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Authors: Anthony Grey

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BOOK: The Chinese Assassin
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The
unfortunate
cook
tried
to
flee
with us but
in his terror
he stumbled clumsily against me in
the
passage
and
fell to
the
stone floor. The
nearest
of the three soldiers lunged forward and speared h
im
through the
chest with
his bayonet. His shrieking rang loud
and
long in the hollow kitchen as I struggled backwards along the passage,
still
dragging the unconscious amah in my arms. Outside I heard
Lao
Kao
start
the car.

The
soldiers kicked
the cook’s body aside
then
rushed screaming towards me along the passageway. At
the
last moment I dropped the
limp
form of the ama
h
at their feet
and as they
stumbled on one another I
turned and dashed
into the courtyard. Lao Kao already had the car on the move
with the
rear door swinging
open and
I flung
myself
inside.
The
gates hadn’t been closed
and
we
roared
out onto the coast road
and
headed for the
airfield.

When we’d caught
our breath
we
realised there
were no signs of unusual
traffic movement.
Only the local peasants wobbled homewards on
their bicycles
along the
tree-fringed
roads and it
was obvious
that the plot had
been launched in great stealth
to avoid
any risk
of open
dashes between army
units that might provoke, a wider civil war.
Our arrival
at the
house after
the removal of
the
family by a trick
had
seemingly not been provided for.

The shock of
our
narrow escape under
the
soldiers’ bayonets
gradually
subsided—only
to be replaced. by
the acute
fear
that we might not
reach the airfield
before the
Trident
took off. We drove with
our windows open listening anxiously
for the
faintest
sound of engines from
the night sky.

The
airfield
lay in a
flat
depression inland,
and
when we rose at last over the hill that brought it into view we
saw
the Trident
was still standing
in the brightly-lit taxiing area. But the orange dorsal light on
its
fuselage
was flashing intermittently, indicating
that it
was
about to depart.

It
was
approaching midnight as we
raced
down the bill towards the
airfield.
We could see that there were no more troops
than usual
on duty—but
special
signs had
been
erected
under the
floodlights by
the
gates. Sombre
black
skull
and crossbones symbols had
been
painted
on white boards
and
large black characters announced: ‘Danger—Prohibited
Contagion Area—
No Entry Without
Medical Authorisation.’

For
a moment I wondered if we were
w
rong. Could
the explanation
be
a
genuine
one? At the gate an
armed
soldier I
had
never
seen
before
barred our
way.
Through the windscreen
I could
see
the
ground staff starting
to remove the gangway steps
from
the Trident out on
the
tarmac. Its
engines
were already
roaring
as it prepared to move off

The soldier shouted through the window
that the
airfield
was
dosed until the emergency
medical
f
l
ight
carrying rabies
victims
had
departed. With one
hand
I took from my pocket the
pass
proving my status
as
Marshall Tin’s
personal aide—and
with the other I snatched my service revolver from under
the
dashboard. I told
the
soldier I would accompany Marshall Lin on
the
flight despite the health hazard.
And
I ordered
Lao Kao
to drive onto the
airfield.

The
soldier
let out a
fierce
oath
and swung
the muzzle of his
rifle
in
through
the window.
But
I
knocked
the barrel aside with my
arm and
shot him at point blank range
through
the
chest.
At the
same instant Lao Kao sent the car surging forward, splintering
the flimsy barrier
and knocking
down another
guard.
We accelerated
fast across
the
tarmac and dosed
on the
Trident just
as
the rear hatch was swinging shut.

I recognised Comrade Ma, the
cadre
in charge of the
ground sta
ff
A loyal officer of Li
n
Li-kuo, he
was supervising
the removal of
the
gangway. In the
darkness
I
couldn’t be sure who the other men were. As the car
screeched
to a
halt
I concealed my revolver
and
leapt
out,
yelling for the
steps
to be
replaced.
Comrade Ma recognised me
instantly and
signalled for them to be ro
l
led back against
the Trident
I ran to his side
and
whispered in his ear that there
h
ad been a plot against
Marshall
Lin. He gaped at me in
astonishment. Then
h
e looked round
and saw Lao
Kao racing towards the
steps.

‘We’re going on board,’ I told him in a fierce whisper. ‘If we fail, try to stop it
taking
o
f
f.
Enemies are
all around us!’ I
shifted
my
eyes
mutely in the
direction
of the other
ground staff.

