The Pekin Target q-10

by Adam Hall

  Not swaying any more, but rather weak, never mind, be better in a minute but by Christ I could have kicked his face in because I'd got an operation to run and time was of the essence, very much of the essence, my watch said 12:29.

  "Listen to me. Do you want me to save Tung Chuan?"

  I noticed his face was running with sweat, and deathly pale.

  "Yes." His voice was perfectly normal.

  "I'm not sure I want to. You're giving me a lot of trouble. Are you going to give me any more trouble?"

  "No."

  "Well that'll be a nice change." I walked round the room a bit, finding my feet again, rotten headache but not surprising, covered in sweat, stinking with it, damn him, what did he want to go and do that for, bloody great brass gong, I wanted to kick it, bring it down off the wall with a bloody great boom, boom, boom, steady for Christ's sake it's over now and we've got to get moving. "Listen," I said to him, "I've come here to do a deal. Tung Chuan's life for exposing the Soviets, and I can't give you long to think it over."

  "I will do anything," he said.

  I stopped walking about and looked down at him. He'd aged ten years in the last six minutes. I suppose it took an awful lot of effort to throw that much force around, serve him bloody well right.

  "It's going to be up to you," I told him. "You make one false move and Tung Chuan won't live. One false move. Just one. For Christ's sake get that into your head." I crouched on my haunches in front of him. "I'm getting out of this place now, or I'm going to try. You've got that submachine gun in the corner there, and there's another one behind the Buddha at the end of the passage where they had me in that cell, you know where that is?"

  "Yes."

  "If you need them, use them."

  "Both?"

  "What? One at a time, of course." Wild laughter ringing out, somewhere inside what he'd left of my head; long time since I'd heard a joke. "I don't want either of them, that's why I'm leaving them to you. I'm not going to try shooting my way out of here because you might get killed by a stray bullet, and you're one end of the deal, remember. Besides, you can never do anything really useful with a gun."

  I straightened up and tried to think, still a bit wobbly but managing well enough now. "It's your job to stay alive, you understand? That's the deal. They won't connect you with my getting out of here — you've been sitting here praying on your bloody mat all night and you never heard anything happening to the guard. As far as they're concerned you're still in charge of the Triad and your operation's still going and you've got the next assassination set for noon tomorrow, or that's what you told me. All that's going to happen is that I'm going to get away, in order to save my own skin. Nothing to do with you."

  What else? Something else. I wish I didn't feel so bloody tired, suppose I lack protein, bean curd's not the answer, you can stick it. Yes, "Listen, if we can get your son away from the KGB unit we'll keep him under guard till you've honoured your part of the deal." Banner headlines, we're interrupting our scheduled programme to bring you this flash, and so forth, Soviets Responsible for Pekin Assassinations. World Shock at Terrorist's Exposure. "Sometime before dawn," I told him, "we'll be sending in paratroopers to pull you out of here, understand? I can't take you with me, there's too much risk. Wait for them to come. Don't antagonise Sinitsin or anyone else. Keep a low profile, but if they try to get you away overland don't let them: hide up somewhere or use the guns on them. Stay alive. That's the deal, understand?"

  "Yes." He got up and stood facing me. "How will you escape?"

  "None of your bloody business."

  I left him, checking the courtyard and using shadow cover, my bare feet silent across the stones.

  28: Fireball

  I stood in the jungle shadows, with the moon's light dappling the ground through the filligree pattern above my head. Then I went forward, stopping for a few seconds to listen.

  12:48.

  The luminous digits of my watch cast a faint glow across the hairs on my wrist. In twelve minutes they would relieve the guard on my cell, and see that Yang was gone.

  I looked upwards, and the moon's light burst against my eyes from the edge of the big black cross. I listened again, and then looked for a foothold, swinging upwards with one hand on the grip. The fuel-cap was now within reach and I unscrewed it, putting it in my pocket so that it shouldn't fall and make a noise. Then I opened my jacket and took the bookmatches and lit the cigarette.

