Taking the Tunnel

by James Adams

  The image went dark as the Riva shifted its aim and began the chase, its light probing the sea ahead. Geordie was talking urgently into his throat mike, summoning help from Mother. He finished speaking, turned off the light and heeled sharply to port for ten seconds and then began a zig-zag course away from the scene. Behind them, the Riva’s light swept the darkness, sniffing for their scent. It only needed a glimpse of their wake and they would be dead.

  “A chopper’s on its way,” Geordie shouted.

  Just then one of the outboards coughed, spluttered and died. Geordie moved to correct the sudden imbalance on the helm but the loss cut their power dramatically and the Riva appeared out of the darkness, its light sweeping over them, past them, and returning to fix the boat and the two men in its bright, relentless gaze. Jonny fired down the light, the gun recoiling into his shoulder. There were no tracer rounds in the magazine and for all the good he did he might as well have been firing straight up into the sky.

  There was no such uncertainty in the machine-gunner’s aim. With the sea as a guide, he once again directed his fire towards them. Geordie was jinking frantically now, left then right then left, then further left, all the time trying to throw the gunner off his aim. But there were too many bullets chasing them through the night and too little speed left in the one engine for them to hide from the deadly combination of light and gun.

  With the experience bred of knowledge, Geordie weighed the odds and found them unacceptable.

  “Jump,” he shouted. “Get out of here.” One hand reached out and grabbed Jonny’s shoulder, lifting him from his seat and propelling him towards the side away from the approaching craft. Half pushed and half driven by his own instinct for survival, Jonny fell over the side, thrusting against the rubber to force himself outside the embrace of the chopping propeller.

  The sea was warm and seemed instantly welcoming after the exposure of seconds earlier. Floating on his back, he turned to look at the scene he had left behind. The two vessels were still tied together by the cord of light and bullets were shredding the port side of the dinghy as the gunner found his aim and the gap between the boats closed. Ignoring his own advice, Geordie was still at the helm and Jonny saw that he was urgently trying to lash a rope around the throttle and the helm to keep the boat on course after he, too, jumped overboard. Then he jerked upright as the first bullet struck. Held erect by the bullets travelling up his body, the Marine began to shake in a grotesque parody of a dancer. It lasted only moments and then the gunman moved on, his human target destroyed, to remove all evidence of their passing. His aim shifted to the stern of the boat and the fuel tanks. His fire fractured the tanks and then the sparks of the bullets bouncing off the engines ignited the vapour. The shock wave from the explosion seemed to reach out and push Jonny’s head beneath the surface. He emerged gasping for air, his mouth filled with water from the wave that had been driven out from the boat by the blast.

  By the time his eyes had cleared and his breathing was back to normal, the Mas had given back the night. Bobbing alone in the sea, legs kicking and arms windmilling to stay afloat, there was only darkness. Disorientated, he could not even tell where Geordie had died, could only try to recover from the sudden and terrifying brush with death.

  It took thirty minutes for the Lynx helicopter to reach the area and pinpoint the search so that the tiny light on his lifejacket was visible to the winchman peering out through the open belly of the aircraft. Once again his horizon narrowed in the white beam of a searchlight but this time it was to illuminate the collar and harness being lowered slowly down from the helicopter. He pulled the ring over his head and under his armpits and tightened the cinch. There was a moment of terror as he was sucked out of the security of the sea and became a spinning, weightless, powerless body. Then the Lynx lifted up and to the left as the winch reeled him in. Moments later arms reached around his waist and pulled him backwards into the helicopter.

  Fifteen minutes later the helicopter landed in the shadow of the Prince of Wales barracks at HMS Tamar, the military headquarters of both the Army and Navy in Hong Kong. Ducking underneath the whirling blades, Jonny ran towards a small knot of people who were waiting for him. He had changed from his soaking jeans and sweater into a Navy jumpsuit. It was the solemn face of Harry Keating, his deputy, that first rang the warning bells. He had expected a sober greeting — after all, they had just lost their quarry and several people had died. But there was something about the stillness of Keating’s face, the rigidity of his jaw muscles, that suggested personal pain rather than professional anguish.

