The Stone Monkey (6 page)

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.

Before the Ghost landed, there should be enough time to find the trucks that were waiting to take them to Chinatown, Chang estimated. The truck drivers wouldn't know about the sinking but Chang would tell them that the Coast Guard was after them and order the men to leave immediately. If they insisted on waiting, Chang and Wu and the others would overpower them and drive the trucks themselves.

He studied the shoreline and beyond—past the beach were trees and grass. It was hard to see in the windblown rain and mist but he detected what looked like a road. Some lights too, not far away. A cluster of them: a small village, it seemed.

Wiping the stinging seawater from his eyes, Chang watched the people at his feet, falling silent as they gazed at the shore ahead of them, the turbulent currents here, riptides and whirlpools, the approaching rocks, sharp as knives, dark as dried blood.

Then, just ahead of them, under the surface of the water, appeared a bank of rock. Chang throttled back fast and turned hard to the side, just missing the stone shelf. The raft was now sideways, buffeted by the ragged waves, which flooded the vessel. They nearly capsized once, then again. Chang tried to steer through a gap in the bank but the motor suddenly cut out. He grabbed the lanyard and tugged hard. A chug, then silence. Again, a dozen times. But nothing happened. The motor didn't even turn over. His older son scrabbled forward and tipped the gasoline can. "Empty!" William shouted.

Desperate, weak with fear for his family's safety, he looked behind them. The fog was thicker now and obscured them—but it also hid the Ghost. How close was he?

The raft rose on a high wave then dropped into a gully of water with a jarring crash.

"Down, everybody down!" Chang shouted. "Stay low." He dropped to his knees in the dark water sloshing on the floor of the raft. He grabbed the oar and tried to use it as a rudder. But the waves and current were too powerful, the raft too heavy. A fist of water struck him and ripped the oar from his hands. Chang fell backward. He glanced in the direction they were headed and he saw a line of rocks just ahead, a few meters away.

The water caught the launch like a surfboard and sped it forward. They struck the rocks with stunning force, bow first. The rubber shell ripped open with a gasping hiss and began to deflate. Sonny Li, John Sung and the young couple in the front—Chao-hua and Rose—were pitched out into the turbulent water just past the rocks and swept away in the surf.

The two families—the Wus and the Changs—were in the rear of the raft, which remained partially inflated and they managed to hold on. The raft struck the rocks again. Wus wife was thrown hard into a ledge of stone but she didn't go overboard; screaming, she fell back into the raft, blood covering her arm, and lay stunned on the floor. No one else was injured by the impact.

Then the raft was past the rocks and headed toward shore, deflating quickly.

Chang heard a distant cry for help—from one of the four who'd vanished when they struck the rock but he couldn't tell where the shout had come from.

The raft slid over another rock, low in the water, fifteen meters from shore. They were trapped in the surf now, battered and being dragged toward the pebbly beach. Wu Qichen and his daughter struggled to keep his injured and half-conscious wife above the surface—her arm torn open and bleeding badly. In Mei-Mei's arms Po-Yee, the baby, had stopped crying and was staring listlessly around her.

But the motor of the raft was hung up on a rock ledge, trapping them eight or nine meters from shore. The water wasn't deep here—two meters—but the waves were still pounding them hard.

"The shore," he shouted, coughing water. "Now!"

The swim took forever. Even Chang, the strongest among them, was gasping for breath and racked by cramps before he reached land. Finally, under his feet, he felt stones, slippery with kelp and slime, and stumbled forward out of the water. He fell once, hard, but quickly regained his foothold and helped his father out of the water.

Exhausted, they all stumbled to a nearby shelter on the beach, open on the sides but with a corrugated roof that protected them from the slashing rain. The families collapsed on the dark sand underneath it, coughing water, crying, gasping, praying. Sam Chang finally managed to stand. He gazed out to sea but saw no sign of the Ghost's raft or the immigrants who'd been swept overboard.

Then he sank down to his knees and lay his forehead on the sand. Their companions and friends were dead, and they themselves injured, tired beyond words and pursued by a killer... Still, Sam Chang reflected, they were alive and were on firm land. He and his family had at last finished the endless journey that had taken them halfway around the world to their new home, America, the Beautiful Country.

Half a kilometer out to sea the Ghost hunched over his cell phone, trying to protect it from the rain and waves as his raft plowed through the water toward the piglets.

The reception was bad—the signal was bouncing via satellite through Fuzhou and Singapore after it left his phone—but he managed to get through to Jerry Tang, a
bangshou
he sometimes used in New York's Chinatown and who was now waiting somewhere on the shore nearby to pick him up.

Breathless from the rough ride, the Ghost managed to describe to the driver more or less where he'd be landing—about three or four hundred meters east from what seemed to be a strip of stores and houses.

"What weapons do you have?" the Ghost shouted.

"What?" Tang shouted.

He had to repeat the question several times. "Weapons!"

But Tang was a debt collector—more of a businessman than an enforcer—and it turned out that he had with him only a pistol.

"Gan,"
the Ghost spat out. Fuck. Armed only with his old Model 51 handgun, he'd hoped for an automatic weapon of some kind.

"The Coast Guard," Tang told him, the transmission lost in static and the sound of the wind, "they're on ... here. I'm listening ... scanner ... have to get away. Where ..."

The Ghost shouted, "If you see any of the piglets, kill them. Did you hear me? They're on the shore nearby you. Find them! Kill them!"

"Kill them? You want—"

But a wave washed over the side of the raft and drenched him. The phone went silent and the Ghost glanced at the screen. It was dead, shorted out. Disgusted, he flung it to the floor.

