Operation Hail Storm

Sea of Japan ― on the fishing trawler Huan Yue

Dingbang Wang was as happy as a captain of a smelly dirty Chinese fishing trawler could be.

He hated fishing and during the last few years he hadn’t been required to do that horrible job.

Dingbang felt truly blessed to be the captain of a smelly fishing trawler. After all, he had been born into abject poverty and raised in one of the poorest areas in southwest China, the mountainous Guizhou province. The only child of a peasant farmer, as far back as Dingbang could remember he had worked to eat. If they couldn’t grow it, then he didn’t eat. Potatoes, potatoes, potatoes, breakfast, lunch and dinner. His mother had died when he was five during the birth of his brother. His unnamed brother had also died still trapped inside his mother. When Dingbang turned sixteen years old, his father contracted a staph infection from a mosquito bite he had been scratching. His father had died two months later after being covered in puss bloated sores that had gone untreated. With no family left, Dingbang felt he had no reason to stay in his landlocked prison. He collected a bag of personal items, a bag of potatoes and eventually made his way south to the city of Zhanjiang.

Before he ever saw it, he could smell the ocean, the South China Sea. It was wonderful. He had never seen or smelled or swam in anything like it. And instead of potatoes, it was possible to throw a fishing line into the sea and pull out a fish. Being accustomed to hard work, before long, Dingbang found himself a job working as a common laborer on a fishing boat. It was wonderful. He had never eaten so much food in his life. Thousands of pounds of fish were hauled in each day and he could eat as much as he wanted. Many of the fish were the wrong kind and the captain would want to throw them out, but Dingbang would have them set aside so he could eat them later.

The young Chinese man from the mountains of Guizhou loved fishing. He loved being on the boat. He loved it every year of his life, until one year he liked it a little less. And the next year, even a little less. And that trend had continued as he worked his way from laborer, to a fisherman working the nets, to the first mate of a boat, and then finally to captain. By the time he had become the captain of the Huan Yue, he hated everything about fishing.

Dingbang also hated the men he worked with. They were young and from the city and had never been forced to work as hard as he had. They didn’t appreciate having a regular meal. They thought that they deserved more and they looked down on Dingbang Wang and his humble background.

Most men, who were around fish all day, became accustomed to the smell. But as Dingbang became less enchanted with the business, he started to hate the smell of fish. The rotting smell of the dock and the fish tanks on board and the bait ― it all made his stomach turn.

The only thing he really liked these days was his boss. The current owner of the Huan Yue had changed his life.

Years ago, around the time Dingbang had turned fifty years old, his boss had told him to bring the Huan Yue into the docks at Shenzhen. While in dry dock, several men worked on the Huan Yue with cutting torches and grinders. Dingbang watched as a big crane lifted a massive piece of the Huan Yue’s deck off his ship. It had been cut free by the men with the torches and the grinders. The big piece of deck that they removed had covered the ship’s massive main holding tank. That piece of metal was then replaced with a tank cover that rolled open and closed on rails. He had never seen anything like it before. In the wheelhouse, Dingbang could flip a switch and the huge cover would roll open, leaving a massive hole in the middle of the deck that looked straight down into the cavernous holding tank. At the time, it didn’t make any sense to Dingbang. With no watertight hatches to hold in the water or the baffles that were removed from the tank, then there was no way that it would ever function as a fish holding tank. And it never did. After the new tank cover had been installed, some other men had come onto his boat and had very skillfully painted the new rolling cover so it looked just like the old deck that had been removed. They painted the entire tank cover using colors that looked old to Dingbang. They even painted on fake watertight hatches using rusty hues and dirty tones. When Dingbang was standing on the deck, it was very apparent that his false deck was a painted illusion. But he assumed that the owner of the ship was more interested in what the eyes in the sky saw and not what the people on the ground saw.

Since the day his ship was modified, Dingbang’s life was much improved. Other than occasionally dipping his nets into the water for effect, his boss had turned his boat into a cargo vessel. It still looked just like a fishing vessel, but it didn’t act like one. Almost always, in the middle of the night, something that Dingbang was not allowed to know about, was loaded into the Huan Yue’s main tank cargo hold.

Sometimes it was many little items, bundled and wrapped together, creating a few large and heavy items. Sometimes it was a massive box or a crate or even large pieces of metal of varying shapes and sizes. Sometimes the crates and boxes had scary markings on them. Markings that even uneducated fishermen like Dingbang understood meant danger.

After the cargo had been loaded, then Dingbang would be sent a message on his new complicated encrypted radio instructing him where to drop off the cargo. Most of the time, the Huan Yue was sent to a port in North Korea. The younger men who worked on his ship all hated the North Koreans. They complained that the North Koreans were scum and evil and many other bad things. Dingbang actually felt more like a North Korean than he did Chinese. Most of the North Koreans were dirt poor, hungry, and if they knew any better they would escape their disparaging country to seek a better life. That was essentially a summary of Dingbang’s early life.

And Dingbang thought that the Chinese people were just a bunch of hypocrites anyway. North Korea depended on China for everything; energy, food, military equipment and China delivered it all dutifully for one primary reason. If the North Korean government broke down, then there would be a mass exodus from North Korea. And all those poor and ugly North Korean refugees would head across the border and into China. That would wreak havoc on the precarious Chinese economy. And if the Chinese economy failed, then there was a good chance that the entire Chinese communist government would fall as well.

Those North Koreans that Dingbang had met, during the times when he dropped off cargo or picked up cargo, were nice enough. Most of them, those with money, asked if Dingbang could give them a ride to anywhere but North Korea. The owner of the Huan Yue had made it very clear to Dingbang that he was not allowed to ever transport people or make his own deals.

Dingbang was being paid very handsomely not to fish and he couldn’t be happier. He was paid to take non smelling things to other countries and he really didn’t care what they were. It’s not as if anyone was ever going to stop him. Most of the time, his trawler was traversing the Sea of Japan, the East China Sea or the South China Sea. The Chinese were not going to stop him. The Japanese were not going to stop a Chinese fishing ship. The Americans, even though Dingbang was told they were always watching him from the air, they certainly were not going to try to board a Chinese boat.

So Dingbang, happy Dingbang, would never do anything to jeopardize his new and wonderful existence. If his boss told him to go pick up a huge metal cylinder in an obscure port in Russia and then drop it off at the port of Wonsan in North Korea, then Dingbang would be more than happy to oblige.

He never wanted to go back to fishing nets and hauling smelly fish and loading and unloading the wretched mass of sea food in and out of his boat.

Now he could sit back and relax and listen to the water and the clanking of the rigging and the occasional cry of an angry seagull that was very unhappy that his fishing ship had no fish to steal.

Dingbang reached over and turned off all the running lights on his boat. If eyes were watching him from above, then he would have just disappeared into the blackness of the ocean surrounding him. Of course this was dangerous, so Dingbang flipped on the autopilot and activated the ship’s collision warning system. If a ship got too close to him, then the collision system would sound a warning and wake him up. He could then steer around it.

Dingbang leaned back in his captain’s chair and closed his eyes. An hour of sleep would feel good since in a few hours he would be docked in Wonsan. There was no telling how long it would take to get the hunk of metal off of his ship. Sometimes the North Koreans moved quickly. On other nights they moved like they were scared of the dark.

As Dingbang drifted off to sleep, he heard the sound of the rigging slapping against the poles. But he never heard the tiny drone that gently touched down and attached itself with rare-earth neodymium magnets to the roof of his wheelhouse.