Eric van lustbader chi.., p.45
Eric van Lustbader - China Maroc 01, page 45
David Oh heard a sharp click through the heavy rumbling of the moving tram car. It drew his eyes to the eight-inch steel blade protruding from the end of the umbrella.
He twisted his upper torso at the last possible instant, feeling the hot wind of the mini-swordblade as it shot past his left ear. He struck immediately upward with the edge of his hand in an attempt to crack the weapon. He felt it bend, not break.
Then the Chinese was yanking it backward for another stab. David Oh heaved himself off the seat. Sitting, he had been at a serious disadvantage. As the Chinese rushed at him, he slammed his foot down on the man’s tensed instep, using all his weight, centering his body over that one spot. He ground the steel-tipped heel of his shoe in a tight arc until he heard the crack of the metatarsal splintering under the pressure.
At once he clasped his hands together, swung them upward from his right hip. They slammed into the Chinese just below his armpit. It was a little high to break a rib, but it got him off balance.
David Oh followed him down, keeping his foot on the other’s foot until he heard the snap of the ankle. Used his elbows just under the Chinese’s chin, digging for the windpipe and the cricoid cartilage.
The Chinese twisted desperately, aware that should his opponent find his mark, he would be dead within seconds. His fingers abandoned the now useless umbrella-sword, scrabbling between the rolling bodies to find a neural plexus.
David Oh felt the telltale burning and he knew the Chinese had hold of a major nerve center. But now he had forced his elbow beneath the man’s jaw. In a moment he would crush the cricoid artery. It was dangerous to ignore the other’s attack, but David Oh made the decision instantly. There was simply no question of his giving up his advantage. He doubted that the Chinese would allow him back within his guard.
There was a buzzing filling up his head. Bees, like lead weights, swam through his brain. His coordination was slowing. He knew what he had to do, but getting the commands down the line to his extremities seemed more and more of a Herculean task. Spots danced before his eyes, as the Chinese, knowing the end was nearing, exerted all his strength in this one desperate bid for life.
A viscous blackness hovered at the edges of David Oh’s vision. He could no longer feel his legs, and he knew the creeping paralysis would soon rise into his arms. When they were too heavy to support, his elbow would come away. David Oh felt close to collapse. His sense of dissociation was now so acute that he seemed able to differentiate his inner self from the husk of his body. He no longer knew what he was doing.
Sweat stung his eyes, bringing him back to a semblance of reality. He felt his heart struggling to maintain his adrenaline level. He felt the hot breath sawing in and out of his painfully heaving lungs.
He knew then that he was in trouble. Concentrate! he ordered himself.
Saw the sharp point of his elbow jammed into the interstice between the Chinese’s chest and chin, and with an awesome rush it all flooded back at him.
Leaned the full weight of his upper body in behind the elbow attack, felt it plunge downward suddenly into soft flesh and cartilage.
He felt the easing of his nerve center at once, but he lacked the perspective to understand what it was. He was panting in the heavy air, still filled with fear and excess adrenaline. There was a trembling inside him at the knowledge that he had almost died, and that he had killed a man.
“Buddha,” he moaned, beginning to massage the burning welts around his solar plexus.
With a great animal grunt, David Oh’s head jerked backward as the steel wire whipped around his neck. He had forgotten about the other Chinese! He began to cough as the oxygen flow was severely restricted.
The panic that tore through him caused him to bring both hands up to try to pull the wire away from the soft flesh of his throat. He was doing just what he had been trained not to do in this kind of situation. It was a waste of time to try to pull the garotte away. He had been trained to forget the garotte entirely and concentrate on the assailant. Disable him, and the garotte would come away.
The panicked animal knew only that something was choking it, and that it must pull it away at all costs.
Perhaps it was the muted laughter in his ear that snapped David Oh back into the mind-set of a veteran intelligence officer. He smelled the garlic and licorice breath in great, foul pants and it made his stomach heave. The real problem was that the nerve damage he had suffered had not yet fully dissipated. He could barely drag his legs along. They felt like dead weights.
