Kuragawa gave a small bow with a smile meant to appear apologetic, that fooled no one.
"I am sorry, but as you say, we are at war. Foreigners are not allowed to charter airplanes flying to and from Imperial territories without a military escort. You understand."
Damien's brow narrowed. "But we're not flying into Japanese territory; we're heading for Mongolia."
Kuragawa's lip twitched. "Excuse my imprecise English. What I meant to say was, flying out of Imperial airfields. We cannot allow strangers to survey us from the air at this time of emergency."
"In other words," Kate said, "if you don't go, we don't go."
He bowed again. This time his smile was genuine. "My trunks are already on board."
"Your trunks? What do you need luggage for?"
"The Emperor has long wished to extend the hand of his friendship to his neighbors to the west, including Quanyu, so he has designated me as his emissary. It is a great honor. As he was so gracious to make your stay in our country a pleasant one, he thought you would not mind assisting him in this small matter."
Damien leaned in to whisper to Ted.
"Seems a pretty important mission to assign to a mere captain."
Ted nodded slightly. "I haven't thought of him as a 'mere captain' since he showed up on the dock."
"Let's get inside," T.J. suggested, but they were interrupted by a hail in English.
"Wait! Wait for me, fellas!"
Sums Dean trotted up to them, out of breath. "Thanks. I wasn't sure how I was going to get out of here." He waved to his driver and pointed at the plane, and his bags soon joined the pile being loaded on board.
T.J. gave Ted a disgusted glare. "You think there's anybody else coming? Maybe we should go back and grab a couple of geisha girls for the trip."
Ted slapped him on the back. "Don’t worry about it. We're full up."
Whatever they thought of the state of air travel in the U.S., they would never again complain after the bucking, swooping, freezing trip across the Yellow Sea and mainland China. They deplaned in Ulan Bator, Mongolia, counting their fingers.
Kuragawa had used the time on the plane to discard his uniform for civilian clothes.
"Mongolia is in the hands of the Soviets," he explained. "Ever since 1905, the Russians have not been friendly to us."
T.J. laid on the ground and kiss the earth.
"Dirt! Beautiful dirt! It doesn't move!"
"It's also freezing," Damien pointed out. He pointed to a low-slung collection of wooden buildings a few hundred yards off, framed by snow-capped mountains. "That must be the terminal. Or it could be the town. Either way, I'm headed there."
They looked around. No one had come to meet them, to question them, or to help with their luggage. A few wooden wheelbarrows stood or leaned forlornly off to one side. With a collective sigh, they fetched them, loaded their bags, and set off for what they hoped was the terminal, or if not, at least it might be warm.
"And you thought it was cold when we got here." Damien pulled his coat tighter around him, then checked to see that his rifle was still close to hand.
"It was cold when we got here," Professor Death argued. "It's just colder now."
They were a day out of Ulan Bator, and with the setting of the sun, the temperature had plummeted. As their guides had warned them, although there was a road between the capitol and Quanyu, it was lightly traveled and even more lightly settled. Night had fallen without any sign of habitation on their route, and they had been forced to camp by the side of the road. Their little caravan of three trucks carried supplies against this contingency, but the Americans were little used to yurt living.
Damien and Professor Death would have given much right now to be in a relatively warm yurt.
"You think we can trust our guides?" T.J. asked through teeth gritted against the cold.
"I think we can. We picked them at random; unless somebody paid off every guide in Ulan Bator, we've got a good chance that these guys aren't going to jump us."
"Then why are we sitting here, without even a fire? I miss the old days in France. At least then we had a trench."
Damien rolled his eyes. "Yeah, and it was full of mud. We couldn't build a fire there, either, because the ground was underwater. You want to build one now, go right ahead. Make yourself a nice fat target for the next bandit that comes along. Or go back inside, if you trust our guides that much."
For all of his grousing, T.J.'s eyes never stopped watching the horizon, nor did he take up Damien's joking suggestion.
