White Gold Read online

  “You are currently obstructing the flight path of a United States military aircraft carrier. Please identify yourself.” The voice was coming from someone with an American accent—a southern drawl.

  I tensed my vocal cords. “This is Catherine Sohon of the Wildlife Investigation Agency,” I reported. “I have changed course and am heading back to Dongxing.”

  “Oh, youz one of them kinda pilots,” he exclaimed in a tone much more playful than it had been. “Switch over to channel seven, wouldya?”

  I switched my radio frequency to channel seven. “This is Catherine Sohon of WIA.”

  “Darlin’, you ain’t gonna catch no tiger from way up there. You need to be here on the ground where all the predators are prowling right under your nose.”

  “Excuse me?” I couldn’t believe someone would talk like this over an open radio in the middle of Chinese waters. And how many other pilots had he seen on similar missions? “Was that transmission directed at Catherine Sohon, Sergeant?”

  “I was just jokin’. Been awhile since I’ve heard a pretty girl’s voice. Apologize for speaking out of line. You fly safe, ya hear?”

  Although the tension was broken, I was still disturbed by the implication that he assumed I was somehow involved in tracking the illicit wildlife trade. Was it my accent? The fact that I was flying around in the gulf in a floatplane? What exactly did he think I was up to?

  “Apologies again, sir,” I said.

  “Next time you’re in these parts, you should let us Navy boys show you a good time.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  “Serious, ma’am, we’ll show you some of the real shit that’s happenin’. Places you can’t get to unless you wanna saddle up on elephant-back.”

  “Like I said, I’ll keep it in mind,” I said in closing, nervous about such an open dialogue on what must have been an unsecure line. “Over and out.” I switched the channel back to two, which is what Mr. Weiping had told me to stay on.

  As I reached the mouth of the river, another voice came over the radio. “You need a picture of that tugboat.”

  I was stunned. Yet another entity was surveilling me. I recognized the voice. I had just had a conversation with someone with this voice. “Mr. Weiping?”

  “No. No names. Just make sure you get that tugboat picture.”

  Where could he be that he would know where I was in relation to a boat out in the gulf? I looked around me and didn’t see signs of another aircraft.

  Down below, there was only one tugboat in the vicinity. “You mean the one that’s about to hit the bay?” I banked around to line up with the starboard side but didn’t descend. I had a pretty good telephoto lens.

  The radio silence was unnerving. I could only assume Mr. Weiping didn’t answer because he didn’t want someone to hear this conversation. I proceeded with my mission, regretting that I had used his name, but was able to get legible numbers and letters in a final image.

  Going All In

  HONG KONG, CHINA

  The floor-to-ceiling window in Craig’s office had an expansive view of the bustling Victory Harbor. The ocean was alive with commerce of all currencies and eras. Modern freight ships steamed busily in the foreground while junks with patched sails dotted and bobbed on the horizon—a reminder of an older world almost forgotten. Despite the slick-looking buildings and brisk business on the streets, there were still people making a living off a few hand-line-caught fish out there in the South China Sea.

  Across from me at eye level, twenty-four stories up, swarms of construction workers climbed down their bamboo scaffolds to dine on dumplings in the steamy streets far below. Skyscrapers were going up overnight with the help of large swaths of bamboo forest—steel and concrete erected by nature to replace nature.

  I took a sip of my tea and looked at my watch. The four-fifteen Star Ferry was just pulling into the dock to the right of the unapologetic Hang Seng Bank building—new Hong Kong thumbing its nose at the old.

  Craig was fifteen minutes late. Something was up.

  I was dressed in my typical business casual, slightly more business than casual today. I wore my best blouse, ivory silk with two buttons unbuttoned. And I had my hair up, which suited two goals—one, it wouldn’t strangle me in this humidity, and two, I looked more intimidating that way, or at least I felt more intimidating. I needed all the help I could get after not seeing any action on the Ka Long River at night—only to be told that everything happens in broad daylight.

