The Mandarin Cypher

Chapter Seven: OVERKILL

The sea was dead calm, a flat blue shimmer of light reaching to the hills of Lamma Island, half seen through the haze. The water near my feet lapped softly across the big smooth stones, swirling around the piles of the breakwater. It was nearly dawn.

The man under the looking-glass tree hadn't moved.

I put the binoculars up again. The jetty of the Golden Sands Hotel was half a mile away, and the launch was still there. A figure was moving about on it, opening the engine hatch and half disappearing, and I thought if he was going to start it up it would mean they'd be leaving soon and there was nothing I could do about it. Nothing.

Relax. You've asked for the impossible so don't start bellyaching because it's not going to happen.

Five minutes later the island across the channel became suffused with a rose light, and the man under the looking-glass tree lifted his arms, beginning the movements of tai chi chuan. He was about sixty or seventy yards from where I stood, and hadn't yet seen me.

Part of my frustration was due to the fact that nothing apparent had happened since I'd sent the two signals last night. Chiang had got them off before 20.15 hours and I'd sweated it out till midnight to give Egerton time. Then I rang Chiang again.

Will make attempt, London had said. Chiang told me the signal had come in at 21.13 hours. That was pretty fast considering the action they'd had to take. My first request wouldn't have been any problem: Macklin had told me during field briefing that they'd probably fly someone in from Pekin to direct me in the field, and he was probably here already, holed up with all those bloody snakes and asking Chiang where the hell I'd gone. It was my second request that would have shaken them up a bit: I'd asked for a high speed power boat to make rendezvous with me at this precise point, the twelve-pile breakwater half a mile north of the Golden Sands Hotel in Telegraph Bay, soonest possible, essential before dawn.

London was six thousand miles away and I didn't know how they were going to do it. I just knew they had to.

If Egerton hadn't played it so close to the chest they could have put a director into Hong Kong with me and there wouldn't have been any trouble: he would have tickled up the Navy or a private small-boat fleet operator and I would have been on board by now, that's what a director in the field is for. Sometimes Egerton is too clever by half.

The man under the looking-glass tree was bending and swaying, bringing his spirit into harmony with the rhythm of the universe as the rose light turned gradually to gold on the hills of Lamma.

Binocs: nobody moving anywhere outside the building itself, two Chinese boys trying to get a sail up near the end of the jetty, could only be to air it, there wasn't any wind. The man on the launch was shutting the engine hatch and in a few seconds I heard the slight thump of the timber. A minute later the throb of the engine began.

Fatalism now necessary. Either London would do something in time and we'd still have a mission or London would be too late and we wouldn't. Nothing I could do.

Of course I wasn't certain it had been Tewson, the European in the bush jacket and sunglasses. But he'd looked like the photographs — the one in my briefing file and the one in the Hong Kong Standard, and his greeting of Nora and her response had been precisely in character with what I knew of their relationship. They'd been meeting, probably, for the first time since Flower had tagged her to the Golden Sands, and they'd met in the presence of strangers, or at least alien acquaintances. They'd kissed, but not like lovers: it had been a gesture of almost anything but love-habit, convention, the need to demonstrate a token affection, leaving nothing for the neighbours to say.

I wasn't sure it was Tewson but I'd bet on it because the whole thing fitted in with her attitudes towards me and her behaviour at Jade Imperial: as a young widow released from a sexless marriage her eagerness, archness and inexperience had been predictable, but it hadn't explained her sense of guilt and intrigue. She wasn't just having an affaire: it was an extra-marital affaire.

Hindsight makes you look a fool: I should have known two nights ago that Tewson was alive.

The engine of the launch was still running and I lifted the 7X50's again, not wanting to, making myself, because if Tewson put to sea and I couldn't follow and find out where he went, the only lead would be Nora again and she'd have to be worked on and that would mean asking London for one of the psychos and he'd have to come all the way out — unless they could rake one up from the embassies or consulates in Pekin or Taipei or Tokyo — and start from scratch and it could take weeks to break her down and get what he wanted without her knowing. And all I'd get out of it was a free ride home and a stomachful of adrenalin, what the hell was London doing, I didn't want the bloody Guards called out, I just wanted a boat, for Christ's sake, and I wanted it now.

