It was half-past five on a Sunday morning, a perfect time to cross the city uninterrupted and unobserved. A perfect time for a coup.
Madziko’s instructions were simple: on the ‘go’ signal, get to the headquarters of the Malemban Broadcasting Corporation, secure the building and hold it until Patrick Tshonga arrived at seven to make the simultaneous announcement of Henderson Gushungo’s death and his own assumption of power on the MBC’s solitary TV channel and all four of its national radio stations. His men had been ready since long before dawn. The signal had been received. So now, as the rising sun split the streets into long expanses of deep shadow and dazzling shafts of burnished gold, the Reconnaissance Squadron was on its way.
Madziko had sworn a solemn oath in the sight of God to uphold the state of Malemba and preserve it against all its enemies, foreign and internal. So far as he was concerned, he was upholding that oath more loyally now than at any other time in his fifteen-year career as an army officer. He had been raised to believe in the essential virtues of democracy and free speech. He did not accept that oppression was any more acceptable just because a black man, rather than a white man, had imposed it. To be in the vanguard of establishing true freedom in his country was thus, to Rodney Madziko, the greatest honour he could possibly be granted.
Up ahead, he saw Broadcasting House, the MBC headquarters, named after the London home of the British Broadcasting Corporation in colonial times and unchanged ever since. It was a heavy-set, redbrick thirties office block that occupied three sides of a large courtyard, in the middle of which stood a modernist white marble fountain that had long since run dry. The fourth side of the courtyard consisted of a high metal fence that ran along the street, pierced by the building’s main entrance. A guard-hut stood by a lowered barrier. The hut was empty, nor were there any signs of life in the building itself. It was, after all, first thing on a Sunday morning. Only the bare minimum of staff would be at work at this hour.
Major Madziko could easily have ordered his driver to burst straight through the barrier, but he did not want to act like a violent oaf. They were supposed to be there in the interests of a fair, law-abiding society. So he ordered one of his men to raise the barrier then led his troop of scout cars into the courtyard, the sound of their engines echoing raucously off the building’s plain brick facade. They proceeded round the fountain, three to one side, two to the other, so that Madziko’s vehicle ended up in the middle of a line of five, all facing the main entrance. He ordered the drivers to cut their engines and jumped down from his car. His men followed him, clambering out on to the tarmac courtyard until only the gunners standing behind their machine guns remained.
Inside Broadcasting House, another major, from the army’s paratroop battalion, was watching events down below from the vantage point of a first-floor window. He was holding a walkie-talkie to his lips. He spoke very quietly into the mouthpiece, and a dozen windows slid open. From each, a round metallic snout slid forward.
‘Fire at will,’ said the major.
The moving window frames caught Madziko’s eye in an instant, but the totally unexpected shock of impending disaster took him a couple of seconds to process. Too late, he turned back to his gunner, pointed at the dark interruptions in the facade caused by the raised glass and shouted, ‘The windows! Shoot!’
By the time the first machine gun was raised, the triggers on the grenade-launchers had been pulled, the rocket flames were spurting and the grenades were on their way. A fraction of a second later, the scout cars were obliterated. The force of the blast and the thousands of razor-sharp shards of metal that filled the air blew Madziko and his men apart. In the time it takes to swat a mosquito, they were destroyed, and with them all hope of a peaceful coup.
The ambush was repeated with equal finality at the Parliament Building, the Central Bank, Police Headquarters and the President’s official residence. Wherever Patrick Tshonga’s forces went, government men were waiting for them. The rebels who had counted on the element of surprise were the ones receiving a rude and terminal shock.
67
Mabeki wasn’t making for the border. He left the highway at the first possible interchange, turned hard left, almost doubling back on himself, and drove away to the southwest. He was driving smoothly, not too fast.
Carver unconsciously clenched his jaw as the tension and concentration built inside him. Where was Mabeki going? He mentally pictured the maps of Hong Kong he’d studied, and skimmed the books he’d read. A name came to mind: Shek Kong, a former RAF base now part-used by the Chinese air force. Private aviation was allowed there, which it wasn’t at the main international airport. If Mabeki had arranged a plane to get him out of Hong Kong fast, on the first leg of the journey to Malemba, he’d very likely fly from Shek Kong.
Carver estimated that Mabeki was around three minutes ahead of him. If a jet was fuelled and ready to go, that was more than enough time to drive on to the tarmac, race up the steps, close the door and start rolling. Like Mabeki, Carver wasn’t keen on driving too fast, but for different reasons. He’d never wanted to be convicted for murder, just because he’d been caught breaking a speed-limit. But he couldn’t afford those niceties now. He had to narrow the gap.
The car showroom’s mechanics had done a good job. The Honda might have looked like a piece of junk on the outside, but it had all the acceleration its reputation suggested, the steering was precise, and the suspension nice and tight. Carver was enjoying himself, revving hard and relishing the angry buzz of the overworked, tuned-up engine as he darted in and out of the traffic on the highway before swinging left on to an off-ramp painted with go-slower yellow stripes.
There was a roundabout at the bottom of the ramp. Carver swung left on to a road that cut through a sprawl of low-density suburban housing before heading out into the country, following the valley floor for a mile or so between two lines of hills. The road was undemanding, with long straight stretches broken by gentle corners that he could take flat out. He had no trouble keeping his speed above eighty miles per hour, sometimes touching a hundred as he overtook slower vehicles, leaving trucks, buses and crowded family cars in his wake.
Carver had to slow his pace slightly as he re-entered a more built-up area. There was another roundabout up ahead. The road to the airfield at Shek Kong was the second exit – straight across. It took him a couple of seconds to register the fact that Mabeki had not taken it. He’d swung left again, going due south now, back towards Kowloon. And he’d taken the most remarkable and most dangerous road in the whole of Hong Kong: Route Twisk.
It had been built in the early fifties by soldiers of the Royal Engineers to link the British Army’s main base at Castle Peak in the Tsuen Wan district of the city with the RAF at Shek Kong. So the road was originally designated TW/SK, which soon became known as Twisk. Designed with inbuilt demolition chambers, which could be blown up to collapse the road in the event of a Chinese invasion, Twisk ran through some of Hong Kong’s most rugged and spectacular landscapes, past its highest peak, Tai Mo Shan. Barely four miles long, the road rose from sea-level up to twelve hundred feet and almost all the way back down again. It twisted and turned along and between the hills in a series of blind corners and hairpin bends. At the far end it was swallowed up by the urban highways and towering apartment blocks of modern Tsuen Wan.