Taking the Tunnel

by James Adams

  Then, instead of driving past them or veering into a shop window, the car drew up with a squeal of brakes. At the same instant as the passenger door opened, Jonny saw the driver’s face. The slanting eyes, round face and smooth hair translated into danger.

  Christ, it’s me, he thought, a groan of fear escaping as his eyes darted around. I was right. I was right. That little shit Dai Choi. The words were discarded as he tried to focus on escape. He could feel his stomach heaving and his bowels loosening. The revolting mess that had been the boarding party was still fresh in his mind and, unbidden, his subconscious was recalling the horror of that moment, only this time it was he who was lying broken on the ground.

  He caught hold of Lisu’s arm. “Run. Run, for God’s sake. It’s us they’re after.”

  He pushed her away from him down the hallway, his eyes searching for a weapon, for anything to defend himself against imminent death. He could see that the man getting out of the car had a gun, its stubby twin barrels swinging in his direction. The back door of the car was opening now.

  “Fucking hell. More of the bastards.”

  But he couldn’t just allow himself to be sacrificed. Frantic now, he turned, his head swivelling back and forth, his vision tunnelled towards the threat, the crowd now a distant echo, his mind watching and assessing as the barrel moved towards him.

  “A Lupo.” The name sprang into his mind from some long-forgotten course on weapons: a shotgun with the barrel sawn off. In the thirties it had been a favourite weapon of the Mafia, hence its Italian nickname, the Wolf. At close quarters it could blow a man almost in half.

  The barrel looked cavernous, an enormous hole pointing directly at him. He could almost feel the man’s finger squeezing the trigger, could imagine the striker hitting the cartridge, the explosion, the cloud of lead pellets pouring out of the barrel and into his body, shredding him.

  Instinct forced him to move and he sank to the ground, sprawled limply in front of the window as the gun roared. Immediately he was showered with glass as the shop window exploded above him. Doorknobs and knockers cascaded down from the display. Scrabbling for a handhold, his fingers fell on a rounded doorknob and seized it as a weapon. His arm levered it forward in a bastardized version of an overarm bowl. It missed, skimming past the gunman’s ear. The Chinese had clearly not been expecting any return fire and he ducked just as he fired the second shot.

  The second man was up now, another Lupo in his hand as he stood on tiptoe to bring the gun to bear over the roof of the car and on to Jonny lying on the floor in front of him.

  The first gunman’s right hand moved in a swift pumping motion as he chambered another cartridge. There was no emotion on the face of either man, just a certainty that they would complete their mission. He saw the driver’s mouth opening, his face contorting as he shouted something at them; driving them on. But Jonny could hear nothing, his ears ringing with the gunfire and his concentration absolute on the next shot.

  The second man brought his gun to bear. Jonny’s hands were searching among the glass for more weapons. He was throwing things, anything, feeling the wetness on his hands as the glass sliced through skin. But his feeble attempts were having no effect. This time he knew that he was going to die.

  Then into his consciousness came a sharp, light crack and he saw a white streak appear on the roof of the car. An instant later, the face of the first gunman appeared to flatten and then disintegrate in a flash of red. Another crack and the second gunman’s face turned away from Jonny, a look of consternation and then alarm flashing across his face.

  “Gunshots,” Jonny prayed to himself. “Gunshots.”

  Then he felt a hand on his arm, pulling him. He looked up and then shrank back as the slim figure in a baseball cap and dark sweater brought a pistol up.

  Seeing the fear in his eyes, the newcomer shouted at him, screaming to make the voice penetrate the fog of fear. “No. I’m not with them. I’m here to help. Come. You must come. Now.” The newcomer jerked, dragging him for a few inches along the floor. As the glass began to tear his legs, the pain helped focus his mind. He was still alive. He had not been shot by the newcomer. He began to help himself. He levered himself up, driving from the floor like a sprinter pushing from starting blocks, and then headed straight at the crowd. He could see the terrified face of Lisu just ahead of him and he reached out, grabbing her arm and dragging her alongside him down the passage.

