Riding the Snake (1998) (32 page)

Now only Wheeler was in the park with Julian. He turned to grab the Englishman while bullets sparked the wall all around him. Miraculously, Wheeler wasn't hit. The huge distance he was from the Temple roof helped throw off the gangsters' aim. He felt one round tug at his sleeve, a reluctant warning.

"I'm a goner," Julian croaked. "Get out of here."

"You're through giving orders," Wheeler said and struggled to pull the overweight detective up over his shoulder. Then he jumped down into the room, pulling the wooden door shut over him. Julian was heavy, and Wheeler's wounded leg almost buckled. His senses were immediately greeted by the worst stench he had ever encountered. It was pitch black. He felt Tanisha's hand on his sleeve. He couldn't see her; his eyes had not adjusted to the dark.

"This way," she said, and with Julian in a fireman's carry over his shoulder, Wheeler stumbled blindly after Tanisha, down the stairs of the darkened house.

They found Chauncy waiting for them in a doorway that led out into a blackened alleyway.

"Follow me," he said.

"What about the night goggles?" Tanisha asked. "I can't see anything, and this stink is about to make me puke."

"Breathe through your mouth," Chauncy said. He looked over at Wheeler. "We've got to leave him. He'll slow us down."

"Not leaving him," Wheeler said stubbornly. "I'm not losing another one." But he wondered how long he could carry the overweight detective. Wheeler could feel Julian's blood running down the back of his own neck, down his rib cage, into his underwear. He tried to blot the feeling from his mind, and the unsettling stench from his nostrils.

Tanisha and Chauncy put on their night-vision goggles. Then Tanisha reached into Wheeler's backpack and pulled his goggles out, adjusted the focus, and put the heavy contraption on his head. Reaching around to the top, she flipped on the power. Immediately, in green hue, Wheeler could see a small alley out the apartment doorway. It was only about two feet wide and twisted away in the darkness. Then he saw the glint of half-a-dozen rodent eyes looking at them from the garbage-strewn alleyway.

They heard a door open behind them in the park, then footsteps coming down the stairs, and the sound of Chinese voices.

"Let's get out of here," Wheeler said. He turned, and with his right hand still on the trigger, let a stream of lead fly in the direction of the voices. No one cried out in pain as his bullets crashed into the walls.

Chauncy led the way. He had been born in the ghetto and, as a child, had memorized every inch. But that gave them no advantage, because he shared that same history with the men pursuing them. The foursome moved along, picking their way over piles of garbage and human excrement. It seeped into their shoes and clung to their pant legs. Then they heard a burst of machine-gun fire. Bullets chipped the walls, sparking light all around them.

Tanisha grunted in pain but said nothing.

"You okay?" Wheeler asked, still struggling with the almost
-
dead weight of Julian Winslow.

"Fine," she hissed.

They moved along the narrow alley path, turning right, then left. The Walled City's corridors were an ungodly maze of dead ends and blind switch-backs. Only once did Chauncy turn the wrong way. "Gotta go back," he said, and they headed back up the alley toward the pursuing Triad assassins. Chauncy and Tanisha took the point, and with the advantage of the night-vision goggles, they laid down a withering fire, hitting three of the Red-Pole vanguards and forcing the Triad gangsters to back up fast to find cover. Chauncy finally found the right path and they followed him into an intersecting alley.

Wheeler was now completely lost. He thought they were going back the way they came. Occasionally the pursuing gangsters would blind-fire in the dark, the whining tracers screaming over their heads or ricocheting off apartment walls. Then they were heading up a small flight of stairs. Wheeler's wounded leg buckled. He could go no farther and was forced to sit down in shit and garbage with Julian still over his shoulder. He turned, and through his night goggles he could see a few gangsters moving along at a trot twenty yards back, their weapons at port arms in front of them, appearing in his night visor like eerie green ghosts. Wheeler set Julian down, almost shrugging him off his shoulder. Then he found his Browning under his arm, hanging from his shoulder strap. He rotated it up, holding it underhanded. Without sighting, he let a blast go and watched in awe as several of the pursuing men were picked up by the powerful stream of lead and flung backward into the reeking, garbage-filled darkness. He heard them screaming in pain as their lives ended.

