As Cockburn-Hawkes ushered me out, he said, “Miss Mandrake will contact you this afternoon, by phone. Better be in.”
I said sure I would be, and went down in the lift to be checked out through the main entrance by the security guards. I looked at my watch: a few minutes after noon. Lunch was indicated, and a drink first. I signalled a taxi and had just told the driver to take me to a little place in Knightsbridge when I felt a hand on my arm and a soft voice in my ear.
“Pardon me.”
I turned, eyebrows raised. A small Chinese stood there, smiling politely and looking expectant. He said, “Commander Shaw, please?”
I said, “What’s it to you?”
“A matter of importance. I come in taxi?”
“First, tell me why. And tell me who you are.”
The Chinese gave a small bow, and smiled wider. “No. I am sorry. I come in taxi. Pardon me,” and he barged, if so small a man can be said to barge, straight past me into the back of the taxi. I opened my mouth and shut it again: no point in raising hell and drawing a crowd of gawpers round us, and nothing much could happen in a taxi provided one of you wasn’t a girl. I got in and the Chinese leaned forward and tapped on the glass and the driver turned his head.
“Yer?”
“Not Knightsbridge after all, please. 14 Silvertown Street, Woolwich.”
“Like hell,” I said, but the Chinese hijacker had shut the glass and the taxi was pulling out into the traffic.
“I am sorry,” my companion said, and smiled again. “In sleeve is knife, and point of knife bears curare. One small push only … very unpleasant death, very nasty, I am sorry.” I glared at him: he wasn’t much bigger than a pint tankard; I could have squashed him to death like an insect, but I didn’t know which way that poison-tipped knife-blade was pointing, so I sat there in a fuming silence while the taxi carried us towards Tower Bridge.
2
Through Greenwich: to the left the three tall masts of the Cutty Sark reared, masts that had often enough in the last century visited my hijacker’s land to bring home the season’s tea. The Royal Naval College, known to me in the past, the National Maritime Museum, the old Royal Observatory. Having nothing else to do, I pondered. I thought about Miss Mandrake, who would ring me after lunch. If I failed to answer, would she report back to Max? And if she did, what would Max do? He might react, might not. Field men were field men, and once they’d gone through the farmyard gate it was up to them. They succeeded or failed, lived or died, and nine times out of ten Max only came in at the end. Self reliance: that was one thing they checked you out on massively before you got on the pay-roll.
The taxi pulled up sharp at a pedestrian crossing, and curare lurched towards me. “Very sorry,” the Chinese said, withdrawing himself. That was about all he’d said to date; he was answering no questions. He was a very correct little man. He was dressed as City gents dress, or anyway used to dress: white shirt with stiff collar, sober tie, dark suit with flares, the one discordant note. Tiny feet like a Japanese. Black shoes shining like mirrors. Some sort of perfume on the air, fresh rather than effeminate. Whose side was he on? He could have information to impart, and preferred to pass it in his own way and on his own premises … as we came towards the old Royal Military Academy building in Woolwich where gunner officers had done their cadetships, I pondered on China — and could only come up with the bright notion that China was in fact imponderable. They didn’t love Russia, we all know that. A different brand of Communism. But, despite friendly noises from time to time and a measure of polite incredulity at the thought of Mrs Thatcher visiting as leader of a great political party, they didn’t love us either. Or America, with its peanut image. Everybody who was not Chinese was looked down upon from a great height: the Chinese were the oldest Master Race the world had known. My thoughts shifted to that possibly hypothetical submarine that had lifted the killers of Roosenbacher: Russia had leaped to my mind, also to Max’s, and so far as we in the West knew, China had no submarines. Other nations, of course, had: Japan for one. Egypt for another. Neither Japan nor Egypt were all that far from Diego Garcia.
