The Pekin Target

by Adam Hall

  Trickle of sweat; it had sprung from the skin when the sharp sound had come a minute ago. I wiped it away from my eyes and manned the peephole again and saw him.

  He was standing perfectly still, looking at the marks on the ground; then in a moment he raised his head, gazing across the wall I had built, across the hidden glint of my eye. He looked like a Korean, young and athletic in a striped track suit and running shoes; the long Remington was slung at the horizontal in both hands, ready to swing up and fire.

  I narrowed my eye until the lids were almost together, and watched him as his head turned slowly to note the stones of my wall, studying them for a while and then passing on. The distance between us was some hundred feet. He began moving again, his head going down to follow my tracks, and when he turned to his left, towards the ledge where I was waiting, I brought my eye down to the third peephole and watched him from there.

  He stopped again, lifting his head and turning it by degrees to look around him, glancing across my shadowed eye and surveying the heights at my back. It was five or six minutes before he was satisfied; then he moved on again with his head lowered, until he saw the dark bloodspots I had left directly beneath the ledge; and now he stopped.

  An hour ago I had brushed the ledge free of loose stones, and measured the distance from the rock wall to the edge; it was the distance necessary to give momentum for the leap. The time estimated was three seconds, but if I controlled my breathing he would see me before he heard me, and that wouldn’t give him long enough to swing the gun up and take aim; he shouldn’t see me for at least half the total estimated time: for at least one second and a half; and he would need more than that. It was a long rifle and weighed ten or eleven pounds and he’d have to swing it upwards against the inertia.

  Of course he might move faster than I’d reckoned, and make use of the final half second before I was on him and blocking the swing of the gun. In that case I would drop straight against the muzzle and receive the shot at point blank range. The issue was unpredictable.

  His head was still lowered and I took a slow breath and whipped the muscles into movement, clearing the edge and dropping with my feet going first. He probably died before he hit the ground because I kicked downwards with my right boot and felt its impact on the side of his neck: he was much slower than I’d estimated and had only got as far as turning his head to look upwards as his peripheral vision had warned him of the changing light factor. I heard the snap of his neck and was briefly aware of sequential images: the shine of the rifle barrel swinging; the gold-rimmed sunglasses hitting the ground and for an instant showing the reflection of his face before the lenses shattered against the stones; his body meeting its shadow and blotting it out.

  I span full circle, breaking my fall with a shoulder roll and getting up as the two men on the track stopped dead and brought their revolvers into the aim.

  Chapter 20

  March

  Dead weight.

  The sun was much higher now, its heat throbbing in the air. I had begun making an effort not to look at my watch.

  Dead weight on my back.

  If he had started from the monastery at the time we had made our drop, it had taken him two hours to reach the area where he’d begun hunting me. It was going to take longer than that for him to return; much longer.

  The sun beat down on the three of us. Four of us. One on my back.

  Sometimes the two men spoke to each other, a few short words in low tones that I didn’t understand; but the tone of the human voice is a language in itself, and universal; and I knew they were talking about the man on my back; there was grief in their voices for him, and hate for the man who had murdered him. I suppose they felt it was rough poetic justice, making me carry his body.

  One of them walked ahead, springing easily across the uneven rock in his cushioned track shoes while I laboured and stumbled under my burden; the other man followed me, and my back was already bruised from the prodding of the long rifle. Sweat trickled on me, stinging my eyes so that they watered all the time, making the flat grey rocks look like a stream bed in the wavering light. I would have said we’d been moving for three hours now, maybe rather less, because time dragged under the dead weight.

  They had tried mouth-to-mouth resuscitation for half an hour; then one of them had raised his revolver to aim at the centre of my forehead and I’d looked down the barrel and begun counting, for something to do; but the other man had spoken to him sharply, with authority, and the gun had been lowered. I was to be taken to the monastery, I suppose he had said, and dealt with there. The tone of the man’s voice had sounded like an order, and it occurred to me that they might be military personnel out of uniform, possibly North Koreans whose uniform in the South would get them arrested.

