Quiller Bamboo

by Adam Hall

  I didn’t answer immediately. It would be pleasant to catch some gleam of hope in what London had set in motion, but it would also be indefensible. If there was going to be any chance Of getting this man out alive it could only be taken by a strictly cool appraisal of the facts, and I didn’t believe that a tactical fighter-bomber now airborne over central China could have any real connection with the line of soldiers less than two miles from where I was crouched at the cave mouth.

  Pressed to transmit. ‘I wish the colonel a pleasant journey.’

  Regretted it immediately but of course too late.

  ‘ We must not despair, my friend. We must not despair.’

  ‘Noted.’

  Static again and I looked down into the valley, but there was no helicopter in sight. I think another military vehicle had moved in, a big one, and it could be that.

  ‘How is the subject bearing up?’

  ‘He’s all right physically, but not totally all there, doesn’t really know what’s going on. I think he was still under drugs when I got him out of the temple.’

  ‘Structions … Lond… as possible …’

  ‘There’s some static. I didn’t get - oh, Christ.’

  Bright flood of light fanning suddenly across the scree down there from the vehicle that had just moved in.

  ‘Information?’

  ‘They’ve brought in a mobile searchlight.’

  ‘Will that affect your position?’

  ‘Not directly, it’s down there by the road. There’s a lot of terrain to cover and they obviously don’t think anyone could have got as far as the caves. But it means they’re dead set on finding us, throwing everything in but the kitchen sink. Did you say something about instructions?’

  The huge light beam swung slowly across and across the landscape, the soldiers moving in like insects, hundreds of them, hundreds, silver-green because of the light on their uniforms and throwing long black shadows. They’d make better headway now, could see where they were going.

  ‘Yes. Your instructions from Control are to protect the subject as far as humanly possible. That is your final objective.’

  Poor little bugger, sitting there dreaming about his bloody windmills, a fine man, he’d been a fine man before that black-bearded bloody maniac had gone to work on him.

  Said I understood.

  ‘I’m in constant signals with Control, of course,’ the tone cheerful, rallying.

  ‘Good-o.’ But they couldn’t do anything now, they could do nothing. ‘Look, I’m going to take him higher into the hills, all right?’ The snow had given over and the sky was clearing and I’d be able to get a fix on Polaris when we went into the open. ‘I’m going to head due north, so if that colonel wants to know where to find us we’ll be somewhere along that line.’ He’d already got a bearing on the cave.

  In a moment, ‘Can you wait another thirty minutes before you leave cover?’

  I looked down into the valley. The soldiers were making better headway but there were no probes breaking their line yet.

  ‘Why?’

  7 don’t like the idea of you leaving cover. At least not yet.’

  ‘Look, that colonel can’t get here in time. No one can do anything. We’re on our own now.’

  Insects down there, ants on the move. But they’d be much bigger when they got here and they’d be carrying assault rifles.

  ‘You haven’t been party to Signals. General Yang has committed himself totally to saving this well-loved and eminent man. Colonel Zhou was chosen for his reputation for high intelligence and courage.’ A beat. ‘It would do us no good to underestimate him, do you understand?’

  I thought about it. ‘All right, we’ll stay put for thirty minutes, if those are your instructions.’

  I wouldn’t have listened to those bastards Loman or Fane or Welford but I would listen to this man. He wouldn’t give up on us.

  ‘They are not my instructions. It’s more important than that. I value your life, perhaps more than you do.’

  Point taken. Thirty minutes.’

  ‘Please stay open.’

  I turned back to the cave. I didn’t care much for trekking north from here myself, but if we left the cave it was the only direction we could take, and it was uphill and rough going and there might not be another refuge for miles and we couldn’t go that far, we couldn’t go for miles, he was a diabetic and he’d been drugged and manhandled and put into shock and all he wanted to do was sit here and think about his windmills and his solar-powered people’s cars, thousands of them, millions, enough for all those millions of lucky ants.

