The Chinese Assassin (22 page)
Three white-cowled figures lay strapped into facing seats, their heads jogging lifelessly with the motion of the plane. A fourth figure, similarly cowled, lay strapped to a stretcher that had been propped across seats on the other side of the gangway. I rushed to the stretcher and looked into the white hood, expecting to see To
u
-to
u
’s face. But it was empty. I turned my back so that I could use my manacled hands to open the robe. Over my shoulder I saw immediately that it was stuffed only with twisted bandages and pillows. I looked up at the guard in the doorway. He stood gazing open-mouthed at the scene, his face white, his eyes dilating with fright.
I hurried across to look at the three other figures. Their seats had been moved into a reclining position and they lolled motionless, their faces obscured in the shadow of the loose white anti- infection cowls.
By half-turning I was able to use my chained hands to pull the hoods aside. But even as I did this I could feel that their cheeks were already cold. Their features were the colour of wax and
it
was impossible to tell whether they were still breathing or not. A great sadness engul
fe
d me as I gazed down at the faces of Marshall Li
n
and his wife and son.
Lao Kao and the peasant boy appeared in the doorway, staring in. The older guard stepped forward and lifted the lid of a document box lying on a spare seat beside Marshall Li
n
. The characters ‘Top Secret’ written in red across the cover of a military folder were plainly visible. Next to the box lay the silver- plated pistol Stalin had given Marshall Li
n
. All four of us stared at each other. Even the guards, despite their low inte
ll
igence, could see how hopelessly we were all trapped in the faked conspiracy.
“The pilot,’ I
said dully. ‘We must
get to
the
pilot
and
stop him lauding.’
‘
B
ut where are we?’ The
peasant boy’s voice was shrill with
panic.
‘I don’t
know.’ I turned and
moved
quickly
towards the
door
at
the
front of the compartment.
Wait! The
guard
has
strict orders
to
defend
the
flight deck with
his life. Nobody from this
quarantine compartment must
approach the pilot.’ I
looked around. It was
the older
guard
who had shouted the warning. His rifle, however, hung loose on his arm,
and
he clearly had no
intention
of trying to stop me.
‘We have no choice. We must show him.’ I lashed out at the door
with
my
foot. It splintered and
broke from
its hinges and
I fell sideways under the
impact.
The guard outside
was
ready for us. Holding his automatic
rifle steady
in front of him, he took one
step
forward
and opened
fire. The peasant
boy
took the whole
burst
in his chest
and
toppled over backwards, screaming
dementedly.
The older
guard
had wisely stepped
aside and taken
cover as
I shattered
the
door.
Now he fired
carefully
from a crouching
position behind
a seat and the flight-deck
guard tumbled forward, dying,
on top of me.
The older
guard
knelt
quickly beside the young peasant, then stood
up
shaking
his head.
Lao Kao persuaded him to unlock his handcuff
s
and
together they came
and
moved the
dead
guard’s body of me
and
helped me to my
feet. When
my
hands
were
freed I picked
up a
rifle
and we broke
open
the
door
to
the flight deck.
The pilot looked
fearfully
round at
us
over his
shoulder.
‘Don’t shoot!
Keep
back. We are
flying
low.’
I. stepped up beside him and thrust the
rifle
under his nose. ‘Where are we?’
The pilot didn’t answer but continued peering anxiously ou
t
through the screen
.
I
followed his eyes and under
the pale light
from the stars
I suddenly
saw the
vast
sweep
of the
steppes beneath
us. A great herd of horses terrified by
the noise
of
our
engines close to the
ground was stampeding madly across
the darkened
plain in our
path.
‘Mongolia!’ The word burst
from me in astonishment. ‘We are
across
the
border.’
The pilot nodded
frantically, still straining
his eyes into
the
night. ‘We must land
soon.
I am returning you to your homeland.’
I stared at him in bewilderment. ‘Where?’
He jabbed a finger at the Projected Map Display on
the
panel beside him. I looked quickly
and
saw the markings of an airfield
200
kilometres east of Ulan Bator, just across
the
K
erulen.
‘The airfield should be somewhere here.
I’m
sure my navigation is right.
But there are no lights.’
‘We are
Chinese!’
He
turned
and stared up at me.
I
jabbed the
rifle
against the side of his neck. ‘What are your orders?’
‘My orders, front
the
office of
Chairman
Mao
himself;
were to fly three revisionist Mongolian
spies
back to
their
homeland.’ He
pointed
again to
the
map display. ‘To this airfield. Then I am to return
with
three
Chinese
comrades who were
innocently
arrested as
hostages.
We are
flying a specially agreed
low
course
for
reasons
of
security.’
‘You are the victim of a plot,’ 1 said very slowly. ‘Like the rest of us. Turn back immediately. Return home to
the
People’s Republic of China.’
