The Vengeance Man (53 page)

THE PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF CHINA

Tourists to the People's Republic of China never travel to the far  north.

Tan Shan in the  north of Sing Kiang Province
is
not on any tourist schedule. The desolate deserts and mountains, shrouded in their sub-zero blizzards in winter and ferocious sun in summer, are only part of the reason.

The real restriction is the existence of sixty-eight concentration camps, six prisons and two psychiatric prisons. It is China’s secret Gulag that makes the huge expanse of high mountains and desert 1,700 miles west of Beijing a forbidden zone to all. Except to the People’s Liberation Army guards, the Interior Ministry Special Cadres and, of course, the prisoners themselves.

There is one main exception. Sometimes the Party sends particularly important prisoners to Turfan. This is only done on the direct orders of the Party Central Committee, or sometimes the Chief of Staff of the PLA. These special prisoners do not stop in  the "ordinary regime" hard labour mining camps around Tok-Sun like Komush and Qong-Kol. These prisoners are ‘special category’.

They usually arrive by air from Beijing, and after a short stay in the special transit block at
Urumqi
, they are transported further to the South, into the "strict regime" forced labour mining complex around Biratur in the Mountains. There these party "specials" are worked to death in the nickel and molybdenum mines.

But even within this special category there are exceptions, and the 1,200 political prisoners at Biratur 3, the "special regime" camp a hundred miles south of the Great Road were not surprised at being ordered to construct a new barbed wire fence around the prison administrative compound.

They are past surprise in Biratur 3.

To the work cadre toiling in their baggy blue padded jackets to erect a real barbed wire cage instead of the single strand that normally defines the camp's limits, nothing was a novelty. The real pleasure lay in not having to shuffle into the open cast mine in 20 degrees of frost for a couple of days. Their work completed, they returned to their labour brigades and continued the slow, painful business of dying in the windswept freezing mountains for the Party fat cats far away in Beijing.

Several months later a young Chuan, Chen Wen-Yan, stood at the wire fence. He knew nothing of the construction teams' efforts, for by now most were dead, their bones deep in the mountains.  Chen was contemplating suicide, a regular enough
occurrence
at Biratur 3. From his watchtower an attentive guard of the PLA Security Cadre eyed Chen with interest, clicking the safety catch of his AK47 rifle optimistically, hopeful for any diversion from the freezing boredom of guard duty. Prisoners were shot about once a month, usually for attempting to escape; but both sides knew that this was little more than a conspiracy by both parties to hide deliberate suicides. In the howling wastes of the Xing Xang north of Lop Nor, there is nowhere to escape to. Anyway, the chance of a bonus or a few days off for 'Services to the Party and the People' was an incentive to all the guards to shoot - and shoot to kill; dead prisoners couldn't argue afterwards. Both Chen and the guard, Ning Enshi, knew this.

The rules are clear in Biratur 3.

Snow shrieked past the arc lights in the gloomy dusk, the flakes driving hard in the gale. Soon night would fall, and the padded-suited prisoners would be locked away in their wooden huts until dawn. Chen hesitated. The tears on his face had turned to ice and his hands were clawed on the wire but still he hesitated to take that fatal first step off the ground, up the special wire fence sealing the forbidden zone, that would lead to the unknown steamhammer impact and pain of a bullet, and then the oblivious darkness of death. Ning Enshi, the guard, eased his rifle up to his shoulder and leaned forward expectantly.

At that moment, behind the wire, the door of the prison hospital hut swung open. A gleam of lamplight flashed through the dusk, silhouetting an awkward, crabbed figure lurching out of the doorway to make a painful progress across the snow-packed inner compound towards the Administration block. Two guards accompanied him.

Chen stopped and looked, and the young guard in the tower above followed his gaze. No-one had ever seen an occupant of the little inner compound, although many rumours about the "special prisoner" in the secret hospital hut had been peddled in the bitter log huts at night.

The bent figure shuffled slowly on two crutches, his legs twisted, his back hunched. As he passed Chen pressed against the wire, the young Chinese saw that the he was a white man. The face was grey and seamed by age, or work, or pain. Doggedly he stumped towards the Admin block, twenty painful paces away. His crippled legs dragged. Chen froze, all thoughts of suicide gone. The pain of moving made the man pant and groan as he sweated past. At the last minute he rested on his sticks and looked Chen full in the face.

