by Adam Hall
Gun at my back, prodding.
His arm was swinging again, the arm of my inert and unconversational friend. It was irritating, and after a mile or ten miles or fifty miles in this blinding heat I thought about grabbing his hand again to keep him still, and then I thought now wait a minute, this kind of pendulum motion might be an advantage, because every time his arm swings forwards it helps me keep moving, bloody clever, yes, but every time it swings back, quite, not bloody clever, you're losing your nut, you know that? You're going stark raving bonkers.
A possibility, just a bare possibility, that if I could manage to centre the psyche for a while and then fall down deliberately and land with him on top of me as a shield against the rifle, and at the same time grab the ankles of the man in front and bring him down, you've got no energy left, you bloody fool, I know, but you've got to think about something.
Gun hit my spine.
Get on, yes.
Sound of my breathing, like sawing wood, sawing slowly through a huge tree trunk, in, out, in, out, while the muscles blazed, thirsting for more oxygen, more oxygen all the time, legs staggering with the knees locked, otherwise fall, fall down, ought not to do that, wouldn't take kindly, no.
Blinding sun and streaming stones and his swinging arm and the pain of the gun prodding, on and on, until there were roofs curving against the sky and a bell somewhere, tolling like a brainstorm in my skull, my legs lurching left and right, my feet shuffling like a cripple's and the whole of my body burning under the weight of the man, the weight of the sun, the weight of the sky. Stop.
Several men, coming onto the courtyard, one of them talking in Russian, asking what had happened.
Stood swaying, then no good, went down like an avalanche and hit the stones, man saying in Russian, Put him against a wall and shoot him.
21: Ki
His eyes were dark stones.
A thin tendril of smoke climbed from the bowl of incense under the lamp, reminding me of the room where I'd met Spur.
What did they do to that snake? I wanted to ask him.
His eyes were so dark in the hollows of his face that they seemed to disappear sometimes, becoming shadows in the low light of the lamp; but I knew he was watching me all the time, with that reptilian ability to go on watching with such stillness that you forget there's a brain behind these eyes, thinking about you.
He was sitting on his heels in the meditation position, his back erect and his thin yellow hands folded on his thighs. It might have been that he was trying to hypnotise me, and I took care to study him, noting everything I could to keep the conscious occupied: the intricate pattern of his kimono with its gold dragons and hieroglyphs, the wisp of white beard at the point of his chin and the sharp ears that had the bone yellowness of ivory carving, the fine chiselling of the nose.
Tung Kuo-feng.
A Chinese, Spur had said, scion of a family traceable to the early Ch'ing dynasty. Tung isn't a young man any more; I'd put him at sixty. But extremely fit; lots of ki, you know, the real thing. If those bastards in London are putting you solo into the field with Tung Kuo-feng, you don't stand a chance. Not a chance in hell.
A current of air met the tendril of smoke and twisted it into a spiral; from somewhere outside I could hear distant chanting, to the sound of wooden clappers; it must be sundown. The man in front of me didn't speak; perhaps he was silently joining in the prayers.
What would he pray for? He should pray for the souls of the departed; this man had killed Sinclair, the British Secretary of State, the American Ambassador, Jason, Spur, Soong Yongshen and his sister, Soong Li-fei, their necks bared under the sword. Let him pray for them. And for himself, if I had a chance to close in.
We sat facing each other in the low light of the lamp. My back burned from the bruising of the gun; my legs were still trembling from the strain of the five-hour march with the man on my back. I was close enough now to Tung Kuo-feng, and I could probably move with at least half my normal speed; but he would have had reports of me from his team of hit men, and would be wary; he wouldn't allow me this close to him without some kind of protection, and his hands, lying so peacefully on the folds of the black and gold silk, probably concealed a ninja weapon. Or was he counting on the fact that out there in the courtyard he had saved my life?
I wasn't ready for him yet, in any case. We want you to talk to him, Ferris had said.
The chanting and the clack of the wooden clappers died away, and a gong boomed; then there was quiet.
