The Shanghai Union of Industrial Mystics

by Nury Vittachi

  ‘We must go NOW,’ Joyce shouted. ‘There can’t be much time left.’

  Sixty seconds later, they were travelling north along the river. Wong, McQuinnie, Cai and Lu sat near the tiny bridge cabin of the freighter, which was piloted by the boatman’s wife (her husband had raced off to ‘put the money somewhere safe’, which probably meant his mahjongg bookie’s cashbox, judging by the twinkle in his eye).

  Joyce, peeling her wet hair out of her eyes, said: ‘CF, can you ask the woman how long it will be before we get to the sea?’

  Wong rose wearily to his feet and shouted the question to the skipper. After a short conversation, he passed the bad news to his assistant. ‘She says it will take at least thirty minutes to get to the part of the estuary where it opens wide into the sea.’

  He sat down, saying no more.

  ‘How long have we got before—you know?’

  ‘Eighteen minutes.’

  They sat in silence, waiting for what appeared to be inevitable disaster.

  15

  Dooley sat twitching in gross discomfort on the motorbike. His buttocks shifted from side to side and he wriggled and squirmed like a restless child. There was nothing wrong with the Electra-Glide’s padded leather seat. He was uncomfortable because he was really sitting on a massive pile of shards of broken dreams. There is nothing sharper: not glass, not knives, not razor blades. Jagged remains of what had been a pretty impressive career stuck out in all directions under him, some of them painfully piercing his tight-muscled butt.

  Somehow, impossibly, he had lost his prey. Yes, every agent loses somebody sometime. A Bin Laden or a Saddam slip through your fingers. But to lose some young woman and an elephant? How could one lose an elephant? In his mind’s ear, he could hear the committee of inquiry asking him: ‘Agent Dooley, tell us once again: how did you come to lose the elephant?’ More importantly, how could a man who had demanded a virtually unlimited operations budget, and received it, lose an elephant? He would be the laughing stock of the White House. Of America. Of the world. Imagine the headlines. Men in Black Lose Jumbo. This was the end of everything: his prospects, his job, his life. Along with the girl and the elephant, the meteoric career of Acting Special Agent in Charge Thomas ‘Cobb’ Dooley had vanished.

  It seemed impossible, but somehow, in the 250 metres between Nanjing Dong Lu and Hankou Lu—an area of nothing but crumbling old blocks, grubby commercial buildings and small alleys hung with washing—his quarry had disappeared into thin air. He had radioed every other bike and car on the road. All had lost the scent. There was no alternative now but to ask the Chinese for help. Perhaps Commander Zhang had managed to catch the sons of bitches on her blasted Jurassic era bicyclette.

  He climbed off Donaldson’s Harley, stretched his spine and punched in her number so hard he nearly broke the phone.

  ‘Zhang? It’s Dooley. We lost them. Kin you see them?’

  ‘Hello, Agent Dooley. I know where they are, although I can’t see them from where I am at the moment. But I can see you.’

  ‘You can?’ Dooley strained to hear as a thrumming noise in the background started to get louder. ‘Where are you?’

  ‘Right on top of you.’

  There was something in the tone of her voice that seemed to add ‘as usual’. He wondered what she meant. But it quickly became obvious. As the juddering sound in the background rose to a deafening level, the Acting Special Agent in Charge looked up and saw a Chinese helicopter moving diagonally across the sky.

  Bastards. They had a chopper. Of course. That’s what was needed to catch slippery devils like these. Bikes or foot patrols were useless in a maze of streets like this. ‘Uh, ah kin see you too, now. Where are they? Where’s the bomb?’ Better to refer to them as a bomb; it sounded less ludicrous, less Hollywood than ‘where’s the kid with the elephant?’

  ‘In the river. East of where you are now, about half a kilometre, in a small cargo-boat, heading due north.’

  ‘Thanks, Zhang. Ah owe you one. Detain them ’til ah get there.’

  Silence.

  Dooley reluctantly allowed himself to remember that she was not one of his staff, and should not be given orders. ‘Ah mean, ah would be grateful if you cud locate them and stop them moving, Commander Zhang. If that accords with your plans, of course. Then we cud decide what to do with them.’

