At four Colhoun rang with the expected news. ‘So plain clothes,’ he concluded, ‘and no traceable equipment. Needless to say, if anything goes wrong you’ll be on your own as far as the politicians are concerned. I’ll do what I can from this end, but it may not be much.’
‘We know,’ Marker said.
‘Oh, by the way, the Chinese Ambassador has been called in to the FO this morning. He’s going to be given a stern rap on the knuckles, and with any luck they’ll assume that that’s it as far as any British response is concerned.’
‘That’s good,’ Marker agreed. Maybe they wouldn’t be expected, after all. It was just difficult to believe that no one had missed the boat which Cafell and Finn had stolen, and put two and two together.
He supposed they would soon find out.
Colhoun was wishing them luck, saying goodbye.
Marker pressed the disconnection bar and punched out Rosalie’s number at the OSCG office, half expecting she wouldn’t be there.
She was.
‘We’ll be off soon,’ he told her. ‘And we’re planning to be back in about thirty-six hours.’
‘Good luck,’ she said, and he could hear the tightness in her voice.
‘I love you,’ he said, the words sounding both strange and true.
‘I love you,’ she echoed, after only the slightest hesitation. And for better or worse, she knew she did. ‘You be careful,’ she added almost angrily.
‘And you,’ he said. ‘There’s plenty of Blue Dragons still out there.’
‘I’ll be OK.’
For a moment he doubted it, and an almost overwhelming urge to stay and protect her welled up in his heart. But a man had to do what a man had to do, he thought sourly. How fucking ridiculous that sounded.
‘Come back to me,’ she said, and put the phone down.
He did likewise, and stood there for more than a minute, wondering if he was making the biggest mistake of his life.
10
About a quarter of a mile south of Tai A Chau Island, at the extreme south-western corner of Hong Kong waters, the Rigid Raider bobbed in the gentle swell as the four black-faced SBS men manoeuvred the two Klepper canoes over the side. Finn and Cafell lowered themselves into the back seats, took the MP5s and bergens that were passed down, and held the canoes steady for Marker and Dubery to follow. The spray deck was positioned, clamped and tied. The four men started paddling, oblivious to the hands raised in farewell by the Raider’s two-man crew.
Marker and Finn took the lead, the former steering a course west by south-west on the rudder bar with his feet. By Cafell’s reckoning Chuntao was eighteen and a quarter nautical miles ahead of them, and provided the sea remained calm they should be there in under an hour and a half. ‘Just like a row across Poole Harbour,’ Finn had joked, but there were few men on earth who could have taken on a journey like this with such equanimity. This was what they had been trained for – to perform tasks as ordinary as paddling a canoe better than anyone else.
They could hardly have hoped for better conditions, Marker realized. The sky was overcast, reducing visibility; the sea was calm enough to make progress easy, yet choppy enough to hide the Kleppers from either human eye or radar scanner. A cool breeze would have been nice, but then nothing was ever perfect.
The four men paddled on, not speaking, each feeling the tension. If a Chinese patrol boat found them it would all be over – the weapons and equipment would have to go over the side, and they would have to trot out their ludicrous cover story of British athletes in training for the Olympics. If they ever got back to Hong Kong the RM Quartermaster would probably kill them for losing his second and last low-light camcorder.
Islands loomed out of the darkness to both left and right, but the sea dead ahead remained empty. Marker paddled on automatically, letting his shoulders glide through the rhythmic motion as the blades sliced through the water. He was thinking about Rosalie, and about feeling hungry for life again, and hoping that his sense of obligation to her would not make him overcautious. In the seat behind him, synchronizing the strokes of his paddle, Finn was thinking about the life his schoolfriends still lived in Hackney. Bored and angry, they hated themselves and everybody else. And here he was – it was like being in a fucking movie!
In the following canoe Dubery was thinking about the past, his and his family’s, and nights like this which were not like this – another sea full of islands, with cold winds scouring his cheeks and his father’s boat tossing in the swell. Behind him, Cafell had his mind on the future. Perhaps he could make a living as a model-maker – mostly ships, of course, but he could model anything, and there was nothing quite as satisfying as working with his hands. He and Ellen could have a studio together, somewhere by the sea. Somewhere near Lyme Regis.
They paddled on, reaching what marathon runners call the ‘wall’ and pushing right through it. About an hour into the journey a short, dark line appeared in the distance, and slowly but surely it grew into the shape they expected. Chuntao had a pair of six-hundred-foot peaks in its six square miles, and from either east or west its silhouette was shaped like a saddle.
According to the information Cafell had gathered from several sources that afternoon, the island had been uninhabited until recently, and as the Kleppers drew nearer the lack of any welcoming lights suggested this was still true of the eastern side. There was supposed to be an abandoned monastery in the centre of the island, but there had never been any agriculture of note, nor any local fishing community. The older buildings by the small bay which Cafell and Finn had seen on their previous visit were all that remained of a settlement set up by fleeing Japanese soldiers in the last days of the Second World War but disbanded a few years later when the victorious Communists asserted their control throughout the southern littoral.
