As the sun rose, the chow and I walked together to the big yurt. I was finishing my coffee when Henry appeared. He had a carefree air. He was smiling, relaxed, practically jovial. He wished me good morning and suggested an outing. He raised his eyebrows slightly when I didn’t leap at the chance. I had come here to work with Henry, to learn new things, to behold new wonders, not to go sightseeing. Besides, Hsi-tau did not leap to mind when you heard the words tourist destination. I had already flown or driven over hundreds of miles of its tawny surface. Everything looked the same even when the wind blew, which was all the time.
“Sounds great,” I said weakly, anticipating yet another gourmet picnic lunch and hoping against hope that the natives I kept expecting to see, but never did, had invited us to share Mongolian hot pot in an authentic yurt.
Reading my face—and for all I knew, my mind—Henry gave me a quizzical look. He led me to a Humvee that stood with engine idling outside the door of the yurt. Two chows—mine and Henry’s—sat in the backseat with black tongues lolling. A couple of Kalashnikov assault rifles and two large holstered pistols were clipped to a rack behind our heads. A canvas bag, perhaps containing spare ammo or even hand grenades, and a pair of army-green, state-of-the-art binoculars dangled beside them.
At breakneck speed we raced down the arrow-straight road to nowhere for a few miles, then Henry turned off the pavement and we proceeded much, much more slowly across a trackless wilderness, Humvee lurching over the rough surface. The bag of grenades, if that’s what it was, swung wildly, banging itself against the window posts, and I kept twisting my head to make sure it hadn’t yet exploded.
“Do the guns bother you?” Henry asked.
“Only if they go off.”
“They’re not loaded.”
“Then what’s the point of bringing them along?”
“The Boy Scout motto,” Henry said.
The country was more rugged here, and as we traveled the dunes got progressively larger. The Humvee’s big knobby tires spun, gripped, spun some more, and gouged deep tracks in the sand. Despite the fact that we were equipped with a two-way radio and a couple of satellite phones interfered in no way with my fear that the Humvee might get stuck and we might die of thirst and exposure. Consider the consequences: If Henry died, so did humanity’s last chance to take command of its fate, unless he could get the president of the United States on the phone before we perished and tell him what was coming.
The Humvee crested a hill. In the distance I saw some tents clustered in the shadow of a mesa. I got out the binoculars and focused on the campsite. People were scurrying around the tents or working on the wall of the mesa, which was pockmarked with excavations of various sizes. As we drew closer, I kept on sweeping the site with the binoculars. The lenses were powerful and self-focusing. Details emerged in great clarity. People were climbing down from the mesa. Most of them were local, but a few who were larger and clumsier than the others were Caucasian. One of them was a brawny fellow with a red handlebar mustache who wore a cowboy hat and, sure enough, when I panned down with the glasses, cowboy boots.
I stifled a gasp. I knew this man. And as soon as I got out of the Humvee, he recognized me. Apart from a look filled with hatred and loathing, which I returned, he gave no sign that he had ever seen me before. He was grotesquely huge, a slab of muscle and bone nearly seven feet high. In a windchill factor of about thirty degrees Fahrenheit, he wore shorts and a T-shirt with the sleeves cut off. His biceps were the size of a normal man’s thighs. Even his teeth, when he grinned at Henry, were half again as large as standard human teeth.
In a booming bass voice he shouted, “Hot damn, Henry! I thought you’d never get here.”
He enveloped Henry in a bear hug, lifting him off his feet and pounding him on the back. After giving him a final shake that dislodged his Yankees cap, Bear put him down. The cap, snatched by the wind, skittered away. The giant chased it as nimbly as a kid, recovered it, and screwed it back on Henry’s head.
