The Mandarin Cypher

by Adam Hall

  The damn thing was nosing inshore, losing way, some kind of police boat, I hadn't seen it because the binoculars had been stuck in my eyes, the engines dying to a slow boil, three smart-looking officers in the stern and watching me but not making any sign in case I was the wrong man. I went along the breakwater like a monkey, jumping from pile to pile and trying to keep my balance along the horizontal timbers. The launch was standing off, quite a big vessel, twin screws, couldn't come in any closer, take time to lower the boat, it was up to me, really.

  One of them grabbed me as I fell aboard.

  'Can you move off?'

  'Are you Mr. Wing? We received -'

  'Can you move off immediately? Look, you see that boat on the horizon?'

  His head swung like a perched hawk's when it sights prey. He was a neat young Chinese, thin as a string, all cap-peak and cheekbones, his eyes locked on the distant sea.

  'You wish me to follow?'

  'If it's not too late.'

  He moved a hand in a signal to the Bo ‘sun and nearly had me in the water as the stern dipped and the deck lurched, sending me against the rails. He was calling something to me above the roar of the engines.

  'What?' I shouted.

  'Are you Mr. Wing?'

  'Yes.'

  'Captain Liu Tse-tung, Narcotics Division.'

  The wind was whipping at our faces now and he led me into the cabin. I caught the scent right away and he saw my expression, giving a quick laugh.

  'Fifty kilos,' he said. A couple of the bags had burst and the stuff had spilled across the top of the locker. 'We were taking it in when we had the signal about you.'

  'When was that?'

  'At 05.40. We were north of Green Island.'

  'You didn't waste any time.'

  Peripheral anxiety: Nora Tewson might conceivably note that two minutes after the launch had left the hotel mooring a police boat had put to sea at full speed half a mile north along the shore. We didn't carry any markings visible at that distance but we had radar and we didn't look like a cabin cruiser. Nothing to be done about it: ignore.

  There were some charts framed under glass on the bulkhead and I looked at them. Hydrographic Department, Hong Kong Approaches. The relevant sheet was No. 341: Islands South of Lantau.

  'What's your bearing, Captain Liu?'

  He looked at the compass. 'Two-four-oh.'

  We were heading roughly south-west, passing the north coast of Lamma Island by Pak Kok Point and moving into the West Lamma Channel. I'd assumed that a Pekin-based operation would take the launch north-west towards the South China seaboard but I was wrong, unless it was going to round Lantau from the south and head north after leaving Hong Kong territorial waters. We could see its dark blob through the windscreen, larger now and growing clearer. The sun was almost directly behind us and still only two diameters high, right in their eyes if they looked astern.

  'Are we flat out?'

  'I am sorry?'

  'Are we going at full speed?'

  'Yes.'

  'All I want is to see where they go. Do what you can to stay up sun of them.'

  'To stay-?'

  'Stay between them and the sun.'

  'Ah yes, understand.'

  It occurred to me that London had taken so bloody long because they'd had to screen the whole of the Hong Kong police through local agents in place before they could give me a boat crew I could trust: Macklin had told me to use utmost care in approaching the police or the Special Branch. Egerton must have worked his chilblains to the bone getting me this toy, it was a shame.

  In ten minutes we began passing junks on their way out to the fishing banks and I looked at the chart again. Lamma was to port and falling astern, with Cheung Chau Island coming up on the other side. The deck had been tilting a bit and I took a look at the compass. We'd begun heading a few points more southerly at 235 degrees. Five minutes later Captain Liu spoke again.

  'You wish me still follow?'

  'Yes. Why?'

  'We are leaving territorial waters now.'

  'What difference does that make?'

  'Only if you wish me to put a shot across bows, or go aboard. We have no more authority now.'

  He was looking slightly disappointed, and I thought what a dangerous world it was.

  'They must not see us, Captain Liu. They must remain totally unaware of our presence. Now is that understood?'

  'Oh yes, understood.' He turned away slightly, probably embarrassed, peering with great concentration through the windscreen. I suppose if you're a young ambitious skipper of a police boat you spend a lot of your time looking for an excuse to blow someone out of the water.

  There wasn't a lot of shipping about, but enough to give us a bit of cover. Liu went to stand by the Bo ‘sun and we altered course twice in the next ten minutes as he brought us almost parallel with the launch, keeping between it and the sun. Then he ordered half speed.

  07.03.

  'What's that thing?' I asked him.

  'An oil rig.'

  'Who does it belong to?'

  'Communist China.'

  I watched the distant shape of the launch slowing towards the oil rig, then looked at the chart again. The date on Sheet 341 was 1972, but someone had marked the rig in ink later, slightly west of Longitude 114 by east, Latitude 22 by north, some two miles south of the San-men Island group.

  'Stop both,' Liu ordered.

  The bubbling of the exhaust died to silence, and we began drifting, suddenly isolated on the expanse of the sea. Water slapped sometimes under the stern, and a cable strained at its cleat somewhere forward of the radio mast. The sun was already hot, and threw an oily shadow on the starboard side. Captain Liu stood without moving, his cap-peak set like a pointer at the horizon. The superstructure of the oil rig stood like a splinter against the sky, and within five minutes the shape of the launch had merged with it. I took another look through the 7 X 50's, but we were still too distant to see much detail.

