The Pekin Target

by Adam Hall

  “That’s extremely kind of you. Exactly how long do I have to wait?”

  “I’d say an hour or two, not more.” I put some money down and left her.

  “Thank you for the coffee,” she called after me.

  At eight o’clock Ferris signalled London and told them what had happened; then we went on talking.

  “You left Soong Li-fei at what time?” he asked me.

  “About ten past nine last night.”

  “And she was found outside the temple about midnight. Three hours at most; half an hour at least. I mean she could have been killed half an hour after you left her - the time needed to drive from the airport to the vicinity of the temple.”

  What we had to decide was whether there had been time for Tung’s men to interrogate her before they killed her off, and whether she had been forced to tell them I now knew how to find Tung. The ultimate question was a very simple one: if we made the drop before dawn tomorrow, would Tung be expecting us?

  If he were expecting us, we wouldn’t have a chance.

  “From what you knew of her,” Ferris asked me, “do you think she’d break?”

  “I think Tung’s men could break a sphinx.”

  Ferris paced the small room; these were my quarters, by courtesy of the US Air Force, complete with bathroom, two telephones, a TV set and an internal communications panel. The equipment for the drop was stacked in the corner: climbing boots and gloves, rope, rucksack, provisions, field glasses, first aid and the rest of the stuff.

  “What present status is Youngquist?” I asked Ferris.

  “He’s standing by as your replacement.”

  “Briefed right up to the minute?”

  He didn’t look at me. “Yes.”

  “Does that reflect your estimation of my chances? Or London’s estimation?”

  He looked at me now, a bit annoyed. “Our estimation’s the same as yours. We’re not keeping anything back from you. If you’d like to consider your record with the Bureau you might realise they’re not about to throw you on the scrap heap.”

  “Civil of them.”

  “We think you’ve got a good chance of getting through to Tung Kuofeng, otherwise we wouldn’t ask you to go. Croder’s discussed a dozen other options including a low-level bombing raid, but the best chance we’ve got is by putting one man in by stealth, a man with your proven capabilities.”

  “Then send me in alone.”

  “You mean without de Haven?”

  “Yes.”

  “She’ll be with you only until you sight the monastery from the ground, unless you need her help after the drop. She’s led climbing expeditions right across this country and she speaks fluent Korean.”

  “How will she get out?”

  “You’ll be given a final joint briefing before take-off.”

  I turned to stand with my back to the stuff in the corner; it was tempting me: I wanted to go in, despite the increased risk, and that wasn’t intelligent. “What can you do to find out if Li-fei was made to talk?”

  “Almost nothing. I’ve got Youngquist working on it, with five or six agents in place; but all they can do is hope for luck in tracing her movements from the time she left you - finding people who might have seen her or talked to her during that blank time period.”

  “Who’s going to make the final decision?”

  “London. Providing you agree to go in if they ask you to.”

  “I shall agree.”

  “You may want time to think.”

  “No.”

  Because Tung would have to be stopped: he’d already gone too far. He had ordered six killings and Li-fei’s wouldn’t be the last; and since I’d seen the photograph of the pretty Chinese girl in the newspaper I had wanted urgently to meet Tung Kuofeng, the diabolus whose hand had reached out from the mountains to guide the sword that had struck across that delicate porcelain neck.

  “We’re not looking for personal reasons,” Ferris said. “We’re not mounting a vendetta.”

  I suppose he sensed my mood; or maybe he thought that Soong Li-fei had meant more to me than she had. But how much does a girl have to mean to you before you’re ready to destroy the man who took her head from her body?

  “What reasons are you looking for?” I noticed that my tone wasn’t all that pleasant.

  “We’re running a mission. We’re asking you to carry out a technical operation, an exercise in logistics. It’s the only way you’ll get through.”

  “That’s the trouble with London. You’re not meant to have a soul. You’re meant to be a bloody machine. But just for your information, when I go in it’ll be for my own reasons, and there’s nothing you can do about that. Nothing at all.”

