Incendiary Dispatch

* * *

LEWIS CHARD HAD NEVER earned so much money for so little work.

Fourteen devices placed on six cars and eight homes, all belonging to employees of BirnBari Expediting Services.

The homes were no problem. He didn’t need to break into them, just get close enough to deliver the device. A few miserable dogs yapped at him when he crept up in the middle of the night. If the miserable dogs woke any of the homeowners, they’d find nothing suspicious. Chard was away in seconds.

Putting the devices on the cars was riskier, but his contacts had told him exactly when the cars would be unattended. Apparently lunch would be paid for by the company today. Chard was told to wait for the shift to go to lunch, and then wait for one last bloke to step outside to get something out of his car. Chard didn’t ask questions, although it seemed an odd bit of staging.

So, sure enough, the shift workers went to the pub next door, then one fellow darted out the back door and grabbed something from the back of his car. After that, Chard put a device on all six cars without delay. The devices were magnetized. They were primed. The LEDs were green.

Lewis Chard was driving away from London before the lunch shift was half done.

He considered the fact that one of the cars he had rigged belonged to the man who had ducked out the back. The car had also been parked at one of the row houses that he had rigged with a device the night before.

Whoever had arranged this whole affair really wanted that one guy dead.

Qingdao, China

ZHANG JEI DUCKED into the park off of Xilingxia Road and sprinted through the darkness. The night was black. There was no reason for security this far away from the city center, the seaports or the airports.

His reef walker shoes were in his pants’ pocket. He pulled them on, then removed his slacks and shirt. He was wearing a wetsuit underneath. He stuffed his clothing and city shoes into his backpack and stepped into the cold waters of the bay.

The backpack floated behind as he paddled patiently into the blackness. There was no water traffic in this area. Too many rocks this close to the shore.

The illuminated face of his TomTom waterproof GPS unit led him effortlessly to the Farallon MK-8. The neutrally buoyant DPV—diver propulsion vehicle—was fully charged.

It started with a touch and hummed with power, like a sea snake. It was black aluminum and weighed almost 130 pounds with the battery.

The battery was key. Zhang had a lot of distance to cover before sunrise. The MK-8 had fantastic range—three miles. That was more than enough.

Silently, in darkness, he let the DPV pull him through the waters of Jiaozhou Bay, toward Berth 62.

Zhang Jei considered himself to be an extremely lucky man. He had been at the right place at the right time with the rare combination of attributes needed for this particular task. They’d needed someone skilled in stealth diving and DPV use. Someone who didn’t have qualms about a long-distance solo operation. Someone who had demonstrated a certain degree of ruthlessness.

Zhang Jei was all those things. Trained by the People’s Liberation Army navy for out-of-area operations, he had been part of the insertion teams on the Somalia shores that had successfully taken out a group of pirates preying on Chinese cargo ships. He’d earned a medal for it.

Then came the operation in North Korea. He’d been part of a three-man nighttime insertion—two divers and an army sniper. To this day Zhang Jei didn’t know the identity of the North Korean official they were supposed to have killed, or why—only that the man had somehow become a severe hindrance to effective Chinese/North Korean relations.

But the mission went all to hell. The sniper missed. Twice. The man was just sitting there in a parked military jeep and still the sniper missed.

Before a third shot could be fired the North Korean target had been hustled into hiding and twenty North Korean special forces operatives were in pursuit of the Chinese sniper team.

The sniper surrendered to the North Koreans. Maybe he thought the People’s Republic would negotiate his return. The other diver found himself surrounded by special forces operatives and shot himself in the head. It was a wise choice, in Zhang’s opinion, knowing that sniper would have endured months of torture and questioning before ending up just as dead.

Zhang had made it back to the shore and into the water and then he’d just swam. He’d come ashore at dawn and collapsed in a stand of vegetation near a noisy little factory village. Throughout the daylight hours he’d been roused from unconsciousness by the occasional screech of bending metal. That night he’d stolen into a shabby building and eaten putrid food, then taken to the ocean again.

It had taken him days to work his way up the coast, moving ever slower as his energy waned. He’d spent his last two nights on a makeshift float and kicked relentlessly across the tide.

The North Koreans patrolled the waters, but one man, in the water at night, could sneak through their guard. When the virtual wall of North Korean ships was behind him, Zhang Jei knew he was back in China.

But as far as China was concerned, he was dead. They had abandoned him. He would abandon them, as well. They had trained him to survive and thrive in darkness and secrecy, and he would make the most of it.

By the time he had wandered into Qingdao he had murdered three men and stolen their identities, as well as enough cash to live a comfortable lifestyle. His fourth victim was the most carefully chosen. A traveling man, recently widowed, no family, with a little inherited money. Nobody would miss him. That man had been the real Zhang Jei, but now the corpse of the real Zhang Jei was disintegrating in the East China Sea.

He had operated in the vicinity, taking on some dirty jobs for local officials and local drug organizations. Just enough to provide a comfortable income without making any unwanted alliances. It was learned that he was skilled at killing.

The job tonight was his biggest paycheck yet. He could live on the profits for a year or more.

If the man who now went by the name Zhang Jei was afraid of ghosts, he would have been worried about the decomposing corpse of the real Zhang Jei coming up and snatching him by the ankle.

But the man now known as Zhang Jei didn’t care about ghosts. Even if they did exist, no animated corpse could move as fast as the DPV.

* * *

BERTH 62 WAS FAR OUT into Jiaozhou Bay. It was a mechanical island large enough to dock an oil tanker up to 280,000 deadweight tonnage. It had four off-loading arms and pumped out huge volumes of crude oil. Still, for a ship like the Northern Aurora, it could take days to get in, get unloaded and get out of port.

She was a VLCC, a Very Large Crude Carrier. She was unexceptional in her class, one of about five hundred VLCCs plowing the world’s oceans. Still, any vessel capable of carrying two million barrels of oil was impressively large when seen from the waterline.

The massive shape loomed over Zhang Jei, but he couldn’t afford to admire it. He had a job to do. He floated on his back and removed the first device, placing it against the hull of the Northern Aurora. He dipped the device in the ocean to wet the foam backing, then pressed the foam to the hull and applied pressure. The foam cells burst and the encapsulated cyanoacrylate adhesive reacted with the water. In seconds, it was stuck in place. And it was never coming off.

The green LED inside waterproof plastic casing told Zhang Jei that the electronics were operational.

He swam along the hull, towing the DPV, making no sound loud enough to alert the security guard on the deck far above him. None of the bay patrol craft came close enough to spot a black-suited man in the black water alongside a black ship’s hull.

He put the second device in place 141 feet from the first one, and then a third. It wasn’t difficult, but he was careful. Soon all six devices were in place. Zhang Jei pulled a last phone from the pack—a waterproofed satellite phone. He dialed the number he had never dialed before.

He didn’t know who had hired him. He didn’t know why they wanted to sink the Northern Aurora. All he knew was that they had put a quarter-million dollars in his bank account already, and were obliged to pay him that much again when the job was done.

“Are they in place?” The man spoke English.

“They are,” Zhang Jei said.

“Wait,” the man said.

Zhang Jei didn’t wish to wait.

Then the man said, “We see a problem. One of the units is not responding.”

“Which one?”

“Do you want the serial number on the device?” the man demanded. “I can provide that if you think it will somehow help you determine which one of the six is not responding. Did you in fact note the serial numbers on the devices as you were placing them?”

Zhang Jei felt chagrined. He had asked a stupid question.

But he was feeling something else, too.

Maybe the question hadn’t been the stupidest thing he had done this day.