The Stone Monkey Page 4

  Searing pain in his chest.

  Air . . . I need air.

  Another wave slammed into him. He sank below the surface, tugged down by the great muscles of gray water. He glanced at his hands. Why weren't they moving?

  Paddle, kick! Don't let the sea suck you down!

  He struggled once more to the surface.

  Don't let . . .

  He inhaled more water.

  Don't let it . . .

  His vision began to crinkle to black.

  Ten judges of hell . . .

  Well, Sonny Li thought, it seemed that he was about to meet them.

  Chapter Five

  They lay at his feet, a dozen or so, in the cold soup at the bottom of the raft, caught between the mountains of water beneath them and the lacerating rain from above. Their hands desperately gripped the rope that circled the orange raft.

  Sam Chang, reluctant captain of the fragile craft, looked over his passengers. The two families--his own and the Wus--huddled in the back of the raft around him. In the front were Dr. John Sung and the two others who'd escaped from the hold, whom Chang knew only by their first names, Chao-hua and his wife, Rose.

  A wave crashed over them, soaking the hapless occupants even more. Chang's wife, Mei-Mei, pulled off her sweater and wrapped it around the tiny daughter of the scar-faced woman. The girl, Chang recalled with a pang, was named Po-Yee, which meant Treasured Child; she'd been the good-luck mascot of their voyage.

  "Go!" Wu cried. "Go for shore."

  "We have to look for the others."

  "He's shooting at us!"

  Chang looked at the boiling sea. But the Ghost was nowhere to be seen. "We'll go soon. But we have to rescue anyone who can be saved. Look for them!"

  Seventeen-year-old William struggled to his knees and squinted through the sharp spray. Wu's teenage daughter did the same.

  Wu shouted something but his head was turned away and Chang couldn't hear the words.

  Chang entwined his arm around the rope and pushed his feet hard against an oar clamp to brace his body as he struggled to nurse the raft in a circle around the Fuzhou Dragon, twenty meters away. The ship slipped farther into the water, a blast of foamy water occasionally shooting high as air escaped from a rent in the side of a porthole or hatch. The groaning, like that of an animal in pain, rose and fell.

  "There!" William cried. "I think I see somebody."

  "No," Wu Qichen called. "We have to leave! What are you waiting for?"

  William was pointing. "Yes, Father. There!"

  Chang could see a dark lump next to a much smaller white lump, ten meters from them. A head and a hand perhaps.

  "Leave them," Wu called. "The Ghost will see us! He'll shoot us!"

  Ignoring him, Chang steered closer to the lumps, which indeed turned out to be a man. He was pale and choking, thrashing the air, a look of terror on his face. Sonny Li was his name, Chang recalled. While most of the immigrants had spent time talking and reading to one another, several of the men traveling without families had kept to themselves. Li was among these. There'd been something ominous about him. He'd sat alone for the entire voyage, sullen, occasionally glaring at the children who were noisy around him and often sneaking up on deck, which was strictly forbidden by the Ghost. When he'd talk at all, Li would ask too many questions about what the families planned to do when they got to New York and where they would live--subjects that wise illegal immigrants didn't discuss.

  Still, Li was a human being in need and Chang would try to save him.

  The man was swallowed up by a wave.

  "Leave him!" Wu whispered angrily. "He's gone."

  From the front of the raft the young wife, Rose, called, "Please, let's go!"

  Chang turned the raft into a large wave to keep from tipping over. By the time they were stable again Chang saw a flash of orange about fifty meters away, rising and falling. It was the Ghost's raft. The snakehead started toward them. A wave rose between the two crafts and they lost sight of each other momentarily.

  Chang gunned the throttle and turned toward the drowning man. "Down, everybody down!"

  He reversed the motor quickly just as they reached Li, leaned over the thick rubber and grabbed the immigrant by the shoulder, pulling him into the raft, where he collapsed on the floor, coughing fiercely. Another gunshot. A burst of water flew up near them as Chang sped the raft around the Dragon, putting the sinking ship between them and the Ghost once more.

  The snakehead's attention turned away from them for a moment when he saw several other people in the water--crew members, bobbing on the surface in orange life vests, about twenty or thirty meters away from the killer. The Ghost sped toward the two, his motor running full.

