Singapore Sling Shot (13 page)

“The Luge,” my memory yelled at me. I now knew exactly where I was. Then an idea hit me with the force of a snowball in the face. Would it work? I started jogging down the Luge runway. The Beach Station wasn't far away. The trains wouldn't be running at 02:00 in the morning and anyway, even if they had been, they would be the first things the cops covered. My idea was a desperate one, but then I was a desperate man. My options were running out with every passing minute. Another chopper swept overhead, forcing me to duck back into the bush for a moment.

The Beach Station, last stop on the short Sentosa railway, was deserted, as you'd expect at this time of night. I had to assume that there were security CCTV cameras in the station itself, so I avoided it. I skirted the station building and finally found what I needed. There was a concrete abutment, one that with luck I could scramble up onto. Once there it would give me access to what just may be my way out of there.

It took a running jump and a lot of upper-body work, but I made it onto the wall. The next stunt I was going to pull would see whether I lived or I died in a ball of sparks and the smell of barbecued flesh.

14

“They have all failed!” Thomas Lu was sitting in a darkened suite of the Silver Sands Hotel, unaware that the man carrying the very thing he most sought had just minutes before run past the hotel. There were three men in the room with Lu. Two were manning the monitors for the hidden cameras. The third was the man on radio receiver.

The image of a shadowy figure running across the bridge connecting the surrender rooms to the pathway was frozen in mid-stride on one of the monitors. Even on maximum magnification there was nothing to identify the man. His face was obscured by greasepaint, a hood and a communications set. There was a gun holstered under his left arm.

“Between them, this man and the police have killed six of my men. The police have the others.”

The men sitting with Lu nodded but said nothing. They knew all this. The police had five men in custody and another was on his way to hospital with a broken skull. The man on the radio was monitoring the police radio frequency.

“Who is he? Who is he working for?” Lu stood and walked to the window. The men in police custody wouldn't talk. They were members of a Mainland Chinese triad. Lu paid the gang a lot of money to use their people to augment his own as required. They knew little and they valued their lives and the rewards that their silence would buy them.

The recorder was gone. The police were searching Sentosa for more of Lu's men. They didn't know about the outsider. They assumed that, for whatever reason, a group of Chinese gangsters had decided to use Sentosa island, specifically Fort Siloso, as the site for a gun battle. They had sealed off the island and would conduct a ground search of every inch of it when daylight arrived.

The railing attached to the side of the concrete train track wasn't electrified, which was just as well, considering I was hanging from it with both hands. I breathed a sigh of relief as I hauled myself up. I stood unsteadily on the nearest of the two wide concrete tracks that supported the trams. Obviously, when the Sentosa train stops running for the night, the current is turned off. I needed lucky breaks like that. It was that sort of logic that had caused me to attempt this stunt in the first place. Now I was standing on the concrete strip ready to take the next step.

The plan, such as it was, couldn't be simpler. The concrete tracks that the trains run on were wide, almost a couple of feet across (in old speak), and the tops were flat. They were also above the eye line of most people on the ground. Humans are good at looking down and straight ahead, but they don't naturally look up, at least not without cause, and that's a fact I was hoping would be proven true about now.

I took my first tentative steps and got my balance. Then I started to jog, slowly at first, but I got faster as my confidence increased. As I crossed above a road, another police car raced by underneath. I kept jogging until a sweeping chopper started to run an intercept course with the train track. I was close to the Merlion tower by then and I figured the pilot would have to stay well clear of that. There are all sorts of towers and aerials on the island, including the Sky Tower plus the cable car wires. The pilots would be most concerned with staying out of trouble. That at least would work to my advantage. I hoped.

I dropped back down onto the electric railing and squatted there, keeping as low as I could. I used one hand on the top strip to balance myself and prayed that one black glove against the white concrete wasn't going to give me away. It didn't. The chopper swept on above me and banked away over the water of the inner harbour, preparing to come back. I stayed where I was for the moment and waited for him to set his course. This time he ran a line a hundred metres away from me between the shore and monorail lines. I scrambled back onto the concrete track and started running again.

