CHAPTER NINE (continued ...)
Ming Guo had been up for hours. He’d arrived on Weichou Island from Beihai the night before, and Comrade Liu had briefed him on the plan over a late supper of cold rice and fish. He would go out before dawn on a fishing boat that belonged to a friend. The boat would take him to Haikou, the port city on the northern coast of the biggest island on the Chinese coast, Hainan. There were still many communists operating in the steep hills in the center of the island.
He had been engaged in one of his regular assignments, carrying dispatches from Chairman Mao’s much larger base in Shaansi to the Hainan soviet, when he’d been contacted to detour to Beihai and wait for further instructions. He’d spent a pleasant couple of days there, staying at the house of a party member who worked in the city’s police department, enjoying the local seafood and relaxing until the package had come. It had been a bag containing a camera and a very long lens. With it were instructions on how to use the camera and contact information for Liu.
Liu was a clerk who worked for the French priests and nuns on Weichou. He had been a communist since the days of Deng Hsiao Ping’s uprising near Nanning in 1929. Over dinner, he’d told Ming Guo that a big ship full of Americans had been anchored on the far side of Hsieyang Island for two weeks. Liu had learned about it from the fishermen who sailed out of Weichou every day. The American ship was on the south side of the smaller island, at a spot not visible from Weichou. Liu had sent a message to the Hainan soviet when he’d heard that the ship had neither moved nor signaled for help for many days.
The boat that Liu had arranged for Ming Guo to go out on belonged to another party member, Wong, a grizzled old Hakka fisherman. He hadn’t said more than ten words to Ming Guo since he’d come aboard. Wong’s boat would fish in the waters to the south of Hsieyang and then, instead of returning home, go on to Haikou the next night. Ming Guo had found a good spot on the piled up nets and gone back to sleep when the boat sailed. Two hours later, Wong had awakened him to get at the nets, and he’d begun to assemble his camera.
Now he was watching as the big ship moved away from the island. Ming Guo had grown up in the mountains of Jejiang province, well inland from Shanghai. He didn’t like boats or being on the water, and he didn’t understand anything about them. None of what he was seeing made sense to him. It appeared the Americans had expended a great deal of effort to build some kind of dock for the island, and that they had put a lot of equipment there. But the place was basically a ball of rock in the middle of the ocean. The crazy foreigners had left a fortune in brand new building material there, and now they were leaving. If this was to be some kind of depot, the location proved how crazy the Americans were. The place was far from any industry, and very far away from the fighting with the Japanese. If they needed some kind of place to retreat to if the Japanese made a major push to the south, this little rock would be useless.
“Hey, Old Wong! Is the big ship turning?” He pointed toward the island.
“Huh?” Wong turned and shaded his eyes with his hand. He peered out at the ship for a moment, then turned to Ming Guo. “It’s turning.” With that, he went back to work playing his nets out.
Ming Guo grinned. The Hakka weren’t Han Chinese – not “real” Chinese to most people. There were many stories about them: They had come south running from the Mongols, they were criminals chased out of the cultured cities in the north, they were Mongols themselves. Whatever the truth, little bands of them lived in isolated communities in the south, usually in the hills on the worst land, or in small fishing villages. Probably half the people who lived on Weichou were Hakka. The French Catholic missionaries from Vietnam had been very successful with them and most of the Hakka on Weichou were Catholics. Liu had told him that Wong had no trouble being both a good Catholic and a good communist, but that Ming Guo shouldn’t expect him to say much; according to Liu, Wong was notoriously suspicious of Han Chinese people. This suited Ming Guo fine. The less the old fisherman talked to anyone, the better.
Ming Guo tilted his head down again. He had the big camera lens propped on the boat’s low gunwale as he lay nestled comfortably on a coil of rope. He peered through the view finder, his finger resting gently on the shutter. He’d already shot ten pictures. He had fourteen left, the instructions with the camera had said.
The ship had turned so that it was now parallel to them, and only the highest point of the island was visible beyond it. Suddenly that knuckle of rock disappeared in a cloud of smoke as great chunks of stone erupted upward. Ming Guo involuntarily jammed his finger down onto the shutter and immediately wound the film with his thumb. “Ma da!” Ming Guo cursed. By the time he tripped the shutter again, the eruption was growing down the length of the island, as more rock rose up from behind the ship.
Ming Guo saw a wave, small but distinct, rushing out away from the island toward them. The big ship rocked a little when the wave passed swiftly beneath it. Before he could look up from the camera, the wave had reached their boat. At that moment a great thundering crack sounded. Ming Guo turned to see Wong whipping around to face the direction of the sound, a look of complete astonishment on his face. For a moment, Ming Guo had the thought that this may be a volcano, an exploding mountain he’d read about in the party school back in Shaansi.
The boat rocked gently and Wong turned to look, wide-eyed, at Ming Guo. Ming Guo shrugged and shook his head to signal that he didn’t know what was happening. Then he turned and looked through the camera again. A huge cloud of smoke was spreading out from the island, more on its southern than its northern side, and big chunks of rock were raining down all around. As he snapped more pictures, he saw geysers in the water as some of these impacted between the ship and the island. Over the next minute or so the cloud of dust began to settle as it spread out, almost obscuring his sight of the ship as it did.
“Should we go?” Wong asked, his voice unsteady. He was crouching down next to Ming Guo.
“No, not yet.” Ming Guo had no idea if they were in any danger. He was more afraid that the Americans might send one of the small boats he’d seen out to investigate them. They were almost a mile away from the island and, as large as the explosion had been, they had not really been threatened by it.
“What was it?”
“Comrade, I have no idea.”
“Was it a bomb?”
“There’s nothing there worth blowing up, is there?” Ming Guo asked.
Wong snorted. “Nothing. There used to be some people living there, a long time ago. Some poor fishermen. There hasn’t been anyone there for many years. We just fish around the reef there sometimes. That’s all. It’s just a piece of rock in the ocean.”
“Well, let’s watch a while and see what happens.” Ming Guo looked back through the long lens and saw the ship turning again, and heading back to the dock.