  I drank some more tea and tried to keep my pulse from quickening. There had to be a reason why Craig sent me all the way down to the border of Vietnam on a seemingly useless mission. Unless he was trying to distract me from something else.

  I sat down in Craig’s plush office chair, poked at the little floating balls of oolong tea leaves in my mug, and licked my finger. I never would have thought that I’d cultivate a taste for burnt, earthy grass, but in a few short weeks I’d come to take comfort in it, just as I had the posters on the wall, all reflective of the business of stopping the illegal wildlife trade—one for Earth Day, one for Shark Awareness Day signed by Peter Benchley, and an assortment of educational posters about banned animal products. Craig’s workspace had the look of a first-world, well-financed nonprofit, a distinctly different aesthetic than the tiny, sleepy Nature Conservation office in the Caprivi region of Namibia where I was last stationed.

  The two months since I’d left made the place seem like a distant memory, except for the recurring dreams of Jon. And his letters.

  I couldn’t stop reliving the last night we spent overlooking the Kwando floodplain from my porch under the full moon. Elephants poured out of the forest to meet at the river’s edge throughout the night, wailing jubilantly as they reunited in the silver-blue light.

  Although I had seen this many times in the short period I lived above that floodplain, there was something particularly intense, primal even, about their interaction that night—like I was a privileged participant in an ancient custom that had occurred in that exact location for centuries. I assumed it was a mating ritual, where all ages join in the excitement of having a female in estrus and younger male suitors are chased off by a musth bull determined to guard his prized cow.

  I don’t think Jon got over the fact that I left a relationship that had taken such a hold of us both in order to pursue Nigel in this steamy godforsaken place. He couldn’t understand why I didn’t want to let others handle the case once Nigel escaped Namibia.

  But I knew the answer. I knew no one else would pursue him like I would. He made it personal by befriending me and then betraying my trust. That made me feel like elephants were dying on my watch when I should have known better. I couldn’t let that go. And when I caught him, I’d make sure there was no escape this time.

  I spun the chair around to face a large monitor. There was a videocassette in an old VCR player that had been left on. It looked as if Craig had been watching some kind of vintage footage before stepping out.

  He often got sample DVDs from different conservation outlets promoting their work combating the illegal trafficking of items like rare turtles, seahorses, tiger paws, or bear gallbladders. Someone recently sent a video from a tiger farm where a film crew had snuck in disguised as interested buyers. They exposed how the owners were rearing tigers to sell paws in the hope of supplying the trade without the need for poaching—a gruesome idea that some saw as a practical solution. There were many opposing philosophies on the best way to save a species from going extinct, some of them well intentioned, some not.

  I couldn’t resist wanting to watch Craig’s new arrival. Even though I felt like I was prying, I pressed rewind and then play as grainy newsreel footage popped up with the Kenyan president, Moi, standing in front of a twenty-foot pile of ivory.

  The noise of an excited crowd mounted as they gathered around the artfully arranged tower of elephant tusks behind him—diplomats, white farmers, rangers, Maasai and Kikuyu tribe members. The Maasai stam
ped their feet and pounded large spears as the president prepared to speak. This was a recording of the 1989 burn to launch the ban on the trade of ivory over twenty-seven years ago.

  I wondered why Craig was looking at this particular footage now, especially since there’d been a number of burns recently, including another in Kenya. Even the U.S. government had hosted several ivory crushes since the latest crisis began.

  There was a hush in the crowd as the president cleared his throat. “I thank you all for joining me in this historic moment.”

  The crowd cheered.

  “To stop the poachers, the traders in ivory must also be stopped, and to stop the trader, the final buyer must be convinced not to buy ivory. I appeal to people all over the world to stop buying ivory.”

  He lit a match and dropped it onto the mountain of ivory that dripped in gasoline. The crowd cheered as flames engulfed the tower of interwoven tusks and roared upward, blackening the ivory. A thick, twisted tongue of smoke reached up to the sky, a desperate call to arms—a desperate time for elephants.

