“Fine. No moon at all. Seas are only a couple of feet, and the wind’s light. Listen, the reason I called is we have some information for you.”

About time, Cabrillo thought but kept it to himself. “Murph tracked down who owns the Maus?”

“No, he’s still working on it. Julia came up with something during her autopsies of the Chinese folks we plucked from the container. I’m passing her off to you.”

“Thanks. E-mail the feeds from the UAV to my phone. I’d like to take a look at the Maus during the flyover.”

“You got it. Here’s the doc.”

“Chairman, how’s Tokyo?”

“It’s all warm sushi and cold geishas.”

“I bet. I think I found something about our immigrants. They’re all from the same village, a place called Lantan in Fujian Province. Most of them are part of the same extended family.”

“Did you do a DNA test?”

“No, I read the parts of a diary that hadn’t been destroyed when the container went into the drink. A lot of the journal was illegible, but I scanned everything into the computer and let the translator take a crack at it. The guy who wrote it’s last name was Xang. With him were two brothers, a bunch of cousins, and distant blood relatives. They had been promised work in Japan by a snakehead who called himself Yan Luo. Each of them had to pay this Yan Luo about five hundred dollars before leaving the village and would have to pay back about fifteen thousand once they reached a textile mill outside Tokyo.”

“Does he talk about the Kra? Was that the boat taking them to Japan?”

“He doesn’t say, or that part of the journal was too damaged to read.”

“What else were you able to get?”

“Not much. He wrote about his dreams and how one day he would be able to afford bringing his girlfriend to Japan with him. Stuff like that.”

“What was the name of that town?”

“Lantan.”

“If we can’t backtrack the Kra or the Maus, maybe we can backtrack the immigrants.” Cabrillo glanced at Eddie. His chief of Shore Operations had heard enough of the call to understand what was coming. It was in his eyes. “I’ll call you right back,” Cabrillo said to Julia and cut the connection.

“China, huh,” Eddie said with an air of the inevitable. “I had a feeling it would come to this as soon as I saw them.”

“Can you do it?”