  Understanding now that the man was going to kill them, they waved their arms desperately toward Chang and kicked furiously away from the approaching raft. Chang gauged the distance to the crewmen, wondering if he could reach them before the snakehead was close enough to have a clear shot. The mist and rain--and the rolling waves--would make it hard for the Ghost to shoot accurately. Yes, he thought he could do it. He started to apply the power.

  Suddenly a voice was in his ear. "No. It's time to leave."

  It was his father, Chang Jiechi, who'd spoken; the old man had pulled himself to his knees and was leaning close to his son. "Take your family to safety."

  Chang nodded. "Yes, Baba," using the affectionate Chinese term for "father." He aimed the raft toward shore and turned the motor up full.

  A minute later came the crack of a gun firing, then another, as the snakehead murdered the two crew members. Sam Chang's soul cried in dismay at the sounds. Forgive me, he thought to the sailors. Forgive me.

  Glancing back, he saw an orange shape through the fog; the Ghost's raft coming after them. He felt the despair in his bones. As a dissident in China, Sam Chang was used to fear. But in the People's Republic fear was an insidious unease that you learned to live with; it was nothing like this, the terror of seeing a mad killer hunting down your beloved family and companions.

  "Stay down! Everyone stay down." He concentrated on keeping the raft upright and making as much speed as possible.

  Another shot. The bullet struck the water nearby. If the Ghost hit the rubber they'd sink in minutes.

  A huge, unearthly groan filled the air. The Fuzhou Dragon turned completely on her side and vanished under the surface. The massive wave created by the sinking ship rolled outward like the shock ring from a bomb blast. The immigrants' raft was too far away to be affected but the Ghost's was much closer to the ship. The snakehead looked back and saw the tall wave heading toward him. He veered away and, after a moment, was lost to sight.

  Though he was a professor, an artist, a political activist, Sam Chang was also, like many Chinese, more accepting of spirituality and portents than a Western intellectual might be. He thought for a moment that Guan Yin, the goddess of mercy, might have interceded on their behalf and sent the Ghost to a watery death.

  But only a moment later John Sung, who was facing backward, shouted, "He's still there. He's coming. The Ghost is coming after us."

  So, Guan Yin is busy elsewhere today, Sam Chang thought bitterly. If we're going to survive we'll have to do it on our own. He adjusted their course toward land. And sped away from the limp corpses and the flotsam that were like floating tombstones marking the graves of Captain Sen and his crew and the many people who'd become Chang's friends over the past weeks.

  *

  "He scuttled the ship."

  Lon Sellitto's voice was a whisper. "Christ." The phone dropped away from his ear.

  "What?" Harold Peabody said, shocked. A fat hand rose to his cumbersome glasses and removed them. "He sank it?"

  The detective nodded a grim confirmation.

  "Lord, no," Dellray said.

  Lincoln Rhyme's head, one of the few parts of his physique that was still mobile, turned toward the heavyset cop. Shocked at this news, he felt a wave of heat pass through his entire body
--solely an emotional sensation, of course, when it sped below his neck.

  Dellray stopped pacing and Peabody and Coe stared at each other. Sellitto looked down at the yellow parquet as he listened once more into the phone and then looked up. "Jesus, Linc, the ship's gone. With everybody on board."

  Oh, no . . .

  "The Coast Guard doesn't know exactly what happened but they picked up an underwater explosion and ten minutes later the Dragon vanished from the radar."

  "Casualties?" Dellray asked.

  "No idea. The cutter's still a few miles away. And they don't know the location--nobody on board the Dragon hit any emergency distress signals. They send out the exact coordinates."

  Rhyme stared at the map of Long Island, its eastern end split like a fishtail. His eye was on a red sticker that marked the Dragon's approximate location. "How far offshore?"

  "About a mile."

  Rhyme's sweeping mind had run through a half-dozen logical scenarios of what might happen when the Coast Guard interdicted the Fuzhou Dragon, some optimistic, others involving some injury and the loss of life. Criminal apprehension was a trade-off and you could minimize the risks but never completely eliminate them. But drowning everyone on board? All those families and children? No, that thought had never occurred to him.

  Christ, he'd lain in his luxurious $3000 bed and listened to the INS's little problem of the Ghost's whereabouts as if it were a diverting game at a cocktail party. Then he'd drawn his conclusions and snappily given them the solution.

