Two Peasants and a President (4 page)

A key was turned in a lock, not quietly like the sound of a door in a house, bu
t metallically as in a cell.  This
sent a shiver down her back. 
U
shered into a room where the blind
fold and handcuffs were removed, s
he found that she could open her eyes now, with only slight discomfort, and she looked around her.  To h
er surprise, the room was slightly
larger than a s
mall motel room.  It had a
metal table with a single chair, a cot topped with a thin mattress and a sink and stool against one wall.  A single lig
ht bulb hung from a ceiling which
was painted institutional green like the walls.

“Where am I
?” she asked.  “Where is my husband?”  The men turned and left without saying a word.  A clanging sound from down the hall told her
that they ha
d closed
another door. 

For the first time in she knew not how many days, she was no longer in pitch blackness.  She stretched, savoring the movement and the fact that her cell door had a small window, but when she looked closer, her reflection told her that they could see her but she could not see out.  She desperately needed a shower but there was only the sink and a few tattered towels and a was
h
cloth.  No suitcase; how she missed that little piece of familiarity. 

Moving around the perimeter of the room, she examined the walls for some means of escape, not really expecting any.  The walls were
of
concrete block; it was obvious from the way they felt to the touch.  The floor and ceiling appeared to be concrete too.  Her spirits sagged again, realizing that her iron pr
ison had merely been replaced with
a concrete one.  She tried to
focus on how her situation had improved, but the tears came welling up nonetheless.  Then the light went out and she was once more in darkness.

She found the cot and lay down upon it, thinking about home and those she loved until finally she fell asleep. 

******

T
he sound of the steel
lock disengaging
awakened her
.  The light had been turned
on and the door was opening.  She sat up, pulling her knees up to her chest.  A thickset man stood in the doorway, wearing a uniform like the man in the van.  He looked at her for a moment and then around the room.  Finally he stepped outside and motioned to someone in the hall.

A tiny woman shuffled into the room, pushing a wheeled bucket and mop.

Her stooped back spoke of a lifetime of labor, making her appear to be in her mid-sixties, but something about her suggested otherwise.  Her white blouse and loose black pants momentarily sent a chill up Holly’s spine as she recalled Jimmy and Grace, who were dressed similarly.  But there was nothing sinister about this tiny person; she had a quiet look of resignation as though she had chosen to placidly accept her lot in life.  A pair of well-worn pink canvas shoes was the only thing about her that stood out. 

The man grunted something in Chinese and then took a seat directly across the hall where he could see into the room.  The woman looked up at Holly briefly, curiously, then began to mop the floor.  When she had mopped her way into the corner where she was out of sight of the man, she looked again at Holly, as if searching her face for something.

Holly felt strangely drawn to her, like fellow prisoners whose shared misery forges a common bond.   There was something else about her that was difficult to pinpoint, something that she held inside.  When she had fi
n
ished mopping, she sponged the sink and swabbed the toilet.  Then she turned to leave, pausing to look at Holly once more.  The guard made a guttural sound and the stooped lady turned and shuffled out.  Once again the door was locked. 

About an hour later, the door was opened again.  A short Chinese man of medium height, dressed in white slacks and lab coat, carrying a clipboard and with a stethoscope around his neck walked in.  He had a bland, officious air about him, but there was little energy in it, as though his zest for life had long ago drained away.  He looked at her in a detached way, as if he could look at a woman or a door and feel the same.

“Where am I,” she asked, doing her best to not sound confrontational. 

“Do not be afraid, you will not be harmed,” he intoned. 

What, does everyone around here use the same script?
she thought.  She wanted to slap him and say:
“
Wake up,
robo
-doc, I’m here against my will, and I’m feeling like shoving that stethoscope right up your tight little Chinese ass.
”

“I will not be able to answer your questions,” he said, which clearly meant not to bother asking any. 

She knew her face must be red because her balled fists were.  Stru
g
gling to restrain herself, she focused on learning whatever she could by o
b
servation and not making things any harder on her.  He removed the steth
o
scope from around his neck and motioned for her to turn around.  After holding it briefly against her back in several places, he returned it to his neck.

“In a little while, someone will bring you food.  If you would like something to read, I can arrange that.”

“What I would like is to know where my husband is?” she said, her anger building.  He simply turned and left, closing and locking the door b
e
hind him.

“Damn!” she said, banging her fist against the door. 

4

The phone on the kitchen wall rang.  “Hello. . . Hi Maggie, how are you?”  Sally listened for several minutes.  “Oh my, that doesn’t sound good.  Have you called the embassy.”

“Not yet,  I wanted to talk to you first, t
o see if you thought I was over
reacting,” Maggie replied.

“No,
of course
I don’t.  They said they’d call from their hotel when they got back from the cruise.  I was
kinda
wondering too.”

“I already spoke to the hotel,” Maggie continued.  “They haven’t been back there.  The people there were very nice, but they said they didn’t know anything and suggested I wait a day or so.”

“No.  Something must be wrong if they never showed up at the hotel.  Oh my, I
am starting to get worried now!
  This just doesn’t feel right.  I’m going to call Jim . . . and Richard.  Why don’t you two come over.  I’ll order some pizza and we can put our heads together.  