  After the ritual congratulations on his narrow escape, the small group moved as if on command to leave Jonny and Keating alone on the tarmac.

  “I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news, Jonny,” Keating began tentatively.

  Jonny had used those exact words three months earlier when he had visited the wife of one of his men who had been killed in a car accident. She, like him, had instantly understood that behind the mild facade lurked a world of horror. With a numbness gripping his heart he asked the inevitable question.

  “It’s Lisu? She’s dead?”

  “No, Jonny, your wife’s fine,” Keating replied. “I think you’d better let me take you home.”

  They spent the five-minute drive to his apartment just off Po Hing Fong Road in silence. Reassured about Lisu, Jonny’s concern had immediately focused on Sam, their two-year-old son. But he couldn’t bring himself to ask the question, so instead he suffered as his imagination cast forward to the small apartment in Central; his wife and their child inside; Sam crippled, Sam dying, Sam dead. Each image more terrible than the last, he could feel his stomach compressing into a tight ball of anxiety, his heart thumping against his chest wall, as if trying to fly from this horror.

  Too quickly, the driver pulled up at the small, grey apartment block. Keating got out first and held the door for Jonny. Reluctantly, Jonny led the way up the two flights of stone stairs to the wooden door of number eight. As he put the key into the lock, he could hear the first cry of what would become a lingering lament.

  He followed the sound down the hallway, past the policewoman and into the second door on the left, Sam’s bedroom. He saw Lisu, prostrate at the bottom of the bed, her shoulders heaving. Then his eyes moved to the cot and he almost cried out with relief. His son was lying on his bed, his tiny frame wrapped in a shirt covered with little dinosaurs, his hips bulging unnaturally with the nappy. He looked as he had locked all those other nights when they had come in to peer at their gift before going to bed: his face at rest, his breathing so quiet it was almost impossible to detect. Jonny did now what he always did, leaned over to pick up the tiny reassuring flutter of air from his nose.

  But this time there was no little gust of wind, just an awful stillness. Then he saw the small red stain in the middle of the green dinosaur on Sam’s chest. His finger reached out to touch it and came away as if charged with a jolt of electricity, the sticky texture of blood unmistakable.

  He felt Lisu’s hand touch his and then curl into the embrace of his palm. It was a moment so redolent of the touch of Sam’s tiny hand that he wanted to scream. Instead, he reached down and brought Lisu into his arms. He felt her tears soaking into his shirt and felt his own tears pricking his eyes. He held her close, trying to smother the grief with his arms and her closeness.

  “It was a stiletto, we think.” Keating spoke softly, trying to paper over the suffering with facts. “He died immediately. There was no pain.”

  Jonny turned around, his face contorted, blue eyes made dark with anger. “No pain? No pain? How the hell do you know?” He paused, seeking some way out of the nightmare. Then his mind focused on action and revenge. “Who did this?”

  “The answer is simple enough,” Keating replied. “Doing something about it is going to be more difficult. We found this in Sam’s hand.” He reached into his jacket pocket and produced a small circular ring. It was a beautiful object made out of green jade and look
ed like a small napkin ring. Called a thumb ring, it is used by Chinese archers to help draw the string of a bow smoothly back. Down the centuries, thumb rings have become a valuable part of the Chinese artistic heritage. Jonny immediately understood what it meant.

  “Dai Choi?” Jonny asked. Keating’s nod confirmed it.

  Jonny took the ring and turned it over in his hand. It was beautifully carved with tiny rabbits chasing each other endlessly around the circle, an image that would appeal to a child. This was Dai Choi’s signature all right, the message from the 14K quite clear. Jonny had ignored their warnings. Now he had paid the terrible price.

  Dai Choi, known to the Chinese as The Archer, was the Triad’s chief enforcer. Such was the power of the gangs in Hong Kong that the police had never been able to get any witnesses to his many murders. Indeed, he was so confident that he always left the same trademark on the body of his victims. Jonny supposed he should have been flattered. The humble peasant gunned down in an alley merited only a brass thumb ring. This was jade. But it wasn’t flattery he wanted. It was Dai Choi.

