The Action

by Peter Tonkin

  His shoulder brushed Feng’s upper arm. No words were exchanged. Feng took the bag. Inside it were a change of clothes, a wallet with identity papers, some money and a Gold AmEx credit card: a simple survival kit - as agreed.

  Keeping Feng’s head in view, Fenderman began to fall back as soon as he had relinquished the bag. His eyes darted among the faces of the crown around him, looking for Albertson and Burke. They were new men, sent out to Hong Kong Station a few weeks before only to get a bit of experience while there was still time. This was their first big job. Fenderman wanted to make sure they did not mess it up - especially with the big man from Langley, Virginia, sitting on board the Lincoln in the harbour waiting for them. And the end of a posting was like the end of a movie, the bit that everyone remembered.

  Lydecker had been unhappy, but his orders from Parmilee had been specific: Local Station would bring Feng in. After all, the guys were there to learn some bush-craft. Lydecker would get him as soon as he set foot on the Lincoln and not before. The tall, rangy operative had made it quite clear to Fenderman’s boss, the Chief of Station, that if anything went wrong there would be severe reprisals: no cushy postings, no extended leave when the Station closed next week. The Chief of Station had passed the buck down to Fenderman as smartly as he could. Feng was important, the Chief had said, a gift from God and probably the best they were going to get. There were to be no mistakes.

  Fenderman’s eyes stared over the oriental countenances all around. Millions and millions of people lived in the city - most of them seemed to be here, now. With a growing feeling of rage he began to realize that Albertson and Burke were not among them. It never once occurred to him that anything was wrong. He just thought a couple of green kids had messed it up. He actually thought to himself, “I will have their guts…”when the screaming started behind him.

  Fenderman saw Feng hesitate and swing round to look back. He realized that he himself was the only person in the crowd who was not looking back. He was in the act of turning when Burke’s hand fell on his arm. “Burke!” he said, “where in Hell…” Burke’s eyes and mouth were wide. His callow face was utterly white. With enormous effort he said, “Head…” His knees gave, and suddenly he was clutching Fenderman’s thigh. “Head ache,” he said to the sky-blue white-lined trousers, and then he fell forward. From under his short intensely black hair something protruded. Something shiny. Fenderman, sickened, knew what it was. It was the end of a bicycle spoke. Someone had placed a sharpened bicycle spoke at the point where the neck joins the skull, just above the ‘atlas’, or first cervical vertebra, and then driven it up into Burke’s brain.

  “Oh, my God!” said Fenderman. He looked up. There was screaming, still, from a little farther down the road. Fenderman yelled in elegant Cantonese, “I’m a doctor!” Then he said it again in heavily accented English, and shouldered forward. But of course Albertson, like Burke, needed a mortician, not a GP On his knees beside the young man’s corpse, Fenderman thought, “I hope Mathews has his eye on Feng.” Then he stood up. “There is nothing I can do here,” he said. “This man is dead.” The crowd involuntarily surged backwards, as he knew it would, and he used the motion to cover his escape before the khaki-clad Crown Colony Police could arrive on the scene.

  He went down the road as fast as he could, calling “Police! Police!” to cover the fact that he was moving against the stream. Beyond the edge of the crowd, the road was suddenly empty except for a beggar asleep against a wall. Fenderman stopped, mopped his face which was suddenly covered with sweat in the warm, dazzling morning, cleaned his pebble glasses and looked around. There was no sign of Feng. “Mathews,” he muttered to himself, “you had better have him in your sights!” He walked swiftly down the road, his mind full of what Lydecker was going to say even if Mathews was still with Feng, which looked less and less likely now. Visions of the tall agent’s lean face dark with righteous rage rose unbidden to Fenderman’s brain and blocked out his sight until he was at least 15 yards past the sleeping beggar, and then some trick of visual memory made him realize that the beggar’s feet protruding from beneath a ragged blanket were pale and uncalloused. “Oh no!” he whispered, turning back. Closer investigation showed the ragged blanket to be covering a good suit. This was no sleeping beggar. This was Mathews and he was never going to wake up.