  I sat down facing him. ‘How do you feel?’

  ‘Very well.’ Spoke in a monotone: he was still under.

  ‘So tell me some more about the new Communism. Why should it fall to China to bring about these great changes?’

  ‘It is the ideal cradle for change. The Chinese created a civilization before all others; we are a cultured people. We possess vast territories; vast manpower, vast natural resources.’

  ‘I see. But this man Xu Yun, your potential leader -he’s going to start things off with a lie, so you’ve said, telling the people he’s going to give them democracy and then leading them down the same old garden path. I’d call him a bloody hypocrite.’

  Turning his head to look at me, saying with great force - ‘But there is no other man to lead us!’

  ‘No one but a bloody hypocrite?’

  Something was happening. I didn’t know what it was.

  ‘He is for the peopled ‘So was Chairman Mao, for God’s sake, he had you walking about with your noses stuck into a little red book, don’t you remember that?’

  He was changing, Xingyu. Eyes different, looked different. He was surfacing, and I snapped the string of the pendulum and let it fall.

  ‘Mao was wrong. He was for the people in the beginning—’

  ‘They’re always for the people, Baibing, it was the People’s Liberation Army that murdered the people in Tiananmen Square, their own army, surely you remember that.’ I went on talking, because something was happening to Xingyu Baibing and this wasn’t a political argument anymore, it was something much bigger than that. ‘Communist leaders are always the same, you know that, they’re either shoving your nose in a book or a gun down your throat. They—’

  ‘But I was told other things.’

  Breakthrough.

  I didn’t say anything.

  He sat staring at me, but now there was intelligence in his eyes; he’d lost that look of a zombie. I didn’t know what had happened to him but it could have been that the effect of the drugs had worn off or that I’d challenged him for the first time instead of listening to his precious manifesto, correction, let me correct something, I did know what had happened, they’d only got so far, Trotter and his Dr. Chen, only so far with him, and this man’s integrity of mind had resisted them and gone on resisting because all his life he’d had the convictions of a revolutionary, a rebel born for the barricades and the stuff had gone in all right, the Utopian bit, but it hadn’t stuck, there hadn’t been time before Chong had got there and blown the whole thing up, this man wasn’t brainwashed, he’d just had a half-baked manifesto shoved into his subconscious and he’d brought it all out again, got rid of it, and the change that had come into his eyes was because he’d surfaced from the effects of drugs and was coming back into beta waves.

  ‘I was told other things,’ he said again.

  ‘Yes. But you can forget them now.’

  ‘He is a very persuasive man.’

  ‘Yes. And a bloody Communist.’

  I understood something else: Trotter had known he hadn’t got far enough with Xingyu; there hadn’t been time to saturate his brain with the tenets of the manifesto to the point where he could safely go in front of the cameras in the Great Hall of the People and spread the new Communism right across the nation, and that was why the jeep had followed us away from the temple and the shots had come and the windshield was smashed and
the mirror had gone flying, because if Dr. Xingyu Baibing couldn’t go on the screens with his mind fully indoctrinated then he couldn’t be allowed to live.

  Glow on the roof of the cave from the distant searchlight.

  ‘His practical ideas,’ Xingyu said, ‘have a certain merit. His technical ideas.’

  I looked at him. We’d need to do a little work.

  ‘Yes, But the West is also waking up to things, and if there’s still time to save life on earth, it won’t be run as a slave planet. This man Xu Yun - what are your thoughts about him?’

  He looked surprised. ‘He is a Communist too, as I have told you.’

  ‘That doesn’t answer my question.’