Ma stared at me in
disbelief
‘But Comrade Li
n
Li-kuo telephoned his orders! Then the ambulance came
and
took them all on
board.
Comrade Tou-tou
was
on a
stretcher—’

Lao
K
ao was
halfway
up the steps. ‘Act now!’ I shouted in Ma’s face. Then I turned and
sprinted
after
Lao
Kao. He was hammering on the closed
hatch
as I rushed up
the
steps.
When
it began to
swing
open he
drew
his pistol
and thrust
it through the narrow slit,
firing blindly
into
the
interior of the plane. Then he widened the
gap with
his shoulder
and disappeared
inside.

The Trident,
its engines
roaring, began to roil forward as I reached the top platform. I stopped to draw my
own
revolver, then launched
myself
across a widening gap of several feet towards the open hatch of the moving
aircraft.

PARIS, Thursday—A Gaullist
deputy who returned from China yesterday told Agence
France Presse
that
he had
been
assur
ed in
the
Foreign Ministry that
Lin Piao had not been
in the plane shot down in Mongolia as was reported in some quarters. It
was a
political eli
m
ination—with
the
implication that Marshall
L
in was not dead, the
deputy said.

I
n
te
rn
ational
Hera
ld
Tribune,
10 February 1972

7

A long crooked
spear
of hot ash tumbled from the
end
of his
cigarette and
splashed across the lapels of his crumpled jacket as Doctor
Vincent Stil
l
man
stood up. He removed the glowing stub from his mouth
an
d
squashed
it in the
ash
tray beside
the lectern,
covering his mouth with his other List at the
same time
to smother the sudden rasp of his smoker’s cough.
When
he’d recovered he
pushed
his thick-framed
spectacles
up the bridge of his nose and
fixed
his eyes reflectively on a
point
above
and
behind the heads
of
the seventeen members of the East Asia Study Group.

‘Have you
any idea, gentlemen,
what sort of velocity would be required to break a
hair
from
the human
head
and
drive it
like
a javelin into a foamed plastic seat
cushion
to a depth of
two inches?’

The
rush-hour roar
of the
traffic streaming
past the
pillared
entrance of the
British
World
Affairs Institute in
Pall Mall
carried faintly
into
the stifling, windowless
basement
lecture
room
during the
long silence that followed.
The
front page of
an
evening newspaper on
the
lap of a
prematurely bald diplomat front the
Cabinet
Office sitting in the
front row,
announced
that it
was
now
officially
London’s
hottest July
of the
century.
The burning
sun
that was shrivelling the whole
country
had again pushed London’s
afternoon
shade temperature
into
the
middle
nineties—hotter, the newspaper’s
headline
shrieked,
than Biarritz, Malta,
Nice, Honolulu
and
Hong Kong.

But although some members of the
Fast Asia Study Group had resorted
to
shirtsleeves,
the Foreign Office
men present, as though
to emphasise
their
separate
and
exclusive experience, were stolidly defying
the
tropics
that had
now come to them on
their
home ground, by
retaining their
jackets
and
ties. Nevertheless, some faces in the audience were
beginning
to
betray heat-induced signs
of
short temper and irritation as Vincent Still
ma
n’s pause
for rhetorical
effect
lengthened.
Sensing
this he
leaned
forward suddenly over the
lectern.
‘Velocities, gentlemen, in the range of five
thousand
to
ten
thousand
feet per second—and
I think you’ll
agree it
would be difficult to conceive anything other than an explosive event
being
capable of producing
velocities
of
that
order.’

Richard
Scholefield, who
was chairing
the
meeting,
glanced
uneasily
along
the platform
to where
Yang sat beside Still
m
an.
He wore now
the high-buttoned tunic suit which Communist Chinese cadres since
1949 had made
their own official uniform, and
he
was scanning the
attendance roster that he
had
insisted on
receiving
from
Scholefield
before
starting
the
meeting.
It listed professors
and
doctors from Oxford
and
Cambridge, the
London
School of
Oriental and African Studies,
La Trobe,
Australia, Windsor Ontario,
senior members of the International Institute for
Strategic Studies and a smattering
of
London-based journalists
specialising in
China as well as Foreign
Office
and
Cabinet Office
diplomats.
Some members
had
not bothered to
conceal their irritation
when they
arrived
to
find
Scholefield declining to answer
questions
about the
nature
of the
speakers.
He
had
concealed the tension that had built up during a long
afternoon
on
the
telephone in
the
convenor’s office
behind a sharp brusqueness
of manner,
and
now he
sat
propping up his head
with
one
hand,
keeping his eyes averted
from
the faces in front of him.