"You think we'll make Quanyu tomorrow? I'll bet they've got fires."
"They've probably got fireplaces," Damien said. "Big ones, if we're staying in the palace. But I doubt we'll make it tomorrow. Maybe the day after."
"Maybe we'll get lucky tomorrow and find a tavern or a hotel or something."
They used that thought to keep them warm for the next two hours until they woke Ted and Sums to relieve them.
They were wrong.
The next night found them deeper in the hills, but no closer to any signs of civilization. They had stopped before sunset, wanting to take advantage of a partly-sheltered wide spot in the road that allowed them to set up camp next to a steep escarpment which would block the cold wind that their guides, watching the clouds, said would come tonight. Across the way to the east, the walls of a similar cliff defined the edge of the road, rising almost vertically to a height of more than a hundred feet except directly opposite their encampment, where it looked as though a giant hand had scooped out a piece and left nothing but a huge field of rubble, featuring boulders that ranged up to the size of one of the trucks.
The guides seemed confident, however, that the party would reach the outskirts of Quanyu in the morning, and the capital before noon. Ted and Sums took the first watch, and T.J. and Damien the second. They were cold, sleepy, and ready to give up camping for life by the time they could see the first golden light in the east.
And that was when they were attacked.
Chapter Sixteen
Pinned Down
They charged straight down the road from the north, screaming in what could have been half-a-dozen languages, firing as they came. It was a full-on frontal assault that catapulted all the sleepers from their beds. Damien and T.J. were already prone when the others emerged.
"Sums! Get behind a rock! Wait to fire as long as you can!" Ted ordered. The guides were already taking shots with their hunting rifles, bringing down a couple of targets but having little effect otherwise. Sums followed orders without question; he had earlier told them he could handle a rifle at need, but whether he could handle these conditions they would only know when it was all over.
"What about me?" Kate demanded, rifle in hand.
"Stay behind the truck. They're coming from the north; somebody has to make sure no one comes at us from behind."
Kate spat out something obscene in French. "There's nobody behind us! They couldn't have gotten past the camp even in the dark! I can shoot as well as you, you big ape!" With that she sidestepped him, raised the rifle to her shoulder, and fired. Someone screamed, but whether from pain or bloodlust was impossible to say.
Ted grabbed her arm for a moment. "Kate, I don't have time to argue. These guys have something up their sleeve. I think I know what it is, but if I'm wrong, you're the only chance we have to guard our retreat. Now do as you're told!"
Wordlessly, she spun about, searching for a niche in the rock wall where her back could be protected while she watched the southern road.
Between the trucks and the rubble that dotted their own campsite, Ted was able to make his way back across to where he had positioned Damien and T.J., looking across the road. Kuragawa had joined them there.
"You think their frontal attack is a feint?" T.J. asked as Ted crawled up.
"Yeah. Why else would they come in screaming like that? And listen--most of that firing is coming from our side. My bet is they've got men crawling through those rocks over there, a
nd they're going to try to put us in a cross-fire." He spared a glance for the men up front. "Captain, I need you to get up close to Sums and the guides. I need you to tell them to draw back to where they can find some better cover, but I don't want to have to shout at them. If anybody over on side speaks English, I don't want to let them know we're onto them."
Kuragawa started carefully making his way across the cold dirt, crab-walking in fits and starts where he could to confuse snipers, crawling on his stomach where he had to. When he got close enough, he relayed Ted's orders in a voice too low to be heard by their attackers. One of the guides responded with a wave of his hand, and cried out when a bullet went through it with an ugly smack. Kuragawa snapped off a few covering shots and the three men up front wormed their way to what they hoped were more secure positions.
Ted and the others had burrowed into the rocky soil as much as they could, trying to watch their side of the road from between whatever rocks they could use as cover.
"I saw something move over there," Damien reported, shifting his rifle.
