Sunstrike_The next gripping Commander Shaw thriller

by Philip McCutchan

  “Military parade of strength is my guess,” I said to Felicity. “And us the Joe Soaps.”

  “Or Aunt Sallies,” she remarked prophetically.

  The lorry was driven across the Square of Heavenly Peace, narrowly and constantly missing human flesh. The place was packing solid with men in singlets, women wearing cotton skirts and blouses, all shouting their slogans, but the police mustered in battalions a few minutes later, coming in from all approaches to the square and hustling the gawpers into neat but close lines along the fringes, using batons to enforce their orders. Under the tomb-frown of the late Chairman Mao we were driven towards the grandstand and halted in the middle of the line of tiers fronting what I identified from remembered 6D2 photographs as the Great Hall of the People. As soon as we had stopped a company of troops was marched towards us and fallen out to form a protective line of guns around the lorry. The crowd sounds had increased a hundredfold by now, but there didn’t seem to be any laughter left, just a sound of rising hate against, obviously, the lackeys of the imperialist West in their cage. Rapprochement hadn’t penetrated, never mind the friendly overtures. There was much mindlessness around: the overwhelming majority of these people must be decent enough and peaceful, but once manipulated by the Party machine and inflamed by the banners and the slogans, they became an unthinking mass dedicated to hate against the foreigner. They became no different in basis from our own domestic football hooligans or race-baiters: it was Lewisham and Birmingham and other places in reverse and on a gigantic scale. And whatever it was, the result was starkly frightening. Felicity, a girl certainly not without guts, had a face of dead ashes. I moved closer to give her what comfort I could, but the sticks came thwacking through the cage bars and for her own sake I moved away again. A while longer and the brass began to assemble on the grandstand behind us; the dais that would form the saluting-base filled up, last of all to come being the Chairman of the Chinese People’s Republic. The air was vibrant, pregnant, hugely threatening and boastful. Then the parade started, led by the Party with bands and great banners and enormously blown-up photographs of the celebrities and leaders, all the usual guff, and behind them came marchers performing lion and dragon dances. Youth was represented, boys and girls in PT rig who would, I supposed, give a display later. Then the armed might of China rolled or marched past, column after column of infantry, division upon division with more bands … followed by massive artillery pieces that seemed never to end … followed by squadron after squadron of heavy rumbling tanks with grim-faced crews … followed by the missiles, hundreds of them, their sleek pointed noses threatening the skies as they were drawn past the dais. I reckoned that on this one parade alone were many times more men and more armour than Britain could muster if her whole army were brought together from Belfast to Hong Kong to march along Whitehall, more, I felt certain, than had ever been seen in Moscow’s Red Square. This was power-propaganda carried to the nth degree of immensity and it struck a chill into my heart. More of a chill was due to be struck before that parade had ended: its tail end was brought up by something grotesque, something at odds with the grey austerity of armour and guns and marching Chinese, something out of nightmare’s pantomime. Mounted on a big articulated vehicle was a fabricated facsimile of what looked like any housewife’s aerosol, giant size, pointing up to the blue sky and covered with Chinese characters. Behind it, on a railed platform, was a small man with an oversize head, a European dressed in an old-fashioned alpaca coat like a grocer, and with a black bowler hat on the gross head. For my money, this was Nodd.

  10

  Nodd rolled on: I say again, it was grotesque, almost a caricature. That great toy aerosol was laughable really, and rather tatty in its construction: some of it was already coming adrift. The odd figure of Professor Nodd added to the comic aspect, yet that thing was there in the parade to symbolise what Deputy-Premier Ch’en and his colleagues seemed to regard as the ultimate horror weapon. It rolled away on its articulated transport and the last Felicity and I saw of the parade was Nodd’s bowler hat. Then, in the wake of the parade, the crowd erupted and our personal guard of soldiers stood-to with their guns to fend them off. Slowly we got under way, with the troops formed up around the lorry. They kept the crowd off but they couldn’t keep off the shouts and screams and they couldn’t keep off the things that mob threw at us. Sticks, stones, chunks of filth of every description. Never mind the agreements and diplomatic visits: they really hated us and all we represented. By the time we were off the streets and back behind that magnificent governmental edifice we were bruised and bleeding and our clothing was foul. Mrs Thatcher had never had it like this. We were given no time to clean up but in our smelly and demoralised state were taken at once under guard to an interrogation room in a small, detached, windowless building standing alone in the centre of a tree-lined courtyard.