  An orderly woke me at 2 a.m. and I reported to the control tower as instructed.

  London must have decided. I couldn’t ask Ferris because he wasn’t here. At 02:15 they put de Haven and me into a transport plane and we landed at Daegu fifty minutes later, 150 miles south-east of Seoul. The night was clear and windless. Ferris was there.

  The briefing was summary; the main points had been gone over before. Ferris was perfectly calm, but that didn’t mean a thing. Helen de Haven had withdrawn into herself; either she was feeling tension or had dismissed me as a boor and had no inclination to talk. We left the briefing room at 03:46 by the clock on the wall and walked onto the tarmac, already strapped into our chutes.

  “Hold it,” Newcomb said, and we stopped. He went ahead of us to join Ferris and Lieutenant Lewes. It was almost dark in this area: they must have switched off the tarmac lights.

  I said to de Haven: “Did they tell you what our chances are?”

  She looked up at me in the faint light. “They didn’t give me any actual figures.”

  “Did they tell you we might be dropping into gunfire?”

  She was quiet for a moment. “They used the expression ‘extremely hazardous.’ Does that fit?”

  “Yes. As long as you know.”

  “All I know is, you don’t want me on this trip. But I’m hard to scare. Sorry.”

  A figure was moving across the tarmac to our right, towards the buildings. “Put those goddamned lights out.”

  “The thing is,” I told the girl beside me, “that the people I work for happen to use human beings as machines. They’re not terribly concerned that in twenty minutes from now there could be two dead bodies hanging from parachutes over the Korean mountains. I just want to make sure they didn’t sell you short.”

  The man was shouting again. This time someone called an answer.

  “If there’s a chance for you,” she said, “there’s a chance for me.”

  “It’s not a big one; but I’ve got my reasons.”

  “And so have I.”

  Then the lights over the dispersal bay went out, and we followed Newcomb’s flashlight towards the plane.

  Chapter 17

  Dance

  Newcomb was using the Omni stations at Seoul and Sogcho and at 04:07 he came back from the flight deck as we felt the airspeed slackening off.

  “Five minutes,” he said. “Everything okay?”

  “What’s our altitude?” de Haven asked him.

  “We’re coming down from seven thousand now and we’ll be running in at three five.” He crouched in the aisle between the seats, looking at us in turn. “The moon’s at one o’clock, seventy degrees. I’m going to put you down to the west of the target point by an estimated mile. You won’t be silhouetted against the moon to anyone watching from the monastery.”

  The pale blur of de Haven’s face was turned towards me in the gloom; the interior lights were out, so that our eyes could accommodate for moonlight. “All right, Clive?”

  “Except for the altitude.”

  “Except for the altitude,” she said, “all right?”

  I looked at Newcomb. “What’s the estimated ground wind?”

  “Up here we’re in still air. It should be the same on the ground.”

  I twisted over on
the twin seats and looked down through the cabin window and saw only patches of dark and light: the mountains and the mist between them. Where we were going in was mountainside but not steep. The slope was ridged, narrow terraces across loose rock slope. Newcomb straightened up and went forward to the flight deck.

  We were gradually losing height, and the airframe sent panels creaking as it flexed. Newcomb had forgotten to shut the door to the flight deck and its low-key illumination was in our eyes. I got up to go forward just as he remembered.

  “Sorry.

  “That’s all right.”

  The panel of light narrowed and went out.

  “Did you see that cartoon?” de Haven asked me.

  “Which one?”

  “It was in a flight magazine at the base. A picture of a sky-diving team: they’d just linked hands together after free fall, in a nice neat circle, and one of them was talking to the man next to him, you know, in the caption. He was saying: ‘You should have thought of that before we jumped!’ Is that your kind of funny?”

  “Yes.” I laughed for her, but it sounded false. The only caption I’d seen at the base just gave the name under the photograph: Soong Li-fei.

