Colonel Sun

by Kingsley Amis

  Vallance did not dare glance at Bond or Tanner. ‘I think not a black-out, sir. The Admiral has plenty of connections and we don’t want them turning inquisitive. I suggest a short tucked-away paragraph saying his indisposition continues and he’s being advised to take a thorough rest.’

  ‘Excellent. I’ll leave that in your hands. Now – any more suggestions? However tentative. Anybody …?’

  Crawford stirred. ‘Well, sir, if I may just …’

  ‘Go on, Inspector. Please go on.’ Sir Ranald crinkled his eyelids. ‘Most welcome.’

  ‘It’s this piece of paper with the names and numbers which we all had a look at earlier. We found it crumpled up in a corner of the man’s wallet. I understand the cipher people are working on a copy of it still but are just about sure it’s a waste of time, there being so little of it. I wondered whether we might perhaps take another look at it ourselves. Have we considered the possibility that these are telephone numbers?’

  ‘I’m afraid there’s nothing in that, Inspector,’ said Tanner, rubbing his eyes wearily. ‘“Christiana” looks like Christiania in Norway, of course, and “Vasso” might be Vassy in north-eastern France, and we all know where Paris is, but it didn’t take us ten minutes to establish that these numbers aren’t possible for the exchanges at those three places, any more than, say, Whitehall 123 would be for London. If they are telephone numbers they’re probably coded on some substitution system we’ve no means of cracking, so we’re back where we were. Sorry to disappoint you.’

  ‘Might they be map references?’ put in the Under-Secretary.

  Tanner shook his head. ‘Wrong number of figures.’

  ‘Actually, sir,’ the Inspector went on with quiet persistence, ‘I wasn’t really meaning it quite like that. Take the one we haven’t mentioned – Antigone. What does that suggest to people?’

  ‘Greek play,’ said Tanner. ‘Sophocles, isn’t it? Code word for God knows what.’

  ‘That is possible, sir. But Antigone isn’t only a Greek play is it? It’s also a Greek name. A woman’s name. I don’t know whether it’s still in use there, but I do know a lot of these classical names are. Now Christiana. Doesn’t that sound like a woman’s name, too, on the lines of Christine and Christina and so on? Christiana might be the Greek form. And Paris, of course, is another Greek name.’

  Abruptly, Bill Tanner got to his feet and hurried to a telephone that stood on an ink-stained and cigarette-burned trestle table by the wall.

  ‘As regards Vasso, I’m afraid I don’t –’

  ‘What are you leading up to, Inspector?’ broke in Sir Ranald, with a return to his earlier manner.

  ‘That our man was going to Greece and had got some telephone numbers off somebody so that he could fix himself up with some female company if he felt inclined. That these are telephone numbers on the same unstated exchange. A large one, presumably. Athens, as it might be. Or at least that’s what we were supposed to think, sir.’

  Sir Ranald frowned. ‘But Paris is a man’s name. I hardly –’

  ‘Quite so, sir, the abductor of Helen of Troy, the man who started the Trojan War. But if you’ll just take another look …’

  Crawford passed over the small creased sheet of cheap lined paper. The Minister, still frowning, hitched over his ears a pair of spectacles with heavy black frames and peered at the ballpoint scrawl. He sniffed. ‘Well?’

  ‘Immediately above “Paris” there, sir … It’s not at all clear, but it looks to me like “If supplies fail” or “fall”. If Antigone and the other two were away or he didn’t like them or something then Paris was going to be able to fix him up.’

  ‘Mm.’ Sir Ranald took the spectacles off again and chewed at the earpiece. His eyes darted briefly to Tanner, who was still telephoning. ‘What did you say about our being supposed to think this?’

  ‘To me this looks planted, sir. If it’s genuine it got into our hands as a result of at least three oversights. Not removing the body. Not emptying the pockets. Not at any rate searching the pockets. Well, now …’

  ‘You mean it’s a red herring?’

  ‘No, sir, quite the contrary. It’s a straightforward pointer to Greece, clear enough but not too clear.’

  Tanner rang off and returned to his chair. He glanced over at Crawford with heightened respect.

