The Mandarin Cypher

by Adam Hall

  It hadn't taken a minute, but it had seemed longer. There wasn't time to plan anything elegant because once they got me inside that bloody place I wouldn't come out again alive and they'd have a go art getting the whole lot before I was too far gone to say anything. There wasn't anything useful I could tell them about Mandarin: we wanted to reach Tewson and we weren't even in the access phase and they knew a hell of a lot more about him than we did. But they'd try for general background: what was my cell, what network, what bases, so forth, and if they worked on me for long enough - I mean for months, not hours — they might get a picture of the Bureau and even some of the organizational features. Names wouldn't mean anything: they were all code. The thing about having the 9 suffix after your name in the dossier is that although it means you've proved yourself reliable under torture it doesn't mean they won't start doing things to you one day that'll finally break you down.

  I don't like pain any more than anyone else does.

  My hands were on the wheel where they'd put them and the thin one turned the ignition key to start the engine and then told me to drive off.

  'Go now,' he said, and I thought how Chinese it sounded, even though he spoke in English.

  So the first thing to do was blow my cover.

  'I can be quite useful to you,' I said.

  The thing that surprised them was that I said it in Cantonese.

  They'd been half-sure I was the man they wanted: it was only when they couldn't find a gun that they began having serious doubts, and even then they'd thought it was worth while taking me along to the interrogators. Now they had all they needed: I could speak Cantonese and I'd been concealing the fact, on top of which I'd told them I could be useful to them.

  They all three started to talk at once and the thin one told the other two to shut up. He leaned forward with his arm across the top of the facia, turned sideways to watch me.

  'You are from London?'

  'Yes.'

  'Your name is Clive Wing?'

  'Yes.'

  His Cantonese wasn't much better than mine but we got along.

  The man behind me was pressing the gun into my neck so hard that I couldn't sit up straight. They were excited again now, ready for the execution but the thin one had a certain basic intelligence and thought I could conceivably be more use alive than dead.

  The thing I needed was speed.

  'Drive to the Bank of China,' he said.

  'If that's what you want. But I've told you, I can be useful to you.'

  The engine was ticking over.

  'You will tell them at our headquarters,' he nodded, his tone cocky and his whole attitude like that of a master-spy running an entire operation. 'I shall arrange full interrogation.'

  I kept quiet for a couple of seconds and then got the right degree of reluctance into the tone. 'All right, but I can put one of my agents into your hands, if you'll be lenient with me later.'

  I looked at my watch.

  'What agent?'

  'We're working together. But we'll have to hurry because we had a rendezvous at 20.00 hours and he'll leave if I don't show up.'

  It was terribly basic stuff and I felt a bit embarrassed. The hit men of any network are never much more than muscle, but these were from a state where most of the population had been trained to regard the life of the ant as Utopia. If I tried any kind of subtlety with them we'd get bogged down in misunderstanding and all I needed was speed: speed in terms of actual miles per hour. Also I needed a valid reason for hurrying.

  I looked at my watch again and the gun poked harder into the neck muscle, sending my head forward, and one of the men behind me laughed but the thin one told him to shut up.

  'Where is your rendezvous?'

  'On a junk, just this side of the Naval Dockyard.'

  He wanted me to show him on the map so I pointed to a spot near the Dockyard. There were a thousand junks along the north shore of the island, and anywhere would suit me, so long as it was west of this quay, because I needed three left turns and a straight to bring me out where I wanted.

  'How many men are there?'

  'One man.'

  He thought about this and someone behind us said they could take on an army and he told him to shut up again. Then he reached his decision, slapping the top of the facia a little dramatically.

  'Very well. We will go.'

  'You've left it a bit late,' I said. 'We'll have to hurry.'

  He nodded quickly and I used my right foot and the acceleration caught them by surprise and that bastard in the back lost his balance and the gun came away from my neck and it was quite a relief.

