The White Vixen

by David Tindell

  “It was my duty,” Taurus said, remembering that terrible night, with the earth above them shaking from the artillery shells, women sobbing uncontrollably, some men disappearing as they made their own desperate escapes. Only sixteen years ago, yet it seemed much longer sometimes.

  Duty. Coming into the bedroom, seeing the woman lying on the bed amidst her own blood, and seeing the man in a nearby chair, hand shaking as he turned the Luger toward his own mouth. Duty had made him grab the pistol and pry it from the trembling fingers before they could pull the trigger. Duty had made him take the man with him and a few most-trusted companions a few hours later, through the secret tunnels, into the dark of night lit up by explosions. He suppressed a shudder as he recalled one particularly vicious artillery barrage, so fierce it separated him and his companion from the others. He kept going, though. Duty kept him by the man’s side for the next harrowing days, hiding by day, moving by night, always concealing the man’s identity, somehow getting them to the coast, where the submarine, thank the gods, was waiting as planned.

  Yes, duty required him to bring the man across the ocean, enduring the brutal undersea journey, the terror of the depth charges in not one but three different attacks, the destroyer captains up on the surface having no clue as to whom they were really trying to kill. It was good that they had not known, or their entire fleet would have come to pursue them to the ends of the earth.

  And what was his duty now? To the man in the other room, to his vision? A vision that, despite the Bull’s work behind the scenes, had led to disaster. They had fled a nation in ruins, crushed under the heels of the invading Bolsheviks. And today, what was left? A third of their country still enslaved by the enemy from the east, the other two-thirds…well, it might as well be. The invaders from the west called the shots there, and they were only slightly more civilized than the Slavs. Both sides, facing each other, armed to the teeth, ready for only a spark to ignite a conflagration that would be the final act, the Gotterdämmerung that would wipe his precious country off the face of the earth.

  It could not be allowed to happen. Taurus looked again at the photo on the mantle. It showed a group of soldiers—Taurus was not among them, for he had not been a soldier then, and in fact few photographs of him even existed—sitting at a café in Paris, twenty years ago now. He knew none of their names, but from the moment he first saw the photo, he was profoundly moved by its significance. Four young men, wearing their nation’s uniform, holding wineglasses to the camera in a toast to their conquest, while a pretty but sullen French waitress stood next to them. To the Bull, the picture represented his beloved nation at the zenith of its power, and power was something the man understood very well. He’d once had it, and so had his country, but he had let loose one or two strings at the wrong time, and it all came tumbling down.

  Almost all of it. A small bit of it remained, here in this new land on the other side of the world. Enough of it, perhaps, to rectify the mistakes of the past, to lead his people into the glorious future that was their destiny. He took a deep breath, and with one last look at the long-ago soldiers, he turned back to the doctor.

  “Thank you, Josef,” Taurus said. “It is late, and I’m sure you are tired.”

  The doctor stood up, recognizing the dismissal. “Indeed I am. Good evening to you, Herr Reichsleiter.” With a short bow, the quack left the room.

  In the next room, the old man lay on the bed, his breathing shallow. The once jet-black hair was pure white now, and a few strands of it drooped down across the sallow forehead. The famous mustache was likewise white, hard to distinguish from the pale skin.

  The Bull stood next to the bed, watching the old man. “So it has come to this,” he said. “Thirty-five years together, through the back-room maneuverings, the clashes in the streets, the marches and rallies. You were the voice, I was the brain. You were the inspiration, I was the one who did the dirty work of politics. You were the symbol, but I was the Party.” The old man’s eyes flickered, then focused on him. “You stood up with me at my wedding, and three years later I repaid you by having your niece liquidated as she was about to tell the police of your sordid affair. Without me, Geli would have brought you down, brought us down, but I acted then, and you became chancellor, and together we nearly captured the world.”

  He sighed. Not for the first time, he regretted entering that room in the bunker. “Well, it is not too late after all,” he said. “The Kameraden, those who still worship you, will not hear your voice again, will not be privy to your final testament, will not carry one last image of you into the years ahead, when we have so much work to do and cannot be distracted by dreams of past glories. They must look to me now, and only to me.”

