Brokenclaw

by John Gardner

  Bond curled into a ball, lifted his right hand and squeezed the trigger twice. He heard the explosions like grenades in the small room. Ding just kept on flying towards him, his mouth blood-flecked and open in surprise. He landed flat against the wall near Chi-Chi. There was a moment when the big Chinese appeared to be nailed there, just hanging like some terrible three-dimensional mural. Then he crumpled, leaving several snakes of blood on the white cement.

  Chi-Chi screamed.

  She did not stop screaming until Bond put his arms around her and told her it was okay. ‘It’s over,’ he kept saying. ‘It’s all over.’

  ‘No it’s not.’ Bill Tanner stood in the doorway.

  ‘Get something to cover the girl, Bill,’ Bond said quietly, and a second later, Ed Rushia was in the room with a blanket over one arm and his eyes averted.

  Bond draped the blanket around Chi-Chi’s shaking body. ‘Just stay here,’ he told her. ‘It’s going to be fine. Look, Ed’s by the door. Nobody’s coming to get you.’

  ‘Please don’t leave me, James. Please!’

  ‘Only for a moment.’ Gently he untangled himself and went into the corridor. ‘What’s up?’ he asked Tanner.

  ‘Come and take a look.’

  They went further down the narrow passage, past the barred rooms from which the original hostages were being taken, and then up steps and out into the waning day.

  ‘He’s not here.’ Tanner’s voice was dull with disappointment.

  ‘Lee?’

  Tanner nodded.

  ‘General H’ang?’ Bond asked, and the chief of staff shook his head.

  ‘Both of them. They’re both gone.’

  ‘They can’t have got far.’ They had started to walk back towards the house.

  ‘We think he had another helicopter stashed away at this end,’ Tanner said dryly. ‘There’s a small wood to the north, and they’re going up now to see if it’s like the other hangar. Two of the Special Forces people say they thought another chopper took off in the middle of the whole business. We’ve alerted the FAA and all the radar stations. They’ve got aircraft up looking. Fighters were scrambled from Alameda. So far, no joy.’

  A figure was approaching from the southern side of the house, and Bond recognised Broderick, the San Francisco FBI Bureau Chief.

  ‘I understand I’ve an apology to make, Captain Bond,’ Broderick began.

  ‘No, no time for that.’ Another thought had raced through Bond’s mind. ‘Anyone know of a house in Sausalito where Lee might have stashed Wanda? Because that’s where she is.’

  ‘There’s a cathouse out there that we’ve often thought had links with Brokenclaw.’ Broderick reached for his pager. ‘I’ll get someone on to it now. Nolan and Wood aren’t busy . . .’

  ‘Oh, no,’ said Bond, quietly. ‘I think you’re going to need a man to man talk with Messrs Nolan and Wood. A man to man talk in an interrogation room.’

  He was about to tell the FBI officer all he knew about his agents Wood and Nolan, when a youngish, thin man with long hair shambled up to them in the fast dimming light. He was dressed in jeans and a T-shirt emblazoned with a colourful decoration of a skull frozen into a block of ice, underneath which the words ‘Ice Age’ were displayed in a Gothic script.

  ‘Hey, man,’ the newcomer began. ‘Hey, that was some real heavy music you were playing just now. Real heavy.’

  Both Tanner and Broderick looked aghast. ‘I think this is the owner of the main house, gentlemen.’ Bond inclined his head towards the figure. ‘Mr Marty Halman of Ice Age?’

  ‘Yeah. Man that music was heavy. Awesome.’

  Bond smiled. ‘Thank you. We thought it was kind of humongously awesome ourselves.’

  17

  NEW DAYS, NEW WAYS, LOVE STAYS

  The military unit left twenty men to comb the tunnels, passageways and the grounds around Brokenclaw’s hideout.

  Everyone else was loaded into helicopters and ferried back to the carrier where they waited for news. At around nine thirty on that Friday evening, Broderick, the local FBI Bureau chief, went off to Sausalito with some local members of the Marin County Sheriff’s Department. They found Wanda Man Song Hing in a sprawling house tucked away behind the boutiques, cafés, shops and art galleries of Bridgeway, the main street which led down to the waterfront with its magnificent view of the San Francisco skyline.

