The Vengeance Man

by John Macrae

  "Of course not," echoed his boss. "Not yet”. He emphasised the ‘yet’. “So let's have two cheers for democracy, Mike. You should be grateful. If I publish this, some bastard would come knocking on your door. Believe me. One would. Or you'd trip up on the underground. Or get mugged by some drug crazed Rasta on day release from the funny farm, with voices in his head. And whose voices do you think they're going to be? Eh?"

  Fielder nodded, half accepting the inevitable.

  "Like I said, Mike, tell yourself that I'm doing you a favour." Robertson stopped, his eloquence now exhausted. He took out the tape cassette, weighing it in his palm. "Is this it? All of it?"

  "Yes."

  "No copies? You're sure?" persisted Robertson.

  Fielder hesitated. "No. I wanted to be safe."

  Robertson looked at him hard. “You’re sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  Robertson relaxed. "Well, you are now."

  He looked at Fielder almost kindly. "Look, Mike, don't take it too hard. You'll get a bloody good bonus and every journo in Docklands will get the word that you cracked a good story. Too good a story, in fact. So good it can’t be published but just sits in the cupboard as a bit of insurance. Like the Blair love letters. Because believe me, if anything happens to you as a result of this,” he waved the cassette, “Then I’ll be the first to break the story. After your funeral.”

  Fielder looked shocked.

  The Editor went on remorselessly, “Because this cassette is your insurance, laddy: I’m your insurance now. Don’t you see? I can’t publish every story I get. You know that. Even a great story. That’s how it happens sometimes. But it won't do your reputation or your wallet any harm. After all, that's why you do it, isn't it?"

  "Chief?"

  "Why, you're a professional journalist, Mike. Remember? A reporter. You do it for money and recognition, nothing else; right? We don't do Pulitzer Prizes here like those pooftahs on the New York Times. This is a real paper. We're real journos. "

  "Right ... '

  "Well, you've got them so stop feeling sorry for yourself. Just keep your mouth shut, and don't spread the story in the pub. Or anywhere else. And don't even think of blabbing your head off about this. Not a fucking word.” He emphasised, jabbing a finger. “Do you understand ? Not a fucking word. Understand? I mean it. For your own good mind, Mike. I don’t want to be comforting your grieving widow at the graveside."

  Fielder nodded.

  Robertson looked relieved. "Well, there you are. A good story. Perhaps. Anyway, we'll never know. And it won’t bring this Boyd, Fritz, whatever, guy back." He pushed the cutting back across the desk.

  No-one said anything.

  The news editor looked appraisingly at the silent and crestfallen reporter. "Now bugger off; I've got a proper job to do. The top floor's screaming about the Newsroom's expenses...." Robertson picked up the phone and switched off the clicking light. “Off you go and keep your mouth shut.”

  Fielder stopped at the door, "Do you know what I'm going to do now?"

  Robertson looked up, the phone halfway to his ear. "You tell me laddy," he said aggressively.

  "I'm going down to the Feathers and I'm going to have a bloody big drink, for the best story I never had printed."

  His boss relaxed. "You do that, son. Probably just as well, from you; it'd be littered with mistakes, I'll bet. Oh, and while you're about it, have one for me." His lip curled. "Because I can't afford the time."

  "Oh I will," riposted Fielder, bitterly. "I'll have a double whisky for you and I'll have a pint of best for me. And I'm going to take bottle of champagne home too."

  Robertson's eyes narrowed.

  " …Which I am going to put on my expenses sheet."

  "Whatever for?" Robertson was puzzled.

  "To drink to the poor sod who made it possible, Mr Bloody News Editor..."

  "I don't get you, Mike ... "

  This time Fielder's lip curled, "For the great Vengeance Man. Wherever the poor bastard is now..."

  * * *

  When Fielder had gone out, Robertson put the phone down slowly, cutting off its outraged squawking and pressed his call divert button. He swivelled his chair and sat back.

  For at least two minutes the news editor stared blankly out of the window at the sky over the river. The clouds were beginning to turn dark. Then he sighed and pulled open his diary, hunting through the back to find an old and little used telephone number.

