1000 Yards - 01 by Mark Dawson

Author:Mark Dawson [Dawson, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Black Dog Publishing
Published: 2014-01-04T05:00:00+00:00

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12.

THE TRANSPORTER was a big eighteen-wheeler, with a fully hydraulic trailer that could accommodate eight cars. The driver, a taciturn Chinese from the border town of Dandong City, had no idea that the expensive load he had driven into the North was not solely for the enjoyment of the country’s elite. The cars had been give a cursory search by the customs officials as he waited to cross into the country, and if––in the admittedly unlikely event––they had discovered the real purpose of the consignment then it would have been very unlikely that he would ever have left the country again.

He had driven on, ten hours straight. Commercial satellite navigation was pointless in North Korea and so he had relied upon a dated road atlas to navigate the route to Pyongyang. His destination was a goods yard to the west of the city and he had arrived, more or less on time, on the day of Milton’s own arrival. A man at the yard had signed the paperwork to acknowledge that the delivery had been made and then, with extravagant care, the cars had been unloaded one after the other. It was approaching midnight when the driver was finished, the task made more difficult by the brownout that extinguished the overhead floodlights halfway through the task. The driver got back into his cab and set back off towards the border. Like most of his friends, he hated the North. They all thought that it was a backwards country, a little hole governed by the latest madman in a family full of madmen, altogether more trouble than it was worth. The sooner he set off, the sooner he would be home. He planned to get halfway to the border where he would sleep in his cab at the side of the road.

Kun picked up Su-Yung and Milton at five in the morning and drove them to the yard. He unlocked the wire mesh gate for them and then disappeared; Su-Yung explained that he was going to arrange new transport for them for when the operation had been completed.

They found the cars parked neatly inside a closed warehouse. They were a very fine collection: a Lexus, two Bentleys, two Mercedes, an Audi, a Ferrari and a Porsche. He found himself nodding his approval: Peter McEwan certainly knew his business. He had arranged the better part of two million pounds’ worth of high-performance automotive engineering. He did not know that British intelligence had been monitoring his communications for weeks and, once they realised he was transporting cargo that suited their particular purposes, the operation had been given the green light to proceed.

A consequence of that had been his murder.

“Which car is it?” Su-Yung said.

“The Enzo, I’m afraid,” Milton said.

“The Enzo?”

“The red one,” he said. The Ferrari was a beautiful, gorgeous machine; it was a shame to have to defile it. He opened the door and ran the palm of his hand across the smoothly carpeted floor behind the front seats. He

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