The Shanghai Union of Industrial Mystics

by Nury Vittachi

  A pair of fighter aircraft bore down on them, and two attack helicopters approached from another direction. ‘Move away, move away,’ came gruff instructions through the speakers. One of the craft fired a warning shot at them—there was a bright flash and a missile streaked past them.

  ‘Abort! We need to abort—I’m moving forty—Jin, swing left, forty degrees, repeat, swing left forty degrees—hold on everyone,’ Peters shouted as the Black Hawk banked steeply away and the Chinese Z9-B followed suit.

  Dooley heard rapid speech in Chinese as Zhang and her pilot swung steeply to follow the Black Hawk.

  Peters shouted into an open channel for the benefit of the fighter planes intercepting them. ‘Don’t shoot, don’t shoot. We are aborting. We are aborting.’

  ‘Move well away,’ said the voice from the attack choppers. ‘We are ordering a no-entry air zone covering two miles around this spot. Get out of range.’

  Wong gripped the handles of his seat so hard his hands turned white. He was scared, but he was also outraged. What on earth was destiny up to? How on earth could quiet, isolated Tsz Lum Cove suddenly be full of army jets firing guns at anyone who approached? And why now, when they had urgent need of it? It was so unfair!

  Dooley was worried that the abrupt movements had set the platform below them swinging, shifting the weight and making it difficult for the two pilots to keep their choppers steady.

  ‘Sorry, you guys, okay?’ he said to his Chinese counterpart.

  ‘What is going on?’ Zhang shouted. ‘The sky here is full of Americans.’

  ‘I don’t know. I really don’t know. There’s half a squadron of aircraft keeping everyone away from that bay.’

  Neither spoke for a few seconds. And then Zhang’s crackly voice said: ‘And I know why. Look what’s down there. One of your American craft.’

  Wong looked out of the window to his left. Sheltering on the sand was Topchop, the presidential helicopter, containing the Presidents of China and the United States.

  The horrific truth hit the Acting Special Agent in Charge with the shock, and the stink, of a massive fish slapped in his face. They’d managed to bring the bomb to the precise spot where its targets were hiding. It was incredible that they had not simply been blown out of the sky without a word.

  ‘Oh no,’ said Dooley. ‘Oh, no, no, no. Are we are in deep shit.’ His voice was a whisper as he took in the enormity of what they had nearly accomplished. ‘We just tried to kill the President. The two Presidents. We tried to drop a bomb on the heads of the President of the United States of America and the President of China. The two most important human beings on earth. Oh shit.’

  ‘We are in, as you say, deep shit,’ Zhang agreed.

  Peters said: ‘We need to get right out to sea.’

  Wong added: ‘Quick, please: time’s running out.’

  The two pilots swapped details of the coordinates to which they were switching, yawed their craft to the east and headed straight out towards the open ocean.

  Joyce McQuinnie and Marker Cai were flying. Well, they were moving at high speed anyway and sort of in the air.

  The second Z-9 chopper had dropped a rubber dinghy on the end of a steel cable just in front of their cargo boat. Guessing what was required of them, the two young people had dived off their boat, swum to it and climbed in. Commander Zhang had obviously told her colleagues to keep close behind them, and also to take custody of the other members of the group. By dropping a small vessel to them, the helicopter crew could do both things at once. Lu Linyao had hidden inside the boat cabin, deciding that she, as a government employee, was best keeping a low profile in this whole affair. Besides, now that they had succeeded in getting the bomb away from the city centre, she felt the main part of her job was done and she was desperate to get home and spend quality time with Jia Lin. Several years’ worth of quality time, preferably in quiet, boring Vancouver, would not be too much.

  The chopper had then picked up speed, dragging the rubber dinghy along the surface of the water. The pilots initially moved quite slowly, but had quickly picked up speed. After a couple of minutes had passed and the pilots saw that their two passengers were firmly strapped into the high performance marine police dinghy, they let the throttle out.

  The dinghy was now flying along at high speed, bumping across the crests of the waves, spending more time in the air than on the water.

  ‘This is kinda fun,’ Joyce said, lying back in the dinghy, fine sprays of salt water reviving her spirits. ‘Bit like a theme park ride. Wet rides—we call them log flumes or log fumes or something like that.’