  My eyes focused on the smoke, wondering how it was possible that the world could have returned to this same desperate time. After the 1989 ban, things improved dramatically for elephants in the wild in Africa. Twenty years later, however, that dark era had resurfaced, partly due to a burgeoning economy in China fueling an appetite for luxury goods, including ivory, and partly because of an increased presence of the Chinese in Africa, making smuggling between Africa and China that much easier.

  Craig walked through his open door. Seeing me sitting in his chair, he knocked delicately. “I see you made it back okay?”

  His eyes were apologetic, but he wasn’t going to get off that easy. I’d figure out how to extract credits for sending me on a dead-end mission in addition to punishing him for leaving me in the hospital in Beijing for two more days by myself, not knowing what was going to happen with the investigation—and the triads.

  I pressed the stop button on the video and got up out of his chair. “Why did you send me down there?” I glared at him as I followed him into the tearoom and watched him make a cup of tea. “The charter guy told me that traders were active in broad daylight. What did you think I was going to see at night?”

  “We were following up on a lead,” Craig explained, trying to sound logical. “We needed to get a handle on the situation down there, and that was our best shot.”

  We walked back into his office and sat down.

  Craig searched my expression. “Look, I understand how it might look. But you know how these things can go. There isn’t always a straightforward outcome. It’s a process. Sometimes it seems like running down blind alleys, but being in the alley can pay off.” He leaned toward me. “You have to be patient, Catherine. You know this,” he said in a placating tone.

  I tossed a thumb drive onto his desk with the photos I had taken. “There’s only a couple of usable HINs. But I did get the tugboat that Mr. Weiping pointed out.”

  “What tugboat?”

  “Mr. Weiping wanted me to take a picture of a specific tugboat.”

  Craig looked stunned. “He didn’t fly with you, did he? I had to go to great lengths to get that night-vision equipment out of the U.S. with the promise that no Chinese nationals would be present when it was being used.”

  “No. He pointed out the boat just as it reached the gulf. I was able to circle back on the starboard side and get an image.”

  Craig seemed confused. “Wait. Exactly how did he point this out to you if he wasn’t in the cockpit?”

  “Over the radio.” I started to get a little concerned. “Mr. Weiping is one of your guys, isn’t he?”

  Craig shook his head. “I was told that he’s a reliable charter operator. That’s all I know.”

  “You mean you don’t work with him?”

  Craig looked at me tentatively. “Not outside of this one arrangement, no.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  Craig shook off whatever had disturbed him and unrolled a map. “Come have a look. I just got another lead.” He weighed down the map with stacks of reports that sat on the corners of his desk, each corner denoting a different level of urgency—no corner seeming particularly urgent since the day I arrived a month ago.

  I stood up to look at the map of southern China with a jagged border between China and Myanmar on the left and Vietnam and Laos on the right. He pointed to the Myanmar border where the topography was rugged and mountainous. It was the kind of place where a small plane could disappear at the slightest amount of turbulence.

  “Apparently, they’re stealing wild elephants from Myanmar and training them to cross this mountainous border to get from Mong La into China.” Craig pointed to a large nature reserve. “I know the manager of Wild Elephant Valley in Xishuangbanna. He’s offered to introduce you to some of the players.”

  “Xishuangbanna, isn’t that the place with the last wild elephants left in China?”

  “Yes, three hundred to be exact.”

  I studied the park’s location on the map. “I wouldn’t mind taking a look.”

  After all the work I had done on elephants in the wild in South Africa and Namibia, I was curious to see Asian elephants in the wild. It was the closest thing I was going to get to Africa in China. After only a month of urban jungle, I was ready for a dose of real Asian jungle.

  “Good. He can take you to the training camp. Sounds like he’s got a lot of information about trafficking between Myanmar and China. And if we can’t get anything useful from Vietnam, we need to try this route through Myanmar.”