"Who are you?"
His voice was quiet, but the tone had an extraordinary harshness, sounding as if it weren't coming from a living body but from a recorder that was distorting it, giving it a metallic flatness.
"Colonel West, British Army, attached NATO defence force, Asian theatre."
The assumed rank of colonel came under routine instructions in the event of the executive's decision to use a military cover; it was the only one I had: you don't do a night drop with a black chute into the Korean mountains to look for geological specimens.
"You feel," he asked me, "that is the best you can do?"
"That's my true identity."
His English was correct and educated; when I'd been sprawled on the big grey flagstones out there a few hours ago, he'd spoken Chinese and an interpreter had put it straight into Russian; I'd understood only the Russian side, as Tung had repeated with unyielding authority that I was not to be killed until he had questioned me.
"What brought you to the mountains?"
"I was on a night exercise.
"With what objective?"
"Survival."
"I realise that your training as a secret agent requires you to explain as little as possible, but we must not waste time. I have to go through the formality of questioning you, since those were the terms of your reprieve; I must therefore know your cover story, so that I can prove later if necessary that I have indeed questioned you. Let me at this point make it clear that while I carry a certain degree of authority, the person in ultimate command here is Colonel Sinitsin of the KGB, whom you saw briefly, I think, when you arrived. In other respects I am, like yourself, a prisoner."
The Russian connection.
I still hadn't got things worked out. I hadn't been fully conscious when I'd arrived, and the incoming data had gone into the memory in its raw state for later analysis, if I lived. I had seen several Europeans looking down at me and at the body of the Korean, two of them in grey formal suits and polo-necked sweaters; it was one of these who had told the Koreans to put me against a wall and shoot me, speaking in Russian to an interpreter. Other men had been there: Koreans again, wearing track suits with the insignia of the Olympiad; behind them there'd been the terraced roofs of the monastery, part of it in ruins, and the roof of a temple nearby, and two large shapes under camouflage nets, one of them with a rotor poking out; above one of the roofs there had been an omnidirectional radio antenna.
I'd had time to do a rough analysis of all this data while I'd been recovering in the cell where they'd thrown me: originally, I suppose, a monk's personal quarters, a narrow cubicle with a grilled window and a crude wooden bed. The most obvious thing was that Tung Kuo-feng hadn't sought refuge here, as the blind priest had thought; he was here to conduct or participate in what looked like a minor military operation. There were always several track-suited guards in sight, and from watching them I'd become more and more convinced that they were at least para-military and professionally trained.
"Where are your papers?" Tung asked me tonelessly.
"I lost track of them when I came down. It was a bad landing."
"Your flying suit was also lost?"
"I took it off when the sun came up; it was too hot."
"And 'lost track of it'."
"That's right."
I sensed movement at the edge of my vision; there were two grilled apertures on one wall of the chamber, showing a lamplit arch beyond; I assumed someone was passing there, outside, or had stopped to watch us
, and listen.
"No one else here," Tung said, "understands English." I felt suddenly chilled; he was reading my mind. "It is important for you to know that when you and I converse, even in the company of others, it is in secret. What other languages do you speak?"
"A bit of army French."
He fell silent, waiting for me to say more. I didn't. "You say you were on an exercise in survival. Who else was with you?"
"No one."
"You chose to be alone?"
"Yes. I was getting fed up sitting around with nothing to do. There's nothing here for a defence force to defend. So I asked permission to do a one-man survival course over the weekend. I've done it before, quite a few times, in England. Were you educated there? Your English is pretty good."
He said: "When will they begin searching for you?"
"They won't need to. I can use the radio here to tell them I'm okay." I left a slight pause, as he'd been doing, but he didn't ask what radio. "There'll be some trouble for those Koreans, though. That fellow was doing his damnedest to shoot me dead. I suppose you know that."
