The Chinese Assassin Read online

  Old Tsereng rose slowly to his feet, his hand reaching for the hilt of the decorated dagger at his belt. But there was a shout from the doorway behind us and we turned to find another dripping figure holding a sub-machine gun pointing in our direction. Old Tsereng’s hands fell to his sides and for a moment nobody moved or spoke. The rain on the roof and the shriek of the rising wind were the only sounds in the yurt. Tsereng’s wife and Kiki remained squatting motionless on the floor, their mouths agape with fear.

  Chiao waved his knife menacingly in the air towards old Tsereng and the women, then stepped warily up behind me. He pinioned my arms quickly and had just begun to bind my wrists when the old man sprang. The long pointed dagger that he’d taken from the dead body of the vanquished camel train leader forty years before buried itself in Chiao’s chest above his heart. At the same moment the man in the doorway opened fire with the machine gun.

  He held his finger curled tight around the trigger until the magazine was exhausted, turning the muzzle this way and that across the yurt, dragging a broken line of gaping scarlet punctures across the back of old Tsereng and the bodies of his wife and daughter on the floor. Neither of them screamed or uttered any sound as they died, Old Tsereng clung to his adversary for a moment then his heavy bulk toppled slowly backward to the ground His hand was clenched so tight round the hilt of his dagger that he dragged it out of Chiao’s lung and fell dead with the crimson-bladed weapon still clutched in his right fist

  Chiao’s companion was joined silently in the doorway by a third Chinese and together they finished binding my wrists Then they attended to Chiao’s wound and one of them helped him outside into his saddle. I was dragged outside too and thrust onto the back of another horse. The third man mounted up behind me and turned the animal’s head back towards the yurt. I could see now that old Tsereng’s son was lying dead on the ground outside.

  The first of Chiao’s companions took a large can of petrol and splashed it around quickly inside the yurt. Then he threw the can inside, lit a large rag-bound torch already soaked in petrol and raced for his horse. He rode to the door and tossed the burning torch inside. As we turned to ride into the driving rain, the interior of the yurt exploded with a thump and began burning fiercely. It continued blazing despite the torrential downpour and faded only slowly into the darkness behind us as we rode away.

  WASHINGTON, Sunday—The United States has received what officials here describe as the first ‘hard evidence’ from Peking that Lin Piao, China’s Defence Minister and constitutional successor to Chairman Mao Tse-tung is seriously—and possibly fatally—ill. But they will not disclose or discuss the origin of the reports.

  New York Times, 11 October 1971

  4

  ‘Do you think Yang himself is the survivor?’ Nina turned on her side as she spoke and raised herself up on her elbow, The single sheet covering her slipped, revealing her naked shoulders and breasts. She looked quickly at Scholefield, but be was oblivious. Dressed only in a bathrobe, he was sitting on the edge of the bed with his back to her, staring at the pink folios he’d propped up on the tea-tray between the milk jug and the sugar basin.

  ‘That looks like the inference we’re supposed to draw.’ He spoke over his shoulder and wiped the back of his hand across his damp forehead.

  ‘Couldn’t it be true?’

  ‘It’s just too damned sensational for words.’ He began leafing through the pink sheets again and Nina reluctantly covered herself: Although it was only nine o’clock in the morning the temperature in the room was already in the upper seventies. Outside the Open window the low sky glowed with a dull metallic incandescence as if some great burnished tureen cover had been clamped over London to keep the breathless heat trapped close to the ground. A stale, dry, sauna-cabin smell of scorched wood hung in the air outside.

  ‘He did limp badly, didn’t he?’

  Scholefield nodded without turning his head. ‘Yes—and I don’t believe that cock and bull tale about being a bent PLA acupuncture student.’

  ‘It didn’t ring true to me either. He doesn’t seem the type. But why such an elaborate cover story?’

  ‘I think for some reason I was meant to see through it. It could have been a signal to look for something more profound.’

  Nina smiled. ‘Like the folios in the chocolate box?’

  Scholefield stared at the pink sheets of paper without seeing them.

