by David Poyer
The Russian frowned. “Our president will support an armistice proposal. We will even propose one. But it has to include debt guarantees.”
“You want America to back the debt China incurred to fight us?” Blair waved it away. “Impossible. Anyway, how much are we talking about?”
“Unless it was a secret agreement,” the Russian said.
She turned to Yun, who was still probing his mouth and looking worried. “What would satisfy your principals? If they were presented with the chance for an armistice?”
He spoke right up, as if primed for this question. “The Party must continue to govern. Senior military leaders will be allowed to retire. No prosecutions. No trials.”
She opened her mouth to say “No way,” when the waiter appeared. “Ist hier alles in Ordnung? Möchtest du mehr Tee?”
“Nein, danke,” the Russian said, clapping a few francs down on the table. “Behalte das Wechselgeld.” The waiter scooped them up and left. When they were private again Blond Hair said, “We will propose the armistice as soon as you are ready to talk. The signal will be the debt guarantee. No guarantee, no talks.”
She stared him out, but finally had to drop her regard. Why were the Russians steering this scooter? “I’d still need a number. To even present the proposal to the administration.”
The Russian shrugged. “Very well. Eighteen hundred billion dollars US.”
“Good God,” Blair muttered. Even with wartime inflation, it was an unimaginable sum.
He spread his hands. “So much less than you are spending on this war! And bear in mind, China will do the paying. The US is only guaranteeing the loan.
“You don’t have to answer now. Just convey the idea.” He glanced around once more and rose. “You can contact us through your Irish friend.”
Hard-nosed terms, for certain. But it was an offer. “And if Chairman Zhang refuses to discuss peace?”
The Russian said, deadpan, “It is very sad, what happened to the leader of North Korea.”
Yun did not meet her eyes. He rose, looking deflated, and made as if to follow the Russian out. At the last minute he turned back, gaze pleading. “Please, please, when you pass this on, do not mention names. We would be shot. It is known how many leaks your government has. We will all be shot. Do you understand?”
Blair nodded, and he stumbled out, still holding his mouth.
She stared after them, feeling light-headed. Woozy. Could it be possible, they might end this shambles short of a nuclear exchange? Szerenci would lobby against it. He wanted war to the knife. But it was an opening. A pathway to peace, however narrow, steep, and rocky.
Outside, in the street-lit square, rain slicked the rounded cobbles. Passing the anonymous-looking building where Vladimir Ulyanov had plotted revolution and tyranny, where the barely started twentieth century had aimed itself at the deaths of millions, she slipped and nearly fell. Fitting the key, pressing the start button, she reminded herself to be cautious heading back. Uphill on wet asphalt, at night, in the rain, on those tiny tires … it wouldn’t be as easy as coming down.
Take it slow, she told herself. Be vigilant.
One wrong move, on that glassy, black, too-slick surface, and it could well be her last.
15
Northern Xinjiang
THE village sprawled amid rolling foothills, beneath mountains whose snowcapped peaks floated like the tents of the gods. The sky was cloudless, not blue but a sullen, scorched brownish white. To the south, just visible in the distance, lay the desert. Its brutal, serrated corrugations swelled away to the horizon, and the thin cool wind that blew in from it abraded like a sanding disk.
Teddy Oberg strolled through the bazaar, flanked by personal guards and trailed by other rebels. One carried a video camera. Another, a device with a cloaking app that replaced their faces with those of approved citizens on the security cameras that festered like polyps on steel poles every hundred feet. They were wrapped in heavy robes against the sand and dust. They all had rifles under their wraps, except for Yusuf. He was a recent recruit, a heavily bearded, reticent, hulking twenty-something who claimed a technical education. Teddy had trained him to use the drone rifle, which he toted charged for instant use.
Teddy himself still carried the Chinese carbine he’d picked up last year. The bullpup design looked weird, but he liked it. No recoil, fast follow-up shots, easy to hide, and a great optic sight. They had hundreds of thousands of rounds of ammo, looted from supply trucks and burned-out police stations and scavenged off dead Internal Security troops.