With a grunt, he tore his hands from their useless task at his burning throat. He willed himself to ignore the fact that there was now no oxygen at all coming in. His windpipe was on fire. His lungs strained for a new breath. He was strangling on his own carbon dioxide. He heard a singing in his ears, the siren song of his own desperately pumping blood. Sound became distorted. His eyes began to bulge.
The only thing that saved him was the braking of the tram. It came unexpectedly, and his assailant loosened his hold for an instant.
Half of that time was past before David Oh recovered enough to take advantage. He reached painfully behind him, grabbing the tail of the other’s jacket. With all his remaining strength he jerked downward. As a result, the garotte tightened against him so hard that he gurgled in agony. But then the Chinese lost his balance completely.
Dimly, David Oh heard the thump. He had to remind himself twice that it was the sound of a body falling. Slowly, painfully, he collapsed to his hands and knees. He was gasping like a fish out of water. All color had drained from his face. His oxygen-starved brain felt as if it were about to explode.
On the floor of the tram, he scrabbled at the wire constricting his throat, desperate to remove the cincture. Then he felt himself pulled down, a dog on a leash. The Chinese had regained hold of the ends of the garotte, and now, face to face with David Oh, he began again to exert pressure on the larynx and windpipe.
David Oh had scarcely enough strength left to resist. He met the garlic and licorice head on, and he almost drowned on his own gorge as he gagged heavily.
He was so dizzy he no longer had any sense of up or down. He felt weightless, suspended as he had earlier, between earth and heaven. Only now he felt much closer to heaven.
He knew he was close to passing out—knew, too, that death lay on the other side of that slumber. He was determined that should not happen.
With great hamlike fists, he pounded against the Chinese’s face, harder and harder until the blood began to flow as he tore through skin, bruising the flesh beneath.
The Chinese was blind with his own sticky blood, but still he refused to let go of the garotte. All his energies were concentrated down that narrow line; his only thought was to pull the wire as tight as he could. Death was in his heart, not survival.
Still, David Oh fought on. He was no longer aware of time or place. There was only life and the void that succeeded it. He turned his thumbs outward like spoons, dug them viciously into the Chinese’s eye sockets. The man only grunted, where any other would have howled in pain and begged for mercy. The Chinese had inured himself to all consequences. He knew his job and he was doing it.
With a last desperate effort, David Oh leaned forward and, hunching his shoulders so that all his muscles bunched up with effort, plunged his spatulate thumbs downward through the soft sockets. The eyeballs burst apart as David Oh, howling in terror and rage, dug his nails through tissue and cartilage as far as they would go.
Death came, and the Chinese whipped under him in galvanic response. There was nothing left inside him but residual nerve flow and the reflexive convulsions of muscles carrying out the fiercely concentrating brain’s last command.
The fists, white with effort and strain, remained pulling at the ends of the garotte. Even in death, the Chinese would not give up. He was killing David Oh just as if he were some undead fiend risen up out of a grave in some lurid horror film.
Jake knew something was wrong inside the car of the ascending tram even as it was slowing to head into the Peak station.
He saw the humped forms through the windows, recognized the black spatters flung across those same windows for what they were: blood.
“Jesus Christ,” he whispered, sprinting toward the car. The tram rose at him out of the mist of the mountainside. It was shining, beaded with rain. Lights were flickering inside. Tendrils of fog clung to its sides.
Slowing as it entered the station proper.
Jake was running alongside, slamming his fist against the door, Bliss right behind him. “Open this thing!” he shouted in Cantonese. “Dew neh loh moh, open the doors!”
At last the tram reached its berth. The doors slid open, Jake and Bliss rushed inside. The short hairs on the back of his neck tingled. The interior stank of blood and the sweet foulness of death.
Without thinking, he ran the length of the car, leaping over the prone body of a young Chinese, Slammed the heel of his shoe into the second Chinese’s face and he bent, dragging the man’s clamped fingers one by one from their death grip on the ends of the garotte.
