Twelve Hours To Destiny (13 page)

CHAPTER 7

THE DESPERATE HOURS

For part of the night, in spite of the bouncing, swaying motion of the truck, Carradine managed to sleep. When he woke, his body stiff and sore, there was grey dawn around them and they were high in the hills, with gaunt bare rock on every side. Tai Fan still sat as imperturbable as ever behind the wheel, looking as fresh as when they had started out. Did that man ever need to sleep? Carradine recalled the way in which he had held that ladder of men beneath the window at the rear of the Red Dragon Headquarters and knew that Tai Fan was a little more than an ordinary man.

Straightening up, he stifled a yawn. In the pale grey light, he saw that the road had narrowed now, was little more than a track through the rocks. At some time during the early hours of the morning, they must have swung around the summit of the hill and cut back on themselves for they appeared to be heading north-east again in the direction of the rosy flush which marked the dawn.

Stretching his legs as far as he could in an effort to ease the cramp which lanced through his muscles, he sat up in his hard seat. Tai Fan momentarily turned his head, then lifted the fingers of his left hand before pointing through the windscreen along the twisting road ahead. What did that mean? Five more minutes—or five hours? He forced a grim nod. He was not sure that he could stand another five hours of this.

Spinning the wheel, Tai Fan sent the truck hurtling toward seeming destruction over the edge of the track, straightened it up with an almost contemptuous flick of a huge wrist. A few moments later, they topped a low rise and against the grey and red brightness of the swiftly-approaching dawn, Carradine saw that less than half a mile ahead of them the ground levelled out into some kind of plateau. Backing it up there was a sweep of rock and set into it, some kind of cave although in the deep shadow thrown by the dawn, it was difficult to make out details. Tai Fan touched his arm, jerked a thumb towards the plateau and smiled happily. Five minutes it had been!

Tai Fan drove the truck straight into the mouth of the cave. There was a wide overhang which would prevent them from being spotted from the air, if the Chinese considered that Chao Lin was sufficiently important a person to use planes to search for him. The sun came up, literally bounding from below the horizon, flooding the hills with light. In the clear, sparkling air, it was possible to see for miles over the vast panorama which lay spread out beneath them. Now that they were there, it seemed a reasonably attractive place, Carradine thought. Plenty of shelter for the cave went far back into the hillside and he had noticed that there were narrow passages running off to the rear. There were, too, he had seen, large wooden boxes and crates which he guessed contained stores and food. Enough to feed an army, he reckoned. Not only that, but it would be possible for a handful of men to hold off an army here. The track petered out at the mouth of the cave and there was the only one approach—the way they had come. Even from the air it would be virtually impregnable.

“This was one of the last strongholds of the Nationalist forces when they fought the Communists,” said Ts’ai Luan. “As a fortress, it is ideal.”

“And how long have you known of it?”

She shrugged. “For many years now. The Communists suspect that there is a place in the hills, but they have never found it. Even if they did, they would find it extremely difficult to capture.” Her eyes sparkled and there was a look of extreme vitality on her face which he had found so attractive and fascinating. Once more, he regretted that they should have been forced to meet under such strained circumstances.

Inside the wide opening, he could see the rest of the men hard at work. The girl was watching his face with a look of concern and tenderness. She smiled up at him, took his arm in hers. What was going on behind those dark eyes, he wondered? Now they were veiled a little as though in thought.

“Before you speak to my uncle, there is something I have to show you,” she said softly. “It won’t take long.”

“All right.” He allowed her to lead him across the rock-strewn plateau, to a spot about fifty yards from the cave entrance. Now they were out of sight of the others; it was almost as though they were the only two people still alive in the world.

“Here,” said the girl. Her voice was suddenly solemn and there was a change to the quality of her movements as she bent and held back a straggling a bush which somehow succeeded in draining some little nutrition from the thin soil.

Carradine glanced over her shoulder. There was the glint of metal among the rocks with a couple of cotton-covered wires leading off into the boulders in the direction of the cave. “What is it?” he asked, curious.

“The top of a landmine,” said Ts’ai Luan, her voice flat. “This is one of twelve sited in and around the cave. They are all linked to a central point. If the enemy should find us, then our last act will be to detonate them. They will find nothing, those who are still alive. I understand that the mines are powerful enough to destroy everything.”

Carradine straightened abruptly. “I see.” God, he thought how inane a couple of words could be!

“It has to be this way,” she went on calmly. “We all know far too much. It is better that we should die in a split second than they should take us alive, back to that place in Canton. We all know what that would mean.”

Carradine felt suddenly tight and cold. There did not seem to be anything he could say. Ts’ai Luan stood quite still for a moment and then reached out her hands, took a tight hold on his lapels, tugged hard at them. With an effort, he forced his mind away from the thoughts that raced through it. Leaning forward, he placed his arms around the slender waist, pulled her almost roughly to him and kissed her hard upon the lips. She did not resist, but clung to him tightly, as though afraid to let him go.

“My God, Ts’ai Luan,” he said thickly. “This is one hell of a way to meet each other. We might just as well meet in the middle of a full-scale shooting war.”

“Hush, Steve,” she said. She placed a finger softly on his lips. “I knew there could be very little between us when we first met. But time means nothing. A day comes and a day goes. Tomorrow will become today, and then there will be more tomorrows, but none of us know how many there will be for each of us. Soon, if you are successful, you will go away and leave me. I know that. But it does not trouble me. So why let it trouble you? We have a little time together.”