  ‘Yes,’ Cai agreed. ‘This is fun. Better even than go for coffee.’ He leaned back too. They were travelling at speed, and the wind roaring into the boat meant that it was almost impossible to stay upright.

  Joyce tingled all over. Two days ago she had been trying to think of a way to get to know Mister Sigh a bit better. Now here she was, zooming along the Huangpu River in a really cool Spy Kids or James Bond mode of transport, and lying down next to him. This was so outrageous! This was amazing. This was incredible. Life was just like so totally, totally weird. As she felt his hard bicep against her, an expression of utter glee spread over her face. So what if she wasn’t wearing makeup, her hair was a bowl of oiled linguine and she stank to high heaven? He was just as tired and dirty and sweaty as she was, and none of it mattered a jot to either of them.

  He turned to her and smiled. ‘This is…so strange,’ he said.

  She nodded. ‘Like totally.’

  She looked at his lips.

  He looked at her lips.

  She half closed her eyes.

  He half closed his eyes.

  They leaned towards each other.

  Then he opened his eyes wide in fear. ‘Aie,’ he gasped, sitting up and looking as if he had been stabbed.

  ‘What is it? What’s wrong?’

  ‘I remember. Just around this corner is a bridge. A bridge. What will we do?’

  They both sat up, the wet air tearing into their faces with the force of solid water. Through thin cracks in their almost-shut eyes they saw what Cai had just seen in his mind’s eye: there was, indeed, a bridge ahead of them.

  Cai turned to Joyce, fear in his voice. ‘The pilot’s not slowing down.’

  ‘We’ll smash into the bridge. Can you undo the cable?’

  ‘I try.’

  But as he leaned forward into the wind, the pilot’s plan to get the unorthodox vehicle they were towing past the bridge became clear. The Z-9 chopper increased both its forward velocity and its height, and lifted the police dinghy high into the air.

  ‘Whoa! They’re gonna try and take us over it,’ Joyce squealed.

  The two of them screamed as their tiny dinghy suddenly rose high into the sky and literally flew over the bridge.

  Joyce slammed herself back down onto the floor of the dinghy. ‘I can’t look. I can’t look. How high are we? No, don’t tell me, I don’t want to know. How high are we?’

  Cai looked over the edge. ‘We’re in the sky,’ he said. ‘Right up, up in the sky. Wah! This is better than theme park ride.’

  ‘This is better than Disneyland.’

  He turned to face her, lying stretched out in the bottom of the boat, strapped in with a seatbelt, high as a kite in every sense of the phrase.

  Joyce looked at him and licked her lips. ‘Marker.’

  ‘Yes, Joy-Si.’

  ‘Come here.’

  Anger, as Warlord Gao’s champion discovered to his cost 2055 years ago, clouds judgement. And that is perhaps one of the key reasons why spiritual people will always defeat armed people in the long run. The brain is the deadliest device in any arsenal of lethal weapons.

  Racing across the waters of the Yangtze River Estuary was a high-speed cruiser owned by the Mee Fan Supermarket Company. On board was the retail chain’s estranged son.

  Having located the two Presidents, Jappar Memet could have won himself a place in history, either s
mall or large, by firing missiles at the helicopter in which they were hiding from his heavily armed ship. If he had hit the Topchop, he would have won himself the great prize he had craved for years—world fame for himself and his worthy cause. There would be no other major talking point in the world’s media for weeks, months, years. He would appear in every history book to be written about this century. If he merely wounded the two Presidents or even just made them uncomfortable, he would still have put himself and his cause on the map indelibly.

  But that is not what he chose to do. It was what he had been planning to do. And it was the reason why he had raced (in the family chopper he had kept on standby) to his armed cruiser and taken it out to sea to the place where his contact had told him the two Presidents were hiding.

  But when he spotted his elephant being whisked away in a helicopter, he saw red. His beast. His bomb. His plan. That man Wong and his silly hippie assistant. Those evil, murderous people who had spoiled both his noble schemes on a single day: ruined them both as each approached the point of success. He was filled with uncontrollable, raging fury. His heart thumped. He became blind, almost physically. He had trouble breathing. Clouds of anger obscured the fact that he had finally come within sight of the goal he had been moving towards for the past year with every fibre of his being.