The Navy had received satellite photographs of the whole region from the Americans in the late seventies, and a study of these had shown Cafell that his impression of the island as rocky and sparsely vegetated had been a misleading one – most of Chuntao was thickly vegetated. For this reason it had been agreed that they would make landfall in one of several bays on the nearer, eastern side of the island, and then make their way across country to establish an OP overlooking the port facilities.
It had sounded dead simple in theory. But looking across the Klepper’s bow at the island’s rugged contours, Marker wondered how easy it would be in practice.
‘Ship ahoy,’ Finn whispered behind him. ‘Off the stern.’
Marker turned to look, and saw the ship’s lights, a mile or so behind them.
Cafell was examining it through the nightscope. ‘Warship,’ he said, his voice barely audible. ‘An EF5 Guided Missile Destroyer.’
It was heading north into the Pearl River estuary. Ten minutes earlier and it would have come close to running them down. There was no doubt at all that they would have been seen.
‘Let’s give it a little while,’ Marker whispered, and the four of them sat there in the bobbing Kleppers, watching the dark wedge of the Chinese destroyer steadily shrink into the distance.
He gave the order to resume paddling, and soon they were inching towards the inviting beach, not expecting any defences, sophisticated or otherwise, but preferring to be safe than sorry. Once ashore they found the sands surrounded on all sides by dense vegetation, and had no trouble finding a reasonable hiding place for the Kleppers. The intention had been to disassemble and bury the canoes, but Marker decided the chances of their being found in such a place were remote, and there was always the possibility they would need a quick getaway. Having to build your own boat tended to slow down an escape, so they left them intact.
The Kleppers hidden, their make-up retouched, the four men started up what once might have been a track. Marker supposed that its near-impassability was a good sign, but with knife-edged leaves whipping him across the face and God only knew what varieties of local fauna lurking in the trees above and on the ground below, he found it hard not to wi
sh for a broad and well-lit path. Concrete if possible.
Finn took the lead scout position, eyes and ears alert for possible trouble up ahead. Cafell came close behind him with their map, Marker in third place, Dubery the Tail-end Charlie responsible for their rear. Each man cradled the silenced MP5SD in his arms.
The quickest route probably lay across the saddle, but they had decided on the longer route around the southern peak, partly because it seemed from the satellite photos to offer slightly less chance of either an unforeseen meeting or a long-distance sighting, and partly because it would bring them straight to their chosen destination on the wooded headland south of the port facility.
It took them about an hour and a half to cover the two miles, and it was shortly after three in the morning when Marker and Dubery had their first view of the two jetties, gantry crane and buildings. It was not the same spot Cafell and Finn had used: this time one line of sight lay straight down across the cabins which climbed up the hill from the small bay, and another, some thirty degrees around to the north, looked down the length of the broad main jetty.
It was a perfect place for taking pictures. The only trouble was, most of what they had hoped to immortalize on video was gone. Scouring the jetties and adjacent ocean with the nightscope, Cafell could find no patrol boat, no Ocean Carousel and no Indian Sun. There was not a single freighter at anchor, and even the speedboat population had shrunk to five.
The four men dug out a good-sized rectangular scrape among the trees, covered it with the light tarpaulin, and then added various pieces of vegetation for camouflage. A breeze was now beginning to blow, and the sky seemed even darker than before. Cafell and Dubery lost the toss for first watch, and the other two snuggled as cosily into their damp earth beds as they could. It was a far cry from the silk sheets of the previous night, Marker thought, as the first drops of rain started beating a tattoo on the tarpaulin.
There was nothing in the papers and nothing on the radio, but Rosalie still arrived at the OSCG offices half expecting to hear that a major diplomatic incident had taken place in the South China Sea that morning. The normal buzz of activity told her it hadn’t, for which she felt only half grateful. It might well mean that the SBS team had been neither intercepted nor observed, but there was always the possibility that the Chinese had simply arrested them and decided not to make the matter public.
She told herself there was no point in worrying about him, that she had her own work to do. Unfortunately there weren’t many grounds for optimism in that regard either. The Blue Dragon Red Pole had been released the previous evening, and unless he made an uncharacteristically stupid mistake, was likely to remain so – a free and prosperous executive in a rising corporation.
Rosalie remembered her father once saying that the less regulated free enterprise became the harder it was to distinguish from organized crime. He had been in a good position to know.
She yawned, stretched and walked across to the coffee machine. Alone for the first night in three, she had expected a better sleep, but neither Marker’s mission nor the knowledge that the Blue Dragons still wanted her dead had been particularly conducive to a restful state of mind.
‘You look awful,’ Ormond said cheerily, appearing at her shoulder.
‘You don’t look so wonderful yourself,’ she told him. And he didn’t. The puffy face was redder than ever, reminding her of an article she had once read on spontaneous human combustion. Those people had burst into flame though; Ormond seemed more likely to simply explode.
‘Any news of our SBS friends?’ he asked.
‘I haven’t seen them since yesterday,’ she said. ‘They’re probably working with the Marine Police on the latest hijacking.’
‘Who knows?’ Ormond said, pouring coffee into his Manchester United mug. ‘No one tells me anything any more.’ He smiled. ‘Only two more years,’ he murmured.
