by Peter Tonkin
‘Finally, late last week, we saw it change hands again in Tulun. The wood from Siberia was apparently removed by this man [insert three], a local businessman who has contacts in building and light engineering in Cheremukhovo and Irkutsk, as well as being a local councillor, ex-mayor and People’s Assembly member with responsibility for law enforcement and fighting organised crime. The container is one of a series he has despatched to Magadan and it now contains, he assures us, small engine parts destined for Malaysia.
‘We studied the container before it went down to the docks. The secret seals we placed on it in Rybinsk have not been broken. The Geiger counters we brought with us still register the same level of radioactivity they registered in Rybinsk.
‘There is no doubt in my mind that the container which even now is being loaded aboard the container ship Okhotsk in fact contains the multiple warheads we saw leave the silo six weeks ago. The warheads are still fully armed and are ready for launch. There are four of them and each one contains ten sections. Each of the forty sections is ten times more powerful than the bomb exploded over Nagasaki. And they are for sale to the highest bidder.
‘Unless, of course, they have already been sold — to the governments of Taiwan, the Philippines, Pakistan, Libya, North Korea … Ladies and gentlemen, this is the nuclear nightmare we were assured could never happen. The men who told us this were mistaken or they lied. It is happening. It may have happened before, we don’t know. But it is happening here and it is happening now, down there on the quayside as I speak to you. This is Anna Tatianova, Magadan.’ She looked at her watch, stirring her breasts once again, certain in her own mind that, by the end of that little speech, not even the most dedicated of her fans would be watching her cleavage. ‘Midnight plus ten,’ she concluded.
Silently, oozing concern, trying not to breathe too deeply, she looked into the camera until Sergei said, ‘That’s it!’
And Alexei said, as he always did, ‘That was good for me.’
The light went out and Anna switched down out of performance mode. The first thing she did was to pull the collar of her blouse closed. Then she shivered. ‘It’s cold,’ she said. ‘Even for this far north. It’s summer for God’s sake! Where’s my coat?’
Katerina tutted and handed it over.
The four television people crossed to the battered old Zil Sergei had rented on their arrival in the city. In the dull brightness of the courtesy light, he began to fiddle with his equipment. ‘Better get the tape out,’ he said. ‘We can send it on the first Moscow plane in the morning. Unless we’re all going on the first plane to Moscow.’
‘I want to make one or two more shots,’ said Anna. ‘I particularly want to get some kind of picture of the Okhotsk leaving the port.’
Sergei shrugged and stopped fiddling. ‘You’re the boss,’ he said.
‘Right,’ she confirmed. ‘Let’s get back to the hotel.’
They were booked into the best hotel available in Magadan but they weren’t impressed. They were all Muscovite citizens and this was really out in the sticks as far as they were concerned.
The main road up from the docks took them past the Port Authority building where Anna had already established the Okhotsk would not be sailing for several more days at least. She had also used her fame, her charm, her intelligence and her cleavage to get copies of the crew lists of the ship so that she knew the names of the captain and all the senior officers.
‘I tell you what,’ she said now, as the lights of the building fell behind them, ‘I think I ought to interview the captain. What’s his name? Zhukhov?’
‘Are you out of your mind?’ Sergei swerved across the road so severely that the motorbike behind them almost went into the ditch.
‘He may not know what he’s carrying. Even the first officer, the one in charge of what do you call it, loading … ’
‘Lading,’ supplied Andrei from the back seat where he was as ever trying to introduce Katerina to his favourite sins. With no success.
‘Right. Even First Officer Grozny may be entirely innocent.’
‘I doubt it,’ said Sergei, stopping for the lights at the first major junction on the outskirts of the city.
‘It would be good on camera,’ said Anna, using her one unassailable argument.
As they sat waiting for the lights to change, the motorbike which had been following them drew level, on Anna’s side. The passenger on the pillion looked into the car and suddenly began tapping at the window. Automatically, the reporter wound the window down, thinking, my God, even here! A fan!
But as she did so, Sergei gave a strange lurch and the side of his head hit the driver’s window. There came the strangest smell. Like fireworks. Anna Tatianova was put most forcefully in mind of May Day celebrations. She looked up into the smiling face of the pillion rider. He coughed twice, discreetly, as he leaned down towards her.