A wall of rock loomed and the Ghost steered around it, making for a broad beach far to the left of the small town. It would take some time to get back to where the piglets had landed but he didn't want to risk injuring himself on the outcroppings of stone. Still, beaching the raft proved to be harrowing. As he closed in on the sand the small craft rose on the crest of a wave and nearly tipped over but the Ghost throttled back fast and the raft settled onto the water. A wave, though, caught him in the back and knocked him to the floor of the boat, drenching him and spinning the raft sideways. It slammed into the shore in an explosion of surf and tossed its occupant hard onto the beach. The propeller tipped out of the water and the motor screamed as it raced. The Ghost, afraid the sound would give him away, crawled frantically back to the engine and managed to shut it off.

He saw Jerry Tang, in a silver four-by-four BMW, on a sandy asphalt road about twenty meters from the shore. He rose and jogged toward the vehicle. Fat, unshaven Tang caught sight of him and drove forward. The Ghost leaned down to the window on the driver's side. "Did you see the others?"

The nervous man said, "We have to go!" He nodded at a police scanner. "The Coast Guard knows we're here. They're sending the police to search."

"The others?" the Ghost snapped. "The piglets?"

"I didn't see anybody else. But—"

"I can't find my
bangshou
either. I don't know if he got off the ship." The Ghost scanned the shoreline.

"I haven't seen anyone," Tang said, his voice high. "But we can't stay here."

From the corner of his eye the Ghost saw motion near the surf: a man in gray cloth was crawling on the rocks away from the water, like an injured animal. The Ghost stepped away from the truck and pulled his gun from his belt. "Wait here."

"What are you doing?" Tang asked desperately. "We can't stay here anymore! They're coming. They'll be here in ten minutes. Don't you understand me?"

But the Ghost was paying no attention to the thug as he walked back across the road. The piglet looked up and saw the Ghost approaching but the man had apparently broken his leg in the landing and couldn't even stand, much less flee. He began to crawl desperately back to the water. The Ghost was curious why he was even bothering.

Sonny Li opened his eyes and thanked the ten judges of hell—not for surviving the sinking but because for the first time in two weeks, the slippery twist of nausea within his gut was virtually gone.

When the raft had hit the rocks he and John Sung and the young couple had been thrown into the water and swept away by the strong current. Li had immediately lost sight of the other three and had been dragged down the beach for what seemed like a kilometer until he'd been able to kick his way onto the sand. Then, crawling as far away as he could from the ocean, Li collapsed.

He'd lain motionless under the pounding rain as the seasickness dissipated and the throbbing in his head lessened. Now, struggling to his feet, Li started slowly toward the road, his skin irritated from the cloth of his jeans and sweatshirt, which were filled with sand and saturated with the pungent residue of salt water. He could see nothing in either direction. He remembered, though, the lights of a small village to his right and it was in that direction that he now began to walk along the sand-swept road.

Where was the Ghost? Li wondered.

Then, as if in answer, came a brief pop, which Li recognized immediately as a pistol shot. It reverberated through the dark, wet dawn.

But was it the Ghost? Or some local resident? (Everyone knew that all Americans carried guns.) Maybe it was a U.S. public security officer.

Better to be safe. He was eager to find the Ghost quickly but he knew he had to be careful. He stepped off the road into some brush, where he was less visible, and started forward as fast as his cramped and exhausted legs could carry him.

At the sound the families paused. "It was—" Wu Qichen began. "Yes," Sam Chang muttered. "A gunshot."

"He's killing us. He's tracking us down and killing us."

"I know," Chang snapped back. His heart cried for them—for Dr. Sung, for Sonny Li, for the couple—whoever among them had just died. But what could he do?

Chang looked at his father and observed that Chang Jiechi was breathing hard but, despite the battering in the raft and the swim to shore, the old man didn't seem to be in great pain. He nodded to his son, meaning it was all right to continue. The cluster of people started walking once again through the rain and wind.

Their concerns about begging or coercing the drivers to take them to Chinatown were unfounded; there'd been no trucks waiting for them. Chang supposed that the vehicles were at a different location altogether, or perhaps as soon as the Ghost decided to scuttle the ship he'd called and had them return. He and Wu had spent several minutes calling for Sung and Li and the others who'd been washed overboard. But then Chang had seen the orange raft of the snakehead approaching and he'd led the two families off the road into the grass and bushes, where they'd be out of sight, and they made their way toward the lights, where he hoped to find a truck.

The beacons that drew them turned out to be a line of restaurants, a petrol station, several stores selling souvenirs like on the waterfront at Xiamen, ten or twelve houses, a church.

The hour was just around dawn—perhaps 5:30 or 6—but there were signs of life: a dozen cars were parked in front of the two restaurants, including a driverless one with the motor running. But it was a small sedan and Chang needed a vehicle with room for ten. And he needed one whose theft wouldn't be noticed for at least two or three hours—the length of time he'd been told it would take them to get to Chinatown in New York City.

He told the others to wait behind a tall hedge of bushes and motioned his son William and Wu to follow him. Crouching, they moved behind the buildings. There were two large trucks behind the petrol station but they were both well in view of a young attendant in the garage. Rain pelted the glass, making visibility poor, but he would have noticed immediately if they'd started to drive a truck away.

Twenty meters farther on was a darkened house and behind it was a pickup truck. But Chang didn't want to expose his father or the children to the rain and weather. Also, ten shipwrecked Chinese would be easily spotted in a rickety old vehicle of this sort, driving toward New York City like a band of the "floating population"—itinerant laborers who travel from town to town in China looking for work.