  ‘China is well known for its sexual puritanism—but homosexuality is not a capital offence. It’s frowned on, of course, politically like rape and promiscuity. They say it smacks of “counter-revolutionary” behaviour from the old, pre-liberation days—but I’ve never heard of it being punished by death.’

  Nina moved towards him and tangled her fingers gently in the hair at the nape of his neck. The sheet fell away again as she leaned closer to whisper in his ear. ‘Demonstrate a bit of counterrevolutionary behaviour for me right now, could you, sweetheart?’

  He ignored her and poured himself another cup of tea, ‘What’s more, the Party’s recommended marrying ages in China are 28 for men. and 26 for women—not 35. If he knows as much as he claims to about me, our devious Comrade Yang would know I should spot that sort of deliberate mistake pretty quickly.’

  Nina struck her forehead loudly with the palm of her hand and fell back on the pillows. .‘.Eureka! Of course, Holmes! This Fu Man-chu’s an impostor! Why didn’t I see that before?’ When she stopped giggling and opened her eyes he was sipping his tea thoughtfully and staring serious-faced at the folios again. She sighed loudly, pulled the sheet right up over her head and held it there, lying rigid, without breathing, in the attitude of a corpse.

  Scholefield continued reading and only the dull hum of traffic noise from outside broke the hot silence in the room. Suddenly Nina took a deep breath and arched her back, pressing herself up against the tight-drawn sheet until her nipples stood out like buttons. Her voice came through the sheet petulant and muffled. ‘If only you were half as good a Nina—watcher as you are a China-watcher—’

  Scholefield turned slowly towards her. He gazed distractedly at the contours of her body for a moment, then laughed despite himself He snatched the sheet from her fingers, peeled it back and flung it aside.

  ‘If only I was, then what?’

  She pouted at him, still holding the posture. ‘You’d know how self-sacrificial I’d been, coming back here last night and finding you in a jet-lagged coma. Then pretending not to notice when you got up every couple of hours through the night to sneak off and read those damned folios in the kitchen.’

  He stood up abruptly, unknotting the belt of his bathrobe. She collapsed with a little scream of mock horror as he took it off and walked purposefully round to her side of the bed. He stopped and stood smiling down at her. ‘This heat doesn’t affect your Irish-Italian nymphomania at all, then?’

  She touched his nearest knee with the first two fingers of her right hand and watched them walk slowly up his bare thigh. ‘It makes me worse—especially after ten-day symposia on Peking’s military strength in Ottawa.’ She gazed up hot-eyed into his face. ‘My intuitive guess is that maybe China and me have something in common—perhaps we both want something from you.’

  He bent over her and the tips of their tongues met between her teeth. They tantalised each other slowly with their mouths and hands until passion finally engulfed them and swept them’ both into a long and tender frenzy. Afterwards they lay clenched together for a long time with their eyes closed, their minds filled only with the blind sensations of their bodies.

  ‘Christ almighty, sweetheart, you know I really begin to suspect I’m only a year or two away from falling in love with you.’

  He breathed deeply and pulled back from her, touching the damp hair on her forehead wonderingly ‘with his fingertips.

  She shook her head in a little motion of disbelief. Her eyes were bright, her cheeks flushed. When she spoke her voice betrayed more than a hint of her original Irish brogue. ‘I’m n
ot entirely indifferent to you either.’ She traced a slow pattern in the perspiration on his back with one finger. ‘Could it be, do you think, because you’re such a beautiful indifferent bastard most of the time? In combination with that devastating academic mind of yours, of course.’

  He smiled. ‘Maybe that has got something to do with it.’

  The traffic hum from outside was growing into a dull roar with the advancing day. They lay contentedly side by side, Nina with her eyes closed, Scholefield staring at the ceiling, drifting into their separate thoughts. For a long time neither of them spoke.

  When she opened her eyes she saw his brow was again furrowed in a frown. She raised herself to look into his face. ‘What’s so important about how Lin Piao died, Richard? If it happened in 1971 isn’t it all rather old hat now?’

