Only hours before her death on the steps of the temple in Seoul, the newspaper had said, Soong Li fei had been the chief mourner at her brother's funeral.
Outside the canteen an F5E went down the runway and lifted off with a reverberating rush of sound.
You must be very careful, Li-fei had told me. She knew Tung Kuo-feng, and the things he was capable of doing; but she had forgotten to be careful herself.
"Are you getting cold feet?" the de Haven girl asked me.
"What?"
"This hostile territory thing. It's losing its appeal?"
"I don't know," I told her, "if it's still on."
"The drop?"
"Yes."
"Oh, for God's sake, they called me down from the north, and I'm bloody busy."
I was trying to focus on the fresh English face with its unwavering gaze, but there was a kind of double exposure and I was also watching the soft cinnamon eyes of Soong Lifei.
"What do you do," I asked de Haven, "in the north?" Not that I was interested, but there was a social obligation to keep the conversation going while I thought out what to do.
"I train parachutists for NATO. Why?"
"Then you're too valuable to lose. How did you get yourself into this mess?"
She put down her coffee with a little bang. "Clive, are you always like this?"
"Like what?"
"A bear with a sore arse. Look, if you've decided to back out of doing the drop then just tell me. Frankly I couldn't care less, but by God I shall want expenses and compensation for wasted time."
Her anger was finally getting through to me and the image of Soong Li-fei was fading. "Something's happened," I told her, "that might stop us going in. I've got to ask Ferris for his instructions; then we'll tell you the score."
"That's extremely kind of you. Exactly how long do I have to wait?"
"I'd say an hour or two, not more." I put some money down and left her.
"Thank you for the coffee," she called after me.
At eight o'clock Ferris signalled London and told them what had happened; then we went on talking.
"You left Soong Li-fei at what time?" he asked me.
"About ten past nine last night."
"And she was found outside the temple about midnight. Three hours at most; half an hour at least. I mean she could have been killed half an hour after you left her — the time needed to drive from the airport to the vicinity of the temple."
What we had to decide was whether there had been time for Tung's men to interrogate her before they killed her off, and whether she had been forced to tell them I now knew how to find Tung. The ultimate question was a very simple one: if we made the drop before dawn tomorrow, would Tung be expecting us?
If he were expecting us, we wouldn't have a chance.
"From what you knew of her," Ferris asked me, "do you think she'd break?"
"I think Tung's men could break a sphinx."
Ferris paced the small room; these were my quarters, by courtesy of the US Air Force, complete with bathroom, two telephones, a TV set and an internal communications panel. The equipment for the drop was stacked in the corner: climbing boots and gloves, rope, rucksack, provisions, field glasses, first aid and the rest of the stuff.
"What present status is Youngquist?" I asked Ferris.
"He's standing by as your replacement."
"Briefed right up to the minute?"
He didn't look at me. "Yes."
"Does that reflect your estimation of my chances? Or London's estimation?"
He looked at me now, a bit annoyed. "Our estimation's the same as yours. We're not keeping anything back from you. If you'd like to consider your record with the Bureau you might realise they're not about to throw you on the scrap heap."
"Civil of them."
"We think you've got a good chance of getting through to Tung Kuo-feng, otherwise we wouldn't ask you to go. Croder's discussed a dozen other options including a low-level bombing raid, but the best chance we've got is by putting one man in by stealth, a man with your proven capabilities."
"Then send me in alone."
"You mean without de Haven?"
"Yes."
"She'll be with you only until you sight the monastery from the ground, unless you need her help after the drop. She's led climbing expeditions right across this country and she speaks fluent Korean."
"How will she get out?"
"You'll be given a final joint briefing before take-off."
I turned to stand with my back to the stuff in the corner; it was tempting me: I wanted to go in, despite the increased risk, and that wasn't intelligent. "What can you do to find out if Li-fei was made to talk?"
"Almost nothing. I've got Youngquist working on it, with five or six agents in place; but all they can do is hope for luck in tracing her movements from the time she left you — finding people who might have seen her or talked to her during that blank time period."
"Who's going to make the final decision?"
"London. Providing you agree to go in if they ask you to."
"I shall agree."
"You may want time to think."
"No."
Because Tung would have to be stopped: he'd already gone too far. He had ordered six killings and Li-fei's wouldn't be the last; and since I'd seen the photograph of the pretty Chinese girl in the newspaper I had wanted urgently to meet Tung Kuo-feng, the diabolus whose hand had reached out from the mountains to guide the sword that had struck across that delicate porcelain neck.
"We're not looking for personal reasons," Ferris said. "We're not mounting a vendetta."
I suppose he sensed my mood; or maybe he thought that Soong Li-fei had meant more to me than she had. But how much does a girl have to mean to you before you're ready to destroy the man who took her head from her body?
"What reasons are you looking for?" I noticed that my tone wasn't all that pleasant.
"We're running a mission. We're asking you to carry out a technical operation, an exercise in logistics. It's the only way you'll get through."
"That's the trouble with London. You're not meant to have a soul. You're meant to be a bloody machine. But just for your information, when I go in it'll be for my own reasons, and there's nothing you can do about that. Nothing at all."
An orderly woke me at 2 a.m. and I reported to the control tower as instructed.
London must have decided. I couldn't ask Ferris because he wasn't here. At 02:15 they put de Haven and me into a transport plane and we landed at Daegu fifty minutes later, 150 miles south-east of Seoul. The night was clear and windless. Ferris was there.
The briefing was summary; the main points had been gone over before. Ferris was perfectly calm, but that didn't mean a thing. Helen de Haven had withdrawn into herself; either she was feeling tension or had dismissed me as a boor and had no inclination to talk. We left the briefing room at 03:46 by the clock on the wall and walked onto the tarmac, already strapped into our chutes.
"Hold it," Newcomb said, and we stopped. He went ahead of us to join Ferris and Lieutenant Lewes. It was almost dark in this area: they must have switched off the tarmac lights.
I said to de Haven: "Did they tell you what our chances are?"
She looked up at me in the faint light. "They didn't give me any actual figures."
"Did they tell you we might be dropping into gunfire?"
She was quiet for a moment. "They used the expression ‘extremely hazardous.' Does that fit?"
"Yes. As long as you know."
"All I know is, you don't want me on this trip. But I'm hard to scare. Sorry."