Twenty minutes later they rounded the southern tip of the island and the last of the anchored ships was lost from sight. Cafell engaged the outboard and Finn let out an exultant whoop as the craft gathered speed.
Marker and Dubery got the news over the radio about fifteen minutes later: the two FPCs at the southern end of 3rd Raiding Squadron’s cordon were running an intercept course on a speedboat coming out of Chinese waters. After a tense few minutes a laconic voice announced: ‘We’ve picked up a couple of Poole’s finest.’
By the time Marker and Dubery got back to Hong Kong waters, Cafell and Finn had consumed all the sandwiches they could lay their hands on and swallowed about a gallon of tea. The ex-stowaways switched boats, leaving an eager Marine to take the captured speedboat back to Stonecutters’ Island. The four SBS men shook hands, high-fived, hugged and grinned at each other.
‘Nice trip?’ Marker asked once they were underway.
‘Apart from the accommodation, facilities, food and entertainment,’ Finn told him.
‘So where’s the Ocean Carousel?’
‘About fifteen miles back,’ Cafell said, gesturing over his shoulder. ‘Unloading.’
He seemed more sombre than usual, Marker thought. ‘Why don’t you start at the beginning?’ he suggested.
Cafell went through the main events of the voyage: the murder of the crew, his and Finn’s killing of the pirate who had somehow stumbled across their hiding place in the hour before the storm. He talked dispassionately, but Marker had spent enough time with him to know that both events had left their mark.
Cafell described the island base, their brief recce and escape. ‘I did some drawings,’ he added. ‘It’s a professional set-up, all right. They’ve got a modern container gantry and the usual derricks, and I’d guess some heavy dredging has been done to let them take large ships. There’s no way someone could put together a facility like that on the quiet.’
‘The patrol boat was a bit of a give-away,’ Finn added.
‘One patrol boat’s not the Chinese Navy,’ Marker argued. ‘And the local authorities might have sanctioned the set-up without knowing who was going to use it.’
‘Maybe,’ Cafell agreed, ‘but I wouldn’t bet Finn’s shirt on it. And it’s a good job we got a look at the place, because otherwise we’d have been wasting our time for six days. How did you find out we were headed this way?’
Marker went through his and Dubery’s story: the discovery of the fax in the office on Rempang; the raid on the Wu brothers’ warehouse in Singapore; the tapped phone call from Hong Kong and the light it threw on Douglas Bellamy’s suspicious death; the emerging role of the Blue Dragons Triad, and the discovery that day of their link with powerful interests across the border in China. ‘And there’s also a tie-in with a baby-smuggling operation,’ Marker concluded, ‘but I’ll save that for later.’
‘Christ,’ Finn muttered. ‘We only need a few international drug smugglers and we’ll have the full set.’
‘So what’s next?’ Cafell asked.
‘A good night’s sleep,’ Marker said. ‘We’ll worry about the rest tomorrow.’
‘Things always look better in the morning,’ Finn muttered facetiously.
Marker doubted it. With the moon shining on the sea, and his men back safe, he felt pretty damn good right then.
They got back to Stonecutters’ Island shortly before two, and after making sure Cafell and Finn had beds Marker borrowed the CO’s office to call Colhoun in Poole.
‘Thought you’d like to know, the wanderers have returned,’ he told the SBS boss.
‘Good,’ Colhoun said, his relief apparent even in the one syllable.
Marker gave him a brief summary of what had happened on board the ship, and Colhoun said he’d get in touch with those authorities in Singapore who were officially handling the ship’s hijacking. ‘I’ve sent the lads to bed,’ Marker went on. ‘I’d like to talk the whole operation through with them sometime later today, and come up with some recommendations.’ He did a quick mental calculation. ‘Four in the afternoon here will be eight hundred hours GMT. Can I ring you then?’
‘Fine.’
Marker hung up to find Cafell leaning against the door jamb.
‘I thought I’d ring Ellen,’ he said.
Marker smiled and left him to it. Cafell punched out the number and hoped she was home from school.
She was, and she sounded happy to hear his voice. ‘How are things?’ she asked.
