by Tom Cain
Carver went back downhill to the main entrance and drove away. The road was little more than a twisting, narrow country lane, lined on either side by trees and heavy undergrowth, with no traffic to be seen in either direction. When he’d gone about a mile, Carver stopped the car by the side of the road and got out, taking the case with him. He looked around to check that no one could see him, then walked about twenty paces into the woodland and shoved the case into the heart of a large bush. Satisfied that it was completely invisible, he walked back towards the road, paused for a moment to listen for approaching engines, then stepped out on to the tarmac and round to the driver’s side of the car.
He looked at his phone display and frowned. Mabeki had reached the Tolo Highway, but instead of turning right, back towards the city, as Carver had expected, he had turned left and was heading north, towards the Chinese border.
That could complicate things. Suddenly Carver couldn’t afford to be quite so casual. When the Honda pulled away again, he had the accelerator down hard.
66
Nearly seven thousand miles to the west of Hong Kong stood the Malemban capital of Sindele. It still pretended, at least, to be the heart of a modern, functioning state. It had a central business district ringed by motorways. Their intersections led to broad four-lane boulevards, criss-crossing blocks filled with office buildings ten or even twenty storeys high. It had splendid government buildings left over from colonial times, lavishly appointed, department stores, banks with marble halls, and parks laid out with rolling lawns, shady trees and herbaceous borders.
These days, however, the roads were virtually empty, there being almost no petrol anywhere, nor spare parts for broken-down vehicles. The office buildings frequently lacked electric power or running water. The department stores were empty for want of goods to sell or customers to buy, and the banks had long since ceased to function in an economy bereft of meaningful currency. As for the parks, the lawns were now parched and bare, with just the occasional straggly weed or rusting soft drink can to break up the monotony of scorched earth. The trees had all been cut down for firewood and the empty herbaceous borders were indistinguishable from the rest of the barren terrain.
But Major Rodney Madziko of the Malemban National Army’s élite Reconnaissance Squadron had no time to contemplate the passing cityscape or bemoan its decline. He was standing in the open hatch of an amphibious BRDM-1 scout car, an old Soviet model, bought second-hand from the Russians almost thirty years ago. Its body-armour was now more rust than metal, its engine propelled it in a random combination of lurches, kangaroo-hops and staggers, and its belching exhaust pipes created their very own black smokescreen. But the 7.62mm machine gun mounted above the front crew compartment still fired live ammunition, as did those on the four other scout cars that were following Madziko’s as it made its way through the deserted streets of downtown Sindele.
It was half-past five on a Sunday morning, a perfect time to cross the city uninterrupted and unobserved. A perfect time for a coup.
Madziko’s instructions were simple: on the ‘go’ signal, get to the headquarters of the Malemban Broadcasting Corporation, secure the building and hold it until Patrick Tshonga arrived at seven to make the simultaneous announcement of Henderson Gushungo’s death and his own assumption of power on the MBC’s solitary TV channel and all four of its national radio stations. His men had been ready since long before dawn. The signal had been received. So now, as the rising sun split the streets into long expanses of deep shadow and dazzling shafts of burnished gold, the Reconnaissance Squadron was on its way.
Madziko had sworn a solemn oath in the sight of God to uphold the state of Malemba and preserve it against all its enemies, foreign and internal. So far as he was concerned, he was upholding that oath more loyally now than at any other time in his fifteen-year career as an army officer. He had been raised to believe in the essential virtues of democracy and free speech. He did not accept that oppression was any more acceptable just because a black man, rather than a white man, had imposed it. To be in the vanguard of establishing true freedom in his country was thus, to Rodney Madziko, the greatest honour he could possibly be granted.
Up ahead, he saw Broadcasting House, the MBC headquarters, named after the London home of the British Broadcasting Corporation in colonial times and unchanged ever since. It was a heavy-set, redbrick thirties office block that occupied three sides of a large courtyard, in the middle of which stood a modernist white marble fountain that had long since run dry. The fourth side of the courtyard consisted of a high metal fence that ran along the street, pierced by the building’s main entrance. A guard-hut stood by a lowered barrier. The hut was empty, nor were there any signs of life in the building itself. It was, after all, first thing on a Sunday morning. Only the bare minimum of staff would be at work at this hour.
Major Madziko could easily have ordered his driver to burst straight through the barrier, but he did not want to act like a violent oaf. They were supposed to be there in the interests of a fair, law-abiding society. So he ordered one of his men to raise the barrier then led his troop of scout cars into the courtyard, the sound of their engines echoing raucously off the building’s plain brick facade. They proceeded round the fountain, three to one side, two to the other, so that Madziko’s vehicle ended up in the middle of a line of five, all facing the main entrance. He ordered the drivers to cut their engines and jumped down from his car. His men followed him, clambering out on to the tarmac courtyard until only the gunners standing behind their machine guns remained.
