Chapter 222: The Mission Briefing

“So the power of the shell will be reduced accordingly?”

“No, the explosive charge is greater than in the old museum pieces, and the explosive force is more powerful.”

If Lin Shenhe had been present, he probably would have waxed lyrical about the superiority of high-density columnar black powder. Xue Ziliang couldn’t be bothered to waste his breath; he didn’t think much of Lin’gao’s homemade explosives anyway. “Those two cranks you just gave it are enough to blow a pirate fast boat to smithereens.”

“A pity there’s no steam engine,” the mercenary said, always distrustful of things without engines.

“You won’t find anywhere to coal in Manila. The industrial sector did suggest experimentally installing a hot-bulb diesel engine on this boat.”

“I don’t remember the Planning and Development Council having any diesel.”

“There is a little. If it really comes down to it, we can burn coconut oil. But after a lot of tinkering, those guys in the industrial sector said they couldn’t get the fuel pump to work, so the whole thing fell through,” Xue Ziliang said with a hint of regret. “This boat was originally intended to have a diesel engine. The space was even reserved.”

The former mercenary neither knew nor cared what a hot-bulb diesel engine was. In any case, apart from the lack of a power system, everything about the Esmeralda was satisfactory and impeccable. The fake Count returned to the captain’s cabin in high spirits.

“We’ve been here long enough. Let’s go to Malate. That bay is just big enough for the Esmeralda. What’s important is that the Count should be able to see his ship from the window of his villa.”

“Interesting,” Xue Ziliang said, sitting cross-legged on the floor of Rando’s study. The cork floor was covered with a large piece of canvas, on which were spread all sorts of broken metal scraps that Ji Mide had secretly collected from the artillery firing range on the outskirts of Manila, as instructed by the Count. There were fragments of various spherical and conical shrapnel and explosive shells. The broken conical shell bodies were covered in rust spots, and the convex marks carved by the rifling were clearly visible on the remaining copper or lead expanding driving bands.

“Look at this thing, the Spaniards’ Saturn V,” Weiss said, picking up the remains of a rocket that was blackened all over but still basically intact. If Lin Shenhe had seen it, he would have recognized it as a modified Congreve rocket. Although the iron-sheet body had a strange shape, wider at the front and narrower at the back, the guide stick fixed to the bottom was burned down to a small stub. A few rows of neat circular holes could be seen on the nose cone, their edges twisted and cracked by the high temperature. The incendiary agent inside the warhead had sprayed out from here, and traces of a mixture of sulfur and asphalt still remained. In fact, after this rocket was launched from the artillery range, it had, by some twist of fate, made a turn in the air and plunged into a nearby village. When Ji Mide, disguised as a Chinese merchant, bought this “devil’s firework” from the Tagalog peasant woman, she was still weeping over her burned-out hut.

“This friend of yours should be getting a hundred thousand dollars a month from bin Laden to build him a nuclear bomb. How could such a person risk his life to smuggle a few broken guns?”

“Damn it, He Er was brought in by Paul. I didn’t even know such a guy existed before he got on my boat. Something else to drink? Rum or wine?”

“Rum, thanks. How much good stuff have you managed to get in Manila, my lord?”

Rando took a wet rum bottle from a wooden bucket filled with well water, poured some into a glass, added a little guava juice, and then topped it up with soda water.

“A pity there’s no ice here.”

“I’m quite satisfied with soda water and rum. Fortunately, the Senate has always been ‘worldly’ when it comes to enjoyment.”

Xue Ziliang no longer sipped slowly at the ruby-colored, bubbling liquid in his glass, but threw his head back and drained it in one gulp. He put down the glass, opened the briefcase he had been carrying since he came ashore, and handed Weiss a kraft paper package sealed with a bright red wax seal: “Confidential. Destroy after reading.”

The kraft paper package contained several documents from different letterheads. The instructions Weiss received were far more complex than he had imagined. He had to establish regular radio contact with Lin’gao, investigate in detail the military strength and economic situation of the Manila colonial authorities—he could see that Jiang’s intelligence bureau was more interested in the latter than the former. He had to report on the movements of the colonial authorities and port information at all times, especially information about the Manila galleons. He was to collect all kinds of intelligence about the situation in Europe from colonial officials and merchants. He even had to try to obtain permission for a survey team from Lin’gao to enter the interior. Although the Executive Committee was unwilling to invest forces in conquering the Philippines at present, it had long coveted the mineral deposits under the archipelago. As for the ghostly, possibly existing former accomplice of his, the intelligence bureau’s directive was: “Try to ascertain his existence,” but “avoid active contact that could lead to your own exposure.”

