by Joe Poyer
'Me . . .' Gillon stuttered in surprise. 'Me . . . like hell, buddy. I'm not going . .
The pay is good,' Jones said wearily. 'One hundred stinking thousand tax-free dollars for a week's work .. . think about that before you say no, and think about this too,' he added as Gillon got to his feet, still shaking his head. 'An old friend of yours, Jack Liu, is the leader of that strike team. He told us in no uncertain terms that there is only one person in the whole damned world that he would trust in the situation he is in now. No one, absolutely no one else, and that's why you, buddy boy, are the key.'
'Jack . . .'Gillon sat back down, clearly stunned. He stared at the table for a long minute before he murmured, half to himself, `So that's where he disappeared to.'
Jones watched him carefully, knowing that he had struck the right nerve, but wondering if it would prove tender enough to provoke the right response.
`Yeah, and when he heard that the Russians have to be in on it as well, we almost lost him. You are the only one he trusts and that's that.'
'And so they sent you out here to get me to go along on your hike into Sinkiang ...
complete with a hundred grand in bribe money . . . you poor bastard,' Gillon finished softly.
-
'That may very well be,' Jones replied. 'But I'm trying anyway. I'm not going to give you the patriotic pitch, and I'm not going to tell you how vital that information is to preserving peace. You know all that nonsense as well as I do. I'm saying that I need your help, that the pay will be damned good and that your friend Jack Liu asked for you, specifically. Right now, the Red Chinese know that he has this information, they know that he has made radio contact with someone outside China. The bets in Washington, Taiwan and Moscow afe that he can't stay far enough ahead of the Chicom hunting parties to actually deliver. But he knew that when he sent out the first message. Unless we can get in there, get that data and get him out at the same time, he's dead and for nothing. Now, I don't know what there is between you two, but I do know that he said that he would hand the data over to you and only you . . . otherwise we wouldn't be trying to convince a two-bit broken-down mercenary that we need his help.'
Jones finished this last savagely, but Gillon wasn't listening any longer.
Jones may not have known what was between him and Jack Liu, but Gillon certainly did and he cursed Liu for calling the debt in this way. Even in the intensely humid room, seven thousand miles from Laos, the taste of dirt, the hammer-like sun grinding down on his back, the rotten jungle-smell of decaying vegetation and the pain in his chest where the grenade fragments had lodged and the rifle butt that rose and fell with monotonous regularity on the backs of his legs were as sharp and intense as that day, three years agog when it had happened.
'Well ...' Jones broke into his reverie. Gillon brought himself back into the hot room with an effort and stared at the two men across the table. 'Where exactly is he?' he asked, his voice hoarse and dry as if suddenly full of that red, powdery dust once more.
Jones smiled in puzzled delight, not quite believing that he had heard correctly.
right, all right, that's more like it!' he chortled. Still grinning, he snatched a thin brief case from the floor and extracted a map and spread it open on the table. Gillon glanced at Phan but found him watching Jones's movements with the same bland expression that. he had worn since Gillon had entered the room. But, tired as he was, Gillon thought he detected the least bit of relaxation in his posture, as if this were as close as he would ever come to an expression of any kind.
Gillon saw that the map that Jones had opened was a composite assembled from carefully matched aerial photographs. Contour lines had been superimposed and details accentuated. After a moment's study, he identified Lake Alma Ata and, once oriented, traced the Kazakhstan/Sinkiang border. Jones pointed to a mark some sixty miles west of the border and south of the Dzungarian Plain, roughly two hundred square miles in area.
'Liu is somewhere in this- area,' Jones said.
CHAPTER FOUR
The flight from Conakry had been uneventful after the helicopter flight from the interior at dawn. They flew due north at thirty thousand feet, straight over the African bulge. The terrain below turned gradually from the deep-green rain forest to the lighter green of savanna grasslands and then to the grayish-brown of rocky, scrub covered uplands. By the time they had been in the air three hours, the land had faded into the sere brown, barren wastes of the Sahara.
