The same phenomenon that they had seen on land was happening on the water. News that there was a drifting lighter containing a strange, monster-shaped piece of cargo and a lao wai had quickly gone round the river community. Clearly something extraordinary was happening. Maybe a Hollywood movie was being filmed. Now that the blanket had blown away to reveal a genuine grey monster, the excitement was palpable. Large numbers of people were approaching the boat.
They came in sampans, in junks, in rowing boats, in speedboats and some in a variety of coracles. Fisherfolk and dockworkers from two or three kilometres up the river were swapping the news and jumping into vessels to have a quick look. Have you heard? There’s a circus in the middle of the water. It was the most excitement the north Shanghai river community had had for years.
Within minutes, flotillas of boats were heading towards Nelson and his crew from every direction.
Wong looked at his watch. Barely ten minutes to go.
‘Shall I shoot them?’ the pilot, a young man named Jin Peng, asked.
‘Of course not, you idiot,’ Commander Zhang snapped. ‘There is apparently a large explosive device there. Blast them and you will probably kill half the boat people in the river, plus blow us out of the sky.’
‘What shall we do?’
‘Just hover. The boat seems to have stopped moving. They aren’t going anywhere. I want to hear what they are saying.’
She opened the door of the chopper and strained to hear Joyce, who was still on the roof of the boat’s cabin, shouting through a megaphone.
‘This bomb will go off in a few minutes,’ the young woman said. ‘We need your help. Our engine has run out of petrol. Can you send down a line and pull the boat along or something? Please. Otherwise a lot of people might die. Please. We need—’ But the rest of her words were drowned out by a low-pitched rumble. A large American Black Hawk helicopter appeared above the tops of the buildings from the south and also moved to a hovering position over the water.
Down below, the young woman on the boat redoubled her pleas, pointing her megaphone first at one chopper and then at the other. ‘Can someone please do something? Does anyone up there speak English?’
‘What do you want me to do? Is this an attack situation?’ The Black Hawk pilot, whose name was Milo Peters, looked over to Thomas Dooley.
‘Ah don’t know. Ah really have no idea what our next move is. Gimme a minute.’
‘Are we talking enemy situation or hostage situation?’
‘Neither. There’s a bomb down there. Inside the elephant.’
‘Geez. In the elephant?’
‘Yes. Don’t ask.’
A pause while Peters took in this information. ‘Is bomb disposal on its way?’
‘No. No time. It’s due to go off in a few minutes.’ Dooley looked at his watch. ‘Mebbe nine-ten minutes, tops. We need to sort this one out ourselves. Don’t ask me how.’
Peters pulled at the joystick, changing the angle of the chopper in a bid to get a better look. ‘We could order the people to move and then blast the boat with an air-to-ground— a small one would be all it would take to sink that boat. Sinking the bomb may stop it going off.’
‘Too dangerous,’ Dooley said. ‘Look at them gawking crowds. It would take half an hour to get everyone to move their boats away. Second, we shoot that boat, we’ll likely set the bomb off. We have no idea how big it is. It may be a toy. It may be a biggie.’
He swung the door of the chopper open and stared down at the scene below.
Joyce’s voice drifted up to him as she stood on the roof of the cabin talking through the megaphone. ‘Come on, you guys. You gotta help us. This bomb is gonna blow in a few minutes. It could kill loads of people. We’ve done all the work so far. Now it’s your bloody turn, if you’ll excuse my French.’
Dooley, dropping his visor against the sunlight, looked across the sky at the Chinese Z-9 hovering 200 metres away. ‘Whatever we’re gonna do, we better do it quick.’ He realised that Commander Zhang must already have been here for a couple of minutes, and probably already had a plan: she’d hinted as such, earlier. His keen sense of competition gripped him. He was not going to let some blasted Chinese female get the better of him, even if she was a hell of an impressive woman. Especially since she was a hell of an impressive woman. ‘We gotta take the initiative before the Chinese do,’ he said to Peters.
‘And do what? Airlift people off the boat?’