  The newcomer fired twice more, the sharp cracks of a small pistol, and then was running alongside them, heading down the corridor towards Marks and Spencer and the T-junction with the main corridor. There was a boom behind and Jonny felt Lisu stagger, a small scream escaping from her lips.

  But there was no time to stop, no time for anything other than escape. He could hear the racing of the car’s engine behind them.

  “They’re coming after us,” he shouted unnecessarily.

  They ran on, fear lending speed and causing Jonny’s throat to contract so that he could hardly breathe. Much more and he would be finished.

  They were at the junction now. Their companion turned on one knee, brought up the pistol and fired twice more. “Fuck. Missed.”

  The figure turned and pushed them to the left towards the purple car park. It was a race now between the three of them and the car behind. Jonny could imagine the driver powering through the crowd, determined to finish off the job his comrades had handled so badly. His eyes would only see their backs drawing closer and closer to the bonnet of his car. Then they were out of the doors and clattering down the stairs. A crash and the car was through, the doors no barrier.

  But the purple car park has a ramp for wheelchairs at the side and the steps down the centre leading to the doors were an unexpected obstacle. The front wheels hit the top step, bounced and hit the fourth with a crash that Jonny could feel in his feet as he ran off to one side.

  They had seconds now, time to run, time to hide, time even to escape. They stopped at a blue Nissan Sunny and Jonny helped Lisu into the back and got in alongside her. With a squeal of tyres they were off, heading for the exit. Within two minutes they were on the A1 heading south. There was no sign of pursuit.

  An hour later he was sitting in the Nissan with his rescuer. Lisu was in surgery in the casualty department at Durham Hospital, having dozens of shotgun pellets removed from her right arm and back. Fortunately, the effective range of a Lupo is short and so by the time she was struck the pellets had spent much of their force. Even so, she had lost blood and the removal of the pellets required a general anaesthetic.

  The fifteen-minute drive to Durham had been a frantic business. They were all still high on adrenalin and fear, shaking with the aftershock of the attack. Jonny had been astonished to discover that his rescuer was a woman whose long dark hair emerged from underneath a New York Giants baseball cap.

  Aside from a muttered introduction (“My name’s Julie Cohen. I was asked to look after you.”), he had learned nothing. She had refused to come in to the hospital, insisting instead that Jonny rejoin her in the car.

  He had called the police and they were on their way.

  “So who the hell are you? How come you turned up there?” Jonny asked.

  “I’m a friend of Lin Yung’s. He asked me to keep an eye on you over here, just in case anything happened.”

  “Well, I’m very grateful for the attention of Chinese intelligence,” Jonny replied. “But what do you have to do with them?”

  She paused, debating how much to tell him. There were advantages to confidences and Jonny’s face encouraged them. Each feature seemed slightly out of proportion — bushy dark eyebrows below straight blond hair, the aquiline nose contrasting with a full-lipped, large mouth — but the overall effect was somehow pleasing. His blue eyes met hers directly and she decided to tell him enough to forge an alliance. If she told him too much her work could be compromised; too little and he might insist she stayed for the police to interview her.

  “Did you ever hear of Mo
rris “Two Gun” Cohen?” she asked. As Jonny shook his head she continued: “He was a Jew from the East End of London. For reasons too complicated to go into, he became a close ally of Sun Yat Sen and Chiang Kai-shek and helped found the modern Chinese secret service. He was in China before the war and he took a Chinese mistress, whom he kept in Beijing, where he had two sons and a daughter. His elder son married a Chinese woman and, by some genetic quirk, I was the result.”

  She opened her arms as if asking Jonny to confirm her explanation. But in the dark, curly hair, fair skin and strong nose there was no hint of her Chinese ancestry. On the contrary, she looked middle European or Jewish, her strong yet sensitive face softened by pale brown, rather than the more common dark eyes.