The rainy season in the Philippines had come late this year, but it had come nonetheless. Fat raindrops hammered against the windowpanes, merging into a waterfall. The Esmeralda was anchored in the small bay near the fishing village. The bay was formed by a natural reef extending from the coastline, which blocked the wind and waves coming from the northeast.

“How long can you stay here?”

“Not long. The Special Reconnaissance Command will call me back soon. You can give orders to the captain and the four members of the Special Reconnaissance detachment. Their instructions are to follow your orders in the Philippines unless they receive new orders from Lin’gao.”

Weiss stared out the window. The curtain of rain outside blurred his vision. The sails on the ship were all furled and neatly tied to the yards. He could vaguely see a few figures in oilskin raincoats walking back and forth on the deck—the sailors on duty.

The sound of hammering came from downstairs, audible even through the closed study door. The Chinese craftsmen of Manila were laying pipes in the garden in the heavy rain, installing the newly delivered sanitary equipment under the direction of a naturalized citizen technician who had come with the ship.

This investment is by no means just to add to my own ostentatious display, he thought. The villa under the name of Count Fannanuova would in the future serve as an intelligence center against the Manila authorities, as well as the Australian trading post in the Philippines. Those Chinese in the Lin’gao Senate were as shrewd as the congressmen on Capitol Hill. This small boat they had sent to support him was, in their eyes, equivalent to an entire carrier battle group. Weiss Rando had to achieve something, or he and Jiang might both face a hearing.

He stuffed the several order sheets back into the kraft paper envelope, lit it with his lighter, and threw it into the fireplace.

“That He Er,” Weiss said, watching the paper being licked into ashes by the flames, “said he was from the United States. Haven’t you ever checked him on the computer?”

“You’re kidding,” Xue Ziliang said. “If there was a Japanese or Japanese-American named He Er in the ATF or INS archives, I would certainly have an impression. The problem is, there isn’t.”

Xue Ziliang made a mistake. Although he didn’t remember a Japanese or Japanese-American named He Er, the FBI and INS databases did contain a Japanese-Brazilian exchange student originally named Evaristo Rosa Okamoto, a terrorist on the wanted list.

In 1974, the 3-year-old Okamoto Keiji left his hometown with his wife and children, crossed the ocean, and finally settled in a village on the outskirts of São Paulo. Although the post-war wave of Japanese immigration had passed by the seventies, no one in Brazil, with its population of over a million Japanese and Japanese descendants, paid much attention to the arrival of a new Japanese immigrant. It was only over time that the local Japanese community found him a difficult person to get close to, especially as he disliked interacting with immigrants from his own country. They didn’t know that this farmer, who claimed to be from Kumamoto, was a distant relative of Okamoto Kozo, who had become notorious a year earlier for the shooting at Tel Aviv’s Lod Airport. To avoid the police, he had immigrated to Brazil, a fact Keiji carefully concealed. His son’s Portuguese name was given to him by his stepmother. In his third year in Brazil, Keiji’s wife fell ill and died. After a few years as a widower, he married a Catholic Brazilian woman of mixed race and added her surname to his son’s name.

Young Okamoto grew up on this almost isolated farm and, like his father, was taciturn by nature. Besides farming, he was a self-taught expert at repairing cars and various agricultural machinery, which earned him considerable praise among the Japanese farmers in the surrounding villages. And when Evaristo was admitted to the Florida Institute of Technology and went to the United States to study, it caused quite a stir among the local Japanese-American residents who had been farming for generations.

During his studies, Evaristo Rosa Okamoto showed no remarkable peculiarities. University professors and classmates, when questioned by federal agents, could only recall a medium-sized, gentle, and quiet Japanese-American student. He had excellent grades and, in addition to his majors in mechanical and chemical engineering, was also very interested in Eastern history. He had taught himself Arabic in addition to Japanese. To save money for a trip to Asia, he had worked for the Union Pacific Company during his holidays, responsible for repairing and maintaining antique steam locomotives. His passion for those old machines impressed even the railway company’s engineers. If not for a random drug bust that led the police to find detailed blueprints for a remote-controlled explosive device and some already-made components in his apartment, he would have continued to play the role of a harmless, well-behaved student.