Taking the Tunnel

by James Adams

  He had been honoured and flattered when Dai Choi had called and asked for his help. Visits from Hong Kong were rare and when they came it was an opportunity to shine. Together the fashionably dressed Dai Choi and Vincent Sum looked like two sons of some rich Far

  East merchant. But the Issy Miyake suits and Valentino ties covered raw, ruthless power which both men had used to rise and stay at the top of their chosen profession.

  Finding the boat for Dai Choi had not been a problem. Powerboating is a popular sport in Britain and he wanted one of the most powerful boats around — a Cigarette boat. Named after the company that created the original design, it has become synonymous with drug-smuggling off Florida because of its high speed and low radar signature. The most important person on a large powerboat is the throttleman who handles the levers that control the acceleration of the boat. He needs the touch of an artist to lift the boat off the crest of a wave at precisely the right angle where an inexperienced man would hit it wrong and capsize. It is a highly skilled job which seems to attract a particular type, seduced by the macho image and the glamour associated with the big boats. Among such men there are always those who drink or do drugs to excess and Vincent Sum had found Dave Abbott in Manchester. He had run up a large debt to the local branch of White Lotus to feed his growing cocaine habit. The local club where he bought the drug appeared to be owned by whites but was actually a front for White Lotus. Abbott had insisted on bringing George and once they had seen the boat there had been no complaints. The prospect of a fast night trip in such a vessel far outweighed any concerns they may have had about smuggling contraband.

  Following Dai Choi’s careful instructions, Vincent Sum had installed a Marconi VHF radiotelephone. This was a standard piece of ship’s equipment available off the shelf. But Sum had also bought the morse adaptor which allowed for a pre-programmed signal to be sent out in a series of dots and dashes rather than voice. In addition, he had procured through Dave Tomkins, an arms dealer contact who works out of his home in Old Basing,

  Hampshire, a TC-182 wide band direction-finding system which came in a small suitcase and was completely portable.

  The trip had begun with an almost festive mood among passengers and crew. They had joined the boat at South-wold, a tiny picturesque fishing village on the Suffolk coast. The sight of such a boat was unusual but not so strange as to excite too much comment. Many powerboats came up the coast for races and the locals had got used to seeing the wakes carving across the horizon of the North Sea. To the curious onlookers, Dave Abbott had explained that he was taking Fire-Eater and her sponsors to put the boat through her paces out at sea. They would return further north up the coast, perhaps at Gorleston or Caister-on-Sea. Dai Choi had been amazed at the lack of interest shown in them. There were no inquisitive police launches, no Customs men asking about cargo and destination, just a bunch of kids admiring the massive engines and swift lines.

  Heading north and east away from the brightness of the setting sun, they were looking for a grid reference, a dot on the map, supplied by the Turk. It seemed to lie north of Leman Bank and inside the arc created by the two Viking buoys in water that shallowed to twenty-five metres. It was a journey of around fifty kilometres and at a steady and bearable pace should have taken just over an hour.

  The rapid fall in temperature after sunset had brought the fog swirling in to engulf them so that their pace had slowed and the noise of their engines had boomed back at them out of the grey darkness.

  Fifteen minutes earlier, Dai Choi had turned the radio on and begun sending a ten-second pulse of morse into the darkness. At the same time he brought out the suitcase containing the DF equipment, turned it on and tuned it to 950 FM.

  From the beginning of the trip, Dai Choi had refused to tell Sum what its purpose was. Instead he had been told the equipment required and what to do with it. Now he felt it was time to know more. “So, what happens now?” he asked Dai Choi, shouting to make his voice heard above the engines.

  “The Turk’s people came through here a few days ago and dropped off our cargo in a container that should be resting on the bottom at the coordinates we have been given.”

  “That’s great,” said Sum sarcastically. “I hope you don’t expect me to dive down and fetch it.”