  If they had made her talk, there’d be a night watch mounted at the monastery and it wouldn’t matter if we went down on the blind side of the moon or not.

  A crack of light came, forward.

  “Two minutes.”

  Still losing speed and altitude; it felt more like an approach. Lewes had told us we could cut the engine sound by almost half, this way.

  De Haven got to her feet, clumsy under the weight of the parachute. “The captain would like to thank you for travelling USAF, and we hope you’ll join us again on your next trip.

  “Not if you serve that chocolate mousse again. You know what I thought it really was?”

  She gave a quick dry laugh and the door of the flight deck opened and I went first down the aisle.

  “One minute.”

  We checked our harnesses, settling the webbing.

  Slight pressure under our feet: Lewes was levelling out.

  “Thanks for everything,” de Haven said; her voice sounded forced, a fraction too loud.

  “You’re very welcome,” I heard Newcomb say; then he swung the door lever and suddenly there was the empty night sky and I went out first as we’d agreed.

  No sensation of falling, just the slam of the air and then the diminishing sound of the plane.

  One.

  The body turning. Moonlight against the retinae.

  Two.

  Turning and tilting now. Two dark shapes in the dome of night, the plane and a small blob, de Haven.

  Three. And pull.

  Pilot chute crackling, and the hiss of the lines.

  In Seoul I’d been a hundred miles away from Tung Kuofeng. Now, if it were daylight and I used the field-glasses, I’d be close enough to see him, to see his face.

  Access.

  Main canopy deploying, black nylon against the black sky and the harness jolting and the windrush gone off. Falling through the dark, knees and feet swinging straight up into the moonlight, and then down. Even in the dark, if he used his field-glasses, he would see me now, a cloud drifting against the wink of stars, no bigger than a man’s hand.

  He would have all the time he needed. Things would be easier for him than at a shooting gallery.

  Li fei, what did they ask you?

  Everything slow now, and no wind. Night and silence, and the wink of moonlight on the metal grip of the toggle above me and to the left with the girl sixty feet away above my left shoulder.

  What did you tell them?

  The cold pressed at my face. When I looked down I could see mist shrouding the mountains in white. A blind landing could be a killer, but we’d known that.

  Anything?

  May you rest, anyway, in peace, with your cinnamon eyes so modest under their smoky lashes, touched there by the artist with a stub of charcoal as his signature to perfection.

  Hanging in the sky, like something caught up on a web and powerless to move in any direction. Loss of identity: neither fish nor fowl, with arms but nothing to hold, no ground to tread. A target, perhaps if you must have a name.

  A white sea below, flooding from horizon to horizon, with dark islands of rock, and suddenly close. I reached up to the toggles, rehearsing. There was no sign of the girl; she must be directly above the black spread of my canopy.

  The mist smelled wet, and had the bitter taint of woodsmoke in it; there were three villages below, on the periphery of our main target area.

  The mist rushed white, swirling as I turned, with the dark peaks thrusting upwards and tearing the vapours into shreds along the valleys; I pulled the toggles and started a swinging action, turning slowly to face the moon and then looking down; if there were lights burning at the monastery I should see them by this time unless the mist were too thick; it was patchy now and breaking up, and I saw a mountain peak at eye level and watched its dark cone rising against the stars, blotting them out one by one.

  At any second now I was going to hit rock.

  Dropping through mist, under the milky light of the moon.

  I spat twice, trying to find the wind’s direction so that I could turn my back to it for the landing; but Newcomb had been right: there was no wind.