It wouldn't have made much difference if I'd used speech code instead of cypher: it would have saved maybe a few minutes but no more than that because C and C were open twenty-four hours and there'd only been two signals to unzip and besides, it would have been highly dangerous. They picked the flower was perfectly safe because even if it was intercepted and its meaning understood, it didn't say anything they didn't already know. It was a whole lot different asking for a director to come out to the field: it not only meant the operator had got hold of something big enough to need direction, but that he was going to try for immediate penetration, a tacit declaration of war that would bring in their troops — and their supply line was a few miles long, from here to the South China coast, with ours having to stretch half across the globe.

The second signal, ordering a boat and specifying the rdv, couldn't have gone in any other way but cypher: it was fully urgent and strictly hush and if the opposition had intercepted and decyphered it they'd have just sent someone down here to the twelve-pile breakwater half a mile north of the Golden Sands Hotel in Telegraph Bay with orders to tread all over my face.

The man had finished his calisthenics under the looking-glass tree and was walking slowly up the beach to his fishing boat. I wasn't worried about him: he could have tagged me here from the hotel and semaphored the entire Book of Mao if he'd wanted to, but he hadn't. His movements had been genuine tai chi chuan and I'd made certain that no one was tagging me when I'd come down here. The immediate field was totally secure.

There was movement now and I refocused: two figures detaching themselves from the edge of the building, one white, one darker, indistinct because the line of magnolias was in the way. More movement, this time on the far side of the pagoda: two figures again, both white, the same stature, their motion co-ordinated. A slight burst of noise from the launch as the seaman cleared the cylinders.

The darker figure stopped, looking up at one of the first-floor windows, and even at this distance and with no depth of field I could see his awkwardness as he waved his hand. Then they were filing down to the jetty, forming the same kind of procession I'd seen last night.

I estimated that Mandarin had another two minutes to run.

London was six thousand miles away but they'd got a radio hadn't they, got a telephone for Christ sake, this wasn't an alien state, it was a Crown Colony and they could pull some rank, couldn't they, and what the hell was the Minister doing about this, the one they were so bloody proud of because he could cut through the red tape in ten seconds flat, hadn't anyone picked up the blower and got him off the pot?

Sweating like a pig.

The seaman was in the stern, handing his party aboard, and the launch heeled slightly to their weight. Two of the figures were going into the cabin, one of them the man in the bush jacket, George Henry Tewson, the man from London, dead on paper, killed off by bought witnesses at the dictates of clandestine necessity, the man at the centre of Mandarin, alive and well and vanishing from sight as the stern went down and the exhaust note bubbled to a roar. Within thirty seconds the launch was a small indistinct blob half lost in the morning haze, and I lowered the binoculars.

Mission aborted. Am returning to London.

Because there wasn't anything else I could do. Tewson was I being released periodically on some kind of parole and he might come here again but it wouldn't be for another week, unless they changed the pattern. I'd already got as close to Nora as I could without getting killed and if I stayed in Hong Kong for another week I wouldn't have time to do anything but keep out of their way and hope to stay alive: but that wasn't what I was here for. All London could do was send one of their tame mind-benders to work on Nora Tewson and by the time he'd produced results I'd be somewhere else and stuck into a different jumble sale — Helsinki, if I could twist their arm, there was a ministry scandal blowing up and we all knew it was Nikolai again and we'd have to stop him. Aware, at the edge of my thoughts, that the sound of the launch remained steady, even though it was on the horizon now. They were going to go straight through the roof in London because they hated a mission to abort, it meant someone had blundered. I supposed it was something to do with the acoustic properties of the East Lamma Channel, there was an echo coming back from the hills over there, making it seem that the launch was stationary at full speed. So what did we do, we lost yet another of those poor little wretches they always put in the field too early and we had all the paper off the wall at the Hong Kong Cathay and we ran out of toothpaste. London was going to fire Egerton from a cannon every Tuesday at the Horse Guards Parade for as long as they could find anything to put back in the barrel. But the direction of the sound had altered too, and I turned my head.

The damn thing was nosing inshore, losing way, some kind of police boat, I hadn't seen it because the binoculars had been stuck in my eyes, the engines dying to a slow boil, three smart-looking officers in the stern and watching me but not making any sign in case I was the wrong man. I went along the breakwater like a monkey, jumping from pile to pile and trying to keep my balance along the horizontal timbers. The launch was standing off, quite a big vessel, twin screws, couldn't come in any closer, take time to lower the boat, it was up to me, really.

