The Action

by Peter Tonkin

  The Action

  Peter Tonkin

  Copyright © Peter Tonkin

  The right of Peter Tonkin to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  This edition published in 2019 by Sharpe Books.

  Table of Contents

  Part One: Prologue

  Chapter One: Washington

  Chapter Two: Prelude: Siva

  Hong Kong, Far East, June 1997

  Part Two: Action: KALI

  Chapter Three: The Ship

  Chapter Four: The Plans

  Chapter Five: The Boat

  Chapter Six: The Lessons

  Chapter Seven: The Island

  Chapter Eight: The Outsiders

  Chapter Nine: Kali

  24 July-25 July

  Part Three: Post Mortem

  Aftermath

  Part One: Prologue

  Chapter One: Washington

  Washington D.C., November 1997

  “So,” said the Secretary of State, “what we have at the beginning of this action is a sunken ship suddenly surrounded by the four largest Intelligence Services in the world, and you don’t know why.” The Secretary leaned belligerently across the open folder of case notes on his desk. A trick of the light threw light over the lenses of his glasses so that his eyes were invisible to the man seated opposite him. This man, Abe Parmilee, folded his hands in his lap and leaned back into the spindly chair until it creaked. Parmilee was a huge man, and he gave the impression of being a slow thinker. He was not. He paused carefully before answering the Secretary’s challenge. When he spoke, it was with a soft Mid-West accent which seemed to come from his boots. “No, Mr Secretary,” he said. “That’s not quite the way I see it.” He paused again. There was absolute silence in the big, book-filled room. Outside it was pouring and blowing half a gale, but here the wind and rain made no impression. They were in the basement of the White House, in the Secretary of State’s private office, near the tiny press room, where Harry Truman’s swimming pool used to be. “It seems to me,” continued Parmilee after a moment, “that this is all tied up with the earlier intelligence action in Singapore and Hong Kong.”

  The Secretary nodded once, light glinting on the pale waves of his perfect hair. “The attempted defection of the man Feng,” he said.

  “Yes, sir, that is correct.” Parmilee spoke slowly and quietly, his voice like the rumble of a distant earthquake. Every now and then his huge square hands, their backs spotted with orange freckles and forested with what looked like copper fuse-wire, would take flight as he spoke.

  The Secretary sat, enthralled, as the tale of violence, confusion and international deviousness began to unfold. And as he listened, his own mind whirled along with Parmilee’s, filling in blanks, strengthening speculation, building up something that he needed very badly. Very badly indeed.

  A few weeks earlier, the Secretary had gone to China. His visit was designed to smooth the way for the President’s visit before Christmas. The Secretary of State, a man of some standing in the diplomatic world, a bargainer on the international circuit second to none, a hard man and a rough rider, had been given a chilly reception by the Chinese. This reception had extended into an icy stay, with everything, it seemed, carefully designed to border on the insulting. The Secretary, unprepared, had been at first surprised and then enraged. Ultimately, however, he had come away concerned. Whereas on the surface the desire for detente with the United States seemed to be real enough, the National Peoples’ Conference in January had thrown a lot of hard liners into the forefront of Chinese politics. And the Chairman, growing very old now, seemed to be relaxing his grip a little. The result had been humiliating for the Secretary and embarrassing for his country. This was not his main concern, however. He was worried about the future, about December, and the President’s visit.

  The Secretary had come away from Beijing with the definite impression that what had happened to him was going to happen to the President also. And that, of course, would not be merely embarrassing: it would be a disaster. And yet the President had set his mind on going. It would be a diplomatic coup of some weight, and the President deemed it necessary to his political strength at home that he be given the chance to sparkle abroad. There had been more budget clashes with the Senate. Government offices had been closed again. The President needed to sparkle.