  The old man’s head lay on two pillows. The Bull gently pulled the bottom one away, and as his head lowered, the old man’s eyes grew wide. The mouth opened also, the famous mouth that had once uttered words that moved a nation and frightened the world, and a bit of drool ran down into the pillow from one corner.

  The old man was fully awake now, and lucid. He turned toward the stocky man standing at his bedside. The rheumy eyes blinked, then re-focused with that strange combination of charm and danger. “Martin?” The voice was but a rasp now, its old power long gone.

  “Rest now, mein Führer,” Taurus said as he lowered the pillow onto the old man’s face.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Fonglan Island, China

  November 1981

  No one paid any attention to the woman as she shuffled along the dirt path that was no more a street than the collection of shacks on the nearby waterfront could be termed a village. Yet it was a village, home to a few dozen fishermen and their families. The men were weather-beaten but plucky as they plied the nearby waters in their junks to scrape out a living. Their women were equally hard working as they struggled to raise their few children in some semblance of a home. By comparison, the People’s Liberation Army base was huge and luxuriant. Helicopters buzzed overhead constantly, back and forth to the mainland some twenty kilometers away, or out over the sea to keep watch on the English and Americans who sortied their gray ships out from Hong Kong. The villagers had heard of that wondrous place, tales of fabulous riches and food beyond belief, and while the men knew how close it actually was from a physical sense, they also knew that in a practical sense it might as well be on the moon.

  Carrying a basket in one hand and a steel cooking pot in the other, the woman shuffled along, her head down, hair covered by a shawl, a heavy cloth coat protecting her against the biting November wind that never ceased its scouring of the island. Shapeless gray trousers covered her legs and her feet were shod with sandals. In one coat pocket she carried her identity papers, and in the other a well-worn copy of Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book. The cover of the cooking pot couldn’t prevent the spicy aroma of the fish and rice from escaping, and the cloth over the basket was likewise helpless against the fresh-baked bread.

  She approached the gate with caution. The base was ringed with a chain-link fence topped with razor wire, and this was one of three entrances. The gate was barely large enough to accommodate a vehicle, and the road leading to it from the village was not the main road. Vehicles almost always used the main gate farther east. Soldiers still guarded this one around the clock, though, and she saw two of them inside the wooden guard shack.

  Dutifully, she stopped when she got within two meters of the shack, and one of the guards came out, his automatic rifle held loosely at port arms. She catalogued the weapon automatically as a Type 56, the Chinese copy of the venerable Soviet-made Kalashnikov AK-47. “Who are you?” he barked.

  “I bring food, as instructed by Sergeant Lu,” she said, eyes lowered.

  The guard stepped closer, then tilted her head up by the chin, none too gently. “I don’t know you,” he said. “What happened to the old woman?”

  Keeping her eyes averted, she said, “Madame Zhi is ill tonight. I am her niece. My papers are in my pocket.”

  The gu
ard released her chin and used the barrel of his weapon to pull the cloth away from the bread. “Smells good,” he said. “You come give me some later, eh?”

  “There may be none left,” she said.

  “Then make sure you save something, eh?” The guard laughed. “Go on, you know where it is?”

  “Yes, sir,” she said, “I do. Thank you.” Wasting no time, she shuffled past him. The other guard was holding the gate open for her. He eyed her hungrily as she went by.

  Jo Ann Geary allowed herself to exhale deeply when she was safely inside, but she never let up her pace. Raising her head slightly, she took in her surroundings. The layout was familiar, thanks to the reconnaissance photos she’d carefully studied. There was a concrete landing pad about three hundred meters away, and a helicopter was coming in for a landing. She recognized it as an SA 321H Super Frelon, manufactured in France by Aerospatiale, and used by the PLA primarily for personnel transport. Two soldiers ran to a side door of the chopper, heads low to avoid the slowing rotors. Three officers emerged from the Super Frelon; at this distance Jo couldn’t recognize faces or insignia, but the deference shown by the troops told her much. She knew she didn’t have much time.

