Tom Clancy's Shadow of the Dragon

by Cameron, Marc

  Midas bought three. “A lot of police,” he said, giving the lady a smiling grimace as he gave her a U.S. five-dollar bill. “Did something happen?”

  She folded the scarves neatly and put them in a flimsy plastic bag. “Nothing happen,” she said. “Always police. They here every day.”

  Midas thanked the woman and walked on, swinging the sack full of scarves in one hand while he sipped the fatty soup with the other—the perfect tourist cover.

  “Mr. C.,” Midas said, blowing a blossom of vapor into the cold, musty-smelling air. “What have you gotten yourself into?”

  Clark tapped Hala on the shoulder so she’d follow when he left the rally point. Midas was twenty minutes late, which meant they’d have to try again at 1400. There was too much law enforcement roaming the livestock market to tarry in one spot for long. They needed to get somewhere out of sight—away from the dead man at the dilapidated caravanserai.

  With his phone battery near zero, he had no way of knowing if Midas was free to move around the city or if he’d picked up a tail. There was always a chance he’d been compromised. Clark would cross that bridge when he came to it, but in the meantime, he decided to pay a visit to Adam Yao’s contact, a woman named Cai, who sold handwoven carpets. Her presence at the market was the reason Clark had picked it as one of the meeting points in the first place.

  The authorities appeared to be looking for someone with a child, so Clark whispered where they were going and then had Hala walk a few paces ahead, mingling with the other marketgoers. She blended in well with the crowd, always alert, stepping behind a string of camels or sheep when she spied approaching officers.

  The clatter of hooves and baas of sheep drew Clark’s attention over his shoulder.

  “Bosh-bosh!” the boy driving the sheep said.

  Hala stepped close enough to tug at Clark’s sleeve, translating before putting distance between them again. “Make way.”

  Clark knew the general area where Yao’s contact would be set up, but he supposed assigned spots could shuffle from week to week with so many people being taken away to camps.

  To his left, a young man wearing an embroidered green doppa hat and a white apron over his coat arranged small glasses of pomegranate juice on a table to tempt passersby. A girl about Hala’s age—his daughter, perhaps—stood behind him, leaning on the handle of a juice press twice her size to fill a large metal bowl with the vibrant red liquid. Beside her, a man fanned smoke away from a line of fatty mutton kebabs that had likely come from a friend of one of the flocks the next row over.

  Across from the juice stand, a cobbler tapped at his bench beside a mountain of refurbished shoes as high as his waist. Beside him, blue tarps covered a stall with shelves of assorted Uyghur pottery.

  Yao’s contact, Mrs. Cai, came into view as he walked, on the other side of the blue tarp. A stout woman with high cheekbones and a sun-pinked face, she wore an ankle-length brown coat of heavy wool over broad, workingwoman shoulders. A few strands of black hair escaped her white headscarf. A Hui Muslim, one of China’s fifty-six recognized ethnicities, Cai’s ancestors had likely been Central Asian travelers from Kyrgyzstan or Kazakhstan on the ancient Silk Road.

  Clark kept his distance, watching the young cobbler tap tiny nails into the new heel of a gnarled pair of leather shoes, while he waited for a German couple to haggle over a Central Asian rug the size of a bathmat.

  They finally got the price they wanted, and walked away with their tiny rug. Mrs. Cai glanced up at Clark but didn’t acknowledge him as she stuffed the Germans’ cash into a metal box underneath her table. Clark noted the tarp over the potter stall next door blocked a good portion of the security camera on the nearby electric pole.

  “Nice carpets,” he said in English, keeping his back to the camera and the pottery seller.

  She smiled but said nothing.

  Clark smiled back and waved a hand over the hand-knotted display rug of rich maroon and deep blue wool. “Like Aladdin’s magic carpet,” he said.

  She looked at him for a long moment and then nodded. “I’ve heard it said that Aladdin’s rug was Persian.”

  Clark gave her Yao’s passphrase response. “I’ve heard that as well,” he said. “I have also heard that all Persian rugs are Oriental, but not all Oriental rugs are Persian.”

  “You are John?” Cai whispered. Her expression never changed, and anyone who looked on would have thought they were still discussing carpets.

  Clark watched her closely. Initial meets were always touchy, but at some point, you had to commit. To paraphrase Hemingway, sometimes the only way to know if you could trust someone was to trust them. There were so many soldiers and police around that all she had to do was raise her voice and he would be toast.