Only one name
was
not on the
list. Nina had insisted on attend ·in as
Scholefield
’s guest after he confided the nature
of Yang’s
threat.
She
sat
a little apart from the main body of members at the end of the front row nearest the door. She
had dressed
soberly in a loose grey dress which concealed her figure and had tied a matching band of the
same material demurely
around her hair. She
sat
staring at the floor in front of her
‘with
her arms
folded,
trying not to let her anxiety communicate itself to those
around her.

‘To people who do my job, it’s a well known fact that
the best
places
to look for the
tiny fragments
of
metal
sent
flying in explosions are seat cushions—and deceased human bodies.’ Stillman
smiled vaguely round
the
room at
nobody in particular. ‘Since
a corpse wouldn’t do anything to sweeten the
already somewhat
foetid atmosphere in here, I’ve brought
along an
example of the former.’

He
reached under
the platform dais
and
lifted up a dust- coloured
slab
of foamed plastic.
‘Incidentally, gentlemen,
it
was much
hotter than this in Vietnam where I once
spent
a couple of
weeks examining fifty-seven
bodies for frag
m
ents
of metal
. The refrigerators broke down
and they
were all
decaying beautifully long
before I’d finished.’
Stil
l
man
smothered another cough
and
looked back
absently
at the plastic
cushion in his hand as
if he’d suddenly forgotten why he
was
holding
it. ‘But
of course
that’s another story.’

Scholefield
started in his seat
as
the door at the
side
of
the
platform
swung open suddenly. Several members glanced
up
irritably
at Harvey
K
etterman
as he stood
in
the doorway,
widening
his eyes in a silent,
theatrical
grimace of self-recrimination. He
cringed bent
double to a
rear
seat, took off his jacket
and
mopped his brow. He held up another copy of the
evening
paper.
‘Only hell’s
hotter today, Mr.
Chairman.
We’re dose to your
famous English “sticky
end”, now, I’d guess. My taxi boiled over on the way here!
Deepest apologies.’

He winked
exaggeratedly
then,
immediately serious, turned and peered through screwed-up eyes in
the
direction
of Yang
and Stil
l
man.
The
scientist was holding
up the seat
cushion
above
his
head
and gazing
myopically over the
heads
of his
audience
again.

‘This, gentlemen, is a
seat
cushion from
an
airliner. It
was
part of the
original furnishings
of a Trident IE purchased
initially
from the
British Aircraft Corporation
by the
Pakistan Air
Force
in
1967.’

The prematurely
bald man from
the
China section
of the
Cabinet
Office rose suddenly to his
feet with a snort
of exasperation.
‘Mr. Chairman, I feel I must intervene. We’ve been called
here
at
exceedingly short notice to listen to two people whom
you
have declined so far to identify for us beyond their fairly meaningless names. We have only your vaguest assurances
that
they’ve got some important revelations to make about the death
of
Lin Piao.’
He fanned himself
rapidly with his evening paper. ‘We know absolutely nothing of what qualifies these men to speak
on the
subject, which of course snakes
it
impossible
for us
to evaluate what they say. Since Li is believed to
have
died fully five years
ago, I fail to see what
urgency there can be in detaining us on one of the hottest afternoons London has ever known when we might be cooling off at home in our gardens with iced gin and tonics
in
our hands.’ He stopped and smiled wearily round at his
fe
llow members. ‘So before we hear any more f
r
om Doctor Stil
l
man about his,
I’
m
sure fascinating, seat cushions, I think we’d all be
grateful for a mite more
elucidation.’

Murmurs of agreement came
from
other
men in the
audience and
Scholefield stood up awkwardly. ‘I
fully
appreciate that most of you might
share Percy
Crowdleigh’s
feelings.
I would probably have reacted in the
same
way in your place, Percy.’ He spoke without
looking
at the
audience, staring
down
instead
at his hands
cl
enched
in front of him. ‘I
apologise
for having to ask you to bear with me down what might look at present rather
like a blind alley,
but—’ Out of the corner of his eye Scholefield
saw
Yang
stand
up.

BOOK: The Chinese Assassin
6.88Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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