Sea of Fire

Chapter One

There were three things that swarthy, dark-eyed Singaporean Lee Tong knew very well.

One of those was the sea. The lanky but muscular Lee was the son of the late Henry Tong, a hardworking mate on a timber carrier. The elder Tong's vessel, the 100-ton capacity Lord of the Ocean, was a container ship. It took regular runs of hardwood cargo from their home port in Singapore to India. On the return trip it would carry teak logs that had been shipped from the Ivory Coast to Bombay. These were bound for Hong Kong and Tokyo. Lee's mother had died of food poisoning when the boy was five. Rather than live with his grandparents in Keluang, on their inland farm, Lee often traveled with his father. By the time Lee was thirteen, he was working full time as a cabin boy for the first mate.

Traveling the timber route, Lee learned the different moods of the waters. The clean smell of the Andaman Sea was different than the tart, oily smell along the coast of the South China Sea. The currents of the East China Sea caused a sharper rocking than the heavier, lofting swells in the Pacific Ocean. The storms were different, too. Some were sudden and ferocious. Others came from afar with enough warning that the pilot could steer around them. Lee also learned about men on these odysseys. What pleased them, what bothered them, what bothered them enough to kill. He learned that money, undemanding women, cigarettes, drink and the camaraderie of drink, and the loyalty of friends were the only things that really mattered to him. By the time the elder Tong died of liver failure, Lee had only managed to get a lot of smoking and drinking done. He would never get much more as long as he worked on the Lord of the Ocean or a vessel like her, which was why Lee Tong took up the next profession he did.

When Lee was sixteen, several years into his own career on the timber ship, he met two other young sailors who did not want to end up like their own fathers. Who were unhappy working for three dollars a day, seven days a week. Eventually, in port, they sat down with other dissatisfied young men from other professions. That led Lee to the second thing he knew very well.

Piracy.

Lee was standing in the steep raised prow of the sampan. The vessel was not of Singaporean design. It was a squat Shanghai Harbor model, also known as a mu-chi or hen boat. The name was a result of the sampan's resemblance to the bird. Built mostly of softwood, which aged well and was extremely light, the mu-chi was eighteen feet long with four compartments, including a galley. There was an engine for rapid travel and four yulohs—thirteen-foot-long oars — for silent travel. That was how the five sampan pirates were traveling now, with Lee's crewmates rowing two men to a side. They had bought the sampan in China, legally, just over two years before. They had paid for it with cash, most of it borrowed from Lee's grandparents. The loan was repaid within a year. Buying the sampan was the last lawful act the men had done.

Early in their career the men learned how to mingle with harbor traffic to select their prey, how to track them until dark, and how to come alongside swiftly and quietly. They learned how to prowl the shipping lanes with their backs to the setting sun so that they would not be seen. Former police sergeant Koh Yu kept both a 500-channel scanner and a world band receiver on board to monitor restricted police and military communications. He had stolen them before resigning from the Special Operations Command of the Singapore Police Force. After sampling all kinds of ships, they focused on yachts and fishing charters. The take was usually good, and resistance was limited to indignant words. Since most of those words were English, Lee didn't understand what was being said. Among them, only the unflappable Koh spoke English. And Koh did not care what was being said. None of the men felt remorse about the work they did. On land, the large took advantage of the small. The fat had their way with the lean. At sea, the sharks ate the tuna. Lee Tong had tried both lives.

He preferred being a shark.

They began by waylaying small pleasure boats, tour ships, and party vessels out of Hong Kong and Taipei. The men didn't even have to board the ships to rob them. They came alongside and pressed plastic explosives low on the hull. The soft, explosive patties were homemade from concussion-ignited mercuric fulminate — a mixture of mercury, alcohol, and nitric acid — paraffin, and linseed oil to keep the wax pliant. That was a contribution of eight-fingered Clark Shunga, a former demolitions man for the lumber industry. Trees that were too difficult to cut down were blasted down. When he lost two fingers to a faulty detonator cap, he was fired with meager compensation. The Woo See Lumber Company was afraid that he would kill someone by mishandling explosives. He showed them that he could still play the guitar, but they were unimpressed. Clark put all of his severance pay — fifty dollars — toward the sampan.

The pirates would carefully place the plastic explosives fore and aft, a few feet above the waterline. That would keep them dry. It would also make it difficult for anyone to try to dislodge them with a pole or net. They would have to stand there, on the rocking deck, while the pirates shot at them. After the explosives were placed, the sampan would withdraw to a safe distance of between fifteen and twenty feet. Using a megaphone, they would order that valuables, jewels, and occasionally a female hostage be sent over the side in a rowboat or dinghy. They would enjoy the woman's company for a short while and then set her adrift. If the orders were not followed, they would turn on the laser sight and fire a bullet from one of the M8 pistols that each man carried. The shot would ignite the explosive. To date, the pirates had never found it necessary to destroy a ship.

The Celebes Sea was still relatively new territory to Lee and the others. They had been sailing this region of the Western Pacific for just two months, since the Singapore navy increased its patrols in the South China Sea. The shipping lanes were different, and the sea itself was different. The waters did not heave up and down or from side to side like other bodies of water. They pitched you back and then drew you forward, thanks to a very strong and constant undertow. It reminded Lee of something his father once said about life: that it lets you move one step ahead and then knocks you back two.

The sampan was traveling dark. The cabin lights were off, and even the phosphorescent compass was covered with a canvas cloth, so that it would not be seen when they came alongside. They were headed toward two beacons roughly a quarter mile away, the fore and aft running lights of a yacht. It was an eighty-foot two-masted sailing yacht they had spotted while heading to port the previous day. The men had tracked the low, sleek vessel as it headed southeast. It was on an easy course with just a few people on board. It was probably a weeklong charter that cost some fat Aussie or Malaysian about fifteen or twenty thousand dollars, American. It was the perfect prey. This was the third thing Lee Tong knew well: spotting perfect targets. Since organizing the others on that hot, humid, hard-drinking night in Hong Kong, Lee had never picked a loser.

Until tonight.