The taxi turned left into a worn-out street of little houses, two up and two down, terraced, a part of old Woolwich that had not yet wholly succumbed to the bulldozers. An air of decay hung: most were empty, windows boarded up, waiting for the end, quietly and with resignation. The roadway was full of garbage: squatters had no doubt been around. Two cats spat and hissed and growled, tails waving. A big rangy black dog appeared, swift as lightning, and the cats vanished in mid-spit. The taxi stopped, and we got out: the Chinese smiled blandly, and I paid. I said, “l’d like you to wait for me.”
“Not wait,” the Chinese said, and smiled again.
“He who pays the piper calls the tune,” I said. “Wait.”
“Not wait, please. Take too long.”
“Make up your flamin’ minds,” the taxi driver said.
The Chinese and I both spoke at once, but the Chinese won. His face changed, the smile went, and a dirty look replaced it. He said something about yobs, and it not being advisable for a taxi to hang about. The driver took the hint and swung his vehicle almost on its hinge, and off he went. With the smile back in place the Chinese said, “Come, Commander Shaw.” He turned away, along the street, his point well made: he didn’t want the taxi driver to know where his abode really was. He went right down the street to its end, meeting a high brick wall, before which we turned right then right again into a street that was dead similar but for its name. Garbage, cats, boarded windows and all. The Chinese stopped at Number 27, not 14, produced a key and opened the front door.
I stepped into a narrow passage serving as hall. The place reeked of decay: paper hung in strips from the walls and the paintwork was cracked into a criss-cross of age, like an old woman’s face. There was a smell of gas and the lino on the floor was in an advanced stage of rot. The Chinese led me through to the back, into a dirty kitchen with shelves deep in mouse droppings. Off this kitchen a bleak room opened, a place with a concrete floor, a sort of wash-house perhaps in its hey-day. Now, it was occupied by two more Chinese, men of a different stamp from my hijacker: big, gaunt men with cadaverous faces, dressed in light blue denim and both squatting on their haunches in front of a dead electric fire that stood in the middle of the room, holding out their hands to it as though in supplication to some god, or as though they couldn’t wait for it to grow cold enough for the thing to be switched on — or something. They said nothing, but they stared plenty, and I didn’t like the look of them. They were immobile but for those staring eyes and there is always something threatening about an immobile person, like a coiled spring.
My man broke the silence, but he broke it in Chinese. I speak a few languages, some better than others, but not Chinese. It sounded like the patter of rain on a tin roof, interspersed with grunts, and it produced no visible results: the men remained frozen in their curious attitudes. I looked at the man who had brought me.
“Well?” I said. “You have a purpose. Tell me what it is.”
“Please sit down, Commander Shaw.” He pointed to a hard upright chair, and I sat at the kitchen table. He pulled up another chair. “Today, you came from Focal House. I watched, and saw.”
I gave him a cold smile. “A natural progression. So?”
“We Chinese have much patience.”
“So I understand.”
“And long memories … as long as old men’s beards.”
“Quite. What are you remembering now?”
“The fame of Commander Shaw.”
I asked, “How did you know I was inside Focal House?”
“Walls have ears, telephones have many, many ears.”
I nodded. “I get it. I no longer have a security line to Focal House.” Max would be fixing that, but this morning my line had been wide open. “So you put a tap on. Mind if I ask, why bother with the cloak-and-dagger? I mean, if you wanted me, why not contact me personally at my flat?”
He was still most polite. “Would not do. Until you had been to Focal House, you would not know.”
“Know what?”
“What was told to you.”
I said, “That follows, sure. I ask again, so what? What has it to do with you?”
“Much, or little. Yet, I do not know, so how can I say?”
I said, “All right. They wanted to discuss the price of ball bearings.”
“Ball bearings?” He seemed disconcerted. “Price of these?”
“Yes,” I said. “They’re valuable to industry. Lots of firms make them, some more efficiently than others. A case of industrial espionage, people placed, planted, to find out some other firm’s secrets.” I flipped a hand, casually. “That’s all there was in it. May I go now, please?”
The eyes had grown cynical though the face smiled on. “I have said we Chinese have long memories. The great Commander Shaw did not deal with mere firms —”
“He does now. He’s undergone conversion. No more hot spots for the great Commander Shaw, and many thanks for the compliment.”
