by Chris Ryan
But now Road Sweep was moving his left arm, and Bald realized his left hand was still gripping the broomstick, and he was sweeping it across his front in a fast and low arc. The stick thwacked into Bald’s right ankle with such immediate force and power of delivery that he was knocked clean off his feet. His ankle exploded with pain. Like someone had shotgunned his foot clean off. He fell sideways, bumping his head against the rim of the dumpster on his downward trip. Road Sweep was scraping himself off the ground, swinging and twirling his broomstick again. The stick made a whooshing sound as it chopped and diced thin air. Road Sweep was building up the momentum for a final, fatal strike. Bald picked himself up. Road Sweep twirled the stick inches from his face.
Then it stabbed him in the chest.
The blows came in a rapid-fire burst. One, two, three jabs. Road Sweep’s hands moved with bewildering speed. This guy’s had some serious training, Bald was thinking. Himself, he hadn’t spent a solitary hour of his life studying martial arts and now he felt something hard crack in his ribcage. He formed his hands into an X in front of his chest to try to deflect the incoming shots, but Road Sweep simply directed his jabs lower, at his stomach and groin. He jabbed repeatedly. He went lower, at Bald’s ankles and shins. The pain formed a ball of vomit in Bald’s throat. Suddenly Road Sweep took a step back on his right foot and kept his left planted firmly in front of him, then raised the broomstick high over his head and brought it down in a diagonal arc, slashing it across Bald’s chest. He drove the stick like a golf wedge into the side of his face. That was the blow that did for Bald. He dropped to his knees. His body was limp and numb. He tried moving. His muscles felt like bags of slag cement. He was losing the fight.
Road Sweep was still for a moment, watching Bald drop. Then he gripped the stick in the way a martial arts expert grips a samurai sword, the stick seeming to just lightly rest on his open palms, as though he was empty-handed. Bald tried to keep his eye on the stick. He had two immediate problems. One, he was unarmed. Two, the guy he was facing was faster than him and more agile.
On the bad days Bald had a million voices pinging around his head. On the good days he just had the one. The voice of a dozen years in the Regiment and lessons learned at the sharp end of life as a Blade. The good one came to him now. It said, get yourself a weapon.
The broomstick was spinning above Road Sweep’s head like a chopper blade.
Bald spotted an empty Chang beer bottle by his ankle, amid the trash. Foamy dregs of beer rested in the bottom.
Road Sweep brought the broomstick down. Bald took evasive action. Scooped up the bottle and shunted to his right. Road Sweep swiped at nothing. From the look on his face he realized Bald had manoeuvred himself into a perfect counter-attacking position. The confusion turned to blood and serrated flesh as Bald slugged the Chang bottle directly into his face. The bottle neck snapped on impact. Bald ignored Road Sweep’s screams and gave the bottle a hard twist, churning up the skin on his face, engraving spirals of blood into his forehead and embedding bits of glass in his flesh. The guy’s screams went a couple of notes higher. Then Bald dragged the broken bottle across his neck. Road Sweep’s left hand released the broomstick, but he wasn’t done. He managed to bring his hands up, and he clamped them around Bald’s neck and squeezed. As though the little prick was dumb enough to believe he could strangle him. As if he really believed he could still win this fight.
Bald clinched his left hand around Road Sweep’s chin and used his thumb and forefinger to prise open his jaw. Then with his other hand he shoved the broken-off bits of the bottle into his cakehole. Forced his mouth shut again and quickly hammered a fist into his cheek. The glass made a wet crinkle as it crumpled inside his mouth. Bald slugged him again. Same spot. Road Sweep started choking on the fragments of glass. He was trying to cough them up, but Bald applied the full strength of his wrists and fingers and forced his gob to stay shut. His legs kicked furiously. His eyeballs were popping out of their sockets.
He stopped kicking.
Bald let go of Road Sweep. He collapsed, a pile of shit and bones, gargling and foaming at the mouth.
Bald was congratulating himself on a job well done when he felt a vibration in his pocket. He dug out his BlackBerry. He felt good about fucking up Road Sweep. Good, too, to finally get a signal on his BB. Three beautiful bars of reception. Land was calling. Bald answered. The line was blitzed by static.
