The Shanghai Union of Industrial Mystics (41 page)

Special Agent Dooley was in a state of shock. No, it was worse than that. He had had so many stultifying shocks in a row this terrible day that his brain was seizing up. Part of his mind was saying that he had just been responsible for transporting and almost dropping a major explosive device onto POTUS and the President of China. The rest of his mind could not cope with this thought, and enclosed it in a little box which it set to one side, refusing to talk to it, look at it, or even admit it was there.

Next to him, below his visor, Peters’ face was as white as a sheet.

Dooley spoke quietly: ‘I thought things couldn’t get worse, but I was wrong. They just did.’

And then they got worse still.

A loud crack shook the chopper, followed by another one. Someone was firing at them from sea level. Alarms jangled in the cockpit as bullets or small missiles roared upwards past them.

‘Now they’re shooting at us from boats,’ the pilot said.

‘Shit. I can’t believe this.’

Dooley looked down. There was one vessel below them and it was not American. It couldn’t be. It was some sort of large white speedboat. They had nothing like that on this trip.

‘Must be Chinese forces.’ He roared into the microphone: ‘Stop them, Zhang, tell them we’re retreating.’

‘It’s not ours,’ replied Zhang. ‘I think it’s American.’

‘It ain’t ours.’

Another missile shot upwards, narrowly missing the Z-9, which tilted dangerously to one side.

Both choppers were now operating separately, causing the platform they were holding between them to swing wildly from side to side.

Peters tried to get the two craft back into line: ‘Yaw left, fifty degrees, got it, after three?’

‘Copy: yaw left, fifty degrees, after three.’

‘One. Two—Jesus, now!’ Peters shrieked as another missile fired from the boat clipped the end of the Black Hawk’s 48-foot rotor, shaking the craft.

‘Excuse me,’ said Wong, looking at his watch. ‘We have two minutes before the elephant goes boom. Maybe only one minute.’

Peters struggled to remain in control of the craft.

That was the moment when Nelson decided to wake up. Who knows what thoughts went through his mind as he found himself on a platform in the sky, being borne aloft by two noisy human vehicles? Whatever it was, he must have decided that he wanted to get a better view. With great effort, he rose to one knee—his front right knee. Then he added his front left knee, his back left knee and his back right knee, in that order. As the platform swung, he raised himself to a standing position. He glanced around. Everything was blue. There was a nice, cool breeze blowing. The fresh air was invigorating. His tail wagged, puppy-like. The medicine that had been pumped into his butt must have contained some sort of painkiller as well as a sleeping solution. He felt better than he had done for days. But where was he? Had he died and gone to heaven? He felt like he was in the sky. There was so much blue around—and clouds: white, fluffy, cumulus clouds.

The bad thing was that he felt a bit unsteady. It wasn’t sleepiness or the medicine. It was the ground. He didn’t like the way the floor was moving. It made him dizzy. He took one step backwards to steady himself. But, sad to say, there was no floor behind him for him to step onto.

Joyce screamed as she saw the elephant fall out of the sky.

Their helicopter had lowered their dinghy onto the surface of the water with a rough but survivable bump and then jettisoned the cable. Whoever had decided that they should come along for the ride had obviously decided they had travelled far enough.

She and Marker sat in the boat, bobbing close to the coast of the Yangtze Estuary, and watched Nelson tumbling from heaven.

He descended slowly. Because it is rare to watch large, heavy objects fall—especially iconically large, heavy objects such as an elephant—it became an impromptu physics lesson. Which falls faster, a four-tonne bag of feathers, or a four-tonne elephant? The answer is that they fall at the same speed. Indeed, everything falls at the same rate, with a standard acceleration factor due to gravity of 9.8 metres per second squared, whatever its size or weight. This is what physics teaches us. And this is what physics taught Joyce McQuinnie and Marker Cai as they watched poor Nelson fall slowly from his platform in the sky down down down towards the water.

Towards the water? No. Wait. What was that below him? A boat. A boat between Nelson and the water.

He dropped from the heavens and landed, splintering an expensive-looking white cruiser to matchwood as he went down. But this didn’t stop him. He was a heavy lump—4181 kilos, in fact—and the rate of acceleration he had gathered from falling 102 metres was considerable. Down he went, deep into the water, and down, down, pieces of boat all over him, down towards the seabed.

The two helicopters, suddenly freed of their heavy load, shot out of control—fortunately, both went upwards and away from each other, and both immediately jettisoned their slings, which gave the pilots a chance of regaining control.

Wong’s watch had decreed that the bomb should explode in a minute or so. But his watch was wrong. He had purchased it cheaply in Shenzhen and it lost about a minute an hour.

There was an explosion.

The bomb went off while the elephant was close to the bottom of the sea. It was impossible to tell, without careful calculation, whether it exploded on the elephant’s way down, at the moment it stopped descending, a few metres from the seabed, or on its slow bounce back up towards the surface— but explode it did. That was evident from the tremor that ran through the sea and the land. That was evident from the huge underwater rumble that thundered from below the surface. That was evident from the mini-tsunami—a wave two metres tall—that roared in all directions from the site of the blast. It was a big explosion. Jappar Memet’s staff had done their jobs well.

The concentric rings of water moving outward from the matchwood remains of the Mee Fan Supermarket cruiser panicked people watching from shore half a kilometre away.

The wave washed into the estuary, shaking the boats in the river and tipping Joyce and Marker out of their dinghy into the water.

They bobbed together in the cool blue sea.

‘Poor Nelson,’ she said, weeping as she trod water.

