White Gold Read online

  He was quite the fastidious Brit, ol’ Craig. And yet endearing. I was enjoying spending time with him in person, finally, after all the conversations we had over the phone while I was stationed in Namibia. “You’d have an edge, too, having to wake up from a romantic dream of drifting down the Zambezi on a houseboat only to find myself in this hellhole.”

  “I didn’t mean to interrupt a romantic interlude.”

  I noticed a policeman pacing back and forth in front of the door to my room. “What’s with the police?”

  “I’m so sorry, Catherine. It was never supposed to happen like this.”

  “How long have I been here?”

  “Three days.”

  “Three days!” I clenched my teeth.

  I nodded toward the policeman. “Have they even apologized?”

  “Who?”

  “What do you mean, who? The police.”

  “Police?” He looked at me with surprise. “You don’t know what happened, do you?”

  “Of course I know what happened.” I stared at him in disbelief as a hospital worker came in with a tray carrying a pot of tea and two teacups, spoons, and containers of milk and sugar.

  “Thanks very much.” Craig nodded to the woman and had her set the tea tray down on a side table. We both watched her leave the room before continuing our conversation.

  “I was there. I got shot, remember?” I whispered as I held my hands up, showing him that I was hooked up to machines. I nodded toward the lone orchid stalk on the table. “And you’re my first visitor.”

  “I could arrange for another bouquet if you like.”

  “Very funny.” I pressed around my rib area again. “Ouch. Damn it.” I tried to sit up. “Am I going to be able to leave with you?”

  “Two more days, I’m afraid.”

  “Oh God.” I dropped my head back onto the pillow and looked out at the policeman again. This time he was talking to another officer. “Can you bring them in here to explain themselves?”

  “Catherine, you were not shot by the police.”

  “What do you mean?” I returned to the moment that the door of the back room was smashed in. I saw the laser sightings beam back and forth. The silhouettes were more defined now—paramilitary-styled uniforms with padding. “They were wearing uniforms.”

  Craig shook his head. “Those men may have looked like they were wearing uniforms.” He leaned forward. “But you were shot by the KWD.”

  “What?” I felt so naive. “Are you sure?”

  Craig nodded. “The Kwan Woo Dun is determined to reclaim the illegal ivory market in Beijing after the Sun Hee Un took over.”

  Craig had warned me that the Sun Hee Un had disrupted a long-standing peace agreement between the two triads after Hong Kong was returned to Chinese rule in ’89. Since they had to become part of China, they decided that they needed to be the dominant triad. That didn’t sit well with the KWD.

  “And I can tell you, it took quite a bit of convincing for the police to believe that you’re not one of Nigel’s lovers, doing his bidding for the SHU.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” I scoffed.

  “It’s a volatile situation since the ivory trade has taken off again and a lot more money is at stake. The KWD is particularly determined to regain control of the wildlife-trade underworld in Beijing.”

  “Well, then, where were the police?”

  “They’d been trying to catch Nigel’s distributor for over a year,” Craig explained. “They didn’t want to risk losing him, so they were being cautious.”

  “Too cautious, as it turns out. With Nigel’s distributor dead, we’ve got nothing. Where do we go from here?”

  He touched his nose with his index finger, which I had figured out was a tell for his discomfort with a particular situation. He got up and poured tea into the two cups. “Catherine, you’re bloody lucky to be alive. We’ve got to be more careful. We had no idea that triad tensions would escalate like this. And the Kwan Woo Dun is making raids into SHU’s Hong Kong home turf to send a clear message to the SHU to back down.” Craig poured milk into both cups. “Sugar?”

  I nodded. “One, please.”

  He placed a teaspoon of sugar in my cup and two in his, and handed me my tea. He stirred and took a sip, eying me cautiously. “The underworld here is far edgier than it was in Namibia.” He sat back in his chair as if he were ready to give me a long lecture. “Here, dealing in illegal ivory goes hand in hand with diamonds, guns, and drug lords. Right now, the police still aren’t a hundred percent convinced that you aren’t part of the war.” He pointed toward the police. “They’ve got the place staked out. They think your enemy might pay you a visit in the night.”

  “That’s comforting.”

  “I’m working on sending over more information.”

  “Why are they so suspicious of me?”

  “We didn’t inform them of your presence at the emporium—rather you didn’t inform me, so I couldn’t inform them of your whereabouts at the time.”

  “Craig, I didn’t plan this. I was in the emporium, I asked a couple of questions, and it just happened. There was no time to warn you.”

  “So you can understand how they might see the situation, since they weren’t given any information to the contrary.”

  “Okay, fine, but once you showed up to explain, the whole thing should have been cleared up.”

  “It takes a little while to process these things. There’s some pride involved, as well. You know how the Chinese are about losing face. And of course, they don’t think we should be meddling in their affairs, at this level, anyway.”

  “So, what do we do?”

  “We wait the two days and hope this blows over.”

  “Can you stay?”

  Craig shook his head. “Unfortunately not. Have to get back to the office.”

  “What could possibly be that important back at the office?”

  Craig’s eyes narrowed as if I knew better than to ask.

  “What is it?”