‘What the hell is going on? Where have you been? Where’s Mallory?’ Land fired off his questions in a burst, his diction posh and arthritic.
‘Somebody killed him.’ Bald was breathing slow and heavy, pumping oxygen back into his overworked muscle groups. ‘Didn’t you get my message?’
‘Shit,’ Land said, the word hissing down the line like a snake. Bald pictured Land rubbing his temples, furrowing his brow.
Bald said, ‘Since when did Edgar start cashing your cheques?’
‘Edgar Mallory was a war hero.’
‘He was a fucking joke in the Regiment.’
Land gritted out the words slowly now, ‘He left because of internal politics. He had other qualities.’
‘If you call being a fag a quality.’
Land paused. Bald glanced at Road Sweep. His skin was whitening. Veins bulging on his neck. Bald figured that bits of the glass had filtered down his throat and punctured his lungs. The cunt was bleeding to death internally.
Bald said, ‘Mind telling me how I’m supposed to find Xia now?’
‘We’re working on finding an alternative intelligence source. But it may take a while. We can’t just magic these things up, you know. In the meantime just hold the fort. And watch your back. We have satellite pictures indicating a heavy Snow Leopard presence in your area.’
‘Snow Leopard?’
‘Chinese Special Forces.’
Bald casually strolled out of the alley and moved down the road, not walking fast enough to draw unwanted attention, checking the faces around him. He manoeuvred between the mobile noodle bars and street stalls and homeless people with no teeth and said, ‘Someone was on my case. But I took care of him. He’s not a threat.’
A banshee hail of police sirens cried out in the distance, growing louder all the time.
Six thousand kilometres away Land said, ‘You bloody fool, John.’
‘What?’
‘Chinese Special Forces have GPS trackers sewn into their clothing . . .’ Land shouted.
The sirens were now harsh and close.
Bald stopped dead. He was staring at the end of the street. Four VW Jettas in Chinese police livery were pulling up ten metres away. Three more bounded down the street at his rear. A dozen guys flew out of the cars. They were dressed in olive-green jackets and trousers. They looked more like squaddies than cops. They were reaching for their holstered pistols.
Land said, ‘As soon as you killed that chap, the tracker broadcast a red alert to every Chinese security agent in an eighty-kilometre radius. They know where you are. Get the hell out of there.’
But it was already too late.
forty-eight
1442 hours.
Three cops shoved Bald into the back seat of one of the cars. They bagged his BlackBerry and gave him stone-faced looks and a pair of silver-coloured bracelets. The Jetta was small. Bald had to fold his legs tight against his stomach in order to squeeze inside. The cops hopped inside and the car rushed west. Soon they left behind the American computer stores and Italian fashion emporiums and entered a teeming sprawl of grey factories belching smoke into a white-feather sky. The whole area was cordoned off with barbed wire and security cameras. This was backstage China, where factory workers miscarried in the morning and went back to work in the afternoon, where they worked in enforced silence, and ingested toxic fumes to make cheap trainers and smartphones.
Eight kilometres west of Jinchun city centre civilization abruptly ended. There had been concrete and steel and glass. Now there was just desert plains and hunchbacked mountains.
&n
bsp; ‘Where the fuck are you taking me?’ said Bald.
‘This place very bad for you,’ the guy in the front passenger seat said in jerky English. His uniform jacket carried more coloured insignias than his mates’. Senior officer, thought Bald.
‘China is home of torture.’ This from the guy next to Bald. He had a bumfluff moustache and flabby jowls. ‘Water torture, slow slicing, tiger bench.’ Bald didn’t react but the man went on anyway. He began laughing and Bald saw he had a dreamy look in his eyes. ‘We put your legs on bench. Strap belts around legs. Then put bricks under your legs. One hour, one brick. Two hour, two brick. Then three brick, and four, until it is very high, and all the bones in your legs break.’
Bald shot the cops an angry look courtesy of the rear-view mirror. ‘I’m here on a diplomatic visa. You lay a fucking finger on me, you’ll have to answer to the British FO.’
The senior officer in the front turned side on to Bald. ‘You killed a Chinese soldier.’
‘It was self-defence,’ said Bald.