Jones spent most of the flight forward in the cockpit while Phan slept. Gillon, although dead tired, had been too tense to manage more than catnaps during the long flight. It wasn't until the azure Mediterranean was visible as a thin line along the horizon that Jones came back to tell him that the next stop was Rome. He apologized for having left him alone for so long, but he felt that sleep would be much more beneficial than company. He then led Gillon aft to a small lavatory, pointed out clean clothes and shaving necessities and left him to luxuriate in a long, hot shower and shave.
The Jetstar swept in over the clean, blue and white vista of Rome at 1100 hours, local time, banked steeply north of the city and followed the traffic into Campagnano International Airport. As they turned off the taxi strip, Jones noted with obvious relief that a NATO staff car was streaking toward them as the 'follow-me' jeep led them to a remote part of the field. He got out of his seat and walked back down the aisle to where Gillon, freshly shaved and in clean clothes, looked as if he felt 100 per cent better. Gillon glanced up at him then and pointed with his thumb at the NATO staff car now pacing them.
'Is that our welcoming committee?'
Jones dropped down into the seat. 'Yeah, the first of the grind, I'm afraid. We get a mission briefing here before going on. They'll bring us up to date on the political situation and tell us what our jump-off point inside the Soviet Union will be.'
'Also,' Gillon asked quietly, 'whether or not they have heard anything more from Liu?'
Jones looked at him hard, wondering just what it was between these two men that had caused Gillon to change his mind so quickly. They had told him in Paris that Liu's specific request would be the only thing that would convince him and he had a vague feeling that even though Gillon was strictly supercargo, his involvement with Liu might really be the key to the success of this whole mission after all. He resolved to find out before they went much further.
'It could be,' Gillon continued, 'that the Chicoms have already gotten Jack. What then? If he isn't answering radio transmissions except when he decides to, how are we going to know? Do we go, unless we hear definitely that he has been caught, or what?'
'No, the drill is that Liu will make a radio contact tonight. We were to tell him only yes or no.'
'Yes, meaning I've agreed to come?' Gillon asked.
Jones nodded but was prevented from saying anything more as the cockpit door opened and the radio operator hurried down the aisle.
'Ready for guests, Colonel?' He grinned at Jones. 'There's a whole pack of them piling up out there and another car on its way.'
He continued on up the aisle to the hatchway and as the aircraft swung around and came to a stop, he pulled the latch bar down and shoved open the door. Instantly, Gillon felt the mild air of the Roman spring course through the stale air of the cabin.
'Colonel?' Gillon asked.
'Yep. For the moment, I'm a colonel in the U.S. Air Force, Intelligence.'
Gillon turned in the seat to face Jones. 'For the moment, heh. Just what is your name, anyway?'
Jones grinned at him and without answering went to meet the first of the brass coming aboard.
After two continuous years in the African bush, Gillon felt overwhelmed by the press of people that flooded aboard. There were uniforms of the various branches of the United States military, as well as what appeared to be the Soviet Army, and several business-suited individuals, all were introduced to Gillon and he promptly forgot every name. A colonel hurried past to the front of the cabin to put up a screen while an enlis
ted man threaded a movie projector in the back. Curtains were pulled over the windows but not before Gillon saw a squad of Italian soldiers scurrying to take positions around the aircraft.
Jones was pressed back against the bulkhead by the crowd of people and Gillon could see his expression changing from surprise to intense anger. Jones elbowed free of the press of people, none too gently, and rushed up the aisle to confront a tall, spare individual wearing a major general's uniform. So, Gillon thought, this shindig was worth the time of a major general. He looked for the Soviet officer and from the stars and ribbons on his shoulder he was, as well as Gillon could recall, a lieutenant general. He took a second look at all of the uniforms, both American and Soviet, with their abundance of medals and ribbons and shoulder braid, and decided that if the Sulkinhov effect – the theory that held that an army's effectiveness was inversely proportional to the flashiness of its uniforms – held true, both armies were in big trouble.
