The Shanghai Union of Industrial Mystics (38 page)
Linyao held up her palm. ‘Hang on. Another problem with this scheme. If we drop the elephant in the water, he’ll probably wake up—the shock of cold water, the falling sensation.’
‘So?’
‘Elephants can swim. They can even use their trunks like snorkels.’
‘He’ll probably swim after us. He likes me,’ Joyce said.
Linyao agreed. ‘He’ll swim after our boat until the bomb goes off. Bang—right up our butts.’
‘Ouch,’ Joyce said.
The feng shui master pretended he was not listening, but Ms Lu’s words worried him. He did not like the sound of this. A massive swimming bomb following him around at heaven knows what speed while he was stuck in a slow-moving boat in the middle of the Huangpu River—not a pleasant notion at all. ‘Okay. I think we need a different plan.’ Trouble was, he couldn’t think of one.
He turned to the boatwoman and spoke in Shanghainese. ‘Where does the river get wider? Is it soon?’ Please let it be soon.
‘Yes, very soon,’ she said.
‘Ten, eleven minutes more?’
‘No. Maybe thirty-five minutes more.’
Wong grimaced. It was madness to rely on this woman’s estimates, as she appeared to be making up numbers as she went along. The only thing he was sure of was that it would take much longer to get to the sea than was available to them.
Suddenly the chugging noise of the boat started to change tone. The engine coughed once, and then twice more. The rhythmic thudding started to slow down. The boatwoman did nothing, nor did she looked concerned. But everyone else did.
‘What’s happening?’ Wong asked.
‘Run out of petrol,’ the boatwoman replied. ‘Never keep much in the tank. Petrol so expensive these days, you know. Carrying so much heavy weight uses up petrol faster. You give me more money, I send for someone to bring us more petrol.’
Wong winced. This was a standard technique that some of the more crooked boat-owners used with tourists: they kept a minimum amount of petrol in the tank so that customers became adrift in the middle of the water for an hour or two, until they agreed to pay anything to get moving again.
The engine coughed one last time before becoming completely silent. The boat bobbed helplessly in the water, drifting forward almost imperceptibly on the current, and then came to a complete halt. The boatwoman dropped an anchor into the river.
‘Don’t do that,’ Joyce shouted.
‘She might as well,’ Wong said. ‘We’re not going anywhere.’
Silence descended as the four of them realised that they had now completely run out of options.
Command Centre broke the news to Agent Dooley that the most powerful helicopter was already taken. While Lockheed Martin put the finishing touches to their current big-budget operation, the rotorcraft equivalent of AirForce One, to be known as the US101, the Bell supercopter they had brought was playing the role of official Topchop. His contact at Mobile Communications filled him in: ‘The SecDef ordered the Topchop to be used to take POTUS and the Chinese Prez to an unidentified location, as they say.’
‘POTUS and the Chinese Prez together?’ Dooley was amazed.
‘Yeah. Kinda cute, isn’t it? Our side had the better vehicle, their side had better information on where to take shelter against a major bomb attack, so they decided to join forces. Apparently they had already prepared this joint escape as one of the options in the security manual for the meeting.’
‘It’s still weird.’
‘It was the SecDef ’s idea. Think about it. If the American forces and the Chinese forces separate and both go on maximum defcon alert to protect their Presidents, then we’ve practically got a situation where everyone’s on a war footing. Doesn’t bear thinking about. One tiny slip or misunderstanding on either side and everything goes ka-boom. End of the world, more or less literally. But if both sides team up against a common enemy—these people scattering hidden bombs— then the whole thing has a different flavour. It’s us against them. Brothers in arms. All in all, this incident could end up being positive for US–Sino relationships.’
‘I guess it figures,’ the agent growled. ‘What other choppers you got?’
‘You can have the number two. It’s a UH-60. It’s already in the air, somewhere over the park. I can probably divert it to you within a couple of minutes. I guess we’ll have to land it on the pedestrian precinct.’
The Command Centre operative was as good as his word. Just over two minutes later, Thomas Dooley was climbing into a Sikorsky UH-60A, better known as a Black Hawk. He was happy. Now he felt powerful. The chopper might have been an old-fashioned model—it was first developed in 1974—but the Hawk had never been bettered, although there was much talk in military mess-rooms of a new Bell attack chopper taking over the prime spot.
Dooley had been in a Black Hawk only once before, but he had never forgotten the feeling of speed and power it gave him. Normally the US Army’s frontline utility helicopter used for air assault, air cavalry, and aero-medical evacuation units, it was infinitely modifiable. Considerably beefier than the Chinese helicopter Zhang was in (yes!), the Hawk was designed to carry eleven combat-loaded assault troops, and was capable of yanking seriously heavy equipment into the air: a 105-millimetre howitzer and thirty rounds of ammunition. It was three tons of pure machismo.
