Singapore Sling Shot - Andrew Grant [42]
“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