  I had tried them with English, French, German and Russian as we’d started the march out, but had got no reaction. We had moved off as soon as they’d gestured to me to lift the dead marksman and sling him across my back; they’d seen nothing of the haversack, higher up on the ledge behind the wall I’d built, and I hadn’t tried to retrieve it; that radio would have been embarrassing: it wouldn’t have suited the cover I was working out.

  Staggering now across the uneven ground, the stones rippling under the tears flooding my eyes.

  The sun’s heat rising towards noon.

  Dead march.

  One of his arms began swinging like a pendulum to the measure of my pace, his hand brushing across and across my chest as if he were trying to catch my attention; but he had nothing more to say to me, and I had nothing to say to him; we’d both been professionals and the match had been fairly even; he’d come close to blowing my head off, so I’d broken his neck, a good enough answer. But his arm was beginning to irritate me and I grasped his hand, a little too late to show friendship.

  The man ahead of me was following the oblique cleft towards the south-east, the way de Haven had told me I should go, the way I would have gone alone if these two hadn’t heard the marksman’s shots, and come down to see if he needed help. Twice in the last hour I’d seen the glint of blue-grey tiles higher on the ridge; we must have climbed most of the thousand feet from the flat area below where my heavy friend had hunted me.

  “What?” I asked them, and-found the sun blinding in my eyes and their hands dragging me upright: I’d just gone straight out with exhaustion. They shoved the barrel of the long blue Remington into me, like poking a pig with a stick, until the pain overwhelmed the urge to go on lying there, freed of the dead-weight load. “Oh shuddup,” I told them, “don’t be so fucking impatient.” I suppose they didn’t take it kindly that I’d dumped their friend so unceremoniously, well that was tough luck, he shouldn’t have put those bloody bullets quite so close to my head.

  They humped him onto my back again and I stood there trying to adjust to the load while bright red spots dripped from me onto the stones; they’d broken the skin somewhere with that thing.

  Off we go, then, yes, my friend and I, not much of a conversationalist, you can say that about him. One foot in front of the next through the throbbing heat of the day. And out of a job, by the way: it had been worrying me. They would have written me off by now, because I hadn’t sent another signal.

  Eagle to Jade One, my present situation extremely hazardous, will report if possible, so forth. Been no report, had there, it didn’t look very jolly, one more ferret bitten the dust, it happens all the time. But I bet they don’t send Youngquist in; he’d looked too intelligent to let London shove him into a shut-ended shambles like this one.

  Stay on your feet.

  On my feet, yes, but not your bloody business.

  If you keep on falling down they’ll shoot you.

  Shuddup. Snivelling little bloody organism worried about dying, plain bloody suburban.

  They’re going to shoot you up there at the monastery.

  Well, I didn’t think they were going to offer me a franchise in a car wash, for Christ’s sake.

  Stones swi
mming. One foot in front of the other.

  Gun at my back, prodding.

  His arm was swinging again, the arm of my inert and unconversational friend. It was irritating, and after a mile or ten miles or fifty miles in this blinding heat I thought about grabbing his hand again to keep him still, and then I thought now wait a minute, this kind of pendulum motion might be an advantage, because every time his arm swings forwards it helps me keep moving, bloody clever, yes, but every time it swings back, quite, not bloody clever, you’re losing your nut, you know that? You’re going stark raving bonkers.

  A possibility, just a bare possibility, that if I could manage to centre the psyche for a while and then fall down deliberately and land with him on top of me as a shield against the rifle, and at the same time grab the ankles of the man in front and bring him down, you’ve got no energy left, you bloody fool, I know, but you’ve got to think about something.

  Gun hit my spine.

  Get on, yes.