  Her destination was the stockade, a brick building in the midst of six smaller buildings, about two hundred meters from the gate. Two more soldiers, looking decidedly more alert than those at the gate, flanked the doorway. “Papers!”

  She carefully set down her basket and pot and produced her identity booklet. The guard tilted her face up to compare it with the photograph in the book, then issued a grunt. His partner looked inside the basket and the pot, then nodded to the other. “Okay,” the first one said.

  Inside, she passed a bored corporal sitting at a desk and clacking away on an ancient typewriter, continued down a hallway and stopped at a closed door. She had memorized the simple routine always used by her “aunt”, and rapped twice on the wooden door. “Come in,” a voice said in response.

  A man sat behind a desk inside the small office. He wore the same baggy PLA uniform as the other soldiers, but Jo saw the sergeant’s insignia. She’d seen his photo during the briefing, and through a cloud of cigarette haze she recognized the face: Sergeant Lu. “I bring food, as requested, honorable sir,” she said, eyes lowered. She’d only needed a quick glance to take in everything.

  The sergeant grunted, then rose from his creaking chair and come around the desk toward her. “Where is Madame Zhi?”

  Jo gave her standard answer. Lu was not very much taller than her, and she knew he was in his late thirties. Non-coms in the Chinese Army were not nearly as professional as those in the Western services, one reason why the PLA was not very highly regarded as a fighting force. What they lacked in efficiency, though, they more than made up for with numbers. And brutality, when necessary. She took note of the pistol holstered on his right hip.

  Lu tilted her chin upward. “I haven’t seen you before,” he said.

  “I just arrived for a visit to my aunt and uncle,” she said. It was an effort to keep her eyes averted and shoulders hunched. She named a village on the mainland, hoping Lu wasn’t that familiar with it. The briefing hadn’t told her much about him.

  “Ah. Well, you come with me.”

  She followed him down a short hallway to a barred metal door. An armed guard stood a little straighter as Lu approached, then unlocked the door in response to the sergeant’s order. Lu and Jo Ann entered the cellblock.

  Just as her briefing had anticipated, the block was small, about ten meters long. Four cells lined the wall to her right. The first was empty. The next contained a Chinese man wearing an unmarked PLA uniform. He looked to be about eighteen years old and quickly averted his eyes from Lu as they passed. An older Chinese man in civilian clothes was in the next cell, lying on a blanket on the stark cement floor, staring at the ceiling.

  They stopped in front of the final cell. “Dinner time!” Lu announced.

  The man inside was sitting in a corner, head between his knees, but when he looked up, Jo immediately recognized the face, despite its bruises and cuts. One eye was almost swollen shut. Two fingers of his left hand were tied together with a piece of rag, doubtless a makeshift splint applied by the prisoner. He was wearing a gray shirt and pants, nondescript and baggy, and his feet were bare and bruised.

  He was Brian Jamison, a colonel in the British Royal Air Force, and one of the most valuable operatives of MI-6, the U.K.’s foreign intelligence service, and he was a dead man unless Jo could get him out of here. She estimated she had only an hour to accomplish that task. Maybe less, depending on how quickly the men from the helicopter arrived.

  Lu unclipped a ring of keys from his belt and used one to unlock the cell door. Jo made a careful mental note of the key’s position on the ring. Fourth from the end, around five o’clock. The sergeant swung the door open and gestured for Jo to take the food inside.

  This was the most critical phase of the entire operation. If Jamison did not recognize her signal, valuable time would be lost later when she came back for him. Worse, if he had already been compromised, she might be moments from being captured herself. She had been carefully briefed on the interrogation methods used by the Chinese and had no desire to experience them first hand. By the look of Jamison, he was only in the early rounds of what would be a long fight that he would inevitably lose. Lu had only gotten the show started here. The men from the helicopter would be taking the agent back to the mainland for the main event.

  She got to the middle of the cell and stopped when Lu barked, “No farther!” Gently, she set the pot and the basket on the floor. Jamison was staring at her with his good eye. Carefully, Jo extended her tongue, flicked it off her upper lip first, then her bottom, then twice more off the top.