  ‘All four are perfectly possible modern Greek first names, according to Mary Kyris at the Embassy. And the figure groups could be telephone numbers in Athens, Salonika and a couple of other cities.’

  ‘We’re on to something, gentlemen,’ said Sir Ranald, his eyes almost disappearing in crinkles. ‘We’re on to something.’

  ‘And we know exactly what we’re on to.’

  James Bond’s head had been sunk in his hands since he had last spoken a quarter of an hour earlier. He had seemed half asleep. In fact he had been striving to keep his exhausted brain ceaselessly analysing and evaluating the course of the discussion. Now, as his voice sounded through the low-ceilinged, smoke-laden room, he sat up in his chair and gazed at Tanner.

  ‘Inspector Crawford is right. This is a plant. Or let’s call it a lure. They were very anxious to include me in their plans. Clearly they still are. The names and numbers on that paper are a brilliant piece of improvisation designed to get me following in their track at full speed. Which of course I’ll have to do. As far as that goes they could have written GREECE on that bit of paper and left it at that.’

  Tanner nodded slowly. ‘Where would you start?’

  ‘Anywhere,’ said Bond. ‘Let’s say Athens. It doesn’t really matter, because I shan’t need to look for them. They’ll find me.’

  5

  SUN AT NIGHT

  The Island of Vrakonisi lies midway between the coasts of southern Greece and southern Turkey; more precisely, near the middle of the triangle formed by the three larger islands of Naxos, Ios and Paros. Like its more distant neighbour, Santorini, thirty miles to the southwest, Vrakonisi is volcanic in origin. It is what remains of the crater walls of an immense volcano extinct since pre-historic times. Ancient upheavals and subsidences have given it a ragged profile, with a misshapen semicircular backbone of hills rising in places to twelve hundred feet. From the air, Vrakonisi looks like the blade of a sickle drawn by a very drunk man. The tip of the blade has broken off, so that a hundred shallow yards of the Aegean lie between the main body of the island and a tiny unnamed islet off its northern end. The islet is inhabited, but apart from a couple of fishermen’s cottages there is only a single house, a long low structure in brilliantly white-washed stone situated among palm and cactus at the farthest corner. The owner, a Piraeus yacht-builder, lets it to foreign visitors in the summer months.

  This particular summer month the house had been occupied by two men whose passports said they were French; morose, taciturn men, their complexion suggesting little acquaintance with life in the sun. Their behaviour suggested the same thing. Pallid and uncomfortable-looking in gaudy bathing shorts, they could sometimes be seen sprawled in canvas chairs above the little private anchorage empty throughout their stay so far or splashing grimly and very briefly across it. For long periods they were not to be seen at all. They had the air of men filling in the time until they could start to do whatever they had come all this way to do.

  Their identity and purpose, and very much more, were well known to Colonel Sun Liang-tan of the Special Activities Committee, People’s Liberation Army. The two men on the islet were out of sight of the colonel as he sat at the window of a smaller and even less accessible house than theirs, situated on the main body of the island. For even the chance of a look at them he would have had to go outside, make his way up an overgrown hillside to a point perhaps two hundred and fifty feet above sea level, and look down across the farther slopes, the stretch of water and the eighty-yard length of the islet, about a kilometre in all. But, ever since arriving here by water the previous night, Colonel Sun had not gone outside for a moment. The immediately recognizable Oriental facia
l type has in itself seriously hindered the expansion of Chinese infiltration and espionage in the Western countries, except for those, like the United States and Great Britain, where Orientals are not uncommonly seen. They are excessively rare in the Greek islands. Nobody on Vrakonisi, nobody outside China, come to that, must even have cause to wonder whether a Chinese might not be present here and now.

  And nobody catching a glimpse of the colonel would have had to wonder about his origin. He was tall for a Chinese, nearly six foot, one of the northern types akin to the Khamba Tibetan, big-boned and long-headed. But the skin colour was the familiar flat light yellow, the hair blue-black and dead straight, the epicanthic eye-fold notably conspicuous. It was only when you looked Sun straight in the eyes that he seemed less than totally Chinese. The irises were of an unusual and very beautiful pewter-grey like the eyes of the newborn, the legacy perhaps of some medieval invader from Kirgiz or Naiman. But then not many people did look Sun straight in the eyes. Not twice, anyway.

