Trigger Mortis

by Anthony Horowitz

  ‘I cannot describe the horror of what followed, Mr Bond. I have no idea how long the attack continued. All I can tell you is that the day turned to night, the world exploded and all around me people were torn apart as they were hit by bombs, by rockets and by machine-gun fire. When I say that the noise was deafening, I mean it quite literally. It was as if a gigantic fist had punched me in the head and all sound – the screams and the explosions – no longer seemed to belong to what I was seeing. And what was that? Fire and blood, stomachs ripped open, limbs torn off. My father died in front of me. One minute he was an elderly man, a man I had loved and respected all my life, standing there with a mixture of outrage and indignation, the next his head had gone and his body was toppling to one side and my mother was screaming hysterically, covered in his blood. The bridge was directly in front of us and I saw that the concrete arches would provide the only cover. Other people had had the same idea – the ones who were still living. It is impossible to say how many mangled bodies were already strewn over the ground. Something incredibly hot seared across my neck and I realised that a bullet had missed me by a fraction of an inch. Where had it come from? That was when I saw that the Americans on the side of the mountain were also firing at us, picking us off not one by one but ten by ten. There were bodies falling everywhere.

  ‘I scooped up Li-Na, the younger of my two sisters. She was twelve. My mother and my other sister, Su-Min, were close by. We began to run towards the bridge. I tried not to look at the people around me. It was too horrible, too unbelievable. All my energy was focused on trying to find a place to hide. Something hit my face. I thought for a minute that it was a bullet – but no. It was a piece of human bone. Li-Na shuddered in my arms and I shouted at her to keep still, not to trip me up. She said nothing. The bridge was ahead of me. It filled my vision. In front of me, terrified villagers seemed almost to be flailing their way through the air. In a field to one side I saw a cow crash to the ground as its legs were scythed away beneath it. And then, incredibly, the concrete archway reached out and embraced me. I was sobbing. My neck was on fire and my sister was a dead weight in my arms. I threw myself against the wall, gasping for breath. The machine guns were still firing. The air was thick with smoke.

  ‘I tried to set Li-Na down but she would not stand on her own two feet. I spoke to her and at the same time I felt something warm and wet gushing down onto my trousers. I let Li-Na go and recoiled in total shock and dismay. There was a huge hole in her back, made perhaps by a bullet intended for me for, inadvertently, she had become a human shield and for much of the time I had been carrying her, she must have been dead. This was a little girl I had played with. I had made up stories for her when she was going to bed. And now her eyes were empty and her blood was all over me. I looked for my mother and for Su-Min. I knew at once that they had not made it. There were people everywhere, screaming and sobbing. Many of them had horrible wounds. But my family was not among them. I was alone.

  ‘In the next twelve hours, as day once again became night, I found myself in an unimaginable hell, surrounded by a sort of madhouse of the dead and the dying. I saw wounds too horrible to describe: little children with their flesh torn open. The heat was intense and fat black flies descended in their droves. And still the Americans were not finished with us. Their warplanes continued to attack us. If we tried to leave, they shot at us. If we tried to get water, we would die. I was torn apart by thirst. As night fell, I licked the concrete wall in the hope of finding moisture. I thought of my father and my one sister whom I knew to be dead and wished that I could join them, and in the end I could bear it no more. Half delirious, and with the last of my strength, I walked out of the tunnel, expecting to be cut down in a hail of gunfire. But at that moment the moon dipped behind a cloud and somehow I was not seen. I had emerged on the side away from the main road and managed to escape into the darkness. The one hundred survivors that I left behind me would remain inside the tunnel for three more days.

  ‘I made my way back to Chu Gok Ri, thinking of returning to my grandmother. But the house was no longer there. The Americans had adopted a scorched earth policy and a pall of smoke hung over the place where the village had once been. All the houses had been burned down, often with the inhabitants still inside. There were a few people picking through the ruins and I was able to beg a little food and water from them before I left, walking the fifteen miles to a town called Yakmok. From my childhood, I remembered that there was a station there and sure enough, as I arrived, a train packed with ROK troops was about to leave. I threw myself on the mercy of the soldiers. I told them what had happened. They took me with them.

