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The Stone Monkey Excerpt
They were the vanished, they were the unfortunate.
To the human smugglers the snakeheads who carted them around the world like pallets of damaged goods, they
were ju-jia, piglets.
To the American INS agents who interdicted their ships and arrested and deported them they were undocumenteds.
They
were the hopeful. Who were trading homes and family and a thousand years of ancestry for the hard certainty of risky, laborious years ahead of them.
Who had the slimmest of
chances to take root in a place where their families could prosper, where freedom and money and contentment were, the story went, as common as sunlight and rain.
They were his fragile cargo.
And now, legs steady against the raging, five-meter-high seas, captain Sen Zi-jun made his way from the bridge down two decks into
the murky hold to deliver the grim message that their weeks of difficult journeying might have been in vain.
It was just before dawn on a Tuesday in August. The stocky captain,
whose head was shaved and who sported an elaborate bushy mustache, slipped past the empty containers lashed as camouflage to the deck of the seventy-two-meter Fuzhou Dragon and opened the heavy steel door to the hold. He looked down at the two-dozen people huddled there, in the grim, windowless space. Trash and children's plastic blocks floated in the shallow tide under the cheap cots.
Despite the pitching seas, Captain Sen a thirty-year veteran of the seas walked down the steep metal steps without using the handrails and strode into the middle of the hold.
He checked the carbon dioxide meter and found the levels acceptable though the air was vile with the smell of diesel fuel and humans who'd lived for two weeks in close proximity.
Unlike many of the captains and crew who operated "buckets" human smuggling ships and who at best ignored or sometimes even beat or raped the passengers, Captain Sen didn't mistreat them.
Indeed he believed that he was doing a good thing: transporting these families from difficulty to, if not certain wealth, at least the hope of a happy life in Meiguo, the Beautiful Country,
America and, of course, making a great deal of money for himself in the process.
On this particular voyage, however, most of the immigrants distrusted him. And why not? They
assumed he was in league with the snakehead who'd chartered the Dragon: Kwan Ang, known universally by his nickname, Gui, the Ghost. Tainted by the snakehead's reputation for violence, Captain
Sen's efforts to engage the immigrants in conversation had been rebuffed and had yielded only one friend. Chang Jingerzi who preferred his western name of Sam Chang was a forty-five-year-old former
college professor from a suburb of the huge port city of Fuzhou in southeastern China. He was bringing his entire family to America: his wife, two sons and Chang's widower father.
A half dozen times on the trip Chang and Sen had sat in the hold, sipped the potent mao-tai that the captain always had in good supply on his ship and talked about life in China and what the Chang family would do once they were in the United States.
Captain Sen now saw Chang sitting on a cot in a forward corner of the hold. The tall, placid man frowned, a reaction to the look in the captain's eyes. Chang handed his teenage
son the book he'd been reading to his family and rose to meet the captain.
Everyone around them fell silent. "Our radar shows a fast-moving ship on course to intercept
us."
Dismay blossomed in the faces of those who'd overheard.
"The Americans?" Chang asked. "Their Coast Guard?"
"I think it must be," the captain answered. "We're in U.S. waters."
Sen looked at the frightened faces of the immigrants around him. They
looked at one another. Like most shiploads of illegals that Sen had transported,
these people many of them strangers before they'd met had formed a close bond of friendship. And they now gripped hands or whispered, some seeking, some offering reassurance. The captain's eyes settled on a woman holding an eighteen-month-old girl in her arms. Her mother whose face was scarred from a beating at a re-education camp lowered her head and began to cry.
"What can we do?" Chang asked the captain. The immigrant took this news hard. Captain Sen knew he was a vocal dissident in China and had been desperate to flee the
country. If he were deported he'd probably end up in one of the infamous jails in western China as a political prisoner.
"We're not far from the drop-off spot. We're running
at full speed. It may be possible to get close enough to put you ashore in rafts."
"No, no," Chang said. "In these waves? We'd all die."
"There's a natural harbor I'm steering for. It should be calm enough for you to board the rafts. At the beach there'll be trucks to take you to New York."
"And what about you?" Chang asked.
"I'll head back out to international waters. They can't arrest me for shipping empty containers that's
not a crime. By the time they board, you'll be on highways of gold, heading toward the city of diamonds. . . .