  “We’ll talk when you get back to Hong Kong.” He got up to leave. “Right now you need to rest.”

  Something about how he was treating me made me feel like I was weaker than he had expected. Like he had had a plan for me and changed his mind. “You’re really going to leave me hanging?” I noticed him pick up a black waterproof equipment case, the size of a briefcase. He must have put it down before my vision came into focus earlier and I hadn’t noticed it. “What’s in the Pelican?”

  Craig stood in the doorway and shifted the case behind him. “I’ll have new information for you when you return.”

  “You can’t be serious.” I tried to sit up again and barely made it onto my elbows. “Come back here and tell me what’s going on.” I looked down at the case. “That’s my night-vision gear, isn’t it?”

  Craig glanced up and down the hallway, exhaled, and returned with the case and sat back down.

  “You were going to ask me to do something and changed your mind. I know you. What’s going on?”

  Craig whispered, “We received reports of a large shipment scheduled to cross the border from Vietnam, rerouted from an undisclosed port in Asia that originated somewhere in Central or East Africa. We assume Nigel is covering his tracks after what happened at the emporium. That ivory transfer will take place in three days.”

  “Where?”

  “The Bac Luan Border Gate. On the Ka Long River.” He pushed the Pelican case in front of him. “We’ve got to get someone down there to take pictures.”

  “I’ll go,” I said without hesitation.

  Craig looked at me with great skepticism.

  “Seriously, you said I’d be out in two days. I can take a flight down to the closest airport and pick up a Cessna wherever you tell me to go.” This was my case and I wasn’t going to let Craig hand it over to someone else.

  Craig shook his head. “Catherine, look at you. There isn’t enough time. They’re only going to let you out in two days. You can’t get
down to the Guangxi Autonomous Region two days from now and then fly an airplane the following night.”

  “Yes, I can. Book me a flight for the day after tomorrow and I’ll have a day to orient down there before having to be in the air.”

  Craig exhaled. “After seeing what condition you’re in, I was going to send one of Marcus’s guys.”

  “Marcus!” I groaned. “He’s a debutant. He doesn’t have anyone serious on his team. You need someone that can get their hands dirty.”

  “That’s just it. I don’t want anyone’s hands dirty. I don’t want the plane to land. Just in-out—take pictures of boats, people, activity and leave.” He let out a long breath. “And if anything were to happen, your current visa doesn’t cover this area.”

  It felt like a year instead of less than a month ago when I dropped off my passport and F application at the Chinese consulate in San Francisco to get my business visa for China. I was transferring from Namibia to the Hong Kong branch of the Wildlife Investigation Agency to work directly under Craig. Following Nigel to China from Namibia was the only way to catch him. Two weeks later I was in Craig’s office in Hong Kong. And now, one week after that, in this hospital bed. How could we have anticipated which provinces and, therefore, all the different visas that I’d need?

  I propped myself up again. “Where exactly?” I needed to be back in a position of power again, in the air above the playing field, not down in the gutter with the traders.

  “I was hoping you wouldn’t ask.” Craig hesitantly opened the case and pulled out a map, placed the tea tray next to my flowers on the side table, and unfolded it on my food tray.

  “You’ve got my camera and night vision in that case?”

  “And mounts for the wing struts, remote control, telephoto lens, everything.” Craig pointed to a river delta just south of the Chinese border between Vietnam and Guangxi, to the east of Yunnan Province. “A lot of ivory has been coming into China through Dongxing, the town that borders Vietnam, apparently.”

  I tried not to seem too eager, but I was studying Craig’s index finger as it drew along a network of rivers.

  He tapped his finger on the map. “Here, on the Ka Long River. The Chinese call it the Beilun. Apparently, there’s a lot of illegal trading right along the border where the river is really narrow, ten meters in some places.”

  “Why would Nigel change his routing to a border crossing that everyone else is using?”

  He pointed to the borders of Laos and Vietnam. “Nigel’s logic, I’m guessing, is that it’s easier to hide in plain sight along a common water route than it is to cross the treacherous mountains from Myanmar, which are under heavy surveillance.”

  “There must be a lot of boats going across that border.”

  “But it’s most likely the same boats. If we could get HINs of those that look suspicious, we could start tracking boats.”

  “HIN? Is that the registration number?”

  “Yes.” Craig nodded. “Hull Identification Number.”

  I studied the map. “This river flows into the Gulf of Tonkin. Isn’t that where we launched airstrikes against North Vietnam?”

  “Fortunately things have quieted down since the Vietnam War. There isn’t anything sensitive going on there now. But please don’t fly past the mouth of the river into the bay. We don’t want to spark an international incident with a trigger-happy soldier.”

  My heart was racing as I looked at the map. “You get me out of here, book me a flight, make the arrangements on the ground, and I’m there.” I thought for a moment. “And I’ll need a new cellphone. Oh, and if you could get my clothes from my hotel room, that would be great. And maybe some energy bars.”

  “Catherine, you’re mad.”

  “That’s right, I forgot you hate the concept of energy bars.”

  “No, all of it, you’re just plain bloody mad.”