Inside Broadcasting House, another major, from the army’s paratroop battalion, was watching events down below from the vantage point of a first-floor window. He was holding a walkie-talkie to his lips. He spoke very quietly into the mouthpiece, and a dozen windows slid open. From each, a round metallic snout slid forward.
‘Fire at will,’ said the major.
The moving window frames caught Madziko’s eye in an instant, but the totally unexpected shock of impending disaster took him a couple of seconds to process. Too late, he turned back to his gunner, pointed at the dark interruptions in the facade caused by the raised glass and shouted, ‘The windows! Shoot!’
By the time the first machine gun was raised, the triggers on the grenade-launchers had been pulled, the rocket flames were spurting and the grenades were on their way. A fraction of a second later, the scout cars were obliterated. The force of the blast and the thousands of razor-sharp shards of metal that filled the air blew Madziko and his men apart. In the time it takes to swat a mosquito, they were destroyed, and with them all hope of a peaceful coup.
The ambush was repeated with equal finality at the Parliament Building, the Central Bank, Police Headquarters and the President’s official residence. Wherever Patrick Tshonga’s forces went, government men were waiting for them. The rebels who had counted on the element of surprise were the ones receiving a rude and terminal shock.
67
Mabeki wasn’t making for the border. He left the highway at the first possible interchange, turned hard left, almost doubling back on himself, and drove away to the southwest. He was driving smoothly, not too fast.
Carver unconsciously clenched his jaw as the tension and concentration built inside him. Where was Mabeki going? He mentally pictured the maps of Hong Kong he’d studied, and skimmed the books he’d read. A name came to mind: Shek Kong, a former RAF base now part-used by the Chinese air force. Private aviation was allowed there, which it wasn’t at the main international airport. If Mabeki had arranged a plane to get him out of Hong Kong fast, on the first leg of the journey to Malemba, he’d very likely fly from Shek Kong.
Carver estimated that Mabeki was around three minutes ahead of him. If a jet was fuelled and ready to go, that was more than enough time to drive on to the tarmac, race up the steps, close the door and start rolling. Like Mabeki, Carver wasn’t keen on driving too fast, but for different reasons. He’d never wanted to be convicted for murder, just becaus
e he’d been caught breaking a speed-limit. But he couldn’t afford those niceties now. He had to narrow the gap.
The car showroom’s mechanics had done a good job. The Honda might have looked like a piece of junk on the outside, but it had all the acceleration its reputation suggested, the steering was precise, and the suspension nice and tight. Carver was enjoying himself, revving hard and relishing the angry buzz of the overworked, tuned-up engine as he darted in and out of the traffic on the highway before swinging left on to an off-ramp painted with go-slower yellow stripes.
There was a roundabout at the bottom of the ramp. Carver swung left on to a road that cut through a sprawl of low-density suburban housing before heading out into the country, following the valley floor for a mile or so between two lines of hills. The road was undemanding, with long straight stretches broken by gentle corners that he could take flat out. He had no trouble keeping his speed above eighty miles per hour, sometimes touching a hundred as he overtook slower vehicles, leaving trucks, buses and crowded family cars in his wake.
Carver had to slow his pace slightly as he re-entered a more built-up area. There was another roundabout up ahead. The road to the airfield at Shek Kong was the second exit – straight across. It took him a couple of seconds to register the fact that Mabeki had not taken it. He’d swung left again, going due south now, back towards Kowloon. And he’d taken the most remarkable and most dangerous road in the whole of Hong Kong: Route Twisk.
It had been built in the early fifties by soldiers of the Royal Engineers to link the British Army’s main base at Castle Peak in the Tsuen Wan district of the city with the RAF at Shek Kong. So the road was originally designated TW/SK, which soon became known as Twisk. Designed with inbuilt demolition chambers, which could be blown up to collapse the road in the event of a Chinese invasion, Twisk ran through some of Hong Kong’s most rugged and spectacular landscapes, past its highest peak, Tai Mo Shan. Barely four miles long, the road rose from sea-level up to twelve hundred feet and almost all the way back down again. It twisted and turned along and between the hills in a series of blind corners and hairpin bends. At the far end it was swallowed up by the urban highways and towering apartment blocks of modern Tsuen Wan.
By the time he got on to Route Twisk, Carver had cut the gap between him and Mabeki to a minute and a half. He wanted visual contact before they entered the maze of the city streets. Judging by the signal from Zalika’s phone, Mabeki was a little over a mile down the road. He’d been doing about fifty on the first steep but reasonably straight uphill section of the road, then slowed right down as he hit a W-shaped sequence of bends that led to the tightest hairpin of all. That was reasonably good going. But it wouldn’t be nearly good enough for Carver. He had no choice. He had to race all the way.
Ahead of him he could see the triangular peak of Tai Mo Shan rising like a huge grey-green pagoda against the clear blue sky. The road ran between two lines of shade-trees that for an instant reminded Carver of southern France: a gentle swing right, a nice stretch of straight road, then a quick chicane right, left and hard right again. There were a couple of motorbikes behind him, powerful ones by the looks of it, but up ahead the road was mercifully clear. So he could take the racing lines, cutting the apexes of the corners, barely applying the brakes at all and letting the gearbox and the accelerator pedal do all the work.