“David,” he gasped. “Oh, my God! David!”
Bliss got the wire from the dead man’s hands and began to unwind it. David Oh groaned as it came away. Blood leaked from the center of the purple-black welts. The neck was already swollen to double its normal size.
Jake tried to hold David still as the younger man gasped for air. It appeared as if the severe swelling was preventing air from getting through the windpipe. He used the end of the garotte to make an incision in the flesh. Opened it with a small splinter of wood to allow the air unimpeded flow.
“Take it easy,” he said. David Oh was shaking all over. His hair was plastered against his skull by sweat and blood. He was gagging and crying all at once.
Jake lifted his head while Bliss went for assistance. In a moment she returned to tell him the ambulance was on its way.
“David.” Jake tried to lift him, but David Oh screamed so piteously that Jake eased up. “David,” he whispered.
David Oh’s eyes were filmy, their rich black turned watery. Their heads were touching. Jake cradled the younger man in his arms. David Oh was struggling to marshal his energies.
“Listen …” His voice trailed off and his lids fluttered closed. With a great effort, he looked into Jake’s eyes. “Beridien, Donovan, Wunderman. One of them knows … did this to me … to Stallings …” His lids fluttered, and when they opened, his pupils were dilated with pain. It was so difficult to speak. The taste of blood and bile was metallic in his mouth. His throat was filling up.
“Missed you, Jake … No one around to talk to … Taking off like that without telling me … anything … I thought you trusted me more.”
“It wasn’t trust, David. It was personal, for me to do alone.”
“Like what happened … happened to you at Sumchun River.”
He, was quiet for a moment, his breathing harsh and irregular. Blood leaked from the corner of his mouth. “I feel like I’m filling up.” He was crying. “I’m sorry, Jake. Whatever happened to you … there … Wish it had never happened. You’re my friend. My friend …” A rigidity coming into his musculature. All at once, the onset. Jake had seen it before.
“A mi tuo fo!” Broken fists like claws digging into Jake’s arms. “Oh, Buddha!” His eyes snapped open and Jake saw the finiteness of the pain, the edge of death, coming.
“David—”
“The huo yan! Remember the huo yan, Jake!”
In death there was no more pain. That was the only sense Jake could make of David Oh’s passing.
As he held the lifeless body, his thoughts were far away from the added revelations David Oh had given him. For seven years, Jake had been David Oh’s mentor. He had taken care of the final phases of David’s training, had protected him from the treacherous eddies of political maneuvering inside the Quarry. Jake had been aware of all this, but in all those years they had never gotten around to talking about it. Now they never would.
It was terrible to know that this man had died while they were estranged from each other. There was an incompleteness to the equation that could never be filled. It was, not so oddly, just as it had been with Mariana.
Oh, David, Jake thought now, I’ve missed you, too. I’ll always miss you. You were like my brother. Because you were so close to me, I hurt you the most. Like Mariana. Sumchun River did that, you were right. I began to die there. Mariana’s death, the dantai’s, now yours. Piece by piece, until I seem more dead than alive.
At that moment he felt Bliss moving against him. Even in this situation, her flesh was like fire where it touched him. His pulse raced. Bliss.
Jake could, and would, spend the rest of the night mourning the loss of David Oh. But he wondered whether it would be a futile gesture on his part. Mourning was meant—insofar as the living were concerned—to bring about resolution to a relationship, a definite ending. All that he should have said to David, he had not. He had wronged his friend as he had wronged Mariana —and Ting as well, if he was to be brutally honest with himself. Now it was too late. Their relationship would forever remain incomplete.
He was engulfed in grief.
“I think we’d better get out of here,” Bliss said. “The ticket taker’s coming.”
Her urgent words pulled him into the present. In a moment his mind was filling up with David Oh’s last words. Remember the huo yan. The “movable eye” in wei qi. What did it mean?
And where was the material David Oh had unearthed from the Quarry? It was not on him, and a quick search of the other Chinese confirmed that they had not taken it from him. That was not surprising. David had been too good an agent to have come to an rdv with written material of that sensitivity.
