by Anthony Grey
HSINHUA (New China News Agency), 28 July 1976
28
Scholefield heard the clank of his heavy ankle chains before Yang himself came into sight. A moment later he appeared round a bend in the tunnel, shuffling painfully forward a foot or two at a time, his wrists manacled in front of him. His head was bent forward, his eyes cast down watching the ground. The hollow-chested cadre and the two guards followed dose behind.
Scholefield stepped aside to let him pass. The close-cropped head of the Chinese remained bowed as he moved slowly on down the tunnel He did not raise his eyes to look at Scholefield or Tan Sui-ling as he edged past them.
The four guards at the archway halted Yang with a shouted order and immediately began searching him. Scholefield watched them rip at his jacket, pushing and pulling him roughly back and forth between them. One of the younger guards spat contemptuously in his face .
‘The Chairman is resting,’ said Tan Sui-ling crisply, turning to address the hollow-chested cadre. ‘He is to receive us again after he has talked with the prisoner Yang. You will escort Scholefield to his quarters and post the guard outside for his security!’ She turned to check on the progress of the search on Yang. ‘I will remain here to conduct the prisoner into the Chairman’s presence.’
The cadre nodded. He motioned to Scholefield to follow him and set off up the slope of the tunnel. Scholefield hesitated, looking back at Yang. He saw the guards stand back respectfully as Tan Sui-ling approached. She snapped orders to two of them and walked on stiff-backed, through the archway. Yang raised his head sharply as she passed him. For a fleeting instant his eyes lost their defeated, hangdog look and he gazed fiercely at her retreating back until she disappeared through the arch. Then immediately he dropped his eyes, bunching once more into a submissive crouch as he shuffled forward between two guards.
Scholefield’s escort nudged him roughly with their rifle butts, and gestured impatiently in the opposite direction. Reluctantly he turned away and started up the long slope. They climbed in silence for three or four minutes and when they reached the top, the hollow-chested cadre turned off into a dimly-lit accommodation tunnel lined with numbered doors on either side. They walked on for a further quarter of a mile then halted outside a door without a number. The cadre produced a key, unlocked the door and stood back, motioning Scholefield inside.
The floor and walls of the room were rough, undecorated concrete. A tier of metal-framed bunks stood against one wall and there was a plain wooden table and four chairs in the centre. In a smaller, connected room Scholefield could see a sink with taps and a lavatory pedestal. The rooms were lit by a buzzing fluorescent tube fixed to the ceiling. On the table stood a large thermos flask decorated with red Chinese characters spelling out a quotation from the Collected Works of Mao Tse-tung.
‘You will remain here until you are summoned again!’ The cadre waved towards the flask on the table. ‘There is boiled water to drink. The two guards will be stationed outside. I shall lock the door—for your own security.’
He went out quickly and slammed the flimsy, wooden door behind him. Scholefield heard the key turn in the lock. There was a murmured burst of conversation between the cadre and the two guards, then silence. Scholefield looked at his wristwatch. It was exactly three thirty a.m. He pulled out one of the rough wooden chairs from the table and sat down. He took out his notebook, opened it on the table and closed his eyes for a long moment. Then he plucked a pen from his pocket and began writing rapidly.
* * *
The ten thousand seats in the main assembly auditorium of the Great Hall of the People stood silent and empty as Wang Tung-hsing hurried across the rear of the red-draped podium. He was taking a short cut from his office to the little-used chamber reserved for formal meetings of the Standing Committee of the Party Politburo. The auditorium was almost in darkness. Only the twin spotlights, lodged against the high ceiling to illuminate the giant coloured portrait of the Chairman hanging above the podium, were lit.
Wang came out onto a high, broad, marble-floored corridor, turned left and stopped outside a closed door guarded by two 8341 soldiers with fixed bayonets on their rifles. Even though they were standing motionless, beads of sweat stood out on their faces in the suffocating heat. As he lifted his left hand to knock Wang glanced at his watch. It was three-thirty two. He rapped once crisply on the door and entered without waiting for a response.
