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

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 Qing-dao 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 northwestern 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.