The Shanghai Union of Industrial Mystics (40 page)

‘Looks a bit busy to me—in the air, at least,’ said Peters.

‘No people live down there,’ Wong said. ‘Not on that island. No access. You can’t get there without boat or helicopter. Thick stone cliffs behind. Bomb proof. Drop bomb there and then fly away quick-quick-quick. It can explode. No one will be hurt.’

Peters was maintaining open channels with Jin, telegraphing every coordinate change, however slight, before he made it. The two craft managed to move in tandem surprisingly well. ‘We’re doing it,’ Peters said. ‘I can’t believe we’re actually doing it.’

Within thirty seconds they were almost directly over the rocky cliffs. There were two bays visible. ‘That one or that one?’ Peters asked.

‘That one, the far one,’ the feng shui master said. ‘There are cliffs on three sides so will hold explosion in.’

‘I’ll need to change angle.’ Peters radioed details of the proposed adjustment in the flight path to pilot Jin. ‘Yawing left, nor’northeast, twelve degrees.’

‘Are you sure there’s nobody there?’ Dooley said, concerned that at least one boat seemed to be visible in the water nearby.

Wong said: ‘A few fisherfolk in the sea only. Almost nobody knows about this cove except me—and the President of China. I told his security chief about it when they consulted me. Even I didn’t charge them.’ The feng shui man folded his arms proudly.

‘Okay, we’re nearly there.’ Dooley turned to Peters. ‘Get ready to release the load. We’re going to have to do a coordinated drop and then escape at high speed.’

The two helicopters flew over the edge of the bay.

‘Dooley here. Can you hear me, Zhang?’

‘Yes, I can hear you.’

‘Let’s drop the cargo on three, as soon as we get over the beach. One. Two. Oh geez, what’s that?’

A pair of fighter aircraft bore down on them, and two attack helicopters approached from another direction. ‘Move away, move away,’ came gruff instructions through the speakers. One of the craft fired a warning shot at them—there was a bright flash and a missile streaked past them.

‘Abort! We need to abort—I’m moving forty—Jin, swing left, forty degrees, repeat, swing left forty degrees—hold on everyone,’ Peters shouted as the Black Hawk banked steeply away and the Chinese Z9-B followed suit.

Dooley heard rapid speech in Chinese as Zhang and her pilot swung steeply to follow the Black Hawk.

Peters shouted into an open channel for the benefit of the fighter planes intercepting them. ‘Don’t shoot, don’t shoot. We are aborting. We are aborting.’

‘Move well away,’ said the voice from the attack choppers. ‘We are ordering a no-entry air zone covering two miles around this spot. Get out of range.’

Wong gripped the handles of his seat so hard his hands turned white. He was scared, but he was also outraged. What on earth was destiny up to? How on earth could quiet, isolated Tsz Lum Cove suddenly be full of army jets firing guns at anyone who approached? And why now, when they had urgent need of it? It was so unfair!

Dooley was worried that the abrupt movements had set the platform below them swinging, shifting the weight and making it difficult for the two pilots to keep their choppers steady.

‘Sorry, you guys, okay?’ he said to his Chinese counterpart.

‘What is going on?’ Zhang shouted. ‘The sky here is full of Americans.’

‘I don’t know. I really don’t know. There’s half a squadron of aircraft keeping everyone away from that bay.’

Neither spoke for a few seconds. And then Zhang’s crackly voice said: ‘And I know why. Look what’s down there. One of your American craft.’

Wong looked out of the window to his left. Sheltering on the sand was Topchop, the presidential helicopter, containing the Presidents of China and the United States.

The horrific truth hit the Acting Special Agent in Charge with the shock, and the stink, of a massive fish slapped in his face. They’d managed to bring the bomb to the precise spot where its targets were hiding. It was incredible that they had not simply been blown out of the sky without a word.

‘Oh no,’ said Dooley. ‘Oh, no, no, no. Are we are in deep shit.’ His voice was a whisper as he took in the enormity of what they had nearly accomplished. ‘We just tried to kill the President. The two Presidents. We tried to drop a bomb on the heads of the President of the United States of America and the President of China. The two most important human beings on earth. Oh shit.’

‘We are in, as you say, deep shit,’ Zhang agreed.

Peters said: ‘We need to get right out to sea.’

Wong added: ‘Quick, please: time’s running out.’

The two pilots swapped details of the coordinates to which they were switching, yawed their craft to the east and headed straight out towards the open ocean.

Joyce McQuinnie and Marker Cai were flying. Well, they were moving at high speed anyway and
sort of
in the air.

The second Z-9 chopper had dropped a rubber dinghy on the end of a steel cable just in front of their cargo boat. Guessing what was required of them, the two young people had dived off their boat, swum to it and climbed in. Commander Zhang had obviously told her colleagues to keep close behind them, and also to take custody of the other members of the group. By dropping a small vessel to them, the helicopter crew could do both things at once. Lu Linyao had hidden inside the boat cabin, deciding that she, as a government employee, was best keeping a low profile in this whole affair. Besides, now that they had succeeded in getting the bomb away from the city centre, she felt the main part of her job was done and she was desperate to get home and spend quality time with Jia Lin. Several years’ worth of quality time, preferably in quiet, boring Vancouver, would not be too much.