  She laughed at his obvious appraisal, showing strong white teeth behind thin lips. “As you can see, you would never know I was from Beijing. This made me a pretty attractive asset so from childhood I was set up for a life in intelligence. When my grandfather moved back to London in 1966, my parents and I came with him. He died in 1975 when I was nine.

  “I went to school here and then went on a scholarship to the Beijing Institute of Contemporary International Relations. As you probably know, it’s a training ground for Chinese intelligence and it was there I was taught the truth about my grandfather. It was all very flattering: a man whom they all respected had played a key part in the Revolution and I was being asked to carry on the family tradition.

  “Anyway, once I graduated, I was recruited almost immediately by Lin Yung into the Guojia anquanbu. I moved back to London and set up as a translator from my flat in Highgate. I went back to my roots among the Jews.” She smiled.

  “So how did you find us up here?” Jonny asked.

  “Lin Yung sent me a message a week ago that you were on your way and asked if I would keep an eye on you. He’s coming over himself but he was anxious that you should stick around until he appears to explain things to you himself.

  “I have to confess this kind of thing is not really my style. I’ve done all the courses, but I haven’t had to do much action stuff. I managed to put a trace on your car the first night you came north and that made life a bit easier.

  “I’d followed you into that shopping centre and then everything went wrong. I’m afraid I’ve never used a gun in anger before. If it hadn’t been for the ricochet off the car roof, I probably wouldn’t have hit that man at all. As it was, I didn’t do much to slow up the car.”

  “Well, I can assure you that if you hadn’t come along, I’d have been a dead man.”

  “Look, Jonny. I have a favour to ask,” she continued. “I want to keep out of the way of the police here. It would blow my cover and I want to go on helping you get Dai Choi. So when the police come, put them off. Say you were pulled out by some person with a gun who drove you here and then pushed off. You can tell them you tried to persuade me to stay but I insisted on leaving. Say I was from a local gang, anything you like. Will you do that?”

  It was the kind of deal that Jonny would have done with Lin Yung. The kind of arrangement that was necessary in the fight against organized crime. Anyway, he owed this woman his life and it was good to talk to someone again who spoke his language.

  CHAPTER XII

  Despite the massive manhunt, it had been remarkably simple for both Dai Choi and Vincent Sum to keep ahead of the police. They had brought the Fire-Eater into Kessingland Beach north of Southwold and unloaded the cargo directly on to a truck for the three-hour drive back to London. Both Dai Choi and Vincent Sum had taken separate cars, the former to stay the night at the Angel Inn at Stoke-by-Nayland in Suffolk and the latter to return to London and oversee the safe storage of the cargo.

  Dai Choi had made the mistake of telling Vincent Sum that Jonny Turnbull was a “problem that needed to be solved”. By the time Dai Choi had arrived back in London the hounds had already been set on the trail. It had seemed then that a simple execution in a city far away might indeed solve the problem. He had not realized that the branch of White Lotus in the north-east was inexperienced in dealing with such matters. They were in fact just petty hoods, used to small-time robberies, some thuggery and a little protection; not at all the sophisticated gangsters with strong leadership that Dai Choi was used to.

  He had heard about the shambles at the Metrocentre at about the same time as Stanley Kung had read about it in the South China Morning Post, where the attack on a local cop on assignment in England was front-page news. The message from Kung that he was on his way to England had arrived soon afterwards. No doubt the Shan Chu wanted to make sure the rest of the operation was running as planned. No doubt, too, he would want to make his views known about the progress so far. Dai Choi was not looking forward to the meeting.

  They had arranged to meet at Model Cottages. In a few days the garages had been transformed. The fires were out, the cauldron stilled. There was no drilling, none of the noise that is associated with a mechanic’s workshop. Instead, an almost antiseptic stillness had settled over the building. The few men who were left appeared to be walking so softly as to be on tiptoe. The silence accompanied by the movement gave the garage a surreal quality, as if the sound had been turned off in a film.

  “They are all terrified that the slightest mistake will blow us all up,” Leung said with a laugh, turning to Dai Choi and Vincent Sum. “They have no understanding of modern explosives. All they know is that there’s enough stuff to blow up the terrace and most of the streets around here.”