I passed through the deserted Imbiah Station and on towards the bridge. The lights of the construction sites glared up at me. With these intense lights, plus the city lights and the moon, it was like a gloomy day rather than the dead of night. I had no choice but to run on. If I couldn't get off the island before dawn I was in big trouble.

Twice, more choppers caused me to stop and hunch down, balancing on the electrical railing, but I was now beyond the construction area and just starting out over the water. It was maybe ten metres down to the tide. A long way to drop.

I guess that to think the police wouldn't have sealed the bridge was naïve in the extreme. Of course they had sealed the bridge. I could see the lights of a dozen squad cars flashing like a Christmas parade across the water between VivoCity and the St James' Power Station. What was my plan beyond this point? I didn't have a plan. I took time out after the next chopper pass to try Sami again.

The fishing boat had been stopped by a police launch. Sami had ditched the night-vision glasses and everything else even slightly incriminating. He had, however, hidden the communicator in the hold. There was a substantial cargo of fish aboard and he was playing the role of a deck hand. Genuine papers were examined and after a quick five-minute rumble, the boat was allowed to sail on. They had no choice but to head back for Tuas. The police boats had totally blockaded Sentosa. I was well and truly on my own.

It was 03:45 and another chopper was coming from the Siloso end of the island. I was part way across the main channel. If I chose to go on and maybe get in the water and swim towards VivoCity, I could get out again over there. Then I had to avoid the police and get to safety. Or should I drop into the water now and swim into the madness of the container complex?

That particular decision made itself with the appearance of another chopper coming from the direction of Changi. Is this the one that will inevitably be geared with infrared and all the high-tech gear? Whatever, I was now going to be sandwiched between the twin spotlights, one coming from each direction. There was simply no place left to hide but in the water below.

It was a long way down, but I didn't have a choice. I crossed my arms, and put my hands over my head to keep it and my communicator and headlight from being blown off on impact. For a moment I said a prayer of sorts. I'd dropped from Sea Kings in training but this was the highest I'd ever done it. Hell, it was a long way down. I stepped off the rail.

15

They say hitting the water from a great height is like landing on concrete. Well, the water sure as hell felt like concrete. The straps of the small pack on my back gouged into my armpits. Down I went, and down, and further down. I swear I felt the bottom for a second and then I was coming back up, slowly, so slowly. The lights from the choppers blazed down at me as they crossed overhead. All I could see in that instant was murky water, metres of it above me. I cursed the fact that I had succumbed to the smoking bug again and my lung capacity had suffered accordingly.

My assent seemed so slow that I was starting to panic. As a trained diver, I know there's plenty of air in the lungs. The real danger, of course, is giving in to the overwhelming desire to drag air into your burning lungs. Water, of course, is no substitute for oxygen for most of us. For the last metre or two, I was fighting that desperate urge.

Eventually I got to the surface and gulp air in I did—big time! There was a rip and it was carrying me under the bridge towards Pulau Brani. The tide, it seemed, had turned. That was good, I think. I kicked a little and angled to the left. I wanted to get out of there as soon as possible and figure out what the hell I was going to do next. That's the trouble with this sort of stunt, you have to make it up as you go along. Because of what I was wearing, I couldn't blend in with any crowd, even if I could find one to hide amongst. My change of clothes was on the damn fishing boat with Sami. I figured I might pass for a jogger wearing one of those new one-piece running outfits, but that was about it. The face paint wasn't going to help convince anyone I was just out for a run.

Cutting across the current was tiring. I swam breaststroke, keeping as low in the water as I could. The ambient light plus the glare from the searching choppers turned the water an oily black. Hopefully my head with the black hood over it was lost to anyone looking in my direction.