‘Pretty good. We’ve been incommunicado for a few days, so I haven’t been able to phone.’
‘You told me that might happen.’
‘I know, but . . .’
‘Have you been chasing pirates?’ He had told her of their secondment to the Anti-Piracy Centre.
‘Something like that.’ It was so good to hear her voice. He felt almost like singing. Or crying. Something to express the relief he was suddenly feeling that they had survived the last six days. The crew of the Ocean Carousel had not been so lucky. Their girlfriends wouldn’t be getting calls.
‘Are you OK?’ she asked, anxiety in her voice.
‘I am now. I miss you.’
‘I miss you too. Have you any idea when you’ll be back?’
‘Not yet.’ One part of him wished it could be tomorrow, the other part reminded him how much he loved his work. ‘How are you doing?’ he asked.
‘Oh, fine.’ She talked about a friend at work, what she was going to eat that evening, how the cat was staring at her as if he knew who was on the other end of the telephone line. He saw the pictures in his head, and felt ordinary life bathing him with its wonderful simplicity.
They told each other they loved each other, and how much they missed making love.
Cafell went back to his bunk feeling both full and empty. This was what it was going to be like from now on, he thought. This was what it was like, trying to share your life in a single man’s job.
The following morning Rosalie had no sooner stepped into the OSCG office than she received an invitation to visit Ormond’s desk. He wasted no time on preliminaries. ‘The hatches are being battened shut,’ he told her in an uncharacteristically low voice. ‘I don’t know how your friend Marker is doing, but I’m getting nothing but the bloody run-around. Very apologetically, of course, but the run-around just the same. I imagine Chatfield upstairs is getting it too. Someone in Government House has probably grabbed the ball and sat on it.’
‘I haven’t seen Marker since yesterday,’ she said.
Ormond sighed. ‘Well, I guess I’ve got other work to get on with,’ he said. ‘What are you working on?’
‘The same old stuff,’ she said. ‘Li and I are checking out the adoption agency which one of the buyers went to.’
He nodded. ‘Good luck.’
She went back to her desk, feeling a little guilty for not trusting him more. Li was indeed working on the line she had suggested, going down the list of clients in search of women who had not been offered legal babies, in the hope that eventually they could narrow the field of suspicion to a particular office and adviser. She, however, had decided to devote at least half the day to running down information on Wang Xiao-bo.
The police computer entry on the Beijing envoy told her only his date of birth – 4 October 1949 – and his current position as a member of the delegation from the People’s Republic charged with facilitating the transition from colonial rule.
‘Facilitating,’ she murmured to herself. It was one of those Americanisms which the English really should have invented themselves. The very word reeked of hypocrisy, of fists curled up in velvet gloves.
She reached for the phone and punched out the number Marker had given her on Stonecutters’ Island. Someone with a pronounced Welsh accent answered and good-naturedly offered to go and look for the man in question. There was no doubt the British were leaving, she thought.
‘Rosalie?’ Marker asked.
‘How many other women are you expecting a call fr
om?’
‘None.’
‘Good. Can you come for dinner tonight?’
‘As far as I know. What time?’
‘Seven, seven-thirty?’
‘Great. I’ll see you then . . .’
‘I’ve also got some news,’ she told him, looking across the office. The ginger head was nowhere in sight. ‘Ormond tells me he’s getting the run-around. No direction, no response at all, as if the politicos are hoping the whole business will just go away.’
‘Sounds par for the course.’
‘Have you heard anything?’
‘I’m talking to my boss at four. I’ll give you an update tonight.’
‘OK, I’ll see you then.’ She put the phone down, her mind made up.
Later that day the four members of the SBS team were sitting round a table in the empty canteen on Stonecutters’ Island. Through the window beside them the towers of Kowloon glittered in the afternoon sun.