‘To the river an’ don’t spare the horses,’ Dooley told the pilot. This was his chance to grab his life back out of the bonfire. He knitted his fingers together in a gesture of supplication and would have prayed, had he been able to think of anyone to pray to.
‘I hate to add to the bad news,’ Lu Linyao said, ‘but I’m going to add to the bad news. I think someone has caught up with us. Look.’
They turned around to see something buzzing in the air a long distance away, approaching from the southwest, following the curves of the river. It was moving at high speed and evolved quickly from a dot into a military helicopter. Marooned in their floating prison, there was nothing they could do but watch as it caught up with them. Within seconds it was hovering right over their heads. A force eight gale blasted over the boat and whipped the blanket off the elephant. It danced in the air like a ghost freed from a coffin before spinning into the water, where it lay pullulating with the waves.
A female voice boomed down in English from the helicopter. ‘This is Commander Zhang of the People’s Armed Police. Stop moving and pull over, or we will fire.’
Wong grabbed Flip’s megaphone and clambered with some difficulty onto the roof of the boat’s cabin. ‘Already we have stopped,’ he said. ‘Can you not see? Don’t shoot, please.’
Joyce scrambled up next to him and lifted the megaphone out of his hands. ‘Let me talk to them. We need to get them to help us,’ she said. ‘There’s a bomb in this elephant. A big one. There are loads of people around here. Families and tourists and boats and dockworkers and stuff. You gotta help us move him. Loads of people are going to get hurt. You have to do something.’
The same phenomenon that they had seen on land was happening on the water. News that there was a drifting lighter containing a strange, monster-shaped piece of cargo and a
lao
wai
had quickly gone round the river community. Clearly something extraordinary was happening. Maybe a Hollywood movie was being filmed. Now that the blanket had blown away to reveal a genuine grey monster, the excitement was palpable. Large numbers of people were approaching the boat.
They came in sampans, in junks, in rowing boats, in speedboats and some in a variety of coracles. Fisherfolk and dockworkers from two or three kilometres up the river were swapping the news and jumping into vessels to have a quick look. Have you heard? There’s a circus in the middle of the water. It was the most excitement the north Shanghai river community had had for years.
Within minutes, flotillas of boats were heading towards Nelson and his crew from every direction.
Wong looked at his watch. Barely ten minutes to go.
‘Shall I shoot them?’ the pilot, a young man named Jin Peng, asked.
‘Of course not, you idiot,’ Commander Zhang snapped. ‘There is apparently a large explosive device there. Blast them and you will probably kill half the boat people in the river, plus blow us out of the sky.’
‘What shall we do?’
‘Just hover. The boat seems to have stopped moving. They aren’t going anywhere. I want to hear what they are saying.’
She opened the door of the chopper and strained to hear Joyce, who was still on the roof of the boat’s cabin, shouting through a megaphone.
‘This bomb will go off in a few minutes,’ the young woman said. ‘We need your help. Our engine has run out of petrol. Can you send down a line and pull the boat along or something? Please. Otherwise a lot of people might die. Please. We need—’ But the rest of her words were drowned out by a low-pitched rumble. A large American Black Hawk helicopter appeared above the tops of the buildings from the south and also moved to a hovering position over the water.
Down below, the young woman on the boat redoubled her pleas, pointing her megaphone first at one chopper and then at the other. ‘Can someone please do something? Does anyone up there speak English?’
‘What do you want me to do? Is this an attack situation?’ The Black Hawk pilot, whose name was Milo Peters, looked over to Thomas Dooley.
‘Ah don’t know. Ah really have no idea what our next move is. Gimme a minute.’
‘Are we talking enemy situation or hostage situation?’
‘Neither. There’s a bomb down there. Inside the elephant.’
‘Geez.
In
the elephant?’
‘Yes. Don’t ask.’
A pause while Peters took in this information. ‘Is bomb disposal on its way?’
‘No. No time. It’s due to go off in a few minutes.’ Dooley looked at his watch. ‘Mebbe nine-ten minutes, tops. We need to sort this one out ourselves. Don’t ask me how.’
Peters pulled at the joystick, changing the angle of the chopper in a bid to get a better look. ‘We could order the people to move and then blast the boat with an air-to-ground— a small one would be all it would take to sink that boat. Sinking the bomb may stop it going off.’
‘Too dangerous,’ Dooley said. ‘Look at them gawking crowds. It would take half an hour to get everyone to move their boats away. Second, we shoot that boat, we’ll likely set the bomb off. We have no idea how big it is. It may be a toy. It may be a biggie.’