  Falling fast now: I could see crags and a dark cliff face through a gap in the mist as it swirled around me and filled the canopy, spilling away in the moonlight; falling faster and faster but at the same speed: it was just that I could see more of the environment and could orientate visually. Turning slowly away from the moon’s white haze, the moon itself hidden by the canopy, turning and swinging and looking downwards now, watching for the ground, if there were any ground and not just a cliff or a crag or an outcrop waiting to break my back; falling, falling fast with the mist clouding white and then suddenly dissolving, clouding again, the ground rushing up, then a great rockface sliding against the sky and the lines trembling as the canopy caught against something, tugging and swinging me full circle and back again, dizzying, look down, keep on looking down, everything

  dark now, the mist gone and nothing below me but black rock, look down, then suddenly the sense of nearness to great mass, and I dragged myself up the straps to soften the impact and saw the rocky floor and doubled my legs and pitched forward and flung out my hands, kicking at the rubble and feeling a tug on the lines as the canopy dragged and caught and jerked me upright before it broke clear and I went pitching down again, sliding on all fours across the rocks until everything stopped.

  I thumped the release and stepped out of the harness and looked up to find the girl; then I heard her cry out and saw the huge shape of her canopy billowing against the sky before it reached the cliff and spilled air and she span and struck the rockface and bounced away again, swinging in a wild arc as the nylon tore free and dropped her small figure beyond the edge of a ridge. I began stumbling forward, pulling the radio from the kit strapped to my waist and hitting the transmit button.

  Eagle to Jade One. Eagle to Jade One.

  I kept moving forward, checking the straps securing the rest of the equipment; if she were still alive she’d need first aid.

  The set put out a rush of static, then cleared as I adjusted the squelch. Come in, Eagle.

  Ferris.

  Eagle to Jade One. Q down and safe. DH injured. Will report.

  He acknowledged and I shut the thing off and started running, my boots sliding over loose gravel and sending it scattering. Even with the noise I was making I was aware of the great silence around me, and the weight of the mountains that sprawled here in the shadow of night. I crossed the ridge and fell twice, loosening rock and hearing it tumble as small stones sent their echoes crackling against the hard face of the cliff. Three or four times I called her name softly, but heard no answer. The light was better here; the moon had found a break in the mist and the rocks glittered like jet. I called again, but there was only
the massive silence pressing down.

  I let myself drop again, sliding through a crevice and finding flat ground at the edge of a dark pool that had no reflection; and the eye-brain interchange of data and association took an instant to inform me that the pool wasn’t water but her black canopy.

  “Hello, Clive.”

  She was on the ground, face up, just lying there. I bent over her, freeing the buckles of the medical kit. “What’s the damage?”

  “Broken leg. Don’t touch it; it’s beautifully numb.”

  “Are you bleeding?”

  “Not much, I think. Don’t worry. I thought I saw a light, when I was coming down, over to the east - did you see it too?”

  “No.” I was touching her flying suit lightly, feeling for damage and odd angles, and also letting her know that she wasn’t alone; sometimes the voice isn’t enough. Blood glinted along her left leg, where the suit had been ripped away. “I’m going to clean you up a bit; it’ll sting. Try to - “

  “Clive,” she said, “listen to me. And don’t do anything. I think I saw a light from the direction of the monastery; then either it went out or the mist hid it again. You know what I’m saying. They might have seen us.”

  I soaked one of the cotton-wool pads in the ether. There was no blood pooling anywhere; it was just oozing from the surface capillaries of the abrasion. “We knew there was the risk,” I told her.

  “Okay. Clive, please listen and do what I ask. Put that stuff away. It stinks.” Her voice was light but emphatic, and I stopped what I was doing. “I’ve got a broken leg, and there is absolutely no way you can get me out of here: no way. When the pain starts I’ll need morphine - I’m no bloody hero; and that would mean carrying me across these mountains to a goat track, and finding a goatherd and asking him to fetch a horse and cart from the nearest village, and waiting till he did that; and there’d be the trip to the village, in a bumpy cart. Clive, do you know your paramedic stuff? Do you know what state my leg would be in by then? After two days, maybe three days?” She put her hand on my arm. “There’s just one other little thing. When daylight comes we’ll be in sight of the monastery, or if we’re not, we’d move into sight of it a dozen times on the trek to the goat track, unavoidably. Are you starting to get any kind of message?”