  “You’ll think of something,” he had said to the Secretary the evening before in the Oval office. “I know you well enough, Mr Secretary, to be sure that you will come up with something.” And he smiled cheerfully as he walked out of the door with his aides. As soon as the door had closed and the footsteps began to move away down the marble hall, the Secretary of State sat at the President’s desk, leaning back against the leather of the big chair, still warm from the President’s back. He had looked across the littered desktop at the Director of Central Intelligence. “It’s not going to be easy.”

  The Director rose and stretched until his joints creaked. “They gave me a very rough ride over there,” continued the Secretary grimly, tapping the point home on every syllable with a perfectly manicured fingernail against the leather desktop. “Since the National People’s Conference in January, and with the Chairman getting old, they’re all trying to prove what great hard-liners they are.” The Director sat down again and studied his mud-marked black shoes. Rain had rattled against glass; dead leaves had wheeled through the bright beams outside the Oval office windows. According to the makeshift weather forecast, it would improve - therefore everyone was certain it would actually be worse tomorrow. The weather bureau had been hit with the rest of the Government offices.

  “They gave me the roughest ride I’ve ever had, bar none,” the Secretary repeated, looking at the closed door as if the President still lingered there. “They’re setting themselves up to take him to pieces,” he persisted, “politically as well as economically. Now they have Hong Kong . . .”

  The Director of Central Intelligence had spoken at last: “We can’t allow that,” he said.

  “Right! Correct! Russia is just in the right mood to make some good sound political capital out of any egg he gets on his face. They have so many problems at home, they’re in the same boat as us. And this administration can’t take a lot. Certainly it can’t take a hatchet job done publicly on the President as soon as he sets foot in Beijing.”

  The Director of Central Intelligence had stirred, removing his glasses to massage his eyes under frowning, worried brows. “The Company’s credit isn’t that good at the moment either here or abroad. You know that.”

  “I don’t want credit. I don’t want diplomatic weight. I don’t want anything anyone has ever heard about.” The Secretary’s hand had struck down like a snake behind a pile of books and had come up with the National Intelligence Daily. “I don’t want anything that’s been in here,” he said, crushing it as though it were Pravda or Isvestia instead of the daily update on important events within the CIA circulated only to the 50 men with absolute security clearance, who needed to know everything.

  “Tall order,” the DCI had observed, carefully.

  “Too tall?”

  “No, I don’t think so. I’ll have a word with my National Intelligence Officer for China, but there were some things going on over the summer. I think the man you want to see is Parmilee from Plans. Far East Division.”

  The Secretary of State’s eyes had narrowed. “If there was an intelligence action in the Far East over the summer, I should have heard about it,” he pointed out.

  “There hasn’t been a full report yet,” the DCI had said, shifting position carefully in the chair. “We’re still trying to work out precisely what happened.” There had been a little silence
, and then he had continued, “It looks a bit like two covert actions, but it might have been only one. Really, we don’t know anything about what was going on. It looked like a defection to begin with, but then it all went haywire. After that it was just one long shambles rounded out with an earthquake.”

  “An earthquake?” the Secretary had asked carefully, in case this was another piece of the never-ending jargon which litters the vocabulary of intelligence men.

  “Yes,” the Director had said. “An earthquake.” He had moved his hands to signify the quaking of the earth.

  The Secretary of State had shrugged, leaned back in the chair behind the President’s desk, made a steeple of his hands and said, “You think there’s something in all this we can use against the Chinese if the going gets really rough in Beijing?” “I really couldn’t say what is in there and what is not. Talk to the case officer. Talk to Parmilee.” A lull in the conversation had been filled by the rattling of the windows. “It depends what you want,” the DCI had said.

  “I want an edge,” the Secretary of State had answered decidedly. “I want an ace in the hole. What was it Teddy Roosevelt said? ‘Speak softly and carry a bit of stick.’ Well that’s what I want. I want the biggest god-damned stick I can lay my hands on.”