With a sense of shock the Chinaman realised the prisoner was quite young, despite his crippled
walk
and haggard face. Chen, who knew what changes the horrors of  interrogations and the pain of wounds could cause in a man, recognised the signs of suffering immediately and, correctly, assumed their cause. The cripple spoke once to Chen in a foreign tongue, looking him straight in the eye. He seemed to be asking a question, or begging. His eyes were a startling blue colour. Then one of the cadre bellowed in the darkness, and Chen obediently let go of the wire to stand away from the fence.

The young guard in the watchtower sighed with disappointment and put the safety catch back to 'safe'
. N
o bonus for him that evening. Pity.

Chen watched the cripple's painful progress into the darkness until the whirling snowflakes had swallowed him up. Then he walked  quickly back to his own hut, vainly trying to warm his frozen hands. What a story he had for them. Worth at least a lump - maybe two - of the jealously hoarded rice, in a camp where gossip was
tradable
currency.

The inmates of his hut would all want to hear Chen's tale of the PLA's mysterious, half-crippled foreign prisoner with the piercing blue eyes, and his incomprehensible language:  "Help me.
Help
me."

Chen’s mouth moved as he practised imitating the strange sounds the foreigner had made;
'Help me. Help
me'
.  It sounded like English.

Maybe there was still some hope.

Raffles: The Gentleman Thief
by Richard Foreman

Chapter One

A tendril of smoke gracefully swirled up from his cigarette into the low-lying, jaundiced fog. Jermyn Street was cast in such a gloom as to be worthy of a scene from Dickens – or Dante. Yet despite the noxious atmosphere – and the gelid air misting up my breath – I could still divine, like a lighthouse in the fiercest storm, the twinkle in my companion’s eye. Oh that incomparable, incorrigible, twinkle that had acted as a Siren song – seducing me and nearly dashing me upon the rocks of prison – these recent months.

“We have had stranger jobs, more dangerous jobs and most decidedly more profitable jobs, my dear Bunny, but I warrant that there have been none so local,” Raffles wistfully expressed whilst extracting his trusty skeleton key from the inside pocket of his navy blue woollen blazer.

I briefly considered the proximity of our first ‘job’ together on that fateful night in Bond Street on the Ides of March, but then nodded in agreement. We were but a few minutes from the Albany, where Raffles resided (when he was not visiting country estates and scoring runs during the day at cricket, and scoring loot at night as a gentleman thief – or I should rather say the gentleman thief).

“The ice may not even have melted in your gin and tonic Bunny, by the time we return,” Raffles buoyantly added.

The clip-clop of horses and the thrum of a carriage’s wheels approached and then rescinded. A party of late-night revellers, either heading to or from a club, could also be heard in the background. With his skeleton key, lifted from a porter at Browns Hotel, Raffles unlocked the back door to Hatchard’s of Piccadilly.

“If knowledge is the key to everything Bunny, then this pick-lock runs it a close second,” Raffles remarked whilst holding up the skeleton key as it glinted – along with his aspect – in what little light the street offered.

I tightened my sweaty grip around the handle of the black carpet bag which carried the tools of his trade (or rather our trade). I then gulped and forced myself through the door, which Raffles courteously held open for me. Fear slithered up and down my spine like an eel. I thought of a thousand things that could go wrong. Even after all this time Raffles had to be confident and courageous enough for the both of us, which thankfully he was.

We soon came through to the back of the shop. I lit our lamp with a match, still trying in vain to noiselessly do so as Raffles could. Tables and shelves of books warmly glowed before us, the gold and silver leaf upon the spines shimmering in the amber haze.

“There are riches here Bunny worth more than those housed in Aladdin’s cave,” my companion whispered in awe, his eyes feasting upon piled-up volumes of classic titles by Walter Scott, Edgar Allen Poe and Balzac. Raffles was as well-read as he was well-dressed. One was much more likely to find him reading an edition of Byron or Pope than pouring over the society pages or cricket scores even.

A presentiment came over me however, as my gaze found itself inexplicably drawn to a solitary copy of Crime & Punishment squatting upon a table – and I cursed the day that I ever set foot across the threshold of 221b Baker Street.

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