  “Yes,” he said. “I am John.”

  Like usual, the travel alias retained his real first name, so John was the given name on his Canadian passport. Cai would not know or care if it was his real name or not.

  Her head dipped in an almost imperceptible nod toward Hala, who stood watching the shoemaker a few feet away.

  “The girl is safe, then?”

  Clark picked up a small rolled carpet, perusing the golden fringe. “She is,” he said. “But getting her out is a problem.”

  “I will help,” the woman said.

  “I would appreciate anything you could do,” Clark said. “The person we were supposed to meet hasn’t arrived.”

  Cai pretended to explain the details of the carpet. Her wrists peeked from the sleeves of her long coat, exposing a cluster of scars when she reached to unroll the edge—cigarette burns that didn’t look accidental. It was no wonder she was helping Yao. Sadly, the fact that this woman had likely been tortured by the same people who were after him allowed Clark to relax a notch. She had her personal reasons for fighting the Han government.

  “I am to give you some special items.” She took the carpet they were looking at and reached below her table to retrieve a small one, deep red and coal black, about the same size as the one she’d sold the German couple. Stepping closer to the blue tarp wall of the pottery stall to block the security camera’s view, she unrolled it enough to reveal two handguns. One a semiauto Norinco known as a Black Star, a Chinese copy of the venerable Russian TT-33. Two magazines of 7.62×25 Tokarev ammo lay nestled in the carpet beside the pistol. Clark wasn’t a big fan of Norincos, but you took what you could get at times like this.

  Mrs. Cai unfurled the carpet a few more inches to reveal a puggish stainless-steel derringer with the words SNAKE SLAYER and BOND ARMS engraved on the side of its three-inch over and under barrels. Elegantly simple, the little gun was chambered to fire either two .45 Colt or two .410-gauge shotgun shells. Cai had no .45, but provided six .410 shells loaded with number-six birdshot—a snake slayer indeed. Always a gun guy, Clark resisted the urge to pick up the derringer and handle it.

  Cai rolled the carpet and tied it with a piece of strong cord.

  “Some Bingtuan police carry 7.65,” she said. “Others nine-millimeter. The derringer was given to me by a friend. I would like the girl to have it.”

  “Of course,” Clark said. He marveled that the little Texas-made gun had somehow found its way to the frontier city of Kashgar, about as close to the rough and tumble of the real Wild West as anywhere left on earth. “It will be perfect for her, should we need it.”

  “I fear you may have many opportunities before you are out of this country,” Cai said. “These guns are small but powerful. Perhaps you can use them to obtain other weapons.”

  “Getting out of the country,” Clark said. “I understand you have the contact for the route.”

  “You must leave the city as soon as possible,” she said. “Too many cameras here. They are looking for the girl, saying she has been kidnapped. If they have her photo, facial-recognition software will eventually identify her.” She scribbled an address and a new passphrase on a piece of paper, holding it out of view of the surveillance camera while she showed i
t to Clark. “Memorize this.”

  He nodded, reading it to himself and committing it to memory before she rubbed the pencil marks away with her thumb.

  “This person will help you get out of the country. You can trust him.”

  She handed him the carpet and held out an open hand.

  Clark looked at her.

  “You have to pay me,” she said. “People will think I am giving things—”

  A commotion on the other side of the cobbler’s stall drew both their attention up the aisle. Four XPCC soldiers moved among the crowds, stopping every few steps to look at people’s phones and question them. They were led by a tall officer with dark glasses and a gray hat of curly Karakul lambskin. This kind of hat, known as a papakha, was traditionally reserved for Russian officers of higher rank. The way this man moved led Clark to believe that the hat might have the same significance for the Bingtuan of western China.

  Behind Clark, Hala gave a startled gasp. He turned to find her crouching behind the stack of carpets at the far end of Mrs. Cai’s stall. Deathly pale, she chewed away furiously at her collar, rocking forward and back as if she might bolt at any moment.

  Clark stepped closer.

  “Do not run,” he said, keeping his face passive, his voice low and even. “They will notice us more if we look afraid.”

  “It is him,” Hala whispered.