Now tell everyone to get their belongings together. But only the most important things. Your money, your pictures. Leave everything else. It will be a race to the shore. Stay below until the Ghost or I tell you to come up top."
Captain Sen hurried up the stairs, on his way to the bridge. As he climbed the steep ladder he said a brief prayer for their survival to Tian Hou, the goddess of sailors, then
dodged a wall of gray water that vaulted the side of the ship.
Captain Sen found the Ghost standing over the radar unit, staring into the rubber glare shade. The man stood
completely still, bracing himself against the rolling of the sea.
Some snakeheads dressed as if they were wealthy Cantonese gangsters from a John Woo film but the Ghost always wore
the standard outfit of most Chinese men simple slacks and short-sleeved shirts. The Ghost was muscular but diminutive, clean-shaven, hair longer than a typical businessman's but never styled with cream
or spray.
"They will intercept us in fifteen minutes," the snakehead said. Even now, facing interdiction and arrest, he seemed as lethargic as a ticket seller in a rural
long-distance bus station.
"Fifteen?" the captain replied. "Impossible. How many knots are they making?"
Sen walked to the chart table,
the centerpiece of all ocean-crossing vessels. On it sat a U.S. Defense Mapping Agency nautical chart of the area. He had to judge the two ships' relative positions from this and from the radar; because
of the risk of being traced, the Dragon's global positioning system and her EPIRB emergency beacon and Global Maritime Distress and Safety System were disconnected.
"I think it will be at least forty minutes," Captain Sen said.
"No, I timed the distance they've traveled since we spotted them."
Captain Sen glanced at the crewman piloting the Fuzhou Dragon, sweating as he gripped the wheel in his struggle to keep the Turk's head knot of twine, tied around a spoke,
straight up, indicating that the rudder was aligned with the hull. The throttles were full forward. If the Ghost was right in his assessment of when the cutter would intercept them they would not be able
to make the protected harbor in time. At best they could get within a half mile of the nearby rocky shore close enough to launch the rafts but subjecting them to merciless pounding by the tempestuous
seas.
The Ghost asked the captain, "What sort of weapons will they have?"
"Don't you know?"
"I've never been interdicted," the Ghost replied. "Tell me."
Ships under Sen's command had been interdicted twice before fortunately on
legitimate voyages, not when he was running immigrants for snakeheads. But the experience had been harrowing. A dozen armed Coast Guard sailors had streamed onto the vessel while another one, on the deck
of the cutter, had trained a two-barreled machine gun on him and his crew. There'd been a small canon too.
He now told the Ghost what they might expect.
The Ghost nodded. "We need to consider our options."
"What options?" Captain Sen now asked the Ghost. "You're not thinking of fighting them, are you? No. I won't allow it."
But the snakehead didn't answer. He remained braced at the radar stand, staring at the screen.
The man seemed placid but, Sen supposed, he must've been
enraged. No snakehead he'd ever worked with had taken so many precautions to avoid capture and detection as had the Ghost on this voyage. The two dozen immigrants had met in an abandoned warehouse
outside of Fuzhou and waited there for two days, under the watch of a partner of the Ghost's a "little snakehead." The man had then loaded them onto a chartered Tupolev 154, which had flown
to a deserted military airfield near St. Petersburg in Russia. There they'd climbed into a shipping container, been driven 120 kilometers to the town of Vyborg and were loaded onto the Fuzhou Dragon,
which Sen had sailed into the Russian port just the day before. He himself had meticulously filled out the customs documents and manifests everything according to the book, so as not to arouse
suspicion. The Ghost had joined them at the last minute and the ship had sailed on schedule. Through the Baltic Sea, the North Sea, the English Channel, then the Dragon had crossed the famous starting point of transatlantic voyages in the Celtic Sea 530N 70W and had begun steaming southeast toward Long Island.
There was not a single thing about the voyage that would arouse the suspicion of the U.S. authorities. "How did they do it?" the captain asked angrily.
"What?" the Ghost responded absently.
"Find us. No one could have. It's impossible."
The Ghost straightened up and
pushed outside into the raging wind, calling back, "Who knows? Maybe it was magic."
