Rampage

The World is Six Feet Square

The Prophetess

Mindanao Pearl

Joshua's People

The Cheetah's

The Hot Sun of Africa

House on Curzon Street

Rogue's Gambit

Cairo Cabal

Bichu the Jaguar

The Walls of Jolo

ASSAULT ON MING

Book Two

Copyright 2024 Eagle One Media, Inc.

Original Copyright 1969 Alan Caillou

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CHAPTER 1

Under the hot blue sky, the bright colors of the little town were startling.

It’s the first thing that strikes you when you hit Macao; a blaze of brilliant reds and blues and greens and yellows, as though a surrealist painter had gone out of his mind and painted the colony in a furious, abstract madness. The painted Eastern and Western characters on the signs over the stores seem to be battling for preeminence, each trying to outdo the other with their colors, as though the Portuguese are saying to the Chinese: We can do better, and better means gaudier.

And I hadn’t been there for more than half an hour when some hopeful idiot tried to kill me.

It was the middle of the hot day, and the wash of the waves at Barra Point, where the dark green banyan trees line the waterfront, was a soft and gentle cadence that seemed to murmur peace. I’d walked from the airport, and I’d dumped my bag at the Penha Palacio Hotel, and gone on to see Markle Hyde, which was why I’d come here in the first place. And as I reached the big white house they’d told me about, with the iron gates on the side that looked across the Inner Harbor to the hills of the Chinese mainland; a young Chinese who was idly watching the fishermen mending their nets turned and looked at me and grinned a sort of welcome and shouted out: “Mr. Cain, over here!”

He was a hundred feet or so away, and there was a good-looking outboard skiff drawn up by the stone wall close by him; he was moving towards it, and he looked back and waved and grinned again and shouted: “Over here, a moment, please.” His English was quite good, with the touch of an American East-Coast accent. I wondered idly how he knew my name—though my size makes me distinctive enough to anyone who’s had a description—and I walked over to see what he wanted, to see if this were perhaps one of Markle Hyde’s men who had something to say about my pending interview. His manner was affable, careless, friendly; I saw him reach into the skiff and he came up with a rifle, and not losing that smile of welcome he raised it to his shoulder and fired. The movement was fast, and the sound of the shot came no more than a fraction of a split second after the beginning of the motion. I was fast too—lying on the ground behind that sheltering wall, I heard the bullet smack into the granite blocks and go whining away across the water. And then, as I stared, two men came running out of the iron gates with revolvers in their hands, and I wondered for a brief moment if I was really as smart as I thought I was in never—or seldom—carrying a gun of any sort.

But the moment of fear passed quickly; the two men were firing over my head, over the wall that sheltered me from the man by the skiff. I raised myself up and looked, and he was already lying there dead half in and half out of the water and the fishermen were hurriedly gathering up their nets and moving away, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, knowing nothing; the casual ease of their movements told me that it was nothing new in Macao that casual battles were won and lost in the heat of every day to the tune of the whispering waters. Perhaps it’s the only place left in the civilized world where this is so, where the terrors of the underworld bubble up sometimes above the surface of the colony’s calm order.

It’s a club, Macao, a European oasis that is surrounded, incongruously, by the nostalgic concepts of Oriental individuality, where every other citizen is at one time or another a pirate, or a smuggler, or just a plain old-fashioned gangster. You feel that you’re in a sort of tropical Riviera with all the elegance you can imagine; and then, suddenly, you’re reminded that this is not only China, but a China that has been left behind in the nineteenth century. It’s one of the world’s last strongholds of completely overt piracy, where anything, absolutely anything. goes.

The two men were Americans; but somehow, they seemed more distant from me than the young Chinese who had tried to kill me. They were dour, unsmiling, unemotional men and they’d put away their guns already and were standing there looking this way and that down the road. One of them whistled shrilly, and three Chinese came pouring out through the gates and ran towards the dead would-be assassin. They lifted him up and tossed him into his own skiff, and one of them started up the motor and pointed it out to sea, and in a few seconds the whole thing was over with the skiff and its dead cargo veering around the Inner Harbor and vaguely finding its way to the hills on the other side. I watched it as it swung around and steadied itself and seemed to find a course, as though the dead hands were steering it home.

One of the two Americans jerked a thumb at the gates and said: “Inside, Mr. Cain, it’s safer. Mr. Hyde is waiting for you.”

◆◆◆

I’d heard plenty about Markle Hyde, of course. Financier, philanthropist, professional do-gooder; and I wondered what he was doing with such efficient, old-time bodyguards.

I soon found out.

He was a man of sixty or so, tough, agile, very sure of himself except in patches, a short, stubby sort of man who stood on two wide-spaced feet as though daring the world to come and knock him down. And everything about him spelt money.

The house was big and cool and comfortable in the old Portuguese Colonial style, overfilled with Chinese furniture and decorated with Chinese sculptures in stone and jade, some fine pieces among them. A huge and ugly bronze bear from the Han Dynasty, heavily gilded, was the centerpiece of the room I was in; and when I looked at it with admiration—there are only three of these pieces left in the world—Markle Hyde said tartly: “Not my taste, Cain, this is not my house. Now, what’s your drink?”

His voice was sharp and imperative, the voice of a man used to giving orders. But he was holding out his hand and saying in the same breath: “I’m Markle Hyde, and you’re going to work for me.”

I said mildly: “I am?”

“Yes. Yes, you are. Sit down, Cain. Sit down and listen.”

I said: “You offered me a drink.”

“All right, what’ll it be?”

“Back home, this kind of weather, I like to drink gin and tonic. But out here...anything long and cold. Whatever you have.”

It was almost an affront to an overly developed sense of hospitality—or perhaps I should say, of the pride that comes from possession and the ability to make it show in even the smallest ways; he was going to put me in my place right away. He said: “What kind of gin? Just name it.”

“Gordon’s Gin, Schweppes tonic, lots of ice, and a fourteen ounce glass. Please.”

He said coldly: “Good. I like a man who knows what he wants.” He made no move towards the mirrored bar at the back of the room; but when I turned at the breath of a sound, an elderly Chinese servant was padding across the room in almost absolute silence; I heard the tinkle of glassware, Markle Hyde said suddenly: “And before I tell you why you are here, I’d better ask if you know who I am?”

I said: “I’ve heard of you. Who hasn’t? But I only know what I read in the papers.”

“Ah yes, you’re a voracious reader, aren’t you? They told me.”

“They?”

He ignored the question. He shrugged his shoulders and said: “And I’m sorry about that little incident outside. If you’d let my man drive you in from the airport, it wouldn’t have happened.”

I said: “It’s three miles. For me, that’s a pleasant stroll. I like to walk.”

The elderly Chinese, red-robed and soft-slippered, was there beside me, handing me a fourteen ounce glass on a silver tray, bowing and showing his yellow teeth; I was astonished at the absolute silence in which he moved; I fancied I could hear old bones creaking and nothing more.