Sunstrike_The next gripping Commander Shaw thriller

by Philip McCutchan

  “Yes,” Felicity said to that query. “There’s no other explanation.”

  “I wouldn’t make too wide an assumption,” I said. “Why did they kill him?”

  “Mistaken identity?”

  “Maybe. Panic reaction, even, I suppose, though the Chinese don’t, in fact, panic easily.”

  “That’s a Western view of them — all those dead-pan faces on TV. Still, I take your point. It’ll all come clear one day.”

  I said there were not many days left: around two and a bit, to be precise, unless Washington could force that delay I’d asked for. As time passed and we stayed locked in that close and smelly atmosphere I felt the descent of unusual gloom: normally I can remain optimistic throughout a mission, but this time I saw no way either of success or of coming out alive. The weird aura of China had penetrated my soul, I think, the feeling of being right at the back of beyond and out of all human ken, something the world had forgotten, a kind of bottom-of-the-dustbin feeling where anything could happen. I whispered to Felicity that I was bloody sorry I’d got her into this and she answered, crisply, that I was giving way to self-pity and I knew perfectly well she would have come anyway. Yes, I said, but for a woman … and then something, one those ‘anythings’ I’d been thinking about, happened: from the free air up above us came a dreadful scream, a really terrible one that seemed to sob the air apart, then silence, then, believe it or not, six more screams, widely spaced. Then the sound of tinny bugles and somewhat unmilitary drums.

  “Six and one,” I said, “makes seven.”

  “You got an AA in advanced mathematics?”

  “Shut up,” I said tersely, and felt my knees shake. “Seven soldiers, including the NCO. Remember?”

  “Oh, Christ,” she said, having got the drift. I didn’t need to spell it out: authority had identified Ellum’s body and the men who had made the fatal mistake had paid the penalty: heads chopped off, Chinese style. (This was confirmed later, when we saw the blood on the square and the heads in a basket.) There didn’t seem anything more to say, and I don’t think Felicity felt like talking any more than I did, so we sat and thought about necks and how tough they can be to cut through if the executioner feels like spinning it out, and after God knows how long we heard the trap door wheeze open and feet coming down the steps, bang bang. The arrivals were two armed soldiers and the tall strongly-built man who, when the cell door had been opened, shook us both rigid.

  “Commander Shaw and Miss Mandrake,” he said in first-class English.

  Well, dead men tell no tales, and Ellum was dead: true, he’d reported our presence in Diego Garcia, but only to Nodd so far as I knew. There was an obvious connection, of course … the man smiled, a sadistic smile. “You have been so foolish to come to China,” he said. “You will never leave our country alive. Have you anything to say?”

  I said, “No, but a word of explanation from you wouldn’t come amiss. May we know who you are, and what your standing is?”

  “I am Lin Fun Fang and I am chairman of the Party committee of the Autonomous Region of Kwangsi-Chuang.”

  “Which is?”

  “The region in which are situated both Yamchow and Shangsze. I think you will understand me?”

  I shrugged. “Your thoughts are your own, Chairman Lin.”

  He seemed to appreciate that: his eyes shone in the light from the bulb behind its grille. The shine, however, didn’t dim the latent sadism, nor did the appreciation. He said, “Now you will come out with Miss Mandrake.”

  “Where to?”

  “You shall see. Come.” He turned and gestured to the soldiers and they stood by the door with their rifles to which short and businesslike bayonets were fixed. Felicity and I emerged and ascended the steps. Outside, the sun was shining still and it was just as we came out on to the square that Lin Fun Fang indicated the basket, all bloody, and told us what was in it and why, which confirmed my earlier theory about a shocking mistake having been made. Somebody, it could have been the Party or it could have been Nodd, had wanted Ellum alive. Maybe he’d been lucky: there might have been torture designed to extract full information as to how much he had been persuaded to reveal to the West.

  Now, only Felicity and I could do that.