  They arrested ten other young girls, four brawny men who were obviously there to protect the place, Mama Tia, the Madame of this particular moneyspinner, and several clients, some of whom had reputations to lose.

  In a further development, agents Nolan and Wood were suspended from duty pending serious allegations against them. Only later did Broderick wish he had pushed for their arrest and incarceration.

  Wanda was moved immediately to the Naval hospital. She was in shock, had been badly beaten, but, according to the doctors, would soon recover her physical strength. They would not vouch for her mental state until they had time to evaluate her.

  Both Chi-Chi and Bond were taken down to the ship’s hospital, where Chi-Chi’s back was treated for the deep welts made by Brokenclaw’s whip, and Bond was X-rayed. Though bruised he had no broken bones. ‘I would suggest you take a shower, Captain Bond,’ the doctor said. ‘To be blunt, you stink like a skunk.’ The animal fat Brokenclaw had spread around his loins was still active. ‘You need rest,’ the doctor added, and he was given a stateroom near the hospital area.

  They had brought all his clothes and travelling equipment to the carrier, so he showered, first in scalding water, rubbing himself down with Clinique soap, which he had only recently discovered, and now preferred to anything he had ever used before. Next he showered again, this time in cold water, allowing the sharp needlepoints of the spray to wash away any excess oil in his opened pores. He towelled himself dry, and splashed Penhaligon’s cologne over his body. Only then did he realise how exhausted he had become. He slept until a steward brought him coffee at ten the next morning.

  Half-an-hour later Bill Tanner came down with the ASP 9mm. ‘They found it among some other weapons in the bunker. You okay now?’

  ‘They must have salvaged it from the helicopter wreck, Bill. Yes, I’m fine. How’s Chi-Chi?’

  ‘Walking wounded, but you’re both expected up in M’s cabin for a conference in an hour.’

  Bond hefted the pistol in his hand. ‘You get me some shells for this thing?’ he asked.

  Tanner said he would try and, in fact, handed over a small box of ammunition when Bond arrived at the day cabin that M had used throughout as his headquarters.

  The Curve operations team was all present – M, Franks, the CIA man, John Grant with a couple of his men, the officer commanding the Special Forces unit, Commander Edwin Rushia, Chi-Chi and Bond.

  M outlined the situation by congratulating all who had taken part in the tracking down, penetrating and assaulting what he called Brokenclaw’s burrow. Then he gave them what he called a Profit and Loss balance sheet.

  ‘On the profit side, we have managed to break up a complex and sophisticated hideout, which the man Brokenclaw Lee has undoubtedly used for a long time,’ he began. ‘Also on the profit side a very serious operation has been stopped in its tracks. Both my own Service and the CIA have long been aware that the Chinese, following sight of a similar plan which appears to have been formulated by Japanese businessmen, have been coordinating an operation which we all knew as Jericho. Its aim was to bring down Wall Street by hacking into the Stock Exchange computers, buying, selling, altering prices surreptitiously.

  ‘Nobody realised how advanced this particular piece of skulduggery had become, and after seeing the amount of computerised detail hidden in Brokenclaw’s vaults, it would appear that we put a stop to the business just in time. I should add that the ladies and gentlemen of Wall Street and the London Stock Exchange have, at our instigation, taken new security steps which will, eventually, prevent anyone from tampering with the system. We all know that while computers
have made our lives easier and can provide instant access to information, they are also a danger, particularly when operated by skilled people who are able to interfere with information stored in corporate data bases. Computer fraud could lead to terrible financial chaos.’

  Lastly, on the profit side, he talked about the rescue of the five Naval experts taken hostage. ‘They undoubtedly provided huge amounts of classified intelligence concerning the Anglo-American projects Lords and Lords Day. Happily, we’re ninety-nine per cent sure that we’ve recovered all the existing material, due to the work of Ms Sue Chi-Ho and Captain James Bond.’

  Before passing on to the loss side of the balance sheet, M said he would like to call on his Service’s special expert, Mr Franks, to say something about Brokenclaw’s manipulation of the hostages.