  They were two Russian Mil Mi2s standing side by side under a single camouflage net, with only a few feet of clearance between their rotor radii; I'd seen this much when they'd brought me in from the mountains. This was the biggest area of flat ground anywhere near the monastery, but it wasn't ideal: there wasn't room for one of these things to be pushed clear of the other in an emergency, because of the parapet walls.

  When I had arranged the cigarette and the bookmatches. I climbed down and made my way towards the second machine, pulling myself up and opening the door quietly. By the time I was sitting in the pilot's seat my watch showed 12:56. I'd left it rather late, because that bastard Tung had decided to fight me for the information inside my head. The twelve minutes had narrowed to four.

  I looked around the cabin. There were two seats forward and four behind, with the cyclic column and stick disposed for right-seat pilotage and the facia panel set centrally inside an anti-glare hood. The general layout was much the same as the one we used for refresher training; the only differences would be in the operating requirements for the two GTD-350 turboshafts and the triple-bladed rotor.

  A pair of string gloves was lying across the cyclic column: the pilot had sweaty hands; the navigational map was on the left seat, opened out and clipped to the board and showing South Korea. The radio display was central, with headsets hooked behind the seat squabs, and I found it tempting to switch the thing on and raise 5051 kHz and tell Ferris to alert the airport police at Kimpo and watch for Tung Chuan's party coming through; but the sound of my voice in the stillness could reach one of the guards and if the Embassy didn't answer immediately or if Ferris wasn't actually at the console I wouldn't have time to get the signal through before they came for me.

  12:59.

  Leaving it late.

  I thought I heard voices; perhaps I did; they probably came from the operations room where the two radios were: twenty minutes ago when I'd crawled on my stomach below the parapet wall I'd heard Sinitsin talking in there. These weren't raised voices I was listening to.

  The moonlight picked up silver crescents from the chrome rims of the reserve fuel tank gauges; they should have been blacked over. Small sounds came as the landing-gear suspension shifted minutely under my weight, and I stopped moving and sat still and listened to the deep percussive rhythm of my heartbeat as the idea came to me that perhaps it wouldn't work; technically I was satisfied, but the psychological aspect was starting to worry me: I was resting the outcome of the whole mission on a single cigarette, and not because it was the best way but the only possible way; it wasn't that the odds were long; it was that the stakes were high.

  Ignore.

  01:00.

  Deadline.

  Synchronise your watches, gentlemen, so forth: maybe Yang's relief had his watch a bit slow.

  The incandescent end of the cigarette should have reached the match-heads by now.

  Sweat. Sitting in my sweat. Left it too late.

  Ignore negative reactions and concentrate and look at the map. There wasn't enough light to see any of the figures but I'd worked them out already from the data de Haven and I had been given at the US Air Force base. Kimpo Airport, Seoul was 224 kilometres from here and the maximum cruise speed of this thing would be in the region of 200 kph and we'd need an hour and eight minutes to get there, giving us an ETA of 02:11 including a give-or-take five-minute delay in getting this thing off the ground, which gave us a margin of seven minutes before Cathay Pacific Flight 584 got the green from the tower and started rolling.

  Seven minu
tes wasn't going to be long enough.

  Thing is to keep control and remember that all we've got to do is get airborne and then raise the Embassy and get Ferris to do the rest: he could put a NATO battalion into the field so long as communications with London held up.

  Leave it to Ferris.

  Look, do you really think you can just light a cigarette and sit back and -

  Voices and this time raised voices, 01:01, they'd missed Yang and now they'd start looking for him and they wouldn't take long to find him and then they'd start looking for me.

  Running feet and more voices.

  Give that bloody thing another two minutes to burn and then give it up and get out of here and take to the mountains and let them put the light out over the board for Jade One in London, but Jesus Christ I'd got close, I'd got bloody close.