‘No.’ Dooley spoke into his helmet mike: ‘Command. Someone find out how much an elephant weighs, can you? It’s urgent.’
‘What? How—’
‘I don’t know how you find out. Phone the zoo. Use Google. Hey, no, AskJeeves.’
‘Ask who?’
‘Look it up on AskJeeves dot com. I need the info quick. You got ten seconds.’
Dooley turned to the pilot. ‘How much do you reckon that thing weighs?’
‘I don’t know, sir.’
‘Can you guess? I mean, you’re a helicopter pilot, you must be used to heaving big heavy things about, right? Can you estimate?’
‘Yes, but...I’ve never had to move an elephant before.’
‘What’s the gross external payload on this baby?’
‘Maybe eight thousand pounds.’
‘I don’t like the word maybe. It’s not in my dictionary.’
‘Okay. Eight thousand pounds.’
‘So what would a lump like that weigh?’
‘Maybe—I mean, I reckon it might weigh the same as a couple of trucks, at least, maybe three or four trucks.’
‘So what’s that, in pounds and ounces?’
‘Ten to fifteen thousand pounds, maybe.’
‘You’re saying we can’t lift it and whisk it out to some remote spot.’
‘Yes, sir. That’s exactly what I’m saying. No way could we lift that.’
The radio buzzed. ‘Uh, Dooley? AskJeeves says seven thousand to twelve thousand pounds, but Google says the biggest one weighed twenty-six thousand pounds. Wikipedia says it depends whether it’s African or Asian, but it could be up to six and a half tons.’
‘Wassat in pounds?’
‘Uh, I don’t know.’
‘Geez.’ Thanks for nothing. Then a thought struck him. That Chinese vet woman, Ms Lu Ling-thing. She was probably down there on that boat with her young friend. She would know.
He switched his helmet mike to external loudspeaker. ‘Ms Lu. How are you? This is Special Agent Dooley speaking from the US Black Hawk helicopter over your head. How much does it weigh? Repeat: how much does that elephant weigh?’
After a few seconds, a hard-to-hear reply came from a tiny megaphoned voice. He couldn’t understand what she was saying.
‘Could you repeat your answer, please?’
‘Four thousand, five hundred kilos,’ came the reply from Ms Lu. ‘Four thousand, five hundred kilos.’
Dooley cursed. ‘How come every goddam nation on this planet counts in kilos and we count in pounds? What’s wrong with them all?’
The pilot interrupted. ‘Four thousand five hundred kilos is a lot. It’s like ten thousand pounds. We’ll never be able to lift it. Even if we were empty. We haven’t got a hope.’
‘Shit.’ Dooley thought for a second and then turned back to Peters. He’d had an idea. ‘What if we had two choppers?’
‘If we had two choppers, we might have the payload capability, but it would be damn near impossible to coordinate the lift. Even in ideal conditions, it would be a stretch—but lifting something from a boat drifting in a harbour—it’s a pipedream, sir, if you want my opinion, sir.’
Dooley radioed Zhang. ‘Zhang? You there?’
Her voice came through the speaker: ‘I can hear you, Agent Dooley.’
‘There’s a kazillion people in those boats there, and living on the river banks. We got to lift that whole goddam bomb and take it out to sea. It’s going to blow in a few minutes. A lot of people are going to get hurt. Neither of us are going to be able
to lift it on our own. What’s the payload on your craft?’
‘What are you proposing?’
‘What’s the payload on your craft?’ Dooley repeated. ‘That thing down there weighs four thousand five hundred kilos. It may well be more than I can carry. How much can you take?’
‘That’s classified information.’
‘We can do more than half of that. We can do eight thousand pounds. I think we may—’ ‘We can lift the other half.’
‘We’re going to have to work together. It’s the only way. We’re going over to the boat to drop our cables. Can you do the same? But we’ll have to coordinate our movements very carefully, you copy?’
He knew that both choppers were going to have to get extremely close to the boat at the same time—a dangerous manoeuvre. The only way to accomplish it would be if they took different flight levels, with one flying much higher than the other. He decided that if he offered to take the lower and more dangerous level, Commander Zhang would feel comforted.
