Unknown to Halversen, the giant car ferry Pawcatuck continued at full speed, the wooden sloop Windforce an almost undetectable speck on its radar set. Halversen felt but did not hear the main sail rip. He raced to the bow and lashed down the shredded sail with a dirty piece of sisal rope. He was starting back to the helm when he first noticed the Pawcatuck steering straight for the Windforce. The ferry was less than fifty feet from his starboard bow and advancing fast.
Halversen raced back to the wheel, slipping hard on the drenched decks and wrenching his knee. Reaching his hand up from his place on the deck, he cranked the wheel left to the stops in a futile effort to steer the Windforce out of the path of the Pawcatuck.
The Windforce strained to turn but the winds were strong against her. Barely responding to the rudder, the sailboat was turned sideways by a wave. It moved directly in front of the path of the advancing car ferry.
Halversen glanced in horror at the massive black metal hull of the Pawcatuck towering above him, looking for all the world like the wall of a giant skyscraper. Before he could leap over the side, the red Plimsoll mark on the Pawcatuck's hull struck him savagely in the chest. He was thrown behind the helm as the sharp edge of the metal hull broke the main mast with a shower of slivers.
On board the Pawcatuck they never saw nor felt the collision with the sailboat. The ferry tore into the Windforce and plowed through the aged boat with barely a shudder. The Pawcatuck's steel hull and giant diesel-powered propellers split the Windforce's wooden hull in two, then quickly ground the planks into pieces, spitting them to the side like pencil shavings in a hurricane.
His spine shattered and wedged tightly behind tie sailboat's wheel, Halversen was unable to move his limbs as the Windforce plunged downward. At first he fought the impending death trying in vain to force his brain to move his paralyzed limbs. Acceptance of his fate came quickly. Pinned fast to the remains of a boat he had been only hired to deliver, Halversen accepted the inevitable and opened his mouth to the seawater. As the remains of the shattered boat descended into the inky black abyss, his muscles relaxed against the pressure of the water. Arms flapping eerily, he sank into the depths.
The Windforce and sailor Ivar Halversen were no more.
Twelve days after the mishap, a life ring with the name Windforce stenciled on the side was found on the beach at Block Island. Two years later the ring was donated to the maritime museum at Montauk, Long Island, along with a load of salvaged marine parts for a display entitled: Flotsam and Jetsam of the Seas. After the exhibit ended, it was hung on the fence leading to the museum along with hundreds of others. The sun and salt air wreaked havoc on the painted letters until finally they were hardly visible at all.
CHAPTER 2
Below ground in the northeast corner of the basement of the sprawling Commerce Department Building located between Fourteenth and Fifteenth streets in Washington, D.C., Burt Lipshiski dipped a corn chip into a crock pot filled with melted Velveeta cheese and salsa. The building was completely deserted. The only sounds came from a small black-and-white television and the shouts of lipshiski and his partner, Carl Lincoln, as the game unfolded.
"As long as you're getting up, make me a dog," Lincoln said.
"Chili and cheese and onion?" Lipshiski asked.
"Whoa!" Lincoln said before answering his partner. Those damn Broncos are going to pull this off. Yeah," he said finally, "the works."
It was in that instant, while Lincoln and Lipshiski were busy eating hot dogs and watching the Super Bowl, that the intruder slipped past their office. Working quickly, he overrode the security system protecting the laboratory at the far end of the hall. The intruder, one of the members of an elite Chinese intelligence apparatus tasked with stealing Western technology, had planned for his entry and escape carefully. Since early 1997, when the Chinese first learned of the laboratory, until now, Super Bowl Sunday 1998, the agent had prepared his action carefully. He selected the date with purpose — believing Americans to be both dumb and lazy, he felt sure the Commerce Building would be only lightly guarded during the game. The agent hated Americans, finding them unmotivated and concerned only with the most petty of details. He had lived in Washington, D.C., for almost a year now, posing as an employee of the Chinese Embassy, and he had seen little to change his opinion. He had grown up in a thatch-roofed shack with pigs living in a pen next door, and now he discovered that for most Americans an automobile without air conditioning was an unbearable hardship. The agent had also found that the average American citizen cared little for the politics of the world. Americans seemed content if they were able to pay their bills, own a home, watch cable television, and screw their spouses on weekends.
The agent believed America's role as leader of the world would soon be ending. It seemed fitting the burglary was planned for the most American of days, Super Bowl Sunday. Slipping into the laboratory during the first quarter, he copied what he needed from the computers, then rifled through desks for the next two quarters before slipping out in the middle of the fourth.
He waited in his car on the street outside, listening to the end of the game on his radio. A pair of bumper stickers sat on the seat next to him. As soon as he confirmed that the team called the Broncos had won, he got out and slapped the winners bumper sticker onto the rear of his car.
Once that was done, he drove into traffic, madly honking his horn, as if the Bronco's winning the game was the greatest event of his life. The horn honked until he was but a block away from the embassy.
It was the perfect touch to end a successful operation.
CHAPTER 3
Li Choi was seeing an apparition.
Closing his eyes, he rubbed them with his fingertips, then opened them again. Strangely enough, he could still see the blond-haired man. It must be my mind playing tricks, Choi thought to himself. Some residual memory from American television perhaps, dredged from the depths of my subconscious and brought about by the torture of the past few weeks. It was a logical assumption and it brought Choi some degree of comfort.
The ghost who had appeared inside his cell looked vaguely like the star of a detective show he had enjoyed when he was in the United States. What was the name of the show? Choi thought to himself. It was about a detective in Florida, the city of Palm Beach. Oh well, no matter, he thought; the show will come to me after the ghost disappears.
Or perhaps I'm actually asleep, Choi thought.
Since being abducted in the parking lot of a Chinese grocery store in San Francisco seventy-one days before, the thoughts that ran through Choi's mind were a jumbled mass of bizarre images, seemingly unlinked. The shock of his kidnapping, combined with his being transported to the remote laboratory and weapons facility at the foot of the Qilian Mountains on the dividing line between Gansu and Qinghai provinces on the edge of the Gobi Desert in China, and his worry for his family's safety in the United States, had combined to bring Choi to the edge of madness.
None of this was happening and he knew he would soon awake.
He rubbed his eyes again. The apparition remained.
And then the blond-haired man framed in the door spoke. "Li Choi, I presume?" Choi stared from the metal cot bolted to the wall of the cell where he had spent the last several months under armed guard. Each evening, after a full day in the laboratory, he was brought to the cell and locked inside for the night. He was so conditioned to the door being closed and locked, his mind could not comprehend the door now being wide open without a guard present.