The Pekin Target

by Adam Hall

  They were all standing very still now, watching me.

  Physical reactions normal for the situation: sweat running down my sides, the pulse accelerated, a tightness of the chest and a reluctance to breathe in case it disturbed the delicate balance between a living body and a mess of disintegrating chemicals.

  The muzzle of the gun was a small hole and I watched it, and the squat blockish shape of the magazine beyond it. He should be pumping that thing by now.

  Everything very still, and the sweat trickling on my skin moonlight and indigo dark, and faces, and silence, and suddenly someone’s voice, pitched in a shout.

  “Come on then, you bastard! Shoot!”

  My own voice, yes. Its echoes came back from the walls of the pagoda. Rather bad show of nerves, but too late now.

  “Come on!”

  Sweat pouring on my face; staring into the muzzle of the gun; breathing rapidly now and the heart thudding under the ribs, if you’re going to do it, do it, if you’re going to do it, do it -

  “Shoot, damn your eyes!”

  Shaking all over, the animal smell of fear, breath coming painfully, sawing in and out, only one thing to do, Mahomet, mountain, so forth, my legs weak as I began walking towards him, towards the gun, watching the small black hole where the flame would burst with its orange light puckering to the dark stitching shapes of the bullets -

  “Shoot, fuck you! What are you waiting for?”

  Walking into his gun.

  Tung Kuofeng was standing there in the shadows.

  I had only just seen him.

  And now I knew what they were waiting for. Page 97 of the GB Manual entitled Treatment of Prisoners and Hostages. The heading for Chapter IV reads: “Effectiveness of Fear Inducement.”

  This was Russian, and it was routine.

  But the human body is a body and as I walked right into a bloody thing he didn’t lower it, and I stood there with the muzzle against my stomach and the sweat still running on me because you can never be sure … you can never be absolutely sure that you’re right, that they’re just pulling your psyche apart to soften you up, to make you afraid, to make you obey. Because prisoners and hostages get shot dead every day all over the world and you can’t simply stand here and whistle just because you’ve read their bloody manual half a dozen times in the Behaviour under Stress class at Norfolk.

  Yang must be military, and under tight discipline; otherwise it would have been too much for him: he would have pumped that thing at me like an orgasm he couldn’t stop.

  I looked up from the gun into his dark burning eyes. He’d frightened me, and I felt the reaction developing inside me with the gathering force of an explosion and then I was working hard, my hands driving down against the barrel of the gun and smashing it away so fast that he could loose only a short burst before my half-fist went into his throat and he staggered back.

  Hands grabbing me, dragging me away from him, that’s all right, you frightened me, that’s all, and I’ve got a rotten temper, not my bloody fault, I was born with it.

  Chapter 24

  Minefield

  5051 kHz.

  Tung was on one side of me, Sinitsin on the other. Somewhere behind me were the two tracksuited guards, one of them Yang. It hadn’t been my intention to kill him, though I could have done that: I had been fast enough and there had been more than enough rage behind the half-fist strike to the larynx; but discipline hadn’t been undermined even after what they’d done to me, and I had known that if I killed Yang there wouldn’t be another mock execution: they would gun me down on the spot.

  So he was behind me now, with a bruised throat and the submachine gun in his hands again, in case I tried to smash up the radio or said anything wrong. I hadn’t increased my chances, of course, by going for him like that: he’d want even less of an excuse now to shoot me out of hand; but without having to think about it I’d realised we had to do something about the fear they’d induced in me, about the wish to obey; we had to minimise the effects that were the object of the whole charade, and the rage and then the release of rage which going for Yang had done. It had been a calculated reaction on the part of the psyche, bringing in the risk-benefit factor: the risk of death at the hands of Yang was now increased, but I would benefit from the fact that my fear of these people and my wish to obey them was much less than it would have been, and if a chance came of destroying them I was more ready to take it.

