Twelve Hours To Destiny
Read Twelve Hours To Destiny Online
Authors: John Glasby
© John Glasby 1966
John Glasby has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published in 1967 by John Spencer under the pen name Manning K. Robertson.
This edition published in 2016 by Endeavour Press Ltd.
The sun, which had hovered almost interminably above the hills on the Chinese mainland, vanished abruptly in a sweeping of red and orange. The day ended as far as the sea and the wharves which stretched around most of Hong Kong island were concerned. But up on the crown of Victoria Peak, daylight still lingered as though reluctant to give way to the swiftly advancing night.
Along the wide, steep steps of Sing Wong Street looking down over the harbour, there was the usual late evening activity; coolies from the waterfront rubbing shoulders with high-class Chinese and Europeans. Within an hour, the street would become deserted, lying as it did between the dives and hovels of the downtown area and the highly residential district on the slopes of Victoria Peak. At this time of the day, the long straight street was cool and seemingly detached from the rest of the sprawling city with the tall offices of rich businessmen on either side, their owners closing up for the day. The occasional bright brass plate bearing the title of a holding company in Great Britain or Australia was usually genuine; but here and there were others which were not quite what they appeared on the surface.
On the second floor of one of the tall buildings were the offices of Chao Lin, dealer in textile fibres, yarns and fabrics. Well known in Hong Kong, respected by his associates, he was a man of strict behaviour. Every working day of the week he would leave the building at precisely six-fifteen, make his way down Sing Wong Street to where a car would be waiting to take him home; every day except Fridays when his office would be the only one along that stretch of the street still showing a light and when he would remain there for more than three hours after the rest of the business people had left for their evening pleasures.
During normal business hours, any visitor to the address would be shown into a respectable, well-appointed room typical of such places in this sector of Hong Kong, with several typists seated at long desks, busy telephones, tall dark-green metal filing cabinets and all the usual accoutrements of a high-class business centre. If one were a very important client, one that might be shown through—by an efficient Chinese secretary—into Chao Lin’s inner sanctum where tea would be provided in tiny, eggshell-thin porcelain cups while details of shipments would be discreetly discussed.
Nothing seen by the many visitors to the office would give the impression that anything more went on there than the normal day-to-day business of running an efficient import and export company dealing in one of Hong Kong’s expanding trades with the Western world. Only at six-thirty each Friday evening was the procedure changed, after all of the office staff had left. Then Chao Lin would press a concealed button beneath his desk and a square section of the far wall, ostensibly a large filing cabinet, would turn with an oiled smoothness on a central pivot, revealing an entrance to the small room whose existence was known to only a handful of trusted men in London and Hong Kong.
At precisely seven o’clock, Hong Kong time, he would be seated before the powerful transmitter, earphones clamped tightly over his head, listening intently for the call sign from London which would link him with a desk at the headquarters of British Military Intelligence. Once the signal came through, he would dispatch all of his carefully gathered information for the week in a business-like and concise manner, vital information which had been gathered, in the main, from a patient monitoring of Chinese radio broadcasts for since China had been closed to all but a few special visitors from the West, a ring of listening posts had been set up by Western Intelligence, to monitor every programme broadcast inside Communist China.
Already, this procedure had paid handsome dividends. Since Russia had stopped the all-important supply of ground-to-air missiles, American U2 spy planes had been able to fly virtually unhindered over the Chinese mainland. Satellites too made passes over China, photographing and recording the presence of nuclear factories in Sinkiang Province at Lop Nor close to the Russian frontier. This information, coupled with broadcasts describing the building of new roads in that area, roads which had been laid across the Sinkiang Desert, gave the clue to the construction of the first Chinese atomic bomb long before it had been tested.
Now there was a hint of something as dramatic going on inside China, little scattered bits of information which Chao Lin had picked up from various sources and from which he was in the process of building up an overall picture which indicated something really big. It might require some weeks of patient work to fill in all of the blanks, but he was a patient man and London would wait until he could give them everything they needed.