‘And then what?’ she asked.
‘Then I go home, buy a semi-detached and sit in it, wondering why I was so damned honest out here,’ he said. ‘I’ll probably take some security job. But it’ll be strange going back. I’ve been out here for almost thirty years now, which is longer than I lived in England. And when I went back for my mother’s funeral last year I couldn’t stand the place.’ He laughed, and walked away across the office towards his desk.
She went back to hers and sat there sipping at the strong coffee. Li was visiting the rest of the adoption agency offices, motivated more by a desire to be thorough than any expectation of a breakthrough. The baby-smuggling investigation had turned into a cul-de-sac: only the Blue Dragons knew where the babies were coming from, and the Triad vow of silence precluded any possibility that the relevant information would be shared with the police.
The cross-border connection was the key. In the hope that something might jog a memory or reveal a connection, she went back through her notes on the life and times of Wang Xiao-bo. Reaching the ‘missing’ mid-eighties years of his career, she stopped at her note in the margin: ‘penal system director?’ That struck a chord, but what was the tune?
The dissident. Two or three years ago, soon after Marker had left. She couldn’t remember the man’s name, but she remembered him talking on TV about the months he had spent in detention on the mainland. He had been held either in or near the Shenzhen Zone, and he had been part of a forced-labour crew working on the construction of a dock.
She reached for the phone, punched out the number for the South China Morning Post, and asked for Gu Yao-bang. He had no trouble remembering the dissident’s name – Lin Chun.
‘And he’s still across the border?’ she asked.
‘Last I heard he still lives in Shenzhen.’
‘If I remember right, he went back voluntarily when the Immigration Department told him he couldn’t bring his whole family out.’
‘He was too much of a Commie for them, and they made a deal with the Communists. He went back, but not to prison.’
‘I don’t suppose you have an address?’
‘No, but someone on the political desk might have. I can ask.’
‘Thanks. And while you’re at it, can you ask about Wang Xiao-bo? I need to know what he was doing in the early to mid-eighties.’
‘I’ll get back to you in a few minutes,’ Gu said, and hung up.
She sat at her desk, feeling more than a little excited, waiting for him to call back. Eight minutes and twenty-three seconds had passed when the phone rang.
‘Lin Chun lives on the city outskirts, in Baguling, in a block of flats on Nigang Road. Block 17, flat 43. He lives with his wife and daughter and his wife’s parents, all in a two-room flat. One of the journalists went up to see him a few months ago hoping for a follow-up story and was told to take a running jump. He doesn’t have many fond memories of Hong Kong, apparently.’
‘That’s no great surprise,’ she said. ‘What does he do now? Does he have a job?’
‘Something very menial, I should think, but I don’t know. As for your friend Wang, from 1982 to 1987 he was in charge of Guangdong’s prisons and their labour force. And I’m told everyone remembers that – everyone but you and I apparently – because there was a big row when he appointed a completely unqualified brother to run the Shenzhen sector.’ Gu grunted. ‘The brother must have been busy – most of Shenzhen City was built by forced labour.’
She thanked him profusely, hung up, and drained the last of her coffee, thinking that the Immigration Department should still have Lin Chun’s original interviews on file. Its headquarters were only a short tram ride away on the other side of Wan Chai. She alighted at the southern end of Gloucester Road, and walked beside Victoria Park to the entrance.
After ten minutes of bureaucratic tussling she won access to Lin Chun’s file and a microfiche machine, but the sense of triumph soon faded. There was no more information here than she had remembered for herself. No location was given for the dock construction; it was not even clear whether it had been built on the mainland or on on
e of the hundreds of islands close to the southern coast. It could even have been Chuntao, she realized with a start, in which case she was no further ahead than she had been that morning.
The one new fact concerned timing – Lin Chun had worked on the dock in the weeks immediately preceding his escape to Hong Kong. Seeing that the records of illegal entrants were chronologically arranged, Rosalie read through the interrogation reports on others who had been smuggled across the border in the following month, and struck gold with a young woman named Sung Mei-ling. She had also been an unwilling visitor to the dock construction site, and mostly in the same labouring capacity as Lin. But Sung had also, on several occasions, been taken away from her labouring duties to look after a roomful of babies.
She, according to Immigration, had been allowed to stay. And she was still living in Hong Kong.
Rosalie took the MRT and a taxi to the address in Sham Shui Po, and got directions from a neighbour to the hairdressing salon where Sung worked. There she spent the first ten minutes reassuring the woman that she wasn’t about to be sent back, while inwardly thinking that in two years’ time it would all be academic in any case.
She asked her about the times she had been taken to look after the babies.
‘It was terrible. Very sad. Some of them were ill, and they cried a lot.’
‘Were they all girls?’
‘Of course,’ she said, surprised, as if the improbability of unwanted male babies had never occurred to her.
‘Where was this place? Have you any idea?’
‘Not really. We always arrived after dark and we left before dawn. But it must have been in the Zone, or close by. The journey in the lorry only took about an hour.’
‘They were building a dock?’
‘Yes. They were breaking up rocks and mixing up the concrete, putting up new buildings. Hundreds of prisoners were there. It was a big project.’
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