She kissed him again. Now there was a fierceness, a passion in her which matched his own feelings. Almost brusquely, he pushed her away from him. For a moment there was a look in her eyes of some small animal being punished for something it did not understand. Then she smiled up at him. “I understand, Steve. There is work to be done. You must question my uncle.”

He nodded wordlessly, forced his mind away from her. As they made their way slowly towards the cave, he tried not to think of those twelve cylinders of metal sited strategically around them, with the detonator wires all leading to the one spot. Hell, what a situation to be in, he thought fiercely. A place of comparative safety and yet with sleeping death lying all about them.

Chao Lin was lying on a pile of blankets in the far corner of the cave, away from the track, when he entered. As he squatted beside the other, he saw the long, fresh scars on the man’s lined features and the bandages around the fingers resting in front of him. Chao Lin followed the direction of his eyes, said in a low voice: “Our friends can be extremely persuasive at times, especially when they are anxious to learn something.”

“The bamboo treatment?” asked Carradine softly.

Chao Lin nodded, lifted his hands weakly and stared at them, at fingers which was swollen, not merely by the bandages taped around them. Carradine felt a little shudder go through him at the thought of what this man must have suffered before they had succeeded in getting him away. Most likely a refinement of the Japanese torture treatment, thrusting long thorns and splinters of bamboo beneath the nails to make their victims talk. There would have been other things too about which he knew little.

“I’m sorry,” he said simply.

“But why be sorry? We all know the risks we are taking when we work for freedom and liberation. I am not the first to have to suffer, nor will I be the last. It is not good that this should be so,” he added philosophically. “But we must all accept life as we find it and try to change it for the better in any way we can. Only out of suffering does true victory come.”

“Confucius?” asked Carradine, forcing a tight smile.

The other shook his head slowly. “The unworthy Chao Lin,” he answered. Then his tone sobered, his voice gained strength. “But there is much to talk about and little time. You know, of course, about Kellaway, my Number Two in Hong Kong?”

“I know that he has a secret transmitter in his room, that he is probably in touch with Red Dragon agents inside Hong Kong, perhaps here in China.”

Chao Lin inclined his head slightly. “That is so. I began to suspect him a little time ago. There were two cases to my knowledge when the enemy knew things which only he and I knew. And there have been too many little incidents which, taken together, would be stretching coincidence too far. There had to be a traitor somewhere and it was only logical to suspect him. But I had no proof. I knew that if anything happened to me, that if London did send someone out to check, they would automatically trust Kellaway and he’d be in deadly danger.”

“So you warned Ts’ai Luan about him, warned her to be on the lookout for me.”

“Yes.” The other lifted his head slowly, looked up at the girl standing nearby. “She has proved extremely useful in the past, being able to get in and out of China with little difficulty and without arousing suspicion.” There was a faint gleam in the tired, old eyes. “There are still many people in China who wish to see the end of this present regime. As yet, they are not strong enough. But there will soon come a time when they will have their opportunity.”

“But what of this secret information you have?” prompted Carradine.

The other’s face changed. “That is a different matter, my friend. I tried to get the news through to London, but as you know, I was unfortunately prevented from doing so.”

“But I’m here now. With luck, I may be able to get it back if it’s sufficiently important.”

“It is of the gravest importance. But it is now too late to send word to London. Before they could do anything about it, the test would have been carried out.”

“What sort of test? A new weapon?” Carradine thought of the first thing which came to his mind. “A hydrogen bomb test, perhaps?”

“No, not that. We know they are working frantically to develop such a nuclear device. This is something different. Three months ago, one of my contacts sent word that a small, but highly secret laboratory had been built near Lungmoonyunhsien about seventy miles north-east of Canton. He had managed to get himself in one of the working parties building the road from the town and from what he saw and was able to describe to me, it was clear that, although this was not an atomic installation, it was highly guarded and the site for top-secret work on some military weapon.”

Carradine recalled that it was Chao Lin who had supplied most of the initial information on the secret site in Sinkiang province which had led to the West discovering about the first Chinese atomic tests and he gave an involuntary shudder as he wondered what more this man had found out.

Chao Lin continued: “There are men in high places inside China who are not entirely in sympathy with the Communist regime, men who are extremely useful to me. Slowly, the reports began to come in, but the picture they built for me was difficult to understand. Gradually, however, the picture clarified. There was news of precision ground optical parts being shipped there from all over China and one of their top scientists, Kao Fi Min, was put in charge of the work.”

Carradine narrowed his eyes. “I’ve heard of him from somewhere,” he said tightly. “Did he not deliver a paper in Moscow two years ago on recent developments in lasers?”

“That is the same man,” affirmed the other gravely. “When I knew his name, I spent much of my time in Hong Kong reading what I could about these instruments, trying to discover some way in which they could be used as military weapons. The libraries there are quite up-to-date. It was not long before I began to see some of the possibilities myself. But even I had no idea how far these men had progressed. We thought they were concentrating all of their efforts on attempting to close the gap in the atomic race. Instead, part of their effort has evidently been directed in other fields and believe me,” he leaned towards Carradine, one hand on his wrist, “they are far ahead of Western scientists in this particular branch of science if my informant is correct. As I understand them, lasers are instruments which deliver pulses of light which is coherent in that it is all of the same frequency. From what I have read, lasers are quite capable of burning a hole through a steel plate within seconds and the beam which they project is virtually completely parallel. There was one report I read which originated in America—and therefore I cannot vouch entirely for its accuracy—that it has been found possible to project a beam from a giant laser to the dark side of the moon and that with a sufficiently large telescope it would have been possible to see the reflection of the light, a distance of a quarter of a million miles.”

“That may have been so, but—”