  Oddly enough, to Fenderman’s way of thinking, Lydecker reacted more with sorrow than with anger. He sat the shaken little man down in his stateroom on the Lincoln with a lot of sympathy and bourbon. The Chief came in, white with shock, his face reminding Fenderman of Burke with the bicycle spoke in his head. There was nothing they could do, so they sat around and stared at each other while the Crown Colony Police started their investigation. A rumpled, square man called Hannegan, pilot of the Bell helicopter lashed to the landing-pad on the Lincoln’s broad bow, joined them silently with more bourbon.

  “The British aren’t going to like this,” mourned the Chief. “A final blot on the copybook. They only let us run it as a final favour.”

  “The British!” exploded Fenderman. “Hell! I don’t like it!”

  Water lapped the sheer metal side. A circle of light from a porthole moved infinitesimally as the Lincoln rocked and the sun climbed.

  “Bicycle spokes,” said Lydecker. “I’ve come across those before.” All their eyes turned towards his lanky figure sprawled uneasily in a comfortable chair. His black hair was tousled. His shirt was open at the neck, revealing a virile mat of curls. His sharp amber eyes lost focus and drifted down until he was studying his gleaming black Oxfords as he thought. He had the practised field agent’s ability to extract important points, like splinters of shattered bone, from the mess of mayhem.

  It had all been included in the emergency interim report sent in code to Parmilee, case officer, in CIA headquarters, Langley. There was nothing more they could do. “Shouldn’t we be on the street, looking?” said the Chief. Lydecker’s amber eyes rested on him for a second, then went to Hannegan and Fenderman. Nobody answered. The dead-end office in Boise, Idaho, rose in the Chief of Station’s mind. He fell silent. Half an hour later, just as midday was threatening, a message came back from Parmilee. Feng had used his Gold AmEx card. As soon as it was presented, its number was fed into the credit company’s computer together with the cost of the transaction, its full details and its location. The number on Feng’s card triggered an alert. A message was automatically sent to another computer. Suddenly a printout in the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, began to reveal facts about financial matters being transacted half a world away.

  The credit card had been presented at 08.25 local time at the booking counter at Kai Tak airport. With it, Feng had bought a ticket on a flight to Singapore.

  Singapore

  Feng caught the Jumbo out of Kai Tak at 0900 in the morning, local time. It stopped over in Bangkok and landed in Singapore at 1405 that afternoon. Without luggage, and with an excellently forged passport which proclaimed him to be the owner of a chain of exclusive Chinese restaurants in San Francisco, and an American citizen, Feng came out of Changi airport at 1420, while most of the other passengers from his flight were still caught up at the barriers inevitable in any international entrepôt. It was an overcast, humid afternoon in Singapore. Everyone was moving as slowly as possible: he stood out from the crowd, not only because of his height, but because of the urgency of his movements. Fenderman had given him white trainers, blue jeans, a white shirt and a lightweight denim jacket, all of which he was wearing. The jacket had huge dark stains at the armpits. He was still clutching the bag from the store in the Wanchai district of Hong Kong.

  The men from the CIA’s little Singapore Station had no difficulty in locating him. They followed his bright taxi in their black Mercedes Benz. None of them left the car or ventured on foot alone onto the busy streets after they had followed him out from Changi’s Arrivals Hall. As well as the flight number, and a description of the man they were to meet, the messages from Agent Lydecker in Ho
ng Kong and Case Officer Parmilee in Langley had warned of the possible presence of two Chinese agents, code-named Hummingbird and Bee, who were almost certainly responsible for three deaths on Hong Kong station. These agents, known only by their modus operandi - sharpened bicycle spokes - were deadly and no risks should be taken as there was a strong possibility that they were still on Feng’s heels. Lydecker himself would arrive on the 1615 flight out of Kai Tak.

  This flight was the direct 747, and it landed at Changi Airport at 1830. By then Feng had disappeared again.