He jinked through the first hairpin and up a straight barely two hundred yards long before he had to hit the handbrake hard for the first time as he approached the first section of a tight double-S. He felt the car scrabble for traction as he kept the accelerator down, working the wheel and letting the car’s rear axle drift, carrying it round the bend. Same again on the next bend, and then he was into the third section of the W, drifting round the apex, swinging right out into the oncoming lane, letting the rear end of the car break free round the outside of the bend in a sort of semi-controlled anarchy.
And there was a bus coming the other way, downhill, heading directly towards him.
Carver’s instant reaction was not alarm but bemusement. The bus was a single-decker Dennis Dart, the doughty old stalwart of countless public transport services up and down the British Isles. And it was about to kill him on a mountain road in Hong Kong.
Carver could see the look of shock on the driver’s face as he registered the presence of a car hurtling towards him in the wrong lane. There was an elephantine squeal of protest from the bus’s brakes and tyres as he tried to check its momentum. But a Dart bus is around thirty feet long and weighs seven tons unladen. Basic physics dictate that it’s a hard beast to rein in, particularly when descending a steep hill. The driver also had the corner to consider. He started turning into the bend, cutting across Carver’s path, blocking off his escape route to the left-hand lane.
Now Carver had to make an instant choice. He could hit the brakes as hard as his right foot could manage and just pray that the car either halted or at the very worst collided with the bus at a sub-fatal speed. Or he could apply an equally powerful force to the accelerator on the outside chance that he could avoid the oncoming bus entirely.
He hit both.
First he yanked on the handbrake, drastically slowing the front of the car. The back end, however, kept moving, swinging round until the Honda was positioned sideways across the carriageway.
The bus was looming above Carver so close he seemed almost in touching distance. He had let go of his wheel and thrown his hands up over his face in an instinctive gesture of self-protection. As the bus, too, slewed round, Carver could see passengers screaming in terror. He couldn’t blame them. He was tempted to scream too. He just didn’t have the time.
He released the handbrake and hit the gas. The front wheels regained traction and the car shot forward, heading straight for the far side of the road … and the two motorbikes that had been riding behind him up the hill.
Carver heaved the steering wheel to the right, missed the leading bike by a whisker, hit the kerb on the side of the road and carried on over it so that his outside wheels actually rode up the earthen banking on the inside of the corner. The Honda tilted so far over it seemed on the verge of toppling on to its roof before Carver regained some measure of control and brought the vehicle crashing back down on to the road again. He took a deep calming breath, slowly exhaled, then raced away again.
Mabeki had gained a few extra seconds. But the chase was still on.
68
Patrick Tshonga had a safehouse, a detached villa standing in a half-acre of gardens, half a mile from the centre of Sindele. It was one of several he had used over the years as he moved from place to place, evading the attentions of Henderson Gushungo. Only his closest associates knew of its existence, and of these only the most trusted had any idea of its precise address. He had decided that this was the best place to be when the news came through that Broadcasting House had been captured and it was safe for him to make his first public appearance as leader of a free nation.
At 02.30 hours, a small detachment of Malemban special forces personnel had arrived in the streets that surrounded the safehouse. To their military training, patterned on the example of the SAS, they added their own, innate skills. They could run for hours at speeds no European could match; track human or vehicle trails over the roughest, stoniest landscape; and move as silently and invisibly as wraiths, so that their enemies died before they even knew they were in danger.
Just as the first grenades exploded outside Broadcasting House, two three-man teams blew the locks off the front and back doors to the house, entering through the front hall and kitchen respectively. A third team was positioned in the garden, waiting to cut off anyone attempting to escape from a window on the ground or upper floor.
The kitchen and hall were secured. There were two reception rooms on the ground floor. They too were checked. Both were empty.
Cautiously, each man, waiting for the first sound of a round being chambered or a gun being fired, dreading the impact of bullets into his own fle
sh, made his way upstairs. They had all seen copies of the plans. They knew there were three bedrooms, two bathrooms and a large storage area in the attic. None of them showed any sign of human occupation.
Only as the soldiers were leaving the building, feeling frustrated and even cheated by their lack of success, did one of them notice the tiny videocam positioned high up on the hall wall, just below the ceiling.
They knew then that Patrick Tshonga had been watching them. The unit commander immediately called his base to alert them to the likelihood that Tshonga had anticipated he might be betrayed. When the conversation was over, the commander summoned his men to gather round him.
‘The traitor has escaped for now,’ he said. ‘He is laughing at us. But we will catch him and we will make him pay for that in blood.’
69
For all its magisterial size and dignity, a Rolls-Royce Phantom can be surprisingly nimble up a steep, winding road. Moses Mabeki was enjoying his Sunday-morning drive, staying well within the Phantom’s capabilities and taking Route Twisk at a pace calculated to enable Carver to catch him if he pushed his car to the limit.