Back on her stomach she continued forward. She pulled her backpack under her stomach, placing her arms through the straps. ‘Can’t lose the bag under any circumstances. I can’t be walking into town in a wetsuit.’
As the first wave picked her up and passed under her she realized that they were in fact quite powerful and her heart started to beat faster. She turned 180 degrees facing back out to sea to see if there was a lull or at least a smaller set of waves. She waited there for a few minutes watching the waves as they picked her up and passed under her and then soon crashed and rolled roughly towards the beach.
After a large set passed, she swam into the zone where they were breaking and she committed to swimming in with the first, hopefully smallest of the next set. The wave rolled towards her, threateningly tall, she kicked her fins and the wave picked her up, threw her down it’s face and then crashed on top of her, pushing her and her bag underwater. After what seemed like a minute, the bag, which had a good amount of air in it, brought her back to the surface in time to be beaten down by the second wave. Somersaulting underwater, she clung to her bag as it brought her back to the surface again, now missing one fin. She had time to take a couple of deep breaths before the next one, this time a tower of bubbling whitewater mowed her down, tossing her head over heels and pushing her under for another twenty seconds. She felt like she was never going to make it to the beach. She was praying that underneath the crashing waves was a sandy bottom. More likely, she knew, there was a jagged reef under her feet, and as the water grew shallower nearer shore, she was more likely to hit her head on the bottom and her body would wash up the next day.
One more monster of white water rushed over her, jetting her forward. Under water again, her lungs bursting to breathe fresh air. She relaxed and went with it, and soon as her bag brought her to the surface, she felt her remaining fin touch bottom. Relieved, but now scared of being thrown into rocks she kicked forward, the next wave pushing under again, but she was now much closer to the beach where the water was neck deep. She pulled the fin off and struggled the rest of the way into the beach, being knocked over by each white water wave as it hit her.
She collapsed on the beach and lay there for a few minutes, waterlogged and exhausted. The roar of the breaking waves was deafening.
“Might be some waves,” she said out loud, recalling the First Mate’s warning.
She unzipped the old wetsuit and stripped naked, shivering on the beach. She opened the dry bag, still dry. Money well spent. Toweling herself off with a T-shirt, she shook her head to dislodge the salt water in her ears and nasal passages. She put on a pair of jeans, a dry T-shirt and a sweater, and dug out one of her small reversible jackets. She squeezed the water out of her hair as best she could and ran a brush through it before tying it up in a bun, shivering. She was starting to warm up, but best get walking into town.
The People’s Liberation Army maintained what it called the “Third Department” which was similar to America’s National Security Administration. It was known to insiders as the “3PLA.” Their directive was to watch the West, particularly America, focusing on military strategy, while monitoring world communications for ‘commercial opportunities’.
Their 100,000+ hackers, linguists and analysts were recruited from elite universities and used academic databases, Government websites and social networks to steal U.S. corporate secrets to influence governments and corporations around the world while staying under the radar.
The 3PLA had unlimited access, much like the NSA, and could listen in on, watch and locate virtually anyone they needed to. In the mid-eighties the 3PLA had preemptively started to secretly ‘chip’ people of interest with first generation geo-location devices, originally designed for the study of animal migration. Prison inmates were often ‘inoculated’ before being released, giving authorities the opportunity to tag them.
An American couple had applied to adopt a young Chinese girl twenty years earlier and the 3PLA had used the ‘vaccination’ program to chip all three of them before the adoption could be made official. The couple had been operating a barbecue manufacturing business in Beijing, but officers at the 3PLA had developed suspicions that they were spying on China, though they were never actually caught doing anything wrong. They were ejected from China in 2003, right around the outbreak of the SARS virus.
Having successfully chipped them, the Government could be sure that if any of them ever returned to China, they would ping the system.
Chapter 14
Night Bus to Shanghai
“Shanghai, one way” Xue Lin said, now speaking Chinese to the lady behind the window at the small village’s bus station.
“Leaves in 20 minutes” said the lady, passing the ticket through the window to Xue Lin.
She took a seat inside the bus shelter, now alone. The smells here were distinct. Very Chinese. She thought to herself how miraculous the ‘sense of smell’ was, how it could remember even after so many years. As the warmth gradually returned to her body, an unexpected feeling relief overcame her. She felt lighter somehow.
Here she looked just like everyone else. No more “so where are you from?” questions from well meaning people. She had done most of her growing up in Beijing. It wasn’t until she was thirteen that her parents were suddenly told to go home to America. At the time, their sudden departure seemed really strange to her. She had no time to say goodbye to any of her school friends, and none of them yet had cell phones. She had not managed to stay in touch with them using email. Unbeknownst to Xue Lin, her emails never made it through the Chinese censors.
In America, she had made new friends at both the normal school with the ‘whities’ and at the weekend school for Chinese kids. Saturdays after school she would hang out with the Chinese kids for hours. She had felt quite homesick for a few years after the move and it had not helped that the some of the white kids and black kids were racist toward her and she had more than a few dust-ups in the schoolyard. Her adoptive parents had put her in regular Kung Fu classes in Beijing, nine years of classes in fact, so quite often she found herself in the office of the head mistress explaining the various abrasions and bloody noses of the other, usually much bigger kids. Xue Lin had adopted a ‘kick them in the face, first; ask questions later’ method with the bullies. It only took a year before they realized it was safer to be her friend than her enemy.
The young computer tech sat at his terminal inside one of the many high security buildings belonging to the 3PLA. He was part of the ‘3PLA Locator Team’ whose purpose was to provide location information on demand about anyone who had been placed in the chip geo-locator database.
His computer had pinged somebody who had just reentered China. He put his hand up to call over his superior.
“I just had a ping for a reentry. Shanghai. The file says: ‘Born 1991, female, adopted by Americans, possibly CIA. Left China in 2003. Possible espionage. Enemies of China.’”
“Keep a detailed file on her movements between cities, and let me know whenever she moves.”
“Got it” replied the young tech.