Although the four men and one woman seated round the table inside looked up at him warily as he entered, no greetings were exchanged. He walked briskly towards them and dealt five bulky, buff-coloured files quickly round the table onto their empty blotters. While they were still in the act of opening them he began, talking rapidly. ‘Reports are continuing to proliferate from all quarters of the north east. The communication systems of the public security apparatus are fast becoming clogged by the reports. In addition to the animal behaviour anomalies, fluctuations in the telluric current, changes in the radon content of well water and other macro-seismic phenomena all point to the same conclusion.’ He turned and hurried to one wall covered with large-scale sectional maps of the People’s Republic of China. He reached up and jabbed a finger onto a map of the northern provinces half way between Peking and the Yellow Sea coast. ‘The epicentre could be somewhere here—and time is running out fast.’ He glanced down again at his watch. The minute hand had crept round to three thirty-five.
He looked up to say something further but his gaze lighted suddenly on a tray of glasses and bottled mineral water on a side table. He waddled quickly across the room, twisted the stopper from a bottle and emptied its contents into a glass. When the last drop of liquid had dripped out, he turned the bottle upside down on the table, balancing it on its slender neck. He looked up at the five members of the Standing Committee to find them watching him intently. ‘May I suggest that if the bottle falls of its own accord,’ he said quietly, ‘we evacuate the building immediately— but go outside at ground level Do not use the underground tunnel route to Chung Nan Hai’
There was an intense silence in the room for a moment.
‘It is not the most scientific instrument for predicting an earthquake and it does not give a great deal of advance warning— but it is one the peasants in my home province have used for many centuries.’
‘What instructions did the Chairman give to the man who has been his beloved bodyguard since those romantic far-off days in the Yenan caves?’ The sharp, sarcastic question came from the bespectacled woman. There was a sneer on her face and her voice was half scornful, half resentful
Wang walked slowly back to the table, his face stretched tight with anxiety. ‘The Chairman refuses to be moved from Peking. He declines to flee before what he calls “the omens of pigs and rats”.’ He directed his words at the tabletop, avoiding the eyes of all those watching him. ‘I urged him at least to remove himself from the tunnels to ground level. But he insists absolutely on remaining where he is.’
‘Perhaps he is too busy receiving clandestine foreign guests—’ Wang looked up sharply. ‘—and shackled prisoners in clanking chains.’ Her eyes glittered behind her spectacles and she smirked in triumph when she saw the surprise on his face. ‘It seems his confidences with Comrade Tan, his empress of foreign intelligence, are withheld even from his old and trusted chief bodyguard.’
Wang drew a deep breath and with an obvious effort directed his gaze into the empty air above their heads. ‘The Chairman intimated that he was prepared to permit his authority to be lent to whatever emergency action this meeting may decide—even mass evacuation. The issue is now extremely urgent, in my view.’ He glanced down quickly at his watch once more. ‘With your permission I shall now absent myself from your presence for a moment to allow you to deliberate in confidence on your decision.’
Without waiting for a response, he turned and hurried from the room. As soon as he had closed the door behind him, to the amazement of the two sweating guards outside, he broke into a lumbering, fiat-footed
run down the centre of the broad corridor.
The uniformed general, standing by the leaden door a hundred feet beneath the foundations of the Forbidden City, stared hard at the hunched figure of Yang as he shuffled into the light of the outer vestibule, dragging his ankle shackles noisily across the concrete floor. Tan Sui-ling stood aside waiting, her chin held high, watching him approach with a coolly contemptuous expression in her eyes.
Yang hesitated as he reached the edge of the carpeted area, but didn’t raise his eyes from the floor. The general barked an order for him to advance and gestured for the two guards behind him to remain where they were. ‘He has been given a thorough body search?’ The two guards nodded vigorously in affirmation, shouting their replies dutifully in unison.
