Taking the Tunnel Read online

  Taking The Tunnel

  James Adams

  © James Adams 1993

  James Adams has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 1993 by Michael Joseph.

  This edition published in 2018 by Endeavour Media Ltd.

  Table of Contents

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  PROLOGUE

  PART I

  CHAPTER I

  CHAPTER II

  CHAPTER III

  CHAPTER IV

  CHAPTER V

  CHAPTER VI

  CHAPTER VII

  CHAPTER VIII

  CHAPTER IX

  CHAPTER X

  CHAPTER XI

  CHAPTER XII

  PART II

  CHAPTER XIII

  CHAPTER XIV

  CHAPTER XV

  CHAPTER XVI

  CHAPTER XVII

  CHAPTER XVIII

  CHAPTER XIX

  CHAPTER XX

  CHAPTER XXI

  CHAPTER XXII

  CHAPTER XXIII

  CHAPTER XXIV

  CHAPTER XXV

  CHAPTER XXVI

  CHAPTER XXVII

  CHAPTER XXVIII

  To Daniel

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Readers should know that the Tunnel in this book is intended to be a convincing but not identical recreation of the Channel Tunnel.

  They should be reassured that this book could not be used as a blueprint for a terrorist operation. Significant changes have deliberately been made to the details of the Tunnel and the terrorist operation in the novel, so that if any criminal or terrorist tried to benefit from the ideas outlined in this book, he or she would be unsuccessful.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I am grateful to Christopher Bennett who helped me with some early research.

  For an understanding of the Triads I recommend Triad Societies in Hong Kong by W. P. Morgan (Government Press, Hong Kong, 1960) and Secret Societies in China in the 19th and 20th Centuries by Jean Chesneaux (Heinemann, London, 1971).

  In Hong Kong, I am grateful to Maggie and Rob Herries for their hospitality and advice; to Mark Pink-stone in the Hong Kong Government Office and to the captain and crew of HMS Plover.

  In Britain, Captain Jeremy de Halpert and the officers and crew of HMS Campbeltown took me to sea and allowed me to explore the ship and understand its capabilities. Hugh Colver, formerly the Chief of Public Relations at the Ministry of Defence, was his usual helpful self. Captain Peter Voute, formerly DPR (RN), allowed me access to the Navy and I am grateful for his assistance and advice. Liam Clarke, The Sunday Times’s Ireland Correspondent, shared with me his detailed knowledge of the IRA. I am also grateful to Mike for his knowledge of explosives and detection systems, to another Mike for his knowledge of special forces and underwater warfare, to Kevin for his help with intelligence methods in Northern Ireland, to Richard and David for their guidance.

  My editor, Richenda Todd, helped me improve this book immeasurably and I am grateful for her wise counsel.

  Finally, my wife Rene patiently read the different drafts of the script. Her encouragement kept me going and her imagination, good humour and love helped make it all work.

  PROLOGUE

  The rubber of the silent patrol boat squeaked softly as the craft bobbed in the ocean swell. The five men sat, stood or squatted in the position each favoured to absorb the shock of instant action. Jonny Turnbull hunched over a narrow metal bar that connected the control cables from the coxswain’s station to the twin 250 Mercury outboards that seemed to dwarf the stem of the small boat. His hands gripped the frayed piece of cord that circled the bar; he felt like a rodeo rider with an unbroken horse between his legs suspended in the short half-life that exists between mounting the steed and the moment the wooden gate opens on the vast arena.

  The two sailors to his left appeared relaxed — bored even — by their vigil, which over the past few days had become something of a routine. The Chinese sailor sitting to his right had said nothing since they had boarded two hours earlier, his presence only revealed by the glow of a carefully cupped cigarette. Turnbull glanced ahead to the reassuring bulk of the coxswain, a Royal Marine nicknamed Geordie.

