‘A political dictatorship and a rampant free market – it’s hard to think of a more toxic blend,’ Marker observed.
‘Well,’ she agreed, ‘it’s certainly not a recipe for peace and tranquillity, but what you’ve just described also sums up a century of British rule in Hong Kong.’
He grinned. ‘No argument from me,’ he said. ‘You convinced me last time I was here.’
‘What about crime?’ Dubery asked.
‘In China? It’s mushrooming, especially in the Special Economic Zones . . .’
‘Which reminds me,’ Marker interrupted. ‘I was thinking – say these pirated ships were taken back to China, up the Pearl River to somewhere. The cargoes could simply be re-exported. Sold twice, in effect. But they would need the use of a decent-sized port, and a lot of authorities willing to turn a blind eye.’
‘I don’t think that would be a problem,’ Rosalie said. ‘You could probably buy Canton with the profit from one ship.’
Marker looked at his watch. ‘Five in the morning in England,’ he said. ‘I’ll give the old man another couple of hours’ sleep.’
‘I hope he’s persuasive,’ Rosalie said, ‘because I wouldn’t hold out any hope of Ormond getting anywhere with our bosses here.’
‘You still don’t trust him?’
‘No, I think I do. There’s just too many powerful people in Hong Kong who won’t want the boat rocked.’
‘In London as well,’ Marker added pessimistically.
‘I’ve just had an idea,’ Dubery said suddenly. ‘If the Blue Dragons are selling information to the Communists, then how are they being paid?’
The other two looked at him blankly.
‘In bairns,’ the Scot said. ‘Babies.’
8
It had been dark for over an hour and a huge red-orange moon had just risen from the black ocean. In their niche among the stacked containers the two SBS men could feel the adrenalin beginning to pump through their veins as the ship approached the end of its six-day journey. By Cafell’s reckoning the distant islands passing by off either side belonged to Beijing, and the Ocean Carousel was now deep inside the waters of the People’s Republic.
‘Do you think it’s time we took a look forward?’ Finn asked softly.
‘Maybe,’ Cafell said. Their narrow field of vision was certainly not good for the nerves, but getting spotted and caught trying to improve it was likely to be considerably more injurious to the health. And if the ship was nearing its destination the chances of there being crewmen this far forward would have greatly increased.
He looked at the map again, but it simply wasn’t detailed enough to offer him any answers.
‘Look,’ Finn whispered.
Off the starboard bow land had suddenly loomed into view. No more than a mile to the east a rocky headland was rising into a bare hill, momentarily eclipsing the moon, and with every passing second the shoreline seemed to be growing closer.
‘OK, I’ll go,’ Cafell said.
A minute later he was down in the corridor between containers and working his way slowly towards the starboard side. A few feet from the edge of the deck he stopped, listening for the sound of feet or voices on the walkway below. Hearing nothing, he climbed a couple of rungs down the ladder and leaned out into space, hanging on with one hand.
The boat was slowing, he realized, and up ahead he could see the reason – a port of some sort. The dark line of a long jetty divided the water from the heights of the island behind, and silhouetted against the latter Cafell could see the tell-tale pattern of gantry cranes. Onshore a cluster of lights twinkled in the shadow of a small, sugar-loaf-shaped promontory.
He climbed back on to the deck, and made his way across to the port side, again stopping and listening before leaning out to scan the way forward. This time he found ships, seven of them, all apparently at anchor within half a mile or so of the shore. One looked like a patrol boat of some sort, but the other six were short-sea traders. Though of various types, each had the usual squat superstructure set aft and prominent lifting gear amidships. They were about a quarter of the size of the Ocean Carousel.
This was the transhipment point, Cafell realized.
He made his way back to Finn, pulling the rope up after him, and told the younger man what he had seen.
‘Plan B?’ Finn asked.
‘Since we don’t have a Plan A, I guess so.’
