A light drizzle fell, and the sea stretched out in a vast expanse of mist.
The entire water room was surrounded by soldiers carrying guns, forming a tight, impenetrable encirclement.
Chen Ke and the chief of staff stood in the rain, completely soaked. Nie Zhao's thin shirt was also drenched by the rain, but the entire umbrella was tilted over Chen Rou, and everyone held their breath.
Small containers, barely larger than the cargo box of a truck, were salvaged.
Finally, the chief of staff said, "What is Gui Touchang thinking? With so much gold, why not exchange it for money?"
Chen Ke smiled and said, "Old Li, gold is a globally unified strategic reserve; it's more useful than any country's money."
The chief of staff thought about it and agreed: "I was too ignorant and thought that the emperor should use a golden hoe."
After the drainage was completed, someone pried open the container door, and there was a large metal box at the top.
Seeing the lock on it, Yue Zhongqi knocked it off with a hammer and said with a smile, "Open the treasure! Open the treasure!"
Everyone rushed over and saw that it was first wrapped in several layers of tin foil, then cut open to reveal perforated plastic, and finally bamboo charcoal. Even Wade laughed and said, "Boss, this must be gold, right?"
After re-estimating the overall size of the container, he said, "It feels a bit less than I calculated, because based on the original gold reserves of Anilo and Lvsun, I calculated that there are at least 10 tons, while this place is at most 3 tons."
The Philippines has many islands with gold mines, such as Lvsun and Anilo, where they are currently located. There used to be a large gold mine behind the port, but it has now been mined out.
In Chen Ke's eyes, this was already a huge fortune, but at the current price of gold, 3 tons would only amount to about 100 million Hong Kong dollars, which was not a great fortune. Moreover, the greater the hope, the greater the disappointment.
Yue Zhongqi was in charge of unpacking the box. After opening it, he blurted out, "Is Gui Tou Chang's mother crazy?"
Secretary An was right there when she came back and reported to the boss with a big laugh: "Boss, guess how funny it is? There was a whole box full of pagers inside."
Chen Ke and the chief of staff exchanged a bewildered glance: "What was he thinking?"
Wade was also laughing, but said, "You can't judge pirates with normal human thinking. You know Cheung Tze-keung, right? About two years ago, he robbed a car full of mobile phones at gunpoint. I heard recently that he's having a big fire sale everywhere."
Chen Rou chuckled, wanting to say something, but after thinking about it, she ultimately chose to remain silent.
In fact, she also handled a similar case in the future. Several robbers stole a whole box full of mobile phones, which were worth about 200,000 yuan at the time. The robber refused to hand over the mobile phones and was sentenced to 20 years in prison.
He worked hard in prison to earn merit and get his sentence reduced to 7 years. After his release, he planned to make a fortune from the mobile phones he had buried in the desert. However, when he got out of prison, he found that everyone had switched to mobile phones, and he couldn't even give away his mobile phones. They eventually became a pile of junk.
Gui Touchang was, after all, just a pirate, and his vision and perspective weren't that broad. So when he opened another box, Yue Zhongqi immediately broke down: "Damn it, a mobile phone is one thing, but with such exquisite packaging, why is there a box full of pagers? What is he trying to do?"
It was estimated that there was nothing of value left inside, and it was already 6 p.m., so the chief of staff said, "Throw away this box and salvage something else. There's no need to waste our time on this one."
But Nie Zhao glanced sideways, and Wade stepped forward, rolled up his sleeves, and said, "Let me check it out."
He crawled into the container and told everyone to throw out all the other large metal boxes. At the very back were sludge and seaweed, but Wade reached out, touched them, and immediately unhooked the winch, hooked it inside, and said, "The stuff is here."
They were three boxes whose material was indistinguishable, linked together by iron chains. If you hooked one up, all three would be together. They were about the size of a 19-inch small television set.
In the half-box of sludge, even Yue Zhongqi almost missed it and threw it away because he was in a hurry. But who would have thought that those three small lumps of stuff accounted for 90% of the weight of the collection box, and the rope was stretched taut by them.
Chen Ke's mouth dropped open: "Gold."
Nie Zhao made a rough estimate and said, "About 3 tons, pure gold."
Three tons of gold—an astronomical figure in the minds of ordinary people—but it turned out to be just three small pieces?
Yue Zhongqi was quick-witted, but he couldn't swim and couldn't lock onto targets directly. However, time was running out, so he ordered his men to salvage the containers as quickly as possible. After all, there were five ships, so who cared about pagers or cell phones? They could just stuff whatever they could find. Everyone dug through the mud and sand together. Damn it, the good stuff was in the mud and sand.
Sure enough, four more small boxes were found in the remaining containers, which were the fourth gold. Night had fallen, and the generator was set up. Wade, being more experienced, searched through the containers for a long time before standing up from the mud and saying, "Let's focus on this one. This one contains gold coins."
Heaps of gold were obviously difficult to trade, and the pirate tradition was to use gold coins for transactions.
They rushed as fast as they could, but it was almost midnight and they were running out of time. Chen Ke said, "Let's go."
The chief of staff asked, "Should we leave a few people behind and go through it again?"
Chen Ke thought so too, but Nie Zhao glanced at Secretary An and stepped forward to advise, "You two leaders, the national conditions are different, and so are the human relationships. There's an old saying in the world: too much of a good thing is bad."
The chief of staff misunderstood and said with a smile, "General Nie and Ms. Chen have helped us a lot on this trip, and the leaders all know that. As for how to divide the items, he has consulted with the higher-ups, and there will be a share for Hong Kong. You don't need to worry about that too much. The soldiers have worked so hard for so long, and the higher-ups have invested so much. We should try our best to take what we should take."
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