  Slowly he pressed the buttons. ‘218’, he thought as he dialled the area code : 218. It’s always bloody Whitehall…

  The number rang for the agreed fifty rings before an official sounding male voice replied.

  Robertson pulled a face. Very quietly, he began to speak.

  CHAPTER 45

  AFGHANISTAN; THE HINDU KUSH

  The stones pressed into Major Feng Zhenyao's thighs and the ground felt as cold as the metal on his Dragunov sniper rifle. He shifted uneasily and scanned the dark little valley ahead through the shimmering green snowstorm revealed by the image intensifier night sight. Nothing; just rocks and boulders strewn across a narrow winding path.

  The Chinese officer had lain there for six hours and the strain was beginning to tell. Feng sighed and stole a glance at his watch for the twentieth time. To his right the teeth of his Tadjik guide gleamed bright in the darkness. The Special Forces of the People's Liberation Army were normally restricted to Han' Chinese only , but here on the Afghan border the demands of the Afghan tribesmen and their interminable civil war had caused even the politically-conscious PLA to change its rules. A discreet local recruiting campaign had brought a sprinkling of Tzahdikis and even a few renegade Tibetans into the Special Political units as guides and scouts.

  For Said-i-Gilgiti, to be lying on a cold mountain pass in the middle of the night was no hardship. He enjoyed the comfort and security of the PLA camps and to be ambushing Afghan criminals in Pamir province on the Pakistan border was not much different to smuggling gold and opium into Siang Kiang. And safer too. He smiled in the dark at the Major, trying vainly to get comfortable, and stroked his own A-47 rifle. He wished he had a rifle like the Dragunov. It was a precision weapon. And he wished he could see through the Major's night sight.

  He liked Comrade Feng. He was a real man, despite his short hair and pale skin. Had not his Paratroop major fenced and shot in the Pentathlon at the last Olympics? Many members of the Special PLA Cadres were members of the Chinese Olympics team, he knew, but Major Feng was one of the greatest, an athlete of legendary toughness; everyone said so. If anyone would catch this CIA-terrorist caravan, Major Feng Zhenyao could.

  All the same, the night was dragging. The garrison border patrols over the border had gone into defence for the night and Feng was conscious that his little platoon of thirty men was at risk just being here, isolated over the sketchy Afghan border, deep in mujahadeen territory. Even now they might be being stalked by the local Pashto warriors. He shivered. There were too many stories of what the mujahadeen did to Chinese officers. No, he wouldn't be taken alive. His imagination roamed over the articles he'd read about the troubles the English and then the Russians had had in Afghanistan. Maybe no-one could tame these wild men who wiped their backsides with stones and killed slowly for pleasure.

  Feng shook his head angrily to throw off these defeatist thoughts. He wasn't going to be taken alive, nor were his men. These were the black three o'clock imaginings, known to every soldier. He sighed and scanned the killing area again.

  It was, inevitably, the Tadjik guide, Saïd, who heard lt first. The infinitesimal chink of rock against rock, caused by a man's foot as he walks along a mountain path at night. The guide’s fingers closed like talons around the Major's arm and he pointed silently down the track. In the gloom, the little circle of prone bodies grew tense and somewhere a rifle butt scraped forward in anticipation.

  Then Feng heard it, too; not so much a noise, more a change in the quality of the silence. He raised the image intens
ifier. At first he could see nothing, but then a shadowy green figure swam like a pale ghost into view. Alert, rifle forward, the figure was joined by others of the forward scouting group and then the Mujahadeen began to pass through the night, twenty yards in front and below the Chinese ambush. Their caution was almost comical, when he could see them like day.

  Feng reached to his left and tapped his signaller: once, twice, three times. The radio man nodded, softly pressing the send button three times in the darkness. The silent squirt transmission flashed in the night, its pre-coded message terse but clear: 'Enemy in sight'. Feng cradled the Dragunov and watched as an army of green ants, each carrying a stick on its back, followed the leading scouts.

  Even though they were trying to be quiet, the chink of stones and the panting of the porters carried the twenty yards. The PLA troopers lay tense, hardly daring to breathe, as a succession of dark shadows crossed their front, bent double under the loads of the illegal arms. There were quite enough weapons on this bandit ridden border of the People's Republic without permitting these stinking tribesmen to bring in any more, and missiles and mines were quite unacceptable to Beijing.

