Rembrandt's Ghost by Paul Christopher Read Free Book Online Page A

abroad—more than a decade—letters from his family told of change in his homeland, none of it for the better. Corruption set in like a disease, infecting everything it touched. His father had been ousted from his post, his lands and money taken, and finally his dissentingvoice silenced by the swinging blade of an assassin’s parang in a Kuching alley.
    Returning to his native land, he found his mother dying of despair, his older brother now a high-ranking and corrupt civil servant in the Judiciary, and the country committing slow suicide under the self-serving regime of Haji Abdul Taib Mahmud as her natural resources were auctioned off to the highest bidder, her forests and rivers destroyed, and her people abused and slaughtered. Then his mother died and he was alone.
    Taking the few remaining assets that were left to him, James How Ling Khan fled to the upriver jungles of the Rejang, renewing friendships and native family ties, forging a pirate empire that had no allies only enemies, preying on the ships of any nation foolish enough to pass within range of his wrath and his fleet of marauding gunships spread out from Sumatra to Zamboanga in the Sulu Sea, lurking like sea snakes in hidden river bases just like this one.
    There was other business as well; there were endless shipments of North Korean methamphetamines and counterfeit American currency to move, raw opium from Vietnam, slipper orchids from Sabah, sometimes special human cargo quietly left on the lonely beaches along Northern Australia’s Gulf of Carpentaria, and always, and very profitably, guns and other weapons ferried to the Kumpulan Mujahidin Malaysia terrorists, Darul Islam, Abu Sayyaf, Moro National Liberation Front, Jemaah Islamiya, and anyone else prepared to pay Khan’s exorbitant freight rates.
    Through the beating pulse of the rain Khan heard another, deeper sound that resolved itself into the familiar, lumbering thunder of his personal boat,
Black Dragon
, one of a half dozen World War Two “Karo-Tei” subchasers he’d discovered, forgotten and derelict in an old camouflaged pen on an uninhabited island in the Sulu Sea. Based on stolen plans for the prewar American “Six-Bitter” Coast Guard ships, the Karo-Tei were sixty-foot-long shallow-draft cutters powered by twin eight-hundred horsepower aircraft engines and capable of speeds up to thirty-eight knots.
    The small ships were heavily armed with twin twenty-millimeter cannons and an aft machine-gun tub. They were completely constructed from wood, which made their radar shadows almost invisible, and they carried a crew of fifteen, more than enough men to capture any unarmed vessel afloat in any weather. They were the deadliest weapons in Khan’s arsenal, and over the years, he had made them even more fearsome with Russian-made RPG rocket launchers, sophisticated navigation electronics as good as or better than those of any ships sent against him, and refurbishedengines that made him fleet as the wind and just as hard to see or catch.
    The narrow, V-hulled boat appeared out of the misty rain, nosing gently through the shallow waters of the estuary, her flat gray and stealthy paint job making her as elusive as smoke. Khan smiled coldly as she approached, powerful engines backing.
Black Dragon
, more a home to him than anything had been since he’d returned to the South China Sea.
    The engines of the sleek gunboat died and
Black Dragon
slid the last few dozen yards silently. A seaman appeared on deck, barefoot, picking up the forward line. The boat bumped gently against the floating dock directly below the
rumah
, and the seaman jumped down and secured the line to a wooden cleat. A short, squat figure stepped out of the wheelhouse, crossed the deck, and stepped down onto the dock. He reached the heavy bamboo ladder at the end of the dock and climbed easily up to the verandah. He was dressed in camouflage greens and combat boots, and there were three official-looking stars on each one of his