  However, whatever was to happen to us was not to happen here in the military barracks. On the square was another truck and we were ordered into it under guard. The truck then drove us to an airfield an estimated twenty miles distant. We were held for a while in the truck while Lin Fun Fang went inside the admin building; when he emerged we were driven across to a waiting transport aircraft and bundled in by our guards who embarked behind us. We were airborne within the next ten minutes; no one would tell us where we were going but by the sun’s position I reckoned, once we had steadied on course, that the direction was due north. Later, when the sun was way down on the western horizon, we altered north-eastwards and in darkness we came down at Peking. We had been brought a long way: we were obviously considered important. It would be a long way back, too, at least in the absence of official transport. I wondered what Rackstall, back in the Hampton Roads, would do when he was faced with a massive blank from the shore. I had tried to get him to commit himself before we had disembarked, but he wouldn’t; since he was a fire-eater I reckoned he would do one of two things: go to war on his own, or have a stroke. Felicity and I were herded out on to the tarmac of a military airfield and then into yet another truck with Lin Fun Fang sitting beside the driver.

  I said, “I suppose you know where the British Embassy is?”

  Lin turned and smiled over his shoulder. “Yes. Number Eleven Kuang Hua Lu, Chien Kuo Men Wai. But you are not going there, Commander Shaw.”

  “No?”

  “No.”

  “I demand, once again, to speak to the British Ambassador.” Silence. I drummed my fingers on the side of the army truck. The ambassador, in his official capacity, would have denied all knowledge of us, very properly. But he would have sent someone to see us, probably a trade attaché, who with discretion could have taken messages for the right quarter. Obviously, Lin Fun Fang knew this as well as I did. As we entered the outskirts of the Chinese capital, I glanced at Felicity: she was being very Miss Mandrake, composed and detached, mouth firm. She was a cool customer, was our Miss Mandrake. The night air was as cool as she was but I began to sweat: Peking had an enclosing feel, and I kept on thinking how its inner sanctum had been known since time immemorial as the Forbidden City, once in you don’t get out again. Since the first advent of the late Chairman Mao, the whole city had become largely forbidden to Westerners. We went through the night-silent streets, passing the tops or bottoms of narrow, twisting alleys. So far as I could see, the city was a good deal cleaner than I had imagined, and as we approached the centre there was almost an air of asepsis and many of the buildings were magnificent in their Oriental fashion, climbing way above the great sixty-foot walls that surrounded the two cities, North and South, that made up the capital. But it was not to any of those splendid, spaciously-set buildings that we were taken: instead, the truck turned off a wide roadway into a side street and then under an archway into a courtyard, a place around twenty feet square that stood like the bottom of a tank at the foot of tall buildings that flanked three of its sides. This place was not so clean: there was a revolting smell of decayed food and God knows what else. Back in Britain I had heard that if you ventured into the behind-the-scenes purlieus of a Chinese restaurant, you would never eat in one again and never mind the façade. Lin Fun Fang got out and, as guns prodded into us, so did Felicity and I. We followed Lin through a doorway to the left of the square and entered a dirty passageway where the smell of decay increased almost to retching point and an elderly Chinese woman, brown and wrinkled like a nut in the light of a tallow lamp by her side, sat in a crouching attitude like the thugs back in Woolwich. She took no notice of us as we passed by; she gave the impression of being in a trance. Lin walked on towards a door at the end of the passage, and we followed
him through with the guns behind us, and climbed a steep staircase that lay immediately beyond the door. At the head of the stairs, another door and then a sharp change of scene: like tradesmen calling at a stately home, we had come in by the back door and now, having come up from below stairs as it were, we met the difference. The furnishings were richly impressive: beautiful carpets and a handsome staircase rising gracefully to a half-landing from which a golden Buddha stared solemnly down upon us. There was something odd about that huge Buddha’s eyes, and as we followed Lin past it I realised why: there was movement behind them, real eyes staring. Buddha was a golden sentry-box, and from the navel region an eighth of an inch of machine-gun muzzle protruded. The hall, the front door and the door to the lower regions were all excellently covered. To right and left of Buddha the stairs divided and we followed Lin up the right-hand one and thence into a spacious apartment at the far end of which one man sat alone beneath a heavily curtained window.

  Lin halted, bowed, and was accorded a small inclination of the head. The man was old, thin and wore a long straggly moustache and beard like a mandarin of a former regime; there the mandarin aspect ended. He wore the regulation, classless uniform of denim cap with peak, shapeless tunic and baggy trousers. Lin spoke to him in Chinese, gesturing towards us as he did so: evidently, he was introducing us. This done, he turned to me and said in English, “You have the honour of facing Deputy-Premier Ch’en Hui-tso of the State Council of the People’s Republic of China, blessed by Heaven and all the Heavenly Bodies, who shall live a thousand years.”