* * *
"We're right on top of 'em, Lincoln. The boat's headin' for land but are they gonna make it? Nosir, no how. Wait, do I hafta call it a 'ship'? I think I do. It's too big for a
boat."
"I don't know," Lincoln Rhyme said absently to Fred Dellray. "I don't really do much sailing."
The tall, lanky Dellray was
the FBI agent in charge of the federal side of the efforts to arrest the Ghost. Neither Dellray's canary yellow shirt nor his black suit, as dark as the man's lustrous skin, had been ironed recently
but then no one in the room looked particularly well rested. These half-dozen people clustered around Rhyme had spent the past twenty-four hours virtually living here, in this improbable war room the
living room of Rhyme's Central Park West town house, which resembled not the Victorian drawing room it had once been but a forensics laboratory, chock full of tables, equipment, computers, chemicals,
wires and hundreds of forensic books and magazines.
The team included both federal and state law enforcers. On the state side was Lieutenant Lon Sellitto, homicide detective for
the NYPD, far more rumpled than Dellray stockier too (he'd just moved in with his girlfriend in Brooklyn, who, the cop announced with rueful pride, cooked like Emeril). Young Eddie Deng, a
Chinese-American detective from the NYPD's Fifth Precinct, which covered Chinatown, was present too. Deng was trim and athletic and stylish, sporting glasses framed by Armani and black hair spiked up
like a hedgehog's. He was serving as Sellitto's temporary partner; the big detective's usual coworker, Roland Bell, had gone down to his native North Carolina for a family reunion with his two sons a
week ago and, as it turned out, had struck up a friendship with a local policewoman, Lucy Kerr. He'd extended his vacation another few days.
Assisting on the federal portion of
the team was fifty-something Harold Peabody, a pear-shaped, clever middle manager who held a senior spot at the Immigration and Naturalization Service's Manhattan office. Peabody was close-lipped about
himself, as are all bureaucrats narrowing in on their retirement pension, but his far-ranging knowledge of immigration issues attested to a lengthy and successful stint in the Service. He and Dellray had
faced off more than once during this investigation. After the Golden Venture incident in which ten illegal immigrants drowned after a smuggling vessel of that name ran aground off Brooklyn the
President of the United States had ordered that the FBI take over primary jurisdiction from the INS on major human smuggling cases, with backup from the CIA. The Immigration and Naturalization Service
had far more experience with snakeheads and their human smuggling activities and didn't take kindly to yielding jurisdiction to other agencies especially one that insisted on working
shoulder-to-shoulder with the NYPD and, well, alternative consultants like Lincoln Rhyme.
Assisting Peabody was a young INS agent named Alan Coe, a man in his thirties with
close-cropped dark-red hair. Energetic but sour and moody, Coe too was an enigma, saying not a word about his personal life and little about his career aside from the Ghost case. Rhyme had observed that
Coe's suits were outlet mall chic flashy but stitched with obvious thread and his dusty black shoes had the thick rubber soles of security guard footwear: perfect for running down shoplifters. The
only time he grew talkative was when he'd give one of his spontaneous and tedious lectures on the evils of illegal immigration. Still, Coe worked tirelessly and was zealous about collaring the Ghost.
Several other underlings, federal and state, had appeared and disappeared over the past week on various errands relating to the case.
Grand Central
Station, Lincoln Rhyme had thought and said frequently in the past day or so.
Now, at 4:45 A.M. on this stormy morning he maneuvered his powered Storm Arrow wheelchair through
the cluttered room toward the case status board, on which was taped one of the few existing pictures of the Ghost, a very bad surveillance shot, as well as a picture of Sen Zi-Jun, the captain of the Fuzhou Dragon,
and a map of Eastern Long Island and the ocean surrounding it. Unlike during his bedridden days of self-imposed retirement after a crime scene accident turned him into a C4 quadriplegic, Rhyme now
spent half of his waking hours in his cherry-red Storm Arrow wheelchair, outfitted with a new state-of-the-art MKIV touch pad drive controller that his aide, Thom, had found at Invacare. The controller,
on which his one working finger rested, gave him far more flexibility in driving the chair than the older sip-and-puff controller.
"How far off shore?" he called, staring at the map.