  That was about all there was to it. I didn't go too fast round the three left-handers because I didn't want to worry them and there wasn't any need, but I gunned up along the straight bit past the warehouse and they all sat waiting for me to slow and turn at the T section but I didn't because this was where the repair work was being done to the edge of the quay and by the time they began calling out we were going through the ropes and the warning flags fast enough to pull the uprights down and clear the edge without hitting the underside of the chassis.

  They didn't shoot or anything because there obviously wouldn't be any point and in any case they were sitting there now with a cold wind blowing through their guts as the water of the harbour came swinging up at us in a great black wall. I had the window down because if we hit the surface at any angle within ninety degrees each side of the vertical the door was going to slam shut again and I wanted the water to flood in before they could do anything about it, not because it was necessary to kill them but because I didn't want them getting out and swimming around and trying to get at me again: if I could reach the junk in the typhoon shelter we could keep Mandarin running and go into the access phase. I wanted that, a lot.

  One of the road-repair boards flipped up and smashed the windscreen as we cleared the edge and a rope tautened and broke and whiplashed past the open window and then there was the long curving drop and I tried to work out the angles and the timing but the surface wasn't far below the edge of the quay and I had to hit the door open and kick clear of the bodywork and strike the water feet first with the impact wave from the station wagon knocking me sideways, most of the breath gone and not much idea of the way things had worked out except that I was still in a fair condition for swimming.

  The door slammed shut as it hit the water but it was a muted sound, metal on bone, one of them probably trying to get out while there was time, not making it. Then there was one colossal bubble as the whole thing went under, then a few smaller ones, then nothing, just the waves across the surface as I began a slow crawl.

  'This island here,' said Ferris, 'is your only possible refuge if you get into any kind of trouble. Heng-kang Chou, with a steep south shore inclining to an average of sixteen fathoms within twenty yards or so of the waterline.'

  'No garrison.'

  'No garrison.'

  He wandered off to the stern deck and took a quiet look around and came back, whistling softly, and I waited for him to tread on something again, then I was going to rip right into him because it had been only yesterday when the bus had left the long red smear on the roadway.

  He couldn't see anything to tread on.

  'You think any of them got back to the surface?'

  'Possibly.'

  I didn't want to think about that either because there are some ways of going that you don't wish on your worst enemy. The thing was that they'd spent a lot of time in the gymnasium but they'd had no security training or they'd have known the last thing you do when you have a captive is let him drive the car.

  'Got any questions?'

  'Only general. What's the sea temperature?'

  'The average for the past week was 82 .'

  'This oil rig.' I got up and peeled off the top half of the track suit and turned it inside out and spread it across one of the bunks. 'How close can anyone go, in international waters?'

  'You feeling the heat?'

>   He was watching me with that quiet glitter in his eyes.

  'Oh for Christ sake it's a hot night, isn't it?'

  It brought more sweat out and I was duly warned: with only three and a half hours to go I'd better start shutting down the spleen. This access was about the most sensitive thing I'd ever had to handle: that was why London was sending in a reserve.

  'Just wanted to know, old boy, that you're feeling on top form.' He looked at the teakwood dragon that held the bulkhead lamp in its jaws. 'In international waters maritime law prohibits uninvited vessels approaching nearer than five hundred metres. That's about what? Fifteen or sixteen hundred feet. Last year a Soviet ship sailed to within a hundred feet of an offshore rig in the North Sea and began taking photographs, and the Navy sent a destroyer out there to warn it off.'

  'How close is the sub going?'

  'Within a mile. That's well clear of the illegal limit.' He gave a giggle. 'Mustn't upset anybody.'

  I asked him about stand-off, liaison, rendezvous patterns, so forth. Some of it hadn't been worked out yet because there hadn't been time. 'You know what their lordships are - you ask them to lend you a piddling little submarine and they think you're trying to scuttle the Fleet. But we got it in the end-she's in the harbour now, been rusting there for weeks. HMS Swordfish - you must have seen her when you came in from --'

  'Yes.'

  'No more questions?'

  'Not really.'