  ‘In one way it is. But still it happens to be one of the greatest unsolved political mysteries of our times. And if the folios are genuine and he was murdered as they suggest and those responsible are now plotting to assassinate Mao, there might be the odd crank in Washington and Moscow, not to mention Peking itself, who’d be interested in the details.’

  She punched him quickly on the solar plexus with a small fist and he jack-knifed into a sitting position, clutching at her wrist. ‘Don’t be so bloody sarcastic. The arcane doings of 8oo million Chinese may be child’s play to you and your clever friends—.

  He grinned and dropped her wrist. ‘Wrong. If you laid all the Sinologists in the world end to end they still wouldn’t reach a conclusion.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because they just don’t know any more than you do about what really happened to Comrade Lin.’

  ‘What do the Chinese themselves say happened to him?’

  ‘For ten months after the Trident crash there was a deafening silence out of Peking. Then suddenly the following July they started to gush out statements saying he had, after all, died in the crash in Mongolia with his wife and son and a few hangers-on when the Trident ran out of fuel. Trying to defect to the Soviet Union, he was, they say, after three bungled attempts to do away with Mao and take over as the great sun in all their Chinese hearts. And they’ve stuck to that colourful story ever since, through thick and thin.’

  She hugged her knees in front of her chest and rested her chin on them, smiling wickedly at him. ‘And why do all you smug Sinologists lying end to end think they shouldn’t?’

  ‘Because in the absence of any evidence really worth that name there’ve been contradictions by the score. The Russians got the wreckage and the burned-out corpses—and may still have ‘em in some grisly deep freeze under the Kremlin for all we know. But although they’ve never said anything official about their findings, Kosygin told Pierre Trudeau casually on a trip to Ottawa that they’d dug bullets out of some of the barbecued carcasses. Now, unless all the Chinese comrades suddenly wanted to read the empty fuel gauge at once and started taking pot shots at each other for that sole privilege, that makes Peking’s story a bit suspect from the start, doesn’t it?’

  She reached out a hand and stroked his hair. ‘I’d believe anything you said, darling I’m sure you’re right.’

  He brushed her hand away impatiently. ‘The Mongolians and the Russians said the bodies were burned beyond recognition— but Chou En-lai told a group of visiting American newspaper editors much later that Chinese diplomats had gone to the scene and identified Lin and the others on the spot. And buried ‘em there, what’s more. There’s a lot else besides, but do you begin to see what I mean?’

  He leaned across the bed to reach for his bathrobe but Nina beat him to it. She wrapped it round her shoulders, danced swiftly out of reach, picked up the tea tray from the bedside table and moved towards the door. As she passed him Scholefield reached out and patted her rump affectionately. ‘And what’s more, my lissom love, whenever all the evidence available in the West is fed into the big China-watching computers in places like Harvard and the American Consulate General in Hong Kong they just rip their bolts loose and get up off their pedestals and rush round shaking their heads and chanting, “Lies, lies, all lies”.’

  ‘I think I’m beginning to get a glimmer, Professor, of why you preferred cuddling those pink folios on the kitchen table all night

  —though I can’t say I admire your choice.’ She waggled her hips provocatively at him and disappeared grinning into the kitchen.

  He heard her clattering the cups in the sink, then the door bell rang and she went to answer it. When she returned a moment later she was clipping her long hair up on the top of her head in preparation for a shower. ‘It was your uniformed voyeur, Moynahan. His eyes nearly fell out of his head. He said an American left some books for you while you were away. He’s going to bring them up.’

  Scholefield nodded and began to get out of bed. ‘Some new American publications from Harvey Ketterman. He’s a State Department Pekinologist. A good chum of mine. You’ll meet him, he’s over here for a couple of seminars.’ He padded barefoot down the hall behind her to the bathroom.

  ‘The mystery of Lin Piao would make a good plot for an old Hollywood B movie, wouldn’t it?’ she said over her shoulder. ‘If it wasn’t true.’