‘So what do we have?’ Marker asked, and proceeded to answer his own question. ‘We have photographs of the ship before, during and after its face-lift at the Indonesian base. We have two eyewitnesses to the murder of the original crew at sea and the unloading of the ship on the Chinese island of Chuntao. We have the names of two of the boats which took the cargo on to God knows where.’ He paused. ‘The people in Singapore think they have enough evidence to shame the Indonesians into some sort of action against their own people on Rempang, and now that you two’ – he nodded in the direction of Cafell and Finn – ‘are safe, I expect they’ll get moving on that.’
‘That’s something,’ Finn said.
‘But not a lot,’ Marker said remorselessly. ‘We have no evidence connecting any Chinese authority with the piracy . . .’
‘The patrol boat?’ Cafell asked.
‘A case of mistaken identity. A fantasy dreamt up by imperialist trespassers on Chinese soil. They’ll probably demand an apology.’
Cafell looked suitably rueful. ‘So where do we go from here?’
‘That’s what we’re here to decide. Or at least, to come up with some ideas.’
There was silence for a few moments.
‘If we could get Singapore to hold their horses,’ Finn said, ‘we might be able to set a trap, and get the Navy to intercept the bastards in international waters.’
‘Even if Singapore was willing, which I doubt, it would be a hell of a tall order to set up a ship, monitor it across two thousand miles in both directions . . . No, sorry, I don’t think so. This bunch are too well organized, and they’ll be even more careful over the next few weeks. Think about it – the Wu brothers in jail, Bellamy’s death, the operation against the Blue Dragon smuggling boat the other night – if you were in Fu Manchu’s position wouldn’t you start getting a little paranoid? And they’ve probably realized by now that one of their boats is missing from Chuntao. Once the Indonesian shit hits the fan they’ll know something’s up. They’ll be waiting for us.’
‘So what’s the good news?’ Finn wanted to know.
‘There isn’t much,’ Marker said brutally. ‘Their operation may be fraying at the edges, but the centre hasn’t been touched. They’ve lost their go-betweens in Singapore, the Indonesian base and an informant in Hong Kong – all of which are replaceable. The only really good news is that we now have a damn good idea how the whole thing works. When we have some hard evidence, then we’ll be in business.’
‘Chuntao,’ Cafell murmured.
‘Yeah. We need the same sort of pictures that Finn took on Rempang.’
‘A Chinese Navy patrol boat sitting in front of a hijacked freighter,’ Finn remarked. ‘Framed by a gorgeous sunset,’ he added unnecessarily.
‘I didn’t get the feeling that Chuntao was much more than a transhipment point,’ Cafell said. ‘And if it isn’t, won’t we still be fraying the edges?’
‘That gantry crane was an expensive investment,’ Finn argued.
‘And the monster’s lair is probably somewhere on the mainland,’ Marker told Cafell. ‘I think we’re going to have trouble getting the go-ahead for another visit to Chuntao. Our chances of getting anyone to let us loose on the mainland are a lot less than zero.’
Cafell grinned at him. ‘We can only ask.’
Marker pushed back his chair and got up. ‘I’ll go and do that now.’
As Marker spoke to Colhoun, Rosalie was sitting in a Wan Chai coffee shop, scrutinizing the several pages of notes she had amassed in visits to three newspapers and the reference sections of the city and British Council libraries. Wang Xiao-bo might represent the Public Security Bureau on the Beijing delegation, but he had made his career as an economic fixer, not as a policeman in the shadows.
He had made no mark at all until after the Cultural Revolution, emerging into public view in the late seventies as the successful director of several semi-privatized industrial concerns in Guangzhou. He had then disappeared again for several years, but his re-emergence in the prestigious post of PSB chief for the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone seemed to rule out the possibility of disfavour.
Rosalie thought it most likely he’d spent the missing years involved in either a military project or the enormous prison labour sector. Either of these would have made it easier for him to set up the sort of organization they now seemed to be facing, and later, as PSB chief in Shenzhen, he would have had access to every economic and military facility. He could have introduced his own men wherever he wanted. Given the experimental nature of the Zones, given their proximity to the outside world, he could have used national security as an excuse to set up, or help set up, any number of no-go areas.
And one of them would have to be a port, she thought.
She needed more information about his years in Shenzhen. She needed to know who his cronies had been, and where they were now.
