by Adam Hall
There are difficulties, ma'am. The agent's position is hazardous in the extreme.
He's alone?
Yes.
Can't you invoke assistance from others? From NATO forces in the area, for instance?
While the rain ran down the window and the red buses swayed through the streets, and the pigeons huddled along the parapets, as Big Ben chimed the hour, and the agent "in the area" sat in his sweat at the radio console feeling as Impotent and as incompetent as that clear and admonishing voice declared that he was.
"Message understood."
Ferris.
We waited. In a moment Sinitsin said: "In addition to the assistance of the Japanese Red Army team, there will be — " Then he broke off as the other radio opened up with a signal, and our heads turned to watch the illuminated panel. The sender was speaking in Russian.
"Zero-one-nine. Zero-one-nine to Action 5."
Major Alyev moved quickly to the transceiver and switched to transmit. "Action 5 to Zero-one-nine, receiving you." Sinitsin took three precise paces and stood next to his aide. There were now only Captain Samoteykin and Yang behind me, but they were both armed and I knew that Yang had his finger inside the trigger-guard of the machine gun, and I was already feeling that sinister vibration in the air as Tung Kuo-feng sensed my thoughts.
"Zero-one-nine to Action 5. Further to our transmission of 14:16 hours, the developing opposition activities in the vicinity of Sinch'on-ni necessitate the removal of Tung Chuan to a more secure environment. Acknowledge."
I looked away from the transceiver but went on listening.
This was Moscow.
Alyev touched the transmit lever. "Action 5 acknowledging.
This is a tough one, Ferris had said a few minutes ago on the other radio; but London had launched a massive intelligence search in response to my signal of last night, and local agents had been sensitised to the area where Tung Chuan was being held, and the KGB unit had felt the trembling of the web. At some time while I was in my cell playing with bricks there had been earlier transmissions, alerting Sinitsin, who in turn had reported to Moscow.
"Zero-one-nine to Action 5. Tung Chuan and our party will board Cathay Pacific Flight 584 departing Kimpo Airport, Seoul, 02:18 tomorrow, destination Pyongyang, North Korea. Our party will signal you on arrival. Acknowledge and repeat."
Major Alyev responded.
I sat picking at the grime that had got under my nails since I'd dropped out of the sky two nights ago. I was listening to the death knell of Jade One and there was nothing I could do about it. When Alyev completed the exchange and switched to automatic receive he was going to put the light out over the board in London.
Croder had been getting warm: too warm. They had all lent their weight to the concerted effort to find Tung Chuan: the sleepers and the agents-in-place throughout South-east Asia, the Asian Signals Coordinate, the Soviet Department V Operations Monitor Section, Dossier File (Asia), Intelligence Support Stations (South Korea) and Active Signals Search. The mobile direction-finding units had deployed their equipment into the areas indicated by reports and information coming in from the departments and support stations in London and Asian theatre, and had gradually closed in on the region of Sinch'on-ni. In another few hours they would have made a hit, and signalled Ferris; London would have ordered a para-military operation to release Tung Chuan, and soon afterwards we would have heard the thunder of a fighter aircraft passing through the night sky low above the monastery here, and Tung Kuo-feng would have turned to Colonel Sinitsin and said: I shall do no more for you.
Mission completed, objective achieved, so forth.
But not now.
"Zero-one-nine to Action 5. You will remain open to receive."
The KGB major acknowledged and left the receiver circuit open.
I had enough time. It would only need ten seconds to hit my own transmit lever and tell Ferris: Tung Chuan is being flown from Seoul to Pyongyang at 02:18 tomorrow, Cathay Pacific Flight 584. Get him. But I hadn't been told to start transmitting again and the moment Sinitsin heard me he'd be auspicious and if he didn't stop me before I'd finished the signal he'd pick up "Tung Chuan", «Seoul», "Pyongyang" and "Cathay Pacific" and would realise I understood Russian and was passing on the message from Moscow. He would then do two things: he would have me taken outside and shot and he would signal Moscow and tell them the plans would have to be changed. And Ferris could send in a whole battalion of NATO troops to pick up Tung Chuan at the airport tomorrow morning, and draw blank.