When Yang was only three or four feet from him, the general ordered him to halt. Drawing his pistol from its holster, be stepped forward and grabbed the chain linking Yang’s handcuffs with his free hand. He tugged at it roughly, checking its strength, then shouted at Yang to raise his arms in front of his face. He pressed the pistol into his ribs and inspected every link of the wrist manacles individually, holding them inches from his eyes. When he was satisfied, he barked another order at Yang to lift his arms higher, then dropped to one knee and jabbed the muzzle of the pistol roughly into his groin while he inspected the steel bands around his ankles. Again he tested each link of the chains joining them, as he had done with the handcuffs, before rising to his feet once more.
He looked coldly across at Tan Sui-ling. For a moment their eyes locked in a stare of mutual hostility. Then with slow deliberate movements, the general unhooked the key chained to his left wrist and inserted it into the lock. Before turning it be hesitated and glanced back over his shoulder once more at Yang, as though beset by a last moment of uncertainty. Yang, however, was still standing with shoulders bunched, staring down at his shackled wrists.
The general eyed him in silence, then as though making up his mind finally, slipped his pistol back into its holster. He unlocked the door with a quick movement then turned and stepped to one side so that Yang could shuffle past him. Tan Sui-ling followed him through the doorway without looking left or right, and together they disappeared slowly into the gloom inside. After a last glance at Tan’s retreating back the general closed the door and locked it carefully behind them.
MENLO PARK, CALIFORNIA, Wednesday— No foreshocks were recorded by American instruments here before today’s massive earthquake in China which registered 8.2 on the open-ended Richter scale—worse than the shock which destroyed San Francisco in 1906.
Reuters, 28 July 1976
29
The sweat running down his forehead into his eyes forced Scholefield to stop writing. He laid his pen aside and wiped the back of his hand across his face. As he did so he caught sight of his watch. It was three-forty. The only sound in the room was the buzz of the faulty fluorescent tube in the ceiling. He stared round at the unrelieved greyness of the concrete walls for several seconds then unscrewed the plastic cup on the thermos flask and filled it to the brim. But the boiling water scalded his mouth and he flung the beaker against the wall with a curse. He watched it fall to the floor and roll slowly into a corner before turning back to his open notebook. He ran his eye over what he had written and for a moment his brow furrowed in thought. Then slowly his eyes dosed and he began massaging both temples wearily with the tips of his fingers. He sat like this for perhaps a minute, his shoulders hunched around his ears.
Then suddenly his head jerked up out of his hands. He rose to his feet, knocking the chair backwards with a crash, and stood staring wide-eyed at the blank wall in front of him. But he saw nothing of the grey concrete. Instead, for the first time, in a star- burst of realisation, his memory was matching the retina-image of the sudden blaze of savage hope hi Yang’s eyes a few minutes before as he gazed at Tan Sui-ling’s retreating back in the depths of the tunnel. Greatly magnified in intensity, it had mirrored what he now knew was the fierce joy of recognition, quickly stifled, that he had first seen in the shadow of the Soho kiosk! Li Tai-chu and Li Kwei-min! Brother and sister? Cousins? It didn’t matter which, the intimacy of intent in their fleeting facial signals was indisputable.
Other elusive inconsistencies tumbled into place with a rush like a picked lock yielding of a sudden all its secret resistance. The false Russian attempts to kill Yang at the Institute and the mortuary that made it seem so highly desirable for him to be saved by the White House for Peking, the otherwise senseless killing of Ketterman when he had just stumbled across this logic —they only made sense if the folios and the revelation in London of a plan to kill Mao bad not been ends in themselves, but the very means of moving the assassin who had announced his own intent into place for his kill! Scholefield shook his head quickly in wonderment. And the final fake confession in the torture cellar had taken Yang over die last barrier into his victim’s presence. Desire for revenge by Lin’s admirers had been harmonised by the Kremlin with their ambition to thwart the radical successors to Mao. Evidence implicating them would no doubt be pressed on the Western outsider whom the Chairman had been persuaded to summon by his murderess! Yang’ had presumably concealed his real identity to avoid identification with his cousin- but in a weak moment, haunted by the fear of an anonymous death before the plan had been carried through, had he scribbled his real name on the Ch’ing scroll in London?
