“Sorry, Captain!” said Dixon’s winch man. There was obviously nothing they could do till the block cooled.
A crewman was rushing out of the dry lab toward the smoking winch with a foam-nozzle fire extinguisher. “No!” yelled Frank. “Get back in the lab!” Christ, that’s all he needed, foam on the winch drum — soap on a rope, lose the vitally needed friction grip of the cord against the drum. “Try it now!” Frank ordered Dixon’s winch man over the agonized scream of Albinski’s winch.
Now the sonar showed the two divers at about the same depth, eighty-five feet, a “short dip” in the ocean compared to the dives Frank had supervised over the Marianas Trench, which was so deep it could swallow Mount Everest with another five thousand feet of water to spare. But right now the two SEALs, though in much shallower water, were in a much more dangerous situation — a dead weight lift.
“Smoke!” Now it was Albinski’s umbilical, but this time the winch man pumped the brake pedal to a stop, the winch hauling up Dixon groaning, the umbilical taut, completely devoid of any slack.
“Smoke!” Dixon’s line was overheating again, threatening to snap at any moment, the tether rope’s strands starting to “split ragged,” as the bosun explained to the cook’s young gofer. All bets as to how long it would take were now off. If both divers had gotten to their Bail bottle in time, there was still the question of their energy, nitrogen, oxygen, helium, and air running out.
“Sir?” It was Petrel’s second officer. “COMSUBPAC-GRU-9’s on the line. They want to know—”
“Not now.”
“The admiral’s asking—”
“Not now!”
CHAPTER TWELVE
“Nai hao,” came the greeting. At first Riser didn’t recognize the general. The commander of Nanjing’s 12th Military District had donned the traditional drab blue workers’ Mao suit instead of his uniform. Wu Ling, also in the drab blue uniform, looked on shyly.
“Ni hao,” replied Riser, extending his hand and nodding to Wu Ling. The general’s eyes smiled, and the sparse apology for a mustache momentarily became a straight line, his tobacco-stained teeth highlighted by expensive gold crown and bridge work, his breath so pungent it could have stopped the Shanghai Express. Riser wondered if his own breath was offensive. Mandy would, had, occasionally reminded him, “Daddy, I think you need a mint.” And since her death — the same thing had happened after Elizabeth’s fatal hit and run — he’d let personal habits slide, didn’t give a damn if he’d showered twice a day anymore, polished his shoes, or done the other things he habitually did.
“I am sorry,” the general said, “that the flight to Hangzhou was delayed. China Air is not very punctuated.”
“Punctual,” said Riser, immediately regretting the correction, which many Chinese, particularly higher-ups like Chang, often resented as typical of “Big Nose” arrogance. But Chang laughed easily at his mistake. “Punct-you-all?”
“Yes.” Riser smiled, seizing upon the general’s good humor to get to the serious questions he wanted to ask, and for which he’d risked the wrath of his boss by foregoing the official Moon Festival festivities in Beijing. Wu Ling trailed behind them, so deferential that it was immediately obvious to Riser that she was not going to be the source of much helpful information.
In the courtyard of the inner garden, Riser suddenly had a powerful sense of déjà vu, so much so that despite his impatience to find out what Chang knew about Mandy’s death, he stopped walking, staring at the lanterns and the master’s study with its distinctive Ming furniture. He had seen this before, with his wife, but he and Elizabeth had never been to China, let alone Suzhou, together.
Chang was still talking. “I wanted to meet you here. One needs tranquility before—” He saw that Riser had fallen several paces behind him, the attaché’s face reminding the general of the British politician Tony Blair, creased with worry lines that momentarily gave him the appearance of a much older man, an effect highlighted by the bereaved cultural attaché’s uncharacteristically unkempt appearance.
Riser turned his gaze from the master’s study in the garden to the general. “Yes?”
“Perhaps you are not ready?” suggested Chang.
“For what?”
Obviously the American hadn’t heard him. “To go to the morgue.”
Wu Ling, Riser saw, had tears in her eyes, fighting hard to control her emotion.
“No,” Riser told Chang. “I’m not ready. But I have to, I suppose.”
“Quite so. I thought the garden might give you a chance to revive your spirits first. Perhaps I should have arranged it the other way around.”
“No, no, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be rude, but I’ve just — I feel as if I’ve been here before with my late wife.”
“You are correct.”
Riser stared at the general, completely nonplused.
“Some years ago,” the general explained, “this courtyard was copied in every detail and displayed in New York at the Metropolitan Museum.”
“When?” asked Riser, relieved by the possibility that his mind was not imagining things but merely remembering a real, happier time — his Sunday visits to the museum with Elizabeth and Mandy. “Going to church,” he used to call it, the highlight of their week, Mandy transfixed by Monet’s Haystacks.
“I think,” replied the general, “it was before your daughter was born.”
“Yes.” Charles forced himself to return to the present. “What have you found out?”
“She was murdered, Mr. Riser, but I do not think it was for money.”
Charles felt his bowels turning to ice. His doubts about Mandy’s death had been difficult enough to deal with, but confirmation of his suspicions that she had been randomly attacked — He had to sit down on the stone bench and take a deep breath.
“Perhaps you should not go to the Suzhou coroner.” The general meant going to the morgue.
“Yes,” said Charles. “I have to see her. Can we go now?”
“If you wish,” said Chang, surprised by the energy of Riser’s request coming so quickly after what had clearly been a body blow.
“I want to get it over with,” Riser told him, sensing the general’s surprise.
Outside the Garden of the Master of the Nets, the general resorted to small talk in an effort to amortize the American’s pain, explaining to Charles how the garden had been named after a government official so fed up with bureaucracy that he’d decided to abandon his world and become a simple fisherman, casting his nets. Charles appreciated Chang’s efforts, and he did understand how the official had felt; how, like so many, he had yearned to be free of it all, as he himself did now — free not only of the bureaucratic world, but of the world itself.
On their arrival at Suzhou’s morgue, Wu Ling remained in the car. The building was renovated but still bore all the elements of the brutal Soviet architecture of the 1950s. Chang and Riser passed through a small, cluttered, smoke-filled office. There were three computers, but no one at them, two of the female clerks staring at the “Big Nose,” the other preoccupied, doing her nails. The coroner, Mr. Wei, was out, one of them told General Chang, apparently not recognizing him out of uniform.
It was the grim, overpowering smell of antiseptic that first struck Riser. Further inside, however, the morgue looked and sounded disconcertingly gay, with Moon Festival paper lanterns strung all about and Chinese opera wailing from Suzhou’s Chinese Central Television channel. Copies of Renmin Ribao — The People’s Daily—the country’s propaganda organ, outdated editions of the Shanghai Star, and several tabloids he’d never seen before, featuring front-page pictures of nudes soaking up the sun on some “unnamed” southern beach, were strewn about. Either there wasn’t much to do in the Suzhou morgue or it was overstaffed. Had the Gong An Bu seen these ideologically impure publications? Either that or they hadn’t been here at all.