The colonel finished with the screen and called for attention and there was a shuffling of feet and shifting of bodies in the suddenly cramped interior of the aircraft, but the noise did not diminish one bit. A moment later the lights went out and the movie projector's beam lit up the screen, stopping the roar of conversation as effectively as a command.
For a moment, Gillon had trouble identifying the scene. The colonel, having extracted his collapsible pointer, tapped the screen.
`This, gentlemen,' he boomed in a professional narrator's voice, 'is the Tien Shan mountain range of western Sinkiang Province, People's Republic of China. These photographs were made available to us for this briefing, courtesy of the Soviet Air Force.
'
So, Gillon thought absently, it was an air force uniform, not army.
`These photographs show, in some detail, the area
where we expect to find our contact. As you may know, the Tien Shan is one of the remotest and, consequently, least explored mountain regions in the world. Today, it effectively separates the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the People's Republic of China. It is some eight hundred miles long and one hundred fifty miles wide with an average height of sixteen thousand feet. Its major peaks, Pobeda and Tengri Khan, are 24,409 and 22,940 feet high respectively and are the highest in the Tien Shan range.'
Our contact. Gillon wondered if he was intending to go along and snorted loudly. The colonel glanced down the row of seats, searching for the source of the interruption, and Gillon waved to him.
`Right now,' he continued, ignoring Gillon, 'we are looking at a pass some twelve thousand feet high, known as the Dzungarian Gate. This gate, or pass, if you will, allows access to the interior of the Tien Shan. The latest maps we have, with the exception of those made up from aerial and satellite photos, are based on those of a German/Russian expedition in 1905 that traveled into the area for the express purpose of mapping and mountain climbing.'
The terrain unreeled slowly as the aircraft flew southward, as shown by a small compass set into an instrument panel superimposed onto the lower left-hand corner of the picture.
After a few moments of high elevation shots, the zoom lens went to work and narrowed the field of view at a dizzying rate. The crumpled terrain took on the look characteristic of mountain ranges. Steep passes and high-walled mountain flanks, all of them covered with snow, Gillon noted, passed in review. The colonel was silent a moment as the harsh terrain, more suited to the moon than to earth, appeared on the screen. Gillon studied the picture intently as the aircraft flew deeper into the mountains. Tall stands of pine became visible, sometimes as individual trees along the top of a ridge, but more often as dense forests to about ten thousand feet in the deeper valleys. The rest of the terrain, beneath the snow and ice of winter, he knew would be alpine meadow and scrub bush.
Jones dropped into the seat beside Gillon. 'Now you
know why we were so anxious to have you along,' he whispered. 'And not just because Liu asked for you. I can use whatever experienced mountain help I can get.'
'You must be crazy,' Gillon chuckled. 'I haven't been in that kind of mountain for nearly ten years. And that country calls for snowshoes and skis.'
'It'll come back to you,' Jones replied comfortably. At least, he thought, some of that damned hostility of his is dying down.
'We can offer you gentlemen no more than this quick look at the terrain,' the briefing officer continued. 'It is all we have. With the help of the Soviet Air Force Mapping and Photographic Service, we have been able to prepare what we feel are adequate maps to guide you to the rendezvous with your contact. Two members of the Soviet intelligence service will accompany you to act as guides. All the equipment which you will need is being put aboard now and you will have time to examine it during your flight.'
The projector went dark and the lights were snapped on.
'The agenda for this mission into China is, of necessity, somewhat lacking in fine detail.
Unfortunately, there has not been time to do much more than select a team, provide the equipment and hope that you will be able to work out the details of the operation yourselves. We are relying on your resourcefulness to offset the lack of support.' The colonel paused for a moment and rubbed his nose.
'Because of the sensitive nature of our relations with China at the moment,' he continued in a hesitant manner, 'it is of course essential to the security and interests of the United States and the Soviet Union that you do not allow yourselves to be captured or . . . well, captured.'