  The colonel continued to sit on his hard wooden chair while darkness fell outside. Normally he was a voracious reader, but tonight he was attuning his mind and feelings for what lay ahead. Twice he smoked a cigarette, not inhaling, allowing it to burn away between his lips. They were British cigarettes, Benson & Hedges. Sun did not share his colleagues’ often-expressed contempt – in some cases, he suspected, routine rather than sincere – for everything British. He was fond of many aspects of their culture and considered it regrettable in some ways that that culture had such a short time left.

  The men themselves (he had met none of their women) had often aroused his admiration. He had first encountered the British in September 1951, at a prisoner-of-war centre near Pyongyang in North Korea. There, as a twenty-one-year-old subaltern attached, in the capacity of Assistant Consultant on Interrogations, to Major Pak of the North Korean Army, he had had the opportunity of getting to know the British soldier intimately. After September 1953, when the last of them had been repatriated, his experience of Westerners had been confined almost entirely to Frenchmen, Australians, Americans: interesting types in many cases, but not up to the British – ‘his’ British, as he mentally referred to them. He had to content himself with the odd spy captured inside China and the occasional US Army prisoner taken in South Vietnam who turned out to be a recent immigrant from the ‘Old Country’. Fortunately, his reputation as an expert on, and interrogator of, the British was well known to his Service superiors and had even reached the ears of the Central Committee, so it was rare indeed that any British captive was not passed over to him. But the last of these occasions had been nearly six months ago. The colonel could not repress a gentle thrill of anticipation at the thought of tonight’s reunion with his British and of the seventy-two hours of uninterrupted contact which were to follow. In the darkness, the pewter-coloured eyes grew fixed.

  There was a tentative knock at the door. Sun called amiably in English, ‘Yes, please come in.’

  The opening door let in a shaft of light which illuminated the outline of a girl. Also tentatively, also in English, a naturally harsh but not loud voice said, ‘May I put on the light, Comrade Colonel?’

  ‘Just let me close the shutters … Good.’

  The instant blaze of the unshaded bulb fell on a stone floor without covering, four white-washed walls, a cheap nondescript table and an equally cheap and nondescript unoccupied chair. The interrogation-room atmosphere soothed the colonel, and at a time like this put him on his mettle too.

  Now his eyes blinked neither at the sudden glare nor at the sight of the girl, which although he had seen her a dozen times since arriving, they might well have done.

  The Albanians, as a race, are not noted for their beauty. They are, of course, much less a race than the end-product of successive admixtures with the native stock – Latin, Slavonic, Greek, Turco-Tatar. Now and then this cocktail of heredities produces an individual physically remarkable even by the high standards of the eastern Mediterranean. Doni Madan, aged 23, citizen of Korce in south-eastern Albania, strictly temporary holder of a Greek passport (forged in Tiranë with unusual competence, thanks to Chinese supervision), was physically remarkable.

  She wore a pair of serpent-green Thai-silk trousers, close-fitting and low-cut, with a plain turquoise jacket of the same material and Ferragamo slippers in embroidered leather. Nothing else: even within twenty yards of the open sea, fine September nights in these latitudes can be hot and humid. Although this outfit had been selected purely to do its part in proclaiming Doni to be one of a standard house-party of well-off cosmopolitan holiday-makers, it did more for her than that.

  She was above middle height, within a couple of inches of Sun, but slender and light of frame, narrow in the waist, richly rounded above and below. Her wide hips and ever-so-slightly protuberant belly strained at the stuff of the pants; the swell of her breasts made the casually-buttoned jacket fall straight, well clear of her midriff. Asia was in her cheekbones and the strong planes of her jaw, Asia Minor in the all-but-black brown of her eyes, Venice in the straight but fully-moulded mouth. The light brown of her hair, cut in a simple bell, made an odd and exciting contrast with the delicate swarthiness of her skin. She stood there in the doorway of the bare room in an attitude of meek unconscious provocation that took no account of Sun as a man.