The cadre had come down from the mountains after the imam died. This was the next phase of the insurgency. Blending with the population, gnawing out the overlords’ infrastructure from within. In this particular village, the first guerrillas to enter had beheaded the mayor and the police chief, then shot their families and any Han residents misguided enough to remain. The government had bulldozed the mosque; the rebels reopened one in the former police station. Now the townspeople smiled and bowed to them in the street. The women covered their faces and stayed indoors. Other than that, Teddy had kept everyone’s heads down for a while, until they could close the trap on Marshal Chagatai.
ITIM was growing. There were cells in all the villages now, and recruiters in each of the scores of concentration camps the Chinese had set up to corral their restive minorities. Not only did thumb drives and DVDs circulate in every bazaar, smart young men and women were hacking the cyber infrastructure the Chinese had gridded over the province to detect “terrorists.” Using a CIA-furnished software tool, they spoofed the spyware every smart phone carried. They jammed and misled the facial identification systems that were supposed to identify security risks and predict terrorist actions. Now Qurban’s sermons played on the Chinese equivalent of YouTube, registering to the authorities as droning presentations on livestock management. The Han police and troops had to travel in armored vehicles. On foot, they were vulnerable to knifings, shootings, or simply being dragged into alleys and beaten to death.
And he’d laid a trap.
Tomorrow, it would be sprung.
Nasrullah’s opium-for-jade traders had spread the word. Surreptitiously dropping a clue here and an oh-so-casual reference there, in the hearing of collaborators, that the IEDs tormenting the authorities were coming from the high valley. A lab, a testing ground, and a school for those who built and planted them. From one of their embeds, a Uighur who served the security forces as a translator, they’d learned Chagatai had taken the bait. Under pressure to end the insurgency, the counterterror general was planning an assault. Even better, he planned to be in on the raid personally, arriving in his helicopter for an inspection and photo op as soon as the rebel base was secured.
Teddy paused, there in the bazaar, to look down at a blanket. Along with the usual brassware, plastic bowls, and cheap battery-powered fans, he’d spotted a strangely shaped hemisphere of grooved wood, half hidden, since the merchant was sitting on it. “Assalamu äläykum,” Teddy said, bowing.
The old guy bowed so deep over his wares his beard curled in his lap. “Wä-äläykum ässalam, honored chieftain Lingxiù al-Amriki,” he mumbled, gaze downcast.
They all knew who he was. Bad? No, good. To know was to fear. To fear was halfway to recruitment. Nasrullah was squeezing the bazaaris and shop owners. Taking half of what they made for the Cause. Using them to help distribute low-volume, high-value imports from Helmand down into the lowlands, then farther east into China proper.
“What is it that you have there, under you?” Teddy asked him.
The old man looked frightened. Reluctantly, he brought it out and handed it up, butt first.
A Mauser broomhandle. The Bolo model, with the stubby barrel. Teddy racked the bolt and an ancient, green-corroded cartridge reluctantly ejected. Making sure that was the only one, he reversed the pistol and peered down the barrel. Pitted, but the lands still visible. He turned it over. The markings were faint, almost obliterated. But it seemed to b
e a real Mauser, unlike the Chinese and Spanish copies you ran into in out-of-the-way places in Asia. “Where did you obtain this?” he asked the old man.
“Sir, sir, I apologize. I did not know we were to turn in weapons—”
“That was the Han order. Not ours. Only oppressors disarm those they would rule. You are loyal?”
“Oh yes sir, yes sir. Three of my sons are with you. And a grandson—”
“This is good. So, the pistol…?”
“My father’s brother bought it from a shepherd. He found it on the mountain. With some bones.” The old man cast a frightened glance at Teddy’s guards. “Please, sir, accept it. As my gift. Will you not sit for tea? I will have my wife—”
Teddy didn’t need more iron to carry, and doubted he could find ammo if he did, but the camera light was on, the video guy crouching. He thumbed a gold Krugerrand from his belt and dropped it on the blanket. The merchant’s eyes widened. The cameraman backed off a step, swinging to zoom in on the coin, then on the merchant’s face. Teddy reversed the pistol and handed it back butt first. The merchant accepted it reverently, bowing over and over. “Xäyri xosh. Peace be with you,” Teddy said.
