“Through the lights?” I waited, and she said: “You must have somehow jumped through them. I told them it could be done, but they thought the cliff...But try and drag me through there and see what happens.”
I thought we could face that problem when we came to it. Less than two minutes to get back to the vent and out onto the face of the cliff, thirty seconds to secure the rope, twenty seconds to climb down, in under three minutes I’d be whistling for the boatman. And then? Three minutes for him to row ashore, with guns covering him if necessary.
I was about to stand up and tell her: Let’s get going; and then, the door with the green drapes opened and Ming was there. I’d heard the sound a fraction of a second before the fact, not long enough to do much more than whip out the Luger and aim it.
He stood there with a look of shocked surprise on his face—he was already in the room before he realized I was there. A shadow behind him moved, and it was another man, too vaguely seen to be more than a nebulous menace moving back out of the line of fire, stepping back with an instinctive movement of alarm.
I had to fire. There was nothing else I could do, though it was something I had badly wanted to avoid.
I saw the shadow crumple, and when it fell into the patch of light that was cast on the floor, I saw it was one of the Northern Chinese that Ming liked to keep around him. He was grabbing at his shattered shoulder and yelling his head off. The time for silence had gone. Mai had already dashed to the doorway we had used and was holding it open, her little gun leveled at Ming. She said, quite quietly: “I’ve got him. Carry her.” She seemed to know exactly what to do, and she was right.
I swooped over Sally and scooped up her featherweight in my arms. She was even lighter than I had suspected, and I let her scream as I ran with her out of there, fast. There was just time to see the surprise go quickly from Ming’s face, to hear him call out mockingly: “A cadaver, Cain, before you’ve gone fifty yards.”
Mai slammed the door shut behind me and stood there coolly and said: “I’ll hold it. Move.” I ran as far as the doorway with the lights, stopped, looked back at Mai who was standing there waiting for someone to open the door, and I called out: “Now!”
Not waiting a split second, she turned and ran towards me, and I said quickly: “Both of us through this thing together, just in case.” Side by side, we ran through it.
And then, all the expertise, the efficiency, the mechanical know-how that was implicit in an operation like Ming’s—like Sally’s—came rushing into immediate action. Somewhere, a bright light went on ahead of us, a searchlight that cast its strong beam all down the corridor. I put it out with my first shot, and a bell was ringing, and there was already the sour stench of chlorine in the air.
I yelled: “Gas!” and we ran like hell for the stone stairway. More lights were coming on, and I was glad of them; it would have been impossible to move so fast in the darkness with the struggling bundle under my arm that was showing a surprising burst of desperate strength. Sally was kicking her legs wildly and trying to ram a heel into my face, and I swung her round with her arms in front of me, and that was worse, because she promptly grabbed me in a very sensitive place and squeezed hard, so I swung her back again and yelled at her: “Cut it out!”
The gas was behind us, on the other side of the lights, where we’d have been if we’d set off the alarm going in instead of coming out; but it was seeping along the corridor and even finding its way slowly up the stairs. But it meant one thing: there’d be no one behind us unless hampered with a gas mask. The lights were everywhere now, small bulbs, mostly, set inside cutouts in the granite roof, too many of them to try and shoot out once we were on the upper level and knew where we were going.
We headed fast for the vent, and there was a guard there, running up and unshouldering a Bren gun as he ran. Mai fired once, and he fell, and then I dropped my angry bundle on the floor and said to her: “I need both hands, do I have to hit you?”
I didn’t wait for a reply, knowing that for one reason or another she’d lie where I put her. I hoisted Mai by the ankles as she held herself stiff and straight, and she grabbed the overhang of the vent and pulled herself up, and then the rope came snaking down and I heard her call: “Behind you!”
I spun round just fast enough to see a thin Chinese pull back round the corner of the passage, fast enough to see his submachine-gun cradled just so, with the sling over his shoulder and the barrel leveled.
Mai called down: “I’ll cover. Hurry.”
I wrapped an end of rope round Sally’s middle and told her, speaking fast and urgently: “This will hurt. Don’t fight it.” But she did. She struggled as Mai pulled her up, tried to kick herself free of the rope, tried to pull at the slipknot as it bit into her frail bones. I heard her screams, and then she was over the edge and suddenly silent.
Mai called: “All right, you’re still covered.”
I fired a quick shot at the angle of granite, just to let them know I was still awake, grabbed the thin rope, and swarmed up it. A burst of gunfire sounded, and I saw the bullets make an upward-moving arc over the walls and roof as the gun ran away from a dead gunners dead hands; I hadn’t heard Mai’s shot in the frightful maelstrom of gunfire in the confined and hollow rock, but there was the man out from under cover and lying dead or dying on the ground with his gun still running away till the magazine was empty.
Sally was up there, lying still and silent and showing no sign of whatever it was that Mai had done to her. Mai slipped along the passage ahead of me, dragging the rope (she never missed a thing, that girl!), and I followed with Sally’s impossibly thin wrists in my hands. And a moment later, we were both sliding down the rope to the rocks of the beach.
I looked up at the top of the cliff. There, silhouetted against the lightening sky of the dawn, were ten, twelve, fifteen men, strung out like soldiers and peering out towards the sea.
But of Theo’s junk, there was no sign at all.
CHAPTER 13
The bullets started coming a moment later.