  ‘I’ve already thought about that. Move fast, Special Agent Dooley. I wish you good fortune. Over.’

  Damn. She knew where they were and it sounded like she already had a plan. She rang off and he stabbed the buttons to talk to the Mobile Command Centre. A red light flashed on to show that he was in contact. He heard the receptionist’s voice: ‘This is—’ ‘This is Dooley. Ah need a chopper and ah need it now,’ he barked, not wanting to waste time with niceties such as procedure. ‘The biggest, fastest, fattest one we got.’ He knew that the Presidential party arrived with at least two choppers, and it was an established fact that the US led the world in aerospace technology, building the biggest, baddest, speediest, meanest, wickedest jet-fresh choppers in the universe. Now he would show two-wheeled Zhang what he could do.

  Commander Zhang’s helicopter paused thoughtfully in the sky over downtown Shanghai for a few seconds before dipping to the north and then east as it followed a bend in the river.

  She was proud of the fact that the Zhi-9 multi-role army support chopper, better known as the Z-9, was built by a Chinese firm, the Harbin Aircraft Manufacturing Company. Of course the original design had not been Chinese. It was a licensed copy of the French Eurocopter known as the AS 365N or, better still, by its nickname Dauphin II. But the percentage of Chinese parts had risen steadily and was now over 70 per cent. So the aircraft were Chinese, in a very real way. The PLA had more than one hundred and fifty of them in three models, and frequently loaned them to the People’s Armed Police for special operations. Zhang had flown in them all. The naval variant Z-9C was the sleekest, the attack variant WZ-9 was the fastest, but she preferred the army multi-role variant Z-9, which was by far the most versatile. The craft she was in now, the Z-9B, was a good mid-size chopper, its 13-metre body small enough to be fast and flexible, but with enough room to carry a heavy payload of communications equipment, or up to eight troops. It had a maximum speed of 305 kilometres an hour, and she told the pilot to step on it and use full throttle to get to the river as fast as possible.

  ‘See that boat over there?’ she said to him. ‘Get us right over it, as quickly as you can.’

  A wise man’s son was going on his first journey away from home.

  His father said: ‘Don’t worry. We shall be in contact, even though we are far apart.’

  The boy said: ‘How can that be? I may be more than one thousand li away from you.’

  The wise man pointed to the sky. ‘At noon every day, look up at the sun. I shall do so at the same time. It will be our go-between.’

  The boy said: ‘Can the sun really carry messages between us?’

  The wise man said: ‘Yes. When I think it is time for you to come home, I will wink at the sun and ask the sun to wink at you.’

  The boy set off, and every day at noon he looked up at the sun and felt his father looking at the same sun, many li away.

  Two weeks later, there was an eclipse. The boy said to himself: ‘The sun is winking at me, passing on a message from my father. Now it is time to go home.’

  But halfway home, the boy fell sick and could not move.

  The sun saw this and winked at the boy’s father.

  The wise man, realising that no second eclipse was scheduled, raced to the boy’s rescue.

  Blade of Grass, pretend you can commune with nature and soon you will be able to.

  As Luo, the sage of the Plain of Jars wrote, ‘Be not afraid of things that make you grow. Fear only when you are not growing.’

  From ‘Some Gleanings of Oriental Wisdom’

  by CF Wong.

  The boat was slow. It was a divine snail, walking in sleepy sl
o-mo over the surface of the water. It ambled. It strolled. It stopped and scratched its butt, spun around a bit in the current, and then chugged along a bit more. It was in no hurry at all. Because, hey, it couldn’t go any faster, so why sweat? It would get there when it got there, and no one could do anything about it.

  Wong and McQuinnie were sweating, despite the stiff wind blasting sideways across the river. The operation was running out of time. The feng shui master kept stealing glances at his watch. There was not the slightest chance that they would be able to get to the open sea by the time the bomb blew up. They needed another plan. They would have to choose a spot somewhere in the river itself for the explosion—and they would need to get themselves well clear of it.