Henry introduced us. We stared at each other, neither of us offering a hand or a smile or uttering a sound. I wouldn’t have touched this creature or spoken to it if someone had put a gun to my head. The giant’s name, as I already knew, was Bear Mulligan. As a young man he had been an All-American left tackle who got his nickname in college from the ferocious way he tackled opponents. It was written in the newspapers that he didn’t just bear-hug running backs, he ate ’em alive. Stadiums boomed with his name, shouted in unison by fifty thousand Texans in a state of bloodlust. Bear had a knack for fame. He grew up to be a paleontologist who was invariably described by the many reporters who traveled far to interview him as “legendary.”
Henry, glancing first at Bear and then at me, immediately picked up on the revulsion between us.
“Come on, Henry,” Bear cried. “I want to show you what your money has bought.”
The two of them rushed away, Bear’s tree-trunk arm around Henry’s shoulders. I followed, uninvited and ignored. Pretty soon we reached the mesa and with Bear in the lead, clambered up a network of aluminum ladders that had been bolted to its face. In minutes we reached the top, which was perfectly flat, and there, in an enormous ditch, lay an enormous skeleton.
“Biggest dad-gum land animal ever seen by human eyes!” Bear shouted. “We’re gonna name it for you, Henry.”
“Oh, no, you’re not,” Henry said.
“It’s a girl,” Bear said. “Looks like a Sauroposeidon, but she ain’t. She’s bigger—about forty meters long. She stood about twenty meters high. Humongous long neck, like a giraffe, but a lot bigger. Weighed maybe forty-five tons. Older than Sauroposeidon, too.”
“What era?”
“Late Jurassic, prob’ly, but don’t hold me to that till we’ve worked on her a little more.”
“Did you find her intact, as we see her here?” Henry asked.
“Intact, more or less,” Bear replied. “We did a little retrofitting, mostly small bones that got scattered by the earthquake that done her in, but the big parts you see lie pretty much the same as they laid for all them millions of years. Found us some eggs, too. Huge—bigger ’n medicine balls. She must’ve been settin’ on the nest when the world turned upside down on her.”
The way Bear talked like an old cowhand grated. Whatever else he might have been—and we’ll get to that presently—he was one of the most famous scholars in his field. He was also well-off. In the 1920s, his grandfather, an authentic redneck, had struck oil in Wink, Texas, and later on, all over the world. The family owned a private bank in New York, among other things. Bear had gone to a well-known New England school, the same one his father had attended, and after his football days, earned a doctorate at Harvard. I knew a lot about Bear. He didn’t grow up talking like he had a mouthful of barbecue.
He showed us some fragments of fossilized dinosaur eggs.
“Imagine being the size of this here lady and all of a sudden finding yourself flyin’ through the air doin’ somersaults,” he said. “Must have been pretty disorienting.”
“I don’t see any broken bones,” Henry said. “The ground must have opened where she was standing. She probably was buried instantaneously, to have stayed together, like she’s done for a hundred and fifty million years.”
“Could be, old buddy. But we’re talkin’ about one hell of an earthquake.”
Henry and I exchanged glances. Yes, he was talking about one hell of an earthquake.
Henry had brought treats for the workers—vacuum chests of hot Chinese and American food, coolers filled with beer, ice cream and apple pie for the Americans, Chinese sweets for the locals, huge boxes of Godiva chocolates for everybody. In the mess tent, speeches were made. Henry—meaning Henry’s money—was cheered. By the end of lunch everybody was drunk except Henry, who didn’t drink in any meaningful sense of the word, and myself, who hated beer and would not drink with Bear Mulligan, who was too large to be affected by alcohol. Afterward, we toured the bone collection. This included a ne
arly intact Tarbosaurus, a carnivore slightly smaller than T. rex, and many other creatures, all of which had been alive one moment and entombed the next on a day more than a hundred million years before.
Through it all, Bear had neither looked at me nor spoken a word to me—nor I to him, because the sight and sound of him made my skin crawl. The time to depart finally arrived. We walked over to the Humvee. Henry visited the latrine, leaving the two of us alone. Bear looked down on me with raw hatred in his eyes.
