by James Adams
But the Revolution was not just about objects. It was the people who suffered. Teachers, doctors, scientists, even humble shopkeepers fell victim to the Red Guards. Thousands were killed, thousands more tortured and yet more thousands banished from the cities to be “reeducated” by working in the fields.
At the time, Lisu had been in her first year at the university, studying to be a doctor. Within three months of arriving at university she had fallen in love with Xie Ming, a third-year student of architecture. It was first love for them both. In long walks through the gardens of the Forbidden City, they talked of their future together, of the children they would have, the life they would build. Then came the Revolution.
The university had been largely destroyed and in the third week of the worst violence, the Red Guards had come for Xie Ming as “one of the new generation of bourgeois reactionaries dedicated to perpetuating the class myth through the creation of buildings that betray the revolution”. The proclamation was read by a fellow student who had joined the Guards and many of those that cheered him on from the crowd were people they recognized.
Lisu had fought for him with such ferocity that they had arrested her too. They had been left for a week in a cellar of one of the buildings just next to the prison. If anything that time together was what she remembered most vividly. Both had believed they would be killed and so they had nothing left to hide from each other. They shared every intimate thought, watched each other perform every bodily function and managed to make love in the tenderest, gentlest ways imaginable.
Then the Guards had come. They concentrated on Xie Ming, wanting him to renounce his beliefs and denounce his fellow students. He refused and they beat him: the soles of his feet became a bloody mass. They attacked his fingers: his nails were left hanging from knuckles as red and as large as ripe tomatoes. They used pliers to attack his mouth: the torturers shouted the count as his teeth grew in a small pile on the table in front of him.
Then they started on her to force him to give up. They assaulted her, one after the other or in groups, in every orifice and in every position imaginable. Her screams had finally broken his will and he had signed the document repenting his imagined sins. Just after he had signed the paper in front of her, the man who had been leading the interrogation stepped forward and, using a lead weighted baton, clubbed him twice around the head. He had collapsed without a sound, the last thing she heard from him was the solid thunk as his head hit the flagstone floor.
The next day they had come and told her that he had died during the night from head injuries. She was free to go, they said.
Broken with grief, she determined to escape the horror of the Revolution. She fled south and west, joining a nascent underground movement that had sprung up because of the Revolution. Later she had boarded a junk on the east coast and made the journey to British territory, where she and the rest of the passengers had been thrown into the refugee camp.
Now this man had appeared out of the past with her file to awaken the buried memories.
“You seem to have had a rough time at the hands of the Red Guards.” He shuddered theatrically. “They were a terrible bunch. I’m glad I wasn’t around in China then.”
“You were going to explain my position, so why don’t you do so?” said Lisu.
“Very well. I see from your file that your lover of the time, a student called Xie Ming, allegedly died under interrogation. Or rather that is what you were told at the time. I would like you to look at this.”
He passed over a black-and-white photograph, The picture showed a man in his forties holding up a copy of the People’s Daily, China’s main newspaper, which she saw was dated a month earlier. She looked closer at the face of the man.
Her heart seemed to stop. Then it felt as if her arteries had expanded to tunnels and her blood was an express train rushing around the tracks of her body. She slumped down into the armchair facing Stanley Kung.
The picture was of Xie Ming. Older, of course; his face was thinner and so was the hair, but the jawline was unmistakable and so was the smile — he was actually laughing, she thought to herself with amazement.
“I can see you recognize the picture,” said Kung laconically.
“How can this be? He’s dead. I saw him.”
“No. What you saw was him fall to the ground. He recovered from that and his other injuries. A period of rehabilitation followed and once he had fully renounced all the sins they imagined he had committed he was released. He wasn’t allowed back to Beijing, of course. But I believe he has been designing some rather nice buildings in one of the provinces.”
It was all too much to grasp. Xie Ming alive. She felt tears of rage well up in her eyes. “The bastards. The bastards.” The tears were streaming uncontrollably down her cheeks now. “To think I have been living like this for all these years when I could have
“Yes, well, I’m sure that you will want to take all that up with the proper authorities in due course,” he said, smiling slightly at his weak sarcasm. “The reason for showing you all this is quite simple. My friends in the Chinese government and I want to know what your husband is doing. You are going to tell us. I am offering you a very simple bargain. Tell me what I need to know and your former lover will continue to enjoy the rest of his life. There may even be an opportunity for you to go and visit him — a visit which I am told he would welcome.
“On the other hand, should you refuse to cooperate, then Xie Ming will be killed. I am sure that his death will be particularly painful.”
He paused and then added as an apparent afterthought: “Oh, and I’m told they’ll send you some more happy snaps for the album. Showing the execution. So the first question I have to ask is this: What does your husband know about the Tunnel?”
She had no time to think about loyalty or betrayal. Her instincts were to defend the only man she had ever really loved. There was hardly a heartbeat of hesitation before she answered.