The lights changed, but Sergei did not move forward.
‘I’m a fan of yours,’ said the helmeted man quietly. He pointed his finger at her chest. Her coat and blouse had fallen open again. He pushed his finger gently against her breastbone and something in his mad dark eyes stopped her from slapping the intimate digit away.
Terror came. Absolute. Overpowering. Though it is doubtful that she ever fully comprehended exactly what was going on.
His finger was warm. Hot, in fact. But it was not flesh and blood. She would have looked down but the mad eyes held her. ‘It would be a sin to spoil your finest feature after all,’ he whispered. The strange finger stroked down the inside of her left breast and then slipped under it.
‘Goodnight,’ whispered the fan, and pulled the trigger. The cough of the silencer was smothered further by the most spectacular cleavage on television. Anna Tatianova slammed back into the seat and then folded forward. The gunman took hold of her almost gently and sat her back. He ran his gloved fingers down over her face, closing the deep-blue pools of her eyes. She looked to be gently asleep, but she was as dead as the others.
‘What shall we do now, Grozny?’ asked the other man on the motorbike nervously.
‘Get everything they had with them,’ spat the first officer. ‘At the very least we can sell it on along with the cargo.’
5
Richard and Lawkeeper Ho left from the Macau ferry terminal in the Shun Tak Centre, 200 Connaught Road, Central, the same as almost everybody else. They did not take the jetfoil because Richard’s leg was still giving him trouble and he always found the airline seats a bit of a crush in any case. The jetcat would get them across in less than ninety minutes and allow him the freedom to move around if he needed to.
And he was feeling the need to access a bit of freedom after a week made up largely of hospital regime followed by the even more restrictively smothering concern of the amah, Su-lin. Su-lin’s ministrations had been compounded from afar by the messages she received from Robin at the beginning and end of the evening chats which she and Richard habitually exchanged. But it was worth putting up with Su-lin’s cosseting to hear from Robin that the twins had adored staying with her father and were now equally happily ensconsed with his parents who were indulging them outrageously. The weather was stunning in England, and for once the North Sea coast of Lincolnshire was in the same league as Hong Kong, though thirty rather than thirty-five degrees, and the onshore breeze at Summersend was a cooling relief from the heat, not a condensation-laden, stultifying blanket as it was even at Repulse Bay. They all missed him and she would see him in a couple of weeks. In the same way as he played down the importance of his experience at the hands of the muggers, she referred only lightly to the family’s experiences on the Solway Firth.
Richard arrived at the Shun Tak Centre almost wild with restlessness, with a briefly-scanned copy of the latest edition of the People’s South China Morning Post neatly folded under his arm. That historic organ had undergone some changes of late, but it was still the most authoritative English-language paper available. Earlier in the week it had carried a
brief piece about the attack on Richard, buried almost out of sight beneath the report of the raid on the Mermaid Club. Even the eel was under arrest, apparently. Today’s edition held the story of the continued detention of Sulu Queen while the authorities decided upon the precise nature of the charges to be brought against her crew and owners. But that, too, was small beer, buried far down the news page. Of more importance now was the arrival of the latest dangerous weather system. This — not yet a tai-fun — had its origins down in that nasty little storm factory off the Philippines. At the moment of going to press, it was whirling between the Mindoro Strait and Da Nang, heading for the latter at a fair lick. The weathermen in Xianggang had given it a name, just in case it came up into their neck of the woods. In the meantime, storm warning Number One was up.
Richard had tested his returning strength by riding down on the MTR one stop from the office. He came out of the Sheung Wan exit, leaning slightly on a cane, head and shoulders above the seething mass of people pouring past the bus station and bifurcating into twin streams for the shopping mall and the Centre itself. Richard followed the latter stream. In his left hand he held his tightly packed weekend case. The Post was under that arm. The cane in his right hand supported his still-strapped knee, though he could have walked without it had he wished to do so and anywhere other than that bustling press of humanity he would probably have done so.
