by Adam Brookes
“We can’t.”
Rocky rounded on him.
“Where do we go, then? How else? You want to drive? Hundred and twenty miles through Myanmar to the Thai border? You want that? Or walk maybe? Or maybe we follow those cars, the mopeds back into China. You want that? What do you want?”
The men had started to move toward the building. Rocky swore, reached in one of the pockets on his vest, brought out his handheld. He poked at the touchscreen.
“Come,” he said.
They ran toward the back of the building, down a long dark corridor lined with what appeared to be hotel rooms, the doors splitting, the jambs warped, holes in the drywall, a smell of fouled drains. Rocky laid the handheld down on the carpet. He took Mangan by the arm and they went farther down the corridor. Rocky motioned him to lie down. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, Mangan made out at the far end of the corridor a window to the night sky. Rocky was rummaging in the backpack, had pulled out something, but Mangan could not make out what it was. Mangan pulled the sidearm from his waist, but Rocky hissed at him.
“No! No shooting, Philip. Let me do this.”
They lay there, three minutes, four. The alarm went off on the handheld, a gritty, metallic whine. The handheld pulsed silver, forty feet from where they lay, casting a glow on the walls and ceiling. The whine grew louder. Another minute passed. Still, the alarm whined.
Silhouetted against the window, now, shapes flitting, very slow, very silent. Two, or three?
They were coming.
Mangan felt Rocky shift, very slowly, bring up whatever it was he was holding.
The first of them approached the shrieking handheld, weapon to his shoulder, scanning, the muzzle stroking the air. The man knelt, reached very slowly to pick up the device, and as he did so he looked up.
From Rocky’s hands shot a silent, flickering, green beam.
The beam played down the corridor, scudding over the walls, ceiling, running over the bodies and the weapons and the faces of the three men. Mangan saw the eyes of the men as tiny points of light in the darkness as the beam touched them, watched the men jerking away. A thud, a weapon dropping to the floor? A shout. Zenme? “How?” Then a wail, turning to a scream. And one of them was trying to run, hitting the wall, thudding away down the corridor, Mangan could see his lurching silhouette. Another got some rounds off, silenced, their thop-thop in the darkness over the screaming of the alarm, but Mangan couldn’t tell where they were going. He forced himself downward into the carpet, felt specks of plaster falling on his hair. The green beam was still playing down the corridor, the handheld’s alarm screeching now, distorting. The first of the men, the one who had gone to pick up the handheld, was on all fours, one hand over his eyes, blind, gasping, his breath catching, chest heaving. His cheeks were wet, liquid dripping through his fingers. And the thought skittered across Mangan’s mind that he had never seen anything so brutal.
They ran, took another stairway down, and fled through a fire door into the night, over an expanse of shattered concrete and rubble, making once again for the trees. The helicopter loitered over the building, didn’t see them go.
69
Mangan was close to collapse when they came on the boathouse. Rocky, pulling him along, soaked in sweat, bright-eyed, maddened, hammered on the door, Mangan falling to his knees. An old man in faded blue denim beckoned them in. Mangan couldn’t stand, crawled into the boathouse, which was lit by a single bulb, the river slapping and shimmering against a tiny concrete dock. The boatman regarded him, spoke in broken Mandarin.
“Who is he?” he said.
“Never fucking mind. Get him on board,” said Rocky.
The boat was a wooden thing with a flat bottom, twenty foot or so, two powerful outboards on the stern. But the boatman was pulling up panels.
Christ, no.
“How long will it take?” Rocky was saying.
The boatman shrugged.
“Go fast, no stop, maybe ten hours.”
And then Rocky and the boatman were pulling him onboard and forcing him down. He tried to struggle, pushed against the boatman’s arms of corded muscle, felt the man’s hands like clamps on his shoulders. He thought of the weapon for an instant but couldn’t reach it. They made him lie down on the same foul, sodden rubber mats, and Rocky was lying next to him, and the boatman dropped in a bottle of water, then the panels came down and the light was gone, and the boatman seemed to be hammering them back in place.
