Riding the Snake (1998) (30 page)

"Can you draw the map? Complete Quincy's map?" Wheeler asked.

"There is no need for a map. Jackie Pullinger told me there is a much easier way." He stood in silence, still rubbing his palms together.

"I will take you there," he finally said. "I will show you the way."

Chapter
27.

City of Willows

It was a little after one in the morning.

There was a strong chop on the bay as they cleared the jetty that sheltered the Hong Kong Yacht Club, leaving the dock lights behind. They were under power, heading east, the sturdy forty-horsepower, four-cylinder marine engine moving the sailboat at a stately seven knots. Easterly swells were breaking against the bow of The Other Woman, throwing a light sea-spray into the air, blowing it back into their faces or to splatter on the main salon windows. They were running without lights as they turned into Victoria Harbor to begin the four-mile journey that would take them past the huge man-made peninsula landing strip of the international airport. Their eventual destination was Lei Yue Mun Point, which was across the harbor in the Yau Tong district.

It had been an exhausting twenty-four hours since Chauncy had made his surprise appearance. They had spent hours with Julian trying to decide if Chauncy's information gave them enough of an edge to try to get into the Triad headquarters. Julian tol
d t
hem that with Johnny gone they could not count on police help. They would have to go it alone. . . . They never really took a vote or decided in so many words, because they all knew they were going to try it. Each had a personal reason.

Their plan focused on one rule: Don't do anything expected. With this in mind, Wheeler and Tanisha had rebooked their air reservations, securing two first-class seats for the eight A
. M
. Singapore Air flight to L
. A
. the next morning. Chauncy had taken their rental car and parked it across from the east end of the Walled City. They had fully provisioned the sailboat with food and water, and were now headed across the bay, where they would meet up with Julian.

Chauncy was sitting on top of the main salon, looking out at the moonlit water, lost in feelings too complicated for him to talk about. All of them shared a need for revenge. Wheeler was at the helm, Tanisha beside him in the cockpit. Wheeler had operated boats since he was a kid in Newport Beach, often stealing his father's sportfisher for fraternity parties. The only fish they'd ever caught were sorority tuna. Now he adjusted his course, heading the fifty-five-foot sailboat a few points higher into the wind to allow for drift, rechecking the compass on the navigation panel next to the wheel.

"Are you okay?" Tanisha asked, looking at the tightly drawn expression on his face.

"Scared pissless," he admitted ruefully. "I only made it halfway through Special Forces training, and in most of our war games we were using rubber bullets or paintballs."

"One thing to remember," she said. "Nobody hits anything they're aiming at in a street action. The direct hits are all pure accident."

"Even these vanguards? These suicide assassins? They sound pretty kick-ass."

"Everybody is blinded by adrenaline. If it gets hot, just move fast and keep zigging," she said.

He nodded, hoping she wasn't just trying to build his courage.

They dropped anchor an hour later in Yau Tong Bay. They could see the lights on the warehouses, and beyond the tall loading docks they could see occasional late-night traffic on Kow Ling Road.

Chauncy was quiet as he helped them get the rubber Avon off the stern davits and into the water. Wheeler stood in the tippy little launch while Chauncy handed him down the two-and-a-half
-
horsepower American-made Evinrude engine. It had a Chinese cowling which read "Yellow River Outboard" in Mandarin.

They were all dressed in dark clothing, which they had purchased in the underground mall earlier that day. Tanisha locked up the yawl's salon and boarded the rubber boat. Wheeler pulled the cord and started the motor. The three of them headed across the little bay in the launch toward the docks.

Wheeler's heart was fluttering in his chest and his head felt light. He wondered if he was entering the last few hours of his life.

They arrived at the huge wharf, which towered fifteen feet above them to accommodate the freighters that loaded there. They putted slowly around the dock until they found a service ladder, then Wheeler brought the Avon in and Chauncy tied the bow line to the ladder. They scrambled up out of the boat, carrying almost nothing with them: no wallets or identification, no weapons, no flashlights. Each had a few hundred Hong Kong dollars in red hundred-dollar bills. They climbed the ladder to the dock, and Wheeler checked the rubber boat, which had now drifted under the pier out of sight. He nodded at Tanisha.

The three of them took off at a jog across the parking lot. The huge shipping warehouse loomed in the background. The moon lit them with unwelcome silver light.

They moved silently. The only danger here was being spotted by a security guard. Finally, they found themselves out on Kow Ling Road. Up ahead, an old, rusty plumbing repair van was parked. It blinked its lights once, and the three of them took off, running toward it. The side door was unlocked and they clambered in.

The interior of the truck was lit by a red overhead light. They had stepped from a desolate commercial roadside into a state-of
-
the-art mobile command center. The rusted-out wreck of a van turned out to be a high-tech miracle inside.

Julian was seated behind the wheel. He looked back at them, his face tight with pre-game anxiety. "Everything kipper?" he asked.

Wheeler nodded. "No problems," he said, looking at the racks fitted with extensive surveillance and combat equipment. "This is amazing," he said.

"Bit of a gasher, what?" He grinned. "The Royal Police have three of these lorries. You have to check them out, but I waited till the motor-pool watchman went to the loo and I took 'er on unauthorized loan. At least we won't want for firepower," he said.

Wheeler took down an Uzi submachine gun from a wall case of various automatic weapons. He checked it quickly before returning it to the rack. Everything Julian had said they would need was in the truck: night-vision goggles, safe-cracking equipment, even laser sights that could be fitted to the weapons.

Julian put the truck in gear. "It's getting on. We'd better cut the stick," he said as he pulled out, swung a U, and headed north to Kwun Tong Road.