‘Want a tissue?’ said Marker, pulling a sodden pack of Tempo tissues out of his pocket.

‘Thanks,’ she sniffed, giving him a tearful smile.

‘They’re a bit wet.’

‘I don’t mind,’ she said sweetly, her nose red. ‘So am I.’

18

Getting everyone satisfactorily seated was often a problem at meetings of the Union of Industrial Mystics. Just doing boy-girl-boy-girl didn’t cut it.

Shang Dan, who had a white beard and wore red and gold robes and looked like the god of wealth, circled the round table carefully. ‘Now let me see,’ he thought out loud. ‘Which way is southwest? I think I had better sit facing southwest.’ He glanced over at Wong, who was sitting, taciturn, in the darkest corner. ‘You’re in the east, Wong? I normally go for due west or northeast but I have been suffering from excess earth energy this week.’

‘Does that give you bad luck?’ Joyce asked Shang.

‘No. Indigestion.’

‘I’ve got antacid tablets. They’re good for indigestion. I keep them for when there’s nothing to eat but really spicy stuff?’

‘I don’t think you can use antacid tablets to counteract the effects of bad feng shui, but thanks for the offer.’

‘We don’t mind moving if you want to sit here.’ Joyce got a little buzz from using the plural pronoun ‘we’ to refer to Marker Cai and herself.

‘Thank you, missy, but you are sitting to the southeast. I suggest you stay there.’ Shang eventually found the right seat and droppd heavily into it.

They had decided to abandon the popular Shanghai eateries. After the horrific experience of two days earlier, Wong couldn’t bear the thought of eating at any sort of restaurant for a while. He quoted Mo Zhou: ‘The man who is bitten by a snake dislikes ropes.’

So Joyce had arranged for a restaurant to cater a meal for them on Shang Dan’s boat, which was making leisurely circuits of the prettier parts of the Huangpu River, looking at The Bund and the futuristic Lujiazui district opposite. It was a pleasant evening, with a purple-pink sunset and a cool breeze. As the sun set, the water was becoming inky black.

Sinha was next to be seated, and was delighted to find that the place left for him had a view of the twinkling lights on the east side of the river.

‘You do realise, of course, that the people behind all this—’ Sinha vaguely waved his hand to encompass The Bund and the line of mansions and the river and then the whole of Shanghai—‘were the Indians?’

No one rose to take the bait, most of them being too busy inhaling the fumes which had started pouring from the galley: the unmistakably and uniquely Shanghainese smell of authentic
jingcong rousi jia bing:
soy pork and scallion pancakes.

Eventually, Marker Cai looked over and said: ‘The Indians? Not the British?’

Joyce said: ‘Not the Chinese?’

Sinha was pleased to have successfully engineered an opportunity to share his wide knowledge of Asian history.

‘Emperor Doaguang, in 1823, took a census and discovered that vast amounts of the silver of Chinese people was going to pay for Indian opium, imported by Western business people. The Chinese arrested British merchants and threw three million pounds of opium into the sea. Various battles followed, and the British took Hong Kong in 1841 and Shanghai in 1842. Now before the days of tugboat steamers, coolies—a Hindi word—got into the habit pulling boats and barges of rice along the river just here.’

‘Coolies? You mean people pulled boats?’

‘Yes. It’s amazing what a human being—’

‘Can move,’ interrupts Joyce. ‘It’s all to do with momentum. Yes, we discovered that yesterday.’ She glanced over at Cai, who smiled and moved a micron closer, so that their elbows were touching.

‘Anyway, coolies pulled barges along the swampy banks of the Huangpu River. The steps they took in the mud had to be reinforced and eventually became what’s known as a towpath. This path was called the
band,
which is another Hindi word, meaning ‘embankment’. The British, struggling with the precise pronunciation of Indian vowels, recorded it on maps as The Bund. The Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank was built on it in 1865 and the former Indian towpath became one of the most famous streets in the world.’

Tonight there were seven diners. Madame Xu Chong-Li was not present. She had sent her apologies. She was busy with a series of unexpected events, including a visit from some long-lost relations and a minor surgical operation she’d booked and forgotten—a bit embarrassing for a fortune teller. But Shang Dan had brought some friends with him: a woman who was an expert in
ming shu
, or Chinese astrology, and a specialist in the
chien tung
, which was the use of yarrow sticks for divination. Cai was present, not as a removal man, nor as Joyce’s official boyfriend, which he wasn’t yet, but as a weigher of bones.

On the way to the harbour, the two young people had purchased a pile of newspapers in English and Chinese, and were whiling away the time before the food was ready going through them to see how the incredible events of the past two days had been covered.

There was not a word about any of them. The newspapers were all filled with bland pronouncements about government departments releasing positive statistics. Eventually, Marker found a line in one of the Chinese language newspapers which said: ‘Due to time constraints, a scheduled visit by the President and the visiting American leader to the Shanghai Grand Theatre last night was cancelled.’

‘Is that all?’ Joyce asked. ‘Nothing about mad bombers or helicopters or kidnapped businessmen or anything?’

Cai shook his head. ‘Joy-Si, one day you will learn. All the interesting things that happen in China never get into the newspapers.’

At that moment, the waiting staff emerged from the junk’s galley and started to place pungent, steaming dishes on the table.

Although this was the official founding dinner of the Shanghai Union of Industrial Mystics, the evening was proceeding rather gloomily. The main reason for this seemed to be that Wong, who usually came to life during events that include large amounts of exotic Chinese food, was in a state of sullen, silent misery.