  ‘It gets more like that the further you go into it.’ He soaped his face and watched her long body in his shaving mirror as she tucked her hair inside a shower cap and climbed under the warm water jet. ‘We know what fantasies the Chinese rank and file were asked to believe because facsimiles of their secret documents leaked out to Hong Kong and Taiwan. They make it sound as though Lin had a mixture of Buster Keaton, the Keystone cops and Harold Lloyd as co-conspirators.’ He fitted a new blade carefully into his razor and began to scrape creamy lather from the side of his face.

  ‘A soldier deputed to blow up Mao’s train is supposed to have gone into a blue funk at the last moment and got his wife, who was a doctor, would you believe, to give him an injection to blur his vision so he couldn’t see the train when it went by. Then further up the line they allegedly tried to kill Mao by leaking gas into the train’s heating system—but found too late the vents in the Chairman’s carriage were blocked. Then another would-be assassin fluffed a stabbing attack because he became totally overawed by Mao’s charisma after tricking his way into the great man’s presence in the Forbidden City in Peking.’

  Nina drew back the shower curtains and poked her head out. ‘A case of first-knife nerves, do you think?’

  ‘Okay, I know it sounds hilarious now. And Chou En-lai practically admitted to another foreign delegation later that all that was bunkum. But we might never know how close China and Russia came to the crunch over it. Or what it might have meant for the rest of us. Kissinger had just made his first secret visit to Peking a few weeks before—and America and China had been sworn enemies for twenty years up to then, remember. The Russians couldn’t have been altogether happy about finding an unidentified aircraft heading out of China towards their heartland, in the middle of the night shortly after that event—if they didn’t know it was coming.’ He put down his razor and turned to wrap a large bath towel round her as she stepped out of the shower.

  ‘But how could the Chinese hush up a plane crash like that in a foreign country for ten months?’

  ‘They didn’t hush up the crash itself The Mongolians and the Russians forced their hand by putting out a bald official news agency report from Ulan Bator. Tass carried it too. But even that didn’t appear until seventeen days after the crash—at the end of September. The Chinese had to .admit then they’d lost a Trident. But they insisted it was a civilian plane. And they didn’t come anywhere near admitting then they’d lost Mao’s heir- apparent.’

  Scholefield stepped under the shower, opened the cold tap and threw his head back under the stinging spray. He shook the water out of his eyes and shivered, despite the heat. ‘We knew all hell had broken loose in China in the middle of September because military radio messages monitored in Japan recalled all China’s troops urgently from leave. And
the messages were going out en clair, not coded. They were obviously at panic stations. The American satellites 4etected a lot of unusual troop movements, and all civilian flights were suddenly grounded throughout the country. Foreigners in China were just stranded where they were. Then to cap it all the annual Liberation Day parade in Peking on October 1st was cancelled at the eleventh hour without any explanation. Whether it was civil war, or war with Russia, they were worried about—or both—we don’t know. But China was certainly standing rather unsteadily on one ear at that time.’

  Nina slipped the bath robe on and stared thoughtfully at her reflection in the mirror. She removed the shower cap, unpinned her hair and began drawing a wire-bristled brush through it with long slow strokes, tilting her head from side to side. Scholefield stayed under the cold shower until his teeth were chattering, then he stepped out and towelled himself vigorously.

  ‘How could the Americans and Israelis come to get mixed up in all this? That sounds a bit unlikely, doesn’t it?’ She stopped brushing her hair and gazed enquiringly at his reflection in the mirror. ‘Has that just been thrown in, do you think, so the Chinese can be sure of selling the motion picture rights of your folios to Hollywood for hard western dollars when it’s all over?’

  Scholefield draped the towel round his shoulders and moved up behind her. He smiled at her in the mirror as be slipped his hands into the front of the bathrobe. ‘You’re a cynical bitch Nina.’ Her breasts were still silkily damp from the shower and she shrugged her shoulders in a deliberately provocative movement, her eyes fixed on his in the glass. ‘Mrs. Chou En-lai contributed her two-pennyworth of mystery by telling some visiting American ladies rather enigmatically that the CIA had found out about Lin’s plotting first. Nobody ever really got out of her what she meant by that. And the CIA haven’t exactly been forthcoming on the subject. Perhaps you should ask Harvey Ketterman about it when you meet him.’