  Rightly so, thought Feng. These primitive ... what was that word he had seen explained in the People's Daily been? “Houligans.” That was the word. These Stone Age barbarians were 'houligans': illiterate, savage trouble makers. Feng liked that. Even on a cold night, three kilometres over the border, he permitted himself a little smile. 'Houligans', he mouthed, silently, still watching through his image intensifier sniper scope.

  Then Feng saw him. Halfway down the column came a little group; three - no, four - men, without loads, obviously different. There was no mistaking Shinwari Khan, the Mujahadeen leader; erect, fierce, even through the lens of the image intensifier he radiated an air of command. Once he turned his face up towards the ledge that hid the ambush and Feng saw the beard, frighteningly close. But alongside him was the big-nosed European. His features matched the description Feng had been given at the briefing. The clincher was his boots: lace-up, European boots.

  That was the man. Feng remembered the orders, sighted on his target through the green night scope, and squeezed the trigger.

  When a heavily laden group of men, strung out along nearly a thousand metres of narrow rocky path is suddenly fired at in the dark, chaos reigns.

  When the middle of that column is blown apart, the two ends usually run to get away from the firing. But the Afghan hill tribesman is made of sterner stuff. After the initial panic, the flanks began to close in and a storm of fire lashed the rocks. Feng punched his signaller, lying huddled behind the stones without even the comfort of firing a weapon in return. He had a more important task. "Now, Xialou, now!" And Senior Radio Technician Comrade Chen Xialou of 174 PLA Airborne Special Signals pressed the electronic command buttons on the radio set again.

  This time the signal detonated the radio-controlled mines. A storm of ball-bearings swept the track for two hundred metres either side of the ambush. The rebels' counter fire slackened and fresh screams echoed faintly in the valley's blackness.

  "Again," bellowed Feng and a further ten Chinese Claymores mines ripped into the night. For a moment an eerie silence fell. Feng gulped, laid down the warm Dragunov, and surged over the ledge with Saïd and the ten men of the snatch team hard on his heels. Securing the bodies was vital in an operation like this, but it was risky, too. A few stray shots cracked overhead, aimed at the PLA position.

  Shinwari Khan lay dead, his legs drawn up to his chest, his body beyond description after the concentrated fire of half a dozen high velocity weapons, aided by image intensifier sights. The Englishman lay face down, his face pressed into the gravelly stones of the track. He looked peaceful, asleep. The single bullet from Feng's Dragunov had dropped him where he lay.

  Faintly, over the sporadic firing, Major Feng Zhenyao heard the distant 'clopper, clopper, clopper' of the helicopters.

  Help was on its way.

  He felt a surge of triumph. Shinwari Khan had been a thorn in the side of the Chinese frontier garrison along this part of the frontier for years. He was known to have killed at least a dozen Border Guards.

  Well, thought the People’s Liberation Army crack sniper, at least now they were avenged.

  All the murdered ever asked for was vengeance.

  CHAPTER 46

  THE PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF CHINA

  Tourists to the People's Republic of China never travel to the far north.

  Tan Shan in the north of Sing Kiang Province is not on any tourist schedule. The desolate deserts and mountains, shrouded in their sub-zero blizzards in winter and ferocious sun in summer, are only part of the reason.

  The real restriction is the existence of sixty-eight concentration camps, six prisons and two psychiatric prisons. It is China’s secret Gulag that makes the huge expanse of high mountains and desert 1,700 miles west of Beijing a forbidden zone to all. Except to the People’s Liberation Army guards, the Interior Ministry Special Cadres and, of course, the prisoners themselves.

  There is one main exception. Sometimes the Party sends particularly important prisoners to Turfan. This is only done on the direct orders of the Party Central Committee, or sometimes the Chief of Staff of the PLA. These special prisoners do not stop in the "ordinary regime" hard labour mining camps around Tok-Sun like Komush and Qong-Kol. These prisoners are ‘special category’.