One of them grabbed me as I fell aboard.

'Can you move off?'

'Are you Mr Wing? We received — '

'Can you move off immediately? Look, you see that boat on the horizon?'

His head swung like a perched hawk's when it sights prey. He was a neat young Chinese, thin as a string, all cap-peak and cheekbones, his eyes locked on the distant sea.

'You wish me to follow?'

'If it's not too late.'

He moved a hand in a signal to the bo'sun and nearly had me in the water as the stern dipped and the deck lurched, sending me against the rails. He was calling something to me above the roar of the engines.

'What?' I shouted.

'Are you Mr Wing?'

'Yes.'

'Captain Liu Tse-tung, Narcotics Division.'

The wind was whipping at our faces now and he led me into the cabin. I caught the scent right away and he saw my expression, giving a quick laugh.

'Fifty kilos,' he said. A couple of the bags had burst and the stuff had spilled across the top of the locker. 'We were taking it in when we had the signal about you.'

'When was that?'

'At 05.40. We were north of Green Island.'

'You didn't waste any time.'

Peripheral anxiety: Nora Tewson might conceivably note that two minutes after the launch had left the hotel mooring a police boat had put to sea at full speed half a mile north along the shore. We didn't carry any markings visible at that distance but we had radar and we didn't look like a cabin cruiser. Nothing to be done about it: ignore.

There were some charts framed under glass on the bulkhead and I looked at them. Hydrographic Department, Hong Kong Approaches. The relevant sheet was No. 341: Islands South of Lantau.

'What's your bearing, Captain Liu?'

He looked at the compass. 'Two-four-oh.'

We were heading roughly south-west, passing the north coast of Lamma Island by Pak Kok Point and moving into the West Lamma Channel. I'd assumed that a Pekin-based operation would take the launch north-west towards the South China seaboard but I was wrong, unless it was going to round Lantau from the south and head north after leaving Hong Kong territorial waters. We could see its dark blob through the windscreen, larger now and growing clearer. The sun was almost directly behind us and still only two diameters high, right in their eyes if they looked astern.

'Are we flat out?'

'I am sorry?'

'Are we going at full speed?'

'Yes.'

'All I want is to see where they go. Do what you can to stay up sun of them.'

'To stay-?'

'Stay between them and the sun.'

'Ah yes, understand.'

It occurred to me that London had taken so bloody long because they'd had to screen the whole of the Hong Kong police through local agents in place before they could give me a boat crew I could trust: Macklin had told me to use utmost care in approaching the police or the Special Branch. Egerton must have worked his chilblains to the bone getting me this toy, it was a shame.

In ten minutes we began passing junks on their way out to the fishing banks and I looked at the chart again. Lamma was to port and falling astern, with Cheung Chau Island coming up on the other side. The deck had been tilting a bit and I took a look at the compass. We'd begun heading a few points more southerly at 235 degrees. Five minutes later Captain Liu spoke again.

'You wish me still follow?'

'Yes. Why?'

'We are leaving territorial waters now.'

'What difference does that make?'

'Only if you wish me to put a shot across bows, or go aboard. We have no more authority now.'

He was looking slightly disappointed, and I thought what a dangerous world it was.

'They must not see us, Captain Liu. They must remain totally unaware of our presence. Now is that understood?'

'Oh yes, understood.' He turned away slightly, probably embarrassed, peering with great concentration through the windscreen. I suppose if you're a young ambitious skipper of a police boat you spend a lot of your time looking for an excuse to blow someone out of the water.

There wasn't a lot of shipping about, but enough to give us a bit of cover. Liu went to stand by the bo'sun and we altered course twice in the next ten minutes as he brought us almost parallel with the launch, keeping between it and the sun. Then he ordered half speed.

07.03.

'What's that thing?' I asked him.

'An oil rig.'

'Who does it belong to?'

'Communist China.'

I watched the distant shape of the launch slowing towards the oil rig, then looked at the chart again. The date on Sheet 341 was 1972, but someone had marked the rig in ink later, slightly west of Longitude 114 by east, Latitude 22 by north, some two miles south of the San-men Island group.

'Stop both,' Liu ordered.

