The Story Continues

Quick Review –




Hong Kong city-state is thickly crowded with inhabitants. The city is old and dilapidated, a city that looks to be weighed down heavy from centuries of over population. The skyline is still jam-packed with giant buildings but most of these are aged rusting steel and dull-glassed skyscrapers; old but still teaming with life, like a cockroach heaven. Life is eeking out of every nook and cranny and leaving the city in an eternal balancing act between holding its inhabitants in check to busting its seams to collapse utterly into the gray harbor seas.
It is an ancient city; ancient in customs; ancient in smell; ancient in people.
Ironically Hong Kong has never been truly independent. The island state is again under the colonial rule of the Europeans, in particular the British Island, book-ending the place to when it was in an incubated state raising for the first time under the old British Empire from a forgotten time. Hong Kong’s northern border of old China resembles nothing of the kingdom that once was. The southern part of the Chinese continent is torn and crumbling under civil turbulence and war. The main land is a very dangerous place to venture where only the strongest or foolhardy dare to tread.

In Hong Kong, the Triads are in the middle of a turf war for dominance with the passing of the late king-pin who had them all under his control. Our story started out with Tsai Lee and Barett Coontail taking out a rival Triad boss and coming into possession of a mysterious computer disk of an unknown source. The two were tracked and almost apprehended until the two rained down an extra measure of violent chaos upon the authorities.

That was three days ago.

Barett and Tsai Lee slipped cleanly out of the net cast to catch them and found a hideout in a secure apartment room on the second floor of a two story very red, traditional Chinese medicine establishment. The computer disk is a mystery to them other than the clue that it was housed in a box that held the symbol of the Albino, a powerful leader from the mainland by the name of Dong-Mei. They have contacted someone Tsai Lee thinks may be able to read the disk. The man is a nearly blind mole-rat that said he needed to get some equipment to be able to read the disk. He called in a friend to see if he could barrow a certain computer component. That is where things have stalled. Come to find out the needed equipment is hard to get. The mole-rat promised news if he can do it or not in two days.

Meanwhile the Barett and Tsai Lee had sent a cryptic message to the Albino of what they have come in possession of.

The Chinese medicine store is a front for the Black Dragon Triad, a group that Tsai Lee is close to being the leader of. The old man that runs the store is, according to Tsai Lee, a partial-looks orangutan. Truth of the matter though he just looks like an original orangutan wearing a straw hat who grunts and “ohs” a lot. Barett likes the old fellow well enough but hasn’t understood a single word that has escaped the monkey’s lips. He just calls him “gramps” and wonders if there is really some logic to the mad method of his mixing unidentifiable objects into powders.

A message has returned from a runner from the Albino informing them that she is willing to meet with them.

What would they like to do?

Trap, Counter-trap....Barett's strategy tested.

Barett worked his way slowly to a spot that looked down the upper trail, a fallen log giving him some cover to break up his profile. The sky was a flat gray, the kind that scrubbed the life from the desert landscape and stripped the joy from the vastness of the desert. But for Him, this was the best light to shoot in, no glare, no sun spots, a perfectly dull background. He checked his escape route, to the left and up wound a light game trail, to the right and down a thicket of brush and aspens. Behind him the trail made its way up to the crest of the ridge, then opened up to low sage brush and rocks and then crested down again beyond his view. Somewhere along that trail Hoss was making his way, at least that is what Barett was hoping for.

The forest breathed in slow and exhaled, breathed in slow and exhaled again, the rhythm of the leaves and the sway of the trees made him feel like he was laying on the chest of a sleeping giant. Struggling to stay sharp and awake, he moved his eyes from side to side and up and down, trying not to make noise, but use every trick he knew to keep his senses sharp. Barett sat on the cool earth, waiting and hoping, hoping that he choose the right spot, waiting until one way or another the conflict was brought to a head.

Through the motion of the trees and rustle of the leaves his sensitive hearing picked up on the steady pattern of footsteps moving stealthily down the trail. Placing the handgun on the edge of the log to steady the scope Barett waited for his kill shot. Hoping to end this quickly, and gain control of the situation, instead of just responding to it.