Ruler.
“Perhaps, indeed, sir,” replied Admiral Zhang. “But if it were not to be detected, it would have to remain underwater for long periods, and to provide power for any facility ashore, it would also have to be moored underwater. Who could ever see it then?”
“Are any of these places on the shipping routes?”
“No, sir. Certainly not Kerguelen, nor Heard, nor McDonald. None of them are even on air routes. They are basically just slabs of granite jutting up from undersea ridges. It’s hard for me to imagine anyone operating anything from there. In my view, the sooner we are able to get a trawler into the Sunda Strait, the better it will be. Then we can acquire some facts.”
“I agree with you, Zhang. And unless anyone here has some serious objection to this course of action, I would like you and Admiral Zu to develop your plan and submit it for our approval as soon as possible.”
The General Secretary of the Communist Party, whose office entitled him to chair the Military Affairs Commission, nodded his assent, and everyone else took their cue from this most powerful paymaster to the Navy. There was no dissenting voice, and Admiral Zhang Yushu confirmed he would take charge of the mission forthwith.
“I would also like to say, sir, that this makes the delivery of the final two Kilos even more pressing.”
“I wondered if that might be the case,” said the Ruler, smiling again. “Tell me why.”
“Because, sir, if we find what we think we may find, behind some remote rock in the Southern Ocean…I imagine we will consider the possibility of an attack…and I would prefer to do so with our very best submarine…a brand-new Kilo would be perfect.”
“If we find what we think we may,” said the Ruler, “there is not the merest possibility of an attack. My orders will be absolute. I want any Taiwanese nuclear laboratory, or factory, or any such facility,
“Yessir,” said Admiral Zhang, standing formally to attention.
The pressure on the CIA from the office of the President’s National Security Adviser had been intense for several days now. Scarcely an hour passed without some new instruction, demand, or memorandum landing on the desk of the profoundly harassed chief of the Far Eastern Desk, Frank Reidel. “Admiral Morgan wants this…Admiral Morgan wants that…Admiral Morgan says, ‘Get into the White House right now’…Admiral Morgan wants to know what the hell’s going on…Admiral Morgan says if he is not told what those ‘fucking Hai Lungs’ are up to within one day, heads are gonna roll.” “Jesus Christ,” said Reidel.
In turn he had turned the heat up on all of his Far Eastern field officers, especially those in Taiwan, who were permitted by the friendly government to operate almost at will, making their inquiries, on behalf of the United States, freely, almost like journalists, which indeed a couple of them were.
There was, however, one place on the island where
This road comes to a shuddering halt three hundred yards from the post office. A big military-style gate, set into hundreds of yards of wire fencing, is manned twenty-four hours a day by armed police. No one is permitted past the gates without documentation. Dock workers who forget or mislay their pass are not admitted.
Frank Reidel’s Taipei chief had two men in the Eastern Command base who undertook enormous risks for very little information. Carl Chimei, the forty-four-year-old foreman on the submarine loading dock, was one of them. A deeply embittered man, he hated China and everything to do with it, including Taiwan. He had done so ever since his schoolteacher-parents had been murdered by Mao’s Red Guards on the mainland thirty years previously. He himself had escaped the insurrection and made it to Taiwan when he was just eighteen years old.
He was probably the easiest recruit Reidel’s men had ever encountered. He lived for the day when he would be flown to the USA; his wife and two children were leaving early next year, if not sooner.
But on this night, June 28, crouched in the shadow of the stacked crates on the jetty, Carl Chimei was in mortal danger. He had not returned home with his comrades, and his exit pass had not been stamped. Tomorrow, or even later tonight, he would attempt to talk himself out of that. Perhaps no one would notice — he had worked in the dockyard for twenty years. But now he was petrified. Every fifteen minutes, two armed Navy sentries walked within ten feet of his hiding place, thirty feet away from the Hai Lung. If one of them saw him, he would be shot dead, no questions asked. Only the thought of life in the United States, and the promised payment of $250,000 for risking his life on more than one occasion, kept him steady. In his hard right hand he carried a two-foot-long crowbar. But the crate he wanted to pry open was stacked twenty feet up, and he would have to work ferociously fast, with only the distant dock lights to guide him.
He had the pattern of the sentries’ patrol clear in his mind. They walked past the orderly pile of crates, and then hesitated at the light above the gangway to the Hai Lung, which was moored alongside. Twice they had called out something to the guard on the casing of the submarine. They had then proceeded down the jetty and it took precisely fifteen minutes for them to return, from the other direction. Carl had already decided to scale the crates while they checked the shore bridge to the Hai Lung.
And now he could hear the steady beat of their footsteps as he flattened himself behind the wall of crates. He closed his eyes and willed his thumping heart to be silent as the footsteps grew louder, and then began to recede.
Carl counted to ten, hooked the crowbar through his belt, and pulled himself up onto the rim of the first crate, three feet above the ground. The crates were unevenly stacked, and the climb was not difficult for a man as fit as Carl. But there were six more crates to scale, and one mistake might prove fatal. He dug his fingers over the rim of the wood as he cleared the next two, and hung on nine feet above his starting point, his soft work shoes jammed into the cracks between the cases. It took him three minutes to reach the top of the stack, and when he got there he could just see the red-painted letters he sought: HAI LUNG 793. He expertly jammed the crowbar between the lid and the wall of the crate, and heaved with short strokes to prevent the nails from squeaking as they came out. But the lid would not move.
Carl’s fingers raced over the surface of the crate. And he cursed the two steel bands that bound it tight. He reached for the cutters deep in his trouser pocket, adjusted them for size, and severed the first band. Then he cut the second and was appalled at the noise they made as they fell away with a twanging, sprung, metallic protest. He thought it would never die away.
But now the six-foot lid of the case moved against the heave of the crowbar, and Carl wrenched it upward and back, leaving it open. Seven minutes had passed, and he ripped at the waterproof wrapping inside the case. Then he switched on his tiny flashlight. He felt around and touched something soft and furry. For a moment he thought he had grabbed a dead panda. But the light told him differently. He was looking at fur-lined clothes, and at the bottom were boots and hats. Carl knew what he had come for — and he knew that wherever those submarines were going was very cold indeed.
He heaved the top of the crate back into position, and pushed the nails back into place with the flat end of his crowbar. The trouble was again the steel bands. He could cut them and get rid of the pieces, but if he left the bands dangling, and ran for it, his break-in would be obvious in the morning.
He had three minutes before the sentries were due back, and he decided to stay and cut up the steel bands, and hope that neither of the guards would look aloft as they passed.
Carl’s luck held. The sentries came and went, and he was able to pull out the bands, one by one, and then fold and carry them to the ground, like fully extended steel measuring tapes.
He cut them into small pieces and then dumped the jangling pieces into a bin. Tomorrow, with any luck, he would himself supervise the loading of the Hai Lung. For now, he just had to get away. And at 2300, that was not going to be easy.
Carl, however, was a senior worker at the yard and had lived right in the town of Suao for many years. If he had a halfway decent reason for being on duty so late, he would almost certainly get away with it.
And so, he pulled on his jacket, picked up a clip-board full of notes, and crate numbers, and marched straight down the jetty toward the Sutung Chung Gate, eight hundred yards distant. As he approached the guardhouse, the duty officer stepped out to meet him. “Hey, Carl,…what are you doing here at this time of night?”
“Ah, someone had misplaced one of those crates we’re loading tomorrow. At least the documents said it was misplaced. Took me five and a half hours to find it…in the wrong damned pile. I was so angry I’ve walked up here with all the stuff…”