  ‘Bloody Mr Wong has now got ’imself an ’elicopter to take my elephant away from me,’ he snarled to Dilshat.

  ‘Forget him. Let’s get the—’ ‘It’s like he killed my baby.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘My plan. My plan was the child I’ve been nurturin’ for years.’

  ‘Jappar, we need to—’ ‘I’m going to shoot that bloody bastard out of the sky. That’s what I need to do. I need to do this. Gimme a minute. It probably won’t take more than one shot. Then we’ll get Px2, awright?’

  Dilshat agreed. With Memet as a boss, there was nothing else one could do. He resolved to give up political activism after this and go back to studying religion—the more esoteric, obscure and lonely, the better.

  Special Agent Dooley was in a state of shock. No, it was worse than that. He had had so many stultifying shocks in a row this terrible day that his brain was seizing up. Part of his mind was saying that he had just been responsible for transporting and almost dropping a major explosive device onto POTUS and the President of China. The rest of his mind could not cope with this thought, and enclosed it in a little box which it set to one side, refusing to talk to it, look at it, or even admit it was there.

  Next to him, below his visor, Peters’ face was as white as a sheet.

  Dooley spoke quietly: ‘I thought things couldn’t get worse, but I was wrong. They just did.’

  And then they got worse still.

  A loud crack shook the chopper, followed by another one. Someone was firing at them from sea level. Alarms jangled in the cockpit as bullets or small missiles roared upwards past them.

  ‘Now they’re shooting at us from boats,’ the pilot said.

  ‘Shit. I can’t believe this.’

  Dooley looked down. There was one vessel below them and it was not American. It couldn’t be. It was some sort of large white speedboat. They had nothing like that on this trip.

  ‘Must be Chinese forces.’ He roared into the microphone: ‘Stop them, Zhang, tell them we’re retreating.’

  ‘It’s not ours,’ replied Zhang. ‘I think it’s American.’

  ‘It ain’t ours.’

  Another missile shot upwards, narrowly missing the Z-9, which tilted dangerously to one side.

  Both choppers were now operating separately, causing the platform they were holding between them to swing wildly from side to side.

  Peters tried to get the two craft back into line: ‘Yaw left, fifty degrees, got it, after three?’

  ‘Copy: yaw left, fifty degrees, after three.’

  ‘One. Two—Jesus, now!’ Peters shrieked as another missile fired from the boat clipped the end of the Black Hawk’s 48-foot rotor, shaking the craft.

  ‘Excuse me,’ said Wong, looking at his watch. ‘We have two minutes before the elephant goes boom. Maybe only one minute.’

  Peters struggled to remain in control of the craft.

  That was the moment when Nelson decided to wake up. Who knows what thoughts went through his mind as he found himself on a platform in the sky, being borne aloft by two noisy human vehicles? Whatever it was, he must have decided that he wanted to get a better view. With great effort, he rose to one knee—his front right knee. Then he added his front left knee, his back left knee and his back right knee, in that order. As the platform swung, he raised himself to a standing position. He glanced around. Everything was blue. There was a nice, cool breeze blowing. The fresh air was invigorating. His tail wagged, puppy-like. The medicine that had been pumped into his butt must have contained some sort of painkiller as well as a sleeping solution. He felt better than he had done for days. But where was he? Had he died and gone to heaven? He felt like he was in the sky. There was so much blue around—and clouds: white, fluffy, cumulus clouds.

  The bad thing was that he felt a bit unsteady. It wasn’t sleepiness or the medicine. It was the ground. He didn’t like the way the floor was moving. It made him dizzy. He took one step backwards to steady himself. But, sad to say, there was no floor behind him for him to step onto.

  Joyce screamed as she saw the elephant fall out of the sky.

  Their helicopter had lowered their dinghy onto the surface of the water with a rough but survivable bump and then jettisoned the cable. Whoever had decided that they should come along for the ride had obviously decided they had travelled far enough.