  *

  I don’t know who conducted that interrogation, but I don’t think it was Deputy-Premier Ch’en: that wouldn’t have been his business, nor that of Lin Fun Fang. I couldn’t see the interrogator, and afterwards Felicity, who was questioned separately, told me she couldn’t see hers either. The voice was disembodied, not quite as though coming at me via a microphone but rather as though it was the other side of a two-way mirror through which I could be seen but couldn’t myself look through — though in fact there was no mirror around, or I don’t think there was. In other respects it was the familiar set-up: I, the victim, was under the full glare of a bright light that shone directly into my eyes, and at my side and a little in front stood the armed guards, one of whom swished a thin cane across my face each time I shut my eyes against the light. That apart, there was in fact no nastiness. The voice boomed at me, filling my ears as the light was filling my eyes so that my enclosed world was sound and kaleidoscopic light, every colour in the spectrum whirling and gyrating inside an outer rim of deepest black. The voice, being interpreted in perfect English — the interpreter could have been British — was insistent and persuasive. China, the world’s oldest civilisation, was on the march to regain her ancient place and no one could stand against her. It was destiny, and it was inevitable, written deep upon the tablets of time past, present and future. China would bring peace to the suffering world, the real peace of world control centralised in Peking, a different thing entirely from the former Pax Britannica which by making war had claimed to prevent war. I found myself agreeing in my mind that that particular proposition carried a certain inescapable logic … we in Britain had sometimes been no mean practitioners of the art of double-talk and double-think. Anyway, there was quite a lot of this proselytising, a kind of simple brainwashing, then came the actual interrogation: some purely personal probing to which I meekly gave the answers since they already knew who I was, then the hard core. What were my current orders, how had I got into China, what was my escape route to be, precisely how much was known in the West about Professor Nodd and his epoch-making plans, what were the governments and the military machines doing about it?

  “Nothing to say,” I said. I kept on repeating that, and waited each time for the chop that didn’t come.

  “We are patient people, Commander Shaw.”

  “Good.”

  “Yet time is short, and we ask you to remember this.”

  “I’ll remember it,” I promised.

  There was silence for a few moments. Somewhere I heard a clock ticking, spelling out that shortness of time which in fact was on my mind just as much as it was on China’s. The silence was broken by a hiss of breath from my unseen inquisitor, who, having given his impatient hiss, then said through his interpreter, “Listen, please, to another person.”

  I listened. I imagine he had made a switch that brought sound in from another room. I heard low crying, then what sounded like the lash of a whip followed by what was certainly a sharp cry of pain. I knew who it was, of course — or anyway who it was meant to be. There are such things as tapes and I could be listening to someone else’s reaction … I told myself,
firmly, that I was. Sweat poured into my dirty shirt and I said, “Nothing to say.” The questioning continued: still no brutality towards me, but a wearing-down process, and interspersed with sounds of desperation when the invisible bastard operated his switch. It’s enormously, unbelievably difficult to keep on and on and on repeating one negative set of words: no one quite understands just how difficult until they’re faced with it personally. It has an extraordinary effect on the mind, a fact that is not unknown to interrogators, of course. Wearing down can very often achieve success, and although I hope it wouldn’t have succeeded with me that day, I can’t be wholly certain since I was saved by a fortuitous interruption. The bombarding voice ceased and a green light glowed from behind it. There was a curious flat silence and an oppressive atmosphere that somehow got under my skin and made the flesh creep with speculation. Then the voice came back, interpreted urbanely as before, and said the session would be resumed later but in the meantime I was wanted elsewhere to meet someone of importance.

  I guessed that would be Nodd.

  *

  I was joined up with Miss Mandrake outside the interrogation building: the cries had been hers, as of course I’d known, really, all along. Her eyes were puffy and she flinched away from her guards, but the message in her face was that she hadn’t answered any of the questions. I felt quite a lump in my throat: she was a good girl, was Felicity, a professional to her finger-tips and with toughness of mind. Nevertheless, I was not very sanguine about the wearing down process. However, one often worries about things that never happen and the moment Felicity and I were brought into a large office where Nodd was holding court. I sensed that something had occurred that could well cut across current Chinese Governmental desires. I was led to this conclusion because there was a most unlikely person in that room, this person being Rear-Admiral Rackstall.

  “Well, well,” I said blankly, stupidly. “Fancy meeting you!” There was no point in trying to make out there was no connection; for one thing, there was the US uniform. And Rackstall was looking as if he’d met a long lost brother, or son in my case. Rackstall was a seaman, not an undercover man, and his face was easily read. He told me his story and no one tried to stop him, not even me: he’d got sick and tired, goddam, of waiting around doing nothing but bite his nails, and when I hadn’t shown he had done what in retrospect he called something darned stupid: he had gone ashore at dead of night with a party of seamen to see if he could help out and they had all been taken just like I had. His face was stiff with self blame when he said he’d lost one man dead. The rest, like him, were okay and they had all been flown up pronto to Peking to be made the most of diplomatically.

  Talk about fouling things up!

  Poor Rackstall, he looked really sick. He was an ageing man and frankly he was getting beyond it, his judgment had gone for a burton. I could imagine the Pentagon busily doing its nut. I could imagine the President of the United States of America looking into a mirror and wondering where that smile had gone. They would be really smiling this side of the Pacific, and, in fact, they were. It’s not every day a US admiral in uniform invades mainland Communist China; Rackstall must have looked like General Douglas MacArthur, striding back through the surf to the Philippines with that pugnacious jaw.

  “So what now?” Rackstall asked, and I gestured towards Deputy-Premier Ch’en who, with Lin Fun Fang from the south, was in evidence once more. Lin, all smiles, rattled off in Chinese to Ch’en but was interrupted by Professor Nodd, who was looking neglected and was gently steaming.