  But everything is relative. As I sat in front of the illuminated console the nerves in my spine were crawling, because the smell of cordite was still on the air and I knew they were standing behind me with loaded guns, in case I tried to smash the radio or use my bare hands on Tung or Sinitsin.

  5051 kHz.

  Eagle to Jade One. Eagle to Jade One.

  I’d been trying for ten minutes or so, without getting anything more than a faint voice speaking what sounded like Korean; the interpreter said he couldn’t understand what was being said. I was rather sorry for the interpreter: I was certain now that he wasn’t military, even in a non-combatant capacity; he’d really thought they were going to shoot me out there, and when we were all coming back into the operations room he’d stayed outside and we’d heard him vomiting.

  Eagle to Jade One.

  The Korean voice came again and this time the interpreter said we were being received.

  “Ask for Murray,” Sinitsin told him, and the interpreter leaned over my shoulder while I held down the transmit lever.

  They would know who Murray was in the Embassy signals room: it was the give-away name for Ferris, the one I’d given away to Sinitsin earlier tonight.

  I was worried about the bad reception we’d been getting it wasn’t the mountains between here and Seoul: this was a Hammarlund HQ-105-TRS with a multiplier and BFO and an auto-response circuit: they could raise Moscow with this. Maybe there was something wrong with the antenna rig, or we weren’t getting the full 105 volts from the generator.

  “He will find Murray,” the interpreter told Sinitsin.

  I felt a sudden surge of confidence. Physically I was less than a hundred per cent after the march through the mountains, and the bullet-wound in my cheek had swollen half my face in the healing process, bringing a fever and leaving a tenderness that kept the nerves bared; but the physical is infinitely less important than the psychological when the stress comes on, and I’d needed an antidote to the lingering fright induced by standing against that wall out there and staring at the muzzle of the gun. Sinitsin had compromised: he’d decided to accept Tung’s logic and let me use the transceiver, but had first put me through page 97 to reduce the risk of my breaking out. To a certain degree he’d done that, but the thought that Jade One was still running and that I was resuming contact with the director in the field was almost heady.

  The Korean voice sounded again but almost immediately faded, and the interpreter told Sinitsin he hadn’t caught anything intelligible. We went on waiting.

  The idea of smashing the radio kept recurring, but I hadn’t got enough data to work on. If this were the only radio at the monastery I might do quite a bit of good by knocking it out and cutting their communications with Moscow, but it wouldn’t cut off Tung from his action group: he could raise them with one of the helicopter sets, and they might well have a short-wave transceiver that could reach Moscow. I couldn’t destroy their operation; I could only cause temporary confusion.

  Jade One to Eagle.

  Something like a spark went through my nerves. It was the voice of Ferris, loud and clear: a voice I thought I’d never hear again.

  Eagle receiving.

  I sensed Sinitsin closing in from my right side.

  “You are in danger,” he said, “but you have obtained information and may be able to obtain more.”

  I sat doing nothing while the interpreter put the Russian into Chinese for Tung Kuofeng, then as Tung began speaking in English I hit the transmit lever.

  “There is a Russian connection,” he said. “The opera
tion is being run from Moscow.”

  I gave it straight to Ferris, but had to use speechcode because even among people who speak only their own language there are many who pick up foreign words: most English people know nyet, parachik, so forth. This applies particularly to the names of people and cities, and a KGB Colonel would know the English for “Russian” and “Moscow,” and if I hadn’t used “bearish” and “Place Rouge” Sinitsin would have dragged me away from the radio and told Yang to wipe me out, this time for real.

  It was like moving slowly through a minefield, and there was a lot to think about. Tung had opened up with a hot signal, and I’d had to control my reaction. The last thing the KGB wanted anyone to know was that there was a Russian connection, and as I sat here waiting for Sinitsin to give me the next item of dezinformatsiya I knew that I’d just dropped an intelligence bomb in the signals room of the British Embassy; depending on the turnaround facilities there, it could be known in London within minutes from now that Moscow was behind the assassinations in Pekin.

