The Flower Net Read Online Free PDF

engine. It would catch for a moment, then fall silent again. The men only intensified their labor. After five hours, one hold had been emptied. The men showed David where there were others. He felt lost under here. The air was vile with oil fumes, human waste, and what David could only surmise were dead rats. Corners melted into darkness. Iron stairs seemed to go nowhere. Hallways ended abruptly. He would walk with a group of five or six, get partway down a hallway, then the group would break into loud, intense arguing. The men screamed at each other in their harsh voices, gesticulated wildly at David, and refused to let him pass. Zhao would finally speak a few words in English. “This is not the way. We go other way.” And they would all turn around and go back the way they had come. It seemed to David that they were walking in circles, and yet, they had found five more holds that were waist deep in icy water.
    Around midnight as the storm buffeted the
Peony
, the engine sputtered and came to life. Throughout the ship a collective cheer went up, but even this was short-lived. They still had so much to do. Within minutes, the pumps were started. Against their steady drone, David abandoned the men he’d been working with to look for Campbell. He found the FBI agent in the engine room. The older man was sweaty and grease stained, but neither his energy nor his humor had ebbed.
    “You look like shit,” Campbell said, and laughed.
    For the first time, David looked down at his suit. Sometime this evening he’d taken off the jacket and left it somewhere. His shirt was smudged and a sleeve had a tear along the shoulder seam. His pants—wet with the fouled water from the hold—clung to his legs. David couldn’t help but grin himself, but the moment of levity quickly dissipated.
    “Okay, this is where we are,” Campbell said. “We’ve got the engines going…”
    “That I know.”
    “We’ve got the pumps going. Are they working? Can you tell?”
    “Yeah, and they sure beat doing the work by hand.”
    “Wei tells me that if we keep the ship headed into the waves and everything else sealed up, we should be all right.”
    David looked at Wei. He was small—maybe five feet three inches—wiry and toothless. “If that’s what he says, then we’ll do it.”
    “Great. Get everyone below decks and—as they say in the movies—batten down the hatches.”
    It seemed like an easy enough job, but it turned out to be one of the most challenging of the day. Many of the immigrants—including Zhao, who had gone back to his old spot and was sitting with a tarpaulin around his shoulders—refused to leave the deck.
    “Come on, Zhao,” David insisted, shouting over the storm. Strong winds from the west pelted him with rain. “I need your help. We’ve got to get everyone down below.”
    “I stay out here the whole trip.”
    “You’re going to die out here is what’s going to happen.” He motioned to the sea. Towering waves caused the ship to pitch violently. Every so often the
Peony
’s propellers could be heard as they rose up out of the water. “You’re going to wash overboard.”
    “I make it this far. I make it to end.”
    David squatted. “I need you, Zhao. I need you to help me with the others. If you help me with them now, I promise to help you later.”
    The Chinese man considered. “How do I know if a white ghost tells the truth?”
    David extended his hand for a formal handshake. “I always tell the truth.”
             
    By four in the morning, the worst of the storm had passed over the
China Peony
. Campbell had called to shore to say they were going to make it and to get off their asses and get a ship out here to tow them in, please. Here and there, men dozed. Others clustered in groups, smoking cigarettes, speaking in low voices. Gardner, still sick, was resting in the captain’s cabin. Campbell had fallen asleep at a long table in the crew’s galley, his head resting in the crook of his