  ‘My thoughts, then, are that’ - He hesitated, and I thought, Christ, we haven’t got any time left for this -‘while he is genuinely for the people—’

  ‘Listen, Baibing, Chairman Mao was for the people and he brought them to their knees and Deng Xiaoping was for the people and he ordered a bloodbath in Tiananmen and now you’re saying that Xu Yun is for the people and you think he’s going to turn out to be a fucking saint?’ I shifted closer to him, got down on my hands and knees to face him. You are the only hope left for China, Baibing, the most powerful voice in the land, but the Communist credo has rubbed off a little on you, even on you, and you’ve got to understand that any man getting up on his feet in a Communist state and talking about the good of the people - the people -the people - has got to be told to shut up and sit down and if he won’t shut up and sit down then he’s got to be taken away and shot before he becomes too dangerous.’ Lowered my voice. ‘Baibing, you’re a man of enormous intelligence and you have got to get rid of the idea that Communism in your country will ever see its people with anything more to their name but a half-empty rice bowl. That man Xu Yun will have nothing to offer you but servitude, suffering, and blood in the streets. Are you listening to me?’

  In a moment: ‘Yes.’

  Silence again, and in the silence I could hear the sound of the engines below, and voices now, carried on the wind, as the light across the roof of the cave grew stronger.

  ‘So what are your thoughts on Xu Yun?’

  ‘He is potentially dangerous. He—’

  ‘Can you trust him, then?’

  ‘No, I cannot—’

  ‘He’s a Communist, Baibing. What are your thoughts on that?

  ‘He is to be mistrusted. He will only bring suffering.’

  Sweat on his temples, I didn’t know why, bright on his temples.

  ‘You help to put that man in power, Baibing, and what will he do?’

  ‘He will perpetuate Communism in China—’

  ‘And you’ll have blood back in the streets, blood back in the streets.’

  ‘Yes, it must not happen, it—’

  ‘If we can get you in front of the cameras, Baibing, what will you tell the people?’

  ‘That they must establish a democracy, a true democracy—’

  ‘As the only way, the only way?’

  ‘Yes of course, as the only way—’

  ‘Democracy as the only way—’

  ‘But yes, of course, it is what I have been saying to them in Beijing for so long—’

  ‘Then you can say it again if we can get you there, and not just on the campus, Baibing, but right across China.’

  ‘Right across China, yes. It seems to me,’ he said, and he lifted a hand to stop me interrupting again, ‘it seems to me that I have come very close, dreadfully close, to being turned into a traitor to my own people. Dreadfully close,’ the sweat trickling on his face and now I knew why.

  ‘But that’s over now.’

  Felt tired suddenly, should have been the other way, shouting glory hallelujah, so forth, but didn’t, just felt very tired.

  ‘Yes, over now,’ he said, and lifted a hand again, this 332 ‘

  time in a kind of appeal, or that was my impression. ‘Do you think I am fully recovered, Mr. Locke?’

  I made an effort, got to my feet, picked up the radio. ‘Probably. But if we can get you onto a plane there’ll be enough time to put you through it again, make sure we know what you’re going to say when you get to Beijing. Don’t think about it, just take it easy, I’d say you’re back in your own mind now.’

  Pressed to transmit.

  ‘DIP, DIP, DI,—’

  ‘Hear you, I hear you, I was just going—’

  ‘Listen, this is for London. He’s come out of it now. They didn’t have enough time to do a proper job. I think he could go in front of the cameras. I know it’s probably academic, but London ought to know, you agree?’

  Static. I watched the soldiers below, and the flood of light across the rocks. We’d have to get out of here now, whatever Pepperidge said, whatever London said, have to save our skins if we could.

  ‘London must indeed know. This changes everything.’ Static again and I didn’t know if I’d missed anything. ‘… Case… going… signal you. London has been in direct contact with Colonel Zhou in flight, and so have I. His ETA Gonggar is twenty-one-oh-five hours, in thirty-two minutes from now.’

  Xingyu had got onto his feet for the first time since we’d reached the cave, stood stretching his legs, and I motioned him to keep back in the shadows. I said to Pepperidge: ‘Thirty-two minutes is nothing like good enough. Gonggar’s sixty kilometres away and he’d have to get right through the town and God knows how many roadblocks.’