He looked pleadingly up at me. ‘I must obey
the
orders of
Chairman
Mao’s
office.’
I pushed
the
gun roughly against the side
of
his face. ‘Turn now! Or I will kill you this
instant and
we will all
die
together.’
He
flinched
but said nothing.
Obediently
he made the
necessary
adjustments to the controls and I watched the compass heading alter as we
climbed and
banked in a wide arc above
the
steppes. When it had settled again on a
bearing
due south I moved back
and
handed
the rifle
to Lao Kao.
‘Ensure
he holds that
course.’
I turned away to
find
that the older guard had removed his mask and head covering.
I
patted him
reassuringly on the shoulder. ‘We will return and confront the plotters
with
the evidence of their treachery.’
His simple, puzzled eyes searched my face and, I remember, he nodded
uncertainly
as I brushed past him. ‘I’m going to
see if
there is
anything
I can do for
Marshall Li
n
,’ I said.
I went out
through the
door of the f
l
ight deck
and
made my
way into the forward compartment again. As I stepped over the dead guard a sudden, deafening roar engulfed my senses. An invisible force struck my body like a battering ram and a bright orange sheet of flame rose before my eyes. In that instant I passed painlessly into oblivion.
TAIP
E
H,
June 1972—According to a certain source, the
nine passengers on the Trident,
including the woman, were all under fifty
years
of age and in
the
woman’s purse was a man’s French
cap. Since a
woman as old as Yeh Clam would not have
need of
such an
article, this suggests Lin Piao and his wife might
no
t
have been on that plane.
Issues a
n
d
Studies,
Journal
of
the
Institute
of
International
Affairs,
Ta
i
wan
1
June
1972
8
‘The Russians, not to put too fine a
point
on
it,
were baffled.’ Dr. Vincent
Stil
l
man leaned his folded arms on
the
edge of the lectern and gazed up at the ceiling. Lost
in thought, he opened his mouth wide
and
those members
of
the East Asia Study Group sitting
in the
front
row
were able to see
that his
teeth, like his
ragged moustache,
were also stained bright yellow with nicotine.
For a moment
his head
seemed to shake almost imperceptibly on his shoulders.
‘The Trident had
come
in too low, remember,
for
their radar screens
to pick it up. So
the first thing
they knew
of its presence was when
it
crashed. Their nearest radio-so
n
de observations from the Soviet rocket base near Choibalsan, a hundred miles away, showed there had been no unusual meteorological conditions. The weather was fine that night with only moderate
wand
and
there
was no evidence to indicate the presence of clear air turbulence
in
the region.’
Scholefield
glanced quickly round die room. All seventeen
members of the
group
were listening intently
to Stil
l
man now. Harvey Ketterman, be noticed, was leaning forward on the seat in front, his head cocked on one side and his eyes
cl
osed
in an attitude
of intense
concentration. For a brief
moment
Nina caught
Scholefield
’s eye from her seat
at
the end
of the
front row. Her face puckered with concern and she shot him a quick
worried smile. A
rustle
of
paper
drew his attention back to Stillman
and
he watched
him fumbling
with a sheaf of notes on the lectern.
‘You’ll all no doubt be familiar
with
Premier Chou
En-lai’s
famous account of what happened to the Trident, given to a group of
American
newspaper
editors
in October 1972.’
Stillman looked up, then picked the top sheet off
the lectern
and
read from
it.
“Its fuel
was
nearly
exhausted,” said
Chou, “so it
bad
to try a forced landing. It slid a good distance on the
ground
leaving
behind
very clear marks.
When
the plane
landed,
one of
its wings first
touched
the ground and caught fire and
all the
nine
persons on board were burned to death.”
Stil
lm
an
dropped the paper back on the lectern and bared his yellow teeth suddenly in a crooked smile, directed towards the ceiling. ‘I’m
surprised
that’s not been
seen in
the
West
for what it
is—a modern Chinese fairy story.’
The
smile faded
only very slowly
from
his face. ‘The
disposition
of the
wreckage
of an aircraft is one of the most important clues about how the
crash has
occurred. An experienced air accident
investigator
can
tell
a lot fro
m
how
and
where the
various
bits
and
pieces come to
rest.’
He raised his arm abruptly
in
a
signal
to the projectionist behind a small window at the
back
of
the
room. The lights
immediately
went out and
an illuminated
slide appeared on
the
white
screen behind
the dais. It showed the burned-out
hulk
of
an aircraft’s
main fuselage
silhouetted
against the
sky
on a flat, grass—covered
plain. In the far distance
the
rear
fuselage,
engines and
tail unit which
had
broken off
cleanly were
visible
standing
up
perpendicularly
as
though undamaged.
One wing, on the starboard side of the
main
fuselage,
was still
intact.