  ‘The train took me to the port of Pusan on the south-eastern tip of Korea, a city jam-packed with soldiers and civilians, the streets swarming with refugees who were struggling to survive. Some of them had managed to get work, helping to unload the ships which had arrived from America. The quays and jetties were piled up with military supplies. I had no money, nothing. I knew nobody. There was a sort of burning emptiness in my head as if my brain was being devoured from inside. And then I remembered the little packet my grandmother had given me. Hiding in the shadows of a temple, close to the sea, I opened it. A dozen little stones fell into my hand. I knew at once what they were even though I had never seen such things before. They were blue diamonds, Mr Bond, quite rare and worth more money than I could begin to imagine. Where had my grandmother got them from? I have mentioned that she was close to Queen Min. Maybe she had been given them for her service. Maybe she had stolen them as the Chosŏn dynasty disintegrated around her. But these questions were immaterial. She had given them to me and they were to be my salvation.

  ‘I sold one of the diamonds to a jeweller who had a shop in the business district of Gwangbok-dong. He cheated me, of course. He gave me a fraction of its true value. But it provided me with enough cash to bribe an American marine who helped me stow away on a boat leaving for Hawaii. Many thousands of Koreans had emigrated to Hawaii at the start of the century, mainly to work on the sugar plantations, including members of my own family, and I had no doubt that I would find help and support once I arrived, certainly with eleven blue diamonds in my hands. And so it proved to be. I will not tire you with the journey nor with the problems that I faced when I arrived. Suffice it to say that I lived among the Korean community in Hawaii for some months before moving to the United States where I established a recruitment and construction business which I named Blue Diamond, and that brings us very much to where we are now.

  ‘But this is what you must understand. This is the point of my story. We have a belief in Korea that if you die away from home, you will be condemned to wander for eternity, that you will never come to rest. That is what has happened to me. I died at No Gun Ri. It was not my life that was taken from me, but my soul, my very humanity. Even as I sit here now, I still see the dead bodies. I can see my father’s head as it separates from his body. I see my dead sister. I smell the blood. Those ugly, black flies are still crawling behind my eyes.

  ‘I have become very wealthy. My business empire is worth many hundreds of times more than those diamonds with which I began. And yet I myself am dead. I feel nothing. I have forgotten the meaning of pleasure. For me, food has no taste, the air has no scent, the sun no warmth. I do not hate the Americans although I will never forgive them for the atrocity that led to the death of my family and so many others. I feel nothing for them, and the same is true of all humanity, including you and Miss Lane. In a way, I have become like death itself. I throw parties because it is expected of me. I wave to cameras and I smile when my rich American friends call me Jason Sin, carelessly trampling on my culture and my origins, and secretly I want to kill them all. In fact, I have been responsible for the deaths of many, many people. Some of them have worked for me. Some were business rivals. Many of them have been complete strangers. I exist now only to destroy everything around me and I understand that this is what makes me so useful to SMERSH. Well, they are useful to me t
oo. I have no interest in their ideology. I would be just as content to work for the American Secret Service or for anyone else. They simply give me the excuse to do what I do.

  ‘There is only a little more to add. I am aware that I have been speaking for some time and I thank you for indulging me but I only get the opportunity to say these things very occasionally. It may further interest you to know what it is that I am doing here, what exactly it is that I have arranged. It will please me to tell you. Am I acting out of vanity, I wonder? Am I, perhaps, a little too pleased with myself? I do not know – but I suppose I must be as there can be no other reason to explain everything to you. Even so, I must be brief . . .’

  Sin reached for the deck of cards and drew them towards him.

  EIGHTEEN

  ‘. . . any Card.’