The bubbling of the exhaust died to silence, and we began drifting, suddenly isolated on the expanse of the sea. Water slapped sometimes under the stern, and a cable strained at its cleat somewhere forward of the radio mast. The sun was already hot, and threw an oily shadow on the starboard side. Captain Liu stood without moving, his cap-peak set like a pointer at the horizon. The superstructure of the oil rig stood like a splinter against the sky, and within five minutes the shape of the launch had merged with it. I took another look through the 7 X 50's, but we were still too distant to see much detail.

'All right,' I told Liu.

'You wish to return?'

'Yes.' I got him over to the charts. 'Head well to the north here, above Sha Wan, and come down the coast, keeping as close to it as you can.'

He spoke to the bo'sun, and as we turned and got under way I stood looking at Chart No. 341. Mandarin was still running, and we now had a target zone centre: 114 X220, South China Sea.

In the first two seconds I forced a yoshida on him but he knew this one and broke it and his foot razored the air edge-on, fast and powerful and deadly but missing me and bringing down some of the jars. They crashed to the floor and my scalp rose but there was nothing I could do. The man was my first concern, not the reptiles, because he was trying to kill me and they would only attack in fright. We rolled and glass crunched under me and he gained a lock and I think it would have finished me but I was lying half across one of the snakes and it began striking at my arm, again and again, and I had to do something because I couldn't stand them, they nauseated me, again and again, coiling and releasing, its scales livid and the tiny black eyes glistening and the jaws gaping at right angles in a regular rhythm as it coiled, released and struck, coiling again as the pain burned in my arm.

It made me feel sick and I had to do something because there were some others free too, slithering around among the broken glass. They'd send me mad if I couldn't get away so I used my other knee and brought it against him in a jack-knife drive that would have been quite useless without my horror of these things to give it force, and the hold eased and came on again and then broke and I tried the only trick I had, the third movement of the toka, going straight in without the first and second preliminaries to open up the target, but he took it and waited, knowing I didn't have the leverage to make the kill. For nearly a second we lay locked and immobile, one body, one two-headed eight-limbed freak with its fierce internal energies at variance and on the point of blowing it apart as the electro-chemical forces sought to regain stability.

I didn't know anything about him. There had only been Chiang here when I'd walked into the snake shop, and at first he'd acknowledged me with a slight nod; then his eyes had shifted quickly to look past me, over my shoulder, and I had moved. There wasn't time to do anything consciously: in extreme danger the organism cedes control to the primitive brain, and the cortex is required only to compute data and supply intelligence. Of the several hundred thousand facts, impressions and implications, these were salient: I was presently listed for elimination by an alien network heavily infiltrating the field; there was alarm in Chiang's eyes; in the Orient the bare hand is the traditional weapon; Chiang's eyes had shifted only once, so that there was probably only one man behind me; my hope of survival in these circumstances (unarmed combat, close confines, one adversary) lay more in a blind lightning move than in a considered and organized attack. In the fifth of a second it would take me to turn and consider the ideal defence he could fell me with a hand-blade to the neck.

So I'd gone in low, spinning and reaching for his legs and finding them, bringing him off balance and chopping at the kneecap to paralyse, since it was the first target presented. If there'd been a mistake, if there'd been no intention on his part to attack, I would have known it at once and could have withdrawn, leaving him only bruised. But there hadn't been any mistake: I'd known from the stance of his feet that I'd caught him halfway through a blow designed to kill.

During this second of suspended time there was near-silence around us as we lay locked together in mortal intimacy on the fragments of glass. I had managed to shift my weight and roll sideways a little so as to bring one elbow down across the small scaly head, crushing it by degrees until its movement stopped. A heavy slithering came from somewhere close and I wished they weren't so quiet, I wished they'd scream in their fright or bang into something, to take my mind away from their oily leglessness.

Something else moved now: Chiang. I didn't know anything about Chiang either. He ran a safe-house for the Bureau with global transmission facilities and had no love for the mainland Chinese but that was all I knew. I didn't know what he was prepared to do for me at this moment; and it would be fatal to believe he'd do anything at all.

I think he was going to shut the door of the shop, and in part of my vision field I could see the faces of two boys peering in from the street, perhaps wondering at the crash of glass just now; but this street, at this hour, was filled with its own din and probably no one else had heard.