“The leopard does not change his spots.”
“Not true. Think of Wellington. After Waterloo, he changed his baton for a seat in parliament … oh, forget it,” I said, and my tone hardened. “You don’t believe me. Well, so don’t. But if you think I’m going to tell you what was said to me by my boss, you can think again.” I got to my feet; the Chinese sat on, smiling placidly, and the two denim-clad men remained motionless but there was more of the coiled-spring element, a heightening of tension, almost electrically so. Max, even if only in passing, had mentioned China. Not unnaturally, I smelled WUSWIPP, though I doubted strongly if Nodd himself was to be found anywhere near Woolwich … I said, “I’m going. If you try to stop me, you’ll be heading for much trouble. You seem to know about Focal House. You won’t need me to tell you, in Focal House they have long arms. Just like the law.”
“I am sorry,” my original Chinese said; I wished like hell I could dent his damned politeness, it was beginning to grate because he so obviously didn’t mean it, like a waiter in a West End hotel. “You are not going.”
I said, “If you’ve anything further, kindly say so.”
“You will talk, please.”
“No,” I said.
He stared at me, searchingly. “You will say nothing, Commander Shaw?”
“That’s right.”
The Chinese smiled, very placid, very patient, very like a mandarin seated on his blue-patterned judgment seat, dispensing law, but with overtones of Fu Manchu reincarnated — or something. The smile of a snake. I backed for the door and the two squatters got up. They got up like greased lightning. My reactions were a trifle slower than they should have been — too much high living the last few months; and I hadn’t yet drawn my automatic from the armoury — they hadn’t got quite what I wanted, what they’d offered didn’t suit me balancewise. I got one of the Chinese with a knee where it hurt most and he went down with tears in his slit eyes, but the other managed to get an arm round my neck, and he squeezed with immense power and as he did so I saw in front of me the original hijacker with his curare-tipped knife poised, handy for my face. And a moment later things blacked out. I was just conscious of something coming down hard on my head, or rather, I think, at the top of my neck, and that was it.
*
Naturally, this wasn’t the first time in my experience that I’d been slugged into total blackout: you get accustomed to it, more or less, and you recognise the symptoms and you know they’ll pass given time: the stars and moons, the nausea, the heaving stomach, the blinding headache — all the clichés are so true. You suffer them in the knowledge that, having come round at all, you’re going to live. Not that it helps much at the time. I lay and retched revoltingly and felt the top of my skull go for lift-off, circle, and return to base with a nasty thump. The awful experience is not wholly dissimilar from the first emergence from blottodom to the start of hangover: worse, of course, but comparable. On the other hand, hangovers mostly start in bed, and I was on cold stone, or so it felt. There was damp around too, a drip of water, there was no light at all, but there was a stench of drains. I couldn’t move much; my body was closed in by something, some very solid matter. I had a couple of inches play, as it were, on either side, and that was all. Something else was above me, covering me from the lower ribs down, leaving just my head and neck and part of my chest free. This small freedom apart, it was like a coffin. Painfully I dragged my arms clear of constriction and probed above my head, finding empty space. There was a singing in my ears to start with, but this faded after a while and as it receded I fancied I heard other sounds: footsteps, several pairs at a time, then silence, then more footsteps. I lifted my voice and shouted, but the sound seemed dead and muted, shut right into my prison. The footsteps passed on. Distantly there was traffic, a sound that built up steadily, and now and again my surroundings shook as though a long vehicle was grinding past with a heavy load. Then other sounds came: voices and whistling. I yelled out again and again, but there was still the dead sound and no response came. A little while later there was a heavy rumble from somewhere overhead and then the roar and rattle and scrape of machinery, all hell being let loose. My prison shook and trembled and the very earth seemed to heave.