  He'd briefed me on night signals, rations, panic-button limits, the whole of the access routine.

  'What've you got?' he asked me, lifting his wrist.

  '21.54.'

  'That thing waterproof?'

  'Yes.'

  'Okay.' He pulled the winder and reset and pushed it back. 'I'll be filling you in on the rendezvous patterns and that sort of thing after we've left harbour. The skipper's had to call up the Admiralty to get various permissions - aren't you glad you're not a bell-bottomed matelot?'

  I said I was going to take ninety minutes' sleep and he seemed rather relieved and said he'd go for a little walk, by which he meant he'd take up station out there and vet anything that moved. He'd already fetched the scuba gear when he'd gone to the hotel for the track suit, and there wasn't anything else to do but wait 'Ferris.'

  'Old boy?'

  'Is London going to put any fresh tags on Nora Tewson?'

  It was nothing to do with briefing, and I was a bit surprised at my own question. A touch of jealousy, I suppose: I didn't want anyone else to know what I knew of her, that strange double image of the innocent and the tigress, at least for a while. I didn't count Tewson, of course: he'd never known her like that.

  'I very much doubt,' Ferris said, 'if they'd put any more tags on that girlie, considering the state of things out here. The Egg doesn't care at all for sending people on suicide stunts.'

  We went aboard Swordfish at midnight.

  Her lights resembled a fishing boat's and I didn't recognize her until the tender began slowing, then the configuration came up in silhouette against the lights of the Kowloon shoreline: radar mast, conning-tower, diving planes. The sea was glass calm.

  The lifeline was still rigged on deck but a couple of hands started bringing it in as we went on board. There were two or three figures standing on the bridge and Ferris peered at them in the inadequate light.

  'Wing,' he said, 'this is Bill Ackroyd, captain.'

  We said hello and a seaman reached down and took my stuff from the man in the tender. One of the air bottles banged against a stanchion and someone said, 'Easy now .. .' I looked down.

  'Careful with that bag there - it's fragile. 'Ay ay, sir.'

  It was the short-wave Hammerlund transceiver Ferris had dug up for me and we'd put it in a waterproof bag along with the lamp and the rations.

  People were speaking in low voices and I noticed the main bridge lights were shrouded: except for her riding lights Swordfish was in wartime' rig. The tender backed off and swung in a wide curve away from us, leaving a scimitar of iridescent light across the sea. I could feel the vibration of the diesels under my feet.

  'What's that over there?' I asked Ferris. It looked like some kind of launch, standing off at a hundred yards.

  'Escort,' the skipper said.

  'For the whole trip?'

  'Just out of harbour. Would you like a drink?'

  He took us below.

  There was gin set up in the wardroom and I asked for a straight tonic and Ferris wanted to know if they had any milk and Ackroyd began looking at us as if we were a couple of freak sea-anemones they'd dragged up with the anchor chain.

  'Frank Topper,' he said close to the chest. 'Diving officer.'

  We all said hello again and I wished to Christ we could cut out the garden party and get moving. Ferris had a nervous smile switched on against any doubts in his mind and I began feeling bloody annoyed because my left hand should have had some kind of treatment and I was still in mild aftershock from the station wagon thing and London was pitching us right into a crash-access operation and that meant something had come up on the board and they'd started to panic.

  'Cheers,' one of the officers said.

  There seemed to be a lot of noise from the fans and blowers but nobody took any notice. Then there was the slam of a steel hatch and two seamen came down and disappeared through a doorway and Ackroyd took us back into the control room. The helmsman was in his seat and there were needles crawling all over the dials and Ferris stood there watching everything with his bright glass eyes and a ruff of hair sticking out where he'd brushed his head on the companionway coming down. Everything had suddenly gone quiet.

  'All right,' Ackroyd said. 'Slow ahead both.'

  There wasn't any appreciable movement but the bug started glowing across the chart on the DRT and in ten minutes we were out of the harbour. Five minutes later there was another sudden period of inactivity and Ackroyd said: 'Pull out the plug and ease her down to periscope depth.'