He could already hear the narrator in his head. “ITIM leaders are peaceful men. Generous to those who are loyal. Resist the Han and bring freedom to all Turkic peoples.” Folding his hands, Teddy tried his best to force a scarred and forbidding countenance into a friendly, approachable smile.
* * *
VLADIMIR was due in that afternoon. Teddy hadn’t seen his CIA handler since the night the imam had been poisoned, but the promised shipments had arrived. They included six hundred pounds of C-4 plastic explosive, with primacord, fuzes, and remote detonators. The explosive had come up by donkey, the detonators separately. The supply drones had flown low and at night through the mountain passes, landed to drop their hazardous loads, then vanished once more into the dark.
Since the passing of the old imam, Teddy, Guldulla, and al-Nashiri—the ex-al-Qaeda fighter who now called himself Qurban, “The Sacrifice”—had shared leadership in an uneasy triumvirate. Headed, for the sake of appearances, by the Uighur.
But it couldn’t continue. Teddy had realized that as he’d knelt beside the imam. Guldulla—Tokarev—he trusted. The mustached fighter dealt openly. His only aim was to eject the hated Han from his homeland.
But the al-Qaeda man wanted more. Abu-Hamid al-Nashiri’s fanatics followed Qurban himself, not the Uighur, much less an American foreigner. Only the link with the CIA, and the supplies they provided, gave Teddy the upper hand.
How long that would last, he had no idea.
The school was two stories, cheaply built of concrete blocks by the government, and taken over by the rebels, who’d dismissed the students when they’d infiltrated two days before. Usually they blew up the schools and shot the teachers, but just now they needed a hideout and rallying point. Not to mention a hospital; the cafeteria had become a medical center, for rebels wounded in the last operation.
The room he entered now was a command center. Hastily set up screens lined the walls. Cables pastaed the floor. Notebook computers nestled on laps, their operators cross-legged on colorful rugs with geometric evocations of gardens, flowers, trees, fruit, and birds. Clamps tapped the high-tension line outside town, evading the consumption algorithms that otherwise would alert the army something new was drawing power here. He walked the space as images flickered, as lines of software lit intent young faces. One screen showed the activity of Marshal Chagatai’s wife’s personal cell. Another monitored communications with the helicopter-borne interior security unit that would carry out tomorrow’s raid.
Regular combat units had electronic warfare and signals intelligence sections. Teddy wanted cyber specialists, linguists, and code-breakers. Most of all, he needed signals intelligence. He wanted the ability to spoof, jam, spy on, and ultimately bring down enemy communications, drones, and surveillance.
This rebellion would be fought in cyberspace as much as with rifles and rocket grenades.
Not that they hadn’t been expending a lot of those as well. He’d reserved two hundred pounds of the C-4 for IEDs. The old cave actually was a school, but each day the completed devices had been packed out. And each day, he’d reduced the number of students, replacing them with volunteer fighters.
They probably wouldn’t make it out. But they knew that, and had embraced martyrdom.
One of the young women caught at his robe as he passed. She wore a blue headscarf patterned with butterflies. The Hajji Qurban had demanded they be in full hijab, but Teddy had vetoed that. He liked to see their faces. After a protest, the ALQ veteran had given way with his usual tranquil smile.
“I do not understand what I am reading.” She showed Teddy, but it was in Chinese and he wasn’t up to recognizing more than a couple of the ideographs. He got “internal security” and “special artillery” but that was all. “What’s the problem?” he asked her. Thinking, Damn, she’s got nice lips.
As if sensing his attention, she looked down. “This unit they mention is not in the table.”
