Undercover - In China - Book 7

Part 1 - Nine Dragons

It was deathly hot and the only light came from a few fluorescent lamps high overhead. Fear was freezing my limbs into paralysis. My neck was sore.    It felt like a mosquito bite or . . . a hypodermic needle. 

 Opposite me, in the gloom, I could just make out two men sitting on cheap plastic stools at a tiny Formica table. They were talking in Cantonese. The one wearing a bowler hat looked familiar but I couldn't recall his name. A few metres away, a wizened old Asian woman was bent over a stainless steel sink, a cigarette dangling from her lip, her eyes squinting against the smoke. Beside her, a giant wok steamed on a gas ring, the gas jets lighting her face with an alien glow. 

 I turned awkwardly and knocked over a pot of chopsticks on the tiny table. A row of pedestal fans blew a hot, humid breeze through a dirty chain-link fence. I had been here before! Sometime in the 1990's. 

 The man in the bowler hat picked up the chop sticks and put them back in the pot. I remembered his name, Kozak. I tried to speak but only a croak came out. How did I get here? Which part of this nightmare was real? I remembered being drugged and carried away. An evil force . . . Murga . . . had attacked Dr Zhang and kidnapped my parents. I had to get back to Silverwood School. 

 My disjointed musings were disrupted by a flash of light and a clatter of weird percussive noises mingled with grunts, screams and shouts. I tried to guess what was happening but I couldn't understand the language. My legs tingled. The paralysis was wearing off. 

 Where was Triple Oh when I needed him? The fans fell over, the chain link fence was jigging up and down and the chopsticks were rattling in the pot. It felt like an earthquake but it meant there was a nexus nearby and with it time shear and negative gravity. 

 Now, I knew what to do. I demonstrated the reason Murga was bent on kidnapping me. I shot up vertically, dizzily zig zagging to avoid the concrete beams and abutments of a road overpass. To infinity and beyond! I was getting good at this super-hero stuff. If only I could think straight.

The overpass below me was crowded with fast-moving cars and double-decker busses nose-to-tail. In front was a wide harbour only a little less crowded, with ferry boats. A giant cruise ship was moored alongside a wharf near the overpass. Everywhere, there were tall buildings and mountains and flashing lights. It sure didn't look like Ottawa. There was no snow.

The dream was about the Haiphong Road Temporary Night Market. It was near the southern tip of Kowloon (Nine Dragons) looking across the harbour to Hong Kong (Fragrant Harbour) island. I was a hundred metres above the road before I noticed somebody was hanging onto my ankle. One of Murga's thugs. He didn't weigh anything but he annoyed me. I kicked at his arm but he didn't let go until I did three fast loops. I watched him fall into the harbour near the cruise ship. I didn't care. This was my dream, eh?

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