  At 1421 on 26 June, therefore, the tall Chinese in the bright blue, easily-visible clothes, raised his right arm, flapping the Wanchai bag like a red flag, to summon the yellow taxi. As he did so, the two rear doors of the black Mercedes opened together, and the two agents who had followed him across the Arrivals Hall, dumped themselves silently on the soft bench seat. The car grumbled into motion as the taxi performed a dangerous U-turn and sped away down towards the city. Following the colourful taxi was easy. The three silent agents all watched it together, their Chief of Station having put it to them very plainly that he did not wish to end up in the same position as his idiot counterpart in Hong Kong. The driver employed no tricks or devices beloved of theoreticians in the art of shadowing. He kept the front bumper of the black Mercedes close to the rear bumper of the yellow taxi at all times, and hang the consequences.

  They went through the perfectly clipped public gardens over the bridge spanning the Rochore River and into the bright, busy thoroughfare of Victoria Street. The first time the taxi stopped, with the Mercedes close behind, both black back doors were half open - in spite of orders - before it became obvious that the cab was waiting, and Feng had just popped into a Bank to change some of Fenderman’s money. After that the taxi stopped every 20 minutes or so, and Feng would vanish into a shop. He never seemed to buy much. There were hardly ever any large packages, although the Wanchai bag stopped flapping emptily.

  The afternoon wore on. Everyone in the black Mercedes got very bored. The only thing they could be certain that Feng had bought was a copy of the Straits Times. Everything else was either wrapped or put straight into the bag. It grew hotter and hotter. The back of Feng’s jacket, the creases of his jeans and sleeves behind knee and elbow also became marked with sweat like dark-blue ink.

  “It’s not that hot,” said the driver. Eventually, after a silence, he suggested to himself: “Perhaps he’s scared. Maybe.”

  Eventually the bright canary taxi turned down the High Street and sped towards the ocean. The black Mercedes followed it down to the docks.

  In procession among many other cars they went along the grey dockside, past the sides of ships standing high like battlements in some strange fortification against the South China Sea. At last the taxi stopped, and Feng went aboard one of the tall, dark ships moored in the Telok Ayer Basin. Against orders, one of the agents went onto the ship as soon as Feng came back ashore.

  The ship was British. She was called Wanderer. In a few days she would leave for Southampton, and she was full of men busily loading her for the voyage. The Company man could find no one to whom Feng had spoken, although one or two remembered having seen him.

  Confused, he reported back to base, just in time to find out that his colleagues in the black Mercedes had finally contrived to lose Feng.

  When Lydecker arrived, the situation was explained to him. Lydecker was tired, dusty, unshaven and very angry indeed. The whole affair, he said, had been unforgivably bungled. Heads would roll if Feng was not found, and he was just the man to wield the axe.

  As the ill-tempered day broke into a vivid, catacysmic thunderstorm, Singapore was taken to pieces. Feng was not found. Lydecker, screaming over the electric static of the storm reported to Langley every three hours.

  Two fruitless days later, Parmilee recalled him. He, too, as case officer, was extremely unhappy. The whole thing had been too fast and far too shallow for his taste. It had been as though they had been trying to carry water in a sieve. He never got to grips with any of it: this he did not like in the least. It was partly to allay his nebulous feeling of frustration at the indecent brevity of the distant action, and partly just a blind, unreasoning hunch, but on the 4th of July, just before he formally closed the non-action Action, he sent orders to the ship Lincoln, apparently innocently moored in Hong Kong, distantly observing the first days of Chinese rule, that she should make all haste for Singapore and shadow the British ship Wanderer at extreme range until such time as Wanderer should reach her home port of Southampton, for which she had departed two days previously.

  Part Two: Action: KALI

  Chapter Three: The Ship

  Indian Ocean, 17 July 1997

  At 1600 hours local time on 17 July 1997, the Wanderer was 15 days out of the Singapore Roads, bound for Southampton via the Suez Canal.

  She had taken a slow course against the currents and recent monsoon up the Straits of Malacca, through the Nicobar Islands, in a great arc south of Sri Lanka and India, then through the Maldive Islands and along the Carlsberg Ridge, and finally north-west towards Socotra and the Red Sea.

