"14 - Flood Tide" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cussler Clive)

He looked up at the sky. It was no longer a thick quilt of dark gray. The clouds were forming into distinct shapes and turning white. The storm was passing, and already he could sense the gusting wind diminishing to a settled breeze. He had little time. If he did not find warmth quickly, he would lose her.

Taking a deep breath, Gallagher slid his arms under Katie's body and lifted her out of the raft. Out of hatred he kicked the raft with General Hui's frozen body away from the shoreline. He watched for a few moments as the current caught the raft and began carrying it back into deep water. Then, clutching her close to his chest, he began trudging toward the cabin in the trees. The frigid air seemed suddenly warmer, and he no longer felt stiff and tired.



Three days later, the cargo ship Stephen Miller reported sighting a body in a life raft, which was later recovered. The dead man was Chinese and looked as if he had been sculpted from ice. He was never identified. The life raft, a model not in use for nearly twenty years, was marked in Chinese. Later translation indicated it came from a ship called the Princess Dou Wan.

A search was launched; bits of floating debris were spotted but never retrieved for investigation. No oil slick was discovered. No ship had been reported missing. Nowhere, on ship or ashore, had any distress signal or cry of "Mayday" been picked up. All rescue stations monitoring the standard ship-distress frequency received nothing, hearing only static from the heavy snow.

The mystery deepened when it was learned that a ship named Princess Dou Wan had been reported sunk off the coast of Chile the month before. The body found in the life raft was buried, and the strange enigma was quickly forgotten

PART I
THE KILLING WATER
1
April 14, 2000 Pacific Ocean off Washington

AS IF SHE WERE STRUGGLING out of a bottomless pit, consciousness slowly returned to Ling T'ai. Her whole upper body swam in pain. She groaned through clenched teeth, wanting to scream out in agony. She lifted a hand that was badly bruised and tenderly touched her fingertips to her face. One coffee brown eye was swollen closed, the other puffed but partially open. Her nose was broken, with blood still trickling from the nostrils. Thankfully, she could feel her teeth still in their gums, but her arms and shoulders were turning black-and-blue. She could not begin to count the bruises.

Ling T'ai was not sure at first why she was singled out for interrogation. The explanation came later, just before she was brutally beaten. There were others, to be sure, who were pulled from the mass of illegal Chinese immigrants on board the ship, tormented and thrown into a dark compartment in the cargo hold. Nothing was very clear to her, everything seemed confused and obscure. She felt as if she was about to lose her grip on consciousness and fall back into the pit.

The ship she had traveled on from the Chinese port of Qingdao across the Pacific looked to all appearances like a typical cruise ship. Named the Indigo Star, her hull was painted white from waterline to the funnel. Comparable in size to most smaller cruise ships that carried between one hundred and one hundred fifty passengers in luxurious comfort, the Indigo Star crammed nearly twelve hundred illegal Chinese immigrants into huge open bays within the hull and superstructure. She was a facade, innocent on the outside, a human hellhole on the inside.

Ling T'ai could not have envisioned the insufferable conditions that she and over a thousand others had to endure. The food was minimal and hardly enough to exist on. Sanitary conditions were nonexistent and toilet facilities deplorable. Some had died, mostly young children and the elderly, their bodies removed and never seen again. It seemed likely to Ling T'ai that they were simply thrown into the sea as if they were garbage.

The day before the Indigo Star was scheduled to reach the northeastern coast of the United States, a team of sadistic guards called enforcers, who maintained a climate of fear and intimidation on board the ship, had rounded up thirty or forty passengers and forced them to undergo an unexplained interrogation. When her turn finally came, she was ushered into a small, dark compartment and commanded to sit in a chair in front of four enforcers of the smuggling operation who were seated behind a table. Ling was then asked a series of questions.

"Your name!" demanded a thin man neatly attired in a gray pinstripe business suit. His smooth, brown face was intelligent but expressionless. The other three enforcers sat silently and glared malevolently. To the initiated, it was a classic act of interrogative coercion.

"My name is Ling T'ai."

"What province were you born?"

"Jiangsu."

"You lived there?" asked the thin man.

"Until I was twenty and finished my studies. Then I went to Canton, where I became a schoolteacher."

The questions came dispassionately and devoid of inflection. "Why do you want to go to the United States?"

"I knew the voyage would be extremely hazardous, but the promise of opportunity and a better life was too great," answered Ling T'ai. "I decided to leave my family and become an American."

"Where did you obtain the money for your passage?"

"I saved most of it from my teacher's pay over ten years. The rest I borrowed from my father."

"What is his occupation?"

"He is a professor of chemistry at the university in Beijing."