  His eyes darted from side to side, looking for a space that was relatively unoccupied. But the river just did not seem to get any wider—and every inch of both banks were covered with buildings, whether dwellings or godowns of some sort. Even worse, there were always people in the water around them. On some reaches, the banks were lined with wooden boats parked for the evening—what Wong called ‘family boats’, in which water-people spent their lives in tiny, damp, creaking rooms. Then there were the boats that nudged past them one way or the other—an unending stream of junks, sampans, water-taxis and cargo-carriers moving around on business or for pleasure. There was no stretch of even a few metres where he could imagine a major explosion taking place without sinking at least one boat and killing or injuring people.

  ‘Cheese. You know that book, Slow Boat to China? It must have been written about this boat. How far now till we get to the sea?’ Joyce asked, her voice little more than an unhappy sigh.

  ‘Twenty-five minutes at least, I think.’

  ‘And how long have we got before—you know?’

  ‘Thirteen minutes. No, twelve and a half.’

  ‘What are we going to do?’

  Wong turned to face her. ‘I think now only one thing we can do. Stop the boat. Tell everyone to go away from us. And then pull the plug.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You mean sink the boat?’ Cai asked.

  ‘We can’t do that,’ Joyce objected. ‘Nelson will drown. He’ll drown in his sleep. That would be awful.’

  Wong cursed in Chiu Chow—a dialect that he hoped none of the people listening understood. Stupid gwai mui cares more about the elephant than about humans. ‘If we sink boat, elephant will drown. He will be dead before he explodes. That is more kind to him than letting him live until he explodes.’

  Joyce looked doubtful.

  Cai didn’t like the plan. ‘If we sink the boat, someone will have to pay for a new one.’

  All three turned to Wong, who adopted a don’t-look-at-me expression and found something to stare at on the eastern shore.

  Linyao held up her palm. ‘Hang on. Another problem with this scheme. If we drop the elephant in the water, he’ll probably wake up—the shock of cold water, the falling sensation.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Elephants can swim. They can even use their trunks like snorkels.’

  ‘He’ll probably swim after us. He likes me,’ Joyce said.

  Linyao agreed. ‘He’ll swim after our boat until the bomb goes off. Bang—right up our butts.’

  ‘Ouch,’ Joyce said.

  The feng shui master pretended he was not listening, but Ms Lu’s words worried him. He did not like the sound of this. A massive swimming bomb following him around at heaven knows what speed while he was stuck in a slow-moving boat in the middle of the Huangpu River—not a pleasant notion at all. ‘Okay. I think we need a different plan.’ Trouble was, he couldn’t think of one.

  He turned to the boatwoman and spoke in Shanghainese. ‘Where does the river get wider? Is it soon?’ Please let it be soon.

  ‘Yes, very soon,’ she said.

  ‘Ten, eleven minutes more?’

  ‘No. Maybe thirty-five minutes more.’

  Wong grimaced. It was madness to rely on this woman’s estimates, as she appeared to be making up numbers as she went along. The only thing he was sure of was that it would take much longer to get to the sea than was available to them.

  Suddenly the chugging noise of the boat started to change tone. The engine coughed once, and then twice more. The rhythmic thudding started to slow down. The boatwoman did nothing, nor did she looked concerned. But everyone else did.

  ‘What’s happening?’ Wong asked.

  ‘Run out of petrol,’ the boatwoman replied. ‘Never keep much in the tank. Petrol so expensive these days, you know. Carrying so much heavy weight uses up petrol faster. You give me more money, I send for someone to bring us more petrol.’

  Wong winced. This was a standard technique that some of the more crooked boat-owners used with tourists: they kept a minimum amount of petrol in the tank so that customers became adrift in the middle of the water for an hour or two, until they agreed to pay anything to get moving again.

  The engine coughed one last time before becoming completely silent. The boat bobbed helplessly in the water, drifting forward almost imperceptibly on the current, and then came to a complete halt. The boatwoman dropped an anchor into the river.

  ‘Don’t do that,’ Joyce shouted.

  ‘She might as well,’ Wong said. ‘We’re not going anywhere.’

