by Rob Jones
He felt a heavy whack in between his shoulder blades – the universal signal to get moving, he thought, and trudged slowly down the steps of the small jet. He had no idea what Sheng had in store for him, but if it involved Mr Luk it wasn’t going to be pretty.
*
Scarlet saw the airport first as the Jeep raced along the highway to its west. Moments later they were being ushered inside a single-story building guarded at the door by two men with guns.
“They must be expecting you, Scarlet,” Reaper said.
“That’s good. I like to be expected. It gives them time to get frightened.”
Reaper laughed and shook his head. “What planet are you really from, Sloane?”
“Planet Nutbar,” Ryan said.
“Don’t be like that, boy. We both know you’d still strip for me if I snapped my fingers.”
“In your wildest dreams, crackerjack.”
“Exactly my thoughts,” Sophie said, glaring at Scarlet and moving closer to Ryan. “You should learn to treat Ryan with more respect. He only gets naked when I snap my fingers, right, Rye?”
Ryan blushed a little and was saved by the bell when a grim man in military fatigues told them to wait inside until Jason Lao arrived, but that didn’t stop Scarlet winking at him as she walked toward the water cooler.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
The goons forced Hawke and Lea at gunpoint along the shore of the island toward a low-slung white building built into the sand dunes. Two of the men shouldered their rifles and swung open the large double doors at the front to reveal an industrial boatshed.
Inside, they found what looked at first like some kind of hideous Halloween prank – a corpse was hanging from an overhead beam. Its fingers and toes had been removed and there were burn marks on the face. Someone had pinned its lips into a macabre smile.
“That’s just not right,” Lea said, disgusted.
“The work of Mr Luk, I should think,” Hawke said.
“Silence!” shouted one of the goons, and aimed his weapon at them. Hawke thought he looked nervous, but the sweat might have been caused by the humidity down by the water, it was hard to tell.
Lea nudged Hawke in the ribs. “Speak of the devil...”
A squat man entered the building from a rear door and approached them. He looked at the corpse and then shifted his eyes to their horrified faces. “Ah – please let me introduce Inspector Wu of the Shanghai Municipal Police.”
Hawke and Lea said nothing as Luk appeared to study the shape of their bodies. A moment later he barked some orders in Cantonese and his men hauled Hawke and Lea over to two benches and tied them down with heavy anchor chains which they secured with padlocks.
Pleased with the work so far, Luk ordered the men to leave the boatshed and sighed deeply as Hawke struggled against the unbreakable chains.
Hawke watched Luk pull a long razor blade from a tool bag and begin to sharpen it on a leather strop. The sweat built slowly on Luk’s forehead as he gently drew the blade back and forth along the strop, smiling as he worked.
Lea strained to see what was happening, but she couldn’t lift her head high enough to see. “What the hell’s going on, Joe? I can hear what sounds like a knife being sharpened.”
“I’m not too sure, but I think Mr Luk here must be preparing us some dinner.”
Luk began to speak, almost in a whisper. “Some have translated lingchi as death by a thousand cuts, Mr Hawke. Others translate is as the lingering death, but myself... I prefer slow slicing. For me, this most adequately expresses the nature of the process, as I am sure you will soon agree, wholeheartedly.”
Hawke heard Lea struggling against her chains. “This doesn’t sound too good, Joe. I hope you have a plan.”
Luk set the leather strop down and turned to face Hawke, the freshly sharpened razor now glinting in the low light of the boatshed.
“Are you ready?”
“That’s very kind but I already shaved today. Perhaps just a wash and blow dry instead?”
Luk stared at Hawke with dead, emotionless eyes.
“I think it’s a little more serious than that, Mr Hawke.”
“Please, don’t tell me you’re talking about full hair systems! Anything but that.”
Luk looked confused.
“Yeah, maybe you are going a little thin on top,” Lea said, straining her head up to see. “You only get away with it because you’re so tall no one can see up there.”
“I am not going thin on top!”
“Ah, save it you vain bastard.”
Luk scraped the razor along the edge of the chains which held Hawke to the bench. “You see, tradition demands that first I must remove your eyes, Mr Hawke, followed by the tiniest of cuts until your ears and nose are removed, then the same method will be applied to your fingers, toes and even your manhood, if I can put it like that. You will of course be kept alive for the entire process.” Luk erupted into a terrifying, hollow laughter and moved even closer to Hawke.
“Get away from him you animal!” Lea shouted.
“Ah, your turn will come, Miss Donovan. Mr Sheng wants you both to enjoy this treatment. You will be delighted to know,” he licked his lips, “that I can make this last for three days, and my record number of cuts before losing a victim to bleed-out is just under four thousand.”
Then a large man with his hair tied back in a pony tail entered the room and spoke rapid Cantonese with Luk, who sighed and put the razor back down on the bench.
“Unfortunately, I have been summoned, Mr Hawke. The agony of delay will be much prolonged for you, but there is no alternative. Please accept my sincere apologies.”
Luk and the man left the room, shutting off the lights. Only a small beam of light came in through a thin crack at the bottom of the door.
Hawke heard Lea rustling her chains in the semi-darkness. “We have to get out of here, Joe!”