  She and Marker sat in the boat, bobbing close to the coast of the Yangtze Estuary, and watched Nelson tumbling from heaven.

  He descended slowly. Because it is rare to watch large, heavy objects fall—especially iconically large, heavy objects such as an elephant—it became an impromptu physics lesson. Which falls faster, a four-tonne bag of feathers, or a four-tonne elephant? The answer is that they fall at the same speed. Indeed, everything falls at the same rate, with a standard acceleration factor due to gravity of 9.8 metres per second squared, whatever its size or weight. This is what physics teaches us. And this is what physics taught Joyce McQuinnie and Marker Cai as they watched poor Nelson fall slowly from his platform in the sky down down down towards the water.

  Towards the water? No. Wait. What was that below him? A boat. A boat between Nelson and the water.

  He dropped from the heavens and landed, splintering an expensive-looking white cruiser to matchwood as he went down. But this didn’t stop him. He was a heavy lump—4181 kilos, in fact—and the rate of acceleration he had gathered from falling 102 metres was considerable. Down he went, deep into the water, and down, down, pieces of boat all over him, down towards the seabed.

  The two helicopters, suddenly freed of their heavy load, shot out of control—fortunately, both went upwards and away from each other, and both immediately jettisoned their slings, which gave the pilots a chance of regaining control.

  Wong’s watch had decreed that the bomb should explode in a minute or so. But his watch was wrong. He had purchased it cheaply in Shenzhen and it lost about a minute an hour.

  There was an explosion.

  The bomb went off while the elephant was close to the bottom of the sea. It was impossible to tell, without careful calculation, whether it exploded on the elephant’s way down, at the moment it stopped descending, a few metres from the seabed, or on its slow bounce back up towards the surface— but explode it did. That was evident from the tremor that ran through the sea and the land. That was evident from the huge underwater rumble that thundered from below the surface. That was evident from the mini-tsunami—a wave two metres tall—that roared in all directions from the site of the blast. It was a big explosion. Jappar Memet’s staff had done their jobs well.

  The concentric rings of water moving outward from the matchwood remains of the Mee Fan Su
permarket cruiser panicked people watching from shore half a kilometre away.

  The wave washed into the estuary, shaking the boats in the river and tipping Joyce and Marker out of their dinghy into the water.

  They bobbed together in the cool blue sea.

  ‘Poor Nelson,’ she said, weeping as she trod water.

  ‘Want a tissue?’ said Marker, pulling a sodden pack of Tempo tissues out of his pocket.

  ‘Thanks,’ she sniffed, giving him a tearful smile.

  ‘They’re a bit wet.’

  ‘I don’t mind,’ she said sweetly, her nose red. ‘So am I.’

  18

  Getting everyone satisfactorily seated was often a problem at meetings of the Union of Industrial Mystics. Just doing boy-girl-boy-girl didn’t cut it.

  Shang Dan, who had a white beard and wore red and gold robes and looked like the god of wealth, circled the round table carefully. ‘Now let me see,’ he thought out loud. ‘Which way is southwest? I think I had better sit facing southwest.’ He glanced over at Wong, who was sitting, taciturn, in the darkest corner. ‘You’re in the east, Wong? I normally go for due west or northeast but I have been suffering from excess earth energy this week.’

  ‘Does that give you bad luck?’ Joyce asked Shang.

  ‘No. Indigestion.’

  ‘I’ve got antacid tablets. They’re good for indigestion. I keep them for when there’s nothing to eat but really spicy stuff?’

  ‘I don’t think you can use antacid tablets to counteract the effects of bad feng shui, but thanks for the offer.’

  ‘We don’t mind moving if you want to sit here.’ Joyce got a little buzz from using the plural pronoun ‘we’ to refer to Marker Cai and herself.

  ‘Thank you, missy, but you are sitting to the southeast. I suggest you stay there.’ Shang eventually found the right seat and droppd heavily into it.

  They had decided to abandon the popular Shanghai eateries. After the horrific experience of two days earlier, Wong couldn’t bear the thought of eating at any sort of restaurant for a while. He quoted Mo Zhou: ‘The man who is bitten by a snake dislikes ropes.’