There was tension in the room again.
"If they move him to Pyongyang," Captain Samoteykin began, but Sinitsin cut him short.
"Say nothing now."
Professional caution: he wasn't trusting the Korean interpreter, the only non-Russian here — as far as he knew — who could speak the language.
Tension from Tung Kuo-feng, too. He must have picked up the same names from the Russian, expecially "Tung Chuan", and probably realised his son was being taken from Seoul to Pyongyang; he didn't know the flight number or the time of departure, but the move was probably imminent and he'd heard the name of the airline; if he signalled his Triad they would move in on Kimpo Airport and wait for Tung Chuan to arrive and try to get him out of the hands of his KGB guards.
But he couldn't transmit without instructions, any more than I could; if he made an attempt, the interpreter would read his Chinese and warn Sinitsin before he'd finished transmitting.
Some of the tension in the room was my own. While Tung was learning that his son was to be moved out of our reach and into North Korea, I was learning the most bitter lesson of the executive in the field: that he can come critically close to bringing off a mission and still have to see it snatched away from him without a chance in hell of holding on.
I wanted only ten seconds with my director on this radio, but I couldn't have it, and the only signal I could send that would make any sense would be: Ferris, we're finished.
26: Moon
Tung Kuo-feng sat perfectly still.
"My son is precious to me," he said in his toneless English. "Our line stems from the Ch'ing dynasty, and he is my eldest."
The thing moved closer to him.
I said nothing.
"They knew that," he said with his night-dark eyes brooding on mine. "That is why they abducted him."
The thing had reached him now, or one end of it had. The rest of it lay across the flagstones like a heavy rope. I tried to warn him but there was no sound.
"That is why it is so important for you to find my son. If I die it is not important to me. If my son dies, the line will be finished. I will do anything you wish, if you can save him."
The narrow mottled head slipped gracefully between the arm and the body of Tung Kuo-feng, appearing on his other side and curving across the golden dragons on the front of his robe, curving again and winding, compressing the dark silk.
Tung Kuo-feng began smiling, as if he knew a secret. I had never seen him smile before.
"They must have put something in the rat. Inside the frozen rat. Kori, perhaps. Or something synthetic, like flarismine." His body was almost hidden now by the squeezing coils. "Something to send it into a frenzy."
Then it constricted in one powerful spasm of nerve and muscle, and Tung's face turned dark with blood; it constricted again and again like a tensed coil-spring retracting until Tung Kuo-feng was a bloodied effigy in the shape of a man, with the dragons writhing across the wet silk of his robe as the boa went on squeezing, squeezing, until it blocked my breath and I woke shivering with the taste of his blood in my mouth, sour and primitive.
I opened my eyes. The oblong gap of light was still there in the door, with shadows moving across the arched ceiling as the flames of the lanterns moved in a draught of air. Under me I could feel the soft resilience of the straw-filled hessian mattress.
The sound came again.
I often dream about snakes.
Figures on my watch-face: 11:36.
That bloody thing in Seoul had upset me; I was going to dream about it for a long time, if there was a long time left to me. Highly unlikely.
Came again. So quiet that it could have just been in my mind; but I know my mind; it doesn't play tricks on me; it lets me know things; it lets me know the kind of things I should know.
The shadows on the arched ceiling outside the door of my cell looked much as I'd seen them before; they were moving in the same rhythm, as the mountain air breathed through the labyrinthine passages and apertures of the monastery, pulling at the lantern flames. These people could have lit this place like a supermarket if they'd wanted to; they had a generator going for the transceivers; but it was probably visible at night to some of the villages on the far slopes of the foothills, or to the wagoners and goatherds along the mountain tracks. They'd put camouflage nets over the two helicopters out there, so they wanted things to look normal.