  The deck began sloping by degrees and I looked at the instruments.

  Time 00.31. Course 220 .

  Ferris was watching me and I felt like kicking his teeth in because his stare was critical and I knew that if I showed any signs of nerves or fatigue or anxiety he'd have this ship turned about and taken back into harbour. I didn't like being assessed at this phase of a mission: if I felt incapable of going in or doing a decent job I'd say so, he knew that. Better than Loman, perhaps, or Porterfield: they'd send you into the target zone with your nerves in rags and your eyes out of focus from fatigue if they thought you could finish the course without dropping dead.

  'We'll slope off,' Ferris said with a bright smile, 'and do some more chatting.' He led me into the wardroom and we sat down and went over the whole thing again. I got it right at the third go and then he filled me in about the liaison and rendezvous patterns, 'The routine rdv's will be prearranged by radio. Ackroyd says we can't risk coming in closer than a. mile from the rig, so if you can swim that distance you'll navigate by the north star and listen for the call of the sea swallow -I'll play you the tape in a minute. Swordfish will pick you up on the sonar and moved slowly to rendezvous.'

  This was typical Ferris: in less than twenty-four hours he'd had the call of the sea swallow put on tape and dug up a radio from the American stores and pushed London to give us a ship through the Navy.

  'If you're not in a condition to swim as far as that — or any distance at all - we can do you a straight emergency pick-up through the distress channels and send in a coastguard chopper with a net. If -'

  'You can't do --'

  'Oh yes we can. It'd expose our hand but if I can get you back alive without blowing the mission that's what I'm going to do.'

  I knew he meant it but as I looked at him in the flat white light of the wardroom I wondered whether he'd always been so considerate towards his executives in the field, or whether he was trying to atone for what they'd sent him to do that time in Brussels.

  'Can I come in?' The capta
in was standing in the doorway.

  'Of course,' Ferris told him. 'We were just chewing the fat.'

  For a submarine skipper Ackroyd looked too young but that might have been partly due to the apple-red glow on his cheeks, which I put down to the gin. His eyes were small and quick and he gave explosive little laughs, trying to cover them by tugging at the creases of his tropical slacks or scratching an ear. He looked about the last man to want to creep about under the sea in the confines of a tin coffin.

  'Would you like to know anything about this tub? She's "S" Class, commissioned only last year and built for patrol -got two diesels and all mod cons. She's fast, silent and difficult to detect. Just the job for you, what?' He tugged energetically at his creases.

  Through the doorway I could hear the pinging of the sonar transducer above the rush of the blowers. There was almost no vibration from the screws.

  'Lucky to find ourselves on board,' said Ferris.

  'Don't know about luck,' his small quick eyes glancing from Ferris to me and back, 'I understand you put such a squib under their lordships they haven't come down yet!' He scratched his ear, his cheeks glowing. 'What are you chaps?' leaning forward suddenly and lowering his voice. 'Intelligence wallahs or something? MI5?'

  'That's right,' said Ferris. I suppose he thought if Ackroyd had. the impression that MI5 worked overseas he might as well leave it at that: a classic piece of disinformation. 'By the way, do you think they'll use depth-charges?'

  Ackroyd's face snapped shut and he looked down at his hands.

  'You know, that's why you chaps had so much trouble getting us to help you. If I were to take Swordfish into Chinese waters only a few miles north of here, we'd have depth charges dropped on us. No question at all.' His bright eyes came up and scanned us in a series of flicking glances. 'I mean unless we surfaced and explained our presence or signalled we were in some kind of trouble. Now, they can't do that in international waters. But they might try.' His glance took in the doorway and he began speaking close to his chest again. 'It hasn't escaped their lordships that if we are to drop off a frogman within a mile of an offshore oil rig whose structure is Chinese Republican territory, we might encounter objections - and of the most tangible kind. It wouldn't be legal. But it would be understandable.' His laugh exploded and he tugged busily at the lobe of his ear.