  I smiled. “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

  Gulf of Tonkin

  When I arrived at the airport in Nanning, the capital of Guangxi, Craig had arranged for me to be met by a man named Mr. Weiping, a private charter operator, who escorted me on a short flight to Dongxing, the Chinese border town with Mong Cai on the Vietnamese side of the Gulf of Tonkin. He delivered me to a floatplane docked about two miles from the border post bridge. The timing hadn’t worked out as planned and I had only an hour before the ivory transfer was supposed to take place.

  I quickly ran through a safety check with him, and he helped me mount my remotely controlled digital camera to the wing strut. I had attached a low-light intensifying tube between the camera body and the lens. This same night-vision technology had been used by the U.S. military in the Iraq War and needed a special permit for me to export it in order to do my night work.

  As instructed, I was careful not to show the pilot this piece of equipment, but he was definitely curious about how I intended to take photographs at night. He assumed that I had an IR camera, which would have been useful for detecting body heat and human activity, but infrared was no good for picking out numbers on a boat. I didn’t bother to correct him and turned down his offer to join me, as much as I would have appreciated the company.

  Weiping didn’t think there was any point in flying at night since so much smuggling activity took place across that border during the day. Night flying was nerve-racking enough, having to suppress the urge to do the opposite of what the instruments indicated, that the last thing I needed was to be told it might not have been necessary. It was easier flying over waterways than mountains in the dark, so at least I had that advantage. And there was a quarter of a waxing moon in the sky, which also helped.

  My takeoff was straightforward. Taking to the air on a floatplane always reminded me of waterskiing, as if my legs were extensions of the pontoons and I was locking my knees and pressing my feet down while pulling back on the yoke to lift out of the water.

  I didn’t see a single boat that wasn’t moored to a dock along the river as I flew toward the border crossing. And as the river narrowed, it grew more and more deserted, despite the water being choked with boats and rooftops more densely packed together.

  There were a few people on the streets, a man carrying a bag of rice on his head, someone on a bicycle weighed down by a trailer full of cabbage. A dog here, another there, and a few young men sitting around a fire next to the road.

  As I approached the border bridge, there were a few people sleeping next to the bridge with their wares and a small pile of embers glowing from a cooking fire. They were probably waiting for the border crossing to open in the morning. Other than that, the place was still.

  I passed boats tied to makeshift docks, which in turn had other boats tied off them, and more boats still tied off from there in a spiderweb of boat moorings. And many narrower wooden dugouts had been hauled out onto the riverbanks with their engines pulled up.

  Beyond the bridge, barge after barge lined the river, one filled with old computer monitors piled on top of one another, hundreds and hundreds of them. Computer monitors were considered contraband—toxic waste destined for old-world recycling of parts—and no doubt the remaining toxic items would be disposed of inappropriately. I tried to get as many photographs of letters and numbers that I could see on these boats. It was easier to get photos on the right-hand side of the river flying toward the bay, since the numbers were on the starboard side.

  Other barges were filled with sacks of grain, and still others with crates of unidentified goods. But there was no sign of ivory being transported from one boat to another. It didn’t seem like anything was going on at all. Everyone below me appeared to be asleep.

  At the mouth of the river there was more activity. A couple of barges and a tugboat headed north along the coastline. Despite Craig’s warnings, I headed out toward the gulf, drawn to the only place showing signs of life at this hour. I wanted to get close enough to take pictures of boats that might be heading to Guangzhou. I was determined to log as many boats as I could, but i
t was hard to position over a barge where the hull ID number was visible without banking over it and looking suspicious. It had been easier getting the numbers from the boats moored along the river. These were the kinds of boats that were officially transporting things like fish and produce, and then unofficially hiding contraband underneath their legal merchandise like the tusks I had seen in Beijing in crates marked FISH MEAL.

  The moon had set, making it hard to orient, but I couldn’t resist taking yet another photo with each barge I spotted. I lost track of how far out I’d flown, and by the time I checked my GPS, I was a mile offshore. Forcing myself to turn back, I noticed that I was approaching a very large dark shape in the distance. At first it looked like a small island, but it was so flat and angular, I knew it had to be an airstrip of some kind. I had seen small spits of land converted into airstrips in the Virgin Islands, but this was different. This was not a landmass.

  As I got closer, I realized that I was on a collision course with the flight path of another small aircraft that was attempting to land on an aircraft carrier. I quickly banked to the left to get out of the way. I scanned the air with my night vision to see if there were any more planes that I hadn’t noticed.

  A voice over the radio broke the silence. “This is Red Crown of the U.S. PIREZ station radio, Sergeant Jimmy Johnson speaking.”

  I was so startled to hear another person’s voice inside my cockpit, I couldn’t help looking next to me even though I knew there wasn’t anyone inside the airplane with me, and I certainly wouldn’t have expected a transmission from Red Crown, a call sign from the U.S. station radio that had operated in the Gulf of Tonkin during the Vietnam War.

  I had done some further reading about this area before my flight and learned that PIREZ was the acronym for a decommissioned zone called the Positive Identification Radar Advisory Zone set up in the gulf in order to facilitate the launching of airstrikes against North Vietnam. Now I wasn’t so sure it was decommissioned.