“Tunnel? Tunnel? I don’t know anything about a tunnel. He’s said nothing to me. He’s trying to find the drugs you shipped into the country from a boat in the North Sea.”
She answered almost automatically, her mind still stuck on the stark black-and-white photograph which had raised so many memories and so many possibilities. If she had looked across at Stanley Kung, she would have noticed a brief look of satisfaction flash across his face as she spoke. He had heard what he wanted. Their target was still a secret. No one had discovered their plans. The operation to seize the Channel Tunnel was on.
PART II
THE ATTACK
CHAPTER XIII
Driving a tunnel train had given Harry Ritchie a new status and a new home. For twenty years he had been driving the Network SouthEast Intercity trains from Waterloo to Poole and Weymouth. It had been a monotonous job, hours spent with his right arm gripping the dead man’s handle, but he was one of the few British Rail employees who actually loved their work. Ever since his childhood spent with notebook and pencil on the platforms at King’s Cross, Charing Cross, St Pancras and Waterloo he had been in love with trains. He had experienced the evolution from steam to diesel to electricity and his love affair had never faded. Unlike most other children, Ritchie had never lost his ambition to be a train driver, nor had he ever regretted his chosen profession. While working from Waterloo, he had lived with his wife Rosie and their two children in a small house in Amies Street, Battersea. His friends thought he was mad to buy the place because it backed on to the main railway line through Clapham Junction, the busiest rail crossing in the world. But he liked to sit in the back room listening to the rumble and thunder of the trains and watching them clatter past, taking people on journeys of hope or disappointment, love and despair. Trains were life, and they filled Harry Ritchie with a thrill each time he drove one.
When the Channel Tunnel was being constructed, he saw this as the ultimate opportunity. The new Class 373 trains were going to be the most modern trains in the world and they looked wonderful, with the
ir yellow and grey livery and low-drag arrowed nose giving a powerful and elegant aerodynamic shape. The cab, he was sure, would be the last word in high-tech luxury and the idea of driving at 150m.p.h. under the Channel filled him with excitement.
He had determined to be reassigned and had written both to British Rail and to Alastair Morton, the head of Eurotunnel, the company which was responsible for making the Tunnel a reality. His boldness had been well rewarded. They had been looking for someone to represent the human face of the new train and Harry Ritchie was the answer to any public relations man’s prayer. He was a devoted and reliable train driver; he had all the experience any nervous passenger could want; he was an enthusiast for the new system; and he was neither overweight nor divorced. Indeed, he ran most mornings, went to Church and had been married to the same woman for fourteen years. This paragon was paraded before the media as part of the publicity blitz leading up to the Tunnel’s opening. Harry had had his fifteen minutes of fame; his picture in every newspaper. The News of the World’s Sunday magazine had done a profile of him together with a picture of his wife Rosemary and children, eleven-year-old David and nine-year-old Becky.
For a short while the Ritchies were celebrities. It was that publicity which had drawn him to the attention of the researchers from the White Lotus.
The job of driving the passenger trains from Cheriton, the special terminal that had been built just outside Folkestone, to the Calais exit in France, had entailed a move from Amies Street to Folkestone. The money for the Amies Street house had bought a larger one in Wilton Road near the Sports Ground and Radnor Park. There were no trains rattling past the window every few minutes, which pleased the family, Becky could at last learn to ride and Harry had even got used to running through the park without feeling he was breathing poisoned air with every step. Yet it wasn’t the fame or Folkestone that made Harry really happy but the pleasure he got from driving his train on a journey that thrilled and frightened every passenger.
Just after he had got his new job, he had been taken with half a dozen other drivers down to Folkestone for the day on a familiarization tour. Harry had followed the development of the project since the signing of the first agreement in 1986. The package of documents given to each of the drivers filled in the history. The idea of a link under the Channel between Britain and France had first been mooted as long ago as 1802 by the French, but it was only as the Cold War drew to a close and there had been no war between the two countries for longer than anyone could remember that the project really took hold. There was still plenty of residual distrust of the French, which was one of the reasons why no British government money was committed, but, with the enthusiastic endorsement of the international financial community, who saw big money to be made from a high-speed freight and passenger link, the scheme went ahead.
Seven thousand men and women had laboured for six years to finish the biggest engineering project in recent times. It had cost around nine billion pounds, a sum which had astonished the public and outraged some of the original half-million shareholders who had to fund repeated cost overruns. But the final price was around the same as the sum Britain had paid for the Trident independent nuclear deterrent, which put the whole deal in perspective.
The result was the longest undersea tunnel ever built — 32.6 miles of which 23.6 miles are underwater — and the journey from London to Paris now takes only 2 hours 45 minutes, half the previous time by rail or road and hovercraft.
