The Chinese Assassin (38 page)

‘What
does he
Say
really happened on that Trident, Mr. Ketterman?’ It
was
the
first time
the President had spoken since Ketterman entered the room.
His
tone
was
unnecessarily formal, as if he was nervous of having his office
and his
person involved closely with matters of low
intrigue
so soon after Watergate
and
so close to the election.

‘A lot of
stuff
in those folios is probably true. Yang’s
line is that Lin
was depressive
and
apathetic. His son
contacted
Moscow, Yang
says,
as a last resort to ask them if they would provide
sanctuary
if Mao moved against his father. Somebody among Li
n
’s enemies did discover the plan to flee to Moscow
and
they did infiltrate
the Trident
ground
staff
at Peitaiho to plant a bomb. Now whether it was
the “radical”
group as we know it today, or Mao
himself
or Chou En-lai’s moderates or simply Wang Tung-hsing’s secret
police,
it’s
impossib
le
to say. Alliances in the Forbidden City form
and reform like
cl
oud in a windy sky with
everybody
jumping hastily
on the “antis” bandwaggon when someone is
obviously heading
for the chop
...‘

‘But
what, where’s the
“but”?’
The Secretary of State’s quick interjection betrayed his
irritation,
as if he thought Ketterman was
taking
too long to get to
the
point.

‘But,’
said
Ketterman slowly,
refusing
to be hurried, ‘what Yang didn’t tell anybody until now, not even
the Russians, is that the
Li
n
Piao group discovered the bomb plot against them long before it was executed.’
Ketterman
looked round the table again. All eyes were attentively on him.
‘And decided to try
to turn it to their
own
advantage. They went
ahead and
prepared a defection party to fly out to the Soviet Union—but Lin Piao
himself
wasn’t
in
it.’
He paused again,
noting
the attentive silence with
satisfaction
.
‘They substituted a “look alike”
and
such embellishments as his silver pistol
anticipating that the radicals
would denounce Lin as a
traitor and
a defector after his fake
death
when he could offer no defence.
Li
n
Piao was kept in
hiding
hi China with
the intention
of bringing him out when the
denunciations had
been completed. Then, his supporters hoped, shocked out. of his apathy, he would create an enormous
stir, denouncing
the plotters in his
tu
r
n
,
rally army support
and
claw his way back to
the
top of the pile.’

‘But
the Russians
had ways of identifying even the charred
corpse
of Li
n
,’ the Director of the
CIA
protested. ‘They
had dental
casts of his mouth from
the time
he
was treated in
Moscow during
the
war.’

‘No, it was all successfully faked up. The look-alike’s fingerprints were surgically removed. His
dental history was
fabricated.
Unless
the
Russians had
a whole-head X-ray of his jaw they
couldn’t
r
un
a reliable check.
And
it’s
highly
unlikely they would have taken whole-head X-rays during the last war in Moscow.’

‘Doesn’t all
this sound
a little—’ The NSC China-watcher searched for an apposite word. ‘—f
a
r-fetched, over-
fantasized
?’

‘There
are
precedents
,’ said
Ketterman
evenly. ‘Remember the corpse of
the
pilot with the false
D
-Day
landing
plans the
Brits
dumped in
the
Channel so that it was washed ashore in France. Fingerprints removed, teeth fixed,
and
so on.’ Ketterman paused but nobody challenged him in the
silence
he offered. ‘It
was a ruthless plan admittedly. The “look-alike”
had to be put aboard comatose not
knowing
what fate awaited him. They
couldn’t
put him on board
dead because
the time of
death
had to
coincide
with the bomb going off. The
rest
of the doomed party on the plane, with the exception of
Yang, didn’t
know what was
going on. They
were sacrificial
lambs
to
Lin
Piao’s future
survival.
It
was
only when one of them stumbled on Yang getting into his parachute
ready to desert
the about-to-explode
ship
that the gun-battle broke out—that’s why the bodies had bullet holes when the
Russians
found them.’