No one said a word.
Traffic on the motorway thinned out. The road sluiced between two mountain ranges. The mountains were low and long and the colour of sandbags. Twenty kilometres due west of Jinchun and the Jetta was the only vehicle on the road.
The silence was punctured by the trilling of Bald’s BB. The senior officer made Bald hand it over, and frowned at the screen with his bottom lip. He held the screen up in front of him so that Bald was able to read the digits for the Unknown Number. The number was for Leo Land.
‘A friend?’ the guy asked Bald.
Bald said nothing.
The officer flipped out the battery, the SIM card and the 4GB memory card. He deposited both SIM and memory card in the left breast pocket in his jacket. He said, ‘You are busy. He can leave message.’
Seven kilometres west of the mountains the driver hung a right off the motorway. The road degraded into a single potholed lane that ploughed through cold, dry and desperate land. The Jetta was going at a steady fifty kilometres per hour. The chassis absorbed most of the jolts and jars as they bounced down the road. Bald still had no idea where he was being taken. Now the Jetta began shedding speed. The desert land suddenly breathed into life and became verdant fields. Four hundred metres up ahead Bald could make out a deserted square with a building either side of it, and a third, much bigger one a hundred metres further back. The square was filled with cypress and magnolia trees and dotted around were statues of dragons and lions and camels. The buildings stood in a perfect symmetrical arrangement in the square, and this intrigued Bald. The China he’d seen so far amounted to little more than a smoggy industrial hellhole. But this place looked like the China of martial arts movies. Bald thought the large building might be some kind of a temple.
The driver pulled the Jetta to a rest twenty metres short of the square. The driver and the senior officer climbed out, leaving Bald lodged in the back seat with Bumfluff for company, the two of them just listening to the tick-tick of the cooling engine. Bald had the growing suspicion that the cops were going to slot him out here. He briefly wondered whether they had vultures in China.
The door to his right unlocked. The senior officer peered in at Bald and gestured.
‘Get out,’ he said.
Outside the Jetta, Bald sucked in a lungful of gritted air. A gentle breeze was blowing dust into his nose and lips and eyes.
Any second now, he was thinking, he’s going to march you away from the car. And he’s going to put a bullet between your eyes.
Bald tried to cook up an escape plan. His hands were locked behind his back. He was not armed. The three cops were. During the ride Bald had got a close look at the weapon Bumfluff, next to him, was holding. The logo on the grip told him it was a Norinco-manufactured nine-mil. It could chamber five rounds, and since the other two cops were packing the same, that made a total of fifteen rounds of 9mm Parabellum. If he tried fleeing he’d get nailed in the back.
Then a low rumble reached his ears, like a thunderbolt hammering in slow motion. It came from his six o’clock. A car on the horizon. White bodywork, headlights shaped like cat’s eyes. A Lincoln Town Car. Curved bonnet, shortened grille. Bald watched the Lincoln lumber towards them – doing no more than thirty per, he reckoned – and crawl to a stop five metres or so behind the Jetta. A chauffeur hopped out, opened the rear door and helped his passenger out of the car. The legs came first, then the rest of her followed, and last her head, caressed by short, glossy black waves of hair. She straightened up and nodded at the cops. A sign that she was in charge.
The cops stood erect as Xia Wei-Lee walked towards them – a stand to attention minus the salute. Bumfluff and the driver held Bald by the arms as she approached.
Xia marched towards Bald, stopping a metre short of him. She nodded and said, ‘I know you came here to kill me.’
She was wearing a serious-looking Mao suit. The top half was a stiff tunic the colour of pomegranate with four pockets and five gold buttons running down the front and another three on each cuff.
Xia smiled a strange kind of a smile at Bald. He could see stresses in the corners of her eyes and lips as she froze it for five long seconds, then it crawled back underneath her skin like a snake slipping into the long grass. She shouted something at Bumfluff, then snatched his weapon from his hand. There was a lot of sudden motion around Bald. Bumfluff breaking to one side, the senior officer backing off to beside the Jetta. Xia shoving the Norinco’s muzzle between his teeth.