  “No. It’s a little easier than that,” Dai replied. “Right now the radio is sending out a coded signal which will be picked up by an aerial that is floating on the surface above the container. As soon as the signal is detected, it goes down the wire and trips a relay switch in the container which in turn fires off a small explosives charge. That will release the valve on the oxygen cylinder which will pump in air to the floats on either side of the container and bring it to the surface.

  “Once it hits the air, a radio will start a continuous transmission which should be picked up by the DF equipment. We just follow the trail and pick up the cargo. Simple.”

  That’s pretty smart,” said Sum. “I’ve heard of the Columbians doing stuff like that but I never thought I’d see it in action.”

  There was no indication that the morse pulse had reached its target but the dial in the centre of the DF console was suddenly illuminated with a three-digit number and an arrow pointing on the compass rose.

  “There. We’ve got it,” Dai Choi exclaimed. “Turn on to that heading and keep on it.”

  It took another fifteen minutes of circling in the fog before the large grey cylinder, coddled by two orange bags, appeared out of the mist. Dave Abbott carefully brought Fire-Eater alongside and eager hands reached over to bring the cargo aboard.

  *

  Two miles astern, Jonny Turnbull perched in the wheel-house of Her Majesty’s Customs ship Venturous as she nosed through the fog, sniffing Fire-Eater’s trail. They had been following her ever since she left Southwold, closing up once the sun set but staying out of what they believed was the other boat’s radar range.

  The Venturous was a ten-year-old boat designed for inshore work, intercepting fishermen breaching the twelve-mile limit. She had a maximum speed of twenty-two knots, at which she started to shudder in an alarming way, so the captain tended not to exceed eighteen knots and preferred to cruise at a steady fifteen. British Customs tended to carry out the light work and leave the interception of arms-dealers and drug-runners to the Royal Navy. But there had been no time to find a frigate and all the Navy’s fishery protection patrol were in the Irish Sea or off the north of Scotland. So Venturous had been delegated the task of following Dai Choi.

  The Customs boat had a crew of eight. The skipper was a thirty-year-old Yorkshireman, Peter Cole, on his first command and his first drug bust. The inexperience of the captain and crew made Jonny nervous but then he had little direct knowledge of arrests at sea either. He only had instinct and that told him they needed more people, more muscle, more everything if they were going to take on Dai Choi.

  As he had promised, Jonny had followed Dai Choi to Britain. For once the liaison arrangements between the colony and New Scotland Yard had worked properly. He had shared his intelligence with Commander Roy Penrose, the head of S09, the Regional Crime Squad, who was responsible for combating drugs in the city. He in turn had passed him to Customs. Between the two groups Dai Choi had been kept under surveillance and the telephone in his room at Dukes Hotel in St James’s Place had been tapped. The transcripts had produced little of interest but the Chinese had made the mistake of requesting a window table at Rue St Jacques, one of Charlotte Street’s better restaurants.

  A laser microphone in a Ford Transit van on the opposite side of the road had picked up the window vibrations from Dai Choi’s conversation. The dinner with another young Chinese with a London accent had been conducted entirely in Cantonese. S09 had no Cantonese speakers but could draw on translators when required. Two days later and five hours before the Fire-Eater left Southwold, Commander Penrose had the translation and so did Jonny.

  Technology, Jonny thought, occasionally delivered the goods. On this occasion,
Dai Choi had spelled out where he and his lunch companion would be meeting their boat and that they expected to rendezvous at sea. From there it had been simple to lie in wait and pick up the boat as she headed out to sea. Exactly what she was meeting and what cargo Dai Choi would pick up remained a mystery.

  “She’s stopped, sir.” The radar operator looked up, his face bathed in a sickly green glow from his screen. “Bearing? Range?” asked Cole.

  “Bearing 280 degrees. Range 1,000 yards.”

  “Cox’n, bring us round to 280. Full speed. Call the men to action stations. Prepare boarding party.”