  Bond laid down his knife, once again contemplating the sharp steel blade and the almost indecently heavy Bakelite handle. It had certainly made easy work of the steak, which he had finished while Sin talked. Eating the meal had been very much as Sin had described, nothing more than a biochemical act. Bond needed the nutrients, the proteins and the carbohydrates that even now his body would be processing, turning into energy for whatever lay ahead. He had tasted none of it and had even been slightly repulsed by the pretence of sociability while all he wanted to do was hurl himself at a host who, at the same time, was preparing to murder him. How tempting the knife was, just inches from his hand! But the four guards hadn’t moved. Not for one second had their attention strayed. At the other end of the table, Jeopardy had barely touched her food. She was sitting very still, her face giving absolutely nothing away. As for Sin, although he had been served the same food as them, he had not eaten at all.

  ‘Your story is a very interesting one,’ Bond said, using the second of his two matches to light a cigarette. ‘Although I wonder if you’ve considered telling it to a qualified psychiatrist? We have some very good ones in England. I could put you in touch with the Tavistock Clinic who have plenty of experience dealing with former Japanese prisoners-of-war and the like, although I grant you that probably none of them was as disturbed as you.’ He blew out smoke. ‘As I understand it, the very fact of having survived brings with it a sense of shame and dishonour which in turn leads to serious mental issues. In your case, these would seem to be raging paranoia and self-loathing, and left to yourself you’ll probably go on to commit suicide. It’s a shame. But anyway, you were about to tell us what particular little madness you’ve got planned. Do go ahead. The steak was very good, by the way.’

  Sin’s lips tightened and what could almost have been a thin mist passed across the glass discs that enclosed and magnified his eyes. Bond was reminded of the portraits he had seen in the castle in Germany. The extraordinary thing was that Sin briefly resembled them. He had been vandalised by his experiences in Korea. Look behind the eyes and you would find . . . nothing.

  ‘I think you are trying to make me angry, Mr Bond. If I am angry, you hope I will make mistakes. But I will simply ignore your facetious remarks and continue with my narrative. Unless, that is, you wish to proceed directly to the last section of the evening’s entertainment, the one that concerns your own particular fate.’

  ‘We know what you’re planning.’ It was Jeopardy who had spoken. Her voice was level, controlled. Bond knew that she had stepped in to take the heat off him. ‘You bribed a rocket scientist called Thomas Keller with money supplied to you by the Soviets. Did they tell you the money was counterfeit? Or maybe they didn’t trust you enough. I’d be worrying about that, if I were you. The NRL is launching a Vanguard rocket tonight and you’ve arranged for it to fail. That’s not such a big deal. We’ve got plenty more where that one came from.’

  Sin said, ‘You are half right, Miss Lane. But the question you should be asking is – why will it fail and what will be the result?’ He turned back to Bond. ‘My friends in Moscow have taken a considerable interest in American and, indeed, European technology. It is important to them, for their own prestige and for economic advantage, that they should be seen to be leading the field in whatever industry you care to mention – and to this end, SMERSH quite recently put together a specialist team with that particular aim in mind. It was headed by Colonel Gaspanov.

  ‘One of their earlier operations involved the Krassny motor racing car which brought them into an arena with which I am already familiar. The Russians were keen to win at Nürburgring and arranged for the English driver to be assassinated by one of their agents. The race was, in my view, a trifling matter and one that could well endanger my own, much more significant operation. Even so, the colonel ordered me to meet him at Nürburgring. This is the trouble with working with the Soviets. They trust nobody, and they had concerns following the quite unexpected death of Thomas Keller, murdered by his wife, as it turned out.

  ‘At any event, they insisted on a meeting although I thought it foolish and told the colonel so, in no uncertain words. It is a shame he did not listen to me. You only became involved in our affairs because of it and since then you have caused us a great deal of annoyance. But for your bad luck last night you could have caused us serious harm.

  ‘Yes. The Vanguard will fail. Mr Keller was able to gain access to the turbo pump in the first stage rocket engine following the acceptance tests, the systems tests and even the static tests when the liquid propellant was ignited without the rocket actually being fired. At the very end of the process he made certain adjustments that will ensure that the pump is not able to deliver enough pressure to take the Vanguard into orbit and, as a result, the central control room will have no choice but to activate a device which they refer to as Trigger Mortis. The rocket will self-destruct and the various pieces fall harmlessly into the Atlantic Ocean.