  Voices again, Sinitsin's among them now, Where is he, and so forth, he'd strip the hide off them for letting me get away.

  01:02.

  Give it another minute. One more, and then if -

  Fireball.

  The camouflage net shivered as the chopper alongside rocked on its landing gear to the shock of the explosion as the tank went up and hurled flames into the night, their bright banners catching the net and firing it as I pushed open the cabin door and got ready to jump because if the whole lot went up I was getting out, stop panicking and shut that door and keep low before they see you, haven't you seen an explosion before, get down.

  Voices again above the roar of the flames, and I dropped low behind the front seats because the pilots would be first here and there'd only be one thing they could try doing.

  The night was orange now, with the flamelight flooding into the cabin and the net shaking as the men below started hacking at it with knives to free the rotor. Someone wrenched the door open and lunged in and dragged the extinguisher off its hook and threw it down to the others, shouting something in Korean. Then he swung out through the doorway and I saw the flash of a blade as he clambered onto the roof of the cabin; I could hear the tramping of his feet as he worked at the net, hacking it away from the rotor.

  The night was full of cries, one of them shrilling as the flames caught a man. Black smoke was pouring from the chopper alongside and enveloping the cabin; two or three times I lifted my head but could see nothing but the darkness curdled with the light of the flames; the man on the roof was choking now in the thickening pall of smoke. Firefoam hit the perspex window and a man shouted, quite close, words I didn't understand. Smoke began drifting into the cabin and I buried my face into my jacket and stayed absolutely still. Something smashed: I think the man had kicked the window in as he came dropping from the roof; I felt the machine lurch as he threw himself inside and slammed the door against the smoke; then the turbos began moaning.

  The warm-up time for these things would be around three minutes but I didn't think we had that long; the fuel had sent a wash of flame across the ground and it was still spreading; there was the sickly smell of rubber on the air as the tyres began burning. There was nothing much to think about as I crouched face down in the dark. This was either going to work or it wasn't; there'd been a whole complex of unpredictable elements and it hadn't been possible to put them together and come up with any kind of certainty; it had just been the only thing I could do, short of putting Tung Kuo-feng at risk in a shoot out. So I kept still and left it to karma, and listened to the rising moan of the turbos and then the sudden jerk as the rotor was cut in and began turning.

  He wouldn't wait for all the needles to reach the green sectors: this wasn't standard take-off procedure; but he'd need close to ninety per cent rotor rpm and that was going to take another sixty seconds or more and there was nothing he could do about it except sit there with the flames washing under the wheels. Now that he was in the right-hand seat I could raise my head as far as the perspex window, but couldn't see anything but figures darting through the smoke, their shadows thrown grotesquely against it by the livid orange of the flames. But the long blades of the rotor were getting up speed, and the smoke began surging lower in the downdraught until all I could see was the wash of flames beneath us; they were fanning out as the draught caught them, pulling them into a fiery disc and blowing the smoke clear of the area.

  Through a gap between the seat and the cabin wall I could see through the undernose perspex, where two men were dragging something blackened to the edge of the flames; then there was nothing but the flames themselves, flattening into a giant Catherine wheel as the rotor picked up speed and the machine lurched as a tyre burst, then steadied and began lifting with the bright disc of flame falling away below.

  "Seoul," I told him, and dug my centre-knuckle hard into his spine at the fifth vertebra jerking him forward and snapping his head back. "Kimpo Airport."

  Most of his shock was at finding he wasn't alone, and his smoke-reddened eyes were wide as he moved his head to look at me. I bunched the knuckle again and drove it into the middle of his spine this time, sending a flash of pain through the central nerves.

  "Kimpo Airport, Seoul."

  Sweat shone on his face. The glow of the flames was dying away now, leaving the greenish illumination of the facia panel; when I looked into the windscreen I saw him watching my reflection, and shook my head slowly, meaning don't try anything; then he tapped the fuel gauge and looked up at me with a shrug, so I got the map on its clipboard and slammed it across his knees and jabbed a finger at Seoul and then hit the median nerve of his left arm enough to warn him because the fuel gauge was at half full and that was ample for the run in to Kimpo and he knew it.