“No shit! I’m the one he wants to turn into a Christmas turkey!”
“And I guess I’m the dessert... and thanks very much by the way.”
“For what?”
“For another amazing Joe Hawke rescue attempt. You bust me out of Johnny Chan’s frigging clutches and drag me all over arsing Mongolia of all places only to bring me down here to Mr Slice n’ Dice and his House of Horrors.”
“Well... there’s gratitude for you.”
“I’m just saying is all.”
“No, you’re just annoyed you’ve had to be rescued not once, but twice by me now and your ego can’t handle it.”
“My ego? You have got to be joking! You’re the one with the ego, Joe Hawke! Your ego is so damned big I’m surprised the frigging SAS don’t use it to teach mountain climbing.”
“SBS.”
“Whatever.”
“Listen, I hate to stop you in mid-flow, but don't you think our time would be better spent trying to get out of here while we still have the chance?”
“Oh – you just worked that out did you? I was wondering how long before that penny dropped.”
“I bet you were...”
“I was, you pig! If you hate me that much then you’re not going to want to know how I picked Luk’s padlock.”
“You what?” Hawke said, stunned as Lea began to free herself from the chains. They slipped to the floor with a metallic clunk. “How did you do that?”
“Hairpin, boyo. We Irish girls are very resourceful, you know.”
She rushed to Hawke and clicked open his padlock. He stopped to pick up a knife from Luk’s impressive collection of torture instruments and moments later they were fleeing the boatshed.
“I’m going to climb up on the roof for a better look at this hellhole,” Hawke said. “We need to find Han before they kill him and then sabotage the place as much as possible for Lao’s assault.”
“Good plan.”
He paused while he was climbing and turned to Lea. “It’s not true, is it?”
Lea looked at his concerned expression. “What?”
/> “About me going thin on top?”
Lea said nothing for a second, then laughed and slapped him playfully on the back. “You are just such a fool.”
*
From the roof Hawke was able to see just how much wealth Sheng Fang had accumulated over the years to build such an immense fortress on a private island as large as this. The main building itself was constructed to resemble a medieval Chinese palace the kind Hawke knew only from all the old martial arts films he’d watched.
A long balcony ran around each floor giving an impressive view over Hangzhou Bay. The island itself was a lovingly landscaped jumble of Zen gardens and tiny wooden bridges leading from one shade-dappled enclosure to the next. Hawke had a nasty feeling much of it had been constructed with slave labor.
“Just goes to show,” Lea said, climbing up to join him. “If hard work isn’t working out for you there’s always people trafficking.”
“Is that something your grandmother told you?”
“Hey now! My grandmother was a fine old Irishwoman and never once did any human trafficking.”
“I’m glad to hear it.”
“Although there was that time she tried to flood the village with her homemade poitín, but we don’t like to talk about that.”
“Funny.”
Lea frowned. “Hey! That wasn’t a joke!”
“We need to get forward to the house,” Hawke said, and they climbed back down off the roof and made their way silently to the main compound.
Closer now, Lea nudged him and pointed to the main house. “Look!”
Two men with submachine guns casually slung over their shoulders walked slowly towards each other and took a moment out to light cigarettes. One of them told a joke and the other laughed loudly for a second or two.
Hawke scanned the area, keeping low and out of sight. “It looks like it’s just these two guarding the outside, but then how many more are inside it’s impossible to tell.”
“When they find out we’re AWOL all hell’s going to break loose anyway,” Lea said. “We’ll count them up then.”
“Hey – what have we here?” Hawke pointed out to the northwest where an enormous super yacht was moving into view from behind a cliff covered in trees.
“What the hell!” Lea exclaimed. “Tell me it’s not the frigging ghost of Hugo Zaugg, please!”
“It’s not – look carefully and you’ll see it’s got two helipads. Poor old Hugo only had one.”
They watched as the yacht powered through the water and slowed its engines a few hundred yards offshore. A few minutes later a smaller tender craft sailed noisily from an opening at the back of the yacht and brought several unsmiling men to the jetty where they were met by the Lotus. They shook hands and then the Lotus led the men up to the main house.
“I think it’s time we joined the party.”
“Always with the bright ideas...”
They crab walked below the line of a magnolia hedge until they were right next to the main wall of Sheng’s house.
“What now?” Lea said.
“Now, we climb that tree and get our arses inside.”
They silently clambered up the gnarled trunk of the tree, looking around them as they went to make sure no one was about. There was the possibility of one of Sheng’s guards seeing them from the courtyard, or even one of the men on the roof, but it was easy to time the operation to get inside the building before any of the men came back into their view.
Inside, they made their way along a plush corridor decorated with porcelain statues of tigers and elephants until they reached a kind of mezzanine boxed in by an ornate carved wooden screen. Beneath them was a plush executive suite – what could only be Sheng’s study, a sumptuous affair of dark hardwood panels and an extensive art collection hanging on the walls.
A moment later Sheng Fang himself entered into the room and moved to his desk. He was wearing a white suit, no tie, and smoking a cigarette. He casually glanced through some papers and tapped his fingers on the side of his desk. Seconds later, Hawke and Lea watched in silence as the Lotus and Luk entered the study with the man from the super yacht. They bowed deeply in front of Sheng before stepping back and awaiting his next order.