"Hold your fire until they give you a target," Ted advised, even though he knew it was unnecessary.
He had barely finished when a fresh fusillade ricocheted off of the rocks in front of them and the cliffside behind. A few metallic pings told of bullets hitting their trucks. But they saw no one and none of the shots came close.
"They're gonna parley," T.J. predicted. "They figured out they can't take us by surprise."
"We have you outnumbered! Put down your guns and we will let you walk away!"
"Interesting," Ted murmured. "They know who we are."
"How do you figure that?" T.J. asked.
"They're speaking English, imbecile," Damien told him. "Not Russian, not Chinese, not Mongolian."
"Which means their offer to let us go is so much Army oatmeal," Ted finished. "Get ready."
"Last chance!" floated down the road.
"Now," Ted grunted, and they brought up their guns just as the next volley rang out, lower and closer this time, but still to no effect. The instant it stopped, men appeared like magic clambering over the rocks. They could hear the rest charging down the road on their flank.
But the Americans didn't wait for anyone to come to them. They started firing, methodically and carefully, when the first marauder appeared, acting in sequence so that they never wasted a bullet on the same man twice until the numbers grew too great and they were firing at will. To their left, they could hear their comrades keeping up their own defense, but there was no time to look to see how that was going.
Suddenly all fell quiet. No more men emerged from the rocks, and the shouting of the small horde to their north retreated.
"Damien, reload," Ted ordered, and when that was done, repeated it for T.J. While each reloaded, his friends covered him, but no more attacks were forthcoming. "Men! Count off!" met with a quick response from Kuragawa, Sums, and the guides.
"What about Kate? She didn't count off," T.J. noted.
"Kate's a smart girl. She didn't count off because I didn't want her to. She heard me say 'Men,' and she figured I wanted her to keep quiet. Now they think they know how many of us there are. I want them to keep thinking that."
T.J. stole a look toward the rear, where Kate was supposed to be waiting, even though he couldn't see her. His expression conveyed his concerns, but he kept his mouth shut.
"You think we got them all?" Damien asked, his smirk betraying that he already knew the answer.
"No, but there's no way of knowing how many are left." Ted thought a minute, then shouted. "Hey, Kuragawa, you got a count?"
"I saw at least fifteen!" the officer shouted back. "And six in the road!"
Ted's eyes watched the rocks as he calculated. "They got six, and we got six, last I saw. If they split their forces in half, that means there are another dozen or so in the rocks over there. There are seven of us, plus Kate if it comes to that."
"Four to one. Not the best odds, but not the worst we ever faced," Damien said.
T.J. squinted at him. "Oh, yeah? When did we see worse?"
"Okay, have it your way," Damien answered.
"Worst I remember was that little town up by--you know, the one where we were holed up in the church?"
"That describes pretty much every village," Ted put in.
"Yeah, but this one, not only did they--Pont à Mousson, that was it! Never forget it. Not only were we knee-deep in Huns, but they had artillery." He flicked his eyes toward the unseen enemy. "Good thing these guys don't have hand grenades, or we'd be in pieces already."
Ted nodded ruefully. "You're right about that. They could bring the entire cliff down on us."
Damien grabbed his arm. "Those guys over there. What do you think the terrain's like?" Before Ted could answer, he went on: "Probably really poor, right? Not much room to move? And they're pinned up against the cliff walls."
"What do you have in mind?"
"I have an idea. A couple of them, actually, but none of them are going to be worth a damn if this wind dies. I have to get back to the truck."
Ted considered. "We can cover you, but if they decide to come out in force again, we'd be in trouble. We could use Kate to cover you, but I don't want to warn them--" He closed his eyes for a moment. "Brothers, when we get out of this, I want you both to give me a good, solid, kick in the pants." Waving off their questioning looks, he turned toward the trucks and called, "Kate! Damien's coming back to you! Get ready to cover him!" in German.
He shook his head. "I am such an idiot. Damien, when you're ready."