  Franks stood, his twitch becoming more and more pronounced as he talked at some length on how Brokenclaw had elicited the vital and classified information from the hostages.

  ‘We are only in the very early stages of debriefing, as you can imagine,’ he started, ‘but already a picture is emerging which is both sinister and a cause for future concern.’ He said that if Brokenclaw alone had carried out the hostage-takings and the manner of their interrogation, he had been very highly trained. So far, all five of the hostages had admitted to the same kind of treatment.

  ‘There are several unique and vital steps, known well to psychiatrists and ruthless interrogators, which if followed, lead inevitably to the breaking of a victim. Contrary to popular belief, these breaking techniques can sometimes be used to manipulate very quickly. Fiction nowadays claims that the most dependable fast interrogations have to be performed with the assistance of mind- and mood altering drugs. Under some circumstances, the drugs are a hindrance. Manipulation and coercion can be achieved with the body alert and the mind clear, though possibly bewildered.’

  He went on to outline the steps required to accomplish this. First, the abduction had to be sudden. No questions would be answered, no details given; and a quick move made into a restrained environment, preferably in darkness. The victim would not know what was happening to him. Next, in order to break the hostage, you had to make him vulnerable. Keep him in darkness, but remove all clothing, restrain him, deny him the normal facilities of a bathroom and abuse the victim physically, probably by irregular sessions of violence. These could range from beating up people to giving them so-called shock or burn treatment.

  Allied to these first premises, there was another, possibly the most important step. The hostage had to be removed from what psychiatrists called ‘normal daylight patterns’. In simple language, they would be, literally, kept in the dark.

  ‘Once you have unbalanced a person through abduction, restrained that person, made that person vulnerable, and disorientated that person by removing his time pattern, the rest is relatively simple and can be divided into three stages,’ Franks continued in his cold, matter-of-fact tone which made Bond wonder how many times this man had practised these very techniques.

  ‘You begin to control through random violence and random reward. A person is beaten up three times in, say, five hours, but between these acts of violence there is one reward – a glass of water or a hunk of bread, a cigarette or the use of a bathroom. But always in the dark, always isolated, always unsure of why this is happening.’

  Further, Franks told them, there were other pressures – threats to the victim’s family, threats of harsher treatment by some unseen and unknown person who is painted as a monster, sudden and irrelevant leniency. ‘Four days of this kind of treatment can, in well-controlled circumstances, bring the victim to rely wholly on his captor. It is then that the captor makes himself known, makes promises and begins to show the victim that he is in charge. If the scenario has been properly played out, then the rest is child’s play. Confused and lost, the victim will sign anything, give any information, just by being promised a return to normal life.’

  Again, Franks maintained that so far, all five hostages had described their treatment in those very terms. They were held in dark cupboards, blindfolded and chained to the wall, naked and with no room to move. They were beaten up one minute, given food the next. They all appeared to have lost track of time. Each one claimed to have suffered horrific humiliation before Brokenclaw revealed himself as the man who pulled the strings. To clinch it all, they had identified the coffin-sized torture chambers where each of the men had been kept after their abduction.

  ‘I defy anyone not to give up even stratospherically classified material under these circumstances,’ Franks finished. ‘I am certain, also, that all these men will suffer only a court of enquiry. None will be required to go through a court martial.’

  During Franks’ long explanation of how the kidnapped officers and men had been separated from the classified information, the CIA man, Grant, had taken two telephone calls and spent a short time whispering to M, who now told them that he could fill in the debit side of the balance sheet ‘Indeed, I am in a better position to do that, for Mr Grant’s colleagues have come up with certain pieces of new intelligence.’

  Soberly, M said that the news was not good. ‘First, it appears that both the Chinese General H’ang, and his associate, Brokenclaw Lee, have vanished into thin air.’ The helicopter which had undoubtedly brought H’ang to what M referred to as Brokenclaw’s lair, had been found abandoned only five miles north of San Francisco.