‘We’re going low—fifty to seventy-five feet. You take the higher plane, one twenty-five feet plus.’
Peters moved the helicopter. Dooley told him to drop steel cables down to the boat—and waited for his Chinese counterparts to do the same.
While Dooley was outlining his plan, Commander Zhang had already called her headquarters and asked them to send a second Z-9.
‘You can have one, but it may take a few minutes, maybe ten,’ military traffic control had replied.
‘We don’t have ten minutes. Is there anything in the air we
can have faster?’
‘I’ll check. We’ll send one as quickly as we can, but I can’t promise anything. Over.’
‘Over.’ Zhang said nothing further, but her glances out of the window at the Black Hawk made Pilot Jin uncomfortable.
‘If you are thinking—’ he began. ‘Commander Zhang. We are not allowed any joint manoeuvres with the Americans without direct permission from the Commission. You know that. If we need two helicopters to lift this item, we’d better wait until we have two Chinese helicopters.’
‘There’s not enough time. I’ll take responsibility. The waters are crowded. We cannot allow so many people to die. My grandmother was born and died on a boat. Besides, the Commission has decreed that the Chinese President and the American President go into hiding together. So the two countries have already teamed up. We are just following their example. How much can we carry?’
‘Externally? The official sling payload maximum is sixteen hundred kilograms. This souped-up model may be able to do a bit more, perhaps two thousand or two ten.’
Zhang did a quick calculation in her head. They could carry roughly half the beast each, but neither of them could do it on their own.
‘We have no choice. Release the cable.’
Joyce grabbed Wong’s arm. ‘Look. There’s something hanging under that one. What is it?’
They all stared at the American helicopter, which appeared to be dropping something. The noise level started to rise as the two choppers came close.
‘I know what that is,’ shouted Marker Cai. ‘It’s a steel cable.’
Within a minute the two helicopters had between them dropped four cables, which Cai grabbed and expertly attached to retaining holes on the underside of the platform on which Nelson continued to sleep. Who would have thought that the most useful person to have around would be an experienced office removal man?
Dooley continued to shout down to them through the Black Hawk’s external speaker system. ‘Move it, guys, we got jest a few minutes before the bomb blows. We need to get her way out of range of all these people. Move-move-move!’ He added: ‘And by the way, kin someone tell us where the hell we should take it.’
Wong’s face lit up. He took the megaphone from Joyce’s hands. ‘I know. I know where to take it. There’s a bomb-proof cove near here. Northeast, thirty or forty kilometre only. Tsz Lum Cove. Very safe.’
Out of the back door of the Black Hawk, a rope ladder fell. ‘Come on up.’
Wong stared at it in horror.
He turned to Cai, who nodded and said: ‘It’s for you. You have to go up there and tell them where to take it.’
He grabbed the bottom rung and tried to hold it steady. With enormous difficulty, and whimpering with fear, Wong clambered up the swinging ladder towards the chopper.
Rope ladders are like naughty children. The more you reach for them, the further they dart away from you. Wong’s dangling left foot stretched out under him, probing for the rung which had swung away. Aiyeeaa! Eventually he froze in horror, finding it difficult to move in any direction. He had never felt so terrified. He was stuck on a string in the middle of the sky, there was a deafening noise above him and an about-to-explode bomb below. He must have done something terrible to deserve this. Lack of respect for the white elephant. Or for animals in general. That must be it. He must remember to be kinder to animals. Maybe this was punishment for ignoring Joyce’s dictums about man’s stewardship of all sentient beings.
Then he heard the American’s voice shouting at him from somewhere above. ‘Hold on tight. You don’t need to move. Just hold on.’