  PART I

  THE PLAN

  CHAPTER I

  In Hong Kong, there is a delicate power structure that allows Oriental and Westerner to live side by side, the latter officially ruling the former in the certain knowledge that both sides understand that in reality the roles are actually reversed. To those who appreciate such subtleties, the attention Stanley Kung received was a clear signal that this man had power. It was not just the perfectly cut suit from Cheng and Chang or the distinctive striped pattern of the Ascot Chang shirt — based on the Turnbull and Asser original — but the way the staff reacted.

  Bowing so that his upper body was at an angle of ninety degrees to his legs, the doorman, an enormous Negro dressed in a peacock-blue shantung silk frock coat, opened the car door and helped Kung out on to the carpet leading to the entrance of the Lotus Casino.

  Officially illegal, the gambling at the Lotus was tolerated in part because of the substantial sums in bribes — known as squeeze — paid to the police and government officials and in part because the authorities preferred to know the location of the gambling dens, the identity of the gamblers and above all the headquarters of the White Lotus Triad.

  As Kung made his progress through the disco the staff responded with servility mixed with fear. A low bow was balanced by the shifting of eyes to left and right, anywhere in fact that Kung might not be looking, in case eye contact could provoke attention.

  Kung, apparently oblivious to these undercurrents, moved straight through the lobby to a small doorway without a visible handle or a lock. Reaching into his trouser pocket he drew out a thin metal rod with hundreds of tiny serrations embedded in the shaft. He inserted the rod into a small hole in the side of the door and a half-turn to the left opened the entrance to the lift.

  Twenty minutes later and three floors above the noise of the disco, Kung stepped into another world a different man. The elegant Western clothing had been replaced by a simple red cotton shift that hung to mid-calf. The shift was secured by a white belt. White is the colour of mourning and the wearing of the girdle commemorates the dead founders of the first Triad. Around his head, Kung had tied a red silk scarf knotted in five places as a gesture of respect to the Five Ancestors whom all Triad members revere. On his left arm was a white circle containing the Chinese character Kin or Heaven. On the right arm the character Kwan, Earth, was drawn inside a similar circle. On the left breast, an octagonal shape, the Pat Kwa or Eight Diagrams, represented the eight groups of broken and unbroken lines from which Chinese script is said to have originated. In the centre of the octagon a white circle contained a rough representation of the relationship between Yin and Yang on which much Chinese philosophical thought is based. On his feet he wore one ordinary black shoe and one grass sandal which to the initiate recalls the story of a pair of magic sandals that had helped an early group of Triad members walk on water to escape their pursuers. Both sandals had been lost and only one recovered.

  It was this uniform, little changed over hundreds of years, that gave Kung his real power. Only he was allowed to wear the red shift with the potent symbols that announced he was the Leader. As he entered the room, he remained upright but moved his left hand, knuckles out, across the front of his body. His thumb and little finger pointed up and down and his middle finger pointed directly away from the body. This is the personal sign of a Shan Chu or Leader. The other ten men in the room all replied with different hand signals which indicated their place in the Triad.

  The origin of the Triads is lost in the folklore of the organizations but is thought to have begun sometime in the seventeenth century. Its members were bound by oaths of blood brotherhood and all were pledged to overthrow the foreign conquerors of China and restore the ancient ruling house to the throne. Down the centuries, the Triads evolved, moving their headquarters from China to Hong Kong, where they became more akin to a trade union. Each Lodge of a Triad fought for the rights of members and jealously guarded jobs. Only in the last hundred years have they taken on their current role of criminal gangs. Today the Triads are the largest criminal organization in the world, managing over half the world’s heroin traffic and controlling the majority of the business in counterfeit money and documents.

  What has not changed down the centuries is the secrecy, the bonding of initiates to the group, the reverence for history and awareness that the group is more powerful than any individual.