  And he'd let it go at that--never thinking one step further, never thinking that the immigrants might be at such terrible risk.

  Illegals're called "the vanished"--if they try to cheat a snakehead, they're killed. If they complain, they're killed. They just disappear. Forever.

  Lincoln Rhyme was furious with himself. He knew how dangerous the Ghost was; he should have anticipated this deadly turn. He closed his eyes momentarily and adjusted the burden somewhere in his soul. Give up the dead, he often told himself--and the CS techs who'd worked for him--and he reiterated this command silently now. But he couldn't quite give them up, not these poor people. The sinking of the Dragon was different. These dead weren't corpses at a crime scene, whose glassy eyes and rictus grin you learned to ignore in order to do your job. Here were whole families dead because of him.

  After they'd interdicted the ship, arrested the Ghost and run the crime scene, his involvement in the case would end, Rhyme had thought, and he'd get back to preparing for his surgery. But now he knew he couldn't abandon the case. The hunter within him had to find this man and bring him to justice.

  Dellray's phone rang and he answered. After a brief conversation he snapped off the call with a long finger.

  "Here'sa deal. The Coast Guard thinks a coupla motorized rafts're heading toward shore." He stalked to the map and pointed. "Prob'ly around here. Easton--little town on the road to Orient Point. They can't get a chopper in the air with the storm being's nasty as it is but they got some cutters on the way to look for survivors and we're going to get our people at Port Jefferson out to where the rafts're headed."

  Alan Coe brushed his red hair, only slightly darker than Sachs's, and said to Peabody, "I want to go out there."

  The INS supervisor replied pointedly, "I'm not making personnel decisions around here." A none-too-subtle comment about the fact that Dellray and the FBI were running the show, one of many such barbs that had been exchanged between the two agents over the past few days.

  "How 'bout it, Fred?" Coe asked.

  "Nup," the preoccupied agent said.

  "But I--"

  Dellray shook his head emphatically. "There's nothin' you can do, Coe. If they collar him you can go question him in detention. Jabber at him all you want. But this's a tactical apprehension op now and that ain't your specialty."

  The young agent had provided good intelligence about the Ghost but Rhyme thought he was difficult to work with. He was still angry and resentful that he hadn't been allowed to actually be on board the cutter interdicting the ship--another battle Dellray had had to fight.

  "Well, that's bullshit." Coe dropped moodily into an office chair.

  Without a response, Dellray sniffed his unlit cigarette, tucked it behind his ear and took another call. After he hung up he said to the team, "We're trying to set up roadblocks on the smaller highways out of the area--Routes 25, 48 and 84. But it's rush hour and nobody's got the balls to close the Long Island Expressway or Sunrise Highway."

  Sellitto said, "We can call the toll takers at the tunnel and the bridges."

  Dellray shrugged. "That's somethin', but it's not enough. Hell, Chinatown's that boy's turf. Once he's there it'll be hell to find him. We gotta get him on the beach if there's any way."

  "And when," Rhyme asked, "are the life rafts going to land?"

  "They're guessin' twenty, twenty-five minutes. And our folk're fifty miles away from Easton."

  Peabody asked, "Isn't there any way to get somebody out there sooner?"

  Rhyme debated for a moment then said into the microphone attached to his wheelchair, "Command, telephone."

  *

  The 1969 Indianapolis 500 pace car was a General Motors Camaro Super Sport convertible.

  For this honor, GM picked the strongest of their muscle car line--the SS fitted with a 396-cubic-inch TurboJet V-8 engine, which could churn 375 horsepower. And if you were inclined to tinker with the vehicle--by removing sound deadeners, undercoating, sway bars and interior wheel wells and playing around with the pulleys and cylinder heads, for instance--you could goose the effective hp up to 450.

  Which made it a boss machine for drag racing.

  But a bitch to drive at 130 miles per hour through a gale.

  Squeezing the leather-clad wheel, feeling the pain in her arthritic fingers, Amelia Sachs piloted the car eastbound on the Long Island Expressway. She had a blue flasher on the dash--a suction cup doesn't stick well to convertible roofs--and wove perilously in and out of the commuter traffic.

