Irving Waters - The Wuhan Mission

Jimmy continued: “He has asked me to arrange a special date with you both tonight. I think you both understand what that means. Am I right?”

“Ahhh Umm no… What does that mean?” asked one of the girls, wide eyed.

“Either you both do whatever he wants in the bedroom with him, or you don’t come back to work tomorrow. You go look for new jobs.”

“We will be fired?” asked the other girl incredulously.

“No,” answered Jimmy, “you just call tomorrow and quit. Much simpler for him, simpler for you. Simpler for me too. Or you both go do bad things with him tonight, and probably a lot of other nights after that too. If I were you I would just quit. He’s a very bad man. You don’t want to go to his house. Trust me.”

Jimmy took them to a restaurant on the edge of town and ate an intimidating meal with the terrified girls before dropping them both home and then reporting back to Roet.

After clearing immigration in Seoul, Xue Lin took the local bus from the airport to the Port of Incheon. The bus was empty of passengers so she took the opportunity to put everything she needed into the dry bag. The suitcase she would discard at the dock.

The bus pulled in a few blocks from the docklands. Xue Lin had memorized the walking route to where the boat captain had said his boat would be waiting.

Xue Lin enjoyed stretching her legs after the long flight, and after a walk in the sun along the dock she found the fishing boat without much trouble.

The boat captain was Chinese, in his seventies, with only seven or eight teeth still in place. He wore an old faded blue jersey, repaired many times, and a wide brimmed straw hat with a string under his chin. His skin was leathery with deep crevices. When Xue Lin appeared on the dock where the stern was tied up, he hardly moved. Just the eyes shifted to look at her. Xue Lin gestured with her eyebrows, and he motioned her to use the gangplank to come aboard his very old, rusty trawler.

The boat wasn’t due to set out until after dark, so the crew was still ashore. Xue Lin accepted the offer of a couple of drinks, just to be polite. She was a bit of a light weight and had to watch herself around alcohol, especially this Chinese rice wine stuff that seemed to go straight for one’s motor skills. Have seven or eight of those at dinner and you don’t realize you are drunk until you get up. The captain’s bottle was an old plastic coke bottle, so this stuff was from a home distillery.

The captain had coerced seven into her by the time his crew of five had all shown up. Most of them merely gave her a curious glance, but the captain introduced the First Mate to her. He was a short and very rough looking muscular fellow, almost black from sun exposure. She learned that most of the crew were Korean and she guessed that these guys were doing more smuggling than fishing. The First Mate spoke to her in Chinese with a very heavy accent, which she guessed was from some coastal village in Southern China. He held his hand out for the cash, and she handed him a wad of US fifties.

“You will need to swim one kilometer from where we drop you. It will be dark so you just swim towards the lights.”

“You got any flippers?” she joked, half serious.

He gestured for her to follow her inside where he yanked out an old wetsuit and pair of cheap snorkeling fins.

“That’ll work,” she said, bemused.

Soon after dark, the boat headed out to sea. Xue Lin grabbed a bunk and drifted off to sleep, thanks to the effects of the rice wine that was still in her system.

The First Mate woke her to give her some hot food. She’d need the calories for what was to come. As she slurped up her noodles, he sat with her and drew her a map.

“We will drop you exactly here. We use GPS so don’t worry. Captain never misses. Current will be going to the West, so you can relax and enjoy the ride, but the last two hundred meters you will have to swim to land and there might be some waves. When you get to shore, leave the wetsuit and fins on the beach, get dry, get dressed, walk into town. The bus terminal is here, only 5km from the beach on the edge of town. You can get a night bus south to Shanghai tonight. Very easy.”

“Any sharks here?” She asked, dubiously.

“You too skinny. They won’t bother with you,” he replied, smiling.

Xue Lin hated that answer.

Very soon, dressed in the old wetsuit and with the fins on her feet, a couple of crew members lowered her over the side on a single rope swing to the water. Her dry bag against her chest, sealed shut.

The boat’s lights were off so as not to be seen, and she could see the town’s lights on shore, some distance away. It looked close enough. Shouldn’t be a problem.

“OK, go!” said the First Mate.

She slid off the line and dropped a couple of feet into the water with a small splash. She pushed her backpack in front of her on the surface.

“Good luck!” one of the crew yelled.

The captain put the boat in gear and moved off leaving Xue Lin alone in the Sea.

Jimmy found the website where Dr. Wu’s lab posted its job vacancies, and sent the link to Roet immediately. Roet’s specialists were already working on Xue Lin’s job application.

Roet had said to them: “It’s a rush job, but Dr. Wu will be able to detect bullshit if you just make it up, so check your sources, make it as real as you can but do your best to avoid Wu’s likely old acquaintances. Write Xue Lin a brief to prepare her for the interview. Make it as thorough as you can, and… well… if worst come to worst she’ll just have to blow him.”

The young team of Chinese-American specialists looked at Roet with a mixture of condescension and disgust.

“Get to work!” he yelled at them and they all turned back to their screens and started typing.

Roet paused in the doorway on his way out:

“Oh, by the way, she has to be from Beijing. That’s her accent.”

He closed the door behind him.

“Maybe you can blow ME…” muttered one of the girls as she started typing a reference in formal Chinese on a Beijing laboratory’s letterhead.

The water was chilly and Xue Lin had a little adrenaline rush going after her exit from the trawler. The trawler seemed to disappear very quickly behind her. She was quite buoyant in the water as the old wetsuit was thick and her dry-bag worked well as a floatation device. She kicked steadily in the direction of the lights, making sure not to wear herself out. Being this far from shore in an unfamiliar sea, which on this moonless night seemed to be completely black, was quite disconcerting. She had no backup, no chance of rescue, and it could all end right here off the coast of China. She also assumed that there would be sharks, so she kicked gently so as not to create a commotion. Sharks liked to feed at night….

As she grew closer to shore the strange thought occurred to her that she was glad that she had never eaten shark fin soup, as she felt her karma was good and they wouldn’t eat her in return. “Another ridiculous thing that Asians eat…” she thought to herself.

“I wonder what Sam is doing now. Probably worried about me.” She smiled to herself as she began to kick more efficiently.

After a while she started to hear the waves breaking ahead. There was a dim line of white water and it appeared that there was quite a large swell coming in off the East China Sea, enough to cause a bit of surf near shore. She stopped a moment and kicked downward to lift her head vertically out of the water so she could get her bearings. Waves rolling in towards the beach, looked like they were just under two meters high judging from the back. “Quite big,” she said out loud.