Chen whimpered and blubbered but didn’t reply. Carmody muscled against him and heaved him up so he was balanced on the rail, the metal bar across his back, his feet off the platform. He pushed so the man’s weight tilted precariously back over the rail into space and the only thing keeping him from falling was Carmody’s own pressing weight and mass.

“Listen,” he said. “I saw two little girls taped to chairs with gags in their mouths. I saw a man try to kill their father right in front of their eyes. I want to find that sick bastard. I want to know what he’s doing in this country. And I’m running out of time. If you don’t tell me, you’re worse than useless. You’re getting in my way. And I promise I’ll throw you over the side to get you out of it. So talk. Or don’t. Your decision.”

Chen looked up at him. The lower half of his face was a mire of blood. He coughed up red saliva.

“They will kill me. Do you understand?” he said. Wetly, like he was gargling. “I’ll be killed. My men too.”

“Maybe,” Carmody said. “And maybe I’ll see you aren’t.”

Chen looked up at him.

“This is a space for boats. A bay.”

“They aren’t here.”

“No. They left.”

“How long ago?”

“About an hour.”

“Where are they?”

Chen looked up. Carmody stared into his eyes.

“I’m waiting,” he said. “Talk.”

Chen talked.

22

April 20, 2024
Hawaii

Harper and Carmody stood on the quay outside the Pier 2 cruise ship terminal in the harbor, a few yards north of Pier 1 and the Xingyun Liwu. The terminal’s windows were dark now at three in the morning. The Coast Guard had commandeered its docking facilities, while the MH-65 continued to spin in place above the container ship. On adjoining Pier 1, the ship’s crew members were being marched into Coast Guard vans and driven off to a Navy detention facility at Hickam.

Carmody looked over the extraordinary vessel alongside the dock. He had never seen anything like it. About sixty feet long, it sat between two large outspread manta-type wings with tubular nacelles at their bottoms. Its hull panels were angled and faceted, like on a stealth bomber, and made of some dark gray nonreflective metal alloy. Its broad windshield was tinted so no one could see inside. The craft could have been a starfighter in a science fiction movie.

“Your one thought,” he said to Harper.

“I tend to think big,” Harper said. “There’s only a single Ghost. It’s a prototype. I hear they’re messing with different versions, but we have the original at Barbers. We’ve been running it through trials for a couple of years.”

“You actually know how to pilot it?”

“I have people that do,” he said. “My job is to act important and bark orders.”