  The instructions were familiar from a hundred films, and their familiarity was somehow reassuring to Jonny, as was the professional way the crew set about their preparations for boarding. Three men stood on the port side with boathooks and ropes, ready to jump the gap between the two ships when they came alongside. Jonny was alarmed to notice that none of the men were armed. He turned to the captain. “Don’t you have any weapons? Your men should be armed.”

  “I hardly think that’s necessary. Our orders are not to carry weapons unless w7e know that we are going to be attacked. That’s not the case here.”

  “Christ, captain, you just don’t understand what’s going on here.” His voice rose above the note of the engines so that the boarding party turned to listen in eagerly. “You are about to try and board a boat owned by one of Hong Kong’s toughest gangsters. He’s probably killed more people than you’ve even met. He’s also probably got the biggest load of drugs you’ve ever seen and you think he’s just going to give up and come along quietly on your say so? You’re fucking crazy! If you’ve got some guns, get them. If you haven’t, let’s go back and wait for them to come ashore.”

  Jonny saw the younger man hesitate, weighing up the risks associated with breaking out the weapons against the penalty for disobeying orders. Jonny was sure that the prospect of action and a successful bust — almost regardless of the risk — would drive Cole onward.

  “OK. We’ll play it your way. But there’ll be no shooting without my direct order and safety catches will be on. Understood?” He looked around the cramped bridge and then out the port door to the boarding party, taking in the nods of each man.

  He turned and, reaching into his jacket pocket, produced a key which he inserted in the door on the aft bulkhead of the bridge. He pulled the door open and Jonny saw two rifles — they looked like standard Army issue SA80s — and four handguns, again the regulation Browning 9 mm automatic pistol.

  “None for you, I’m afraid,” he said over his shoulder. “Regulations strictly forbid handing weapons to civilians. Anyway, I’m sure this is an unnecessary precaution.”

  For someone used to going on operations armed with a pistol and sub-machine-gun and supported by men with automatic weapons, gas and grenades, the armoury appeared pathetically inadequate.

  The captain passed round the weapons and there was the snick and slap of magazines being jammed home while the radar operator was calling out the range. When he reached the 200-metre mark, the coxswain snapped on the searchlight mounted on the top of the cabin. Its beam pierced the darkness but failed to penetrate the wall of fog. Instead, the white light broke apart, carried like an opening curtain on the tendrils of white fog to be reflected back at the Customs men. In an instant their night sight was destroyed and no one could see anything.

  Turn it off,” Cole hissed, and instantly darkness, thicker than before, descended.

  Then out of the black appeared a soft white glow, so faint as to be almost imagined. The cox’s right hand left the helm and pointed forward. The captain saw the glimmer through the fog and immediately ordered slow ahead.

  Jonny moved out to the starboard side and walked forward so that he could see ahead. The light was brighter now, steady about ten degrees off the port bow. Then, in an instant, the curtain parted and they burst through the fog.

  The boredom of the past few hours vanished with sudden and shocking action. Each step of the unfolding drama appeared to Jonny to be encapsulated in its own separate compartment. For months afterwards, he was able to play the action back scene by scene like a single-lens reflex camera in autodrive with an infinite amount of film.

  The image before him was startlingly clear, illuminated by the lights on the long, slender, dangerous boat ahead of them. The Venturous lost way as the cox shifted the gears to bring the boat alongside. Jonny registered their sizes — the difference not in length but in height, one built for speed and performance, the other for reliability and heavy weather.

  The tableau before them froze for a moment as each face looked around. Two people, Chinese — Dai Choi? — were hunched over a long grey cylinder that glistened in the light. A door to the container was open and the men seemed to be transferring the cargo into their own vessel.

  Of the two other men, one, bearded and tall, had his mouth open in shock; the other, smaller, broader, was still hunched over the throttles, looking back over his shoulders, his eyes staring white without pupils in the strange light.