  'All right,' I told Liu.

  'You wish to return?'

  'Yes.' I got him over to the charts. 'Head well to the north here, above Sha Wan, and come down the coast, keeping as close to it as you can.'

  He spoke to the Bo ‘sun, and as we turned and got under way I stood looking at Chart No. 341. Mandarin was still running, and we now had a target zone centre: 114 X220, South China Sea.

  In the first two seconds I forced a yoshida on him but he knew this one and broke it and his foot razored the air edge-on, fast and powerful and deadly but missing me and bringing down some of the jars. They crashed to the floor and my scalp rose but there was nothing I could do. The man was my first concern, not the reptiles, because he was trying to kill me and they would only attack in fright. We rolled and glass crunched under me and he gained a lock and I think it would have finished me but I was lying half across one of the snakes and it began striking at my arm, again and again, and I had to do something because I couldn't stand them, they nauseated me, again and again, coiling and releasing, its scales livid and the tiny black eyes glistening and the jaws gaping at right angles in a regular rhythm as it coiled, released and struck, coiling again as the pain burned in my arm.

  It made me feel sick and I had to do something because there were some others free too, slithering around among the broken glass. They'd send me mad if I couldn't get away so I used my other knee and brought it against him in a jack-knife drive that would have been quite useless without my horror of these things to give it force, and the hold eased and came on again and then broke and I tried the only trick I had, the third movement of the toka, going straight in without the first and second preliminaries to open up the target, but he took it and waited, knowing I didn't have the leverage to make the kill. For nearly a second we lay locked and immobile, one body, one two-headed eight-limbed freak with its fierce internal energies at variance and on the point of blowing it apart as the electro-chemical forces sought to regain stability.

  I didn't know anything about
him. There had only been Chiang here when I'd walked into the snake shop, and at first he'd acknowledged me with a slight nod; then his eyes had shifted quickly to look past me, over my shoulder, and I had moved. There wasn't time to do anything consciously: in extreme danger the organism cedes control to the primitive brain, and the cortex is required only to compute data and supply intelligence. Of the several hundred thousand facts, impressions and implications, these were salient: I was presently listed for elimination by an alien network heavily infiltrating the field; there was alarm in Chiang's eyes; in the Orient the bare hand is the traditional weapon; Chiang's eyes had shifted only once, so that there was probably only one man behind me; my hope of survival in these circumstances (unarmed combat, close confines, one adversary) lay more in a blind lightning move than in a considered and organized attack. In the fifth of a second it would take me to turn and consider the ideal defence he could fell me with a hand-blade to the neck.

  So I'd gone in low, spinning and reaching for his legs and finding them, bringing him off balance and chopping at the kneecap to paralyse, since it was the first target presented. If there'd been a mistake, if there'd been no intention on his part to attack, I would have known it at once and could have withdrawn, leaving him only bruised. But there hadn't been any mistake: I'd known from the stance of his feet that I'd caught him halfway through a blow designed to kill.

  During this second of suspended time there was near-silence around us as we lay locked together in mortal intimacy on the fragments of glass. I had managed to shift my weight and roll sideways a little so as to bring one elbow down across the small scaly head, crushing it by degrees until its movement stopped. A heavy slithering came from somewhere close and I wished they weren't so quiet, I wished they'd scream in their fright or bang into something, to take my mind away from their oily leglessness.

  Something else moved now: Chiang. I didn't know anything about Chiang either. He ran a safe-house for the Bureau with global transmission facilities and had no love for the mainland Chinese but that was all I knew. I didn't know what he was prepared to do for me at this moment; and it would be fatal to believe he'd do anything at all.

  I think he was going to shut the door of the shop, and in part of my vision field I could see the faces of two boys peering in from the street, perhaps wondering at the crash of glass just now; but this street, at this hour, was filled with its own din and probably no one else had heard.

  The man on the floor with me moved. I couldn't do anything immediately because this new advantage was his and we both knew it and we'd felt it coming: one of the hazards of close combat is sweat, and for the past few seconds it had been springing on our skin, most critically on the fingers of my left hand that were gripping his wrist. He had felt them begin to slip and so had I and we were both ready but he was faster and the air brushed my face as he chopped hard for the temple and missed and chopped again and tried for a third time, too greedy or too impatient, spending his strength and letting me work for a throw and letting me get it, a blinding light in my head as I called for more force than I had, pain under my palm as broken glass went in, the throw succeeding to the point of taking him off balance and leaving him vulnerable, not defenceless but open to anything I could do with my right hand. There wasn't a lot of opportunity because he was spinning away from me through the terminal phase of the throw, his shoulders smashing against the shelf of jars and sending them down,- his face passing for the first time across my field of vision: a youth with thick black brows and flattened eyes, a Chinese from the north or north-east, Mongolian or Manchurian. Glass flew as the jars hit the floor and a black and yellow trickle ran, forming a coil and rearing, but I blocked my mind and tried to concentrate totally on the need to survive.

