ADAM HALL - The Pekin Target

I kept on walking, five yards one way and five back, while he sat there like a carved Buddha. I didn't pass either of the two grilled apertures.

"You realise," he said evenly, "that you have no chance of leaving here alive."

"Possibly not, but it's my duty to warn you that if I don't get a message to my unit by radio then you'll have to suffer the consequences. They'll certainly start a search for me after forty-eight hours, because they know exactly where I came down and I told them I'd telephone them from the village to report progress."

"I am going to correct what I just told you. Your only chance of leaving here alive is to give me your confidence."

And blow my own cover.

"That's what I'm doing."

His head turned again to follow me. "There will be a point in our conversation when you will realise that your cover is less important than the proposition I shall make. You might find yourself in a position to prevent the assassination of the next three people on the list. The dates of these events are already fixed, and the first is to take place in two days' time — unless you are prepared to cooperate."

I got impatient with him. "But surely you realise that the moment I rejoin my unit you'll be hunted down and arrested?"

He ignored that, as I knew he would; my remark was simply there for the record as part of my cover. It might not be true that he knew who I was or that we were the only people here who understood English or that he was a prisoner at the monastery; the chances were that there was someone on the other side of these apertures in the wall with a microphone, or that Tung had one concealed in his hand for that matter.

But now I understood something about the Russian connection. Not all, but something. It concerned Chinese-American relations.

"I must tell you," he went on, "that the assassination of the British Secretary of State was a mistake, and that I deeply regret it. The one responsible has already forfeited his life."

Soong Yongshen.

"That hardly helps the late British Secretary of State, does it? You bloody terrorists don't care whom you wipe out. You know that man had a family?"

"I mention the incident so that you shall be conversant with the overall situation. And the situation is this. A short time ago I received a proposal from the Soviet KGB that I should assist them in a certain endeavour, the object of which would be the severance of diplomatic relations between the United States and China, and with it, the end of the so-called triangle diplomacy involving those two powers and Japan. The threat to the Soviet Union presented by the growing recognition of China is seen by the Kremlin as intolerable. The four thousand miles of frontier common to Russia and China and the constant military skirmishes across it are of deep concern to the Soviets; in addition, China is close to developing a nuclear missile with a range of eight thousand miles, capable of reaching Moscow. It is my personal opinion that the severance of relations between China and the United States may be a preliminary to a Soviet attack on China, with a view to pre-empting a nuclear-armed, American-supported attack by China against the Soviets. To you and to me, such fears on the part of the Russians may seem extreme; but you must remember these people are xenophobic to a dangerous degree."

I stopped walking about and sat down to listen, leaning my shoulders against the cool stone wall to ease the bruises. I had fifty questions for him, but I didn't speak; I wanted to see how far he would go in what he was telling me; but even at this stage I was ready to take notice because he was answering a lot of the questions that had been on my mind before I'd left Seoul.

He wasn't putting out an elaborate smokescreen, I knew that. He wasn't even interested in my intelligence background; if he'd wanted to get any information out of me he would have thrown me to the Koreans and told them to go to work, and they would have enjoyed it after what I'd done to their friend.

"I declined the Russian's proposal that I should assist them." Tung hadn't moved since I'd come in here, but there was nothing lifeless about him except his voice; I had the feeling that if I made a wrong move he'd react with the speed of a snake. "They offered me several million US dollars to help them; I forget how many; I was not interested. But they persisted, saying that I was the only man who could successfully carry out the necessary tasks involved. I told them I was no longer active internationally. They offered me political power in the new government of China, but again I refused; the power I have now is sufficient to me."

His ash-grey head was turning slightly, so that he faced me directly in the low light of the lamp, and in the shadowed and stone-dark eyes I saw an expression shimmering, like a reflection on black water.

"So they took away my son."

I felt a kind of pressure in the air, as if the edge of a storm had passed across the mountains, leaving the chamber grave-quiet and the flame of the lamp pointed and motionless in this deathly calm.

"Tung Chuan, my son. He was studying the Buddhist faith, and was to be a priest; but they seized him in North Korea and accused him of spying; and now he has vanished."

The air seemed charged again with pressure, as if dark lightning had struck, and I knew now what it was: it was an expression of his psyche. His rage was so intense that it was producing an aura, and I was recording it, somewhere in the complex psycho-chemical organism that I identified as myself.

"I do not know where he is", he said. "my son, Tung Chuan."

It was a little while before I could get my senses back to normal.

"That's rough luck," I said. "The British Secretary of State's family know where he is. In a coffin, what few bits you left of him."

I think he could have killed me then, and I was ready for it. I think that at the back of my mind I was wanting to do something for Sinclair, and Jason, and the American and the girl with the cinnamon eyes; I think I'd wanted to provoke this murderous bastard so that I could destroy him before he could destroy someone else.

Unprofessional conduct. I'd got business to do here. But it fitted the cover of a forthright Army colonel shocked by the death of the British delegate.

In a moment Tung Kuo-feng said carefully: "My agents have been trying to find my son, and have failed; they report at he is known to be in South Korea, but that is all. It may be that the resources of the British Secret Service could discover more than that; Tung Chuan was seized by Russian agents, not Koreans; your Service might have learned of it through its agents in Moscow, and are unaware of its significance. You should inform them. A great deal of trouble could be avoided if my son was set free.»

"I'm afraid the British Army hasn't any agents in Moscow, or anywhere else."

He said: "The moment my son was safe, I would halt my operations and you would have achieved your objective."

Cool stones against my back, and the stillness of the lamp's flame against my eyes; voices in the distance, coming rough the grilled apertures, and farther way the sound of miniature bells as the goats were gathered in the mountain dusk. No real sense that we were ourselves held captive by guards armed with submachine guns while two military helicopters stood by; _instead, a sense of karma, a feeling that what this man was saying was true, and that I should trust him; and a premonition of enormous danger, not only for me but for many.

Fatigue, that was all.

"You could avert enormous danger," the quiet monotone came to me through the waves of silence, "for many people." A spasm of nerves passed along my spine as I realised how easily this man was reading my thoughts; I sat straighter against the hardness of the wall at my back, trying to borrow from its strength. "Before the advent of Mao, the Chinese military was trained by the Soviet Red Army, and is still oriented towards the Russians' tactics, strategies and weapon systems. On the political and ideological level the two countries are opposed, but there are several Army generals still capable of wielding great power, and they feel a natural brotherhood for their Soviet mentors and would like to be training with them once more. Lin Pao's attempted coup against Mao did not succeed; but Mao is now dead, and a new power struggle has begun in China. We are very close to seeing a general take command, supported by high-ranking military advisers, all of them friendly to the Soviets. I do not need to tell you what such a volte face would mean: the immediate destruction of the American-Chinese-Japanese bloc and a massive Soviet-Chinese threat to the West. The next two actions I shall undertake on behalf of the Soviets will bring this about, within a matter of days, unless you can prevent it."