Two seconds, three. "I have told you we must not waste time. I know that you are an agent in the British Secret Service and that your assignment was to enquire into the death of your Secretary of State in Pekin. You have resisted efforts on the part of my own agents to eliminate you. You are here in the hope of eliminating me, since it is believed I was responsible for the two political assassinations in Pekin, and might be in the process of ordering others, as indeed I am. For your information, TWA Flight 232 from Pekin sustained an accident on take-off early this morning, killing more than fifty people including an American football team; they had been visiting the People's Republic of China on a goodwill mission with the aim of furthering the interests of international sport."
I think he wasn't quite finished, but I got up at that point and did a bit of walking about to ease the leg muscles. "Look, you ought not to be telling me things like that at this stage, before the trial. You've just made some pretty hefty confessions."
His small grey head was turning to watch me. "As you know, the Americans are as fanatical about sport as the English. The object of the sabotage action was to further incense the Americans and strain their new relations with China."
"All I can say is, I've given you fair warning."
It was like having two conversations going on, but we both knew what we were doing, and we both knew that we knew.
I kept on walking, five yards one way and five back, while he sat there like a carved Buddha. I didn't pass either of the two grilled apertures.
"You realise," he said evenly, "that you have no chance of leaving here alive."
"Possibly not, but it's my duty to warn you that if I don't get a message to my unit by radio then you'll have to suffer the consequences. They'll certainly start a search for me after forty-eight hours, because they know exactly where I came down and I told them I'd telephone them from the village to report progress."
"I am going to correct what I just told you. Your only chance of leaving here alive is to give me your confidence."
And blow my own cover.
"That's what I'm doing."
His head turned again to follow me. "There will be a point in our conversation when you will realise that your cover is less important than the proposition I shall make. You might find yourself in a position to prevent the assassination of the next three people on the list. The dates of these events are already fixed, and the first is to take place in two days' time — unless you are prepared to cooperate."
I got impatient with him. "But surely you realise that the moment I rejoin my unit you'll be hunted down and arrested?"
He ignored that, as I knew he would; my remark was simply there for the record as part of my cover. It might not be true that he knew who I was or that we were the only people here who understood English or that he was a prisoner at the monastery; the chances were that there was someone on the other side of these apertures in the wall with a microphone, or that Tung had one concealed in his hand for that matter.
But now I understood something about the Russian connection. Not all, but something. It concerned Chinese-American relations.
"I must tell you," he went on, "that the assassination of the British Secretary of State was a mistake, and that I deeply regret it. The one responsible has already forfeited his life."
Soong Yongshen.
"That hardly helps the late British Secretary of State, does it? You bloody terrorists don't care whom you wipe out. You know that man had a family?"
"I mention the incident so that you shall be conversant with the overall situation. And the situation is this. A short time ago I received a proposal from the Soviet KGB that I should assist them in a certain endeavour, the object of which would be the severance of diplomatic relations between the United States and China, and with it, the end of the so-called triangle diplomacy involving those two powers and Japan. The threat to the Soviet Union presented by the growing recognition of China is seen by the Kremlin as intolerable. The four thousand miles of frontier common to Russia and China and the constant military skirmishes across it are of deep concern to the Soviets; in addition, China is close to developing a nuclear missile with a range of eight thousand miles, capable of reaching Moscow. It is my personal opinion that the severance of relations between China and the United States may be a preliminary to a Soviet attack on China, with a view to pre-empting a nuclear-armed, American-supported attack by China against the Soviets. To you and to me, such fears on the part of the Russians may seem extreme; but you must remember these people are xenophobic to a dangerous degree."
I stopped walking about and sat down to listen, leaning my shoulders against the cool stone wall to ease the bruises. I had fifty questions for him, but I didn't speak; I wanted to see how far he would go in what he was telling me; but even at this stage I was ready to take notice because he was answering a lot of the questions that had been on my mind before I'd left Seoul.
He wasn't putting out an elaborate smokescreen, I knew that. He wasn't even interested in my intelligence background; if he'd wanted to get any information out of me he would have thrown me to the Koreans and told them to go to work, and they would have enjoyed it after what I'd done to their friend.