The man on the floor with me moved. I couldn't do anything immediately because this new advantage was his and we both knew it and we'd felt it coming: one of the hazards of close combat is sweat, and for the past few seconds it had been springing on our skin, most critically on the fingers of my left hand that were gripping his wrist. He had felt them begin to slip and so had I and we were both ready but he was faster and the air brushed my face as he chopped hard for the temple and missed and chopped again and tried for a third time, too greedy or too impatient, spending his strength and letting me work for a throw and letting me get it, a blinding light in my head as I called for more force than I had, pain under my palm as broken glass went in, the throw succeeding to the point of taking him off balance and leaving him vulnerable, not defenceless but open to anything I could do with my right hand. There wasn't a lot of opportunity because he was spinning away from me through the terminal phase of the throw, his shoulders smashing against the shelf of jars and sending them down, — his face passing for the first time across my field of vision: a youth with thick black brows and flattened eyes, a Chinese from the north or north-east, Mongolian or Manchurian. Glass flew as the jars hit the floor and a black and yellow trickle ran, forming a coil and rearing, but I blocked my mind and tried to concentrate totally on the need to survive.

Forebrain processing was taking over the gross elements of the task while the primitive creature conditioned itself, the nerve signals triggering the medulla and pouring adrenalin into the bloodstream, the pulse rate and blood pressure rising as sugar flowed in to feed the muscles, the senses increasing in their refinement so that the input of data should receive almost instantaneous assessment by the cortex.

But time moved slowly and at present the overall data was derived from a scene that was near stationary: the youth was still reacting from the momentum of the throw, his head jerking as his shoulder bounced from the shelf. Somewhere at the edge of the scene was Chiang, slamming the door.

Forebrain. The youth was coming back in a rebound from the shelf and I could take him with a single bracket throw if I waited long enough:' it would need a tenth of a second. His face had blenched and I thought it was only partly because his blood had receded to supply the internal organs: his shoulder had smashed fairly hard into the edge of the shelf and the muscle would be in trauma. I went on waiting, letting him come, working out what I wanted to do and planning the best way to do it. The bracket was still viable, right hand in a swinging chop at the nape of his neck to add force to his own momentum, left hand bunched and driven upwards into his abdomen. Supplementary moves: my left knee to his groin if the bracket spun him towards me, a chop at his shoulder to increase the degree of paralysis made by his impact with the edge of the shelf.

It was getting near time and he was already working for some kind of initiative but we were too close for foot-blows and he wasn't moving his left hand or arm: they were hanging from the shoulder and I knew why his face was white. The heel of his right hand was coming up but he wouldn't be able to make the blow because his right foot was too close for support. Then it was time and I put the bracket on him, connecting but not strongly enough for a finish because my foot was slipping on something and robbing me of the support I needed. He buckled over the abdomen blow and my hand hit iron muscle and there wasn't anything I could do about it because the bracket was on and he was still alive and very active, hooking at my leg and swinging a close fast throw that turned me and sent me down. He could have done it then because my spine was exposed and he still had the strength in one hand but what he didn't realize was that he was throwing me back into that bloody snakepit and I wasn't going to have it.

The forebrain shut off almost completely and the organism took over and I was vaguely aware of the action being triggered by the emotional syndrome: horror, desperation, fury — each emotion contributing to the next and powering the physical body with speed and strength otherwise unavailable. No science, no cerebration, no technique. Blind rage. In this way murder is often done, and the well-known statement is heard later in court: I don't know what happened. Something just came over me.

I think he reacted twice, but nothing remained in my memory except an impression of heat, redness and a form of unearthly joy. It probably took two seconds, three at the most. I wasn't on the floor any more because that was the place where the organism had been determined not to go: it had been quite adamant about this because it had known that if it fell down there among those things again it would go mad.

I was standing in a crouch with my back against the wooden counter. He was on the floor, facing upwards with his eyes still open. Blood was dripping from my hand where the glass had gone in. It was dripping into one of his eyes and I moved my hand away, thinking vaguely that if it went on dripping there he wouldn't be able to see, though of course it didn't matter what went into his eyes now.

It was very quiet except for the sawing of my breath. I didn't hear anything but sensed a movement to my right, and looked up at the man sitting on the stairs holding the gun.