Lon Sellitto, on the phone, glanced up. "I'm finding out."
Rhyme
frequently worked as a consultant for the NYPD but most of his efforts were in classic forensic detection criminalistics, as the jargon-happy law enforcement world now preferred to call it; this
assignment was unusual.
Several days ago Sellitto, Dellray, Peabody and moody young Alan Coe had come to him at his town house. Rhyme had been distracted the consuming event in
his life at the moment was an impending medical procedure but Dellray had snagged his attention by saying, "You're our last hope, Linc. We got us a big problem and don't have a single idea where
else to turn."
"Go on."
Interpol the international clearing house on criminal intelligence had issued one of their infamous Red Notices
about Kwan Ang. According to informants, the Ghost had surfaced in Fuzhou, China, then flown to the South of France then gone to some port in Russia to pick up a load of illegal Chinese immigrants
among whom was the Ghost's bangshou, or assistant, a spy masquerading as one of the passengers. Their destination was supposedly New York. But then he'd disappeared. The Taiwanese, French and Russian
police and the FBI and INS could find him nowhere.
Dellray had brought with him the only evidence they had a briefcase containing some of the Ghost's personal effects from his
safe house in France in hopes that Rhyme could give them ideas where his trail might lead.
"Why all hands on deck?" Rhyme asked, surveying the group, which representing
three major law enforcement organizations.
Coe said, "He's a fucking sociopath."
More reasonable, Peabody offered, "The Ghost's probably the
most dangerous human smuggler in the world. He's wanted for 18 deaths immigrants, sure, but also police or agents. Then there're twelve rape charges against him by women immigrants. And we know he's
killed more. Illegals're called 'the vanished" if they try to cheat a snakehead, they're killed. If they complain, they're killed. And they just disappear. Their families never hear from them
again. We're estimating at least fifty or sixty immigrants under the Ghost's control have vanished over the past few years."
Dellray said, "Looks like mosta the
high-level snakeheads like him don't make the trips themselves. Th'only reason he's bringing these folk over personally is 'cause he's expandin' his operation here. We can't let that happen."
"If he gets into the country," Coe said, "people're going to die. A lot of people."
"Well, why me? I don't know a thing about human smuggling."
The FBI agent said, "We tried ever-thing else. But we came up with nothin'. We don't have
any personal info 'bout him, no good photos, no 'prints. Zeerow. 'Cept that." A nod toward the attachι case.
Rhyme glanced at it with a skeptical gaze.
"I don't know, gentlemen." He explained that he knew nothing, forensically, about France or Russia, much less did he trust the French crime scene searchers to have followed his exacting
procedures in collecting evidence. He had no standards against which to compare the trace in the items they'd found. Without positive print exemplars, how could they even be sure the evidence was the
Ghost's?
Doughy Harold Peabody said, "Mr. Rhyme, human smuggling isn't the same as it used to be. Few years ago, the husbands'd come over alone. Now, it's families, women by
themselves, children. And to the Ghost, if they're the least threat hell, if they're inconveniences he'll kill 'em. Just like that. . . . We really need your help."
"We're just hopin' you can point us in some di-rection," Dellray said.
"I'll do what I can. But don't expect miracles."
Two days later Rhyme had summoned them back. Thom handed agent Coe back the attachι case.
"Was there anything helpful in it?" the young man asked.
"Not a thing. The French are apparently abysmal at crime scene collection. At least those particular gendarmes, or whatever you call them."
"Hell," muttered Dellray. "So we're outta luck."
Which was a good enough cue for Lincoln Rhyme. He had leaned his head back into the
luxurious pillow Thom had mounted to the wheelchair and spoke rapidly. "The Ghost and approximately twenty to thirty illegal Chinese immigrants are on board a ship called the Fuzhou Dragon,
out of Fuzhou, Fujian Province, China. It's a seventy-two meter combination container and break-bulk cargo ship, twin diesels, under the command of Sen Zi-jun that's last name Sen 56 years old, and
has a crew of seven. It left Vyborg, Russia, at 0845 hours fourteen days ago and is presently I'm estimating now about three hundred miles off the coast of New York. It's making for the Brooklyn
docks."