  “Ren Shuren,” Cai said, running a hand across one of the carpets for the benefit of the security camera that viewed that end of the table. “A major with the local Bingtuan police service. His younger brother, Ren Zhelan, works for the Kashgar building council.”

  “It is him,” Hala whispered again.

  “Ren,” Clark said under his breath. Of course. He’d heard Hala use that name before. The major bore an uncanny resemblance to the man Hala and her aunt had been fighting with when Clark first stepped into their home—the same man he’d finished off with the cleaver.

  Major Ren Shuren waved his men along, scanning the crowds like a machine as he stalked forward. He hadn’t made eye contact with Clark yet, but he was close, less than thirty feet away, and closing fast.

  40

  There’d been no way for Midas to reach the rally point on time. He was nearly run over by police patrols twice. Black uniforms were around each corner, beside every flock of sheep, their boots visible beneath the bellies of standing camels. They were everywhere. Midas resorted to combat breathing—four seconds in, four seconds out—willing himself to remain calm. It made no sense to rush into danger when he could stroll his way out and approach the situation from a more strategic angle. So he walked slowly, taking in the sights, doing his best to play tourist.

  At half past nine, he decided to go check out the carpet lady. There didn’t seem to be quite as much law enforcement in this area of the market, and it made sense that Clark might try and link up with Yao’s contact when Midas missed the meet.

  A shepherd with a half-dozen sheep bosh boshed him again just as he reached the corner, grabbing his attention for an instant. A cloud of greasy meat smoke hit him in the face as he made the turn. When he stepped out of the smoke, he forgot about his combat breathing entirely.

  Forty feet away, John Clark stood by a pile of colorful carpets, chatting with a round lady in a white scarf and heavy coat. A group of very grumpy-looking soldier cops stalked directly toward him.

  A man to Midas’s left held up a glass of red juice, grinning broadly. His daughter, a girl of ten or twelve, sat behind a table full of glasses, pressing more juice. Without a second thought, Midas turned toward the man, nodding, reaching for the juice. Up until now, he’d worked hard to make himself insignificant, small, a tourist not worth noticing. Now he straightened up to his full height, making no attempt to hide the hint of belligerence that was usually present in his bearing. Two feet from the man, he dragged his lead foot, stumbling forward in the gravel. He knocked the glass from the man’s hand, spilling the juice and crashing headlong into the table. The array of full glasses flew everywhere, shattering into the ground. The table was a flimsy affair, nothing more than a few wood planks set atop two sawhorses. It gave way quickly, allowing Midas to stumble past the cursing man and into the juice press where the young woman sat, knocking her to the ground.

  Midas caught the girl by her hand, mid-fall. She cried out in surprise, covered in bright red pomegranate juice and seeds from the juicer. She hit the ground on her butt, startled but uninjured.

  The XPCC authorities were looking for a tall man with a Uyghur girl, and when the man approaching Clark turned at the sound of breaking glass to look at Midas, that is exactly what they saw.

  Midas scrambled to his feet, helping the girl. She tried to pull her hand away, but Midas held her for a moment, long enough, he hoped, to give the impression that she was with him.

  Her hand locked in his, Midas looked toward the officers. They were all running in his direction. He released his grip, allowing the girl to scramble to the safety of her father. On the far side of the oncoming policemen, John Clark caught Midas’s eye for a fleeting second and gave him a nod of thanks for the distraction.

  “I’m sorry,” Midas said to the juice seller, taking out his wallet as he watched Clark hustle Hala Tohti away. He shoved a wad of cash toward the other man. “I can pay. I’m sorry. I’m sor—”

  A blur of black body armor bowled him over, cutting his apology short and knocking the wind out of him.

  You’re on your own now, Mr. C., he thought, as a knee speared him in the small of his back and a forearm smeared his cheek into the dust.

  The commotion with Midas drew every available soldier and policeman at the market, leaving Clark and Hala unimpeded as they left the scene. Clark found a likely vehicle at the far edge of the parking area—an old Toyota flatbed truck with the key still in the ignition. Even the farmers were interested in Midas’s commotion, so the area was all but deserted.