  Sound of my breathing, like sawing wood, sawing slowly through a huge tree trunk, in, out, in, out, while the muscles blazed, thirsting for more oxygen, more oxygen all the time, legs staggering with the knees locked, otherwise fall, fall down, ought not to do that, wouldn’t take kindly, no.

  Blinding sun and streaming stones and his swinging arm and the pain of the gun prodding, on and on, until there were roofs curving against the sky and a bell somewhere, tolling like a brainstorm in my skull, my legs lurching left and right, my feet shuffling like a cripple’s and the whole of my body burning under the weight of the man, the weight of the sun, the weight of the sky. Stop.

  Several men, coming onto the courtyard, one of them talking in Russian, asking what had happened.

  Stood swaying, then no good, went down like an avalanche and hit the stones, man saying in Russian, Put him against a wall and shoot him.

  Chapter 21

  Ki

  His eyes were dark stones.

  A thin tendril of smoke climbed from the bowl of incense under the lamp, reminding me of the room where I’d met Spur.

  What did they do to that snake? I wanted to ask him.

  His eyes were so dark in the hollows of his face that they seemed to disappear sometimes, becoming shadows in the low light of the lamp; but I knew he was watching me all the time, with that reptilian ability to go on watching with such stillness that you forget there’s a brain behind these eyes, thinking about you.

  He was sitting on his heels in the meditation position, his back erect and his thin yellow hands folded on his thighs. It might have been that he was trying to hypnotise me, and I took care to study him, noting everything I could to keep the conscious occupied: the intricate pattern of his kimono with its gold dragons and hieroglyphs, the wisp of white beard at the point of his chin and the sharp ears that had the bone yellowness of ivory carving, the fine chiselling of the nose.

  Tung Kuofeng.

  A Chinese, Spur had said, scion of a family traceable to the early Ch’ing dynasty. Tung isn’t a young man anymore; I’d put him at sixty. But extremely fit; lots of ki, you know, the real thing. If those bastards in London are putting you solo into the field with Tung Kuofeng, you don’t stand a chance. Not a chance in hell.

  A current of air met the tendril of smoke and twisted it into a spiral; from somewhere outside I could hear distant chanting, to the sound of wooden clappers; it must be sundown. The man in front of me didn’t speak; perhaps he was silently joining in the prayers.

  What would he pray for? He should pray for the souls of the departed; this man had killed Sinclair, the British Secretary of State, the American Ambassador, Jason, Spur, Soong Yongshen and his sister, Soong Li-fei, their necks bared under the sword. Let him pray for them. And for himself, if I had a chance to close in.

  We sat facing each other in the low light of the lamp. My back burned from the bruising of the gun; my legs were still trembling from the strain of the five-hour march with the man on my back. I was close enough now to Tung Kuofeng, and I could probably move with at least half my normal speed; but he would have had reports of me from his team of hit men, and would be wary; he wouldn’t allow me this close to him without some kind of protection, and his hands, lying so peacefully on the folds of the black and gold silk, probably concealed a ninja weapon. Or was he counting on the fact that out there in the courtyard he had saved my life?

  I wasn’t ready for him yet, in any case. We want you to talk to him, Ferris had said.

  The chanting and the clack of the wooden clappers died away, and a gong boomed; then there was quiet.

  “Who are you?”

  His voice was quiet, but the tone had an extraordinary harshness, sounding as if it weren’t coming from a living body but from a recorder that was distorting it, giving it a metallic flatness.

  “Colonel West, British Army, attached NATO defence force, Asian theatre.”

  The assumed rank of colonel came under routine instructions in the event of the executive’s decision to use a military cover; it was the only one I had: you don’t do a night drop with a black chute into the Korean mountains to look for geological specimens.

  “You feel,” he asked me, “that is the best you can do?”

  “That’s my true identity.”