  I walked back to the window and stared out at the harbor again. The churning black water looked cold and uninviting—exactly like this city. I’m not sure what I thought I would find by coming to Hong Kong, but I couldn’t help feeling that I had left Africa too soon. I was missing Jon and desperately needed to get out of the city.

  “When do I go?”

  “Monday.”

  “Perfect.”

  “No direct questions about ivory this time. If anyone asks, you’re on an AP gig, doing a story on exotic meat in the restaurant business.”

  “You think that will lead us in the right direction?”

  “I promise you, the guys eating reticulated python are making illicit ivory deals under the table.”

  “A restaurant reporter with a pilot’s license?”

  “Sure. Why not? You’re trying to win the Pulitzer for your colorful reviews of exotic dishes. My Associated Press mates will love it.”

  “Jon would be amused.”

  Craig’s expression changed suddenly—like he was looking at a piece of thinly blown glass that could break under the slightest pressure. He opened a drawer and pulled out one of those old-fashioned lightweight blue aerograms that turned from letter into envelope and slid it toward me with his index finger. “This came while you were in Beijing.”

  I snatched the envelope off the desk.

  “Has he been in touch since you’ve been back?” His tone had a hint of insincerity, as if he’d prefer I didn’t have the distraction.

  Even though I appreciated that Craig knew me so well, I also resented it, particularly now that he seemed to think I had just been a convenience to Jon, and now that I’d left Africa, I was out of his mind.

  “I talked to him before I left for Beijing. He’s planning to come visit soon.”

  “Good.” Craig gave me that delicate look again. “You miss him, don’t you?”

  “Is that a crime?”

  “A crime, no. But maybe a handicap.”

  I dropped the letter into my shoulder bag, wanting nothing more than to tear it open and drink in Jon’s every word, but I contained myself. “Trust me, missing someone is way better than mourning. I’ll be fine.”

  I never should have told Craig that I had developed feelings for Jon. I told him in a moment of weakness while stuck in San Francisco, and now I’d have to live with it. At the time, I thought it was better than telling my dad, as m
uch as I had wanted to. I wouldn’t have wanted him to tell his wife, and I didn’t think it was fair to ask him to keep a secret. I knew he knew I was hiding something, but he respected my decision to do so.

  Craig took the last sip of his tea and winced at the bitterness of the dregs. “Sleep on it, and we’ll talk tomorrow.”

  “That won’t be necessary. I said I’d go.”

  Craig narrowed his eyes. “Listen, it’s the Wild West down in Yunnan. It’s very easy to make a person disappear down there.”

  “I think I’m pretty experienced with that sort of thing by now, don’t you think?”

  “Yes, well, don’t make me regret sending you. In the meantime,” Craig changed the subject, “here’s some homework for the weekend.” He pulled out a thumb drive and handed it to me.

  “What’s this?” I picked up the drive and put it in my bag.

  “The reason I was watching the ’89 ivory burn. See if you recognize anyone.”

  “Okay.” I looked at him quizzically. “That’s all you’re going to give me?”

  “We’ll compare notes when you’ve had the chance to study it.”

  “You’re quite the mysterious man.” I smiled as I opened the door. “Keeps me on my toes.”

  Craig smiled. “Speaking of keeping you on your toes, I forgot to mention that I’ve arranged to set up that little DNA testing lab that you’ve been wanting.”

  “Really? Where?”

  Craig got up and pointed down the corridor to the little kitchenette alcove where he had just made tea. “I figured since it’s already plumbed, we could use the tea area.”

  “Sacrificing your tea station, now that’s dedication.”

  Craig smiled. “U.S. Fish and Wildlife made a deal with the secret police to start a crime lab. They’re giving us the companion equipment. The shipment arrived two days ago, and apparently they got it set up over there already. They’re coming to install on Monday. Should be up and running in a few days.”

  “Impressive. Hong Kong just got a whole lot more interesting.”