  I nodded, as if endorsing the hope of long life; Lin bowed again, again the old man’s head inclined, and Lin gestured us to approach him more closely. Behind us, the armed guards also closed in as we moved. Ch’en Hui-tso looked older and more fragile the closer we got to him, as though the thousand years were entering their last decade. He pulled with a deathly white hand at the skimpy hairs of his beard, and black eyes glittered at us as he spoke in Chinese. He uttered a fairly lengthy statement, which Lin interpreted for me.

  “Ch’en,” Lin said, “wishes you to know that the Chinese People’s Republic demands a world of peace for all, and that such a peace will not be achieved until world dominion has been established. China has tried to live amicably with all races — with the Soviet Union, with Britain and America, with the emergent nations of Africa, with all others, there being no exceptions. This has failed —”

  “So China means to go it alone?” This needed a little interpretation on its own account, and I gave it. Lin agreed that this was so, in a sense; but that China would have the essential help of WUSWIPP. And that, of course, was the final clincher from the horse’s mouth, no less.

  “Deputy-Premier Ch’en,” Lin went on, “is empowered by the Chairman of the Republic himself to say that within a few days the process of establishing a single world control will be begun. He says that he knows that you understand what he means.”

  “Do I?”

  “He says you come from Diego Garcia.”

  I glanced at Felicity: there was no point in making stupid denials. I said, “All right, I come from Diego Garcia. So?” There was a short consultation in Chinese, then Lin said, “You will, of course, know about the Candar Islands.”

  “Yes.”

  “And perhaps of Yorkshire. And today at noon, though this you will not know, there was much heat in the great city of New York across the Atlantic from Yorkshire. A number of elderly persons were overcome, and died. Deputy-Premier Ch’en thinks that now, perhaps, the West is beginning to understand and when a few more demonstrations are made will accede to our requests.”

  “And Russia, who can attack directly across your border?”

  “But will not do so. Our army is immensely strong, and our nuclear resources are great. Russia, should she attack, can be contained easily until her land is burned by the sun, and this she knows.”

  Also, I thought, it’s in Russia’s interest to have the West demilitarise. Russia would bide her time, maybe even come with smiles and handshakes to Peking to cement an alliance and share the ruling of the world. The day would come when they would split again, but by that time it would be too late for the subject peoples to make a come-back. All the same, I fancied that China was placing too great a reliance on Nodd’s burn-up powers, and I said so. I pointed out that the earth revolved around the sun, that the sun was never for long in the same relative position, that a daily half-hour dose would take one hell of a long time to burn the world up however much UV could be projected in that time, and that Nodd, from his static position north of the Gulf of Tongking, couldn’t burn everywhere at once. Or something like that. It cut no ice. The enigmatic smile on Ch’en’s face when all this had been interpreted was the equal of the Mona Lisa’s, and I began to get the idea that Nodd had something else up his dirty sleeve. I also got the idea, since Ch’en had spoken through Lin of ‘a few days’ to elapse before Nodd went into action, that Rackstall’s urgent message to Washington had had its effect and the Pentagon, or the White House, was using delaying tactics with a fair degree of success, and that at least was comforting. On the other hand, the Chinese were not exactly sitting back: while the delay went on, Nodd’s demonstrations of intent were going to cost lives.

  I asked, “Where do I and Miss Mandrake come in? Why bring us up to Peking?”

  I saw Ch’en smile again. Lin said, “You will see — you will see that and you will see other things.” As he finished speaking, Deputy-Premier Ch’en lifted one of those thin white hands and the guards moved in behind us, thrusting their guns into our backs. The interview was over, and we were led away.