‘As you can
see, gentlemen,
the distribution of the wreckage was not
inconsistent with
Chou En-lai’s
explanation,’ said
Stil
l
man’s voice from
the darkness.
‘But it does
seem
very
odd
to me that
nobody in the West
has ever
bothered
to
ask
how,
if
the Trident
really
did
run out of fuel,
its empty
tanks were able to produce such a
fierce fire
that it burned
all the occupants
beyond recognition.’
E
verybody
gazed
in silence
at the slide of the crashed
aircraft. ‘And since, as you can see,
the
aircraft ca
m
e down practically intact
why
didn’t anybody manage to
get
out? They would have
had
a good chance of
remaining
conscious in these circumstances.
Has nobody
ever wondered that?’
Again
nobody broke the rhetorical silence. ‘It takes a
good
many
minutes in a fierce
fire, you know, before all
the skin and
superficial flesh on
the human
body gets burned to the
extent
that these fellows were.’
The slide
changed abruptly and
the
starkness
of
the next
image provoked an
involuntary
m
u
rm
ur of shock
around
the
room.
Scholefield
clearly heard Nina’s separate gasp of horror. On the screen
nine
charred
corpses
had
appeared, laid
out in a row on white sheets. The photograph had been taken by a cameraman
standing
at
normal
height
and
the bodies seemed to resemble poorly-constructed
human-sized puppets fashioned
from blackened papier-mâché.
The tense silence in
the darkened room was
broken by the
scrape
of a match
and a tiny
bud of
flame
flowered brightly in front of
Stillman’s
face. His
sagging
features were
illuminated theatrically
for a moment as he
lit another
cigarette. Again his head seemed to quiver
momentarily
on his shoulders. ‘
I
t
didn’t take
the Soviet Army pathologist boys long to discover that
three
of
these
corpses had
bullets
lodged in them,’ he
said
quietly,
turning
back to the
screen.
‘Two lots were of
rifle
calibre
and the
other one
was
a smaller revolver
bullet. All
the
weapons
were found in
the wreckage and
matched up
with their
respective bits of
lead
by
their ballistics
bof
f
ins. But there were no
bullets in
the pilot. His
body was
found at
the controls—and this was
what worried the
Soviets. Because although there may be
popular
misconceptions nowadays
about
what
happens
when you
fire guns
in
pressurised airliners, these
were not
shared
by
our Russian
friends on the spot.
They
knew that air
pumps are perfectly
capable of
maintaining
pressure
differentials
in spite of
leaks
from. several bullet holes. You’ve got to have a f
a
irly massive hole, you know,
gentlemen,
three or four
feet
square, before
it beats
the pumps.’ He stopped
and
removed the
cigarette
that his audience had
been
watching jiggle
between
his lips in silhouette against the light of the screen. ‘You could stage the gunfight at
the
O.K.
corral, you
know, in the
press
ur
ised cabin
of a modern
airliner and I
doubt
if
even that on
its own would bring
it down.’
He turned suddenly and noticed that the
slide
of the charred bodies was
still
showing. ‘Let’s lose that now
shall we?’ he
called quickly to the projectionist. ‘It’s not all that pleasant, is
it?’
When he was satisfied the screen behind him was blank he turned back to his audience. But he didn’t ask for the lights to be switched up again. -
‘Because of all this, the Soviets really needed at this stage to consult everybody’s “spy” on board the Trident—the flight recorder. Or the “black box” as the newspapers tend to call it. They dug
it
out from the wreckage, all right, but
it
was a Plessey
-
Duval, you see. Now, that’s a common enough flight recorder
in
Western aircraft but to their dismay the
Soviets found they couldn’t
make
head nor tail of the ruddy thing.’
Stil
l
man
took out his cigarette
packet
again
and
lit a further cigarette from the stub of the old one,
lie walked across
to
the
lectern
and dropped
the old
stub
into
the ash
tray. ‘Now this has happened before of course. Several times in
Eastern
Europe,
airliners
built
in the west have crashed and the
men who put the
first
sputnik in space have
been
embarrassed to
find
they didn’t have the
technical equipment
to do
the
black box read-outs. They couldn’t, for instance, develop
and
print your Kodak colour films in Moscow either for the same reasons—but that’s neither here nor there. A couple of times in
the past they saved their faces
by returning the black boxes to
their
capitalist
makers and asking
them to
send
them back
with the data in
readable form. They
always
covered up their
incompetence by saying they were anxious
to demonstrate their desire to co-operate
in international air
accident prevention. But you can
see
without my telling you that they couldn’t
risk
returning this particular Trident’s
black
box to the
makers.’ Stillman
laughed suddenly, a short, shrill bark of laughter. ‘That’s where I
came in—or
rather, looked at from your point of view, gentlemen—that’s where I went out.’