Lawkeeper Ho saw Richard long before Richard saw him and so was able to appear as if from nowhere to fall in step beside the tall Englishman. ‘The storm’s turned north towards us,’ he said easily. ‘Number Four will be up in half an hour.’
‘Will they halt the sailing?’ Richard sounded uncharacteristically worried. It was hard to get tickets for the Macau ferry. If this sailing was cancelled it would be well into next week before he could go, especially as he was choosy which way he went. And he would lose his ticket money too — extra because it was a Saturday.
‘Shouldn’t think so. It’s only eighty minutes, after all. What can go wrong?’
Richard looked at his slight companion. ‘Have you ever been to sea?’ he asked.
‘Not in the way you mean.’
They reached the gate side by side and produced their tickets. A bored-looking official of some indeterminate type waved them through. As they went, his eyes followed Richard but that was probably only because the gweilo was so tall. Then he turned back to scanning the faces — and glancing at the tickets — of the people thronging past him. It was not until a gweilo woman came past that he stirred into interest again. But that might have been because she, too, was so tall and statuesque, and because her hair, though short, was so exactly the colour of fire. Even in the precisely tailored emerald-green silk suit she wore, she had an aura of dangerously feline physicality. The ticket collector shivered, caught between an excess of lustful speculation about that silk-sheathed body and simple masculine nervousness about such power in a woman.
Richard and Lawkeeper, meanwhile, were swept forward by the river of humanity. A covered walkway took them to the entrance at the rear of the jetcat’s passenger cabin. Through the walkway windows it was just possible to catch a glimpse of gathering clouds, puffy and white for the most part, though gathering some solid grey at their bases. Richard’s eyes, however, were taken by the lines of the jetcat’s white hull. He was used to seeing hovercraft crossing the Channel from the wide windows of Ashenden. During the last year or two, he had heard, these sleek monsters had replaced the boxy, propeller-driven SRN4s, but he had hardly been home long enough to see any of them crossing to France. Who would have dreamed that massive multihulls would oust the apparently invincible hovercraft from the fast sea-transport niche? Perhaps Heritage Mariner should get involved, he mused. When they were free of the China Queens fiasco. The beginning of that freedom would come in a couple of hours’ time in Macau, when he had a chat with Twelvetoes. On that cheerful if fundamentally flawed hope, Richard stepped aboard the jetcat, with Lawkeeper silently at his side.
The jetcat carried more than two hundred passengers but such was the popularity of Macau as a destination, every seat was booked and had been for days. Some official somewhere in the local government commune responsible for ferries currently masquerading as the Xianggang Ferry Company had assigned names to seats and each name was expected to occupy the seat marked on the ticket. Things were not always that simple, but by and large the passengers were content to do what they were told. Only Richard, unschooled in Oriental obedience and too big to fit easily into his seat in any case, rather undermined the system by refusing to sit down. He knew the jetcat well but for some reason that day he wanted to wander around the common parts and explore a little. Lawkeeper went with him, but only after he had established where their seats were. The numbers corresponded to two out of six gathered round one of only four tables on this side, under a square window looking out to port — literally. At the moment it gave a good view of a rope-littered pier piled with general freight, and a line of cars. Lawkeeper carefully tore each ticket in half and pinned the top to the back of each seat. This announced to the thronging cabin that the seats’ occupiers were safely aboard and would be returning. This in theory ensured no one else would take them. It was hardly needed since the passengers for the most part had been schooled in obedience from the cradle. Even so, Lawkeeper went through his little ritual and glared around the nearest passengers, just in case. Then he followed Richard on his restless tour of the big craft.