  I wiped the sweat off my face as I waited.

  Sinitsin spoke. “The Pekin assassinations were designed to divert both world and intelligence attention from the actual operation Tung Kuofeng is running.”

  I sat listening to the interpreter.

  We’d passed the first hump in the minefield but there would be so many others. Whenever Sinitsin spoke, I must remember not to react, but to wait for the translation. Whenever Tung spoke to me in English I had to assess what he wanted Ferris to know, and if I didn’t like it I would have to try inserting an “ignore” keyword by careful rephrasing, and that would be dangerous because he might realise what I was doing. I had to use speechcode for any words Tung gave me that Sinitsin might understand, like “Russian” or “Moscow,” and I must hope that Tung would know why I was doing it. I had to listen for any internationally known names or words - “Pekin,” “airport,” so forth - spoken by Sinitsin and put them faithfully into the final signal so that he would hear them: because he’d be listening for them; and Tung would have to do the same. At the same time I had to insert an “ignore” key to cover them, because they’d stand out oddly in the message. If Tung didn’t understand what I was doing, he couldn’t ask me, because Sinitsin would want to know what we were talking about.

  While I waited for the interpreter to finish I thought over what Sinitsin had just told me to send. The Pekin assassinations were designed to divert world and intelligence attention from the actual operation Tung Kuofeng is running. “Pekin” and “Tung Kuofeng” would have to go in.

  When the interpreter had finished Tung leaned over me. “The Pekin only chance of stopping the operation is by finding and releasing Chuan, Tung Kuofeng’s abducted son.”

  He was on to what we had to do: he’d inserted “Pekin” at the beginning and got his own name in the right place near the end, using exactly nineteen words, as Sinitsin had. If we could work together like this we had a chance, but it would need only one slip, and Sinitsin was listening hard.

  I opened transmission. “The Pekin, really, only chance of stopping … ” It was the only “ignore we had to insert.

  We all waited.

  “Message understood so far.” Ferris.

  He wouldn’t be worried by the “ignore” keyword “really.” He would be cautious, but not worried. He was already wondering at the delay between my first and second transmissions, and would almost certainly realise I wasn’t alone; he would be listening carefully to the tone of my voice, alert for any stress tones or background sounds; but he would know that the signal as a whole could be trusted and that I was sending what I wanted to send; without duress; otherwise I would have thrown in a priority “discount” key right at the outset and the only reason he would have gone on listening would be to hear what kind of disinformation the opposition was trying to feed him, and to respond with formal acknowledgements to give the impression he accepted the signal.

  When they’d led me to the radio I’d tried to angle my chair slightly so that I could press down the transmit lever without anyone seeing, so that Ferris would hear the Russian and Chinese in the background; but it hadn’t been possible: Sinitsin and his aides had been watching for that.

  I looked up at him now, wanting him to know that the transmission had been acknowledged. He began speaking again.

  “The Tung operation is aimed at a mock overthrow of the Kim Sung presidency of North Korea, ostensibly by a South Korean terrorist group, followed by an immediate counter coup and a full military invasion of South Korea and the installation of a Communist government.”

  The interpreter took it up and passed it to Tung Kuofeng.

  I sat waiting, conscious that Ferris too was waiting, and wondering at the delay; but he had some data to work on: he knew I spoke fluent Russian and that there was a Russian connection; he might guess I was concealing the fact that I spoke Russian, and was speaking through an interpreter; he would know I’d reached the monastery and made contact with Tung, because of the information I was sending; but he wouldn’t know why I was having to insert sporadic “ignore” keys as I went along.

  Tung began speaking. He’d remembered my use of “bearish” for “Russian” and used it now, putting his own name early in the phrasing and putting in the names of Kim Sung, North and South Korea and Communist; I’d been waiting for Sinitsin to pounce at any moment, but I should have realised that Tung, chief of a formidable Triad, would be capable of working out the game we had to play; and he knew that the better he played it the more chance he had of seeing his son again.

