

Fan spoke Mandarin and English, but both the crew on the boat and the other men here — his angry protectors — spoke only Vietnamese, so there was no way for Fan to tell anyone here how sorry he was for all the trouble, how much he regretted that there had been a fight, and how much he appreciated the fact that the five survivors had continued on with their operation despite the hardships and the loss of their friends.

Fan was worried about the future, to be certain, but he was so glad to be out of Hong Kong finally that he could hug the men in the hall. Not that he would try, because they would probably just pistol-whip him if he climbed to his feet and attempted to leave the storage compartment.

He guessed he was just ahead of his pursuers when he made it into Hong Kong proper, where he made contact with Wo Shing Wo, first by e-mail, and then in a bar in Tsim Sha Tsui. They agreed to take him in when he made them an offer they could not refuse: he’d give them a list of all members of their organization known to the Chinese government, as well as a complete rundown of all the surveillance measures being used against them.

This Fan did in an Internet café on Waterloo Road. Years earlier Unit 61398 had created a back door into mainland China’s federal police network for the PLA, so it was no trick for him to pull up known Wo Shing Wo personalities and details on the police surveillance packages run against them. Once Fan had the info, he immediately raced out of the café with the Triads surrounding him for protection, because he had reason to believe the Chinese would be able to track the origin of his session in their network.

For the next week the Triads demanded more and more of Fan, especially as the heat on them grew and grew in HK. Clearly the MSS had been able to discern that Fan was working with Wo Shing Wo, so the cost of Fan’s protection grew in relation to the cost the Triad group paid to keep him safe. He used other Internet cafés and coffee shops, a Starbucks on Argyle, an outdoor café with wireless access on Prince Edward Road, hotel rooms all around the Central and Western Districts — all to help Wo Shing Wo learn information from the Chinese mainland about rival Triads operating here in the city.

Fan’s work had been helpful to Wo Shing Wo, but the heat from the mainland Chinese agents in the city grew, and soon it was too dangerous for both Fan and Wo Shing Wo to continue their relationship.

So the Vietnamese entered the picture.

The Vietnamese gang on the boat with him went by the name of Con Ho Hoang Da, the Wild Tigers. Boasting a membership of over one thousand, they paid bribes to communist leaders in Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi to keep the police back and to let them move heroin, mainly from Laos, through Vietnam, and then on to small dry-goods haulers like the one Fan Jiang now traveled on, directly to Hong Kong, Singapore, and South Korea.

They weren’t the biggest transnational criminal organization out there, not even the biggest in Vietnam, but Fan had done his homework while in HK, and he decided he would be safe with the Wild Tigers.

Fan made a deal with the Ho Chi Minh City — based gang to give them a month of his services in exchange for safe passage and refuge out of Hong Kong and into Vietnam; Fan promised to break into Vietnam’s Interior Ministry’s secure network and help the gang learn about measures against them, and for his work he only wanted a safe place to hide out for a month or so till the heat eased on the hunt for him, before finding his own way on to his next destination.

After the deal was made with the leader of the Wild Tigers, his Wo Shing Wo protectors took him in a high-speed boat to the southern Hong Kong island of Po Toi, a rocky and sparsely inhabited speck in the water accessible only via ferry, a few water taxis, and private boats. In a quiet bay, the Wo Shing Wo boat pulled alongside a seventy-five-meter-long and nine-meter-wide rust-covered dry-goods hauler called the Tai Chin VI.

Fan learned quickly that he could communicate with no one on board, other than to confirm that they would take him to Ho Chi Minh City.

Not long after the Triad boat disappeared around the northern tip of the bay, as the crew of the Tai Chin VI began pulling in the anchor, a trio of heavily armed men appeared on the deck — Fan only assumed later they had come from below the water’s surface — and a vicious gun battle erupted and raged across the ship. Two white men and one black man fought like lions against the much larger force, but the Vietnamese protected Fan, rushing him to the very storage hold he now sat in. In the fighting, five Vietnamese boat crew and three Wild Tiger gangsters had been killed. All three Westerners died, as well; this was explained to Fan from hand gestures by the Vietnamese survivors, and the boat had to wait in the bay for two days before more crew could come up from Vietnam to sail the vessel back home.