The previous night they had scouted their immediate neighbourhood, looking for a short-term hiding place which would give them both a better view of what was happening and more flexibility of manoeuvre. The niche among the containers had served them well at sea, but in port it could swiftly turn into a death-trap.
‘Home sweet home,’ Finn murmured, taking one last look at the square of shadow before starting down the rope. Once both men were down in the trench between containers, he worked the improvised grab-hook loose and deftly caught it as it fell.
The ship was now moving at only a couple of knots, and off the port side the first of the anchored boats was visible between the walls of stacked containers. Cafell gestured to Finn to stay where he was and advanced stealthily to the other side, where the lights of the port installation buildings were now reflected across a quarter of a mile of sea. On the long concrete jetty the container lifting gear was bathed in yellow light. A few figures were visible, and on the far side of the jetty’s longer arm two more short-sea traders were berthed.
A host of smaller boats were drawn up beside a smaller, L-shaped jetty in front of the installation buildings. More men were emerging from one of these, and for a second Cafell assumed the voices were carrying across the water. Then he realized they were coming up behind him.
He decided not to move, and hung there above the deckwalk like an angel about to take flight from the buttress of a church, working out the sequence of movements he would need to make if he was seen. Swing back on the left arm, he told himself, moving the body into a crouch as the right hand pulls out the Browning . . .
That would be the easy part. It would start getting difficult when fifty Chinese overheard the shot.
The men were only about ten yards away, then five, then passing beneath him, still talking, two men in T-shirts and loose trousers, one of them with a pigtail. As they walked away their shiny black hair turned gold in the reflection of the jetty lighting. Cafell let go of the breath he had been holding, and pulled himself back up on to the main deck.
The ship was inching in towards the jetty, the men on both ship and shore exchanging shouted greetings. This crew of pirates had obviously been here before.
Cafell worked his way back to Finn.
‘Time to say goodbye?’ Finn asked in a whisper.
‘I think so.’
‘If we’re caught don’t forget to tell them you’re Maurice Chevalier,’ Finn added.
Cafell looked at him blankly.
Finn shook his head. ‘I’ll explain later. Let’s go.’
They hoisted the bergens on their backs and started towards the port side, with Cafell scanning ahead, Finn watching their backs. There was no visible movement on the port walkway, and the nearest of the anchored traders, some three hundred yards in front of them, seemed devoid of human life.
‘As good a time as any,’ Cafell said, starting down the iron ladder to the walkway. If they were seen now it was just bad luck, for on a docking ship the crew’s attention was normally focused on the dock.
He let the rope out across the side, hearing a faint thump as it struck the metal hull. ‘You first,’ he told Finn, holding their wooden grab-hook against the rail until the Londoner’s weight had pulled the rope tight.
As Finn’s head disappeared into the darkness it occurred to Cafell that the circumstances had been kind – both the moon and the jetty lights were bathing the other side of the ship, creating a deep cloak of shadow for their disembarkation.
A tug on the rope told him Finn was in the water. He clambered across the rail and started down, usi
ng the soles of his feet to run backwards down the ship’s side. The last time he had done this was in a Poole Harbour training exercise earlier that year.
This time the water was about forty degrees warmer – sliding into the South China Sea was like entering a lukewarm bath. Finn was waiting for him in the prearranged spot twenty yards from the ship’s side, a big schoolboy grin on his face, leaning on his watertight bergen as if it were a beach ball.
They started swimming, dragging the bergens with one hand and using the other three limbs to pull them through the water. Taking care to keep beyond the range of the lighting, Cafell led them round the bow of the halted ship in a wide circle, past the end of the concrete jetty, and in towards the shoreline of the wide bay which lay behind. The moonlight was brighter now, but there was enough surf to hide them from anything but the most rigorous watcher, and soon they were back inside the moon-shadow cast by the island itself. Behind them on the jetty they could hear the whine of the gantry crane in motion – the unloading had begun.
