ADAM HALL - The Pekin Target

Colonel Sinitsin stopped in front of me with his grey suede shoes neatly together. "Tung spoke a certain amount of logic in there. You could have been valuable as a disinformer; but we know your record and we know you can't be trusted to behave intelligently when it's all over. You'd only try something stupid, and I'm not going to have that."

I stared him back but didn't show any reaction. There was no point now in concealing the fact that I understood Russian, but it's the kind of thing we've been trained to do, in whatever circumstances: maintain the cover. Actually it's a bit like running around like a chicken with its head cut off, and I would much rather have told Sinitsin something to annoy him, Lenin was a silly shit, something simple enough for him to understand.

"So you can only blame yourself," he said, and gave a brief energetic nod, as he'd done earlier when I was introduced; then he turned his back on me and walked with his measured stride to where the others were standing, saying a word to Yang as he passed him; Yang was standing alone and slightly forward of the group, and I heard the interpreter catch the word from Sinitsin and translate it for him. Sinitsin had been walking with his back to me when he'd spoken, and I didn't hear what he was actually saying; I suppose it was something like "in your own time".

They say that we go through three phases in the last few moments of our life: we panic, then we get angry, then we accept. I had got through the first phase — Listen, there's time to run, so forth; and my thoughts about Moira must have been part of the acceptance. I didn't feel any anger, because in this branch of the trade you kill or get killed, and there's nothing personal. I was still in the final phase, the acceptance bit, because my mind was clear enough to wonder why Sinitsin had bothered to come up and speak to me. He believed I didn't understand Russian, or he wouldn't have wasted his time with all that palaver in there, with the cripple and Tung translating. Was it conscience, then? Wanting to go through the motions of addressing the condemned man, telling him he'd only got himself to blame? A KGB colonel from Department V with a conscience, yes, that would do all right if I wanted to go out with a funny story.

I watched Yang bring the submachine gun into the aim. There would be fifty rounds in that model and the stuff would be coming into me with the force of a pneumatic drill. If there were any humanity in him he would start with the head and work downwards through a series of a dozen shots, so that the brain would go first and not understand what was happening afterwards; but there wouldn't be any humanity in him; he'd just stand there and spread me all over the wall and leave it at that; or to put it another way he might have some humanity in him, but that marksman was either his brother or a good friend and he was very upset about him and he'd get a kick out of blowing me apart.

They were all standing very still now, watching me.

Physical reactions normal for the situation: sweat running down my sides, the pulse accelerated, a tightness of the chest and a reluctance to breathe in case it disturbed the delicate balance between a living body and a mess of disintegrating chemicals.

The muzzle of the gun was a small hole and I watched it, and the squat blockish shape of the magazine beyond it. He should be pumping that thing by now.

Everything very still, and the sweat trickling on my skin moonlight and indigo dark, and faces, and silence, and suddenly someone's voice, pitched in a shout.

"Come on then, you bastard! Shoot!"

My own voice, yes. Its echoes came back from the walls of the pagoda. Rather bad show of nerves, but too late now.

"Come on!"

Sweat pouring on my face; staring into the muzzle of the gun; breathing rapidly now and the heart thudding under the ribs, if you're going to do it, do it, if you're going to do it, do it —

"Shoot, damn your eyes!"

Shaking all over, the animal smell of fear, breath coming painfully, sawing in and out, only one thing to do, Mahomet, mountain, so forth, my legs weak as I began walking towards him, towards the gun, watching the small black hole where the flame would burst with its orange light puckering to the dark stitching shapes of the bullets -

"Shoot, fuck you! What are you waiting for?"

Walking into his gun.

Tung Kuo-feng was standing there in the shadows.

I had only just seen him.

And now I knew what they were waiting for. Page 97 of the GB Manual entitled Treatment of Prisoners and Hostages. The heading for Chapter IV reads: "Effectiveness of Fear Inducement".

This was Russian, and it was routine.

But the human body is a body and as I walked right into at bloody thing he didn't lower it, and I stood there with the muzzle against my stomach and the sweat still running on me because you can never be sure… you can never be absolutely sure that you're right, that they're just pulling your psyche apart to soften you up, to make you afraid, to make you obey. Because prisoners and hostages get shot dead every day all over the world and you can't simply stand here and whistle just because you've read their bloody manual half a dozen times in the Behaviour under Stress class at Norfolk.

Yang must be military, and under tight discipline; otherwise it would have been too much for him: he would have pumped that thing at me like an orgasm he couldn't stop.

I looked up from the gun into his dark burning eyes. He'd frightened me, and I felt the reaction developing inside me with the gathering force of an explosion and then I was working hard, my hands driving down against the barrel of the gun and smashing it away so fast that he could loose only a short burst before my half-fist went into his throat and he staggered back.

Hands grabbing me, dragging me away from him, that's all right, you frightened me, that's all, and I've got a rotten temper, not my bloody fault, I was born with it.

5051 kHz.

Tung was on one side of me, Sinitsin on the other. Somewhere behind me were the two track-suited guards, one of them Yang. It hadn't been my intention to kill him, though I could have done that: I had been fast enough and there had been more than enough rage behind the half-fist strike to the larynx; but discipline hadn't been undermined even after what they'd done to me, and I had known that if I killed Yang there wouldn't be another mock execution: they would gun me down on the spot.

So he was behind me now, with a bruised throat and the submachine gun in his hands again, in case I tried to smash up the radio or said anything wrong. I hadn't increased my chances, of course, by going for him like that: he'd want even less of an excuse now to shoot me out of hand; but without having to think about it I'd realised we had to do something about the fear they'd induced in me, about the wish to obey; we had to minimise the effects that were the object of the whole charade, and the rage and then the release of rage which going for Yang had done. It had been a calculated reaction on the part of the psyche, bringing in the risk-benefit factor: the risk of death at the hands of Yang was now increased, but I would benefit from the fact that my fear of these people and my wish to obey them was much less than it would have been, and if a chance came of destroying them I was more ready to take it.

But everything is relative. As I sat in front of the illuminated console the nerves in my spine were crawling, because the smell of cordite was still on the air and I knew they were standing behind me with loaded guns, in case I tried to smash the radio or use my bare hands on Tung or Sinitsin.

5051 kHz.

Eagle to Jade One. Eagle to Jade One.