  “Just one moment, gentlemen,” Nodd said in English, and I looked at him. He appeared utterly insignificant, still in his grocer’s alpaca but minus the bowler hat, which was hung on a hook behind the door. Insignificant except for the massive head, not impossibly due to arrested hydrocephalus, but with a compelling nastiness in his pasty face, which was somehow as flat as a board. Even the nose seemed to have been ironed flat. He looked what he was: the bastard who without a flicker had destroyed the face of Dr Ludwig Ercks of Bonn University. Now he coughed importantly, tugged at his alpaca coat and gave tongue in a thin, rather whining voice. He said, and his introductory sentence I’d heard before. “Time is short. I have extended the deadline. I shall not agree to a further extension. For certain meteorological and scientific reasons, the best time for the present series of attacks will come to an end by one week from today.”

  Nodd spoke as flat as his own face, very little expression in voice or face, and I noted the ‘I have’ and ‘I shall not.’ No deference to Deputy-Premiership nor to Chairmanship of the Party committee of the Autonomous Region of Kwangsi-Chuang. What’s more, they took it like lambs and hastened to placate the mighty-brained Western professor. Lin spoke again to Ch’en, then said, “There will be no more delay, I promise this.”

  “But the prisoners.” Nodd lifted a hand and jabbed a finger at Felicity, Rackstall and myself. “You say you want them for interrogation —”

  “Yes, that is so. Very valuable information is to emerge.”

  “Indeed. Then it must emerge later. I must insist. My requirements have an obvious priority if you wish to succeed in what we have set out to do.”

  “That is agreed, Professor Nodd.”

  The big head inclined. “Thank you. In that case the prisoners must come south with me. They shall be returned to Peking when I have no more need of them.”

  “But we have —”

  Nodd held up a hand, peremptorily. “I insist. There is no more to be said. Without me, you cannot succeed.” All at once he looked down at his sleeve: on the grey alpaca crawled a beetle, fairly sizeable and of a dim red colouring, with gossamer wings peeping out from beneath protective armour. Quite a handsome insect, and probably harmless since Nodd calmly lifted it off with his fingers and placed it on the jade that formed one of the window seats. It rubbed its legs together and moved its wings a little, then it crisped into a charred corpse as Nodd flicked a gas lighter and used it as a miniature flame-thrower, his flat face as blank as ever. Both Ch’en and Lin looked quite shocked. Maybe, I thought, the bastard’s practising: the UV released by his filthy aerosols would in the long run have a similar effect. But shocked or not neither Ch’en nor Lin looked like back-tracking on what Nodd had in store for humanity, and animals, and food producing areas outside the great mainland of China.

  *

  Nodd won the day and that evening we were airborne again for the vicinity of the Gulf of Tongking. The whole party of prisoners was there, including Rackstall’s seamen — six of them. Nodd had wanted the lot and so far his reason had not emerged. On the flight south Nodd sat up front with the pilot, navigator and engineer, wearing his bowler hat. That and his big head blocked most of the view of the night sky for all of us in rear, where we sat under heavy guard. Nodd looked grotesque, sitting like a statue, motionless nearly all the time until he fell asleep and lolled sideways in his seat, to be hoisted upright by the flight engineer before he fell right out of line. I was next to Rackstall and no one stopped us talking. Maybe they wanted to overhear, and though none of the guards looked as though he had more than a few hundred words of Chinese, let alone English, neither of us were taking any chances. Nevertheless I gathered that Rackstall had managed — he thought — to convince his captors that he had come ashore from a surface vessel that had turned about and sailed away after landing him. That could, and I repeat could, mean that the Hampton Roads might be able to remain submerged and anonymous, but I didn’t propose to bank on that. The Chinese would almost certainly send out submarine hunters to scour the Gulf of Tongking with their Asdics and though they might not attack they would undoubtedly lie in wait. Things were far from propitious and I felt bloody furious with Rackstall, though I could imagine just how frustrated he had been. After some three hours’ flight, when we were not so far off the Yamchow region, Nodd got up from his seat and came aft towards us. He stood there, looking down at us, a faint smile on that flat face, the oversize head looming like a pale ballo
on, a sickly sight. Small man, big head, big mission. But just how big really? I thought of that massive parade of Chinese military strength. I thought about China’s developing nuclear potential. True, like other countries, China was said to be feeling the financial draught of so much military expenditure and she might see some advantage in using free sun, always provided the means of bringing it through the ozone layer were not as costly as the rest of the arms programme. But it seemed to me that China’s huge reserves of manpower allied to her armour and her nuclear missiles could, if she wished to attack the rest of the world, cause more damage more quickly than anything Nodd could do. When Nodd went on staring without speaking, I spoke myself. I told him what I was thinking: I laid it on thick that he was superfluous, that his bloody aerosol was too cumbersome, and when I had finished he spoke at last. He smiled and said simply, “Not so. There is no defence against it and its use involves no risk to the country that uses it.”