  “Thank you,” Jamison said in a croaking voice. Jo suppressed a smile of relief. He had gotten the message. Each flick of her tongue had sent a different signal. I am here to help you. Be ready to move. Twenty minutes maximum.

  She bowed to the prisoner and then shuffled backward out of the cell. Jamison made no move for the food. Jo noticed that Lu’s hand was on the butt of his sidearm. With his left hand, he closed the cell door firmly. Only after it locked did Jamison reach out for the basket and cook pot.

  “Eat well,” Lu said in Chinese. “You’re going on a trip tonight.” Jamison made no reply, although Jo knew he was fluent in the language, as was she.

  “Come with me,” Lu said, taking her by the arm and hustling her back toward the cellblock entrance.

  “I must go tend to my aunt,” Jo said, forcing her voice up an octave to show fear.

  “Later.”

  The guard quickly let them through the door, but not so quickly that Jo couldn’t catch the position of the key on his ring. First one on the right. Good, that would save a second or two. Still gripping her upper arm, Lu moved her down the hallway and toward another room. He opened the door and pushed her inside.

  Her many years of instruction allowed her to think and react instinctively. Know your environment. A bare bulb hanging overhead illuminated the room. It was a storeroom of some sort. Along the wall to her right, shelves held a few piles of papers and files, some books, cleaning supplies. To her left, a mop and broom leaned against the wall, next to a sink. Ahead of her was a rickety cot, canvas supported by metal legs. A rumpled blanket lay on top of it. She heard the door shut behind her, and the lock clicked. Program for engagement. Anticipating Lu’s movements, Jo planned her own. She concentrated on bringing her breathing under control, reaching deep within herself for her kokoro, her indomitable spirit, knowing that the next few minutes would determine whether she lived or died.

  “Undress and lie down,” Lu ordered.

  “Please, honorable sir, I beg you not to hurt me.” Her back was still toward the sergeant, so he could not see her slip the dart from the hem of her left sleeve. She slipped effortlessly into a state of kiai, a relaxed but intense focus upon her life force, her ki.

&n
bsp; “Do as you are told,” he said. She could hear the slap of leather; he was unbuckling his belt. Keeping the dart concealed in her right hand, she began unbuttoning her coat. Behind her, she heard the clump of the belt being dropped on the floor.

  Pulling off her coat, she turned to face Lu. This time she stood up straight, and noted the glint in his eyes as he saw that she was nearly as tall as him. Instead of averting her own eyes, she stared directly into his, bringing her inner spirit into a state of aiki. The words of one of her past masters came back, quoting an early Japanese jujitsu master: “Aiki is the art of defeating your opponent with a single glance.” She saw uncertainty, and perhaps a touch of fear, enter Lu’s eyes.

  Still, he was arrogant. “I am going to enjoy this,” he said huskily, reaching for Jo’s scarf. He had no idea she was already feeling haragei, an intuitive sense focused on her abdomen, the center of all movement. She had entered a state of mushin, a sense of mind/no mind, allowing her to react and move almost literally without thought.

  “I doubt it,” Jo said as Lu’s right hand grasped the edge of her scarf. She reached up with her left hand, covering Lu’s and pinning it down onto her head. With her right, still protecting the dart, she pushed up into his right elbow, thumb finding the nerve and squeezing, pushing up as she moved her body fluidly underneath Lu’s arm, stepping behind him and then bringing his arm up into a gooseneck hold. Lu gasped in pain and surprise, from the pain in his arm and then in his neck as Jo released his elbow long enough to drive the dart into the right side of his throat. Her entire movement took less than one and a half seconds. The drug carried by the dart began flowing through the sergeant’s neck, reaching the carotid artery in moments. Lu tried to yell, but the rapid closure of his windpipe only allowed a near-silent rasp. Two seconds later, the drug reached his brain and his eyes rolled backward.

  Jo caught him as he collapsed and moved him quickly to the cot, laying the unconscious body out carefully. It took her only two minutes to strip off the uniform and shoes. Probably too small for Jamison, but they’ll have to do. She turned the sergeant onto his left side, facing the wall, and covered him with the blanket.