Mangan heard himself emit a scream, battered his fists against the planking, thrashed with his legs, but the engines started, drowned everything out. The wood felt slippery, soapy, against his fingers. He could see nothing. The boat started to move, the water bubbling beneath the hull. His breath was coming shallow and fast, panicky, the air hot and soaked with the stench of the river.
“Are you there?” he said.
“Yes.” Rocky’s voice was tight, straining over the engines.
The boat was starting to pitch and jerk with the river’s chop.
“This is our coffin.”
“No, no.”
“I cannot do this.”
Rocky was speaking, but he could hear nothing over the engines, the vibrating hull, the slosh and slap of the water. The boat pitched mercilessly, Mangan scrabbling for purchase against the wet wood. He was sodden, deafened, weak with panic, when his mind suddenly flooded with a childhood memory.
At a fairground, he had been urged onto a ride, a drum that started to spin, flattened you against the wall and held you there as the floor fell away. He was terrified, loathed it and cried and wet himself, and his mother had pulled him away and taken him home and his father had not said anything, smoked his pipe. Damp with piss, he had sat and watched television, an animation, singing animals in an herb garden, his mother telling him not to be babyish. The animals’ songs looped in his head—I’m Dill the dog, I’m a dog called Dill—as the boat crashed down on the water and the engines screamed. He tried to shout to Rocky. Should have told the polygraph man about that. So he could calibrate me. But the words came out blurred, knotted, half-formed.
He was retching, choking, drifting, receding.
By three, Mac had them hard by the river, just outside Chiang Khong. They stopped by the bridge, looked across the water. Mac turned off the car, and the night was silent, no traffic, just the effervescent insects.
“Now what?” he said.
Patterson ignored him. She had the laptop out, was cabling it to the sat phone, searching for a signal.
CX BRAMBLE
PLAN ARRIVE CHIANG SAEN BY RIVER WITHIN EIGHTEEN HOURS.
COORDS 20.261048, 100.094416. EXPECT TWO FOR EXFIL. EXPECT CX>
She said nothing, showed Mac the message, then Cliff, who nodded.
“So we park up and wait,” he said.
Mac started the car and they nosed up the road. Chiang Saen, she calculated, was about thirty miles. They settled on a rutted track behind a temple, a stand of bamboo and palm trees hiding them from the road. Mac put his chair back, tried to sleep. The heat was oppressive, even in the pre-dawn. Cliff got out of the car and ambled a way off, stretched, shook out the stiffness. Patterson watched him go, then got out and followed him. He turned a corner in the track, slipped from view.
When she caught up with him, he was murmuring into a secure handheld.
She walked back to the car, the disappointment aching in her.
At the beginning, she thought, we are in control. And then control slips from us. Who is in control now? Who are we serving?
Late evening at VX. Hopko, her left wrist wrapped in a beaten silver spiral, glasses poised in mid-air for emphasis. Tonight, thought Chapman-Biggs, she is embattled. She demands the attention of the crowd with her smoky charisma, her knowingness, but she has choices to make.
She had a screen set up in her office. Chapman-Biggs, Mobbs, C, and a cluster of other Service worthies studied it.
“The reports,” she was saying, “are filtering out from th
e Hong Kong press and are as yet, unconfirmed.”
She looked around the table.
“They report odd troop movements in Beijing. Social media is showing images of a cordon around Party Headquarters at Zhongnanhai.”
Click.
On the screen, a photograph of Chang’an Avenue, shot at night from a moving vehicle, the image soaked in orange, the street lamps streaked across it. Before the vermilion walls of Zhongnanhai, security barriers lining the street. A column of wujing, the paramilitary police, snaked away past five or six armored crowd control vehicles.
“The embassy is being roused from its stupor. Foreign reporters are trying to get down there, but they’re being stopped before they can get close.”
She turned and studied the image.
“And we’re seeing messages on social media saying roads in and out of Beijing monitored, checkpoints and what have you. They’re deleted as soon as they appear.”