The chopper had then picked up speed, dragging the rubber dinghy along the surface of the water. The pilots initially moved quite slowly, but had quickly picked up speed. After a couple of minutes had passed and the pilots saw that their two passengers were firmly strapped into the high performance marine police dinghy, they let the throttle out.

The dinghy was now flying along at high speed, bumping across the crests of the waves, spending more time in the air than on the water.

‘This is kinda fun,’ Joyce said, lying back in the dinghy, fine sprays of salt water reviving her spirits. ‘Bit like a theme park ride. Wet rides—we call them log flumes or log fumes or something like that.’

‘Yes,’ Cai agreed. ‘This is fun. Better even than go for coffee.’ He leaned back too. They were travelling at speed, and the wind roaring into the boat meant that it was almost impossible to stay upright.

Joyce tingled all over. Two days ago she had been trying to think of a way to get to know Mister
Sigh
a bit better. Now here she was, zooming along the Huangpu River in a really cool
Spy Kids
or James Bond mode of transport, and
lying
down next to him.
This was so outrageous! This was amazing. This was incredible. Life was just like so totally, totally weird. As she felt his hard bicep against her, an expression of utter glee spread over her face. So what if she wasn’t wearing makeup, her hair was a bowl of oiled linguine and she stank to high heaven? He was just as tired and dirty and sweaty as she was, and none of it mattered a jot to either of them.

He turned to her and smiled. ‘This is…so strange,’ he said.

She nodded. ‘Like totally.’

She looked at his lips.

He looked at her lips.

She half closed her eyes.

He half closed his eyes.

They leaned towards each other.

Then he opened his eyes wide in fear. ‘
Aie
,’ he gasped, sitting up and looking as if he had been stabbed.

‘What is it? What’s wrong?’

‘I remember. Just around this corner is a bridge. A bridge. What will we do?’

They both sat up, the wet air tearing into their faces with the force of solid water. Through thin cracks in their almost-shut eyes they saw what Cai had just seen in his mind’s eye: there was, indeed, a bridge ahead of them.

Cai turned to Joyce, fear in his voice. ‘The pilot’s not slowing down.’

‘We’ll smash into the bridge. Can you undo the cable?’

‘I try.’

But as he leaned forward into the wind, the pilot’s plan to get the unorthodox vehicle they were towing past the bridge became clear. The Z-9 chopper increased both its forward velocity and its height, and lifted the police dinghy high into the air.

‘Whoa! They’re gonna try and take us over it,’ Joyce squealed.

The two of them screamed as their tiny dinghy suddenly rose high into the sky and literally flew over the bridge.

Joyce slammed herself back down onto the floor of the dinghy. ‘I can’t look. I can’t look. How high are we? No, don’t tell me, I don’t want to know. How high are we?’

Cai looked over the edge. ‘We’re in the sky,’ he said. ‘Right up, up in the sky.
Wah
! This is better than theme park ride.’

‘This is better than Disneyland.’

He turned to face her, lying stretched out in the bottom of the boat, strapped in with a seatbelt, high as a kite in every sense of the phrase.

Joyce looked at him and licked her lips. ‘Marker.’

‘Yes, Joy-Si.’

‘Come here.’

Anger, as Warlord Gao’s champion discovered to his cost 2055 years ago, clouds judgement. And that is perhaps one of the key reasons why spiritual people will always defeat armed people in the long run. The brain is the deadliest device in any arsenal of lethal weapons.

Racing across the waters of the Yangtze River Estuary was a high-speed cruiser owned by the Mee Fan Supermarket Company. On board was the retail chain’s estranged son.

Having located the two Presidents, Jappar Memet could have won himself a place in history, either small or large, by firing missiles at the helicopter in which they were hiding from his heavily armed ship. If he had hit the Topchop, he would have won himself the great prize he had craved for years—world fame for himself and his worthy cause. There would be no other major talking point in the world’s media for weeks, months, years. He would appear in every history book to be written about this century. If he merely wounded the two Presidents or even just made them uncomfortable, he would still have put himself and his cause on the map indelibly.

But that is not what he chose to do. It was what he had been planning to do. And it was the reason why he had raced (in the family chopper he had kept on standby) to his armed cruiser and taken it out to sea to the place where his contact had told him the two Presidents were hiding.

But when he spotted his elephant being whisked away in a helicopter, he saw red. His beast. His bomb. His plan. That man Wong and his silly hippie assistant. Those evil, murderous people who had spoiled both his noble schemes on a single day: ruined them both as each approached the point of success. He was filled with uncontrollable, raging fury. His heart thumped. He became blind, almost physically. He had trouble breathing. Clouds of anger obscured the fact that he had finally come within sight of the goal he had been moving towards for the past year with every fibre of his being.

‘Bloody Mr Wong has now got ’imself an ’elicopter to take my elephant away from me,’ he snarled to Dilshat.

‘Forget him. Let’s get the—’ ‘It’s like he killed my baby.’

‘What?’

‘My plan. My plan was the child I’ve been nurturin’ for years.’

‘Jappar, we need to—’ ‘I’m going to shoot that bloody bastard out of the sky. That’s what I need to do. I need to do this. Gimme a minute. It probably won’t take more than one shot. Then we’ll get Px2, awright?’

Dilshat agreed. With Memet as a boss, there was nothing else one could do. He resolved to give up political activism after this and go back to studying religion—the more esoteric, obscure and lonely, the better.