  They usually arrive by air from Beijing, and after a short stay in the special transit block at Urumqi, they are transported further to the South, into the "strict regime" forced labour mining complex around Biratur in the Mountains. There these party "specials" are worked to death in the nickel and molybdenum mines.

  But even within this special category there are exceptions, and the 1,200 political prisoners at Biratur 3, the "special regime" camp a hundred miles south of the Great Road were not surprised at being ordered to construct a new barbed wire fence around the prison administrative compound.

  They are past surprise in Biratur 3.

  To the work cadre toiling in their baggy blue padded jackets to erect a real barbed wire cage instead of the single strand that normally defines the camp's limits, nothing was a novelty. The real pleasure lay in not having to shuffle into the open cast mine in 20 degrees of frost for a couple of days. Their work completed, they returned to their labour brigades and continued the slow, painful business of dying in the windswept freezing mountains for the Party fat cats far away in Beijing.

  Several months later a young Chuan, Chen Wen-Yan, stood at the wire fence. He knew nothing of the construction teams' efforts, for by now most were dead, their bones deep in the mountains. Chen was contemplating suicide, a regular enough occurrence at Biratur 3. From his watchtower an attentive guard of the PLA Security Cadre eyed Chen with interest, clicking the safety catch of his AK47 rifle optimistically, hopeful for any diversion from the freezing boredom of guard duty. Prisoners were shot about once a month, usually for attempting to escape; but both sides knew that this was little more than a conspiracy by both parties to hide deliberate suicides. In the howling wastes of the Xing Xang north of Lop Nor, there is nowhere to escape to. Anyway, the chance of a bonus or a few days off for 'Services to the Party and the People' was an incentive to all the guards to shoot - and shoot to kill; dead prisoners couldn't argue afterwards. Both Chen and the guard, Ning Enshi, knew this.

  The rules are clear in Biratur 3.

  Snow shrieked past the arc lights in the gloomy dusk, the flakes driving hard in the gale. Soon night would fall, and the padded-suited prisoners would be locked away in their wooden huts until dawn. Chen hesitated. The tears on his face had turned to ice and his hands were clawed on the wire but still he hesitated to take that fatal first step off the ground, up the special wire fence sealing the forbidden zone, that would lead to the unknown steamhammer impact and pain of a bullet, and then the oblivious darkness of death. Ning Enshi, the guard, eased his rifle up to his shoulder and leaned forward expectantl
y.

  At that moment, behind the wire, the door of the prison hospital hut swung open. A gleam of lamplight flashed through the dusk, silhouetting an awkward, crabbed figure lurching out of the doorway to make a painful progress across the snow-packed inner compound towards the Administration block. Two guards accompanied him.

  Chen stopped and looked, and the young guard in the tower above followed his gaze. No-one had ever seen an occupant of the little inner compound, although many rumours about the "special prisoner" in the secret hospital hut had been peddled in the bitter log huts at night.

  The bent figure shuffled slowly on two crutches, his legs twisted, his back hunched. As he passed Chen pressed against the wire, the young Chinese saw that the he was a white man. The face was grey and seamed by age, or work, or pain. Doggedly he stumped towards the Admin block, twenty painful paces away. His crippled legs dragged. Chen froze, all thoughts of suicide gone. The pain of moving made the man pant and groan as he sweated past. At the last minute he rested on his sticks and looked Chen full in the face.

  With a sense of shock the Chinaman realised the prisoner was quite young, despite his crippled walk and haggard face. Chen, who knew what changes the horrors of interrogations and the pain of wounds could cause in a man, recognised the signs of suffering immediately and, correctly, assumed their cause. The cripple spoke once to Chen in a foreign tongue, looking him straight in the eye. He seemed to be asking a question, or begging. His eyes were a startling blue colour. Then one of the cadre bellowed in the darkness, and Chen obediently let go of the wire to stand away from the fence.

  The young guard in the watchtower sighed with disappointment and put the safety catch back to 'safe'. No bonus for him that evening. Pity.

  Chen watched the cripple's painful progress into the darkness until the whirling snowflakes had swallowed him up. Then he walked quickly back to his own hut, vainly trying to warm his frozen hands. What a story he had for them. Worth at least a lump - maybe two - of the jealously hoarded rice, in a camp where gossip was tradable currency.