They actually had the Southwest Frontier’s Table of Organization, listing and describing every unit assigned to western China. A convert to Islam had filched it from General Chagatai’s helicopter, scanned it, and returned it the same night. Teddy had wanted to know how committed the guy was—if he could steal a manual, surely he could plant a bomb—but he’d already been rotated out. Still, they had plans for Chagatai … he refocused. “It’s not in the TO? What’s the unit title?”
“The 103rd Special Counterterror Unit.”
“Infantry? Cyber? What?”
She said it might be artillery, but couldn’t really tell. Only that it had been deployed the night before to a code-named location.
Teddy stroked his beard. Since they didn’t have the key to the code, no telling where it was. Most likely, though, close to the cave complex. Mountain artillery? Part of the strike force the marshal was putting together to hit what he thought was an IED school?
A rebel appeared in the doorway. “For you, Lingxiù,” the man said, extending a slip of paper. The rebels didn’t use digital communications themselves. Only paper, or more often, simple verbal codes.
Teddy unfolded it. Nodded.
Vladimir had arrived.
The agent was being held in a hut outside the village. Teddy debated going there, but decided bringing him in was the better course. That way he could see what the Agency’s money was buying.
* * *
THEY embraced, awkwardly, but more easily than the first time, a year before. This was the third visit by the man they knew as Vladimir. He looked different, and it took Teddy a second glance to make out why. “What happened to the beard?”
The agent shrugged. “Hurt my credibility in the Agency.”
“It helps your cred here, bro.”
“I’ll work on it.” He clapped Teddy’s shoulder. “You’re looking good, though. How’s the leg holding up?”
They chatted as he led the way to the schoolhouse, but Teddy’s handler fell silent when they entered the command center. He stared around, then whistled. “Impressive. I had no idea.”
“You can’t run an old-fashioned insurgency. Not against the Chinese.”
“I see that, I see that. And, wait, what’s that—a typewriter?”
“Can’t embed spyware in it. Can’t be intercepted. We use it to type five-letter code groups.”
“Fascinating, Look, we should get you to do a piece in Studies in Intelligence. How to run an insurgency in a cyber-hostile environment—by Theodore Oberg.”
The name sounded weird, as if it had been his in some previous incarnation. But it wasn’t anymore.
He was the Lingxiù.
But he couldn’t tell this guy that.
So instead he took the agent’s hand and led him into the cafeteria, which was filled with wounded and groaning men attended by hastily trained medics. Into the armory, where wea
pons were being repaired. He showed him a drone they’d jammed and recovered when it fell from the sky. Vlad kept shaking his head and exclaiming.
Until finally they were in Teddy’s own room. Actually, the janitor’s closet. Dandan had fixed it up some, but it fitted his image as the ascetic, luxury-spurning battle commander. Had to think about shit like that if you wanted to lead a rebellion. They settled on the carpet, and the girl brought tea and crackers. Teddy was settling in for another tea-and-chat session when a dull concussion tinkled the cups on the tray.
Vladimir tensed. “What was that?”
Teddy had half risen when a second, much louder detonation rattled the mop buckets. He grabbed his carbine, jumped to his feet, and rushed out.
In the control room the guys and girls were still working away, heads down. Damn, Teddy thought. I got me some serious operators here.
Then the first shell came through the roof.
It exploded in the cafeteria. The whole school rocked. The second landed just outside, in the playground. Teddy caught the flash. But even as he ducked under a desk and the window blew in, he was thinking: That wasn’t high explosive.
“What the fuck,” he muttered as a billowing mist swept off the playground and filtered through the shattered window. Other detonations shook the ground and the air. Other shells, but only a few went off with the ear-shattering crack of high explosive. It wasn’t a crushing barrage. More like a carefully spaced scattering, some near the school, others farther away.
Then his eyes stung. Vladimir seized his arm. “It’s gas,” the CIA agent yelled. He yelled it again, to the room, in Chinese.
They began screaming and jumping up. “Save the computers,” Teddy yelled, and laptops slammed shut and plugs were yanked from extension cords. “Into the basement!”
“No!” Vladimir shouted. “It’s chlorine. Chlorine settles. Get them outside. Disperse and fight. That’s all we can do.”