  “Well it’s better that they take care than that we have an accident,” Dai Choi said.

  “Oh, there’s no worry about that,” Leung replied with the carelessness of the man who knows just enough to be dangerously confident. “Look, I’ll show you.”

  He went over to two cardboard boxes and came back with a thin sheet of material half an inch thick, ten inches wide and twenty-four inches long. It was a slate-grey colour, completely malleable, flopping in Leung’s hand rather like uncooked pizza dough. As he approached Dai Choi, he flicked the sheet in his direction and the Chinese reached out with both hands to catch it, the fright clear in his face.

  “Don’t worry, this stuff is the best. The days when you had to worry about handling explosives or be concerned about them going off prematurely are long gone. This is

  Demex 200, made by Royal Ordnance in Britain, sold to Turkey, their loyal Nato allies, and then passed on to us. Each one of these sheets has enough power to blow up this whole street. About a hundred times more powerful than C4 and ten times more powerful than Semtex,” Leung said with the pride of ownership. “It’s fitting that we should be using their own explosive against them, don’t you think?”

  Dai Choi merely nodded, uncomfortable with his burden.

  Leung reached over and took the sheet back. “Come over here and I’ll show you just how safe this stuff is.”

  They approached a bench where one of the soft-footed workers was cutting the sheets into strips with a Stanley knife.

  “You see, this can be cut, thrown around, shaped into anything we want. And if you come over here” — gesturing towards the Kamper — “you will see that the type we have fits perfectly.”

  Dai Choi looked inside the van. He saw that the roof lining had been taken out and was being replaced with strips of the explosive by the simple method of stripping off a paper backing on each sheet and exposing an adhesive surface. Another man was waiting at one side with a portable paint sprayer to make sure the new lining blended in perfectly.

  “Over there,” Leung said, pointing to a man at a table against the far wall, “we are using an iron to join together and then flatten out strips into floor mats for the cars. Those, too, will be spray-painted black to match the material we’re replacing.”

  Leung then hefted the tube in his other hand. “This may look like bathroom sealant but actually it’s a tube of Demex 400. Same manufacturer, same source. Except you can squeeze this stuff out in precise amounts.” He squeezed the trigger device on
the base of the tube and a small grey blob appeared, to sit innocently in the palm of his hand. Leung put the tube down and then proceeded to mould the blob, squeezing it between his palms and rolling it out like a strip of Plasticine until he had a long snake. “We can take all the door and window sealers out and substitute this in each car. A bit of paint and you’d never know the difference.”

  “Very impressive,” Dai Choi acknowledged. “What about detonators and weapons?”

  “We’ve solved that problem too. You remember we insisted on a VW Kamper?” Dai Choi nodded. “Well, we’ve taken out the second battery, rewired some of the electrics and used the second battery as a safe for the detonators. I’m confident detection is impossible. As far as the weapons are concerned, you’ll find the answer over here.”

  They walked over to the van which was now resprayed and in one piece. Dai Choi looked inside and saw three large lead containers bolted to the floor. Stepping inside the van he saw that each of the containers was hollow.

  “There’s enough room for all of this?” He pointed towards the wall where the remainder of the equipment he had brought back from the North Sea was stacked. MAC10 sub-machine-guns, automatic pistols, stun and phosphorus grenades, night-vision devices, ammunition and even a broken down Steyr Aug rifle with an image-intensifying sight. It was a formidable armoury that under normal circumstances even the most basic security system would have no trouble detecting.

  “I can assure you that on the tests we have run, unless we are very unlucky, there will be no problem.”

  “And what about our little surprise package?” Dai Choi gestured to the far corner where a wooden packing case lay in isolation.

  Leung gave a small chuckle. “Ah, now that is the real reason this place is like a morgue. All the men are terrified of it.”

  “They’re not the only ones,” Dai Choi replied. He gave a small shudder. “When I think what that can do and how easily, I would prefer to be somewhere a long way away.”