  He felt an affinity for the large man: not just the bonding of two men bound by a shared danger, but a clear similarity in their backgrounds. Both came from Newcastle, although Geordie’s Benwell accent was more obvious than Jonny’s longer Jesmond vowels. They had both sought service far from the grime and poverty of the north-east in an attempt to shake off the constraints of their narrow upbringing. But there the common bond ended. The Marine was in his mid-forties; tall, broad-shouldered and dark, with the strong chin and scrawny neck of the runner. Jonny had always thought of himself as a throwback to the Norsemen who had colonized the north-east of England, leaving behind their accent and their blue eyes and blond hair. The looks had mostly died out, but Jonny, a fit man in his early thirties, could in height and colouring have stepped from a longboat on to the beach at Whitley Bay. He wished he had inherited the other attributes. He hated and feared the sea and all this bobbing about was making him feel sick.

  They had taken up station two hours earlier in the Tolo Channel in the New Territories. Two miles to the east, the mother ship, HMS Plover, a 690-ton Peacock class patrol boat, waited at anchor. Turnbull had been ferried from Hong Kong to the vessel in a small rubber dinghy and then they had sailed north-east into the dusk for three hours before anchoring at the mouth of the channel. He recalled the tiny bridge, the ballets that officers and crew performed as they tried to work around each other. The briefing the captain had given before they left the security of the mother ship had been short.

  “We sit here at the mouth of the hole while we send you down as ferrets to flush out the rabbits,” he explained. “We have a Kelvin Hughes radar and a thermal imager we borrowed from a Challenger tank. Between the two we can see anything moving out there.”

  The radar showed both the outline of the surrounding hills and any surface movement. Jonny looked through the binoculars of the thermal imager and could see the green shimmer of the town of Tai Po ahead and half a dozen slow-moving green hot spots, junks plying their normal business.

  “The smugglers use thirty-foot fast boats with four Mercury outboards on the back. Even loaded with televisions, videos or the odd Mercedes for the party elite over there” — he gestured to his right towards China — “they can barrel along at around seventy knots, which is about what we can manage, so the chase is usually a close-run thing.

  “As I understand it, you expect the Ma brothers to try and make a break for the mainland tonight?”

  “That’s what we hear,” Jonny replied. “But these two are smart, so who knows? What’s certain is that they are not going to make us welcome so your men will have to be ready to fight if necessary.”

  It was difficult for Jonny to keep the excitement and the nervousness out of his voice. For six months he had been hunting White Powder Ma, the controller of the 14K Triad, and his younger brother, Golden Ma, so named because of his lavish lifestyle and generosity with tips.

  The Ma brothers had emigrated to Hong Kong from China in the early 1960s and with the help of the Taiwanese government had graduated from being street sellers of drugs to control of the most powerful Triad in the colony. An early trip to the Golden Triangle by White Powder Ma and a fortuitous meeting with General Li, the leader of the Chinese Nationalist army in Laos, had convinced the general that Ma was worth helping. Supplies of opium from Li were subsidized by the nationalist government in Taiwan who paid him with cash and guns. In return, as Ma’s power grew so did the
scale of the intelligence he gathered for Taiwan. Eventually, he controlled thousands of people and had the best spy network in the region as well as the most effective system for distributing heroin.

  Of course, financial success gave the Mas the social acceptance these two illiterate men had always craved. White Powder Ma bought Chung Fat Pak, the colony’s most famous horse racetrack, and became a prominent member of the Royal Hong Kong Jockey Club. Golden Ma was on the board of a number of worthy local charities and helped run the Hong Kong Boy Scouts.

  Jonny’s investigation of the Ma brothers was exciting, frightening and the most challenging operation of his career. Normally, the Mas would have remained immune from the Hong Kong justice system, which was modelled on Britain’s but had evolved into a bastardized version where the rich were untouched and the poor were offered as sacrificial pawns to make the arrest records look impressive. But the Mas had misjudged a deal and a traitor had appeared who talked not to the police but to the press, and the resulting scandal meant an investigation.