  I got the headset off its hook behind the navigator's seat and started work on the radio panel, getting an answer in Korean from the Embassy and then losing it two or three times because there was a hell of a lot of static from the rotors. We'd gained a thousand feet by now and he'd got the thing on an even keel but I wasn't trusting him: he was a fanatic and he wanted to put this machine down near the monastery again, even if it had to be on the roof, because Sinitsin and his group were now cut off.

  5051 kHz was answering again and the voice sounded English so I told them Eagle to, Jade One and repeated it but the static was appalling and I couldn't even tell whether it was Ferris responding or someone else.

  The time was now 01:09 and I checked the airspeed indicator and gripped the pilot's fist, turning the throttle and telling him to stay at maximum speed, using words he didn't understand but a tone of voice that told him he'd got to do what I wanted. The floor shifted under my feet as the power came on, and I grabbed at the seat-back and then tried to raise the Embassy again. It was difficult to tell if they were getting my signal with any clarity so I left the set open and kept repeating what I wanted them to know.

  Eagle to Jade One. Hostage Tung Chuan and KGB captors due to board Cathay Pacific Flight 584 from Seoul to Pyongyang ETD 02:18. You must stop them and take Tung Chuan alive. This is ultra priority, this is ultra priority, my voice probably unintelligible, reaching them in an ocean of static, while the red light came up on the facia panel and the reflection of the smoke-blackened pilot's face watched me impassively from the windscreen, Eagle to Jade One, can you hear me?

  I bent over the map and read the call sign for Kimpo tower and switched to that wavelength and tried to raise them with the call sign for the aircraft but all I could get was slush, the red light beginning to worry me now so I looked at it and saw it wasn't on the facia panel, it was at the edge of the curving windscreen, the bastard had been turning full circle all the time and that was the fire down there, the one at the monastery -

  "Turn this bloody — "

  He'd been waiting for it and his bunched fist drove in at groin level and impacted on the thigh as I twisted in time and lost balance and hit the tubular metal along the back of the seats and found him rising against me with both his hands out and reaching for the throat. The deck was tilting badly and we both lurched sideways and the pilot's headset swung clear of its hook and struck my face
, blinding me on one side before I could get my balance back and block him as he came in again while thunder broke out as the rotor tips went through the sound barrier and the whole machine started shuddering to the vibration.

  Kaleidoscope of images in the glow from the facia lamps — his squat body frantic to get at me as the deck tilted again, tilted and swung down with the blades crackling and the seats shaking on their stanchions, his face suddenly looming as he got close with his hands hooking, catching my jacket and dragging me down across the cyclic column, and now the whole thing went wild as the deck came up and threw us both across the seat squabs with my shoulder crashing past the bulkhead and bouncing me the other way and straight into him, a chance in a thousand and I used a sword-hand and found his neck and did it again and saw him pitch back into the perspex window, did it again with the deck tilting me and lending me extra force till he wasn't there any more but somewhere below me as the cabin began spinning slowly under the rotor and the deck came up and then sank and went on sinking as I tried to find the controls and couldn't manage it because of the angle, tried to get a grip on something, on anything, finally found the cyclic and brought it upwards, twisting the throttle down a degree and feeling the sudden pause as the rotor steadied and the cabin stopped spinning and I slumped into the seat and trimmed the aircraft, locking the column on automatic and turning to see what had happened to the Korean.

  He was watching me steadily, and I turned away and settled down in the pilot's seat, checking the compass and bringing the machine in a slow swing towards the north-west and then putting its nose down and going for maximum speed with the tips just this side of the barrier. After a minute the nerves in my spine began crawling, and I turned round and closed his eyelids and then faced forwards again, concentrating on the compass and feeling with one hand for the headset and putting it on.