Bald felt the cold metal digging into the roof of his mouth. His eyes flicked from the cocked hammer to her finger on the trigger. Her index finger was slender, almost fragile. Not a lot of strength in that finger. One small inward curl of her forefinger was all it needed to activate the trigger mechanism. Bald went from not sweating at all to swimming in the stuff.
Xia laughed and unplugged the pistol from his mouth. She reset the hammer and handed the gun back to Bumfluff. Bald opened his mouth, but Xia put her trigger finger to his lips and winked at him.
‘Shhh,’ she said. ‘It’s OK. It’s over now. You don’t have to worry any more.’
She removed her finger from his lips. Brushing her hand across his, she whispered moist, electric breath into his ear. ‘Tell me everything you know soon and there doesn’t have to be much pain for you.’
Bald didn’t answer.
Xia gestured to the senior officer. He brusquely nudged Bald at gunpoint in the direction of the square, and he, Xia and Bald started walking. The buildings on the left and right of the square were fifty metres away. Their timber fronts were painted white and red, and they had brilliant yellow tiled roofs that curved up in a sweeping motion. Figurines decorated the roofs. All the figurines, Bald noticed, were facing south-east.
Directly ahead was the larger building. At forty metres Bald was able to pick out more details. It was painted an immaculate white with an octagonal roof that peaked some sixty metres above the ground. Two sets of white stairs led up to a main entrance formed by a pair of five-metre tall double doors. Bronze statues of ancient Chinese warriors stood guard either side of these.
Bald said, ‘What is this place?’
‘Li-Fen Chuen Memorial Hall,’ Xia said. ‘I could tell you about its glorious history. Or I could just tell you that this is where you are going to die.’
Xia guided Bald up the steps, the senior officer at his back, vigilant with the nine-mil. Bald counted the steps. Thirty in total. The officer heaved open the door at the top. It gave a loud, dense groan.
At a gesture from Xia, the officer handed her the Norinco and turned back to descend the steps. Xia led Bald into the main hall. It was gloomy inside and it took him a few moments to adjust his eyes to the granular half-light. Xia pushed at the door and it closed definitively behind them. A bronze statue, twenty metres tall, occupied the central part of the hall. Some guy sitting on a throne, dressed in traditional Chinese clothes. The walls were built from bulky, shiny bricks and decorate
d with Mandarin inscriptions. Giant stone columns supported the roof. A design was engraved onto a spider-web-shaped panel sunken into the ceiling. Its colours glowed: it depicted dragons and elephants and a bunch of other shit.
Bald said, ‘Can I get a take-away?’
Xia ignored him. She led him further into the hall, past the statue. The far wall was fifty metres from the main entrance, and a small wooden door was set centrally in the wall. When they reached the door, Xia opened it. Strokes of brilliant light flashed in through the gap, briefly blinding Bald. Artificial light. Bald cleared his vision and looked again. A set of stone steps led down into what he assumed would be a courtyard of some kind. Cypress trees, stone statues, carefully maintained lawns.
Instead the steps led down a brightly lit staircase. Holding the Norinco to his back, Xia ushered Bald down the stairs. He lost count of the number of stairs, but knew they were leading away from the building. The air grew increasingly stale and humid and when they reached the bottom of the stairs it felt like they had descended a long way below ground. In front of them was a solid metal door with a keypad to the right, and above the door a single light burned brightly. Xia punched in a four-digit combination and the door hissed and yawned heavily open. She pushed Bald through the doorway. He couldn’t see much inside, except for distant lights, hooked high up above like stars.
Then he took a few steps more, and the lights revealed a vast, open area the size of eight football pitches. He saw teams of guys in white coats frowning at banks of computer screens, engineers assembling metal components on work benches, and black-suited, black-haired Communist Party bureaucrats nodding seriously at various hi-tech bits of weaponry. He spied racks of weapons stacked up on the far wall. The weapons were experimental, Bald guessed, because none of the designs looked remotely familiar to him. And Bald knew his guns. There were bullpup assault rifles shaped like dolphins’ heads, pistols with flexible barrels and machine-guns kitted out with antennae. There was an assault rifle with thirty-six barrels in a simple yet elegant pod-like configuration at the muzzle end, the whole arrangement roughly the size of a hardback book.