by Anthony Grey
Marshall Lin must have known that this was his death warrant. But still he would do nothing to resist his fate. He seemed to retreat even further into the shell of his resigned inner despair. His eyes saw less, his ears became more deaf to reason. His wife and son, now at their wits’ end, persuaded him at last to move for his health’s sake to the sea resort of Peitaiho, 200 miles from Peking on the Gulf of Tientsin. He agreed reluctantly and without enthusiasm, and at the end of the first week in September we all flew there from Peking in one of the four British-built Trident jet airliners which had been bought from Pakistan the previous year for the personal use of the leadership. Because of his family’s fears, Lin Li-kuo, from that time onward, wed the influence of his Air Force officer’s rank to keep the same aircraft standing by twenty-four hours a day in a state of constant readiness in case an emergency should require it.
His plan, which he confided to me, was to fly south to Chekiang where the commander most loyal to his father in the whole of the People’s Liberation Army would ensure their safety from intrigue. If necessary he would pilot the plane himself:
But long before, without our knowledge, the plotters had infiltrated their own personnel into key positions in the Peitaiho control tower and among the air and ground staff manning the Trident itself. And as the evening breeze from off the sea began to cool the exceptional heat of the day on 12th September, they struck.
Just as the sun was setting, Marshall Lin’s daughter ‘Tou-tou’, named affectionately at birth by her father after the beans he loved so well, was strolling disconsolately in the sand dunes beside the shore. She had wandered out on her own, deeply depressed and, like the rest of the family, beside herself with anxiety for her father. She was worried too about the effect his fate might have on all their lives and because of this, she scarcely looked where she stepped. She had taken to walking out alone at that same time each evening since our arrival in Peitaiho and this had obviously allowed our enemies to draw up a strategy.
Because of her distress she took little notice at first when a group of men appeared among the dunes, chasing a dog. As they drew nearer, however, she noticed that the men were shouting wildly and waving their arms. The dog was baying, too, in a most unnatural manner and she first began to be apprehensive when she saw it bounding towards her.
She turned and began to run. But the dog, a powerful animal of the kind used to guard military installations, caught her easily.
It sprang upon her back and she fell screaming to the ground with the dog snarling and tearing at her clothes. Before it was able to inflict more than superficial injuries, however, the crowd of army men and civilians giving chase arrived and drove the dog off
Tou-tou, shocked and hysterical, did not resist when one of them carrying a leather satchel with a red cross painted on it declared himself to be a doctor. He told her that the dog was believed to be rabid and that was why it was being pursued. The dog’s attack had left scratches and lacerations on her neck and arms and he drew a hypodermic from his bag, explaining that an early injection could protect her against a possibly fatal infection.
Her brother, Lin Li-kuo, had been attracted by the commotion and he ran to her side from the nearby grounds of Marshall Lin’s quarters. As he arrived breathless on the scene, the doctor was just withdrawing the needle of the empty hypodermic from his sister’s arm. At that moment a volley of shots rang out and the men pursuing the dog cheered as the animal staggered and fell dead in the surf on the beach. Before the bewildered Lin Li-kuo had fully realised what had happened, the doctor had persuaded him that he too should have an inoculation against possible infection, and he rolled up his sleeve on the spot.
Between them he and the ‘doctor’ carried the shocked Tou-tou back to the house. She was very pale and near to unconsciousness. Because of their great consternation, Marshall Lin and his wife also submitted without demur to the doctor’s immediate insistence that the entire household, family and domestic workers, should be inoculated too.
Marshall Lin sat, quietly at his desk with his eyes downcast as the needle punctured the slack, scrawny muscle of his left arm. He watched the ‘doctor’ press home the ounce or two of colourless liquid without knowing it would finally quench the long indomitable fighting spirit that had made him one of China’s greatest-ever warriors. Or perhaps deep within himself he did know—and still refused, because of his courage and his life-long loyalties to the ideals of the old Chairman Mao, to turn aside.
The details of this might have remained unknown to me if Marshall Lin’s young cook, Sao Li, had not taken fright as he waited in line in the study with the rest of the staff for his turn under the needle. He was a thin, squeamish youth, and after seeing Marshall Tin injected he suddenly took to his heels and ran from the house without knowing why.