On this particular Friday evening, Chao Lin moved purposefully around the outer room of the office, checking that everything was in order. The last of the employees had gone and the place was deathly quiet. He glanced at the watch on his left wrist. Another thirty-five minutes and the call sign from London would be beaming its way through the ether. Locking the outer door, he made his way through into the back room.
*
At the same moment that the steel bolt on Chao Lin’s outer office shot home, the high-pitched whine of the engines of the small submarine faded to a low-throated moan and then fell silent. There was a slight, scarcely-felt jar throughout the whole metal structure as the craft touched bottom. The two men in gleaming black, skin-tight suits and aqualungs moved slowly towards the escape hatch. Behind the transparent masks, their faces were inscrutable, narrowed eyes and watchful, fixed on the olive features of Commander Chi ten Lao.
“You have your instructions.” The commander’s tone was soft but had an urgent edge to it. “We are now in fifty feet of water some four hundred yards outside the harbour at Hong Kong. Once you leave through the escape hatch, you will make your way underwater to the harbour and rendezvous with the junk having the red sail. There is no possibility of a mistake. There you will change your clothing and make your way onshore to the address you have been given in Sing Wong Street. Once you arrive at the house and offices of Chao Lin, you will carry out phase two of the plan. This is perfectly understood.” The final sentence was a statement of fact and not a question.
The two men nodded slowly in agreement. It would have been strange had they not done so. Each man had been carefully chosen for this task, had been briefed with a thoroughness which was peculiar to the Chinese. It was, indeed, a mark of the utter importance of their mission that one of the few submarines possessed by the Chinese had been used to bring them to the spot from a secluded point on the mainland.
Chi ten Lao was silent for a long minute. Then he nodded slowly. “I am satisfied,” he murmured finally. Turning, he gave a brief signal to the men standing on either side of the steel door leading to the escape hatch. They spun the great wheel that operated the mechanism, waited until both men had passed through into the narrow chamber beyond, then closed the heavy steel door behind them. Unconcernedly, the commander returned to his post. His job was almost finished for the time being. For Yun Shih-Min and Chu Hsi it was just beginning.
Savagely the blast of compressed air caught Chu Hsi around in the middle and hurled him upward through the dark water. The surface of the sea, still high above him was also dark, featureless. He commenced to swim to one side as a further ballooning of bubbles shot from the black, whale-like shape of the submarine below him and Yun Shih-Min was projected upward, gliding beside him a few moments later. Together, they swam some twenty feet below the surface to obtain decompression.
Breaking surface three minutes later, the two dark shapes slid easily through the waves to where the tall cranes and gantries of Hong Kong Harbour lay on the dim skyline. Off to their left, a small cluster of junks bobbed up and down in the water. When they were less than fifty yards away, they paused, treading water to keep themselves upright, scanning the long line of small vessels until they were able to pick out one, a short distance from the others, the red, square sail standing out prominently in the dim starlight. Chu Hsi pointed, then dipped his right hand downward to indicate that they would swim the rest of the way underwater so as not to leave any tell-tale wake which might be seen from the other fishing vessels in the vicinity. Everything depended on the utmost secrecy. The British authorities had eyes everywhere; though they were on the lookout for smugglers rather than swimmers moving in from the ocean.
Just for a moment, before submerging, he wondered why Lung Shan wanted Chao Lin so desperately that he had devised this method of getting him out of Hong Kong. As a small cog in a very large and complex machine, he did not ask questions of those in authority and simply carried out the orders given to him. All that really mattered was his ultimate success in this particular mission. If he and his companion delivered Chao Lin to Lung Chan all would be well; if not... he immediately put any thought of failure out of his mind. Lung Chan was the Devil incarnate. If he wanted Chao Lin—and alive—then it was for some purpose which he, Chu Hsi did not wish to contemplate.
They broke surface again less than ten yards from the junk. There were three men on board to help them over the side. Fresh clothing was waiting for them. Now it was only a question of speed, of relying on the precision with which everything had been planned in advance.