  I could see their guns now, the searchlight sweeping across them, the whole scene silvered, the stark shadows of the boulders angling over the scree as a beam of light swung across them, and Pepperidge came in again.

  ‘Colonel Zhou has raised the military garrison at Gonggar from his plane and ordered an M19 helicopter to stand by for him with a pilot and navigator by the time he lands. The maximum speed of the M19 is two-fifty kph, so allowing for changing planes and lift-off he estimates he can arrive your area by twenty-two hundred hours, in fifty-five minutes from now.’

  Xingyu was standing there watching me. I didn’t know if he could hear Pepperidge’s voice clearly enough, but he could hear mine.

  ‘It’s still not good enough.’

  Heard myself saying it, having to say it.

  ‘Then you must work something out.’

  Yes indeed, those were the only instructions my director in the field could give me - they were as close as that.

  ‘I can hear their voices now, and you’re talking about fifty-five minutes.’

  ‘ You must work something out. I expect you to work something out, and so does London Control.’

  He’d caught my tone, the color of my speech, and heard I was tired, close to exhaustion, been a thick night, two nights, the mission had been running four days now and the pressure hadn’t let up, listen, if I’d been fresh I’d have got Xingyu out of here and higher into the hills, on my back if I’d had to, but I wasn’t fresh and Pepperidge knew that and all he could do was to try putting some energy into me, enough faith and energy to work the magic.

  No magic left.

  ‘I’m going to take him north with me,” I told him, ‘all I can do, it’s all I can work out. We won’t get very far, so if that colonel can find the cave he’ll have to look for us north of there, maybe a few hundred yards due north, tell him that.’

  In a moment: ‘If that is your decision.’

  ‘We can’t stay here. They’re too close now.’ Too close and oh Jesus look down there. ‘They’ve also moved a helicopter in, and it’s putting a light beam across the ground. We’re getting out, you understand, all we can do now.’

  Xingyu Baibing watched me from the cave, his eyes large and alert, concentrating on what I was saying. I believed he would give me no trouble, lend what strength he’d got left, push himself up that bloody hill if I helped him.

  Pepperidge came in again. ‘I will tell Colonel Zhou where to look for you. Now these are your instructions: he will fly both of you to Gonggar and put the subject into the fighter-bo
mber and take him to Beijing. You will be placed in the hands of two dissident PLA captains, ostensibly under arrest. They will take you by military plane to Chengdu, and will personally see you aboard a civilian flight to Hong Kong. Do I need to repeat any of those instructions?’

  Said no.

  Running things much too close for the colonel to do anything, that bloody chopper down there, tracing a line of light from east to west, turning and moving closer toward the caves, west to east, the sound of its rotor slapping at the night, but perhaps it was the fatigue, perhaps I didn’t have the nervous energy to believe there was a chance now, one in a thousand.

  Put faith in him then, faith in Pepperidge, believe in the thousandth chance.

  ‘Please stay open to receive,’ his voice came through the static.

  ‘Will do.’ Then on an impulse, perhaps just to hear myself say it, give it substance, ‘Maybe he can make it in time.’

  ‘Say again?’

  ‘This colonel. Maybe he can get here in time.’

  ‘But of course he will.’

  I put the radio down and went back inside the cave to talk to Xingyu, the acid glow from the searchlight spreading brighter now across the roof and then suddenly the huge black shadow rearing above us and I spun around as he came for us, Trotter.

  Chapter 27

  ETA

  The voices of the soldiers had been reaching as far as the cave on the soft night wind, but I couldn’t hear them anymore because the search helicopter was flooding the ground with light much closer now to the foothills and the beat of its rotor covered all other sounds.

  The whole terrain out there must be awash with light now that the helicopter had arrived. It would help Colonel Zhou, when he came, if he came, if there was going to be anything left here for him to come for; he would see the lights from a long way off.