  ‘H’ang came into this country posing as a Hong Kong businessman. That is now certain. We have details and records. The passport, visa and other papers were impeccable forgeries. Our CIA friends have yet to discover how he came to be provided with a helicopter, but doubtless the Lee fellow could tell us that, if we could find him. Naturally, all ports and airports are being watched. There is a police alert out for both men, but H’ang in particular.’

  He went on to say everyone was convinced that Lee was essentially the leading Chinese Intelligence resident in the United States. ‘As such, he is undoubtedly privy to the identity and whereabouts of every single Chinese agent at large in the United States. Therefore, it is essential that Lee is caught, sooner rather than later. I would go as far as to say that he is America’s and Britain’s most wanted man.’

  Bond said nothing. Already he thought he knew where Brokenclaw Lee could be found, but he was battered, bruised and very tired. He put the thoughts on hold. There would be time enough to follow up his theories which were more than mere hunches.

  ‘Sadly,’ M continued, ‘we see no reason for keeping the Curve team operational, but we’re going to wait until Monday in case anything else turns up. All of you are welcome to take the rest of the weekend off and reassemble here at 09.00 hours on Monday to make the final decision. I shall be staying aboard, but that need not apply to the rest of you.’

  The words were hardly out of his mouth before Chi-Chi whispered in Bond’s ear, ‘Please, James, please, you stay with me, yes?’

  He gave her a long look which needed no further explanation. ‘Certainly. I’m honoured, Chi-Chi.’

  ‘Hey, James.’ Big Ed Rushia was behind him. ‘You’re welcome to come stay with me and my little child bride; she’s the damnedest cook. Makes an incredible gazpacho, if you like cold soup. She also produces apple pies just like Ma used to make.’

  ‘Unhappily, my ma never made apple pies.’ Bond tilted an eyebrow. ‘I’d love to stay, Ed, but I’m afraid I’ve had a previous invitation which not even the demon Brokenclaw could make me give up.’

  ‘Ah!’ Rushia said, looking at Bond and then at Chi-Chi. ‘Ah!’ again. ‘Bless you, my children. May your days be long and your nights longer. I’ll give you my number, though, just in case the novelty wears off.’ He slipped his card into Bond’s hand, and with a cheery wave, left the cabin.

  Tanner approached them, saying they would have to delay any departure as Franks wanted to go through one or two points with both of them. It was well after five before they were taken back to the mainland.

 
; Chi-Chi lived high in an apartment building on Union Street. ‘It’s not all fixed up yet,’ she warned him, but, when they arrived, Bond was impressed by what he saw. It was not large – a living room, bedroom and kitchen, but it had a huge picture window looking out towards the Golden Gate Bridge and the furnishings were new, modern and very comfortable. There were a couple of extremely good reproductions on the walls of the living room, together with an attractive, framed museum poster advertising a da Vinci exhibition and an excellent original oil by Eyvind Earle in the bedroom.

  Within half-an-hour he felt comfortable and relaxed, as though he had lived in this apartment for some time. There was no clutter and the kitchen was what his old housekeeper, May, would have called ‘prick neat’.

  ‘Relax, James. I’ll get us some dinner. Unless you want to go out and live it up.’

  ‘I don’t really think you’re in any condition to go out and live it up, and I feel as though I’ve just gone four rounds with Mike Tyson. In fact, I really think you ought to go to bed while I get you something light on a tray.’

  ‘That an invitation, James?’

  ‘Could be. You Chinese are so inscrutable, though.’

  ‘I’m an inscrutable American, Captain Bond.’ She came towards him, her eyes again locking with his. She winced slightly as he put his arms around her and he quickly apologised for his clumsiness. Then his mouth was on hers and it was as though he had known her lips for years. He pressed harder and she pushed against him. In the bedroom he said, ‘Your back, Chi-Chi. Be careful of your back.’

  ‘James, my dear, I know many ways to please us both without lying on my back.’

  Three hours later, he had to concede that she knew a whole encyclopedia of ideas that neither hurt her back nor his own bruised ribs. There were moments when Bond experienced that sense of wonder only granted to some men once in a lifetime, as her slim body seemed to float above his, light as a wisp of gauze yet giving and taking something more than just lustful pleasure.