  *

  Back to prison, this time separately. I was taken with Felicity down to the courtyard where we were put back in the truck and driven to a building facing a vast and magnificent square — the Square of Heavenly Peace, as I realised when I saw at one end the great tomb where the late Chairman Mao, now passed beyond the simple days of his old, patched flannel nightgown and democratic slippers, lay embalmed in a coffin of expensive crystal, the Red Flag of Communism covering his corpse from the chest down. Grand-looking government offices loomed through the night and in front of one of them was an immense sprawl of tiered benches, a grandstand hung with banners, erected for some spectacle yet to come. There were crowds about, and gongs were sounding, and firecrackers leapt to scare away devils. There was much spaciousness; but not much space inside for us. Once in the building we were hustled along thickly-carpeted corridors, then through a steel-lined door into a narrow alleyway, equally well carpeted, to deaden sound no doubt — it was all very similar to what I’d known a few years earlier in Moscow’s Lubyanka Prison. This narrow corridor contained individual cells and was guarded by a gaoler with the face of a devil, an automatic pistol and a long, thick stick. I was almost kicked into my cell and Felicity into hers, I being at one end of the inner corridor and she at the other. Once we were in, I heard the gaoler rattling his stick against the walls as he walked up and down and every now and again I felt his beady eye upon me through the spy hole in the door. The cell passageway was brilliantly lit and since the wall above the door was no wall but a strong grille, there was no possibility of avoiding the light. In any case my mind was too active, and the plank bed too hard, for sleep to come easily. I brooded on what was to come. It was obvious they wanted us for questioning: no country captures an agent without milking him or her, or trying to. There would be a lot I could cough up, not necessarily to do with the current schemes of Nodd. All intelligence is welcome. Another thing stood out a mile: if Miss Mandrake didn’t know enough in her own right, she would be a very good lever to get me to talk, although, as an experienced agent herself, she would accept the fact that in 6D2 or any other such organisation, the official ones included, levers are never allowed to shift anything. That is the laid-down instruction, the golden rule, as golden and basic as the one that says you don’t talk under your own personal torture. I had yet to be tested on that one vis-à-vis
Felicity Mandrake. I didn’t think I would be able to stand her screams and that thought made me sweat like a pig. The Chinese are known to be subtle at torture. Anyway, I dropped off to sleep in the end through sheer tiredness and woke to feel the thwack of the policeman’s stick across my shoulders. He gabbled at me in his own language and I got up with fists clenched. He saw that and lashed out at my right fist with his stick, numbing it and drawing blood. As he left the cell and banged the door to, I saw he had deposited food and water: a jug of the latter, and a bowl with a turgid-looking mess in it coloured grey. Being thirsty I risked the water, which had a brackish taste, but the mess in the bowl revolted my stomach and I left it where it was. Drinking the water, I heard the sound of laughter followed by crying coming from along the passage and I knew the crying was Felicity and prayed that she wasn’t breaking already. Half an hour later I saw the eye at the spy hole again, then the door was opened and two armed soldiers stood waiting. I was beckoned out and saw Felicity, also under guard.

  I said, “What happened?”

  She was looking white and shaky. She said, “I’m sorry, I couldn’t help it. They forced me to eat the food … then held my mouth.”

  I said nothing: there was nothing helpful I could say, but I saw more red than I’d ever seen before. Along the passage came the gaoler to use his stick on prisoners who shouldn’t talk to one another. I grabbed it before it fell on Felicity, grabbed it with both hands and to hell with the guns, and forced the gaoler back against the wall. The butt of a rifle slammed into my kidneys and I felt searing pain and sickness, but a point had been made. A man who had the look of authority came into the passage and I let the gaoler go. He went up to make a report to the newcomer. I had the feeling of being saved by the bell but knew that vengeance was being stored up. A few moments later we were being marched out of the passage, out of the back of the building towards a curious contraption on the back of a lorry: a large bamboo cage, quite big enough to take two persons — us. That was a guess that turned out dead accurate: we were herded into this cage and the door was bolted and padlocked and the two soldiers climbed up and sat on the tail-board behind us, grinning at us and waving their rifles menacingly. For a while nothing happened; we sat on the floor of the cage and waited, hearing growing sound from the Square of Heavenly Peace — the ‘spontaneous’ crowds gathering by order? There was a surge of many feet and bursts of laughter, and the sound of drums and cymbals — all very excited, and filled, for us anyway, with extreme foreboding. The overall excitement appeared to inflame our guards: with nothing else currently to do, perhaps, they both got to their feet and began spitting at us, a filthy exercise and well-aimed. After some minutes of this, an officer appeared and shouted orders, a driver climbed up to the lorry’s cab, and we rolled out into a side street, a street that was crammed with people, men, women and children who pressed out of the lorry’s path and shook fists up at us in our wretched cage. From the side street we emerged into the Square of Heavenly Peace and saw the tiered benches of the banner-hung grandstand starting to fill.