“Be warned, bitch,” he said in the Chip-and-Buffie English he spoke when I knew him.
“Of what?”
“If you repeat one word of your rotten dirty lies about me to Henry,” he said, “I’ll hunt you down and tear your head off.”
“Better do it now, then,” I said.
“You’re going to tell him, aren’t you?”
“You’ve made it pretty obvious that you and I have a problem. If he asks what it is, I’m not going to lie to him.”
Henry emerged from the latrine tent. Still glaring, Bear muttered, “Here he comes. One lie and you’re dead. That’s a promise.”
He reached out for Henry and gave him a gentle hug. So tender was the look on Bear’s face that for a moment I thought kisses might come next. Bear stood waving good-bye to Henry until we couldn’t see him anymore.
Henry checked the Humvee’s navigation screen and told me we had just time enough to get to the road to nowhere before dark.
I said, “Good,” but dreaded the bumpy ride ahead. Already the Humvee was pitching and yawing. I wished I had worn a sports bra. The windows were closed because of the dust. The chows, carsick already, whimpered.
After a silence, Henry said, “What was that all about?”
I didn’t pretend that I didn’t understand the question. I replied, “Bear was surprised to see me, I think.”
“You know him?”
“We knew each other in the past. It didn’t end well.”
“Why not?”
“He’s the rapist.”
Henry stopped the Humvee. “Go on,” he said.
“His family bought the judge and Bear walked on a legal technicality. The cops were so busy trying to subdue him—he broke some bones—when he resisted arrest they forgot to read him his rights.”
Henry took my hand. I was astonished. He had a nice hand, dry and sinewy.
“I had no idea,” he said.
“How could you have?”
“It should have turned up when he was vetted for the grant.”
“That was long before you knew me. Wouldn’t you have given him the grant anyway? It would have been the broad-minded thing to do. He wasn’t convicted of anything.”
“Probably,” Henry replied. “Are you afraid of him now?”
“Terrified. I know him. When you were in the latrine he warned me that he’d rip my head off if I told you who and what he is.”
“He meant it?”
“Of course he meant it.”
Henry was still holding my hand. His face was grim.
“You’re going to tell Bear about this conversation?”
“No,” Henry said. “But he’ll know. The money will stop.”
“Then what?”
“Then we contain him. You’re safer than you think.”
2
DARKNESS FELL BEFORE WE REACHED the yurts. We saw their lights, a white blotch in the anthracite sky, from a long way off. Their brightness puzzled, even startled Henry. He floored the gas pedal and the ungainly, rattling Humvee sped onward, headlights poking into the darkness.
When we arrived, we found a couple of military vehicles parked inside the compound. One of them was equipped with a machine gun, its long barrel pointed at the sky. Six impassive soldiers with assault rifles slung across their chests watched as we approached. Henry drove right by them. We were not challenged. Our dogs—the ones in the backseat—began to bark. There was no answer from the rest of the pack, and as the Humvee rolled on we saw that all the other chows lay scattered on the ground. They did not move. They looked stiff, as if frozen in place like Bear Mulligan’s dinosaurs in the last nanosecond of life. I saw no signs of blood or mutilation. I had never before seen the slightest sign of anger in Henry, but he was furious now. He drove up to the big yurt, slammed on the brakes, and leapt out of the vehicle. I followed. Before I could stop them, so did the dogs. They broke discipline, abandoning us humans, rushing to the prostate animals, sniffing and whining.
Inside the yurt, a slender, erect Chinese with a Waterford glass in his hand was conversing amiably with Henry. He wore an immaculate uniform with many campaign ribbons and decorations. His blue-black hair was turning gray. Three younger men, also in the uniform of the People’s Liberation Army, stood by, also holding glasses. I smelled Scotch whisky. Daeng appeared, smiling as though he knew nothing of the dead dogs lying just outside the door. He carried a tray of canapés and passed light-footedly among the officers as if serving at a cocktail party.