"Bloody fucking marvelous," Julian whispered, surprising Wheeler with his consciousness. Then Wheeler heard Chauncy at his right elbow.

"Come on. It's not much farther."

"Gotta help me. Can't carry him," Wheeler said.

With Chauncy now bearing half the weight, and with one of Julian's arms around each of their shoulders, they dragged him along, through the stench and darkness. It was a terrifying journey, almost as if they had been dropped onto an alien planet. Ungodly rats, the size of small cats, sat on piles of human waste hissing in the dark. Occasionally they would pass a flat that had a light burning, and the night-vision goggles, unable to handle the light, would white out, blinding them until they could tip them up. Once they were past the light source, they would pull them down again and continue on.

It seemed like they were in the narrow, twisting alleyways forever. Then finally Chauncy turned and broke down a door with his shoulder and led them into a house. They dragged Julian up a short flight of stairs and into a small living room where a Chinese family slept.

"I lived here once," Chauncy whispered as he moved through the flat, tripping over a sleeping man. They heard a child cry, and one of the sleeping men awoke and screamed at him. Then Chauncy was out a back door, and he led them into another narrow alley.

Wheeler momentarily lost track of Tanisha. He was too busy dragging the fat detective, worrying about his footing, and trying not to throw up from the horrible smell.

Finally, Chauncy opened a door and they moved through a low doorway. Like magic, they had stepped out of hell and were back on Tung Tsing Road. The street, the moonlight, and the cold air revived their tortured senses.

They laid Julian down against the side of a building and looked into his face. He had almost bled out. His eyes were open, but he was a ghastly pale color. Blood was all over his shirt and Wheeler's back. Then Tanisha came through the door from the Walled City.

"They're right behind us. I can hear them coming up the alley," she said as she shut the door.

About two hundred yards away, they could see the rented Mercedes that Chauncy had parked there yesterday for their escape. Chauncy took off, running toward it, and in a few seconds he had it going and was speeding back toward them. He pulled the car up just as the door behind them opened and a Chinese Triad member cautiously looked out. Wheeler was closest to the man and stepped up and hit him with his best husband-bashing left hook, knocking the man back into the ghetto. Then he threw the car door wide. Chauncy and Tanisha got Julian into the Mercedes. Wheeler dove in as Chauncy jumped behind the wheel and floored it. The car screeched away just as three more Triad gangsters ran out into the street, firing automatic weapons. Their gunfire starred the back fenders and shattered the taillights.

The Mercedes sped away into the night.

An hour later, they had returned to the dock and lowered an unconscious Julian aboard the Avon. It took two trips to get them all back to The Other Woman. Wheeler turned on the anchor winch and pulled the hook. Then he started the marine engine and powered the sailboat back out into Victoria Harbor.

It was then that he noticed blood on Tanisha's shirt. "You're hit," he said. She didn't reply, but she looked pale.

He pulled her shirt up and checked the wound. The bullet had caught her under the armpit right above the protective vest, cutting out a furrow of flesh between her rib bones. The bleeding had stopped, but some of her shirt was buried deep in the wound.

"We gotta get you both to a hospital," he said.

"Can't do it," Chauncy said, glancing at his watch and recalling the exit plan. "We're supposed to clear this harbor in half an hour." He was now watching Julian, who they had laid out on the sofa in the main salon. The English cop hadn't said anything in over fifteen minutes. But now his eyes opened and he looked at them through dull slits.

"Julian's lost too much blood. He'll die," Wheeler argued.

Their original exit plan had been to cast off from here and head directly out of Victoria Harbor. They figured their enemies would check the airport and discover their eight-o'clock airline reservations, then waste valuable time staking out that flight, while they cleared Chinese water and headed off across the South China Sea to Sydney, Australia. Wheeler doubted Julian would ever make Sydney alive. Tanisha had a chance, but she had become listless and he was sure she was going into shock.

