The Stone Monkey

many low-level snakeheads paid in.
    “You are not going to fight with them are you? The Coast Guard?”
    The Ghost gave an impatient laugh. “How could I fight them? They have dozens of sailors, right?” A nod toward the crewmen on the bridge. “Tell your men to follow my orders.” When Sen hesitated the Ghost leaned forward with the placid, yet chilling gaze that so unsettled everyone who looked into his eyes. “Is there something you want to say?”
    Sen looked away then stepped onto the bridge to give the instructions to the crewmen.
    The Ghost turned back to the stern of the ship, looking again for his assistant. He then pulled the captain’s cap tighter over his head and strode onto the bridge to take command of the rocking ship.
    •   •   •
    The ten judges of hell . . .
    The man crawled along the main deck to the stern of the ship, stuck his head over the side of the Fuzhou Dragon and began retching again.
    He’d been lying beside a life raft all night long, eversince the storm picked up and he’d fled from the stinking hold to purge his body of the disharmony wrought by the rocking sea.
    The ten judges of hell, he thought again. His gut was in agony because of the dry heaving and he was as cold and miserable as he’d ever been in his life. Slumping against the rusty railing, he closed his eyes.
    He was called Sonny Li, though the given name ruthlessly bestowed upon him by his father was Kangmei, which meant “Resist America.” It was typical of children born under Mao’s reign to have such politically correct—and thoroughly shameful—given names. Still, as often happened with youngsters from coastal China—Fujian and Guangdong—he’d taken a Western name too. His was the one that the boys in his gang gave him: Sonny, after the dangerous, bad-tempered son of Don Corleone in the movie The Godfather.
    True to the character after whom he was named, Sonny Li had seen—and been the cause of—much violence in his life but nothing had ever brought him to his knees, literally, like this seasickness.
    Judges of hell . . .
    Li was ready for the infernal beings to take him. He’d own up to everything bad he’d done in life, all the shame he’d brought to his father, all the foolishness, all the harm. Let the god T’ai’shan assign me a place in hell. Just stop this fucking sickness! Light-headed from nearly two weeks of meager food, dizzy from the vertigo, he fantasized that the sea was in turmoil thanks to a dragon gone mad; he wanted to rip his heavy pistol from his pocket and fire bullet after bullet into the beast.
    Li glanced behind him—toward the bridge of the ship—and he thought he saw the Ghost but suddenly hisstomach lurched and he had to turn back to the railing. Sonny Li forgot about the snakehead, forgot about his dangerous life back in Fujian Province, forgot about anything except the ten judges of hell gleefully urging demons to prod his dying belly with their spears.
    He began heaving once again.
    •   •   •
    The tall woman leaned against her car, the contrasts stark: her red hair tossed by the fierce wind, the yellow of the old Chevy Camaro, the black nylon utility belt securing a black pistol to her hip.
    Amelia Sachs, in jeans and a hooded windbreaker on the back of which were the words NYPD CRIME SCENE , looked out over the turbulent water of the harbor near Port Jefferson, on the north shore of Long Island. She surveyed the staging area around her. Immigration and Naturalization, the FBI, the Suffolk County Police and her own shop had cordoned off a parking lot that on an average day in August would normally have been packed with families and teenagers here to catch some rays. The tropical storm, however, had kept vacationers far away from the shore.
    Parked nearby were two large Department of Corrections prisoner buses the INS had borrowed, a half-dozen ambulances and four vans filled with tactical officers from the various agencies. In theory, by the time the Dragon arrived here, it would be under the control of the crew of the cutter Evan Brigant and the Ghost and his assistant would be in custody. But there would be a certain period of time after the Ghost had spotted the Coast Guard cutter and before the actual boarding by the crew—perhaps as much as forty minutes. That would give the Ghost and his bangshou plenty of time to masquerade as immigrants and hide weapons, a tactic that snakeheads frequently used. The Coast Guard mightnot be