  ‘But let us imagine for a moment that due to some catastrophic piece of negligence, the rocket – or part of it – fell onto a major city in America; New York, for example. Can you imagine the devastation that would be caused by twenty thousand pounds of metal, filled with kerosene and liquid oxygen, falling at 220 miles per hour onto a populated area? It would be the equivalent of a million tons of TNT, something not far short of a nuclear explosion. That is what I am going to cause to happen—’ He held up a hand before Bond could interrupt. ‘At least, that is what I am going to simulate.

  ‘Last night, when you broke into this compound, you saw a perfect replica of the Vanguard rocket that is going to be launched at Wallops Island tonight. As we have been speaking, it has been carried to the rapid transit yard at Coney Island. A very large number of people working in the New York transit system have been recruited by Blue Diamond and I have my own workshops there. The replica rocket will be loaded onto a train which will also be carrying a very large bomb which you may also have seen here last night. It might interest you to know that I will be using C4, a plastic explosive originally developed by the British and one of the most destructive materials on the planet. Just a couple of pounds of it would be enough to destroy a small building, but my train will be carrying one hundred and fifty pounds connected to a series of quite basic detonator caps.

  ‘Half an hour before the launch, the train will leave Coney Island, travelling non-stop to 34th Street and Sixth Avenue. I have ensured the line will be clear and your knowledge of Manhattan will tell you that the train will have arrived at the very heart of the city, less than two blocks away from the Empire State Building. That is a considerable distance – some 1480 feet – but we are helped by the presence of an underground stream, which appears on old maps as the Sunfish Pond. It will provide a channel through the metamorphic rock. Technicians working for SMERSH have predicted that the explosion will be enough to bring the Empire State Building down. This will not be a result of the initial shockwave itself but because of a process known as soil liquefaction in which the effective stress of the soil is reduced to zero by the force of the blast. You might imagine an old man with a stick having that stick kicked away from beneath him. I do not know how many
hundreds of people will die or how many millions of dollars’ damage will be done. These are not my concern, although there will be a useful corollary in that Blue Diamond will greatly profit from the reconstruction work. Nor is this an act of war. No. The aim is simply to ensure that the Russians win what has become known as the space race and that, ultimately, control of outer space – weapons, communications, the exploration of other planets – is theirs.

  ‘This is what will happen, Mr Bond. Some time after eleven o’clock, the real Vanguard space rocket will fail. It will be destroyed. Five minutes after that, a gigantic explosion will take place in the heart of New York. I have representatives gathered around the city who will swear that they saw an object falling out of the night sky. At the same time, I will ensure that news leaks out of the failure at Wallops Island. This will be supported by photographic evidence of an explosion a mile or so above the Atlantic. The American media and the general public will quite naturally put two and two together. What goes up, must come down. Of course the government and the Naval Research Laboratory will deny any culpability – but who will believe them? It was their missile that destroyed a vast tract of New York that happened to include the Empire State Building, in itself a symbol of American pride. And when the crater is examined, parts of a Vanguard rocket will be found, the final evidence. The fact that a subway train has also been destroyed at the same time will be nothing more than a coincidence. It will be seen as irrelevant.

  ‘The result will be a public outcry. There are already enough people in America who believe that the exploration of outer space is a colossal waste of money but as a result of this catastrophe, all projects will be frozen and future funding cut off. And the beauty of it is, although the NRL will be furious, although they will know that the public have been deceived, they will be completely powerless. The louder they shout, the more people will turn against them and even retrieving the debris of the real rocket from the ocean – if such a thing is possible – will make no difference. It is my belief that the events tonight will end the American space programme for ever. At the very least, it will set them back a decade or more, by which time the Soviets will be in total command and unstoppable. You could say that the very future of the world will be in their hands.’