“Wu Ling,” Chang apologized, “is very saddened by Miss Riser’s death. She does not want to dwell upon it.”
“I understand,” said Riser, “believe me—” Charles paused to regain his composure. “—but I wouldn’t take much of her time. I would be grateful for even a half hour. I’ll catch the early morning flight.” Riser heard Wu Ling agree, albeit reluctantly.
“Perhaps,” added Chang, clearly sensitive to Riser’s mood, “we could meet somewhere quiet. The Garden of the Master of the Nets. You know it?”
“Yes,” said Riser. “Tell Wu Ling I appreciate it. This is very kind of you, General. I won’t forget it. Neither will my government.”
The truth was, his government didn’t know about him going to Hangzhou because Riser knew there was no way his boss and the American ambassador would sanction a trip to Hangzhou tomorrow. It was the day of the Moon Festival, an important all-China, mid-autumn celebration during which cultural attachés posted in Beijing should have remained in the capital, not traveled six hundred miles away to the south, no matter what personal reasons they might have. Besides, China and the U.S. were not on good terms. As usual, there was the perennial tension over the human rights issue in Chinese-occupied Tibet, the ever potentially explosive issue of Taiwan, and now Beijing struggled with the problem of the “Stans”—the countries of central Asia that bordered China. They included Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and Pakistan, with their huge Muslim populations. In particular, there was the problem of Muslim terrorists in China’s far northeast region of Xinjiang. In that vast province, almost four times the size of Texas, many of the terrorists were believed to have been financed by al Qaeda.
Charlie Riser, forgetting that he was still on the phone with the general, was surprised to hear Chang speaking. It was a kind of absentmindedness that had frequently overtaken him since Mandy’s death.
“Wu Ling,” said the general, “tells me that your daughter desired it very much — the garden.”
Desired? thought Charlie. It was such a beautiful, albeit unusual, way of putting it.
“Yes,” Riser said. “I look forward to it.” The thought that he would be walking in a place where his daughter had so recently been was strangely comforting and saddening at the same time.
As usual, China Air was running late. En route to Hangzhou, Riser, irritated by the surliness of a flight attendant, recalled how the nascent airline used to test applications for the job. “Honest to God,” the embassy military attaché, Bill Heinz, had told him, “four turns in a swivel chair. If you didn’t get dizzy you were in.” It was the only airline Charlie knew — from a flight he’d once made to Xian to see the famed buried Stone Warriors — that had landed the aircraft with food trays still down and not cleared. On one flight, both pilot and copilot managed to lock themselves out of the cockpit and, drawing the curtain separating flight deck from passengers, proceeded to bash their way back in by means of a fire axe.
He was relieved when he saw the early morning lights of Hangzhou, still sparsely lit by Western standards. Most of them were clustered east of the West Lake, a long string of lanterns marking the Sudi Causeway, which seemed to be running uphill north to south across the four-square-mile lake as the plane banked, the blackness of the lake dotted here and there by the firefly dots of ferries and sampans.
After the gritty Mongolian dust storms that perennially blanketed Beijing and irritated his contact lenses, it was the fresh, sweet air of Hangzhou’s surrounding hills that first struck Charles as he stepped off the plane. The second thing he noticed was the abundance of colored lanterns — Hangzhou would of course be required to celebrate the anniversary of Mao’s revolution, but much of the bustle in the city was in preparation for the Moon Festival.
At the Hangzhou rail station there were no soft-seat-class tickets left. Envisaging riding “hard seat,” jammed in with masses of “cawking,” spitting comrades in a blue haze of cigarette smoke and shouted dialects, Riser told a taxi driver the price he was prepared to pay in yuan for the eighty-mile cab ride to Suzhou. The driver snorted as if the proposed price was ridiculously low. Riser began walking to the next cab in line when the first driver relented. Even so, he wrote down the amount so there could be no “misunderstanding” when they reached Suzhou. “Ni hùi shuo yingwen ma?” he asked the driver. Do you speak English?
“Bu shuo,” the driver said, shaking his head.
“Zhèci lüxing yào hua duochang shíjian?” How long does it take?
“Two … maybe forty hours,” the driver told him in English, grinning in the rearview mirror. A comedian.
Charles gave him a smile, though he didn’t feel like it. The fact that the teeming life of China, of the world, was going on outside without the slightest concern for his daughter’s death seemed monstrous to him. But part of the reason he put his Walkman earphones on again was not so much to shut out the world, but to try to make sense of Mandy’s urgent, static-saturated message that he’d taped and replayed at least twenty times. And to hear her voice. And, yes, in part, to black out the teeming, uncaring world, to close his eyes to the passing fields of morning, to retreat like a migraine sufferer, withdrawing from his pain into the cave of darkness. In drawing the shades against the indifference of the world, against its harshness and unrelenting glare, he could see her again, hear her voice. His memory of her and his need for vengeance were the only things that made it possible for him to go through these China days. But he couldn’t escape the urgency in her tone.
“Daddy … Wu Ling … loaded … as usual … told me Chang… tralize … or … wes … kind of deal … the mill …”
He only hoped Bill Heinz could help.
At first Riser had resisted passing on a copy of the garbled conversation to the military attaché. It seemed to him like giving up something, his daughter’s last words, an intensely private thing, to a stranger. But maybe the appropriate agencies could make something of it? Since 9/11, the atmosphere in the embassy had been as paranoid as that in America itself. And so, while not yet recovered from the mind-numbing shock of Mandy’s murder, he sought what the media called “closure,” while knowing there could never really be any following your child’s death. Which was when he had typed out a memo, including the message, to Heinz.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
At the surface, the tough fiberglass Kirvy-Morgan diving helmets that Frank Hall’s Petrel crew had gotten for Rafe Albinski and Peter Dixon were a bright canary yellow atop the SEALs’ black neoprene dry suits. Under the suits, they wore their Navy-issue clothing as they dove to reinvestigate Darkstar’s first reported anomaly, only this time they would be going much deeper, literally trying to get to the root of the problem.
Within fifteen feet, the canary yellow diving helmets were a light pastel. Another twenty feet, and Frank Hall — his right hand wheeling clockwise, telling the two adjacent winch men to keep lowering — could no longer see the helmets. His eyes shifted instead to the two blocks at the apex of the square A-shaped derrick, the depth needle on each block moving smoothly, registering the two divers’ descent. Each of the SEALs’ umbilical cords consisted of a half-inch black air, or Kluge, hose, a thin communication wire and nylon tethering rope. They had passed easily over the block’s wheel, a coarse, chalky white powder rising from both divers’ cables as dried salt particles were spat out by the uncoiling tether rope.
In the nether world 180 feet down, the two SEALs saw the high intensity light of their halogen lamps suddenly speared by a sixty-foot-high forest of kelp moving in a strangely beautiful yet Quixotic ballet, parts of it swaying gracefully side to side in the main east-west current, other strands of the amber plant quivering rebelliously, the rasping sound of frond upon frond faintly audible to the divers’ external mikes. Dixon, though the junior of the two, wasn’t at all fazed by the sight of the massive kelp barrier, which was so wide their halogen beams couldn’t find a perimeter around which they might circumscribe the forest. In fact, Dixon thought it a “cool” diversion, and he radioed Rafe Albinski, “Man, that’s pretty!”