The Mandarin Cypher

'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 — '