In his Poole office Lieutenant-Colonel Neil Colhoun replaced the phone and stared thoughtfully out across the rain-swept harbour. It looked miserable out, but he wouldn’t have swapped it for the weather he knew Marker and his team would be enduring. It was always the same in Hong Kong, like walking around with a hot flannel a couple of inches from your face.
He looked over the notes he’d made during the conversation, and didn’t feel hopeful. In fact, in a situation like this, he had no real idea where to begin. There were too many important interests involved, most of them with no higher objective in mind than the preservation of a barely defensible status quo.
The Foreign Office had set up the liaison with the Kuala Lumpur people, he thought – someone there should have some interest in following through against the pirates. And the insurance companies were certainly more interested in stanching their financial haemorrhage than in preserving Beijing’s sensitivities. They would have some clout in the Cabinet Room.
Colhoun wondered if Marker was right in thinking the men in Beijing could be shamed into acting against the pirates. In his years in Hong Kong he had been baffled by the Chinese, and had almost come to believe the nostrum proposed by his CO at HMS Tamar, that the only two motivating forces in the Chinese psyche were greed and the need to save face.
He supposed the latter was what Marker was counting on. He was the man on the spot, a man whose judgement in such situations had always been good. If Marker wanted his team to do a photo shoot behind Chinese lines then Colhoun would do his best to get the man a diplomatic green light.
The problem remained – where to begin? Colhoun decided he needed advice from a disinterested quarter, and flicked through his tattered leather telephone book for Oliver Bradburn’s number. They had both been in Hong Kong for the same two-year period in the mid-eighties, Colhoun with the Marines, Bradburn completing the last phase of a long diplomatic career, and a friendship between their wives had widened to include them. Jenny still wrote to Alice Bradburn, but he had not talked to Oliver since a chance meeting at Twickenham a couple of years ago.
‘He’s sitting in the garden,’ Alice told him, and there was a long wait
.
Her husband would be in his early seventies by now, Colhoun thought. He hoped that Bradburn had not lost touch with, or given up on, that world he had lived in for so long.
‘Long time no hear,’ the familiar voice exclaimed. ‘To what do we owe the pleasure?’
‘I need some advice,’ Colhoun said honestly. ‘I want to ask you about the situation in Hong Kong.’
‘Fire away. I haven’t been back for three years, but I think I have a pretty good idea of what’s going on.’
Colhoun felt relieved. ‘Say I wanted to do something which would irritate the Communists, make them lose a lot of face, make them angry – where would I find support for doing something like that in Hong Kong?’
‘What are you planning to do? No, I know you can’t tell me. Well, the answer’s pretty easy – hardly anywhere. Nowhere that counts.’
‘Why?’
‘They’ve made this deal with Beijing and they’re hoping it will stick. They may not like it very much, and they may not trust Beijing, but they’re still hoping. And they’re terrified of giving the Communists an excuse to tear it up. It’s like the thirties, but you wouldn’t remember that. It’s appeasement.’
‘Who are the "they" you’re taking about?’
‘The business people in Hong Kong are the most influential people involved. They can put pressure on both the Governor there and the Government here. And they’ll have friends and partners in the business world here who’ll do the same. There’s probably a few local politicians who’d like to stand up to the Chinese, but you’ll always find a few Don Quixotes. When all’s said and done, in two years from now Beijing will be in charge. It’s not in anyone’s interest to stir things up.’
‘What about here in the UK?’
‘Hmmm. There’s a lot of people who find the whole deal shabby, and are happy to say so. Of course they won’t have to live with the consequences. I know the MoD’s pretty fed up with drug smugglers using Chinese waters as a sanctuary, but you’d know more about that than I do.’
‘Aye,’ Colhoun agreed noncommittally. ‘So how are you coping with retirement?’
The two men talked for another ten minutes, concluding with vague promises of a visit. Colhoun put the phone down, hoping his mind would still be as sharp when he was Bradburn’s age, and feeling profoundly pessimistic about the chances of getting his team the green light they wanted.
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