At exactly six-fifty, with the swiftly-rising length of Sing Wong Street standing virtually deserted before them, the two men walked unhurriedly up the wide steps. There was a strict professionalism about the way they forced the lock of the outer door and slipped noiselessly inside. Crossing the room, they moved towards a far door, paused, listening intently. No sound came from the other side, but a faint slip of yellow light showed plainly from beneath the door...
Gently, Chao Lin eased himself forward in his chair, taking up the most comfortable position. A quick glance at his watch told him that London should be coming through any second now. Everything was in readiness. Inside the small room there was no sound beyond the faint humming of the powerful transmitter with its neat rows of dials and flickering needles. His fingertips brushed the dial in front of him.
Right hand poised above the gleaming transmitter key, he waited patiently for the slight change in the modulated note which would warn him that the code signal was coming through over the ether.
The first he knew that there was something wrong was the hard deadly touch of cold steel against his temple just above the left ear. Almost automatically, without thinking, he dropped his hand away from the key, swung it sharply across his body to where the tiny automatic reposed in the holster under his left armpit, his whole body swivelling in the chair.
Something struck him hard across the wrist, smashing the bones in an agonising stab of pain. The gun dropped with a clatter to the floor at his feet and he twisted his head with a wrenching of neck muscles, staring up at the two men who stood menacingly over him.
“You are a fool, Chao Lin,” said the taller of the men contemptuously.
“Who are you?”
“That is of no importance. All that matters is that we know who you are.”
The small black hole of the gun with the ugly cylinder of the silencer screwed over the barrel was aimed straight at his eyes. For a moment, as he heard the faint staccato click of the call sign in the earphones, he debated whether to send a warning signal, even though it would almost certainly be his last action on this Earth. Then he shrugged resignedly. He had made up his mind. He had no other alternative. The fact that these men had known who he was, where to find him, was enough to know that he did not have a chance of warning London that there was something wrong. Perhaps when he did not acknowledge their signal, they would put two and two together and realise that something was gravely wrong.
Weakly, he let his right hand drop to his lap. One of the men picked up the fallen automatic, thrust it into his belt. The other tugged the earphones off his head, held them against his ear for a moment, then smiled thinly and tossed them contemptuously on to the shelf in front of the transmitter.
“You will send no more messages of any kind to your imperialistic masters, old man.” The other backed away a little. “Get up. Move very slowly or we shall kill you.”
Feebly, trying to shut out of his mind the searing flame of agony that lanced through his broken wrist, stabbing through the whole length of his arm, Chao Lin got up out of the chair. The short, stocky one of the pair pushed him towards the door, waited until he was just inside the other room, then swung downward with his left hand, fingers stiffened. The edge of his palm caught Chao Lin on the back of the neck. With a sigh, the other collapsed forward, unconscious even before his inert body hit the floor. Chao Lin did not even feel the jarring pain as his injured wrist crumpled under his weight.
In the small back room, Chu Hsi smashed the flimsy wooden chair to bits using the unyielding side of the transmitter, then proceeded to wreck the rest of the furniture, piling it high against one wall. Finally, he tore down the silk curtains with their red and gold printed designs, thrust them into the pile, struck a couple of matches and waited until the wood was well ablaze before joining Yun Shih-Min. He nodded tersely. Calmly, the other bent, heaved the limp body over his shoulder and followed him to the outer door. Behind them, the first wisps of grey smoke were oozing through the concealed door into the room.
Twenty minutes later, a junk with a red sail drifted slowly and inconspicuously from the others which bobbed at their moorings and moved out into the stretch of water between Hong Kong and the Chinese mainland. Standing in the bow, Chu Hsi scanned the dark, heaving waters. Overhead, the diamond-hard stars glittered brilliantly but he had no eyes for them. These waters were, he knew, constantly patrolled by the British Navy, on the lookout for opium smugglers and they were liable to stop, board and search any small vessel behaving in a peculiar manner. In the event of this happening before they rendezvoused with the submarine, it would be necessary for them to put their emergency plan into operation.