He ran through the town to the Palace of Culture where Lao Kao and I were attending a performance of revolutionary music. We had gone there for an hour or two’s respite from the deep pall of unbearable despair that gripped the household. When Sao Li burst into the packed auditorium I recognised his scarecrow figure at once. He stood by the stage staring round uncertainly at sea of faces in the audience. In the unknowing alarm of his expression I at once read confirmation of my worst nightmares. I pulled Lao Kao to his feet and shouted and waved to the cook. When he saw us we all ran headlong from the hall, heedless of the commotion we caused.
I took the wheel of our car and drove at breakneck speed back to the house. My heart sank as Sao Li related what had happened. I cursed myself again and again in an agony of remorse for leaving Marshall Lin’s side. The cook could not explain why he had run out to fetch us. But I think he was as instinctively aware, just as we as outsiders were, that the ‘mad dog’ hue and cry was just the beginning of some terrible subterfuge.
Lao Kao and I did not exchange a single word. He sat white- faced beside me clutching the dashboard as we raced along the beach road. There was. no moon that night, and the surf roared loudly in the blind darkness beside the highway. I expected to find the house ringed with hostile troops and I had quickly become reconciled during that wild drive to giving myself under arrest to them in order to demonstrate my loyalty to Marshall Lin. But when we arrived the house stood dark and silent. At first I thought it was a trap. But once inside we found the rooms empty. Nothing had been removed, nothing packed, no preparations made for departure.
We stood in Marshall Lin’s study, the three of us, staring helplessly at one another. The house was silent as a grave. I picked up an empty syringe from the desk and held it in my hand. I would have jabbed its point into my own heart at that moment in my misery.
Then we heard a groaning from the rear of the house. I dashed through to the kitchen and found the wash amah slumped in a corner, her head in her hands. She tried to look up at us but she couldn’t focus her eyes because of the drug that had been injected into her. The cook shook her roughly and asked her where everybody had gone. Had they been taken away by force?
‘No, no,’ she sobbed. ‘Lin Tou-tou became hysterical. She began to suffer spasms and foam at the mouth. The doctor said she must go at once to Shanghai for treatment or she would die.’
I grabbed the amah by the shoulders. ‘How did they travel?’ I shouted at her.
The woman seemed on the point of losing consciousness. I slapped her sharply in the face and she opened he eyes with the shock. ‘The Trident! They are all flying to a hospital in Shanghai. They left half an hour ago.’ She groaned something unintelligible and collapsed against me, her face ashen.
At that moment we heard a footstep in the stone passageway behind us and turned to find three soldiers with rifles confronting us. Broad-bladed bayonets jutted from the ends of their weapons and I recognised this ‘badge’ of the special troops from Unit 8341, Chairman Mao’s crack personal bodyguard in the Chung Nan Hai
I leapt to my feet and backed away holding the now unconscious amah in front of me. I shouted to Lao Kao to make a dash for the door behind us. I
t was at the end of a narrow passageway beside the fireplace and from the corner of my eye I saw him fumble with the door for a moment then hurl himself out into the courtyard.
The unfortunate cook tried to flee with us but in his terror he stumbled clumsily against me in the passage and fell to the stone floor. The nearest of the three soldiers lunged forward and speared him through the chest with his bayonet. His shrieking rang loud and long in the hollow kitchen as I struggled backwards along the passage, still dragging the unconscious amah in my arms. Outside I heard Lao Kao start the car.
The soldiers kicked the cook’s body aside then rushed screaming towards me along the passageway. At the last moment I dropped the limp form of the amah at their feet and as they stumbled on one another I turned and dashed into the courtyard. Lao Kao already had the car on the move with the rear door swinging open and I flung myself inside. The gates hadn’t been closed and we roared out onto the coast road and headed for the airfield.
When we’d caught our breath we realised there were no signs of unusual traffic movement. Only the local peasants wobbled homewards on their bicycles along the tree-fringed roads and it was obvious that the plot had been launched in great stealth to avoid any risk of open dashes between army units that might provoke, a wider civil war. Our arrival at the house after the removal of the family by a trick had seemingly not been provided for.