  “British Customs. Heave to. We are coming aboard.” Cole’s voice over the loudspeaker sounded so British, Turnbull thought. It was as if his lines had been rehearsed for a play where all the actors knew their parts. But Jonny knew that Dai Choi would never play to some British idea of right and wrong, fair or unfair.

  Cole’s voice broke the mirrored surface of the scene, fracturing it into a thousand pieces. The two Chinese seemed to move as one, their hands emerging from the crate with the stubby and distinctive shape of machine-guns in their hands.

  Jonny’s mouth framed a shout but it was already too late. The first ripping tear of bullets leaped the narrow divide between the boats. Each man emptied a full thirty-round magazine into the Customs boat. The noise, which was somehow contained and amplified by the fog, added to the terrifying suddenness of the attack.

  Each bullet found a target and Jonny was showered with splinters from the wooden deck and then by pieces of flesh, blood and bone as the bullets struck and destroyed the bodies of the boarding party. One moment they were young men preparing to do what they had routinely practised many times. The next they were dead.

  Jonny could feel blood running down his face, whether his own or other people’s he had no idea. His nostrils were filled with the sickly, creamy, cloying smell and he felt his stomach heave as both mind and nerves rejected the invasion of his senses.

  He saw that the Chinese had shucked their empty magazines and were fitting two new rectangles underneath the barrels. He had only seconds, fractions of seconds to do something, anything, to live. His eyes darted around the deck, shutting out the sounds of war: the splash of bodies and parts of bodies hitting the water; the curses from the captain and the screams from the coxswain who must have taken a hit.

  His eyes raked the raised deck in front of the bridge, passed over a black object and then returned. His heart leaped into his throat as eyes and brain coordinated to pick up the clear outline of a Browning automatic pistol. It must have been flung there by one of the sailors as his shattered body jerked and jumped with the impact of the Chinese bullets.

  Turnbull’s body arced as he flung himself from the cover of the starboard side on to the roof of the cabin, his hands reaching for the weapon. He had no thought now of survival by running. He was a primitive animal, a man attacked who was determined to fight back. To kill or be killed.

  As the fingers of his right hand closed around the butt of the gun, his left hand smacked into the palm of his right, squeezing the butt in a classic double-handed grip. His left thumb flicked the safety catch upwards and his arms were pushing the pistol out ahead of him as his eyes began to search and focus on a target.

  He heard again that terrible tearing sound as one of the Chinese fired another clip at the boat. But the angle was wrong, the height of the Customs boat making him fire upwards. The bullets raced along the edge of the cabin roof and then into the bridge. The screaming he had heard was a
bruptly cut off.

  As Jonny brought the pistol up to aim, he saw the froth begin to churn at the stem of the boat as the throttleman punched the levers against the forward stops. Jonny was firing now, his forefinger jerking back against the trigger guard again and again. He saw the back of the tall bearded man at the helm suddenly turn dark and he appeared to levitate before slumping forward over the wheel. But the boat was moving fast now, the roar of its engines deafening him, drowning out all other sound, all thought. He saw the second Chinese raise his weapon as if to fire, but the gap was too wide now, the range too great. Instead he stood erect, looking astern as his colleague reached forward and with one push shoved the helmsman overboard before taking control.

  For a brief moment before the fog swallowed the speedboat, Jonny met the man’s eyes. There was instant recognition and Dai Choi raised a hand in salutation and farewell.

  CHAPTER X

  Bryan Dickens had come to hate London because it represented so many of the failures in his professional life. When he was younger, a rotation into the Ministry of Defence in Whitehall was considered an essential part of the job, an opportunity to make contacts outside the regiment and the enclosed world of intelligence. Such contacts were essential to the informal network which made the vast bureaucracy of the MoD actually work. It helped when promotion came around to know the man on the board, perhaps to have smoothed the path of a particular memo or found a way to get the job done faster than the system would normally have allowed.