Click. Beijing airport, more armored vehicles on the approach road, wujing lining the shoulder.
“And we have Chinese bloggers, God bless them, declaring that troops of the Capital Garrison and all Beijing Military Region have been ordered to stay put in barracks. Normally something we’d discount, but Cheltenham say they’re seeing something strange. A big military exercise in Inner Mongolia has gone silent. Airwaves should be crackling with signals, but they’re not. Everyone’s stopped work. Or gone home. Reduced Air Force activity, too. The People’s Liberation Army seems to be on hiatus.”
She smoothed her hair.
“So this is what it looks like.”
“What what looks like?” said the Director.
Hopko sighed.
“China coming undone.”
C, arms folded, his head cocked at her, spoke.
“I don’t think that’s going to happen though, do you?”
Hopko waited a moment.
“I wasn’t aware it was up to us.”
C laughed, a harsh little bark, spread his arms wide.
“But, Valentina, we have exercised extraordinary leverage, wouldn’t you say? We’ve been able to warn, to advise, even provided them with first-rate operational intelligence, the pinpoint location of key plotters.”
He paused, watched her through his rimless spectacles, and then rammed it home.
“And all due to your superb tradecraft, Val, your peerless operational planning.”
And it was there, for a sliver of a moment, that Chapman-Biggs saw Hopko reel.
“I hope they are grateful,” she said.
“Oh, they are. They contacted us twenty minutes ago.”
“And?”
“The Chinese Communist Party thanks us and welcomes our intervention on behalf of security and stability in the face of criminal plots.”
No one said anything. Then C spoke again.
“Oh, everyone is grateful, Val, everyone. They’re, well, relieved, frankly, not to have to think about all those Chinese accounts in Jersey and Cayman.”
She had put her glasses on the table in front of her and sat looking at them, with her hands in her lap.
“Foreign Office is thrilled,” C went on, “to be basking in Beijing’s approval. Anticipating all sorts of goodies, they are.” He nodded, but she had had enough.
“Did they say anything else?”
“Oh, if you mean did they say anything about Mangan, yes. Yes, they did. Said they had no knowledge of his whereabouts. Which I took to mean that if he can skedaddle, they won’t go out of their way to find him, wring him dry and shoot him. Rather generous of them, I thought. Given his history.”
A long, awkward silence. Chapman-Biggs felt himself on the very edge of saying something, anything to fill it. Until C finally broke it.
“They do, however, want HYPNOTIST, of course.”
Hopko put one hand on the table, palm down.
70
He came and went over interminable hours. He heard Rocky talking, shouting at him, once felt Rocky’s hand on his shoulder, understood nothing over the engine roar. The boat lurched upward, crashed down onto the water relentlessly, over and over and over, hurling the two of them about the sodden compartment. Mangan writhed in the filth, sometimes present, sometimes deep inside himself, in chaotic whorls of thought and memory, teetering on the edge of hallucination, entangled in semi-conscious dreams of punishment, of a beating he’d had as a child looping in his mind, the voice of the master as he bent, I’m going to give you twelve and I don’t want to do it but I will, and the thwack of the shoe echoing away into his mother’s voice, scolding him for something intangible, something forgotten in everything but her tone of voice, his awareness of it, standing in the kitchen, the back door open, the smell of mown grass from the garden. I am present at the hatching of my doubt. I am present as it lives in me and grows old with me.
Sometimes he was just gone, oblivious.
Once, he was aware of the engines cutting out, orders shouted through a megaphone. The boat wobbled and tipped as they were boarded. And then the grumble as the outboards restarted, and it began again.
Then, hours, weeks later, a slowing, a calming. The engines idled, the movement lessened. He heard the boatman’s feet, the creaking and straining of the wooden panels.
The sunlight was blinding. He felt the boatman pull him from the compartment, lay him down, pull a canvas tarpaulin over him.
“Thailand water now. You can lie here.” He imagined Rocky was there beside him but he couldn’t tell. He slept.