“Come on! Come on!”
Bliss took his hand, pulling him upward. As they raced out of the car, another thought struck him a savage blow. Now that the Quarry had found and sanctioned David Oh, it was a certainty that he would be their next target.
Shanghai/Hong Kong-Central China-Shanghai/ Japanese Highlands
SUMMER 1937-SPRING 1942
For ninety-odd years, the foreign tai pan had ruled Shanghai. Now the rats and the mongrel dogs had the run of the rubble-and corpse-strewn streets. The tai pan, who, in years gone by, had made their fortunes in tea, opium, silk, shipping, rubber, real estate, and silver, depending on the decade, retreated to the rooftops of their white buildings along the Bund. There, binoculars in hand, they watched as their city was destroyed.
As they had been in 1932, the Japanese were on the march. Generalissimo Chiang, who had at that time been so successful in defending Shanghai’s twisting streets and narrow back alleys, its array of bridges and canals, confusing to all but seasoned residents, had decided to make his stand in the city rather than face the invaders in the Kaoliang fields to the north. Besides, he knew that in Shanghai he would return to the international spotlight.
Quite naturally, the tai pan did everything in their power to keep the Chinese from fighting the Japanese, knowing that this war would certainly destroy Shanghai—and their futures—for good. But in these dark, militaristic days the tai pan had lost almost all their power. Once again they had forgotten that they stood on foreign soil. The illusion given them by the existence of the International Settlement had increased their arrogance. This time the Chinese ignored them completely.
Japanese and British gunboats rode at anchor in the great harbor. Ten thousand Chinese troops, handpicked for the job by Chiang himself, had dug in throughout the city, erecting barricades, unrolling barbed wire. Twenty-one Japanese warships began to sail up the Huang Pu; their blue-jacketed army was on the march.
On August 13, the first shots were fired across the Yokohama Bridge, at the northern tip of the Settlement.
The Chinese had bombers—American-built Northrops, as it happened. Their pilots were young, inexperienced, and short-tempered. For hours, the day following, they tried repeatedly to destroy Japanese factories and stores. Failing in that, they turned their attention to the huge battleship Izumo, lying at anchor in the Huang Pu. Bombs exploded in the river, along the wharves, destroying a line of godowns. The flagship of the Japanese naval forces remained unscathed.
Gritting their teeth in frustration, the pilots turned their planes and, heading lower, overflew the Bund. The impeccably dressed tai pan, field glasses to their eyes, gasped to see the bombs begin to fall over the Settlement’s busiest crossroads, the intersection of the Bund and the Nanking Road.
The first plunged through the roof of the Palace Hotel, swarming with foreign and Chinese guests. The second detonated in the street just outside the entrance to the Cathay Hotel. The devastation was staggering. The road was jammed with people. Most of those in the immediate area never knew what hit them. Others, hit by spinning debris or caught in the flames spreading from the epicenters of the targets, stumbled screaming in pain and terror. Children eating ices were torn apart, young women crashed through plate-glass windows or were crushed by collapsing mortar and brick. In all, 729 people were killed. Another 861 were seriously wounded. All within the space of ninety seconds.
Athena and Jake, safely away from the site of the terrible carnage, felt the shudder of the bombs. Athena, if she thought about the moment at all, assumed an earthquake had hit. Her inner-directed mind did not translate the roar her ears had picked up.
Ever since the night of the incident with Zilin’s mistress, she had been a changed woman. Horrified at what she had done to another human being, she had taken Jake and retreated to Zilin’s study at the rear of the house. While she had waited for him to return, she had had much time to contemplate her actions and her conflicting emotions.
It was the first time she had seen, firsthand, that intense fear could turn to hate. The expression of her own aggression terrified her.
Athena’s Hawaiian mother was no more capable of hating than she was able to be unkind. It simply was not in her nature. Athena had always believed that she was like her mother in this. Until now. Her mother could not have done what she had done to Zilin’s mistress, no matter what the provocation.