It was useless, but I yelled again. This time I could scarcely hear my own voice. Things began to fall around me; I used my hands to shield my head and face. To say I was scared would be totally inadequate: I didn’t know how, but I knew I was being buried alive. Each breath I drew was precious even though it was filled with dust. Dust was in my eyes too, but behind the lids I saw a lightening as daylight struck through, just for a matter of seconds before the dark came down again. Brick and stone thudded on my hands and I felt the backs of them lacerate. The something that had pinned me down was still in place, and hammer blows were falling upon it and being transmitted to my body. As though by some sixth sense I was aware that something was crunching down deep into the ground just clear of my feet — I couldn’t see it, but I was aware of it. And seconds later I was being pressed up from underneath, and earth and bricks and rubble were dropping away, and fresh air came, and daylight, as I was literally scooped up.
Behind my head huge metal teeth loomed, and there was a sickening lurch like a ship in a heavy sea. I saw a vast cloud of dust overlaying the sunlight, and then I heard a woman screaming.
*
The woman had bent over me as I lay on some sacking in the open air. I recognised her from the photograph: Miss Mandrake. The camera hadn’t lied: she was bloody attractive though at the moment her face was as white as a sheet and her lips were trembling. I managed to smile at her. “Well met, Miss Mandrake,” I said, “but why?”
“Why?”
“I mean, why are you here?”
She said with an attempt at crispness, “It’ll keep. You’ve been very, very lucky.”
“Is that what you call it? I feel I’ve been mangled.”
“Not mangled,” she said. “Bulldozed. Bulldozed up out of the earth. This is a building site. You were in what had been a cellar.”
I nodded. It had begun to permeate, though what she’d called a bulldozer was in fact an earth-moving machine. I said. “All right, I’ve been lucky. Now let’s get over to FH.”
“Not FH,” she said. “I have a car, but it’s not going to FH. Max’s orders. I’ve just called him. You have to vanish for a while.”
I looked at her. “With you?” She said yes, with her. I rose from the sacking like from the dead. Workmen stared, looking as shaken as I was. It’s not every day a gang of earth-movers turns up a live man from the depth, I dare say, and from now on they were going to be squeamish where they thrust the great teeth and jaws of their metal monster. I didn’t feel too bright, in fact I felt bloody awful, but I managed to walk, with Miss Mandrake’s assistance, to a TR7 at the fringe of the site. When I was settled she wove expertly into the stream of traffic heading into central L
ondon. She said something about the M4 and Wiltshire and I asked her what had put her on my track. She said she got worried when I didn’t answer my telephone, and after a couple of hours of no response she contacted Max, who in fact got matters moving. The taxi driver had had a loaf to use and he’d reported to the police the strange juxtaposition of one Chinese and one toff — yes, apparently he’d used that very word — and an argument about whether he should wait or not, and a derelict street that had not been our true destination; he had even taken time off to snoop a little and had observed our entry to the house in the next road. Max had ordered a recce and the house had been found deserted and no apparent clues left, a clean getaway.
I said, “Round one to Mr. Nodd,” because I still smelled that connection between my Fu Manchu character and WUSWIPP.
“You’ve been lucky,” Miss Mandrake said again. “You realise, of course, what the intention was?”
“To bury me alive, for good and all. No trace left. Under an office block, in due course. What’s the matter?” She was smiling.
“Not an office block. The workmen said, a public urinal was going where you were dug up.”
“Too bad,” I said disagreeably, not feeling funny. “But I wonder why … why they felt they needed to do that to me?”
She gave me a quick sideways look. “Pour encourager les autres.”
“A warning to lay off — is that what Max thinks?”
“Yes.” I saw her look into her rear-view mirror and I saw the frown. “We have a tail, Commander Shaw. Don’t worry, I’ll shake it off.”
“No,” I said. “Leave it, but not too obviously.”
“Max said you were to vanish.”
I said, “I’m the field man in charge, not Max. The one thing I can do with now is a fresh lead. If Max had the idea I might stay dead for official purposes, he can forget it. If we have a tail, that says they left a man on watch, in case of accidents — and anyway, not even Max could stop that demolition gang yacking their heads off.” I added, “By the way … how come you were there when I was turned up?”
Sunstrike_The next gripping Commander Shaw thriller Page 2