******

“Jim, will you get the door, honey, that must be the pizza man.” 

The dining room table was cluttered with coffee cups, and a large map lay unfolded in its center.  Between questions, Richard, Holly’s grandfather, was making notes on separate sheets of paper. 

“The plates are by the pizza,” Sally called from the kitchen.  “Help yourselves.”  Sally Petersen, Holly’s mother, was nothing if not efficient, having grown up in a Navy family.  Richard, her father, was organizing lists of tasks to be completed and assigning each as if he was still the officer in charge.  Known in naval circles as Captain Richard. J. Davis, he had once commanded one of the Navy’s most powerful warships and was used to taking charge.

Retirement had not diminished the Captain’s intensity in the slightest, though he no longer commanded anything.  In the incident with the Cubans and Iranians, his ship had been blown out from under him, which had led to his retirement, even though the orders of his superiors had been the cause.  Nonetheless, the Navy and his country owed a great deal to the fact that his actions, though unauthorized, had saved the nation from a terrorist attack that would have dwarfed the twin towers.  He was a man who preferred to go
through channels, but as he had shown during the incident, he was willing and more than capable of making his own path through obstacles if there was no other way.

“Somebody needs to call the cruise outfit in Hong Kong later tonight when they’re likely to be open,” he said.  “Here’s a copy of the itinerary with their ph
one number on it.  Oh, and here’
s a little miniature recorder that will come in handy.  We should have a record of every word that’s said.”

“I’ll take care of it,” answered Jim.  The Captain had often said of Jim that there weren’t many men whom he would have allowed to marry his daughter.  Of course, that might have been partly due to the fact that Jim was a Navy Seal in those days, and he and Brett, Ray’s dad, also a Seal, along with the Captain and some very brave police officers had prevented a terrorist a
t
tack of unspeakable proportions.

“Sally, will you call the travel agent tomorrow and find out what they know about this cruise company they picked?  Oh, and would you please stop at Best Buy in the morning as soon as they open and pick up three more of the miniature recorders like the one I just gave Jim.  We should all have documentation on everything.  But let
’
s not let anyone know they
’
re being recorded.”

“Roger,
Wilco
, Dad,” Sally answered
without thinking,
in the way she’d done
when
she was a child and an honorary sailor in her father’s pe
r
sonal navy.  “Isn’t that illegal, though?”

“Depends on where you are calling from, I think,“ he replied, without explaining
further
.  “I’ll call the State Department in the morning and find out what procedures they have for locating missing persons abroad, though frankly I’d be surprised if those people could find an outhouse in a parking lot.”

It was well past eleven when the families of Holly and Raymond Walker finally decided to call it a night.  They each had a list of things to check out, and they had agreed to decide when to meet again once they had at least some preliminary answers. 

5

    March 10
th
 
2013 –
0220 hrs – S
pratly Islands
–
South China Sea

Steaming at a leisurely 12 knots, the elderly frigate was probably pushing more water than it was slicing through.  Three hundred and six feet in length, it had begun life in 1943 as the destroyer USS Atherton. 

After the war it was transferred to the Japan Self Defense Forces and in 1978 to the Philippine Navy where, following an extensive refit, it was named the BRP Rajah
Humabon
(PF-11) after
the native chieftain of
Cebu
in the Philippines at the time of Ferdinand Magellan's arrival in the archipelago in 1521.  Although it had undergone another minor refit in 1995, she was still one of oldest active duty warships in the world and was intended as a patrol craft, not a modern combatant.  The officer of the deck, lieutenant Juan de la Cruz was nursing his third cup of coffee, struggling to stay awake when his radar man beckoned him over to the screen. 

“Sir, there is a large craft approaching a group of Filipino fishing boats,” he said.  “Looks like it could be that Chinese Frigate.”

C
ruz felt the hair rise on the back of his neck.  In February a Chinese Frigate had fired warning shots at a group of Filipino fishing boats in the
Spratlys
area.   China had been expending enormous amounts of capital to increase the size of its littoral fleet and build a blue water navy in order to back up a claim that virtually the entire South China Sea, approximately 1.4 million square miles, is their sovereign territory.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson
Jiang
Yu had stated: “China enjoys indisputable sovereignty over the South China Sea and the islands.”

In as much as the area is also bordered by Taiwan, Malaysia, Brunei, Indonesia, Singapore, and Viet Nam and given that the region has proven oil reserves of 7.7 billion barrels with an estimate of 28 billion barrels in total and natural gas reserves of around 266 trillion cubic feet, China’s goal was o
b
vious.  That and the fact that more than 50% of the world’s annual merchant fleet tonnage passes through these waters ensured that not only the nations of Southeast Asia were intently following events here. 

Traditionally, these nations have relied on th
e United States to ensure that
vital sea lanes stay open.  But recently
,
reports were filtering out of China that they were developing an anti-ship missile capable of destroying an aircraft carrier 900 miles away.  That and their aggressive construction of
large, powerful naval assets made it clear that they intended to control the South China Sea by force if necessary.

“Bring the ship about and make 16 knots for those fishing boats,” o
r
dered Lieutenant Cruz.  “And call the Captain to the bridge.”  Three and a half minutes later, Captain
Macario
Santos was standing next to the lieute
n
ant.