  Anything more overt would certainly have been wasted. Sun Liang-tan was unmoved by women, though if challenged on the point he would have replied, rather mechanically, that he respected them as wives, mothers, and the bringers of comfort to men. He glanced somewhere in Doni’s direction and said simply, ‘Yes?’

  ‘I am wondering if you wish any food,’ said the quiet harsh voice.

  Doni’s Italian, Serbo-Croat and Greek were idiomatic and relatively accentless. Her English was neither, but she had no other means of communication with her temporary master. Being forced to use the enemy’s language in order to work with European agents is a habitual source of irritation to Chinese subversives, but the mild irritation Sun now showed sprang from an opposite feeling.

  He laced his fingers behind his long head and leant back as far as his chair allowed, making a curious semi-Westernized figure in his white tee-shirt and uncoloured cotton trousers. ‘I was wondering,’ he said slowly, ‘if you wanted any food. If you would like, if you would care for something to eat. If you’d like me to rustle up – no, that’s American – if you fancy a snack. Do try not to be a peasant in everything you say and do, my dear. And in any case, no. No thank you. Not just now. Let’s hang on for a bit until our chums join us, shall we? They shouldn’t be long.’

  The colonel’s English was correct enough – he had studied the language for two years at Hong Kong University – but his pronunciation would have been a joy to any phonetician. His quick ear and passionate desire to learn, allied to a total ignorance of the British dialect pattern, had issued in a kind of verbal salad of regional peculiarities. The tones of Manchester, Glasgow, Liverpool, Belfast, Newcastle, Cardiff and several sorts of London worked in successive syllables against those of the governing class. The result might have sounded merely bizarre, even ridiculous, from another mouth than Sun’s, accompanied by a different kind of gaze.

  Doni looked to one side of him. ‘I’m sorry, Comrade Colonel,’ she said humbly. ‘I know my English not good.’

  ‘Better than the other one’s, anyway,’ said Sun with a tolerant smile. His lips were dark, the colour of dried blood, his teeth pointing slightly inwards from the gums. He went on: ‘But enough of the Comrade Colonel. You sound like somebody in a progressive youth play. Call me Colonel Sun. It’s more friendly. And enough of solitude – let’s be sociable, eh? Where are the others?’

  Followed by Doni, he walked out of the room, across a stone-flagged corridor, and into the main sitting-room of the house, a high-ceilinged, airy place with a cobbled floor that sloped gently and splendid shapely furniture of olive-wood, made on the island. The brightly-patterned modern rugs and cushions, the
pair of run-of-the-mill abstracts on the rough-cast wall, were incongruous. Open double doors gave on to a narrow terrace with folding chairs and a low table, and beyond there was nothing but the sea, flat calm and so brilliantly lit by a fast-rising full moon that it seemed both infinitely liquid and impossibly shallow, a sheet of water one molecule thick stretching out to the edge of the sky. Invisible wavelets made tiny hushing sounds on the stretch of pebbles between the two stubby moles of the anchorage.

  Sun stood for a moment by the doors, keeping well into the shadow, and gazed out. He had not seen the sea for fifteen years, and the sight still fascinated him. It was the British element, on which the men of those cold islands had ventured out, long ago, to bring a quarter of the world under their sway. A perfect setting, thought Sun with a full heart, then turned back to the room.

  The girl stretched out on the square-cut day-bed looked up quickly. She was Doni’s height, had the same near-black eyes, wore the same kind of outfit (black pants, white jacket in her case), but her slimness made the other girl appear almost lumpish. Long-legged and high-breasted, with an exquisitely-shaped small dark head cut short in a boyish style, Luisa Tartini was Italian in more than her name. Like Doni, however, she was Albanian by nationality, carrying a similar passport. But she had none of her companion’s docility of manner, and her glance at Sun now was edged with resentment and fear.

  It seemed that Sun did not notice. He said pleasantly, ‘What a lovely evening. And how very decorative you look, my dear.’