A very definite click. Immediate associations: gun, wooden box, lock. It was too quiet for the moving mechanism of a gun and there wasn't a wooden box in this cell for anyone to open and nobody could get in here without -
Lock, yes.
Turning.
Rotten taste in my mouth from that dream: the taste of fear.
It was a heavy door, solid oak and with huge wrought hinges. I'd seen the key when they'd first put me in here, an enormous thing, the kind of thing you'd only ever see in a flea market, genuine antique, and so forth. They'd oiled the tumblers through the ages; monks run a tight ship, orderliness next to godliness. But there's no way you can turn a lock this size without making at least a slight noise.
Tung.
For the last five hours he'd been shut in with his sense of impotence in the face of karma, hearing his son's name again and again in that heavy Russian accent. I will do anything you wish, if you can save him. That was only in a dream, yes, but dreams are cyphers for a reality we haven't the time to understand.
No, it couldn't be Tung outside my door. He didn't need to come along here in the dead of night to talk to me, because he didn't think I knew any more about the Moscow signal than he did; he didn't know I understood Russian. Besides, he'd have to knock out Yang or the other guard: one of them was always outside and at this hour it would be Yang; I knew the shifts they worked. Yang wouldn't let him in here without permission from Sinitsin: the KGB was running this show, not Tung Kuo-feng.
Yang wouldn't let anyone in here.
I would have to think about that.
Other tiny sounds, from a different direction. Immediate associations: water rushing, fire crackling, both very far away; distant rain. I turned my head a little to listen and the sounds were suddenly much louder; it was the straw in the palliasse, close to my ear.
Mechanical sound again, of tumblers falling against the force of the spring, held back by the tines of the key. And I'd thought about it now. Yang wouldn't let anyone in here, so either he'd been called away from guard duty or someone had got at him. Unsatisfactory: these Koreans were military and they wouldn't take a guard away without relieving him, and no one could have got at him because no one would want to, except Tung, and Tung was under house arrest and had guards watching him wherever he went.
Pride?
There was nothing over me; the night was too mild. My arms were free, and lying along the mattress. The mattress was on the stone floor. The only light in here was coming from the small oblong in the door, and its source was a good way off, near the second archway along the passage to the operations room; if I lifted my hand I would just about see it, but that was all.
Wounded pride.
Because I'd gone for him in front of the others, even though he'd had a submachine gun pointing at me. For whatever his reasons, this was Yang coming in here.
He took his time. I watched the thin strip of luminosity forming on the wall as the big door began swinging inwards, and smelled the oil from the lamps out there, and the lingering sweetness of the incense that had filled the arched chamber where Tung Kuo-feng had talked to me last evening. The far voice of a night bird came from the mountain heights; it had been too faint to register through the narrow oblong in the door, and there was no window here.
Yang was moving with infinite patience. I could see his hand now, and his shoulder, a shadow against the shadows beyond, as the door swung inwards. Its edge was three feet from the end of my mattress; when he had the door wide open he would be within reach of me if he leapt. But perhaps he wouldn't do that. Perhaps he'd just come to talk. Not seriously, no.
The far cry of the nightbird. Incense.
The door was wide open now, and he stopped moving. He was a shadow the shape of a man, and I watched him. He had left the big gun outside; it would make too much noise in the still of the mountain night.
He stood watching me. I lay watching him.
I suppose the instincts of his ancient race had been working in him over the hours while he'd been pacing outside my door, pacing tiger-like, soft-footed in his trackshoes, ten steps to the left and then ten to the right, the gun in his arm and hate in his heart for me, the bruise pulsing in his throat and in his pride, his instincts begging revenge and so strongly that his military training was gradually overwhelmed, with the stealth of an infiltrating foe.
He wanted my blood.
Not moving. He was not moving now.
