Power and Empire

Ma Xiannian: General, People’s Liberation Army

Long Yun: Colonel, Central Security Bureau; Foreign Minister Li’s principal protective officer

TEXAS

Eddie Feng: Taiwanese journalist

Magdalena Rojas: Thirteen-year-old victim of sex trafficking

Blanca Limón: Thirteen-year-old victim of sex trafficking

Ernie Pacheco, aka Matarife (The Slaughterer)

Lupe: “Bottom girl” who works for Matarife

Emilio Zambrano: Upper boss in cartel

Roy Calderon: Texas Department of Public Safety trooper

Kelsey Callahan: FBI special agent, commander of the Dallas Crimes Against Children Task Force

John Olson: Special Agent, FBI, on CAC Task Force

That city is well fortified which has a wall of men instead of brick.

— LYCURGUS

I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.

— JACK LONDON

PROLOGUE

A dozen men clad in bright orange coveralls and white hardhats swarmed the decks of CGSL Orion, the 396-meter flagship of China Global Shipping Lines, like ants. The hollow thud of metal box against metal box rattled the air, adding a bass note to the scream of gears and the whine of spinning cable drums. Gargantuan orange gantry cranes towering fifty meters above dipped and rose, then dipped again, their noses swinging back and forth from dock to ship with payloads of white, green, blue, or red metal containers known as TEUs, or twenty-foot equivalent units.

Gao Tian, chief of the ants, stood on the concrete docks of Dalian. This was one of the busiest container hubs in China, and the mountain of TEUs stacked beside the huge vessel made the man look and feel minuscule. He waved his good arm and spoke into the radio clipped to a loop on the chest of his coveralls. The broad smile across his face belied the frenetic pace of the activity around him. Far too busy with their own tasks, none of the other dockworkers looked up to pay any attention to his flailing arm, but they listened intently to his voice over their respective radios. His job was to coordinate and make certain the loading went quickly and safely; of all the people on the docks, Gao was intimately familiar with the dangers.

Each year, almost three-quarters of a billion of these ubiquitous metal containers — roughly 24 trillion pounds of cargo — moved around the world via tractor-trailer, locomotive, and cargo ship. Roughly 180 million TEUs came from China, and well over 10 million of those came through the Port of Dalian — on ships much like Orion.

The job of a dockworker was stressful enough, but Gao Tian found it difficult to concentrate, considering his recent upturn of fortune.

Gao was forty-one years old, with thinning black hair and a round face that naturally relaxed into a smile — a coworker had remarked that he always looked as though he’d just relieved himself in the swimming pool. He was not a big man, nor was he particularly strong. In truth, Gao had many reasons to be unhappy. His right hand had been crushed in an accident three years earlier when a turnbuckle on a piece of lashing gear had snapped. The sudden loss of tension allowed the TEU to shift just a few inches — but those few inches were enough. Three fingers of his right hand had been sacrificed to the ship, his bone and flesh smeared between the steel bulkhead and the fifty-thousand-pound metal box, like so much red-currant jelly.

Gao’s thumb and remaining finger were of little use. He could, at least, hook the antenna of his radio and depress the talk button, allowing him to direct the activity of the crane operators and the dozen orange-clad stevedores, ensuring that the stacks of TEUs were loaded correctly and efficiently. Gao earned no more pay as the chief coordinator, but, given his useless hand, he counted himself lucky that the dock manager gave him a job at all. And besides, it made sense that the men who did the hardest and most dangerous work received a few more yuan a day than someone who merely stood on the dock and talked into his radio.

Other men in the crew might eventually move up and become true supervisors with offices of their own, but that was not to be for Gao. In all his years, he had never strayed farther than a hundred kilometers from his birthplace of Dalian — and then only to visit his wife’s mother, who lived on a small piece of cooperative land north of the city.