The shock of our narrow escape under the soldiers’ bayonets gradually subsided—only to be replaced. by the acute fear that we might not reach the airfield before the Trident took off. We drove with our windows open listening anxiously for the faintest sound of engines from the night sky.
The airfield lay in a flat depression inland, and when we rose at last over the hill that brought it into view we saw the Trident was still standing in the brightly-lit taxiing area. But the orange dorsal light on its fuselage was flashing intermittently, indicating that it was about to depart.
It was approaching midnight as we raced down the bill towards the airfield. We could see that there were no more troops than usual on duty—but special signs had been erected under the floodlights by the gates. Sombre black skull and crossbones symbols had been painted on white boards and large black characters announced: ‘Danger—Prohibited Contagion Area— No Entry Without Medical Authorisation.’
For a moment I wondered if we were wrong. Could the explanation be a genuine one? At the gate an armed soldier I had never seen before barred our way. Through the windscreen I could see the ground staff starting to remove the gangway steps from the Trident out on the tarmac. Its engines were already roaring as it prepared to move off
The soldier shouted through the window that the airfield was dosed until the emergency medical flight carrying rabies victims had departed. With one hand I took from my pocket the pass proving my status as Marshall Tin’s personal aide—and with the other I snatched my service revolver from under the dashboard. I told the soldier I would accompany Marshall Lin on the flight despite the health hazard. And I ordered Lao Kao to drive onto the airfield.
The soldier let out a fierce oath and swung the muzzle of his rifle in through the window. But I knocked the barrel aside with my arm and shot him at point blank range through the chest. At the same instant Lao Kao sent the car surging forward, splintering the flimsy barrier and knocking down another guard. We accelerated fast across the tarmac and dosed on the Trident just as the rear hatch was swinging shut.
I recognised Comrade Ma, the cadre in charge of the ground staff A loyal officer of Lin Li-kuo, he was supervising the removal of the gangway. In the darkness I couldn’t be sure who the other men were. As the car screeched to a halt I concealed my revolver and leapt out, yelling for the steps to be replaced. Comrade Ma recognised me instantly and signalled for them to be rolled back against the Trident I ran to his side and whispered in his ear that there had been a plot against Marshall Lin. He gaped at me in astonishment. Then he looked round and saw Lao Kao racing towards the steps.
‘We’re going on board,’ I told him in a fierce whisper. ‘If we fail, try to stop it taking off. Enemies are all around us!’ I shifted my eyes mutely in the direction of the other ground staff.
Ma stared at me in disbelief ‘But Comrade Lin Li-kuo telephoned his orders! Then the ambulance came and took them all on board. Comrade Tou-tou was on a stretcher—’
Lao Kao was halfway up the steps. ‘Act now!’ I shouted in Ma’s face. Then I turned and sprinted after Lao Kao. He was hammering on the closed hatch as I rushed up the steps. When it began to swing open he drew his pistol and thrust it through the narrow slit, firing blindly into the interior of the plane. Then he widened the gap with his shoulder and disappeared inside.
The Trident, its engines roaring, began to roil forward as I reached the top platform. I stopped to draw my own revolver, then launched myself across a widening gap of several feet towards the open hatch of the moving aircraft.
PARIS, Thursday—A Gaullist deputy who returned from China yesterday told Agence France Presse that he had been assured in the Foreign Ministry that Lin Piao had not been in the plane shot down in Mongolia as was reported in some quarters. It was a political elimination—with the implication that Marshall Lin was not dead, the deputy said.
International Herald Tribune, 10 February 1972
7
A long crooked spear of hot ash tumbled from the end of his cigarette and splashed across the lapels of his crumpled jacket as Doctor Vincent Stillman stood up. He removed the glowing stub from his mouth and squashed it in the ash tray beside the lectern, covering his mouth with his other List at the same time to smother the sudden rasp of his smoker’s cough. When he’d recovered he pushed his thick-framed spectacles up the bridge of his nose and fixed his eyes reflectively on a point above and behind the heads of the seventeen members of the East Asia Study Group.