In front of them, a small and apparently empty beach sat beneath low cliffs. At either end of the bay these merged into rocky headlands: the sugar loaf on the right masking the installations in the small bay next door and a much larger, less elegant hump on the left rising almost sheer from the sea.
The two men swam until the water grew too shallow, then lay with only the tops of their heads above water for several minutes, searching the beach for any sign of movement. At Cafell’s signal they crawled ashore and slowly up the beach, stopping only when they reached the shelter of some bushes at the foot of the cliff.
‘If this is China I want my money back,’ Finn murmured.
Marker sat with one elbow on the side of the unmarked Fast Patrol Craft, gazing out across the night sea. He was beginning to feel anxious. It was almost nine o’clock, and by his reckoning the container ship should have hove into view more than half an hour ago. So where was it?
If it wasn’t headed up into the Pearl River estuary then where the fuck was it headed? Up until now his main concern had been trying to gauge the stowaways’ intentions. Were they committed to seeing the voyage through, even if it meant sailing into the maw of the Chinese dragon? Or would they try and jump ship? He had wondered what he would do in their place, and decided that, on balance, he would jump.
That afternoon he had phoned Colhoun in Poole and explained the situation. After a round of phone calls between the various military and political parties involved, it had been agreed that, while there were no circumstances in which the Marines’ 3rd Raiding Squadron could trespass in Chinese waters, two non-uniformed SBS men might be allowed a slightly wider latitude. So he and Dubery, wearing the plain clothes of innocent boating enthusiasts, were sitting plum in the middle of the estuary mouth, some eight miles west of the diplomatically correct cordon of FPCs.
‘Just use your discretion,’ Colhoun had said drily. ‘If you see someone in trouble at sea, then it’s your duty to pick them up.’
‘And to use reasonable force in helping them evade capture by known pirates,’ Marker had added hopefully.
‘Aye, that sounds reasonable enough,’ Colhoun had agreed.
But it was hard to meet people off a boat which refused to arrive.
Having found a relatively easy place to scale the low cliffs, Finn and Cafell started south across the uneven slopes in the general direction of the port’s onshore installations. On their left more rocky hills stretched into the darkness. If this was the island Cafell thought it was, then it was about two miles wide and three miles long. It didn’t seem overcrowded.
After about five minutes they came upon what they were looking for. A stream had cut a small valley in the hillside, and among the trees they could find a place to rest up and take stock. The noise of the stream would even mask their conversation.
A few yards downstream they found a bamboo grove which offered both invisibility from the landward side and a fine view of the distant jetty, where the loading of the two short-sea traders was now in full swing. Cafell studied them through the nightscope.
‘We should be on one of them,’ Finn said quietly.
Cafell disagreed. ‘Their names are in Chinese, not English. They must be headed up the coast or the estuary. If this was Europe or South America I’d say risk it, but white faces in China? We’d stick out like a dog’s bollocks.’
‘So how far are we from Hong Kong?’
‘About fifteen miles from the nearest island.’
‘OK,’ Finn said, ‘so unless you’re planning to open a business here we’re going to need some kind of transport.’
‘Yeah. I thought . . .’
‘Of course we could always build a raft from driftwood.’
‘I was thinking more in terms of simple theft.’
‘The boss’ll be proud of you. So what are we waiting for?’
‘Patience,’ Cafell told him, rummaging in his bergen for paper and pencil. ‘First off, I want to copy down the names of these ships,’ he said, putting the nightscope to his eye and starting on the first Chinese character.
Finn watched, feeling disappointed in himself for missing it.
‘We need as much evidence as we can get,’ Cafell said as he drew. ‘By this time tomorrow the containers will be gone – in half a dozen different directions, for all we know. And without them we might even have a hard job proving that ship out there was ever the Ocean Carousel.’
‘Ships should have serial numbers stamped on their hulls,’ Finn muttered.
‘How about some pictures?’ Cafell asked.
