Listening Station Yangtze

Synopsis

Late 1944, a Republican Chinese gunboat sits locked in the Yangtze estuary blockade, listening to enemy coast-watchers disguised as fishermen. Seventeen-year-old Lin Qiao, the ship’s only Wu-dialect intercept operator, decodes a kidnapping order naming Watch Officer Tang—the one officer required to co-sign her report. With the radio cabin locked from outside and unsigned decrypts treated as treason, Lin must decide who can be trusted before the transmission window closes. Each message tightens the trap: her senior operator Wei may be the leak, Tang may be walking into the kidnapping, and the only signal that can save him will expose the grandmother-cipher of Lin’s home village to military retaliation.

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