  Forebrain processing was taking over the gross elements of the task while the primitive creature conditioned itself, the nerve signals triggering the medulla and pouring adrenalin into the bloodstream, the pulse rate and blood pressure rising as sugar flowed in to feed the muscles, the senses increasing in their refinement so that the input of data should receive almost instantaneous assessment by the cortex.

  But time moved slowly and at present the overall data was derived from a scene that was near stationary: the youth was still reacting from the momentum of the throw, his head jerking as his shoulder bounced from the shelf. Somewhere at the edge of the scene was Chiang, slamming the door.

  Forebrain. The youth was coming back in a rebound from the shelf and I could take him with a single bracket throw if I waited long enough:' it would need a tenth of a second. His face had blenched and I thought it was only partly because his blood had receded to supply the internal organs: his shoulder had smashed fairly hard into the edge of the shelf and the muscle would be in trauma. I went on waiting, letting him come, working out what I wanted to do and planning the best way to do it. The bracket was still viable, right hand in a swinging chop at the nape of his neck to add force to his own momentum, left hand bunched and driven upwards into his abdomen. Supplementary moves: my left knee to his groin if the bracket spun him towards me, a chop at his shoulder to increase the degree of paralysis made by his impact with the edge of the shelf.

  It was getting near time and he was already working for some kind of initiative but we were too close for foot-blows and he wasn't moving his left hand or arm: they were hanging from the shoulder and I knew why his face was white. The heel of his right hand was coming up but he wouldn't be able to make the blow because his right foot was too close for support. Then it was time and I put the bracket on him, connecting but not strongly enough for a finish because my foot was slipping on something and robbing me of the support I needed. He buckled over the abdomen blow and my hand hit iron muscle and there wasn't anything I could do about it because the bracket was on and he was still alive and very active, hooking at my leg and swinging a close fast throw that turned me and sent me down. He could have done it then because my spine was exposed and he still had the strength in one hand but what he didn't realize was that he was throwing me back into that bloody snakepit and I wasn't going to have it.

  The forebrain shut off almost completely and the organism took over and I was vaguely aware of the action being triggered by the emotional syndrome: horror, desperation, fury -each emotion contributing to the next and powering the physical body with speed and strength otherwise unavailable. No science, no cerebration, no technique. Blind rage. In this way murder is often done, and the well-known statement is heard later in court: I don't know what happened. Something just came over me.

  I think he reacted twice, but nothing remained in my memory except an impression of heat, redness and a form of unearthly joy. It probably took two seconds, three at the most. I wasn't on the floor anymore because that was the place where the organism had been determined not to go: it had been quite adamant about this because it had known that if it fell down there among those things again it would go mad.

  I was standing in a crouch with my back against the wooden counter. He was on the floor, facing upwards with his eyes still open. Blood was dripping from my hand where the glass had gone in. It was dripping into one of his eyes and I moved my hand away, thinking vaguely that if it went on dripping there he wouldn't be able to see, though of course it didn't matter what went into his eyes now.

  It was very quiet except for the sawing of my breath. I didn't hear anything but sensed a movement to my right, and looked up at the man sitting on the stairs holding the gun.

  Chapter Eight

  555

  'Put that bloody thing away,' I told him.

  I meant it. I wasn't joking.

  He'd had me worried for a second, till I'd recognized him. I'd thought it was more trouble and I wasn't ready for it.

  He was Ferris.

  'Tried to tread on you,' he said, 'did they?'

  He gave a wintry little smile, putting the gun away.

  Ferris had directed me in Hanover, last time. He was sitting on the steep flight of stairs, thin
and sandy and owlish, an eccentric don, his hair all over the place, what was left of it.

  'Why didn't you do it?' I asked him, still annoyed at the start he'd given me.

  'You wouldn't keep still.'

  I suppose he didn't want to make a noise, either, not that sort of noise. And he might have got Chiang in the leg or somewhere. He would only have done it if he'd seen I couldn't do it myself: that was Ferris, he always made you bloody well work for your living.

  My breath went on sawing. I'd used an awful lot of muscle in the last few seconds and I needed the oxygen back and my lungs were going like bellows. When I could I said:

  'Chiang. What kind of venom is it?'

  He didn't answer. He was standing quietly looking down at the boy on the floor, his expression benign. It could have been Chiang who'd done something at the last minute, thinking I couldn't manage: he was a belt, the briefing said. Maybe I'd ask Ferris. Or maybe I didn't want to know.

  'Chiang.' My nerves were still sensitive.

  His head snapped up.

  'What kind of venom have these things got?'

  'Venom?'

  'Poison - come on, I want to know if it's -'

  'No poison.' He shook his head. 'Snake not venomous, no. Law not allow, in shops.' He took a step towards me and dragged my sleeve back, his fingers very strong. There were fang marks all over the place and I tried not to think about it. 'No trouble,' he said. 'It happen sometimes with me too, is like little nails.' He called suddenly in the direction of the stairs. 'Chih-chi!' As he moved impatiently towards the stairs I caught the smell of the incense that clung to his gown. I straightened my back slowly, letting the nerves explore the bones and ligaments. There didn't seem to be anything wrong, just the hand burning, and the punctures in the arm.