  Minus the necessary repetition of the names Sinitsin was listening for, and minus the relevant “ignore” keys, Tung’s transmission read: Chuan Tung is held by Russian agents somewhere in South Korea. His location and release would bring the operation to an immediate stop, so you must do utmost. Tung ready to expose Russians’ objective, which is to destroy Chinese-American relations.

  I lifted the transmit lever and waited on automatic receive. I’d had to use “subject” for the second “Tung”, and “Red Indian” for “American”, because “American”, “States”, “United States”, “USA”, “US”, “Uncle Sam” and “Yank”, “Yanks”, “Yankee” might be understandable to Sinitsin. For five or six seconds there was silence in the room except for the low hum of the transceiver.

  “Message understood.”

  I didn’t relax until the silence continued for another few seconds after Ferris acknowledged. Sinitsin would have jumped straight in with a question if he’d had one. Ferris himself was less of a worry: he knew he daren’t ask any one of a dozen questions he was wanting to - my reasons for speechcode and “ignore” keys, and so forth; their presence alone warned him of danger.

  “He doesn’t sound very surprised,” Sinitsin said.

  I looked blank and turned to Tung Kuofeng and waited for the translation to come through, at the same time thinking out the answer. When I was ready I said through Tung and the Korean: “In our trade, Colonel, there aren’t many things left that can surprise us, don’t you agree? And your transmission’s being relayed to London, so he’s not going to hold things up by any questions. Do you have more?”

  “Yes.”

  He began on the next phase.

  It was now midnight by the twenty-four hour chronometer on the lighted console, three o’clock in the afternoon in London. If the Embassy in Seoul had immediate relay facilities, Croder would be channeling this transmission direct to half a dozen departments, alerting sleepers and agents-in-place throughout South-east Asia, asking for an immediate two-week playback analysis from Asian Signals Coordinate to catch anything intercepted during the last fourteen days that sounded like a terrorist or political abduction, and directing emergency staffs into Soviet Department V Operations Monitor Section, Dossier File (Asia), Intelligence Support Stations (South Korea) and Active Signals Search.

  Feedback would be reaching Seoul within minutes and all of it would go to Ferris, but only fo
r his information until someone picked up traces of the Tung Chuan abduction or made a lucky hit with one of the dozen radio direction-finding mobile units that would initiate roving missions even while the stuff was still coming in from London. This service offered the greatest hope: they could pinpoint an individual house if they were in the area at the right time; but high-speed transmitting would make it difficult, and if the Russian agents had an automatic player device it would make it impossible. But the signal I was now sending on this set was going to launch a massive intelligence search for Tung Chuan throughout South Korea: I wasn’t just speaking to Ferris on an internal directive level.

  Midnight plus ten. We walked through the minefield together, a Russian, a Korean, a Chinese and an Englishman, with the glow of the radio console on our faces and hum of the transmitter bridging the silence between the babel of words and phrases.

  Sinitsin threw in traps for me a dozen times, and when I looked up at Tung for the translation I warned him with my eyes and he stepped around the traps and I covered the transmission with insertions and “ignore” keys. Three times Tung missed an international name, one of them “Washington,” and I put it into transmission as early as I could before Sinitsin noticed the omission. Several times Sinitsin threw in an inconsistency, and Tung questioned it, and I covered.

  We walked through the minefield not as friends trying to guide each other to safety but as enemies trying to reach our different goals and reach them first; the terrain itself was innocent, and the danger lay in our own conflicting objectives. If Sinitsin caught me in a deliberate mistake or suspected for an instant that I was sending a different signal he would turn to the guards and have me shot. If Tung Kuofeng caught any hint that my transmissions were trying to compromise him or the rescue of his son, he would tell the KGB party that they were right: I was too dangerous to remain alive. And if I could see a way to do it, as I picked my way through the patterns of explosive phrases, I would destroy them both.