The lanky chemist scooted end-for-end and began inching his way across the campsite, hugging the ground like it was his mother. A scarf-wrapped head popped up from among the rocks opposite and ducked as a bullet his the stone so close he was cut by flying chips.
"They see him," T.J. said. "They're coming."
And they did. Thinking the campsite less well-defended, the bandits announced their attack with another burst of fire that hit nothing but kept everyone's head down, this time until their men were in the road. Ted and T.J. were shooting for all they were worth, but one man seemed to run between the bullets straight through no-man's land and was about to leap the sheltering rocks when a shot rang out from behind a truck and he stood bolt upright before falling backward, bleeding from his forehead. Again and again the unseen Kate took deadly aim and two more raiders fell in the dirt.
And once more, silence reigned. Ted and T.J. took turns reloading as they had before.
"I counted four more," T.J. said. "That leaves maybe eight or ten of them."
"If we're right," Ted pointed out. "And I don't have a whole lot of ammo left. Plus there's still another fifteen up the road."
"I wonder what Damien's up to."
"I hope we have time enough to find out."
Chapter Seventeen
Quanyu
Time seemed to be on their enemy's mind as well, because an ominous quiet settled over the tableau. No more faces appeared above the rocks; no more suicide charges were mounted. The sun climbed in the sky, warming the ground only slightly, but the tension and dryness began to tell on the defenders. There were no more demands or offers, and as the day wore on the strategy became all too clear.
"They're waiting for dark. There's not going to be much moon tonight, and it'll probably be clouded over anyway. They'll be able to walk right up to us and we won't see them."
T.J. smiled. "Then they won't be able to see us, either. We can retreat behind the trucks, get into a little bunch. Anybody who isn't one of us, we shoot."
"Sure. And then they'll know exactly where we are and pick us off." Ted worried at his dry lips. "What the devil is Damien up to back there?"
"Ted!" a low voice called in German. "Damien's coming out. He needs cover."
Ted seized his rifle and started to translate for T.J., but the latter shook his head. "I got that."
"Now!" Kate called, and she glanced a shot off the rocks opposite. T.J
. and Ted followed suit, and four seconds later Damien dropped next to them as the first enemy bullet whizzed harmlessly overhead.
Damien was holding something under his coat. He leaned over and gently pulled out a small glass jar, tightly sealed.
"What's that?" Ted asked.
"If my hunch is right, something that's going to clear those boys over there right out of there. But I need to throw it over the rocks, and for that I'm going to have to stand up."
Ted stared at him hard for a moment. "I'll need your rifle. You've got more ammo left than I do."
"I'll give to you, but not yet. I think this'll work better if we wait until the sun's almost down. It'll give me a better chance, too, if it's close to dark." He jerked his head toward the trucks. "Kate already knows the plan. She'll be ready."
"In that case, I hope we're right about what they're planning to do."
"And I hope you're right," T.J. said. "Because my plan stinks."
At their latitude, the sun set early in the late winter, and Ted, T.J., and Damien watched tensely as it inched its way toward the horizon. The enemy's hours-long inactivity only strengthened their belief that a night attack was planned, but for their own part, a daylight maneuver would be almost certain suicide on Damien's part, and as he told them, "I went over the top enough times when we were kids. I'm not looking forward to it again."
The sun was about a finger's-breadth above the horizon when he finally took a deep breath.
"Well, it's now or never."
"How much time do you think you need?" T.J. asked.
"Remember all those up-downs we used to do at practice? And remember how Coach used to yell at us because we didn't do them fast enough? Well, he won't have any reason to yell at me. Maybe two seconds."
"Kate!" Ted called in German. "Count of five!" And on the silent five-count, he and T.J. started shooting as fast as they could. Kate followed a second later.
Damien popped to his feet, set, threw, and dropped, beating his estimated time by half a second. If anyone on the other side saw him, they had no time to react.
The Scent of Death Page 8