  After only a few years in the colony, Jonny had not yet been corrupted and pursued the case with a vigour lacking in his older colleagues, who either knew such cases never made careers or who were already in the pockets of the Triads. There had been the usual threats made against Turnbull and his family, but he was just inexperienced enough to ignore them and carry on regardless. It had all paid off and two days earlier they had been about to raid the Mas’ offices in the heart of Hong Kong, known as Central, when the brothers vanished.

  It was money paid to an informant that had put Jonny in the boat that night. The informant reported that the Mas would head for the mainland by boat and so Jonny had been elected ferret.

  As he absorbed the technology, Turnbull tried to understand the flow of acronyms that washed over him: the smuggler’s ship was an FMT (fast-moving target); his rubber dinghy (how offended the Navy would be if they knew he thought of their boat in such terms) was an FPC or fast-pursuit craft; it chased “trade” or smugglers towards HMS Plover, “Mother”.

  Their chance to intercept the smugglers was brief, as the journey from the New Territories to the Chinese mainland took only thirty minutes, of which around ten were in China’s territorial waters. The fact that the traffic in televisions, videos and cars was currently worth around $500 million a year showed that the Navy’s efforts were pretty ineffectual; a few arrests, the occasional craft sunk, a reasonable price for the smugglers to pay.

  Geordie suddenly clamped his left hand to his headphone and leaned forward, the red glow from the instruments giving his face an unearthly appearance. Turnbull hurriedly pulled his headphones from around his neck and pushed them over his ears.

  “…Vector 110.”

  The reply was drowned out as Geordie punched the twin throttles forward and the Mercury outboards responded instantly. Within seconds the craft had accelerated up from nothing to fifty knots, the force lifting Turnbull off his seat and trying to propel him back in a somersault off the stern. He gripped the rope between his hands, muttered a silent prayer and felt his mouth pushed open by the force of the wind so he appeared to be laughing.

  The darkness was absolute. The roar of the engines assaulted his senses yet even their thunder was diminished by the speed which whipped the sound away behind them. To complete his disorientation, there was no horizon and no sign of the surface of the sea. He half shut his eyes to keep the tears from completely obscuring his vision, but he could still see nothing so each wave came as a surprise and each plunge into a trough was a jolting, jarring crash that seemed to compress his spine into his hips. Determined to be professional among the professionals, he was surprised to find himself muttering over and over again, “Christ Almighty, Christ Almighty,” as exhilaration battled with raw terror.

  Both the coxswain and the leader of the three-man assault force were wearing portable thermal imagers which produced a greenish haze for around four hundred yards. The two were shouting to each other, seeking the target, knowing that at a combined intersecting speed of around 160 knots, Geordie would have just seconds to see, identify it and then change course to avoid a collision.

  Suddenly, a hand shot out to Turnbull’s left. The hunter had found his quarry. The boat heeled to starboard for a few moments and then in a sickening lurch came back on its former course. Peering ahead, Turnbull thought he could dimly discern an intermittent flash of white which rapidly hardened into the wake of a speeding boat. They were coming in at an angle and aiming to hit the smuggler amidships. Already his imagination had pictured the moment of impact: the bow of their boat carving through the other vessel’s centre, a moment of panic and then both boats locked in a fatal embrace and sinking beneath the waves, dragging pursuers and pursued — himself among them — beneath the surface.

  Geordie flicked a switch at his right hand and a white light lanced through the darkness to illuminate the smugglers’ boat and its startled occupants. Turnbull took in the boxes piled high in the centre of the boat, the three men who appeared transfixed by the beam, the four huge outboards at the stern, the impossibly large wake and the sudden movement of the helmsman.

  There was a microsecond to register the beam and then Turnbull’s retina contracted and his world dissolved into a single sheet of intense whiteness, so bright it was both blinding and painful.