‘Have you any idea, gentlemen, what sort of velocity would be required to break a hair from the human head and drive it like a javelin into a foamed plastic seat cushion to a depth of two inches?’
The rush-hour roar of the traffic streaming past the pillared entrance of the British World Affairs Institute in Pall Mall carried faintly into the stifling, windowless basement lecture room during the long silence that followed. The front page of an evening newspaper on the lap of a prematurely bald diplomat front the Cabinet Office sitting in the front row, announced that it was now officially London’s hottest July of the century. The burning sun that was shrivelling the whole country had again pushed London’s afternoon shade temperature into the middle nineties—hotter, the newspaper’s headline shrieked, than Biarritz, Malta, Nice, Honolulu and Hong Kong.
But although some members of the Fast Asia Study Group had resorted to shirtsleeves, the Foreign Office men present, as though to emphasise their separate and exclusive experience, were stolidly defying the tropics that had now come to them on their home ground, by retaining their jackets and ties. Nevertheless, some faces in the audience were beginning to betray heat-induced signs of short temper and irritation as Vincent Stillman’s pause for rhetorical effect lengthened. Sensing this he leaned forward suddenly over the lectern. ‘Velocities, gentlemen, in the range of five thousand to ten thousand feet per second—and I think you’ll agree it would be difficult to conceive anything other than an explosive event being capable of producing velocities of that order.’
Richard Scholefield, who was chairing the meeting, glanced uneasily along the platform to where Yang sat beside Stillman. He wore now the high-buttoned tunic suit which Communist Chinese cadres since 1949 had made their own official uniform, and he was scanning the attendance roster that he had insisted on receiving from Scholefield before starting the meeting. It listed professors and doctors from Oxford and Cambridge, the London School of Oriental and African Studies, La Trobe, Australia, Windsor Ontario, senior members of the International Institute for Strategic Studies and a smattering of London-based journalists specialising in China as well as Foreign Office and Cabinet Of
fice diplomats. Some members had not bothered to conceal their irritation when they arrived to find Scholefield declining to answer questions about the nature of the speakers. He had concealed the tension that had built up during a long afternoon on the telephone in the convenor’s office behind a sharp brusqueness of manner, and now he sat propping up his head with one hand, keeping his eyes averted from the faces in front of him.
Only one name was not on the list. Nina had insisted on attend ·in as Scholefield’s guest after he confided the nature of Yang’s threat. She sat a little apart from the main body of members at the end of the front row nearest the door. She had dressed soberly in a loose grey dress which concealed her figure and had tied a matching band of the same material demurely around her hair. She sat staring at the floor in front of her ‘with her arms folded, trying not to let her anxiety communicate itself to those around her.
‘To people who do my job, it’s a well known fact that the best places to look for the tiny fragments of metal sent flying in explosions are seat cushions—and deceased human bodies.’ Stillman smiled vaguely round the room at nobody in particular. ‘Since a corpse wouldn’t do anything to sweeten the already somewhat foetid atmosphere in here, I’ve brought along an example of the former.’
He reached under the platform dais and lifted up a dust- coloured slab of foamed plastic. ‘Incidentally, gentlemen, it was much hotter than this in Vietnam where I once spent a couple of weeks examining fifty-seven bodies for fragments of metal. The refrigerators broke down and they were all decaying beautifully long before I’d finished.’ Stillman smothered another cough and looked back absently at the plastic cushion in his hand as if he’d suddenly forgotten why he was holding it. ‘But of course that’s another story.’
Scholefield started in his seat as the door at the side of the platform swung open suddenly. Several members glanced up irritably at Harvey Ketterman as he stood in the doorway, widening his eyes in a silent, theatrical grimace of self-recrimination. He cringed bent double to a rear seat, took off his jacket and mopped his brow. He held up another copy of the evening paper. ‘Only hell’s hotter today, Mr. Chairman. We’re dose to your famous English “sticky end”, now, I’d guess. My taxi boiled over on the way here! Deepest apologies.’
