Chapter One
They were the vanished, they were the unfortunate.
To the human smugglers the snakeheads who carted them around the world
like pallets of damaged goods, they were ju-jia, piglets.
To the American INS agents who interdicted their ships and arrested and deported
them they were undocumenteds.
They were the hopeful. Who were trading homes and family and a thousand years of
ancestry for the hard certainty of risky, laborious years ahead of them.
Who had the slimmest of chances to take root in a place where their families
could prosper, where freedom and money and contentment were, the story went, as
common as sunlight and rain.
They were his fragile cargo.
And now, legs steady against the raging, five-meter-high seas, Captain Sen
Zi-jun made his way from the bridge down two decks into the murky hold to
deliver the grim message that their weeks of difficult journeying might have
been in vain.
It was just before dawn on a Tuesday in August. The stocky captain, whose head
was shaved and who sported an elaborate bushy mustache, slipped past the empty
containers lashed to the d ... read full excerpt from: The Stone Monkey: A Lincoln Rhyme Novel ebook