Henry beckoned me closer and introduced me to the older man. His name was General Yao. He was from the China Association for International Friendly Contacts, otherwise known as the counterespionage arm of the intelligence service of the People’s Liberation Army.
Smiling, he said in flawless California English, “I must apologize for the dogs. Let me assure you they will soon wake up and be as good as new. Unfortunately they attacked us when we arrived. We were forced to subdue them with a humane gas. Had I realized they were going to sleep so long, I would have had them removed from sight. We didn’t know exactly how much gas is required to render a dog unconscious. I am assured they will soon be all right.”
“Thank you, General Yao. That’s very comforting,” I said.
The general’s eyes became colder by a degree or two. Henry shot me a cautionary look. Clearly he and General Yao knew each other well. Just as clearly, the general found it difficult to be entirely frank in my presence. I drifted away and joined the young officers. For the fun of it, I gave no sign that I spoke their language. I understood fragments of the things they were saying about me in Mandarin. Two of them didn’t like my blue eyes—“ghost eyes,” one man called them. The third found them mysterious. They all liked my body even though they agreed that the breasts were a little too large to be truly beautiful.
General Yao joined us. If he harbored resentment of my earlier snippiness about the gassed chows, he showed no sign of it.
“The dogs have awakened,” he said. “They’re quite frisky. In humans, recovery time is related to body weight. No doubt the same is true of dogs. Or elephants. You are an animal lover, I gather.”
“You could say that. After all, we’re animals, too.”
He smiled charmingly. He escorted me to the table and helped me into my chair. He poured mao-tai into my glass. He placed food on my plate in the Chinese manner, as if I were the honored guest and he the host. He asked polite questions about my family, my work, my education, my time in Shanghai. I got the impression that he knew the answers to his questions before I supplied them. He regretted that he had not read any of my books. I offered to send him one. No, no, he wished to buy one. He would order it from Amazon.com. Perhaps I would be so kind as to inscribe it the next time we met. He was charm itself.
“It is so interesting that the American people and the Chinese people became friends again on the very day that the great President Nixon came to China and the animosity between our two populations ceased to exist,” he said. “Forty years of the most outrageous propaganda vanished like the smoke of a couple of cheap cigarettes.”
His smile asked how anyone could possibly question this sunny view of Sino-American relations.
Over coffee, General Yao turned to Henry.
“Something rather curious is happening,” he said. “The American government is suddenly very interested in you, Henry.”
“Really?” Henry said. “How so?”
People from the American embassy, Yao said, had asked him and certa
in of his colleagues questions about Henry’s activities in Hsi-tau and elsewhere in China.
“We are puzzled by this gossip,” General Yao said. “It’s unusual for the Americans to ask us about one of their own citizens, especially one as prominent as Henry Peel.”
These Americans had heard that Henry was investing heavily in certain Chinese companies. They were especially curious about his dealings with Ng Fred and his company. They were curious about the mysterious ring of booster rockets. They knew from their satellite images that they were not military vehicles, but they were somewhat alarmed by their size. What was their purpose? The CIA had asked permission to visit the site to inspect the boosters. They told General Yao that the president of the United States himself was concerned about them. CIA briefers had shown him photographs taken from orbit. He had been intensely interested, even agitated. He thought the rockets might be a threat to America’s national security. He had demanded more information. The situation was uncomfortable.
Henry said, “Have you granted permission for an inspection?”
“Our government has taken the request under advisement. It will move slowly, Henry, but it’s difficult for us to say no to the CIA. As you know, it has done good and valuable things for China.”
For instance? I was dying to hear, but Henry did not ask the question, no doubt because he, like his friend General Yao, already knew the answers.
“And there is another problem—two problems, actually,” said General Yao. “The booster rockets do not belong to the Chinese government, nor are they in China. As you know, they are just across the frontier in Mongolia.”
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