‘Parachute?’
The Secretary of
State’s
eyebrows threatened to
disappear
in his hairline. ‘So Yang
jumped
before the bomb went
off?’

Ketter
m
an nodded. “That’s
what he told me. He
jumped and
broke his hip. He
did
as he says in the folios,
run
into old Tsereng Toktokho on
the
ground, who
took
pity on him
and
took him
under his wing.
All that’s true—except he
was
found by the
Russians
who shot up
the yurt and burned
it—not the
guards
from the Chung Nan
Hai.’

‘The
KGB disinformation
department
must have enjoyed
writing
that into the scenario,’
murmured the CIA chief.

‘
How did
Yang explain
the bullets
in the corpses to
the Russians?
Presumably he
didn’t
admit to baling out.’ The NSC man
leaned
forward eagerly on
the
table.

‘He told them at the
last minute
so
me
of the party
funked
it
and wanted
to turn back. He and
the
KGB together concocted the
rabies
fable to hide Moscow’s involvement in Lin’s plot.’

‘So why
did
it
all fail
to work?’
Again the
President’s tone
implied a distaste
for the subject. He asked the question as if forced.

‘Lin’s hideaway in
China
was discovered. He was taken by his opponents
and
held under strict house arrest outside Peking. Yang says he
died
in the spring of 1972 of what are termed natural
causes
while under arrest. His
chronic
ill-health was probably worsened by his depression and dejection. That’s why it took the
Chinese
a year to come out with the
official
story of
Lin’s
death while defecting. It took them that long to
establish
that there
had been
a plot within a plot. By then however they
felt that if
there
had been enough faked evidence for them to believe for a time, after
sending men to the spot, that he really
was
on board, there
was
enough for the rest of the world to be told that
same
story.
And
it
had
the double advantage that it
was
more
damaging
to
Lin—and
covered up
the treachery
of
those
who tried to kill him.’

There
was
a long silence in
which all the men
round the table sat
looking
wonderingly at each other.
The Secretary of State shook his head slowly, a faint smile
of incredulity
twisting
the corners of his mouth downward. ‘It all sounds incredible—but it would all fit.’

‘The thing we’ve got to decide,’
said
the President brusquely, ‘is whether to tell
Peking
about the new death plot
and
what do we do about Yang?’

‘That’s
one
curious thing I’ve not mentioned, Sir,’ said
Ketterman quickly. ‘We know
lie’s
not
Yang Tsai-chien.
At
least the Chinese insist that the man
of
that name was positively identified
by
them at
the
crash site by his finger prints. Yang consistently refuses
to
divulge who he is. We know
he
was on tha
t
Trident but his identity remains a mystery.’

‘It’s
not really important,
is it?’
said
the
President irritably. ‘More important
is, do we
tell the Chinese we believe the
Russians
are planning to
kill
Mao
on the strength of these
cl
aims?’

‘It’s not entirely
against our
interests to have a
regime in
Peking
that hates the Muscovite
guts of Brezhnev
and
his friends.’ The NSC
man
smiled
as
he spoke
to
emphasise his
heavy
irony. ‘If they ever do roll back into the
arms
of the
Russians
we’ll have to rethink a lot of
our current
precepts.’

The President
nodded frowning.
‘It’s not
our
damned job anymore to try to
decide which governments should
be in power in foreign
countries.
We’ve gotta do
our best to rub along
with whichever of those
that
come out on top.’

‘Mr. President, I ha
v
e
decided
to recommend,’
said
Ketterman slowly, ‘that we ought to
hand Yang
back to the
Russians
once we had
extracted
the
truth
from him. There is a certain
amount
of continuing interface between us at the intelligence level, the detail of
which
needn’t
bother
you. Now we’ve stymied their
plans with
the Ninth Folio they’re
pretty damned anxious to
get
him back, I can
tell you.
And
they’re
making unmistakable threats about what might happen
if they don’t.’