But if I did it there’d be another death a second later because the nearer of the other two, the one with the blepharitis, would recognize the blow I was using and come for me with any one of the forward-killing kicks while my neck was exposed to him at the end of my own movement. He’d be too frightened to do anything else: because this is the way with the graduated belts — their powers are so deadly that they recognize the dangers of an equal.

  So there wasn’t a chance but you have to think of everything or you’ll miss a trick and they’ll go in there and switch the lights on and lock the door and pull your dossier out of the safe and drop it into the document destruction thing, just because you didn’t think of everything.

  ‘You’re making a mistake,’ I told them again.

  They didn’t understand and it worried them in case I was saying something they could use for their profit. They told me to shut up: I didn’t know the word but I knew the tone. Then the thin one folded my papers and put them into the passport and I waited for him to hand them back to me and give a shrug and let me go, because the imperilled psyche becomes undisciplined and clutters the mind with false hopes, however you try to reason.

  He said a word and the gun was pushed harder against my spine and we moved at last, the four of us, towards the station wagon. I was forced back into the driving seat and they took my wrists and put my hands on the wheel-rim. Then they all climbed in and slammed the doors and one of them tugged out the street map from the glove compartment and got it open and stared at it for a moment and finally stabbed his finger near one of the folds. ‘Here.’ He looked at me with his blank animal eyes to see that I understood. ‘Go here.’ The facia wasn’t lit but there was a chemical glow from the quayside lamps and his finger was stabbing again at the point on the map: the corner of Statue Square, where the Bank of China stood with its great brass doors and its garrison of armed guards and interrogators, the place where they were going to take me and after a while make me wish to Christ I’d drawn a capsule.

  Chapter Eleven : TARGET

  ‘Have you seen this chart?’

  ‘Yes,’ I told him.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘On the launch.’

  ‘What launch?’

  ‘The narcotics boat.’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  He had it spread across the table: Chart 341 - China - South-East Coast - Approaches to Hong Kong-Islands South of Lantau.

  ‘Have you studied it?’ he asked me.

  ‘Not in detail.’

  His head turned slightly and he became very still for a second or two. Then he went across to the bulkhead and put his foot down and there was a light crunch and he came back.

  ‘I wish to Christ you wouldn’t do that,’ I said.

  He gave a titter but watched me with unamused eyes. ‘Cockroach, old boy, the mariner’s bane. How are you feeling?’

  ‘Bloody awful.’

  Physically I was all right but it had put an edge on my nerves, those three little ticks trying to get at me like that within minutes of final briefing.

  ‘You’ve got three and a half hours yet,’ said Ferris. ‘Take it easy.’ He leaned over the chart again, moving the lantern so that its light featured the bottom right-hand corner. This was the target zone, centred on Longitude 114 by east, Latitude 22 by north. The oil rig was two miles south of the San-men Islands and I saw he’d marked it in: I suppose he’d asked the Navy or someone where the thing was.

  ‘Have you seen any other charts?’

  ‘One or two.’

  ‘On the narcotics launch?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I hadn’t studied them. He got another one and unrolled it and spread it out and began topographical briefing while I sat in my track suit and tried to get my left eyelid to keep still: they could have wrecked the whole mission for me, those little bastards.

  ‘Hong Kong is pretty well surrounded,’ said Ferris, ‘with these little islands, a couple of hundred of them belonging to the Colony and the rest of them garrisoned by the Communist Chinese.’

  I didn’t ask any questions yet but I was already wondering how the hell he was going to drop me into the target zone with any kind of security, even by night.

  ‘You’ll be going in by sub,’ he said without looking up from the chart.

  It wasn’t telepathy: he was just a very bright director and keeping one step ahead of me. I let him go on talking, trying to get the other thing out of my mind.

  They were probably dead.

  ‘This group is perfectly barren, with the nearest garrison on this island here, five nautical miles to the north-east.’

  I was beginning to steam now so I unzipped the track suit to the waist and let it hang open. Ferris had gone to fetch it for me from the Harbour Hotel, mustn’t catch a cold he’d said with a whinnying laugh, and left me here on the junk with a towel round me. I hadn’t dried off enough before I put the track suit on and that was why I had begun steaming.

  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 Londan?’

  ‘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.