Now Fan was on his fourth full day in this cargo ship, and just when he looked at his watch and realized night had fallen above deck on another day he’d not seen with his own eyes, the young Chinese man felt the change in the vibration in the floor, then heard the pitch alter in the cargo ship’s engines.

They were slowing, and soon they came to a complete stop.

The Vietnamese gangsters led Fan out of the bowels of the ship on his unsteady legs and up a series of ladders, and he stepped into a humid night that felt amazing on his skin. He followed his protectors past the crane in the center of the deck and over the port-side ladder of the big cargo vessel, passing a large group of armed newcomers on the deck who appeared to be more Vietnamese gangsters. The men wore backpacks and looked like they were a new crew, already preparing for another mission.

At the bottom of the ladder, a large rigid-hull inflatable boat trolled in the black water alongside, and Fan climbed down into it. His protectors climbed in with him, the injured man was lowered on a litter, and then the RIB turned away and its pilot pushed the throttle to full power.

Fan sat in the middle of a group of young, quiet, and unhappy-looking men. Looking around in the distance for the first time, he saw the skyline of Ho Chi Minh City on both sides of him, and he realized he was no longer in the South China Sea at all. The Tai Chin VI had steamed up the Saigon River, which wound through the city like a partially coiled snake.

As they neared the water’s edge in the boat, Fan looked back behind him; the Tai Chin VI had already turned around in the center of the river, and it was now heading back to sea.

Off the nose of the RIB, a dozen men waited on a poorly lit dock in front of a small motorcade of vehicles. Fan saw no weapons, but several of the men wore jackets in the warm night, so he assumed they were hiding pistols or folded-stock submachine guns. Despite his nerves, Fan climbed off onto the dock and approached the entourage.

A Vietnamese man in his forties stepped out from the group of men. He was well dressed, and he wore a wide grin. “Welcome,” the smiling man said in English.

“Thank you,” Fan Jiang replied, bowing low as he spoke.

With a handshake the man said, “I am Tu Van Duc. I am in charge.”

“I am Fan.”

“You will be well protected while you are with us.”

The wounded Wild Tiger fighter from the boat was carried off the RIB next to the two men and into the back of an SUV. He looked like he could die at any moment. Tu looked him over, spoke authoritatively to his men, then returned his attention to Fan.

“I’ve been told you were attacked by a group of Westerners.”

“Yes. I was on deck when it started, but your men protected me, some with their lives. I am sorry this happened.”

Tu slapped Fan on the shoulder, knocking him back on his heels. “We have been fighting for one hundred years. It is in our blood. To die in battle is every man’s dream.”

Fan didn’t know what to say. He was a soldier himself, in that he was a sergeant in the People’s Liberation Army, but he’d never met anyone who much wanted to get shot in the leg and then slowly bleed to death in a rusty cargo ship.

Tu smiled now, as if a dying man had not just passed by. “You look like you could use some food, a beer, a shower.”

Fan bowed again. “Thank you, sir.”

“Tomorrow you will begin this computer magic you have promised us. Tonight you eat and rest.”

“I will fulfill my end of our arrangement,” Fan said as he was led into an SUV in the center of the motorcade.

Fan’s ultimate goal was Taiwan, not Vietnam, but he had to get out of Hong Kong, and this group had helped him do just that. Taiwan still felt like a long way off, but Vietnam would work for now, and he didn’t think either the mainland Chinese or the unknown Westerners who had attacked the ship three days earlier just before they set sail from Po Toi Island would find him here.

He could not have understood the scope of the hunt for him, and he could not have been more wrong.