As they rode in silence, Wheeler looked up to the front seat at Julian, studying the cherubic English Inspector's constantly changing profile in the overhead street lamps. When Wheeler called Julian that afternoon and asked him to reconsider, he had never expected him to say yes. The cagey, paranoid cop had set up another meeting outside the People's Police Building in the same park, and listened while Chauncy, Wheeler, and Tanisha described the bones of their idea.

"Pretty long odds," Julian said, after he'd heard it all. "We cock it up, we're all gonna kiss the gunner's daughter."

Wheeler couldn't figure out why the Inspector had agreed to help. A few hours later, while they were working out the exit plan, he'd finally asked Julian why.

"I'm not doin' this for you, laddie," he said. "I'm doin' it for me and Johnny, and for all the good coppers who've been scuttled. We had it good here. This was a special place, then the Commies came and left us to carry the can. There was a time when Johnny was the best. But it got too bloody hard, too much moving around under the covers. Johnny couldn't hold on with the Triads and the Commies in business together. So I guess they turned him and burned him. Time to set that right." And that was all he would say.

Julian turned on Prince Edward Road, and it didn't take them long to get to the Walled City. He drove slowly past the ugly line of slum buildings that stretched for miles in every direction. The place was huge, much bigger than Wheeler had ever imagined. A few of the apartments were lit with dim lights, from kerosene lanterns or from electricity stolen from power lines. The overwhelming color of the Walled City was concrete gray.

Finally, Chauncy moved up to the shotgun seat beside Julian and looked at the passing buildings. "There," he said, pointing to an apartment house across Tung Tsing Road, on the other side of the street from the Walled City.

Julian parked the van and turned off the lights. They sat there for a long moment and looked at the darkened apartment building. It was much better maintained than the ghetto buildings just across the road.

"They bring the money back here from their criminal take in Hong Kong every night at about two-thirty," Chauncy said. "Usually a car with two guards. There are one or two armed men inside the garage to meet them."

Wheeler again felt light-headed. He looked at Tanisha, who squeezed his hand.

"Let's get ready," she said.

Tanisha and Wheeler moved to the back of the van and were joined there by Julian and Chauncy.

"I loaded up the knappies," Julian said, pointing at four backpacks. "Everything's in there we talked about. Flak jackets are in the lorry boxes."

They opened one of the built-in boxes in the van and took out the bulletproof vests. Tanisha was surprised to see that they were the same "second chance" American-made Kevlar vests that were issued to the LAPD. They were light and could stop just about anything but a full-load Rhino or a Winchester nine
-
millimeter Black Talon. She put one on and handed one to Wheeler. They were all working under the single red light, bathed in its seductive glow.

"Pick your poison, mates," Julian said as he took one of the automatic weapons from the gun wall in the van.

Wheeler selected a Browning fully automatic rifle, because he had used them in the Marines. He grabbed two banana clips and a laser sight and began to assemble it. Then he slammed in the clip and tromboned the slide.

"You look like you know what you're doing," Tanisha said, impressed.

"And you thought I only knew how to field-strip coeds?" He smiled weakly as they saddled up.

They were jacked and flacked, and now they waited.

At a little past two-thirty A
. M
., a car with three men pulled up the street, turned, and nosed into the driveway, its headlights making hot circles on the garage door. A second later, the electric door opened. Two other Chinese men were standing in the under
-
lit garage with guns out as the car pulled in.

"Now," Julian said.

They pulled back the side door of the van and jumped out. They ran the short distance across the sidewalk and exploded into the garage, shoving their weapons into the faces of five startled Chinese gangsters. One of the lookouts in the garage turned to fire, but he got clubbed to his knees by Chauncy's rifle butt before he could discharge his AK-47. Chauncy swung the automatic weapon a second time, hitting the man in the jaw, knocking him backward. Julian and Tanisha pulled down on the three men in the car, their guns trained in the windows. Wheeler was left in a standoff with the last garage guard. They were facing each other, gun barrel to gun barrel. They stared in fear at one another, seconds from death, both frozen in desperate indecision.

"Drop it!" Wheeler shouted.

"Fuck him," Julian said, then turned and fired a short burst. The bullets flew into the Chinese man's chest, blowing him off his feet and across the garage, dead before he landed.

"You didn't have to kill him," Wheeler said.

Julian grabbed the garage opener out of the other Chinese guard's hand and closed the door, shutting them off from the street. "This ain't a bloody Boy Scout trip," Julian said angrily. "We take 'em without shooting if we can, but if one a' these buggers pulls down on you, you put the effin' bastard in the mummy bag!" He was boiling mad.

"He's right," Chauncy said. "These men are killers. They'll have no mercy. You can't hesitate."

Wheeler looked at Tanisha. She caught his look and nodded her agreement.

"Watch that door," Julian instructed. "If there's more upstairs, that's the way in here."

They were still holding their guns on the three other men. They got them out of the car, and using plastic cuffs that Julian had brought with him from the truck, they cuffed the gangsters to the wooden column supports in the garage, then gagged them with their own socks. Tanisha removed their weapons and took their cellphones. There were two canvas bags of money in the trunk of the car, which they left.

"Okay," Julian said, "let's sweep this flat, make sure we got 'em all."

They moved upstairs from the garage and went room-to-room through the apartment. It was deserted. They found one unexpected piece of good fortune in the bedroom closet: Six red Triad robes were hung there with cellophane cleaning bags over them.

"This is a spot of sunshine," Julian said as he pulled them out of the closet and started passing them around. The robes had hoods, and once on, went all the way to the floor.

They quickly found a staircase that led down to the basement. Julian turned on the lights. The basement was very small and looked as if it had been dug under the house by hand. Cold, musty air began cooling their skin and icing their nerves. At the far end of the basement was a door. They opened it and were looking at a four-seat electric golf cart and a tunnel that extended beyond, into the darkness.