Scholefield looked round frantically, picked up the fallen chair and darted across the room. He swung it wildly against the flimsy wooden panels of the door and let out a high, keening scream. One of the upper panels shattered under his assault, and outside in sudden dose-up he saw the shocked, alarmed faces of his two guards. Scholefield backed off quickly, then ran a few quick steps before jumping into a two-footed yoko-tobi-geri which shattered the remaining panels of the flimsy door. He landed on all fours in the tunnel outside in a storm of splintering wood, sending one of the guards sprawling to the concrete floor under the impact of his rush. He flailed the shattered chair-back at the head of the other guard, stunning him, and was running fast along the tunnel fifty yards away before either of them scrambled to their feet.
* * *
Yang did not allow himself the luxury of raising his bowed head until he had hobbled as far as the edge of the circle of light cast by the single lamp. Then he looked up for the first time at the shrivelled, waxen face sunk into the snowy pillow. His shackles ceased to rattle as he stopped and stared, transfixed. The eyes of the man he had come so far to kill fixed on him with a feverish intensity as he raised his head from the pillow on the wasted stalk of his neck.
‘This is the loyal servant of Lin Piao.’ Tan Sui-ling made the introduction in a flat detached voice, giving no emotional weight or colour to any of her words. As she spoke she moved quietly forward until she was standing between the couch and the emergency call button on the edge of the desk.
The burning eyes of the dying man swivelled frantically in their sockets and he gazed at her for a moment in stupefied disbelief. She had deliberately omitted the ritual adjectives of vituperation that should have accompanied any reference to Lin! His lower jaw sagged suddenly and a dribble of saliva ran out of his mouth and down his chin. The pitiless mask of her features had confirmed for him beyond any doubt the shock of betrayal After a moment of total silence he turned his head and stared at Yang as though hypnotized.
‘For five long years in the wastes of Mongolia and in my Moscow “prison” I dreamed of this moment’ Yang whispered the words In a shaking voice ‘I served Marshall Lin Piao loyally for many years and was powerless to prevent you destroying him, as you destroyed a host of other great men loyal to you and your ideals.’ His voice died away and his face contorted as though in pain. He raised his manacled hands and clenched his fists. ‘I have come here not to seek atonement but to avenge the countless good men of China on whom you have rained ruin and destruction.’
The chief night supervisor of the Party Communications Centre in the
Great Hall of the People looked up in alarm as Wang Tung-hsing sent the door crashing back on its hinges and lunged past him towards the nearest telephone switchboard. He ran across and asked if he could be of assistance but Wang ignored him, snatched an operator’s headset from a hook beside the board and dialled a single digit His shoulders rose and fell convulsively as he fought to regain his breath.. When the general outside the leaden door came on the line be had controlled his breathing sufficiently to speak and he tried to snake his enquiry sound casual. ‘How is the Chairman?’
‘He is rested, now,’ said the general warily. ‘He interrupted his talk with the foreigner in order to rest.’
Wang’s face twisted into a scowl ‘Is be alone?’
‘No, the personally authorised audience of the prisoner Yang and Comrade Tan of the Central External Liaison Department has just begun.’ The general paused and his voice took on a faint note of alarm. ‘You were aware of these privately-arranged visits, Comrade—’
Wang’s reply was barely audible. ‘Of course.’ He closed his eyes. ‘Permit no further visits of any kind. I shall be there in less than two minutes.’ He flung the head-set to the floor and turned and dashed out into the passageway.
The clamour of the two guards shouting for him to halt echoed along the confined passageway behind him as Scholefield came out at the top of the steeply pitching ramp leading to the maximum security areas under the Forbidden City. He tugged the letter from his pocket as he ran, and when he rounded a curve in the downward tunnel he slowed and held it out towards two guards manning the first wooden barrier. ‘I have been ordered to return immediately!’ he yelled in Chinese, pointing beyond the barrier.
The same soldiers had been on duty when he. was escorted through earlier and they recognised him and the letter immediately. They hesitated for a moment and Scholefield, taking advantage of their indecision, accelerated past them, hurdled the low barrier and rushed on down the slope.