  ***

  Thus it was that Abe Parmilee, a senior man in the Far East Section of the Plans Division, found himself in the Secretary’s office in the basement of the White House late the next evening, trying to tie it all together - the defection of Feng, the disappearance of the ship Wanderer, the carnage, the earthquake, the confusion. Both men, having talked it through twice, admitted to a gut feeling that there was something important there. Neither man could put his finger on it. After Parmilee finished speaking there was a silence, then they began to skirt around it once again. The Secretary opened a red file of white flimsies which were the field reports on the first action. Or the first part of the action - if Parmilee was right and it all held together.

  “You thought this man Feng was the genuine article?” he asked. “I thought defections went out with flares and the Osmonds.”

  Parmilee leaned forward again, spade palms on tree-trunk thighs. “We weren’t sure. We got the news through Hong Kong Local Station, if you could call the tiny office the Brits used to allow us out there a Station. That’s all. The National Intelligence Officer with responsibility for China had heard of him, though no one at Plans had. We just got the message that he was coming out and it was too good to miss. Those were the last days before it all went back to China, remember, so we acted fast. One of our ships, the Lincoln, was in the China Sea. We sent it to Hong Kong immediately and I briefed Ed Lydecker, from the Operations section of the Office of Current Intelligence, and sent him out to the ship with orders to debrief Feng on board and bring him back.”

  “You didn’t want Hong Kong Local Station to do it?”

  “No. They were just a couple of guys in loud suits anyway.

  We’d been pulling out as fast as the banks and the triads. They were to bring him through the city and put him on the Lincoln. I didn’t want them to debrief him.”

  The evening dragged on. Coffee was brought every hour or so and they drank most of it. Outside, the gale howled in spite of the weather forecast. Once in a while, Parmilee found his mind wandering to thoughts of his tiny Chinese wife alone in their house in Georgetown.

  At last the Secretary sat back and closed both the folders. “So,” he said, “what we have is a pair of intelligence actions. First action: a defection from China into Hong Kong. It goes wrong. The subject, Feng, disappears. He reappears a few hours later in Singapore. He disappears again. Action terminated. Several dead. Probable authors of deaths two Chinese agents code-named Hummingbird and Bee. Hong Kong, Singapore, then nothing. How did you read it again?”

  “It seemed to be either a strike at Hong Kong Local Station, complete with trick defection to bring them out into the open. Or it was a genuine defection and we lost him. Either would make sense and it was all falling apart out there, remember.”

  “Yes,” said the Secretary. “I think it was genuine though. I think these people, the Hummingbird and the Bee, took him back from Singapore. But if this is so, then what is going on six weeks later with the British ship, the Wanderer, sinking in the middle of the Indian Ocean?”

  “That was the only place Feng went in Singapore. To that ship, the Wanderer,” said Parmilee, his great, square red-freckled hand sweeping back through his thin, wiry red hair. “That’s why I set the Lincoln to shadowing her. It was all I had left. A hunch…”

  “OK. We have this British ship, which had been visited in Singapore by a defecting Chinese government official, sinking with almost all hands in the middle of the Indian Ocean, and all hell breaks loose. I know why we were involved: we were shadowing it. But the Chinese?”

  “They were shadowing too.”

  Because maybe friend Feng put something on the Wanderer while he was on board,” mused the Secretary. “His bargaining counter. They usually bring a bargaining counter, don’t they - information, something like that?” “Yes,” said Parmilee. “And when he knew Hummingbird and Bee were onto him, he stashed it, whatever it was, in case they caught him.”

  “But why a British ship?” asked the Secretary.

  “Chance?” said Parmilee, his bright Irish-blue eyes flicking restlessly round the room, not believing the word.

  “OK. Leave that for a moment,” said the Secretary.

  “What about the KGB? Why did they get mixed up in it?” Parmilee shrugged. “They’re not the KGB anymore. They have been the Federal Security Service for a couple of years now. But you’re right, they must have been well motivated,” he said. “They’ve been keeping their heads down since Chechnya. And it was Andropov himself.”

  “The British?”