I was in a small basin. The bridge offshoot that connected Pulau Brani to the Sentosa Bridge was above me. Concrete channelling connected the mainstream to the basin beyond. The basin was lined with docked container ships on both sides. If I wanted to get to the mainland, I was going to have to cross that piece of water. The tide was now drawing me into one of the concrete channels. I went with it. Above, on the access road, I could hear heavy trucks on the move. The container port never slept and that was both good and bad for me.

The moment I was beyond the bridge, I started kicking for the stern of the ship moored closest to me. It was only thirty metres away to my right. I wanted to get into some sort of cover. I was feeling exhausted and I was getting cold.

The slab side of the container boat towered above me. I rested for a moment, clinging to the top of the rudder, then I moved on. The wharf at this point sat up on concrete piles. I swam under into the pitch-blackness. Only when I was five or six metres in did I turn on my headlamp. Ahead of me there were rocks, covered in waterborne debris. The rocks and the crap covering them climbed to the low concrete ceiling. At least there was room enough for me to get most of me out of the water.

Knee deep in the foul, oily tide, I could stand upright, my head just a centimetre or two from the concrete above. The first thing I did was start dissembling the Browning. If I were taken by the police I didn't want it on me, and the last thing I wanted to do was shoot an innocent Singapore cop. I thumbed the rounds out of the magazine and flicked them away. The magazine went in another direction, as did the shoulder rig. The barrel, body and slide I would drop as I swam.

I tried calling Sami, but under a metre or two of concrete, the signal wasn't going anywhere, even if he were still in range. I wasn't prepared to risk the cellphone yet. It was in a sealed bag in my pack. I didn't want to drown it. Standing there, shivering, I knew I had to be moving or I was going to be a candidate for hypothermia. I debated what to do with the knife. In the end I pulled the sheath off my belt and put it into the pack. My biggest dangers now were the cold and armed police and probably a mass of heavy machinery if I made it across the water to the other side.

I waded back out until the water was chest deep, then I started swimming again. This time, I stayed under the edge of the wharf and swam parallel to it, keeping the hull of the ship and the wharf's support pillars between the harbour and me. I swam past one vessel and then another. They were docked close, nose to tail. Inner harbour space was obviously at a premium.

I lobbed the remaining parts of the automatic away from me at intervals. I was now at a section of dock where there was nothing moored, but there were vessels in the harbour both coming and going. I could see across the two or three hundred metres of water to the far shore.

Across the channel there were ships lined up as far as I could see from my low vantage point. There were some gaps along the face of the wharf, but not many. A container ship was leaving, being manoeuvred into the middle of the harbour by a pair of busy tugs. However, there were at least two other vessels I could see waiting to dock. Christ, I was going to have to try and swim across with all that fucking traffic on the move.

A police patrol boat was moving along the far shore, a spotlight playing on the water. Were they looking for me or was it a normal patrol? Only they knew. Somehow, I was going to have to get across this busy piece of water, but once I'd done that, where the hell would I head to?

The communicator stuttered in my ear.

“Daniel?” The voice was faint.

“I can just hear you, Sami.”

“We're driving back to the city. Where are you?”

“In the container basin between Brani and the mainland.”

“Well done.”

“Maybe; I've got to get across and through the container park and then what?”

“We'll stay in the area. Call when you can.”

“Roger,” I responded. Putting first things first, I would get across to the other side and worry about what came next when I got there. The police boat had gone to the bridge and vanished from my limited line of vision. I guessed its beat would bring it back down my way. I would let it go past and then start for the far side. While I waited for the launch to arrive, my attention was drawn to the skyline across the water. There were several tall blocks of flats beyond the container farm. That gave me an aiming point, both while I swam and as a possible destination when I got across.

The searchlight on the police launch came stabbing beyond the bow of the ship to my left. I eased back into the dark and put a pillar between the boat and me. The light flared off the water as it probed the shadows under the wharf and was gone. The boat's idling motor was barely audible over the other sounds of the port.