There was no need to tell him twice. He was frozen with fear, unable to move, clinging to the rungs for dear life. Then he felt a sharp jerk on the ladder, and it started to vibrate before moving steadily, mechanically, hydraulically upwards— there was some sort of pulley system which retracted the entire ladder up into the helicopter. Thank Heaven. He looked up as the lower surface of the helicopter approached. Wong repeated the words of Mo Zhou in 479 BC: he was not really being snatched up into the sky. The world was leaping and jumping and dancing around him. He was really just standing still and the American helicopter was lowering itself onto his head.
As the feng shui master came within reach, Dooley grabbed the back of his jacket and yanked him into the cabin.
Wong, trembling with fear, fell sideways into the seat.
Below, Marker Cai checked the fasteners on the platform one more time before looking up to Dooley in the chopper. ‘You take it now,’ Marker screamed and raised his thumbs up.
In the Black Hawk, pilot Peters kept a radio channel permanently open to the Chinese Z9-B. ‘Ready, Pilot Jin?’ Dooley said.
The smooth reply came from Commander Zhang: ‘We were ready a minute ago, Agent Dooley.’
With the two pilots carefully coordinating their movements, the helicopters gathered strength and gently rose, lifting the beast into the air.
The boat, suddenly bereft of the weight that had been holding it half underwater, heaved itself up with such violence that the lighter ones on board—Joyce and Linyao—were jolted off their feet.
From the floor of the now wildly rocking boat, Joyce watched with her heart in her mouth as the two helicopters heaved Nelson into the sky. Then they moved rapidly towards the estuary opening where the Huangpu met the East China Sea.
‘Seven minutes,’ Marker Cai said. ‘They better move as fast as the summer lightning.’
As the two young people heard the stuttering sound of the two helicopters disappearing ahead of them, they were surprised to hear a similar sound behind them—getting louder.
Joyce was the first to turn around and look up. ‘Marker,’ she said. ‘There’s another Chinese chopper coming this way. And it looks like it’s dropping something.’
17
Wong pulled his wet lo pan out of his jacket pocket. ‘That way, that way,’ he said. ‘There’s a cove there. Tsz Lum Cove.’
‘How far?’ Dooley shouted.
‘Not far. Very close. On the east side of a small rock in the Yangtze River estuary. Is the most sheltered place in the whole area.’
They flew away from the river due east overland towards the cove, and quickly came in sight of the sea, and several islands, some of which had steep rocks. There were other aircraft in the distance, apparently circling the area.
‘Looks a bit busy to me—in the air, at l
east,’ said Peters.
‘No people live down there,’ Wong said. ‘Not on that island. No access. You can’t get there without boat or helicopter. Thick stone cliffs behind. Bomb proof. Drop bomb there and then fly away quick-quick-quick. It can explode. No one will be hurt.’
Peters was maintaining open channels with Jin, telegraphing every coordinate change, however slight, before he made it. The two craft managed to move in tandem surprisingly well. ‘We’re doing it,’ Peters said. ‘I can’t believe we’re actually doing it.’
Within thirty seconds they were almost directly over the rocky cliffs. There were two bays visible. ‘That one or that one?’ Peters asked.
‘That one, the far one,’ the feng shui master said. ‘There are cliffs on three sides so will hold explosion in.’
‘I’ll need to change angle.’ Peters radioed details of the proposed adjustment in the flight path to pilot Jin. ‘Yawing left, nor’northeast, twelve degrees.’
‘Are you sure there’s nobody there?’ Dooley said, concerned that at least one boat seemed to be visible in the water nearby.
Wong said: ‘A few fisherfolk in the sea only. Almost nobody knows about this cove except me—and the President of China. I told his security chief about it when they consulted me. Even I didn’t charge them.’ The feng shui man folded his arms proudly.
‘Okay, we’re nearly there.’ Dooley turned to Peters. ‘Get ready to release the load. We’re going to have to do a coordinated drop and then escape at high speed.’
The two helicopters flew over the edge of the bay.
‘Dooley here. Can you hear me, Zhang?’
‘Yes, I can hear you.’
‘Let’s drop the cargo on three, as soon as we get over the beach. One. Two. Oh geez, what’s that?’
The Shanghai Union of Industrial Mystics Page 28