  Cai’s contact was a sheep farmer ten kilometers farther out of the city. He knew they were coming, which meant it could be a trap. Clark reasoned that if Cai had wanted to turn him in, she could have done it at the market—unless, of course, she wanted to blame it on someone else so she could keep the arrangement with Adam Yao. Unless … It was all too easy to work yourself into a lather on what might happen. That was one of the greatest stresses of intelligence work. Everyone involved was lying. Some lied to safeguard their own skin, some to protect secrets—or a ten-year-old Uyghur girl. Some lied for money or to settle ancient feuds. Hui and Uyghurs hadn’t always gotten along, each contending the other group were the outsiders. But then, the Uyghur man at the caravanserai had proven that people were people, and he could not trust someone with Hala’s safety simply because they shared a common ethnicity. Conversely, he could not write off Mrs. Cai simply because she did not.

  Circumstances often forced an intelligence officer to approach strangers in strange lands. Time and again, these people were no more than the proverbial friend of a friend—or, worse, the enemy of a common enemy. No matter how tenuous the connection, there had to be some trust to move forward in any mission.

  And then there was the problem of the mole hiding out somewhere in the ranks of the U.S. intelligence community. Yao’s contacts in and around Kashgar didn’t have to be bad themselves. They could simply be compromised—and that would drop everyone in the grease.

  The driver’s-side door of the old pickup creaked and groaned when Clark pulled it open. Too late to quit now, he didn’t even look around to see if anyone had heard. Instead, he waved Hala in ahead of him. She scuttled quickly across the bench seat and ducked down while he shut the door. The inside of the truck smelled like tobacco and lanolin—sheepherder smells. Exploring, Hala opened the glove box and found a loaf of bread and a can of apple juice.

  “Lunch,” she said, holding them. A half-moon of saliva dampened the collar of her shirt, but she was smiling now instead of chewing it—breathless and elated at having gotten away.

  Clark
was relieved, too, but had enough experience to know all of that could change in a heartbeat. Midas would be fine, so long as his cover held.

  Clark turned the ignition. The truck started up without a fuss, and he pulled out onto the road, rattling east, out of town, away from the dusty livestock market, and the dead man in the slumping caravanserai—outlaws on the Silk Road.

  41

  Illegal entry into a hostile nation was beyond tricky.

  Adam Yao weighed the pros and cons carefully of which point of entry would be best to take the Campus operators across. Holograms and embedded biometrics had rendered forged passports all but anachronistic. Fortunately, stolen passports still worked, so long as the offended country didn’t report the missing numbers. The Finnish documents Yao provided were genuine, with matching biometrics and authentic barcodes. To add a touch of even more veracity, VICAR, Yao’s agent in place in Russian SVR, had arranged for a Russian entry and exit stamp, with which Yao was able to mark each visa. Travelers with some history drew less scrutiny—at least that was the theory. Thanks to Yao’s contact in Beijing, the last-minute Chinese tourist visas were all in order. Probably. Trust was always a risk. CIA did have the mole, but Yao told himself he’d mitigated that by keeping his asset off the radar, paying him off the books with discretionary funds. Assets were supposed to have control numbers, files. Langley, and, more important, Congress, liked to know where their money was going. Thank God he’d broken the rules on that one.

  They’d seriously considered crossing by bus at Maikapchagai, Kazakhstan, into Jeminay, a sparsely populated county in western Xinjiang. Locals used the crossing, so tourists, even benign Finnish ones, would raise a fuss. Still, the border guards were poorly paid, and Yao felt certain he’d be able to sort it out with a few hundred well-placed American dollars. Scrutiny sometimes wasn’t quite as tight at land crossings as it was at airports.

  The problem was one of logistics. Entry with a stolen passport was one thing. But regulations at the Maikapchagai/Jeminay crossing required them to take a bus rather than a private or rented vehicle. It was much closer to their destination on a map, but the realities of vehicle procurement and border delays could add hours or even days to the journey. A commercial flight into Urumqi had put them seven hours away, but at least they had the independence of their own transportation. Security had been tense, but they’d been admitted with Yao, a Hong Kong resident, acting as their guide and minder. Yao slapped magnetic signs on both sides of the rented van, proclaiming them a “Sun Country” guided tour to ease the minds of jumpy security patrols. Chavez had wanted two vehicles, but the XPCC officials were suspicious of outsiders as it was. An extra vehicle without someone Chinese driving it would be an extra chance for random search—particularly in the off season, when tourists were rare and personnel at the checkpoints had little to occupy their time. So far, they’d passed three, and Yao had gushed about the beauty and glory of mainland China at every turn.