  “The bastards!” Geordie shouted, his body tensing as he hunched over the throttles trying to peer through the wall of light as the two beams fought for supremacy of the night. With a stubbornness bordering on the reckless, Geordie kept the boat on course. He could see nothing, was relying instead on instinct and experience. Turnbull felt the deck lift slightly. To him, that meant impact was imminent, but to Geordie the proximity of the other boat’s wake was the signal to turn the helm slightly to port and bring himself on to a parallel course.

  Now Turnbull could see through the whiteness the outline of the other ship as they moved underneath the cone of the bow-mounted searchlight. A shuffling of feet, the cocking of SA80 rifles and the crew were ready. The Chinese crewman shouted through the loudhailer, urging the smugglers to heave to. The response from the helmsman was to drive the throttles forward, trying to urge another knot or two from the boat in a last desperate effort to reach the safety of Chinese territorial waters.

  “Prepare to board,” Geordie shouted.

  The three crew moved to the starboard side, SA80s slung across their backs. A slight flick of the helm and the two boats were racing side by side, the wakes soaring out in two huge, white arcs to either side. Turnbull noticed a moment of calm as Geordie cut the craft inside the smuggler’s wake and then for a fraction of time the two hulls caressed. At that instant, the three men sprang over the side. The moment their feet left the deck, Geordie swung the boat back through the wake so that once again the light shone on them directly — and they were blinded.

  Then the smugglers’ light died and in the undisturbed illumination of their own searchlight they could see the three Chinese crew standing with hands in the air.

  “Piece of cake,” said Geordie, turning with an open smile, determined to maintain the image of the unflappable Royal Marine in front of the civilian outsider.

  But it was Jonny who heard the noise first, the distant burble that in a moment became a throbbing roar. From their left a piercing white light cut behind their own, pinning the two men down. Geordie’s smile turned to a snarl, and then the shooting began. In clearly distinct moments of time Jonny registered the red and orange flashes of a gun barrel firing, heard the ripping explosion of bullets over the engine and then saw the splashes as the gunman marched the rounds up the beam of light.

  He felt completely impotent, the attack was so fast, the bullets suddenly so close that he had no time to move. The first rounds struck the stem of their boat, snatching huge chunks out of the rubber and spitting them into the sea. The bullets marched onward and into the smugglers’ boat, this time scarring the smooth aluminium into huge jagged tears. Then it
was people and not objects and the shots were cutting indiscriminately into prisoner and captor. Each body reacted differently. One seemed simply to fold over and die without any visible sign of injury, another lost an arm and a leg and teetered for a moment, blood fountaining from its side before falling sideways below Jonny’s line of sight.

  The blood and the imminence of death shocked Geordie out of his lethargy. He slammed the throttles forward and the Mercurys responded with a roar of power. At the same time, he swivelled the light away from their captive and towards their attacker. As they pulled away from the smugglers’ boat, Jonny followed the beam and saw in its brightness the low, lean shape of a Riva powerboat. Instead of the vanity pennant at the stem there was a mounted machine-gun with a man hunched over it. In the well of the boat, two men sat, calmly, apparently almost indifferent to the carnage being caused by the man behind them. Jonny recognized the squat, toadlike form of Golden Ma sitting next the thin, ascetic White Powder Ma, the Laurel and Hardy of the drugs business.

  “It’s the Mas,” Jonny shouted over the noise of the engine. “It’s a trap. We’ve walked right into a fucking trap.”

  “Pick up a gun and start shooting,” Geordie replied.

  Jonny unclipped an SA80 from the side of the tiny wheelhouse. He brought it up to his shoulder, flicked off the safety catch and started firing astern in groups of three. But the boat was bucking and rearing in the waves and he didn’t even have the half-satisfaction of seeing his rounds hit the water. Instead they simply disappeared.

  Fifty yards astern there was a roar and a huge, jagged curtain of orange flame as the fuel tanks of the smugglers’ vessel exploded. In the beam of the Mas’ searchlight, Jonny’s retina retained the image of the boat for a moment before it was replaced by the thousands of pieces of aluminium metal and flesh cascading into the night sky.