He nodded abruptly and hurried down the aisle while 'a distinguished-looking man in a dark business suit took his place at the front of the cabin and, with an air of controlled patience, waited for the colonel to collect his belongings and leave. The guard at the hatch saluted and swung the hatch shut again.
'What the hell did he say?'
Jones nudged him and nodded to the front of the aircraft.
'Gentlemen, I am here to brief you on the present political situation. As you can see, our military colleagues are unable to supply you with any significant information concerning conditions on the ground. But I think that you will see that in, the political realm, it will be somewhat different.'
'Son-of-a-bitch,' Jones stage-whispered loudly enough for his voice to carry. He smiled serenely in reply to the dirty looks from the State Department people and the appreciative laughter of the military.
'The situation, briefly, is this. You will be violating the borders of a sovereign nation; one, further, which is extremely sensitive to any infringement of its sovereignty. After twenty-some years, diplomatic relations have just been re-established. In spite of this, we are told, the information which you will collect is of sufficient importance to risk jeopardizing all our work. But, that being the case, I must emphasize what the previous speaker stated and that is that you are to take special precautions against being captured or in any other way, being discovered . . . as must the government.' He paused for effect.
`The government of the United States will take no actions of any kind to protect you should you be captured.'
Jones growled and started to rise, then thought better of it and sank back into his seat.
-'If you or any member of your. team is captured or killed, the government will disavow any knowledge, etc. ...' he quoted loudly from a popular television program.
The diplomat stared at him frostily. 'I am sorry, sir, but that is how it is.' His voice was hard. 'If you are captured, there is nothing that we can or will do for you . . . and conversely it is important that you do absolutely nothing to ...
Jones shot to his feet at this point and shouted angrily, 'General Masue, who the hell let this bastard on hoard?'
Masue pushed his way forward from the tiny lounge, where he had been talking with, another officer. 'I _beg your pardon ...'
'I said,' Jones repeated furiously, pushing his face directly into the general's and forcing him to back up until he collided with an aide, who stumbled and plopped down into the seat occupied by the Soviet genera
l. During the ensuing squawks, which he ignored, Jones poked General Masue in the chest, 'who let this bastard in here? This damned mission is supposed to be so top secret that even your mistress doesn't know about it.
Who in hell brought all these people in here. . . ? Get them out now and unless you have anything else of importance, real importance, get your own ass the hell out of here as well.'
`Just a minute, sir ...'
Gillon suddenly revised his opinion of Jones. Anybody who talked to brass that way couldn't be all bad. He got to his feet just in time to intercept the diplomat, who had come hurrying forward. Gillon caught his outstretched arm and jerked. The diplomat swung off balance and before he knew it, his arm was twisted up behind his back and the other caught at his side in a hard grip. Gillon rushed him down the aisle to the hatch and kicked it hard. The guard swung it open in time to receive the diplomat, business suit and all, and they both collapsed in a heap on the runway.
Gillon swung back to the shocked aircraft. An air policeman was reaching for a pistol but one of the men who had come aboard, heavyset and with a weather-beaten face, shot out a hand and pinioned the guard's arm against the wall.
`Don't, or I'll break it off and feed it to you,' he told the guard softly.
'Now, the rest of you who don't belong or have anything constructive to contribute . . .
out,' Jones roared, and jerked a thumb at the hatch. Another State Department official started to protest, but stopped promptly as Gillon started up the aisle toward him.
'You heard ... out!'
A few moments later the aircraft was empty of everyone but Gillon, Jones, the flight crew and two new men; one of whom had stopped the air policeman from drawing his weapon. Gillon eyed them expectantly but Jones shook his head.
'Fellow members of the suicide squad .. . Michael Leycock and Charles Stowe.'
Gillon nodded and shook hands briefly.
'What the devil was that all about?' the one intro.. duced as Charles Stowe demanded. 'I thought you were keeping this thing dead quiet.'
