ADAM HALL - The Mandarin Cypher

'When was that?'

'At 05.40. We were north of Green Island.'

'You didn't waste any time.'

Peripheral anxiety: Nora Tewson might conceivably note that two minutes after the launch had left the hotel mooring a police boat had put to sea at full speed half a mile north along the shore. We didn't carry any markings visible at that distance but we had radar and we didn't look like a cabin cruiser. Nothing to be done about it: ignore.

There were some charts framed under glass on the bulkhead and I looked at them. Hydrographic Department, Hong Kong Approaches. The relevant sheet was No. 341: Islands South of Lantau.

'What's your bearing, Captain Liu?'

He looked at the compass. 'Two-four-oh.'

We were heading roughly south-west, passing the north coast of Lamma Island by Pak Kok Point and moving into the West Lamma Channel. I'd assumed that a Pekin-based operation would take the launch north-west towards the South China seaboard but I was wrong, unless it was going to round Lantau from the south and head north after leaving Hong Kong territorial waters. We could see its dark blob through the windscreen, larger now and growing clearer. The sun was almost directly behind us and still only two diameters high, right in their eyes if they looked astern.

'Are we flat out?'

'I am sorry?'

'Are we going at full speed?'

'Yes.'

'All I want is to see where they go. Do what you can to stay up sun of them.'

'To stay-?'

'Stay between them and the sun.'

'Ah yes, understand.'

It occurred to me that London had taken so bloody long because they'd had to screen the whole of the Hong Kong police through local agents in place before they could give me a boat crew I could trust: Macklin had told me to use utmost care in approaching the police or the Special Branch. Egerton must have worked his chilblains to the bone getting me this toy, it was a shame.

In ten minutes we began passing junks on their way out to the fishing banks and I looked at the chart again. Lamma was to port and falling astern, with Cheung Chau Island coming up on the other side. The deck had been tilting a bit and I took a look at the compass. We'd begun heading a few points more southerly at 235 degrees. Five minutes later Captain Liu spoke again.

'You wish me still follow?'

'Yes. Why?'

'We are leaving territorial waters now.'

'What difference does that make?'

'Only if you wish me to put a shot across bows, or go aboard. We have no more authority now.'

He was looking slightly disappointed, and I thought what a dangerous world it was.

'They must not see us, Captain Liu. They must remain totally unaware of our presence. Now is that understood?'

'Oh yes, understood.' He turned away slightly, probably embarrassed, peering with great concentration through the windscreen. I suppose if you're a young ambitious skipper of a police boat you spend a lot of your time looking for an excuse to blow someone out of the water.

There wasn't a lot of shipping about, but enough to give us a bit of cover. Liu went to stand by the bo'sun and we altered course twice in the next ten minutes as he brought us almost parallel with the launch, keeping between it and the sun. Then he ordered half speed.

07.03.

'What's that thing?' I asked him.

'An oil rig.'

'Who does it belong to?'

'Communist China.'

I watched the distant shape of the launch slowing towards the oil rig, then looked at the chart again. The date on Sheet 341 was 1972, but someone had marked the rig in ink later, slightly west of Longitude 114 by east, Latitude 22 by north, some two miles south of the San-men Island group.

'Stop both,' Liu ordered.

The bubbling of the exhaust died to silence, and we began drifting, suddenly isolated on the expanse of the sea. Water slapped sometimes under the stern, and a cable strained at its cleat somewhere forward of the radio mast. The sun was already hot, and threw an oily shadow on the starboard side. Captain Liu stood without moving, his cap-peak set like a pointer at the horizon. The superstructure of the oil rig stood like a splinter against the sky, and within five minutes the shape of the launch had merged with it. I took another look through the 7 X 50's, but we were still too distant to see much detail.

'All right,' I told Liu.

'You wish to return?'

'Yes.' I got him over to the charts. 'Head well to the north here, above Sha Wan, and come down the coast, keeping as close to it as you can.'

He spoke to the bo'sun, and as we turned and got under way I stood looking at Chart No. 341. Mandarin was still running, and we now had a target zone centre: 114 X220, South China Sea.

In the first two seconds I forced a yoshida on him but he knew this one and broke it and his foot razored the air edge-on, fast and powerful and deadly but missing me and bringing down some of the jars. They crashed to the floor and my scalp rose but there was nothing I could do. The man was my first concern, not the reptiles, because he was trying to kill me and they would only attack in fright. We rolled and glass crunched under me and he gained a lock and I think it would have finished me but I was lying half across one of the snakes and it began striking at my arm, again and again, and I had to do something because I couldn't stand them, they nauseated me, again and again, coiling and releasing, its scales livid and the tiny black eyes glistening and the jaws gaping at right angles in a regular rhythm as it coiled, released and struck, coiling again as the pain burned in my arm.

It made me feel sick and I had to do something because there were some others free too, slithering around among the broken glass. They'd send me mad if I couldn't get away so I used my other knee and brought it against him in a jack-knife drive that would have been quite useless without my horror of these things to give it force, and the hold eased and came on again and then broke and I tried the only trick I had, the third movement of the toka , going straight in without the first and second preliminaries to open up the target, but he took it and waited, knowing I didn't have the leverage to make the kill. For nearly a second we lay locked and immobile, one body, one two-headed eight-limbed freak with its fierce internal energies at variance and on the point of blowing it apart as the electro-chemical forces sought to regain stability.

I didn't know anything about him. There had only been Chiang here when I'd walked into the snake shop, and at first he'd acknowledged me with a slight nod; then his eyes had shifted quickly to look past me, over my shoulder, and I had moved. There wasn't time to do anything consciously: in extreme danger the organism cedes control to the primitive brain, and the cortex is required only to compute data and supply intelligence. Of the several hundred thousand facts, impressions and implications, these were salient: I was presently listed for elimination by an alien network heavily infiltrating the field; there was alarm in Chiang's eyes; in the Orient the bare hand is the traditional weapon; Chiang's eyes had shifted only once, so that there was probably only one man behind me; my hope of survival in these circumstances (unarmed combat, close confines, one adversary) lay more in a blind lightning move than in a considered and organized attack. In the fifth of a second it would take me to turn and consider the ideal defence he could fell me with a hand-blade to the neck.

So I'd gone in low, spinning and reaching for his legs and finding them, bringing him off balance and chopping at the kneecap to paralyse, since it was the first target presented. If there'd been a mistake, if there'd been no intention on his part to attack, I would have known it at once and could have withdrawn, leaving him only bruised. But there hadn't been any mistake: I'd known from the stance of his feet that I'd caught him halfway through a blow designed to kill.