  His English was correct and educated; when I’d been sprawled on the big grey flagstones out there a few hours ago, he’d spoken Chinese and an interpreter had put it straight into Russian; I’d understood only the Russian side, as Tung had repeated with unyielding authority that I was not to be killed until he had questioned me.

  “What brought you to the mountains?”

  “I was on a night exercise.

  “With what objective?”

  “Survival.”

  “I realise that your training as a secret agent requires you to explain as little as possible, but we must not waste time. I have to go through the formality of questioning you, since those were the terms of your reprieve; I must therefore know your cover story, so that I can prove later if necessary that I have indeed questioned you. Let me at this point make it clear that while I carry a certain degree of authority, the person in ultimate command here is Colonel Sinitsin of the KGB, whom you saw briefly, I think, when you arrived. In other respects I am, like yourself, a prisoner.”

  The Russian connection.

  I still hadn’t got things worked out. I hadn’t been fully conscious when I’d arrived, and the incoming data had gone into the memory in its raw state for later analysis, if I lived. I had seen several Europeans looking down at me and at the body of the Korean, two of them in grey formal suits and polo-necked sweaters; it was one of these who had told the Koreans to put me against a wall and shoot me, speaking in Russian to an interpreter. Other men had been there: Koreans again, wearing track suits with the insignia of the Olympiad; behind them there’d been the terraced roofs of the monastery, part of it in ruins, and the roof of a temple nearby, and two large shapes under camouflage nets, one of them with a rotor poking out; above one of the roofs there had been an omnidirectional radio antenna.

  I’d had time to do a rough analysis of all this data while I’d been recovering in the cell where they’d thrown me: originally, I suppose, a monk’s personal quarters, a narrow cubicle with a grilled window and a crude wooden bed. The most obvious thing was that Tung Kuofeng hadn’t sought refuge here, as the blind priest had thought; he was here to conduct or participate in what looked like a minor military operation. There were always several tracksuited guards in sight, and from watching them I’d become more and more convinced that they were at least paramilitary and professionally trained.

  “Where are your papers?” Tung asked me tonelessly.

  “I lost track of them when I came down. It was a bad landing.”

  “Your flying suit was also lost?”

  “I took it off when the sun came up; it was too hot.”

  “And ‘lost track of it’.”

  “That’s right.”

  I sensed movement a
t the edge of my vision; there were two grilled apertures on one wall of the chamber, showing a lamplit arch beyond; I assumed someone was passing there, outside, or had stopped to watch us, and listen.

  “No one else here,” Tung said, “understands English.” I felt suddenly chilled; he was reading my mind. “It is important for you to know that when you and I converse, even in the company of others, it is in secret. What other languages do you speak?”

  “A bit of army French.”

  He fell silent, waiting for me to say more. I didn’t. “You say you were on an exercise in survival. Who else was with you?”

  “No one.”

  “You chose to be alone?”

  “Yes. I was getting fed up sitting around with nothing to do. There’s nothing here for a defence force to defend. So I asked permission to do a one-man survival course over the weekend. I’ve done it before, quite a few times, in England. Were you educated there? Your English is pretty good.”

  He said: “When will they begin searching for you?”

  “They won’t need to. I can use the radio here to tell them I’m okay.” I left a slight pause, as he’d been doing, but he didn’t ask what radio. “There’ll be some trouble for those Koreans, though. That fellow was doing his damnedest to shoot me dead. I suppose you know that.”

  Two seconds, three. “I have told you we must not waste time. I know that you are an agent in the British Secret Service and that your assignment was to enquire into the death of your Secretary of State in Pekin. You have resisted efforts on the part of my own agents to eliminate you. You are here in the hope of eliminating me, since it is believed I was responsible for the two political assassinations in Pekin, and might be in the process of ordering others, as indeed I am. For your information, TWA Flight 232 from Pekin sustained an accident on take-off early this morning, killing more than fifty people including an American football team; they had been visiting the People’s Republic of China on a goodwill mission with the aim of furthering the interests of international sport.”