The mass of passengers on the jetcat were housed in a great central cabin like the cabins of two airliners laid side by side and separated by a raised walkway. At the forward end of this, stairs rose in two elegant curves to a balcony with rather more exclusive little round tables. From this balcony the front windows opened over the foredeck and looked ahead into the gathering cloud. At either end of the balcony doors opened outwards so that it was possible to walk out on to the foredeck if one wished to do so. Hanging against the wall of this raised section, which most of the aircraft-style seats faced, was a great video screen. As the passengers milled about, settling themselves and preparing for the crossing, the screen displayed the safety procedures everyone was required to follow in the event of an emergency. Hardly anyone paid the slightest attention, and nobody could have heard the earnest soundtrack over the babble in any case. At the rear of the cabin, where another raised section opened into a cross-cabin area not quite as high as the forward balcony, a little shop sold papers, maps, books and tourist trash. Behind this, two passages, one port and one starboard, led back above two exclusive conference facilities which were already packed with Japanese and Malaysian businessmen doing deals before the cat sailed. Behind this was a bar area, again already packed, where the cosy little nooks of eight seats bunched round a table looked out over the aft deck which in turn looked down over the massive engines at the rear of each twin hull.
Richard and Lawkeeper were out on the afterdeck, up against the aft rail, when a sort of a stir went through the passengers and a distant slamming clang announced the closing of the door. Almost at once the captain began to speak on the intercom in Cantonese and then in English and then in some other Chinese tongue less easy to distinguish. But it was impossible to hear what he was saying in any language. Only one word in three penetrated the babble. As soon as the intercom fell silent, the jetcat began to move. Richard’s seafarer’s eyes watched the way she was piloted out into the watercourse at the western end of what he still thought of as Victoria Harbour. They pulled out past West Point, with what was formerly called Victoria Peak soaring in the background beyond the high-rises and the university. If he looked the other way, he could see across to Kowloon, with Tsimshatsui gathered down by the water and the other tongs rising higher behind, sprawling away to the north beyond the glitter of the ocean terminal, China Hong Kong City and the Yaumatei typhoon shelter — which might well get use sometime soon. Even during the bustle of departure, the clouds had gathered and darkened. And a little wind had picked up, just e
nough to blow away the mist and reveal Stonecutter’s Island and, beyond it, Kwai Chung. The jetcat surged up a little closer to full speed, the jets of water beginning to lift behind the twin hulls. They swung round into the channel inside Green Island and Richard’s view swung also, until he could see the rising span of the bridges across to Tsing Yi and then over to Lamma Island; the latter massive span disappearing behind the swell of Green Island with its lighthouse.
As they pulled out of the channel into the open waters north of Lamma Island, the cat went full throttle, the arches of water rose and sparkled, and it became impossible even for Richard to discern that first quiet puffing of dark storm wind from the forty-knot headwind created by their speed. Richard stood, entranced, as the massive power of the water jets thrust the craft across the gathering grey chop almost parallel to the southern shore of Lan Tao. Discovery Bay and Silver Mine Bay unwound in the distance, increasingly dully under the overcast; in the foreground lay the tiny islands of Peng Chau and Hei Ling Chau. Then the Chi Ma Wan peninsula gathered on the starboard while Cheung Chau rose to port and the cat sped through the little channel between them like an arrow before swinging a little harder to port and shooting past Cheung Sha Beach with Sunset and Lan Tao Peaks rising behind and, beyond, the planes flying into and out of Chek Lap Kok. The Soko Islands sped past more distantly to port and Fan Lau point to starboard defined the end of Lan Tao Island altogether. Abruptly, the sparkling curves of clear water went muddy, then almost as dark as the gathering sky. They had entered the outwash of the Zhujiang — the Pearl River. For the next half-hour they would be crossing its outflow. Incredibly, the cat seemed to surge up even higher, its powerful jets moving them even more quickly towards their destination.
As both sky and water darkened, Richard and Lawkeeper went inside. They had plans to make, or at least arrangements to agree. Still without admitting any kind of relationship — insisting, in fact, on only the most distant professional interest — Lawkeeper was nevertheless able to give Richard a good deal of detail as to the whereabouts of his namesake, Twelvetoes Ho. It was the Xianggang police’s understanding that the Dragon Head had come down from Huangpu Gang, Guangzhou’s massive deepwater port, to the new port facility at Macau. It was rumoured that Ho’s ship would be sailing soon, though exactly when and where for remained a little out of focus as yet. When he came off the ship he would probably go to Man Wa, a quiet little hotel he habitually frequented. If he did not, the Macauese police would tell Lawkeeper where he was. Richard would be very unlucky indeed to miss his old friend, said Lawkeeper, with knowing emphasis.