Slowly, excitement began to grow in Court.
Conclusive evidence? Not hardly, but he had a feeling he was onto something.
The ship had closed enough to where Court could read the lighted bow with the help of his binoculars. It was the Tai Chin VI, which, he saw to his excitement, was on Brewer’s list of ships that had not run their transponders on Sunday. It was registered to a freight company out of Jakarta, and Brewer had noted that it never transmitted location information, even though its gross tonnage was 745, well over the 300-tons rule.
Interesting.
Court just sat there, watching through the night vision binoculars, occasionally switching to his infrared monocular to scan the deck of the vessel, then sweeping the device over different fishing boats in the area, before going back to his binos to look at the crowded bar at the southwestern end of the bay.
Less than thirty minutes after dropping anchor, one of two white tenders with outboard motors was lowered from the back of the Tai Chin VI. Several men climbed down a ladder and boarded. Court went back to his infrared device and used it to count the men on the tender. Five white-hot human forms, plus the heat from the little boat’s outboard engine. As they got closer to the shore, he could see that a couple of the men wore backpacks, but otherwise they weren’t carrying anything overtly on their bodies.
Their tender motored directly to the dinghy dock floating below the bar he’d visited earlier in the day, and they climbed up the narrow and steep stairs to the deck of the bar.
Court lowered his binos and drummed his fingers on them, trying to decide what to do.
It did not take him long.
He realized he’d accomplished as much as he could sitting on this hill. Now it was time to stir things up, to play the role of agitator.
He would go to the bar, where he would stand out like a sore thumb, but he would try to get close to someone from that boat, or any Wo Shing Wo Triads involved with Fan Jiang. He’d try to get bad actors to reveal themselves, using his own proximity as a lure. If they were tied to whatever happened to Fitzroy’s men, well, then Fitzroy’s new man would probably find some trouble, too.
And Court was looking for trouble tonight.
Before leaving his overwatch position, Court took a device out of his bag and turned it on. It was one of the wireless cameras he’d bought at the surveillance shop earlier in the day. Smaller than a deck of cards, it would run for eight hours on a single charge and send video directly to Court’s mobile phone. The camera had a motor to pan left and right on a small disc, but Court just tied it to a branch on a nearby tree with pipe cleaners bought for the task, rendering it stationary. The wire in the pipe cleaners allowed him to adjust the angle of the camera somewhat, so he maxed out the ten-power zoom with the app on his phone, then physically adjusted the camera till he had it centered on the cargo ship anchored five hundred yards away. It wasn’t the closest view of the ship, but with a single sweep of the mobile app, he could switch the low-light vision of the camera to infrared view, and using this he could see figures standing on the deck, represented as red hot spots.
With this camera he could keep an eye on the ship without yanking his binos or monocular out of his backpack in the middle of the bar, a tactic he couldn’t imagine he could pull off while remaining covert.
At nine forty p.m., Court flicked his pack over his shoulder and began moving down the hill.
CHAPTER
FOURTEEN
There was another vessel in the water near Po Toi Island, but Court couldn’t see it. It lay at anchor off the eastern shore, some two and a half miles east of the bay, and it was impressive to look at on the outside. But as luxury yachts went, the current occupants found it almost as cramped on the inside as living in military barracks. The yacht was a Numarine 68 Fly; it boasted a forty-seven-ton displacement and a cruising speed of twenty-five knots, and it had been rented out by the week from a service on Kowloon. Logistics personnel working at the SVR station in Hong Kong had acquired the vessel from the owners with an open-ended return date, stocked it for a week so it could house more than a dozen operatives and all their gear, then moored it in a slip at a large public docking facility.
Then the logistics personnel left it there.
And soon after they left, Zoya and the task force arrived and climbed aboard.
The boat was now crewed by Russian naval personnel brought down from Vladivostok, men who looked at this operation as a vacation from their normal daily grind on a coastal patrol boat, and they, as well as a team of security men brought in to secure the vessel, had no clue about the real mission of the main element of their small task force.
This yacht was designed to accommodate eight in luxurious comfort. Now seventeen in all — sixteen men and one woman — lived in stifling proximity to one another, sleeping in shifts on every flat surface, their massive stocks of gear filling all the cargo holds as well as every possible nook and cranny belowdecks, even stowed under black tarps lashed to the main deck.
The yacht had been docked in a mooring field north of the Hong Kong airport for the past three days, but the previous evening they’d relocated to this spot off Po Toi. Zoya had ferreted out information from a rival Triad gang that a Chinese defector pursued by mainland intelligence in Hong Kong had been taken to Po Toi on a Wo Shing Wo speedboat several days ago. Here he was to be handed off to a cargo ship called the Tai Chin VI that ran heroin back and forth between Wo Shing Wo and some Southeast Asian drug concern. The information was thirdhand at best, but Zoya liked her chances, so she moved her task force here to set up shop off the island.
After confirming the presence of Wo Shing Wo on the island and after a Russian spy satellite had found the ship heading back to Po Toi, Zoya and her task force decided their best chance for finding Fan before anyone else was to hit hard and fast soon after the ship arrived this evening.
They didn’t expect Fan to be on board, but they did expect the crew would know something of where the ship went last, and possibly even who had Fan now.
On the Russian yacht, a lone sentry armed with binoculars stood on the flying bridge and scanned the deserted shoreline to the west. On the main foredeck, two more crewmen readied diving gear, while inside the main-deck saloon, seven men pulled on neoprene suits. The operators were crowded, but they were accustomed to living and working in close proximity to one another. As members of the elite and secretive Zaslon (Shield) Unit of SVR, this very team of paramilitaries had helicoptered across eastern Ukraine and Dagestan on direct-action missions. They’d killed terrorists and kidnapped local rebel leaders in Chechnya after sitting huddled together in the back of armored vehicles for hours on end, and they’d parachuted into Syria to assist with the escape of a Syrian Army general from a position being overrun by rebels.
These men were all first-timers to Hong Kong, but tonight’s mission was no different from others in their careers. They would raid a cargo ship from underwater, capture any on board who could be captured, and kill those who offered resistance.
Vasily was in charge of the Zaslon team, with Yevgeni serving as his second-in-command. They stood in the middle of the saloon talking over last-minute details of the mission while everyone geared up around them.
Just as the men began a final weapons and comms check in the tight room, the hatch to the lower deck rose, and Zoya Zakharova climbed up from below. She wore a black neoprene shorty wetsuit, her bare legs and arms exposed. Her chin-length dark hair was pulled back and banded tight against her head, obviously so she could pull on the neoprene diving hood she held in her hand. On her right thigh she wore a sheathed knife, and over her shoulder she lugged a black backpack.