Finn shook his head. ‘There’s not enough light. You’d need a special job for this. Even that camcorder we used in Florida wouldn’t do it – not at this sort of distance.’ He thought for a moment. ‘But we could stay the night and take some pictures in the morning.’
Cafell considered the suggestion. ‘No,’ he decided, without being sure why. Certainly there was a noticeable shortage of cover on the island, but they could always dig in somewhere . . . No, it was more a feeling that they would be pushing their luck. And during his years in the SBS Cafell had learnt to take such feelings seriously. ‘The boss would be worried about us,’ he told Finn.
‘Oh yeah? He’s probably sitting in some ill-lit room with a Suzy Wong on each knee and opium pipes sticking out of every orifice.’
Cafell laughed in spite of himself. ‘Has anyone ever told you how disgusting you are?’
‘No. But thanks.’
Cafell admired his own calligraphy, and started on a rough sketch of the scene in front of them. Five minutes later he was stowing the folded drawing in the bergen. ‘OK, let’s go. And the more info we pick up en route the better.’
‘Land or sea?’ Finn asked.
‘Land. We should be able to circle round above the buildings and get down to the water within reach of the smaller boats.’ He stopped and turned to Finn. ‘Why Maurice Chevalier?’ he asked.
Finn grinned. ‘The boss and I got the stowaway idea from the Marx Brothers . . .’
‘No wonder I spend half my time feeling like I’m trapped in a farce,’ Cafell murmured.
‘They stow away on this transatlantic liner,’ Finn went on, ‘and when they reach America, and they have to go through immigration, all four of them claim to be Maurice Chevalier.’
Cafell just looked at him.
‘It’s one of the funniest scenes ever shot.’
‘I’ll take your word for it.’
It took them the best part of an hour to reach a point overlooking the onshore port installations. A line of three modern warehouses had been built on levelled ground between the sugar loaf and the roadway which continued out on to the main jetty. On their left, facing the smaller jetty, there was a cluster of smaller, much older-looking buildings – the remnants, Cafell guessed, of a bygone fishing port. Even further to the left, beyond a grove of palm trees, a line of connected cabins climbed the hill like a giant’s stairway.
‘Aim for th
e palms?’ Finn suggested.
‘Yeah. But I’m going to do another drawing first.’
Finn watched as the scene below was transferred on to a clean sheet of paper. There was no doubting the man could draw. ‘I can smell food,’ he said.
‘So can I,’ Cafell agreed. It was six hours since they had eaten the last of their rations. ‘I expect there’ll be a McDonald’s for you in Hong Kong,’ he added unkindly.
‘The rate you’re going it’ll be closed by the time we get there.’
Cafell put away the drawing, made sure the bergen was sealed against the water, and led the way down the hill. There was no sign of life around the buildings below – it looked as though everyone was out on the jetty getting on with the job in hand. A previously anchored ship was now moving in, presumably to take its turn beside the loading berth.
The two men crossed a narrow road, and carefully picked their way down a grassy slope towards the palm grove. As they entered the shelter of the trees a baby suddenly started wailing in the cabins above, the sound merging with the distant whine of the gantry crane.
They clambered across the rocks on the edge of the water, slid into the lapping waves and swam towards the end of the L-shaped wooden jetty. Cafell left Finn to keep watch while he checked along the line of tethered boats for a suitable candidate. The selection was impressive – there were eight sleek-looking speedboats, each equipped with radios and loaded with extra fuel cans. All but one had their keys in the ignition.
There were also a few decrepit wooden boats, and in one of these Cafell found the oars he was looking for. He placed them in his chosen speedboat, slit through the securing ropes with his knife and started gently pushing the boat towards the mouth of the harbour. Finn joined him, and the two men eased the vessel down the shoreline for fifty yards or so. Once confident that the dark line of coast would hide them from watchers on either jetty, they clambered aboard and began to row.
Marine G SBS Page 14