“We have the device,” Sheng told the man.
“Where is it?” the Russian replied.
Upstairs on the mezzanine, Lea whispered: “What’s that accent?”
“Very heavy Russian,” Hawke said. “Probably somewhere south of Moscow.”
“The device is in a safe place,” Sheng said. “All ready for the true enemy.”
The Russian drummed his fingers on the arms of his chair and made no reply for several long, awkward moments. “I must see the device or I will not even consider moving on with our plan.”
Now it was Sheng’s time to think.
After another long silence, he spoke: “You know I cannot transport the device out of China. The Americans are closing in on me, and certain, shall we say, obstructive elements within my own government are also joining the chase. Therefore I need you. You know this.”
The Russian nodded slowly before he replied. “I am happy to transport the device to the location we have agreed on, but before I do so I must make sure it is real, that it is what you say it is and not, for example, a nuclear device. When this is verified I will order my men to take it on board my yacht and transport it to the target destination.”
High above, Lea whispered to Hawke. “What a shame we don't have a gun, Joe! We could take the whole fucking lot out right now and be home in time for tea.”
“You should have become a poet.”
“Why, thank you, sir! But seriously, we’re going to need to communicate this stuff to the outside world in a hurry. If something happens to us then no one’s going to know about the device being moved from psycho to psycho like this.”
Sheng and the man spoke for several more moments and then reached an agreement. They left the study, and Hawke and Lea retraced their footsteps back outside the house and watch as the Russian’s men loaded the device onto the tender and climbed aboard. Below them, the Russian spoke to another man in rapid Russian, but one word was mentioned several times – and that word was the same in Russian as it was in English – Tokyo.
“Oh my God,” Lea said. “They’re going to destroy Tokyo.”
“That was what Sheng meant when he told the Russian about the true enemy. I thought he meant the Americans, or the West in general, but I should have known better. The Chinese and Japanese have an ancient history of warfare between their two nations. Clearly Sheng wants to settle that once and for all by totally destroying the Japanese capital.”
He listened again, and this time heard another word repeated several times vody, the word for water.
“How do you know that?” Lea asked.
“Same root as the word vodka... And just then he said St. Petersburg as well and that’s the limit of my Russian, I swear. Either way, this bloke looks pretty serious about doing Sheng’s bidding.”
“But what the hell’s in it for him?” She nodded her head at the Russian who was now making his way back to the tender with the Lotus at his side.
“I don’t know, but whatever it is, it must be pretty big to try and kill twenty million people. And it looks like Sheng’s sent the Lotus to oversee the job.”
With everyone on board, the super yacht turned in the harbor, its massive engines now powering the vessel out of the small bay and away from the island. They watched in despair as it slipped effortlessly toward the hazy horizon and moved at great speed to the east where Tokyo bustled in total ignorance of the lethal threat to its existence now racing towards it.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Jason Lao met Scarlet and the rest of her team at Hongqiao International Airport and less than an hour later they were flying in a Chinese army helicopter south over the city and out over Hangzhou Bay on their way to Dragon Island. Below them in the water Scarlet saw a tiny armada of RIBs racing across the bay, fil
led with whatever forces Lao could put together with the smallest amount of fuss.
It seemed the self-styled Thunder God had finally rattled someone high enough up in the food chain to give Lao some extra muscle and the authority to go in and take him out. Scarlet Sloane was only too pleased to be heading up that operation with all of her SAS experience.
The thought of a whack-job like Sheng getting hold of the map and using it to locate the elixir of immortality was enough to freeze the blood in her veins, but what really enraged her was the thought of Joe Hawke and Lea Donovan, kidnapped and held at his mercy. That had happened once before in Greece when Zaugg took Lea, Ryan and Sophie, and she had sworn never again. Now was revenge time and Sheng would pay not only for his crimes, but for everything Zaugg had put them all through as well.
Now, sitting in the lead helicopter her mind was focused like never before, and the events of her turbulent past seemed to align in perfect clarity for the first time. She could finally begin to understand what was happening in the world. For men like Zaugg and Sheng, limitless wealth wasn’t enough. They wanted more. They wanted the ultimate power – the power to live forever. Men, she thought… total idiots.
But these men were dangerous idiots. They knew the power existed somewhere in the world, but it was hidden by the ancients – maybe even the gods in the far distant past. But all that remained today was an ancient map, older than time itself for all anyone knew, and whose very creation was perhaps the biggest mystery of all.
Zaugg had tried to find it and failed in spectacular fashion, but only thanks to the bravery and determination of a handful of people from all walks of life. Even Joe Hawke had turned out to be an asset, something she was pretty skeptical about when he had walked back into her life in Geneva.
Perhaps one day he would know the truth about her – about everything – but that wasn't her call to make. For now she was focused on rescuing him and Lea and stopping Sheng and his insane henchmen from getting their hands on the map of immortality. Something told her that would be very bad news indeed, plus she thought of all the fun she could have taunting Hawke with the fact she had saved his life. Some things were beyond priceless.