The Tunnel is not, in fact, a single tunnel at all but three different ones laid alongside each other and connected by passageways. To the west is the 22-foot-wide tunnel that carries trains from Britain to France every three minutes at an average speed of 130 m.p.h. Seventy-five feet to the east is the tunnel for the French trains. In between is a service tunnel nearly 13 feet wide which in an emergency can be used for evacuation. Every 275 yards, a smaller 6-foot-wide tube links the two main rail tunnels to act as a pressure relief duct. These tubes allow the column of air that a train pushes ahead of it to whoosh into the other train tunnel and dissipate.
In early 1993 when Harry made his first visit, the engineering work had been completed and trains were running through the tunnels to test the complex computer systems that managed the traffic. Their guide had taken them in a single rail car as far as the entrance to the first tunnel and they had all got out and walked in.
That was the one time he had been scared. They had walked into a cutting with concrete banks one hundred feet high on either side. As he walked forward, the holes appeared enormous, black and somehow threatening. He imagined the Tunnel five miles ahead with the whole weight of the Channel above, water seeping through cracks in the walls, the air filled with damp. A tiny fracture could swiftly become a fissure and the whole edifice would come tumbling down, crushing everyone beneath thousands of tons of water.
There is no danger of leaks and every possible emergency has been evaluated and precautions taken,” said the guide, a pretty young woman in the grey and green uniform of Eurotunnel. She spoke in that confident voice adopted by guides everywhere who know their subject but have given the talk so often they have forgotten what they are saying.
They had walked forward into the hole along a concrete walkway that ran against the left-hand wall. In the well in the centre, the railway track glistened, reflecting the lights overhead. It ran as far as Harry could see, curving gently downwards and to the left. Every few yards bright lights illuminated the grey concrete walls, giving the place a clean, even clinical look. He was pleased to see that no water was visible.
“If you look to the wall on your left you will see two large pipes. These have cold water running through them and will keep the temperatures in the Tunnel at an acceptable level,” the guide explained. “Above them are the radio antennae which will allow you to keep in touch with your control room at all times. Above us is the electric power supply for your engine and on the far wall you can see the hoses for use in the event of fire.
“Underneath the track is a drainage and pump system to deal with any water that might seep in.”
“What happens if the electrics go down?” one of the other drivers had asked.
“There are three different power sources,” she replied. “In this tunnel the trains will run on British electricity but if for any reason that is cut then there is an automatic switch to power from the French grid. If that goes down as well then there are back-up generators which will keep the trains running. You shouldn’t even notice a cut.”
The doubts had disappeared with the first run through the Tunnel. Used to the vista of the run to the West Country, the claustrophobia of the walls was at first startling but he had quickly got used to it. The speed and power of the train overcame any fear of the dark or being underground. The train was virtually silent, the electricity surging through the transformers in the engine to the tracks and powering the train through at well over a hundred m.p.h. Accelerating up to cruising speed in the Tunnel was extraordinary. He felt like a bullet shooting down the barrel of a gun. The view ahead was a blur of light with the dark hole of the Tunnel at its centre, the digital readouts on the gauges the only mark of his progress.
The whole trip through the Tunnel took under thirty minutes and there were so many checks and waypoints to note or acknowledge that there was little time to worry. Certainly there was no chance to see any water dripping through the roof and after a while he had stopped worrying about it.
Now the Ritchies’ world had settled into a comfortable routine. The roster was decided every Monday with one day on and one day off. He tended to drive the same two or three trains (numbers 7,12 and 16). They were all identical and it made little difference except for the kind of superstitious familiarity which all men seem to develop with particular machines. Each day he did six journeys through the Tunnel, with the first journey beginning at nine a.m. This meant he needed to leave the house at seven-thirty and so the family got up at six-thirty to eat breakfast together. Rosie made him a lu
nch which he ate in the cab. They had both become rather partial to French pate and cheeses so he would do some of their shopping on the other side and then ferry the raw materials back home, only to eat the finished product a few yards away from where he had bought the food originally. The gap between the two countries had narrowed to such an extent that they never thought of such intercontinental shopping as being odd.
Breakfast this morning was the usual friendly chaos of stretching arms, shouts for the milk or sugar amid hurried discussion about plans for the day ahead. Rosie had just put her cereal bowl in the dishwasher and was putting bread into the toaster when the doorbell rang.
“Who on earth is that?” Harry asked, amazed and annoyed at the interruption so early in the morning.
“Don’t worry, dear, I’ll go,” Rosie answered, anxious to keep the peace.
As she left the room, David reached across to steal a piece of apple from Becky’s plate, provoking a cry of outrage and a squabble that Harry had just calmed when Rosie returned to the room.
“Who was it?” Harry asked, turning around in his chair to see his wife come back into the room. He had read the expression “white with fear” but had never actually seen the reality until now. The blood seemed to have drained away entirely from Rosie’s face. She looked as if she had daubed herself in white powder.
Concern and instinct pushed Harry half out of his chair before he saw the gun and then the man — a Chinese — who was holding it to Rosie’s neck just behind her right ear. He noted vaguely that the gun was an automatic and looked enormous, black and very dangerous. He made to rise until the man spoke, his voice deep and fast.