"How the hell'd you figure that out?" Coe blurted in astonishment. Even Sellitto, used to Rhyme's deductive abilities, barked a laugh.
"Simple. I assumed that they'd be sailing east to west otherwise he would have left from China itself. I have a friend on the Moscow police a forensic scientist I've written some papers
with. I asked him to call all the port masters in ports in western Russia. There aren't as many of them as you'd think.
He pulled some strings and got all the manifests from Chinese and Taiwanese ships that left port in the past three weeks. We spent several hours going over them. By the way, you're getting a very large bill for phone calls. Oh, I told him to charge you for translation services too. I would."
The criminalist continued, "We found that only one ship took on enough fuel for an 8000-mile trip when the manifest reported it was making a 4400-mile one. Eight thousand would get them from Vyborg to New York and back to Southampton, England, for refueling. They weren't going to dock in Brooklyn at all. They were going to drop off the Ghost and the immigrants then scoot back to Europe."
"Maybe fuel's too expensive in New York," Dellray had offered.
Rhyme had shrugged one of the few dismissive gestures his body allowed him.
"Everything's too expensive in New York. But there's more: The Dragon's manifest said she was transporting industrial machinery to America. But you need to report your ship's draft that's how far
a ship sinks into the water, by the way to make sure you don't run aground in shallow ports. The Dragon's draft was listed at three meters. But a fully loaded ship her size should draw at least seven
and a half meters. So she was empty. Except for the Ghost and the immigrants. Not offended by calling the ship 'she,' anyone? It is customary. Oh, I say twenty to thirty immigrants because the Dragon
took on enough fresh water and food for that many, when like I said the crew was only seven."
Later that day, spy satellites had picked up the Dragon about 280 miles out
to sea, just as Rhyme had predicted. The raging tropical storm battering the eastern U.S. coast had slowed the progress of the ship; it appeared that she would make landfall on Long Island just before
dawn on Tuesday. But the Coast Guard's right to interdict stop and board vessels in international waters is limited. They can stop a U.S.-registered vessel and they can interdict a "stateless
vessel," one that is apparently unregistered or is falsely registered. But the right to board a properly documented ship outside of U.S. coastal waters is murky and the Fuzhou Dragon was a duly registered cargo ship of the People's Republic of China. The U.S. attorney was concerned that a court would throw out the Ghost's arrest if he were nabbed on the high seas. So the decision was made to hold off intercepting the Dragon until she entered U.S. waters.
The Coast Guard cutter Evan Brigant, with a boarding party of 25 sailors, backed up by twin fifties and an 80mm canon, had gone to ready status but kept its distance,
fearing the Dragon's radar would pick up the cutter's approach.
But the ship was now in U.S. waters and the Evan Brigant was in pursuit. The plan was to take control of the Dragon, arrest the Ghost, his assistant, and the ship's crew. The Coast Guard would sail the ship to the harbor at Port Jefferson, Long Island, where the immigrants would be transferred to a federal detention center to await deportation or asylum hearings.
A call was patched through from the radio of the Coast Guard cutter closing in on the Dragon.
"Agent Dellray? This is Captain Ransom on the Evan Brigant."
"I'm readin' you, Captain."
"We think they've spotted us they had better radar than we thought. The ship's making for shore. We need some
direction on the assault plan. There's some concern that if we board, there'll be a firefight. I mean, considering who this particular individual is. We're worried about casualties. Over."
"Among who?" Coe asked, "the undocumenteds?" The disdain in his voice when he used the word that described the immigrants was clear.
"Right. We were thinking we should just make the ship come about and wait until the Ghost surrenders. Over."
Dellray reached up and squeezed the cigarette he kept behind
his ear, a memento from his smoking days.
"Negative on that. Follow your original rules of engagement. Stop the ship, board it and arrest the Ghost. The use of deadly force is authorized. You copy that?"
"Five by five, sir. Out."
A moment later Rhyme's private line rang. Thom took the call in the corner of the room. He listened for a moment then looked
up. "It's Dr. Weaver, Lincoln. About the surgery." He glanced at the roomful of tense law enforcers. "I'll tell her you'll call her back."
"No," Rhyme answered firmly. "I'll take it."
Copyright © Jeffery Deaver 2001
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