But what would he tell them afterwards? That someone else had come here and done this bloody deed? There'd be a lot of awkward questions: who were they and why did he let them pass? Perhaps he was going to do it in some way that would leave no mark, no evidence, pricking my skin with a poisoned thorn or holding me still while I inhaled exotic and lethal fumes, so that it would look as if I'd died in my sleep, or of a poison that someone else had put in my food. It wasn't my concern, and I stopped thinking about it because time must be short now.
I had only worked once before against Asiatics and that was in Bangkok, nine or ten missions ago; but I remembered that they killed readily. In the Curtain theatre it seldom happens; there are hundreds of KGB agents in London and as many CIA and British Secret Service people in Moscow, but we leave each other alone unless we're really pressed: there's a tacit understanding that if once we decided to wipe each other out on our home ground there'd be no possibility of carrying on our trade any more, and that would be dangerous in the extreme because Cold War espionage lowers the risk of a hot war breaking out. The Asiatics are different, and these people at the monastery were terrorists rather than spooks. It wasn't that life was cheap, but that death was expedient.
They'd tried to kill me four times, and the odds were growing short; in our trade a man has only so many lives.
The organism was sensitised now; the appropriate chemicals had been poured from the glands into the cardiovascular and muscular systems; blood had receded from the surface and I was breathing deeply; my pupils were expanded to make full use of the available light. I was cocked like a gun.
He believed I was asleep, and couldn't see the glint of my eyes between the narrowed lids because I lay in shadow; he would also assume that if I were awake and had heard him come in here I'd be on my feet by now. But all I had to rely on was the advantage of surprise; in all other respects I was appallingly vulnerable here on the ground. From my viewpoint he looked tall, dominant and invincible, and I knew that when he came for me he'd come very fast, exploding against me, fired by the hate that burned in him; he wouldn't be human, but monstrous, and with a monster's demoniacal strength. My quickest way out would be to underestimate him, I knew that.
He seemed to be moving now.
Or I thought he was moving, my imagination anticipating the event. I wasn't sure; I had to watch the soft edge of his shadow and the gap between it and the shadow of the door, but even then I couldn't tell if his movement were real. The saliva was thick in my mouth and I wanted to swallow but that would trigger him: the sound would be loud in the infinite stillness of the little cell. Anything would trigger him, however s
light, even the rustle of the straw under my body. He wanted to do it while I slept, forcing my brain from its slow delta waves into the terminal stillness of annihilation.
Yes.
He was moving.
He was crouching over me, so slowly that even now there was no real indication of movement; his shadow-form was simply becoming larger, and changing shape. I could hear his breathing now, and in it the trembling rhythm of the animal engaged in a matter of life and death. And now I caught a glint of light on something he was holding in one hand; it was very small.
My breathing became deeper, and my veins sang with their blood; my ears were loud with its coursing.
What have you brought for me, Yang, in the dead of night?
Nothing kindly.
By Christ he was fast and the thing was in my mouth before I could stop it because my jaws had opened in readiness for stress the instant he'd moved and he'd known that would happen and as I bit into his fingers a warning rang in my head not to bite the capsule because that's what it was and we've all held them in our mouths before to get an idea of the feel and the taste, biting his fingers, biting hard, my jaws locked and my teeth sharp and the blood coming as I broke through the flesh, and all the time the feel of the capsule lying at the side of my tongue with only the thickness of the glass between the cyanide and my nervous system, I've seen the stuff work, I saw that poor bastard Lazlo put one in his mouth in Parkis's office in London because we were going to throw him back across the frontier, gone down in five seconds with his skin turning blue and his fingers hooked and his teeth bared, so this was what Yang wanted them to think: rather than wait for them to finish me off I'd do it my own way.
Monstrous strength, his other hand rising and thudding against the mattress with the force of an axe as I rolled my head clear and used a splay-hand into his eyes, their resilience against my fingertips as I drove them hard again and again as he jerked his head back but not fast enough, my teeth clamped and his blood running into my mouth until I swallowed and felt the capsule go with it into the safety of the alimentary canal, unbroken, the cyanide unreleased.