  Silence descended as the four of them realised that they had now completely run out of options.

  Command Centre broke the news to Agent Dooley that the most powerful helicopter was already taken. While Lockheed Martin put the finishing touches to their current big-budget operation, the rotorcraft equivalent of AirForce One, to be known as the US101, the Bell supercopter they had brought was playing the role of official Topchop. His contact at Mobile Communications filled him in: ‘The SecDef ordered the Topchop to be used to take POTUS and the Chinese Prez to an unidentified location, as they say.’

  ‘POTUS and the Chinese Prez together?’ Dooley was amazed.

  ‘Yeah. Kinda cute, isn’t it? Our side had the better vehicle, their side had better information on where to take shelter against a major bomb attack, so they decided to join forces. Apparently they had already prepared this joint escape as one of the options in the security manual for the meeting.’

  ‘It’s still weird.’

  ‘It was the SecDef ’s idea. Think about it. If the American forces and the Chinese forces separate and both go on maximum defcon alert to protect their Presidents, then we’ve practically got a situation where everyone’s on a war footing. Doesn’t bear thinking about. One tiny slip or misunderstanding on either side and everything goes ka-boom. End of the world, more or less literally. But if both sides team up against a common enemy—these people scattering hidden bombs— then the whole thing has a different flavour. It’s us against them. Brothers in arms. All in all, this incident could end up being positive for US–Sino relationships.’

  ‘I guess it figures,’ the agent growled. ‘What other choppers you got?’

  ‘You can have the number two. It’s a UH-60. It’s already in the air, somewhere over the park. I can probably divert it to you within a couple of minutes. I guess we’ll have to land it on the pedestrian precinct.’

  The Command Centre operative was as good as his word. Just over two minutes later, Thomas Dooley was climbing into a Sikorsky UH-60A, better known as a Black Hawk. He was happy. Now he felt powerful. The chopper might have been an old-fashioned model—it was first developed in 1974—but the Hawk had never been bettered, although there was much talk in military mess-rooms of a new Bell attack chopper taking over the prime spot.

  Dooley had been in a Black Hawk only once before, but he had never forgotten the feeling of speed and power it gave him. Normally the US Army’s frontline utility helicopter used for air assault, air cavalry, and aero-medical evacuation units, it was infinitely modifiable. Considerably beefier than the Chinese helicopter Zhang was in (yes!), the Hawk was designed to carry eleven combat-loaded assault troops, and was capable of
yanking seriously heavy equipment into the air: a 105-millimetre howitzer and thirty rounds of ammunition. It was three tons of pure machismo.

  ‘To the river an’ don’t spare the horses,’ Dooley told the pilot. This was his chance to grab his life back out of the bonfire. He knitted his fingers together in a gesture of supplication and would have prayed, had he been able to think of anyone to pray to.

  16

  ‘I hate to add to the bad news,’ Lu Linyao said, ‘but I’m going to add to the bad news. I think someone has caught up with us. Look.’

  They turned around to see something buzzing in the air a long distance away, approaching from the southwest, following the curves of the river. It was moving at high speed and evolved quickly from a dot into a military helicopter. Marooned in their floating prison, there was nothing they could do but watch as it caught up with them. Within seconds it was hovering right over their heads. A force eight gale blasted over the boat and whipped the blanket off the elephant. It danced in the air like a ghost freed from a coffin before spinning into the water, where it lay pullulating with the waves.

  A female voice boomed down in English from the helicopter. ‘This is Commander Zhang of the People’s Armed Police. Stop moving and pull over, or we will fire.’

  Wong grabbed Flip’s megaphone and clambered with some difficulty onto the roof of the boat’s cabin. ‘Already we have stopped,’ he said. ‘Can you not see? Don’t shoot, please.’

  Joyce scrambled up next to him and lifted the megaphone out of his hands. ‘Let me talk to them. We need to get them to help us,’ she said. ‘There’s a bomb in this elephant. A big one. There are loads of people around here. Families and tourists and boats and dockworkers and stuff. You gotta help us move him. Loads of people are going to get hurt. You have to do something.’