Jeffery Deaver - The Stone Monkey

The raft rose on a high wave then dropped into a gully of water with a jarring crash.

"Down, everybody down!" Chang shouted. "Stay low." He dropped to his knees in the dark water sloshing on the floor of the raft. He grabbed the oar and tried to use it as a rudder. But the waves and current were too powerful, the raft too heavy. A fist of water struck him and ripped the oar from his hands. Chang fell backward. He glanced in the direction they were headed and he saw a line of rocks just ahead, a few meters away.

The water caught the launch like a surfboard and sped it forward. They struck the rocks with stunning force, bow first. The rubber shell ripped open with a gasping hiss and began to deflate. Sonny Li, John Sung and the young couple in the front – Chao-hua and Rose – were pitched out into the turbulent water just past the rocks and swept away in the surf.

The two families – the Wus and the Changs – were in the rear of the raft, which remained partially inflated and they managed to hold on. The raft struck the rocks again. Wus wife was thrown hard into a ledge of stone but she didn't go overboard; screaming, she fell back into the raft, blood covering her arm, and lay stunned on the floor. No one else was injured by the impact.

Then the raft was past the rocks and headed toward shore, deflating quickly.

Chang heard a distant cry for help – from one of the four who'd vanished when they struck the rock but he couldn't tell where the shout had come from.

The raft slid over another rock, low in the water, fifteen meters from shore. They were trapped in the surf now, battered and being dragged toward the pebbly beach. Wu Qichen and his daughter struggled to keep his injured and half-conscious wife above the surface – her arm torn open and bleeding badly. In Mei-Mei's arms Po-Yee, the baby, had stopped crying and was staring listlessly around her.

But the motor of the raft was hung up on a rock ledge, trapping them eight or nine meters from shore. The water wasn't deep here – two meters – but the waves were still pounding them hard.

"The shore," he shouted, coughing water. "Now!"

The swim took forever. Even Chang, the strongest among them, was gasping for breath and racked by cramps before he reached land. Finally, under his feet, he felt stones, slippery with kelp and slime, and stumbled forward out of the water. He fell once, hard, but quickly regained his foothold and helped his father out of the water.

Exhausted, they all stumbled to a nearby shelter on the beach, open on the sides but with a corrugated roof that protected them from the slashing rain. The families collapsed on the dark sand underneath it, coughing water, crying, gasping, praying. Sam Chang finally managed to stand. He gazed out to sea but saw no sign of the Ghost's raft or the immigrants who'd been swept overboard.

Then he sank down to his knees and lay his forehead on the sand. Their companions and friends were dead, and they themselves injured, tired beyond words and pursued by a killer… Still, Sam Chang reflected, they were alive and were on firm land. He and his family had at last finished the endless journey that had taken them halfway around the world to their new home, America, the Beautiful Country.

Half a kilometer out to sea the Ghost hunched over his cell phone, trying to protect it from the rain and waves as his raft plowed through the water toward the piglets.

The reception was bad – the signal was bouncing via satellite through Fuzhou and Singapore after it left his phone – but he managed to get through to Jerry Tang, a bangshou he sometimes used in New York's Chinatown and who was now waiting somewhere on the shore nearby to pick him up.

Breathless from the rough ride, the Ghost managed to describe to the driver more or less where he'd be landing – about three or four hundred meters east from what seemed to be a strip of stores and houses.

"What weapons do you have?" the Ghost shouted.

"What?" Tang shouted.

He had to repeat the question several times. "Weapons!"

But Tang was a debt collector – more of a businessman than an enforcer – and it turned out that he had with him only a pistol.

"Gan," the Ghost spat out. Fuck. Armed only with his old Model 51 handgun, he'd hoped for an automatic weapon of some kind.

"The Coast Guard," Tang told him, the transmission lost in static and the sound of the wind, "they're on… here. I'm listening… scanner… have to get away. Where…"

The Ghost shouted, "If you see any of the piglets, kill them. Did you hear me? They're on the shore nearby you. Find them! Kill them!"

"Kill them? You want -"

But a wave washed over the side of the raft and drenched him. The phone went silent and the Ghost glanced at the screen. It was dead, shorted out. Disgusted, he flung it to the floor.

A wall of rock loomed and the Ghost steered around it, making for a broad beach far to the left of the small town. It would take some time to get back to where the piglets had landed but he didn't want to risk injuring himself on the outcroppings of stone. Still, beaching the raft proved to be harrowing. As he closed in on the sand the small craft rose on the crest of a wave and nearly tipped over but the Ghost throttled back fast and the raft settled onto the water. A wave, though, caught him in the back and knocked him to the floor of the boat, drenching him and spinning the raft sideways. It slammed into the shore in an explosion of surf and tossed its occupant hard onto the beach. The propeller tipped out of the water and the motor screamed as it raced. The Ghost, afraid the sound would give him away, crawled frantically back to the engine and managed to shut it off.

He saw Jerry Tang, in a silver four-by-four BMW, on a sandy asphalt road about twenty meters from the shore. He rose and jogged toward the vehicle. Fat, unshaven Tang caught sight of him and drove forward. The Ghost leaned down to the window on the driver's side. "Did you see the others?"

The nervous man said, "We have to go!" He nodded at a police scanner. "The Coast Guard knows we're here. They're sending the police to search."

"The others?" the Ghost snapped. "The piglets?"

"I didn't see anybody else. But -"

"I can't find my bangshou either. I don't know if he got off the ship." The Ghost scanned the shoreline.

"I haven't seen anyone," Tang said, his voice high. "But we can't stay here."

From the corner of his eye the Ghost saw motion near the surf: a man in gray cloth was crawling on the rocks away from the water, like an injured animal. The Ghost stepped away from the truck and pulled his gun from his belt. "Wait here."

"What are you doing?" Tang asked desperately. "We can't stay here anymore! They're coming. They'll be here in ten minutes. Don't you understand me?"

But the Ghost was paying no attention to the thug as he walked back across the road. The piglet looked up and saw the Ghost approaching but the man had apparently broken his leg in the landing and couldn't even stand, much less flee. He began to crawl desperately back to the water. The Ghost was curious why he was even bothering.

Sonny Li opened his eyes and thanked the ten judges of hell – not for surviving the sinking but because for the first time in two weeks, the slippery twist of nausea within his gut was virtually gone.

When the raft had hit the rocks he and John Sung and the young couple had been thrown into the water and swept away by the strong current. Li had immediately lost sight of the other three and had been dragged down the beach for what seemed like a kilometer until he'd been able to kick his way onto the sand. Then, crawling as far away as he could from the ocean, Li collapsed.