It was as though the whole of Red China had erupted into sudden and well-accustomed violence. I threw myself at Mai as the rocks chipped noisily right beside our bodies, and I forced her tight into the overhang of the cliff face, knowing that the same bluff that had given me so much trouble on the climb would now be our salvation. In the noisy, bullet-whining darkness, I took out at last the walkie-talkie I’d brought. I flicked it on and said: “All right, Theo, where the hell are you now that I need you?”
His voice came back, calm yet excited, soothing yet distant. He said: “Senhor Cain? Run to the north, five hundred yards. You do this for me, you make me very happy man.”
I said: “Me too, brother Theo,” and switched off.
Sally was coming round, her eyes opening in the darkness, open enough to glare at me with a terrible savagery; I was hoping that the time might have come for complete resignation, but this wasn’t a resigning kind of woman. She echoed Ming’s words and said: “All right, another fifty yards, so you measure your life in the distance you can travel?”
Her wrist in my hand was a painfully fragile stick as we ran along the shore, stumbling over the wet boulders, listening to the roar of the waves. From up on top of the cliff, the bullets were coming fast, but we were close in under its protection. At an open space where the protection was gone, I sent the two girls on ahead while I turned and fired a few rounds from the Luger, glad of the weapons long range. They were following us along up there, running along the top of the cliff as we scooted along at the bottom; somewhere, I was sure, there’d be a way down. I saw one man in the moonlight, trying to make the difficult descent alone, his gun slung over his shoulder; I could only admire his courage, but this was hardly the time for mercy; he fell, yelling, when I fired.
We stepped now into deep water, and Sally screamed; Mai was there immediately to help, though it wasn’t at all necessary. Ahead of us, up against the sky, a rope ladder was being thrown over the steep cliff, a suicide mission if ever I saw one, and as we rounded a curve in the broken shoreline, there was the silhouette of the junk against the cold red-bronze of the eastern horizon. I could still see the lights of Macao, impossibly close and impossibly far away. I was ready with the Luger for the first sign of anyone on the top of the ladder, but then a frightening booming sound crashed out, and there was a sheet of fire shooting out from the junk. I heard rocks shattering, mixed in with the twanging sounds of metal on granite, and I said “For God’s sake!” It was as though a great bomb had blown up on board the junk, but I knew that it was something else; it was hard not to laugh.
Now they were swarming down the rope ladder, six, seven, eight of them all at once. I fired in the hope of discouraging them, and two men fell, but the Chinese are not easily discouraged when they’re aroused; their anger is always emotional rather than intellectual, and that makes them savage and dangerous enemies. I’d used my gun eight times, so there was one round left in the breech; I shoved Sally ahead of me while I changed the magazine hurriedly, and then a man rose up out of the rocks in front of me and shoved a rifle in the pit of my stomach. I wondered how he’d got there so fast.
I threw myself sideways and lashed out with one foot as the shot screamed through my side, just raking the flesh; he went spinning into the water, his arms thrown out wide, and I heard the crack of his head against a rock, but he recovered quickly and was pulling himself out of the water again when I kicked him once more, just hard enough to make sure that this time he stayed there for a while.
And then another of them was rushing at Mai, his rifle held horizontally and pointed at her stomach. I fired, not taking time to aim; and the rifle went spinning from his hands; but he still came on, and I saw that Mai’s gun was jammed in the open position, meaning that its last shot had been fired and it was time to reload. I saw her drop it, almost calmly; and then, so help me...
It was time to fire again. But somehow, I wanted to see what would happen now. I could not justify, even to myself, what I was thinking. But it was something to do with the legend of the magnificent; I thought of that ancient Hispano-Suiza again and heard myself telling myself: All right, now’s the moment to open the throttle and see what she can really do down the autobahn.
It was quite unforgiveable, but I’d seen the look in Mai’s face as she put down the gun and sized up her opponent at the same time, and the look there was of absolute self-control, a look of the coolest possible assurance; so much so that I could only gape and think of legends that now or never would prove themselves.
All right, it was a moment of aberration, and a dreadful way to behave; but we all have our weaknesses, even the best of us. And my confidence in the legend was more than justified; the horsepower was still all there, and more. Mai dropped to one knee, which he was waiting for, of course, then stood up straight again without completing the move as he pulled back his shoulders to avoid the throw he must have thought was coming. And then, she dug her fingers into his exposed solar plexus, hit him under the ear with the flat of her hand as he doubled up, kicked an ankle out from under him as he tried for new balance, seized his wrist, and sent him hurtling through the air; I heard his skull crack open on a rock. It was all over in a split second.
I was still staring at her; my mouth, no doubt, was not hanging open; but it felt as though it were. She turned to me calmly and said: “Impressed?” and gathered up her gun and ran on.
I swallowed hard and followed her, grabbing at Sally again and dragging her with me through the rock-strewn water, splashing over the sharp barnacles and feeling the heavy tug of the receding waves.
The red-headed boatman was there, close into the rocks, and so help me, he was lighting a cigarette; I wondered if the light was to show us the way or whether it was just a show of bravado; it didn’t immediately occur to me that, for these pirates, this was the norm of their lives. You step into a world that is not your own, and it takes a little time to realize that other people live there all the time.
I saw Mai splash through the water and fall base-over- lovely-apex into the boat, and she was on her feet again in a flash, firing her little Walther and quickly reloading as I threw Sally aboard and jumped in after her. I put away my Luger and grabbed an oar as the boatman started to pull, using it over the stern in sampan fashion to help us along a bit faster.