  As she and Rhyme had decided when he'd called five minutes before and told her to get the hell out to Easton, Sachs was one-half of the advance team, which, if they were lucky, might get to the beach at the same time the Ghost and any surviving immigrants did. The other half of the impromptu team was the young officer from the NYPD Emergency Services Unit sitting next to her. The ESU was the tactical branch of the police department, the SWAT team, and Sachs--well, Rhyme actually--had decided that she should have some backup with firepower of the sort that now sat in the man's lap: a Heckler & Koch MP5 machine gun.

  Miles behind them now were the ESU, the crime scene bus, a half-dozen Suffolk County troopers, ambulances and assorted INS and FBI vehicles, making their way through the vicious storm as best they could.

  "Okay," said the ESU officer. "Well. Now."

  He offered this in response to a brief bit of hydroplaning.

  Sachs calmly brought the Camaro back under control, recalling that she'd also removed the steel plates behind the backseat, put in a fuel cell in lieu of the heavy gas tank and replaced the spare with Fix-A-Flat and a plug kit. The SS was about 500 pounds lighter than when her father had bought it in the seventies. Could use a little of that ballast now, she thought, and snipped another skid short.

  "Okay, we're okay now," the ESU cop said, apparently far more comfortable in a shoot-out than driving down the wide expanse of the Long Island Expressway.

  Her phone rang. She juggled the unit and answered it.

  "Say, miss," the ESU cop asked, "you gonna use one of those hands-free things? I'm just thinking it might be better." And this from a man dressed like Robocop.

  She laughed, plugged the earpiece in and upshifted.

  "How's the progress, Sachs?" Rhyme asked.

  "Doing the best I can. But we turn off onto surface roads in a few miles. I may have to slow up for some of the red lights."

  " 'May'?" the ESU cop muttered.

  "Any survivors, Rhyme?" Sachs
asked.

  "Nothing further," he answered. "The Coast Guard can only confirm two rafts. Looks like most people didn't get off."

  Sachs said to the criminalist, "I hear that tone, Rhyme. It's not your fault."

  "Appreciate the sentiment, Sachs. That's not an issue. Now, you driving carefully?"

  "Oh, yeah," she said, calmly steering into the spin that took the car forty degrees off center, her heart rate rising not a single digit. The Camaro straightened as if it were on guy wires and continued down the expressway, its speed goosed up to 140. The ESU cop closed his eyes.

  "It's going to be close, Sachs. Keep your weapon handy."

  "It always is." Another brief skid.

  "We're getting calls from the Coast Guard cutter, Sachs. I've got to go." He paused for a moment. Then said, "Search well but watch your back."

  She laughed. "I like that. We need to print it up on T-shirts for the Crime Scene Unit."

  They hung up.

  The expressway ended and she skidded off onto a smaller highway. Twenty-five miles to Easton, where the lifeboats would land. She'd never been there; city-girl Sachs wondered what the topography was like. Would it be a beach? Rocky cliffs? Would she have to climb? Her arthritis had been bad lately and this thick humidity doubled the pain and stiffness.

  Wondering too: If the Ghost was still at the beach, were there plenty of hiding places for him to snipe from?

  She glanced down at the speedometer.

  Ease back?

  But the treads on her wheels were true and the only moisture on her palms was from the rain that had drenched her back at Port Jefferson. She kept her foot near the floor.

  *

  As the launch smashed through the water, closer to the shore, the rocks grew more distinct.

  And more jagged.

  Sam Chang squinted through the rain and spray. There were some short stretches of beach ahead, covered with pebbles and dirty sand, but much of the shoreline was dark rock and bluffs well over their heads. And to reach a portion of beach where they could land he'd have to maneuver through an obstacle course of jutting stone.

  "He's still there, behind us," Wu shouted.

  Chang looked back and could see the tiny orange dot of the Ghost's raft. It was heading directly for them but was making slower progress than theirs. The Ghost was hampered by the way he handled the raft. He aimed right toward the shore and fought the waves, which slowed his progress. But Chang, true to his Taoist leanings, piloted his craft differently; he sought the natural flow of the water, not fighting it but steering around the stronger crests in a serpentine pattern and using the shore-bound waves to speed them forward more quickly. The distance between them and the snakehead was increasing.