"I declined the Russian's proposal that I should assist them." Tung hadn't moved since I'd come in here, but there was nothing lifeless about him except his voice; I had the feeling that if I made a wrong move he'd react with the speed of a snake. "They offered me several million US dollars to help them; I forget how many; I was not interested. But they persisted, saying that I was the only man who could successfully carry out the necessary tasks involved. I told them I was no longer active internationally. They offered me political power in the new government of China, but again I refused; the power I have now is sufficient to me."
His ash-grey head was turning slightly, so that he faced me directly in the low light of the lamp, and in the shadowed and stone-dark eyes I saw an expression shimmering, like a reflection on black water.
"So they took away my son."
I felt a kind of pressure in the air, as if the edge of a storm had passed across the mountains, leaving the chamber grave-quiet and the flame of the lamp pointed and motionless in this deathly calm.
"Tung Chuan, my son. He was studying the Buddhist faith, and was to be a priest; but they seized him in North Korea and accused him of spying; and now he has vanished."
The air seemed charged again with pressure, as if dark lightning had struck, and I knew now what it was: it was an expression of his psyche. His rage was so intense that it was producing an aura, and I was recording it, somewhere in the complex psycho-chemical organism that I identified as myself.
"I do not know where he is", he said. "my son, Tung Chuan."
It was a little while before I could get my senses back to normal.
"That's rough luck," I said. "The British Secretary of State's family know where he
is. In a coffin, what few bits you left of him."
I think he could have killed me then, and I was ready for it. I think that at the back of my mind I was wanting to do something for Sinclair, and Jason, and the American and the girl with the cinnamon eyes; I think I'd wanted to provoke this murderous bastard so that I could destroy him before he could destroy someone else.
Unprofessional conduct. I'd got business to do here. But it fitted the cover of a forthright Army colonel shocked by the death of the British delegate.
In a moment Tung Kuo-feng said carefully: "My agents have been trying to find my son, and have failed; they report at he is known to be in South Korea, but that is all. It may be that the resources of the British Secret Service could discover more than that; Tung Chuan was seized by Russian agents, not Koreans; your Service might have learned of it through its agents in Moscow, and are unaware of its significance. You should inform them. A great deal of trouble could be avoided if my son was set free.»
"I'm afraid the British Army hasn't any agents in Moscow, or anywhere else."
He said: "The moment my son was safe, I would halt my operations and you would have achieved your objective."
Cool stones against my back, and the stillness of the lamp's flame against my eyes; voices in the distance, coming rough the grilled apertures, and farther way the sound of miniature bells as the goats were gathered in the mountain dusk. No real sense that we were ourselves held captive by guards armed with submachine guns while two military helicopters stood by; _instead, a sense of karma, a feeling that what this man was saying was true, and that I should trust him; and a premonition of enormous danger, not only for me but for many.
Fatigue, that was all.
"You could avert enormous danger," the quiet monotone came to me through the waves of silence, "for many people." A spasm of nerves passed along my spine as I realised how easily this man was reading my thoughts; I sat straighter against the hardness of the wall at my back, trying to borrow from its strength. "Before the advent of Mao, the Chinese military was trained by the Soviet Red Army, and is still oriented towards the Russians' tactics, strategies and weapon systems. On the political and ideological level the two countries are opposed, but there are several Army generals still capable of wielding great power, and they feel a natural brotherhood for their Soviet mentors and would like to be training with them once more. Lin Pao's attempted coup against Mao did not succeed; but Mao is now dead, and a new power struggle has begun in China. We are very close to seeing a general take command, supported by high-ranking military advisers, all of them friendly to the Soviets. I do not need to tell you what such a volte face would mean: the immediate destruction of the American-Chinese-Japanese bloc and a massive Soviet-Chinese threat to the West. The next two actions I shall undertake on behalf of the Soviets will bring this about, within a matter of days, unless you can prevent it."