"The Chinese will be looking for us. The police will have warrants out. They're all working for Willy," Chauncy said. "We can't go back to Hong Kong."

"We can't just let them die," Wheeler insisted.

Chauncy looked at him, trying to come up with a new plan. "Maybe we could get to Macao," he said. "It's only forty-six miles from here. It's still a Portuguese province and doesn't get handed back to China until 1999. All you need to get in is a valid passport. But it's dangerous--the population is ninety-five percent Chinese, and they have agents everywhere in Macao."

"Let's try," Wheeler said. He grabbed some charts off the navigation table and found Macao on one of them. It was a little island colony off the eastern coast of China, north of Hong Kong. As Chauncy had said, it was only forty-six miles away, about five hours at ten knots. Wheeler grabbed a new navigation chart and found the heading for Macao Harbor. He plotted the course, then went up on deck and reset the autopilot. The moon and cold night wind seemed to clear his thoughts. It was finally up to him to take charge.

As they headed out into open water, Wheeler organized what he had to do. He rechecked the autopilot and listened as the little servomechanism clicked and hummed, then he moved back into the cabin. Julian had again closed his eyes. He looked bad. Chauncy said Tanisha had gone forward and was stretched out on the bed in the master stateroom. He found her there and put a pillow under her feet to try to stave off shock and get blood to her head. Then he found a blanket in the overhead and spread it over her. He reached out and took her hand.

"I'm fine," she said, reading his concerned expression. "You can't drop a homegirl with a wing shot. You gotta hit the ten-ring."

"I've got to get Julian to a hospital," he said. "We're headed to Macao."

"You saved Julian's life. You know that, don't you?" she said, still holding his hand. "I'm proud of you, baby."

Ten minutes later, when Wheeler came down from the wheel to recheck on Julian and Tanisha, he found Chauncy holding a document they had removed from the altar safe. It had been sealed in a bright red envelope of very heavy bond. The flap had been dipped in cinnabar paste and stamped with beautiful, intricate ideograms. The document inside was on very thin rice paper, the writing was brushed calligraphy. Chauncy handed it to Wheeler.

"I think this is the one you were looking for," he said.

Wheeler looked at the Chinese calligraphy. He could make no sense of it. "Does it say he's going to run for Governor of Hong Kong?" Wheeler asked.

"It does," Chauncy answered.

"Does it say Beijing has made a deal with Willy?" Wheeler asked again.

"It does." Then Chauncy turned the page and pointed with awe to the gorgeous red stamped imprint. "This is the seal and signature of Chen Boda, the head of the Chinese Military Commission," he said. "One of the three most powerful men in the world."

Chapter
28.

Macao

It was nine-thirty in the morning when they dropped anchor in the Bay of Praia Grande. They could hear music drifting across the water. Wheeler got the binoculars out of the cabin and inspected the coastline. In the distance, along the Avenida de Republica, a parade was winding through the outskirts of Macao. A line of costumed, dancing people serpentined along, carrying a huge Catholic crucifix.

"What the hell is this?" Wheeler wondered aloud.

"The February Festival," Chauncy said, looking off across the bay.

At this distance Macao looked misplaced. It didn't seem to belong on the east China coast. The Spanish architecture and old steeple church of Sao Paulo gave it the look of a sleepy Mediterranean village, but the picturesque image was destroyed by a line of modern hotel casinos on the water. The monstrously ugly Hotel Lisboa, with its tall white circular architecture, sat like a misplaced visitor from Las Vegas amidst the Spanish ambiance.

Wheeler had been reading a guidebook he'd found aboar
d a
nd already knew that Macao was technically part of the Chinese mainland, connected by two bridges to the islands of Coloane and Taipa. In the hill section of central Macao, overlooking the sea, was the Sao Paulo Cathedral, built in the fifteen hundreds, and right next to it, a huge stone garrison, Fortaleza de Monte.