  At 15 seconds past 1600 the bomb in the engine room exploded.

  Wanderer had been built in the late sixties by Harland & Wolff in Belfast. She had been designed as an old-fashioned, three-castle ocean-going cargo vessel, a throwback to the pre-container days; and her prime function was still to carry goods between England and the Far East. In the late eighties however, J.J. Hyde & Co., the owners of the South Indian Line, had bought her, had her extensively refitted though not really modernized, and added five expensive staterooms to her high superstructure. These were mainly for the directors of the company, but were also available to other people when not in use by them. The fine profit Wanderer returned, however, came mainly from the heavy goods she carried below in her holds.

  When the bomb in the engine room blew up, the great engines raced wildly and then stopped forever, causing Wanderer to lurch abruptly to port. In No 1 hold, 500 tons of Japanese iron girders, loaded in the Singapore entrepôt, broke free from the chains which held them in place and tore through the hull, and so the bomb, which would otherwise have simply disabled her, caused the ship to begin to sink. A gaping hole opened 20 ft aft of the bow on the starboard and less than two fathoms under the agitated surface of the ocean as the girders spilt out into the water, tumbling end over end through the ruined plates like giant matches escaping from a ruined matchbox. It took a little over 12 seconds for No 1 hold to flood. Someone in Singapore had neglected to fasten the watertight bulkhead door which divided it from No 2 hold. It took longer for No 2 hold, packed tight with Indian rice, to flood, but not much.

  Aft of No 2 was the engine room itself, beneath the old-fashioned midships bridge house. The explosion here, with its epicentre by the massive engines, had been of sufficient force to damage a few plates, but Chief Engineer O’Rorke, together with two GP seamen who had escaped the full force of the blast, managed to staunch the small seepage of water. In their shocked state, and because of their concern with the buckled plates, none of them noticed that the explosion had also damaged the forward watertight door which separated them from No 2 hold. Two minutes after No 2 had flooded, with the saturated rice already swelling with that inevitable vegetable strength which allows grass stems to split flagstones, some two minutes and 45 seconds after the explosion, Chief Engineer O’Rorke looked up from what he was doing, and saw several fine jets of water spraying out round the edge of the damaged door, and began to yell, “Look out!” Before he had even opened his mouth properly, the door gave way. It exploded inwards, bolts and hinges sheered by the weight of the water behind it. It hit O’Rorke in the chest, swept his body down the whole length of the engine room and crushed it against the after wall. The two seamen panicked and tried to walk through the soggy flood of water and rice to reach the ladder up out of the engine room. Neither of them made it.

  By 1605, local time No 1 and No 2 holds, and the e
ngine room were completely flooded. Chief Engineer O’Rorke, two Engineers, and twelve GP seamen were dead; but the Wanderer’s rate of sinking was slowing down. It might have taken her another hour to vanish beneath the Indian Ocean, but at 1607 the boilers blew up, and after that it was only a matter of minutes.

  At 1530 precisely Alec Stone came into the bar. Stone was a broad, solid man approaching early middle age slowly and easily. He had broad shoulders and the deep chest of a rugby forward. Later, perhaps, he would run to fat, but at the moment he wore his solid muscles with an air of suppressed power. He moved with quiet confidence and an almost feminine precision, as though he was always aware of what he was doing - even in the smallest particular - and how he was doing it. He entered the bar and made his way silently to a table, sat down and raised his left hand a few inches above the polished teak to summon the bar steward. As he approached, Stone took an old gunmetal cigarette case and a silver cigarette lighter out of the breast pocket of his short-sleeved shirt, opened the case with a practised flick of his finger, took out a long low-tar cigarette, and lit it. “Whisky please,” he said to the bar steward, in a puff of smoke.

  The steward moved away silently thinking it had been a waste of time even asking: every day since Singapore Mr Stone had come into the bar at 1130 and stayed until lunchtime; he had come in again at 1530 and stayed until tea; he had returned finally at 2230 and stayed until after midnight. And he always drank whisky.