The Last Six Million Seconds

Six pupils the size of pinheads tried to focus on him.

“Wow.” Clare scratched her arm, grinned. “Someone just fell from the sky.”

“Fuck.”

“Maybe he fell outa that chopper I can hear.”

“Oh, fuck! Choppers! I’m outa here.” Clare tried to stand. She rose up against the wall of the container, slid back down again. “Shit. I’m so friggin’ stoned. Damn, I think they got us.”

“Don’t move,” Chan repeated. “I don’t want to have to hurt you.”

Clare stared at him from under heavy lids. “He has one of those British accents.”

“I guess they all do round here.”

“Martian falls outa the sky, and fuck, he talks faggy English.”

Chan hoped they wouldn’t try to escape. How do you instill fear and respect in someone whose consciousness is floating in space? He knew he couldn’t shoot them either. He wasn’t the type to shoot sick dogs. He stood staring at them while they stared at the chopper that had reared up like a prehistoric beast apparently from nowhere. As far as the three addicts were concerned, it upstaged Chan and his gun, like a film with bigger technical effects. They were transfixed by it; their heads swiveled as it banked and hung, blowing up a small typhoon of dust at the other end of the compound.

“Man, I been dreaming about one of those coming to take us away,” Clare said, staring. “Ain’t much they can do us for ’cept possession.”

“Ain’t the cops we’re worried about, remember, Excellency?”

Clare scratched her head again. “Yeah. Shit.” She turned to Chan. “You got, like, witness protection over here? We got stuff we could sell, you know, make your hair stand on end. International implications definitely.”

Chan watched while two SAS officers slithered down a rope at amazing speed. They hit the compound, running.

“It’s okay,” Chan shouted, “I’ve got them covered. I’ve arrested them. They’re too stoned to move. They’re unarmed. I said I’ve arrested them.” Perhaps it was the noise of the chopper. “They’re unarmed, it’s okay.” The two soldiers seemed not to hear him.

They took up positions at angles to the three junkies; each knelt on one knee, held his gun in both hands with arms straight. Chan dived to the ground and watched while bullets from the two machine pistols sawed first through the bodies of Clare and her friends, then through their heads.

Under the thunder of the chopper human mush the consistency of watermelon dripped from the container wall. It must have been all of twenty seconds since Clare was speaking.

“I had them covered, there was no danger, they were unarmed, we could have questioned them.” He was still saying it, jabbering almost, as they led him across the compound to where a rope was dangling from the chopper. Two more men came down the rope.

“All yours to clean up,” one of the gunmen said. The new arrivals nodded and walked briskly toward the corpses.

The gunmen found a harness, which they forced him into, and he was hoisted above the steel maze to the cabin of the chopper, where rough hands hauled him in with brutal efficiency. The other two came up the rope in the same way. A few minutes later the remaining two soldiers were also hoisted aboard, and the machine banked into a turn. One of the soldiers hung on to a steel upright to speak to the pilot.

“We’ll need bulldozers, heavy lifting gear-the containers are packed tight-oh, and something for a fire.”

The pilot flicked a switch; static crackled from a radio. “Operation Kidgloves here, are you reading?”

“Reading Kidgloves, over.”

“You have the coordinates. Send bulldozers, lifting gear to shift shipping containers-and something for a quick bonfire. Something that burns hot for total incineration. Over.”

“Will do. Over and out.”

Chan was made to sit at the rear, the two gunmen immediately in front of him. They had taken his gun. Three others sat on the other side; it was a big chopper. Below, they seemed to be following the ribbon of road that led back toward Kowloon and Hong Kong Island.

Chan felt a gathering fury. When he’d finally caught up with Moira’s enigmatic daughter, during the few minutes that he’d watched and heard her speak, the mystery had fallen away, together with the fear and awe. He knew who she was; any city cop would have recognized her and her friends: They were the eternal fantasists, the ones who from an early age know that reality will be more than they can bear. They slip into crime out of weakness and despair and deserve to be treated like common criminals, not terrorists. Whatever the connection with the uranium, those three could have been no more than couriers, that much was clear.

The gunman in front spoke to his colleague opposite. “It was a hostage situation; we had no choice. A police officer was in mortal danger.”

The man opposite-he had lean cheeks in which a single furrow had been plowed from cheekbone to just behind the corner of his mouth-nodded. He turned to Chan. “Hear that? These officers saved your life. I’d like you to appreciate their efforts on your behalf.”

The gunman in front of Chan turned to look him directly in the face. “Okay, Chinaman?”

There didn’t seem to be any physical threat in the way they acted, Chan did not fear they were about to throw him from the helicopter. They seemed to rely for intimidation on the innate menace that emanated from who they were and what they’d done and, perhaps most of all, the psychopathic quirk that had driven them to volunteer for the SAS’s training program in the first place. Chan was still in shock. Deeper than shock, distress. The object of policing was peace, but now Moira’s daughter was dead, and so were her two companions, butchered in an unnecessary paramilitary siege. It took him minutes to wind his mind back from a condition of passive despair to deal with the man in front. Finally he leaned forward and spoke with controlled contempt.

“Put what you like in your report, soldier, but if you call me Chinaman one more time, I’ll find a way to squeeze your balls in a vise. Got it, cunt face?”

Chan leaned back in his seat, feeling marginally better. On occasion infantile hostility could revive the spirit when mature self-restraint merely left one feeling depressed.

The man exchanged a glance with his colleagues but said nothing more. At Stanley, Cuthbert was waiting. He ignored Chan and locked himself in a room with the soldiers to debrief them. Chan was sent back to Central in a government car, as if he’d not been at the scene of the slaughter at all.

In his office Chan paced in front of Aston, refusing to answer questions, forcing his black hair back in a juddering motion every few seconds, trying to control the aftershock. Finally he took the Sony Dictaphone from his desk drawer, slipped it into his pocket and went home.

More in sorrow than in anger he found a piece of A4 size paper, wrote with a black ballpoint in large letters: “She’s dead, Chan.”

At his fax machine in the kitchen he pressed the only autodial number he had ever programmed. He watched the paper make its mournful way through the machine.

He took a beer from the fridge to steady his nerves. He was on the sofa sipping from the can when the telephone rang.

“You okay?”

“Yeah.”

There was a noise of a throat being cleared. “A chopper came. I heard shots, so I ran.”

“Smart.”

“What about the money?”

“I think they’ll pay. So long as you didn’t see a chopper or hear shots.”

“What chopper? What shots?”

“Good. And when you get the money, disappear. That would be my advice.”

“Sure.” There was a pause. “This is big, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“You remind me of a triad foot soldier. You’re just obeying orders, and you don’t really know where they come from. Right?”

Chan replaced the receiver without replying. “Right.” He said it to the beer can. Two more cans later he found the strength to face the grille on the Sony Dictaphone.