I called him on his cell phone. “Hello,” he said, and it felt strangely good to hear his booming voice. He’s all right, I told myself, and maybe he was.
“Are you still around?” I asked.
There was a pause, during which I imagined him grinning. I heard him say, “Depends on what you mean by ‘around.’ I’m in the area again, if that’s what you mean.”
“How soon can you be back in the same place we met last time?”
Another pause. “I can be there tomorrow, if you need me.”
“I do. Same time as last time?”
“I’ll see you then.”
I hung up and, out of habit, wiped down the phone. Then I went to an Internet café for a bit of research on Hong Kong container shipping.
THE NEXT MORNING I caught a plane to Hong Kong. I sat in a coffee shop overlooking the restaurant where Dox and I had last eaten. He showed up an hour later, alone. I waited ten minutes, then went to join him.
“I didn’t expect to see you again so soon,” he told me, as I sat down.
“I missed you,” I said.
He laughed. “You take care of our friend Mr. Crawley?”
I looked at him. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
He laughed again. “All right, all right, I was just asking. May he rest in peace.”
A waitress came over. “You know what you want?” I asked him.
“Can you get me some more of that caterpillar soup?”
“Glad you’ve developed a taste for it.”
“Well, the taste is all right, sure. But it’s the effects I really admire. Last time we ate here, that night, I showed two Thai ladies what love with Dox is all about. By the time the sun came up they were practically begging for mercy.”
“I’m sure they were.”
I ordered the food and looked at him. “How are your sniping skills?” I asked.
He scowled as though offended. “Shoot, partner, now you’ve gone and hurt my feelings, asking a question like that. You know marine snipers are the best in the world.”
“What I mean is, you’ve been staying in shape?”
He smiled. “Well, let’s just say that our friends at Christians In Action didn’t hire me exclusively for my charm, considerable though it is.”
“Do you have access to a rifle?”
“ ‘Access’? Last job I did, I wanted to try out the new M-40A3. I had one waiting for me the next day, with a matching ANPVS-10 night scope, no questions asked.”
“How’d you like it?”
“Liked it a lot. It’s a little heavier than the M-40A1, but I like the adjustable cheek piece and the recoil pad on the butt stock.”
“You used it in field conditions?”
He smiled. “With an M118LR round, chambered in 7.62mm. Drilled a certain malefactor through the eye in the middle of the night at four hundred yards. Nothing like seeing the pink mist to make a sniper feel alive, I’ll tell you. Although in the night scope, it was more green than pink.”
I nodded, satisfied. I’d seen some of Dox’s exploits in Afghanistan. I knew he might enjoy exaggerating his prowess with women, but when it came to sniping, he was as good as he said.
“I’ve been on a job that’s gotten more difficult as it’s progressed,” I said. “To finish it, I’m going to need help. If you’re interested, I’ll split the fee with you-two hundred thousand U.S., one hundred thousand each.”
“Two hundred thousand? They’re paying you that much? Shit, I’ve been getting shortchanged. I need to have a talk with that damn Kanezaki.”
“Plus there might be some additional cash involved, although I don’t think we’ll know how much until the time comes.”
“Well, I’m interested, all right. Tell me more.”
I told him what he needed to know about Belghazi, the NOC, and the Hong Kong container port connection. He didn’t react in any way that would have indicated prior knowledge or involvement, but you can’t prove a negative, as they say.
“Well, first thing is, I need to see the terrain,” he told me. “You say there’s only one entrance to the terminal, that’s where we’re going to hit them, that’s good. But can I get in and out of position without being seen? Will I have concealment? Can I shoot undetected? Will there be a clear line of sight to the target?”
I nodded and pulled out a sheaf of papers from inside my jacket. “These are printouts from the company that runs Container Terminal Nine,” I told him. “They ought to be a good start.”
I handed the papers to him and he started shuffling through them. “My gracious,” he said, pausing at one of the pages, “is this a map of the terminal?”
I smiled. “It’s amazing what you can get on the Web.”
He nodded. “Well this is a nice head start, that’s for sure. But I still need to do a walk-through.”
“I’ve already rented a van. We’ll drive over as soon as you’ve fortified yourself with the caterpillars.”
“It might be less conspicuous if I do the reconnoitering by myself.”
“Yeah, you’re right, they get a lot of enormous, goateed white guys sniffing around Kwai Chung. I’m sure you’ll blend right in.”
He grinned. “Well, that’s a persuasive point you make there, partner.”
KWAI CHUNG and its massive container port are located in the New Territories, a name conferred by the British when they “leased” the area in 1898 and unchanged even after the transfer back to China almost a century later. Although its rolling hills are now obscured by ferroconcrete forests of residential skyscrapers, there’s a timelessness about the place, a slower pace than is to be found on Hong Kong Island a few kilometers to the south, as though the area is gradually emerging from a long agrarian sleep and still suffused with the dreams of what it saw there.
We took Highway 3 north to the container port. Because we couldn’t afford multiple passes of the port facility lest someone notice and get suspicious, we stopped along the way and bought a video camera.
I drove; Dox videotaped. When I took us along Cheung Fi road, the thoroughfare that leads to the Terminal Nine gate, Dox looked to the area opposite and said, “Well, this does look like fine sniping terrain. Fine, fine, fine.”
I glanced over to see what had elicited his reaction, and saw a series of terraced hills, rising to what I estimated to be about one hundred and fifty meters above the road and overlooking the terminal entrance. Some of the hills were wooded, some were grass, some were cleared and home to what looked like partially constructed apartment buildings. Dox would have his pick of ingress and egress routes, cover, concealment, and an unobstructed field of fire. He was right. It was perfect.
We went to a tea shop in Tsim Sha Tsui to talk things over. Dox was pleased about the terrain, but I was uneasy.
“The problem is that our information is limited,” I said. “Kanezaki says he’ll know from Belghazi’s sat phone when Belghazi is on his way to Hong Kong, so we’ll have some warning about that. And the time window is manageable, too-apparently, Belghazi conducts his business at Kwai Chung between oh two hundred and oh four hundred. But we don’t know what he’ll be driving. We don’t know whether he’ll get out outside the gate, or stay in the car and drive in.”
“What do you think he’s been waiting for? He’s been in Macau for you said, what, a week now?”
I shrugged. “Part of it probably really is the gambling. Part of it is the appearance he wants to cultivate for anyone who’s trying to figure out what he’s up to in the region-‘Oh, he’s just there to gamble.’ And maybe part of it has to do with whatever shipment is being handled at Kwai Chung. There might have been some logistical problem along the way, the ship could have been delayed. A lot of things that could have kept him in place longer than he’d originally planned.”
He was quiet for a moment, then said, “There’s another thing. You said he’s a careful man, and that he knows you’re after him so he’s extra nervous. What if he rents an armored vehicle for his little trip to the dockyards? A place like Hong Kong, with all the property magnates and such, would have armored Mercedeses and Bimmers available, I’m sure.”