Switching on the recorder playback, Gadgets listened to the tape of slaver frequencies during the assault. While he worked, he heard static, the pops and squeaks of over-the-horizon transmitters disrupting the slaver radio frequencies, electronic noise from space. Then came the Asian voice, the words in textbook English, yet alien and macabre when Chan Sann spoke.
No. Gadgets shook away the thought. That's superstition. It's not in his voice. It's what I've seen in the last three days. Now I can't hear that Cambodian talk without thinking about dead people.
Chan Sann relayed a curt announcement of the capture of the steamboat to Abbott — an American, Gadgets judged from his Massachusetts accent. Other transmissions announced numbers of workers captured and the departure of Chan Sann by helicopter. But during the time of the assault, nothing. No clicking of a transmit key, no emergency call words, no voices cut off by rifle fire, nothing.
We did it. Took them out without a sound.
Spreading out his shortwave and scrambler on the captain's chart table, he carefully positioned the units. He set a note pad precisely where his right hand would rest. Then the tape antenna went up the flagpole.
Keying codes, receiving automatic coded replies, Gadgets taped a burst of Stony Man intelligence transmitted from Virginia, relayed by satellite. He replayed it through the scrambler as he wrote out his own message on the yellow pad.
His writing stopped. He listened another moment, then rushed out to find Lyons and Blancanales. Replaying the tape, they heard a conspiracy of depravity and assassination beginning before they were born.
Now, that conspiracy threatened every living man and woman and child in the Free World, and unknown generations of the unborn.
19
Born the eldest son of a Chinese warlord, Wei Ho enjoyed the vast wealth of his clan. The Wei clan had ruled Jiangsu province from the time of his greatgrandfather, a puppet for the British invaders of China. After the English introduced opium and addiction to millions of Chinese, the Wei controlled the drug trade in their region. They reaped an unending harvest of gold. The family maintained an army of mercenaries to enslave the people of the province, enforcing their sovereignty through assassination and atrocity.
The first-born son knew only palaces, European tutors and luxury. After an education in the finest English prep schools and universities, Wei Ho traveled the capitals of Europe, tasting the life and vices of royalty and the very wealthy before returning to China to assume control of his clan's drug trade in Shanghai.
Modern, designed by Europeans wanting a city of boulevards and lights, Shanghai represented a door to the hundreds of millions of the Chinese nation. There, English and French and Portuguese exacted the wealth of the vast but weak nation through "concessions" imposed by military threat. The European masters erected ornate offices and regal homes, built opera houses and theaters for their own entertainment. Chinese police excluded Chinese from the European sections where the foreigners promenaded on jacaranda-shaded boulevards in the finest Paris fashions.
As China entered the twentieth century, the adventurous and radical among the nation's youth sought the freedom and the Western ideas of Shanghai. Actors, writers, poets crowded the ghettoes. Young girls sought careers denied by their traditions. Idealists read Marx and Engels and Lenin, dreamed of a workers' paradise in China.
This became Wei Ho's world. His playboy life-style and underworld connections endeared him to the decadent rich. The artists enjoyed his patronage. The beautiful young men and women enjoyed his exotic drugs — the finest opium, cocaine from far-off Bolivia, red hashish from Beirut, kif from North Africa. The radicals appreciated his education in philosophy, endlessly discussing their plans of political and cultural revolution in cafes and bookstores as Wei Ho, in his tailored English suits, smoking English cigarettes, smiled at their fantasies.
One night, not in a bookstore or coffee shop or lecture hall, he saw Lan Pin. The girl who would later rule the destinies of a billion Chinese ran from the stage of a cabaret theater, sequins in her bobbed and curled hair, sweat streaking her makeup. When the young Chinese playboy, dressed like a European prince, caught up with her and simply smiled to her, the actress invited him back to her tiny dressing room. They chatted of art and beauty, she thanked him for his roses and champagne. The cabaret's owner interrupted. The fat old man with a blind eye took the beautiful young Lan Pin away to his apartment.
Wei Ho felt no jealousy. He knew of the young girl's relationship with the old man. He knew every detail of her flighty career. Riding in limousines to the nightclubs where Chinese youth affected the fads of Europe and America, dancing to jazz and drinking gin, Lan Pin presented herself as an actress. But she played her best roles in the beds of theater promoters and playwrights, musical directors and matinee idols. Her favors won her small roles in minor productions, but never the notice of the critics, nor the adoration of the audience, never stardom. Wei Ho courted her to offer a different sort of stardom, in roles where the ambitious, amoral young girl would excel.
He soon took her to the Persian splendor of his apartment and introduced her to opium. Sprawled on the soft carpets, she traveled the fantasy worlds of his drugs. She listened to his tight dictatorial voice attempt whispers. She felt his cold hands undress her. He offered her pleasure and wealth if she accepted a role...to become his mistress.
Lan Pin accepted instantly. As his lover, she knew she would enjoy the best circles of Shanghai society. She would enjoy his wealth.
Wei Ho demanded total subservience. He took her as mistress and student, training her in conversation, the social arts, how to subtly manipulate. He hired aging courtesans to instruct the girl in the erotic arts.
She had misunderstood the role he offered. When she finally had the talents of a high-priced prostitute, he dispatched her to his father.
In the old man's bed, she spied for Wei Ho. Learning of an important conference of warlords, Wei Ho arranged his father's assassination, and the taking of his empire.
Wei Ho rose to dominate the drug gangs of pre-Revolutionary China through the use of assassins and young girls. Wei Ho rewarded his star spy with a feature role in a film production. Lan Pin finally gained the wealth and stardom she desired.
Soon she desired more, much more. She had seen her mentor's rise to power. Exploiting her sudden fame when her movie became a box-office smash, she sought introductions to politicians, outspoken army officers, Communist Party leaders.
Wei Ho felt no jealousy. Famine and war stalked China in the 1930s. He knew the value of a woman in government.
As an actress in cabarets and theaters, she knew the thrill of an audience. She loved the sensation of standing on a stage before hundreds of adoring watchers. But the small audiences of theaters no longer satisfied her. She dreamed of greater adoration. One warm night, after miles in a car crowded with Communist leaders, she followed her friends upstairs, found herself looking out over a sea of faces, thousands upon thousands into the distance.
After that night, she lusted for power — the greater power of life or death over the common people, the masses. Wei Ho guided her. He selected her lovers.
Lan Pin's intellectual lovers taught her the rhetoric of revolution. Her wealthy patrons talked of capitalism. The young men of the Communist Party talked of a People's War.
She watched Mao Tse-Tung gathering support. She saw him as the emerging leader of an overwhelming popular movement. Though he had already married a peasant girl, the beautiful actress, perfumed and demure in her silk gowns, speaking the approved Marxist cliches, recognized no bourgeois vows. She flattered and charmed the revolutionary, parroting his dogma, marveling at the beauty and philosophy of his poetry. Finally, the awkward young idealist succumbed to her charms.