Cliff pulled the vehicle off the road just to the south of the jetty, shielded from the road. He and Patterson clambered down to the water’s edge. The river was brown and sullen. They sat in silence amid thorn bushes. They took it in turns watching through binoculars, swigging water from a bottle. She had one of the sidearms under her shirt. Cliff had another. The MP7s were with Mac in the car.
At around nine thirty in the morning, a fishing boat, its orange paint flaking, pulled onto the jetty, and a dark, spindly man in shorts tied it up and stepped out, but it was too early, she thought.
Later, a launch, peopled by portly men with clutch bags and sunglasses who struggled to clamber ashore, fussing and offering each other a hand, their purposes on the river entirely unclear.
Water birds skimmed the river. Midges floated around her. They sat in silence watching the water.
And then, at nearly midday, hugging the Thai side of the river, there crawled toward them a flat bottomed boat of the sort used to transport desirable items from place to place along this stretch of the Mekong. A single boatman aboard, but as Patterson refocused, she could see a green tarpaulin in the bottom of the boat, covering something.
Bodies?
The boat was moving slowly, cautiously, toward the jetty, the boatman craning his neck, searching the shoreline.
“That’s him. Agreed?” she said.
“Agreed,” said Cliff.
“We do it quickly. Get them to the car and go.”
“After he touches the jetty, should be two minutes, tops,” said Cliff. His voice was calm, supportive. For a moment, she felt reassured.
“So we go.”
She stood, exposing herself to view, and started to walk along the bank. Cliff was right behind her. The boat was a hundred meters away. She climbed onto the jetty. Cliff stayed down on the bank, watching her back. She could see Mac getting out of the car, scanning the road. The boatman saw her, and the engines came alive and the boat sped up its approach, the prow lifting, flecking the brown water white. The boatman brought it up to the jetty, turning it deftly at the last second, so it glided in side on, the engines cutting out.
And there he lay, covered by a tarpaulin, filthy, pale, hollow-eyed, accusing her with his look.
And next to him, kneeling, HYPNOTIST, the look anticipatory, a gesture, something of a wave, or the offering of a hand.
They were moving fast now, Cliff bounding up onto the jetty, into the boat, lifting Mangan to his feet, helping him onto the dock,
where he stood, sodden and shaky, silent. Then HYPNOTIST, Cliff handing him out of the boat. The Chinese man was in better shape, went immediately to Patterson and began to speak.
“I am Colonel Shi Hang of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army—”
Patterson cut him off, spoke fast, in military.
“We know who you are, Colonel—”
“And I wish to defect.”
“We must move now, talk later.” Cliff was behind him taking an arm. Mac was waiting, the car doors open. Mangan just stood like a drowned dog. Cliff began marching HYPNOTIST up the jetty to the car.
She went to Mangan.
“Let’s go, Philip. Let’s get you out of here.”
He looked at her, that level look, and then down at his feet.
“Come on, Philip, everything’s all right. Let’s move.”
He began to walk shakily up the jetty. She took him by the elbow. He felt clammy and she could smell something fetid coming off him.
“Quick as you like, then you can rest.” She urged him forward.
Ahead of her, she could see Cliff, his hand still clamped on Rocky’s arm, standing a short distance from the car, looking toward the road, in the direction of the town.
She followed his eyeline. Some distance away, two vehicles were moving at speed towards them. She shouted.
“Get him in the car.” She was dragging Mangan now. He was shaking his head, his face crumpling.
Rocky was gesturing towards the SUV, looking expectant. Time for me to get in? Cliff was nodding, smiling, seemed to be telling him to relax. Patterson propelled Mangan forward. Mac jogged toward them to help. He had one of the MP7s on a strap, snug against his chest. Together they maneuvered Mangan into the back seat of the SUV. Patterson climbed in next to him. Mac was quickly around the car to the driver’s seat.
The two vehicles were closing fast, no more than a quarter of a mile away now.
“Cliff,” Patterson shouted. “Now.”
“Coming, boss.” But still he just stood there.
Rocky was starting to get frantic. He turned his body, tried to break for the car, but the New Zealander held him.