“That’s why I became a CIA agent. I dropped out of school and joined the agency in hopes that I could find my parent’s killer and bring them to justice. Again, the same as you.”
“I didn’t drop out of school,” Hail said, trying to keep the subject light.
“Yeah, I know. You had already graduated. An MIT whiz-kid that became a Gabillionaire.”
Hail said nothing.
“Which plane were your parents killed on?” Hail asked after a minute or two.
“Mexico,” Kara said sadly.
Hail had no response.
Kara continued talking, as if she were talking to herself. “It was around the time when Mexico changed their laws and allowed foreigners to own property outright within the restricted zones.” Kara explained. “It was a boom for the lagging real estate business in America. My Mom, being a super real-estate queen, took advantage of the new law and was making a killing representing rich Americans who wanted to buy cheap Mexican land and houses. The money was just rolling in. She really didn’t need to work, but she loved it.”
Kara stopped talking and looked at Hail. He looked interested so she continued.
“My mom travelled all over Mexico during the time when my Dad’s medical practice was winding down. He was getting close to early retirement, so he spent a lot of time in Mexico with my mom.”
Kara tilted the little glass and drained the rest of the sake into her mouth.
“So did all their money go to you?” Hail asked. “Are you a gabillionaire as well?”
“Money, houses, cars, boats; lots of stuff that requires up-keep and payments and all the things that I don’t care about. I’m not sure how much we’re talking about. A gabillion sounds about right.”
“I understand,” Hail said.
Kara turned her head and looked out the window at China, or wherever it was that this video was taken.
She said softly, “It could have been any plane. I don’t know off the top of my head how many planes fly out of Mexico every day, but it has to be hundreds. My folks were unlucky enough to be on American Airlines 264 flying out of Mexico City on that day.”
Kara paused, turned back around and tried to drain even more drops out of her empty glass. She set it back on the table. She looked down at the wonderful food and realized she had lost her appetite. She reached for the bottle of sake and then changed her mind and drank a sip from her water glass instead.
She asked rhetorically, “What are the chances of that? You know. It was only five planes out of more than a hundred-thousand flights per-day worldwide, but they just happened to be on one of those five. Go figure.”
Kara looked at Hail. She thought he looked sadder than she felt at that moment.
“I’m sure you feel the same way,” she asked Hail in a sympathetic tone.
“Yeah, I do.” Hail said.
“Don’t worry about our date tonight,” she said. “I’ll pay for dinner. Can I borrow some Hail dollars from you?”
Hail laughed.
Sea of Japan ― on the fishing trawler Huan Yue
Dingbang Wang was as happy as a captain of a smelly dirty Chinese fishing trawler could be.
He hated fishing and during the last few years he hadn’t been required to do that horrible job.
Dingbang felt truly blessed to be the captain of a smelly fishing trawler. After all, he had been born into abject poverty and raised in one of the poorest areas in southwest China, the mountainous Guizhou province. The only child of a peasant farmer, as far back as Dingbang could remember he had worked to eat. If they couldn’t grow it, then he didn’t eat. Potatoes, potatoes, potatoes, breakfast, lunch and dinner. His mother had died when he was five during the birth of his brother. His unnamed brother had also died still trapped inside his mother. When Dingbang turned sixteen years old, his father contracted a staph infection from a mosquito bite he had been scratching. His father had died two months later after being covered in puss bloated sores that had gone untreated. With no family left, Dingbang felt he had no reason to stay in his landlocked prison. He collected a bag of personal items, a bag of potatoes and eventually made his way south to the city of Zhanjiang.
Before he ever saw it, he could smell the ocean, the South China Sea. It was wonderful. He had never seen or smelled or swam in anything like it. And instead of potatoes, it was possible to throw a fishing line into the sea and pull out a fish. Being accustomed to hard work, before long, Dingbang found himself a job working as a common laborer on a fishing boat. It was wonderful. He had never eaten so much food in his life. Thousands of pounds of fish were hauled in each day and he could eat as much as he wanted. Many of the fish were the wrong kind and the captain would want to throw them out, but Dingbang would have them set aside so he could eat them later.
The young Chinese man from the mountains of Guizhou loved fishing. He loved being on the boat. He loved it every year of his life, until one year he liked it a little less. And the next year, even a little less. And that trend had continued as he worked his way from laborer, to a fisherman working the nets, to the first mate of a boat, and then finally to captain. By the time he had become the captain of the Huan Yue, he hated everything about fishing.
Dingbang also hated the men he worked with. They were young and from the city and had never been forced to work as hard as he had. They didn’t appreciate having a regular meal. They thought that they deserved more and they looked down on Dingbang Wang and his humble background.
Most men, who were around fish all day, became accustomed to the smell. But as Dingbang became less enchanted with the business, he started to hate the smell of fish. The rotting smell of the dock and the fish tanks on board and the bait ― it all made his stomach turn.
The only thing he really liked these days was his boss. The current owner of the Huan Yue had changed his life.
Years ago, around the time Dingbang had turned fifty years old, his boss had told him to bring the Huan Yue into the docks at Shenzhen. While in dry dock, several men worked on the Huan Yue with cutting torches and grinders. Dingbang watched as a big crane lifted a massive piece of the Huan Yue’s deck off his ship. It had been cut free by the men with the torches and the grinders. The big piece of deck that they removed had covered the ship’s massive main holding tank. That piece of metal was then replaced with a tank cover that rolled open and closed on rails. He had never seen anything like it before. In the wheelhouse, Dingbang could flip a switch and the huge cover would roll open, leaving a massive hole in the middle of the deck that looked straight down into the cavernous holding tank. At the time, it didn’t make any sense to Dingbang. With no watertight hatches to hold in the water or the baffles that were removed from the tank, then there was no way that it would ever function as a fish holding tank. And it never did. After the new tank cover had been installed, some other men had come onto his boat and had very skillfully painted the new rolling cover so it looked just like the old deck that had been removed. They painted the entire tank cover using colors that looked old to Dingbang. They even painted on fake watertight hatches using rusty hues and dirty tones. When Dingbang was standing on the deck, it was very apparent that his false deck was a painted illusion. But he assumed that the owner of the ship was more interested in what the eyes in the sky saw and not what the people on the ground saw.
Since the day his ship was modified, Dingbang’s life was much improved. Other than occasionally dipping his nets into the water for effect, his boss had turned his boat into a cargo vessel. It still looked just like a fishing vessel, but it didn’t act like one. Almost always, in the middle of the night, something that Dingbang was not allowed to know about, was loaded into the Huan Yue’s main tank cargo hold.