  Stanley Kung had called this meeting of the ruling clique of the Triad to mete out justice to one of their own. Like everything else in the Triad, there was an order and a ritual to punishment as there was to promotion.

  The room was rectangular, about thirty feet long by twenty wide, with plain white walls adorned with red and yellow flags, each with a single Chinese character symbolizing the five first ancestors of the Triad and the different branches of the White Lotus Lodge.

  Kung walked past two guards armed with the wide-bladed ceremonial swords, past the three bamboo arches symbolizing the entrances to the first Triad castle, past the heaven and earth circle of stones, the fiery pit which was in fact a small burning brazier, past the stepping stones which the magic sandals had once trod, past a line of black-robed officials, to stand on the left of the altar facing the room. Amongst the stones, rocks and flags that are all redolent of Triad history, the sheet of clear plastic stretched across the floor at the foot of the altar was starkly incongruous.

  At the right-hand side of the altar stood the white-robed figure of the Heung Chu or Incense Master, the master of ceremonies within the Triad.

  Lighting a joss stick, the Incense Master held it high.

  After joining the Lotus family, remain loyal and faithful.

  The wicked and treacherous will perish like this stick.

  He threw the joss stick to the ground where in a tiny burst of sparks it extinguished, a small blue tendril of smoke marking its passage.

  With one voice, the dozen other men in the room intoned the traditional response.

  The foolish one has done wrong.

  He brought havoc to our brethren.

  His death is not a matter of regret.

  Let joss paper be his coffin.

  As the last tones of the chant faded away, Kung spoke for the first time. “Bring forward the Cho Hai,” he commanded.

  Two men moved from behind the line of officials on the left of the Leader and brought towards the altar the Cho Hai, a man in his early thirties dressed in the uniform of a Grass Sandal, or messenger official, who is responsible for liaising between different lodges and mediating disputes between Triads. This man had been discovered passing information about White Lotus interests in the heroin traffic on the island to the rival Kam Lan Kwan Triad. The matter had been investigated, the Cho Hai found guilty and now it was for the Leader to see the sentence carried out.

  The two guards forced the Cho Hai to kneel in front of the altar and then stood, heads bowed on either
side. The Incense Master reached behind the altar and brought out a cockerel from inside a wooden cage. Grasping it by the body, he held it in front of him as another official stepped forward holding an ornately inscribed silver bowl. Drawing a short sword from a sheath at his waist, the Incense Master held the blade aloft.

  The silver blade brings blood from the cock.

  Do not reveal secrets to others.

  If any secrets are disclosed,

  Blood will be shed from the five holes of your body.

  As he finished speaking, the sword descended in a single smooth motion and the severed head of the cock dropped to the floor with a slight plop, the one eye still open looking up at its executioner, startled by the suddenness of its end. Blood flowed into the cup as the cock’s heart pumped out the last vestiges of life.

  The assistant passed the cup first to the Incense Master and then to the Leader. Both drank deeply, the blood leaving a thin moustache of red on their upper lips. Stanley Kung picked up a white towel from the table, passed it over a bowl of water and delicately dabbed a comer of it across his lips to remove the smear of blood. He intoned the final, ritual sentence.

  The white cloud covers the sea and sky.

  When the floating cloud is removed the bright sky is seen.

  Then can be perceived who are loyal and righteous.

  Those who are deceitful and unfaithful will perish immediately.

  The two assistants on either side of the kneeling Cho Hai grasped him by each arm and forced his head down. Stanley Kung gestured to his left and a man dressed in the robes of the senior Hung Kwan or Red Pole stepped forward. He reached underneath the black robe with the red and white ribbon which showed he was the leader of the Triad’s fighting section, and brought out a Browning 9 mm pistol. Standing slightly to one side, he placed the barrel against the kneeling man’s left ear and gently squeezed the trigger. The sound of the shot was startlingly loud in the quiet of the Triad temple. The head jerked to one side under the impact and the bullet pushed through the ear drum into the cranium and exited the other side, carrying in its wake blood and brains that scattered in an arc, splashing over the assistant and the plastic sheet that carefully protected the floor.