  Parmilee shook his head. “It was a British ship,” he said. “Someone pulled a string on the Old Boy network. You know how the Brits are.”

  “So. We’re back to the beginning”, the Secretary persisted. “What we have is a sunken ship, suddenly surrounded by the four largest intelligence services in the world. It’s the Cold War in the Indian Ocean for Christ’s sake. And you don’t know why.”

  “I don’t think anyone knew precisely why,” said Parmilee reasonably, not for the first time, frowning at the use of that old-fashioned phrase “Cold War”.

  “I see. So what were you all going to do - you, the British, the Russian and the Chinese? I mean once the survivors from the ship had found the island, and you had found the island and everyone was sitting there in the middle of the Indian Ocean armed to the teeth and staring at each other. What were you actually going to do?”

  “Find out what it was all about,” explained Parmilee. He moved his huge frame to a position of relative comfort on the small hard chair, looking at the Secretary’s pensive profile. “Our field agent, Lydecker. He’s a good man. He would have sorted it out in no time, flat.”

  “The only person who seems to have had any idea what was going on was that big Englishman, Stone ... I wish he’d been with us instead of…’’he drifted into silence, then he roused himself. “Still. There’s no blame to be attached when it falls to pieces like this one did.”

  Parmilee agreed.

  “I wouldn’t have liked to have been on that island,” said the Secretary.

  “Me neither,” said Parmilee.

  The Secretary of State made a steeple out of his forearms and hands, resting his elbows on the arms of his chair, rocking his face forward until his thumbnails were on his teeth and his index fingers against his glasses at the bridge of his nose. He thought for a while. Eventually he looked up. “You haven’t got case names for these actions,” he said.

  “No, sir. We don’t.”

  “Siva and Kali,” said the Secretary. “Indian gods of death, rebirth, death and destruction.”

  “Very apt,” said Parmilee. “There was enough death and destruction. And a hell of a l
ot of thugs, too, at one time or another. And India, of course.”

  Silence returned. Then the Secretary of State said, “It’s in there somewhere. Somewhere between the defection and the earthquake, between Siva and Kali. I feel it. It is in there!”

  “What is?” asked Parmilee.

  “The diplomatic stick with which I am going to guard the President’s back next month in Beijing.”

  Silence returned. Parmilee’s thoughts wandered towards Wei-Wei his wife alone in their huge bed. The Secretary thought of less alluring Orientals. Coffee came and he said, “Right. Let’s take it from the top again.”

  Chapter Two: Prelude: Siva

  Hong Kong, Far East, June 1997

  To the north of Hong Kong between Kowloon and China there lies a bustling, mountainous district leased from the Chinese for 99 years in 1898. Only the British would still be calling this the New Territories in the year it was to be returned to China.

  Feng came out through the New Territories on the night of 25 June. How he managed to cross the border and avoid the Ghurka patrols which range the hills in the dark, nobody knew. He was picked up, as agreed, on the outskirts of Kowloon just after dawn on the 26th by four men from the depleted CIA Local Station. Feng was a tall man, unusually tall for a Chinese, and he towered head and shoulders above the crowd bustling off to work. He was nervous. Every movement betrayed the tension in his long, lean body. Fenderman, the senior field operative, CIA Local Station, shrugged himself off the wall and plunged into the colourful crowd as soon as the tall defector caught his eye. A few yards back down the road, he knew, Albertson and Burke would have swung invisibly into the tail position. Ahead, Mathews should be ready to join the parade. They were more or less all of the station men left now. And they would be gone in a week.

  Fenderman was short. His skin was sallow. His hair was black and oiled back flat on his skull. Thick pebble glasses magnified narrow brown eyes. He had been on various Far East stations since he first joined the Company. He was dressed in a suit almost cut to a Western style in a shiny sky blue, white pinstripe material. The pinstripes went from side to side instead of up and down. He was clutching in his plump right hand a bright bag bearing the legend of a big store on the Wanchai end of Queen’s Road. He did not stand out in the crowd.