Darkness Under Heaven

by F. J. Chase

  A sergeant smashed a side window with his rifle butt, then used the same blunt instrument to hammer away at the steering column until the ignition cylinder gave way.

  At the sound of the glass shattering faces appeared in nearby windows. But disappeared as soon as they saw the silhouettes of men with rifles.

  One car would not start, so they smashed the window on the third.

  Commissioner Zhou went in one car with two sergeants, Inspector He the other. In the commissioner’s car was the sergeant who had voiced his misgivings about walking. As they drove out of the alley he asked the man, “Better?”

  “Much better, Comrade Commissioner,” the sergeant replied.

  22

  I know being anal has paid off for you so far,” Judy Rose said from the back seat as she passed him tear gas grenades. “But as your doctor I’d like to advise you that even the most successful personality traits can easily become pathological.”

  “Remind me to consult a psychiatrist the next time I tweak my knee,” Avakian replied, placing the soda-can-sized grenades in the Mercedes cup holders.

  “Touché,” she replied.

  “If for some reason we need to change vehicles there may not be time to pack a leisurely bag. So each of us having one ready to go with food, water and money isn’t such a bad idea, is it?”

  “It’ll never work,” she said in her Eeyore voice.

  Once again, Avakian had to grin in spite of himself.

  She climbed back over the seat and thumped her bank heist bag down on the floor. “You want to cut up the loot now, Clyde?”

  “That’s okay, Bonnie. You hang onto it. If I have to get the rifle out of my bag in a hurry, I’d just as soon a shower of loose bills didn’t come flying out along with it. By the way, buckle up. Safety first.”

  “Yeah, that’s one rule we’ve been following religiously,” she snorted, clicking her seat belt. “You know, just to totally change the subject, I keep thinking I’m still carrying around a sense memory of those Beijing manholes. But it’s your bag.”

  “Which is disturbing,” Avakian conceded. “But it’s the only thing my rifle fits in.”

  “You always run into that with accessories.”

  Every exit they passed had a military police jeep sitting on it. Which kept the right lane mostly clear. Occasionally they ran up behind a scofflaw trying to get over on the system. Avakian enjoyed driving up close, hitting the lights and siren, and watching them swerve into the breakdown lane trying to get out of the way. Once when they were in a section of expressway without a breakdown lane the violator sent up sparks scraping the guardrail.

  After they cleared the far suburbs the traffic jam largely disappeared. Few seemed to be traveling north tonight, though the lanes on the other side heading into Beijing were still packed. And the open emergency lane was full of military trucks.

  A bit farther on they did come up on a military convoy that couldn’t match their speed. But Avakian gladly settled in behind them, pleased to have the camouflage. The trucks turned off at the Changping exit right after the Ming Tombs.

  The expressway went from three lanes to two as they climbed into mountains.

  At Badaling, sixty kilometers from Beijing, the road went right through a gate in the Great Wall of China.

  “Never got a chance to see it,” Judy said sadly. “I was going to wait until after the competition. And now it’s dark.”

  “Don’t think of it as a missed opportunity,” Avakian urged. “Think of it as a big honking stone wall you don’t have to climb now.”

  “You always know the right thing to say.”

  “I have my moments.”

  Once through the wall the road turned more sharply northwest and became the Jingzhang Expressway. At the changeover there was the Beijing City Limits Toll Gate. Plenty of police checking vehicles, and MPs backing them up. Avakian turned on the flashing blues, cut through the backed-up line of traffic, moved into the open lane, and switched the lights off. Two cops in reflective vests were on either side of the toll lane. They had a military van stopped and were checking the driver’s papers.

  That wasn’t good. Avakian took out the pistol and laid it on his lap. “Remember,” he said. “If we have to bail out don’t forget your bag. And if there’s any shooting duck down below the window.”

  Judy didn’t say anything, but he could hear her breathing hard.

  He pulled in behind the van. One cop looked up, saw the plate, and said something across the hood. His partner handed back the driver’s papers and impatiently waved him along. The van driver, probably nervous, took his time getting it into gear and the cop pounded on the roof with his fist.

  The van shuddered through the gears and Avakian moved up. Both cops waved him through.

  As they cleared the gate Judy let out a breath even she didn’t know how long she’d been holding. “Are you sure I can’t write the general a thank-you note, even if he is a tool?”

  “We’ll send him a postcard,” Avakian said, trying to steady out his own breathing.

  After they passed the first exit, at Donghuayuan, a bridge rose up out of the darkness ahead. On the way up it they were enclosed in mist. Faced with the problem of the proposed expressway being blocked by the large expanse of Guanting Reservoir, along with an ever-increasing onslaught of traffic and the deadline for the 2008 Olympics, the Chinese had pragmatically decided to put up a bridge right across the water. All that extra economic boom cash didn’t hurt.

  Avakian turned on his high beams but they couldn’t cut the night mist coming off the water.

  “Very creepy,” Judy said.

  Avakian was thinking of a witty quip to that when lights loomed up out of the fog right in front of him. He yanked the wheel hard left to avoid the car lying on its side and felt his right wheels leaving the ground.

  A little yelp from Judy. Easy now, Avakian told himself. He got off the gas, fought the impulse to step on the brake, and eased the wheel back right.

  The tires squealed but he made it because there was no other traffic to contest his little journey across the lanes. More deep breaths to try and quiet that pounding in his chest. “Sorry, buddy, no good Samaritan tonight,” he muttered.

  “Jeez,” Judy exclaimed.

  “I was probably going too fast for conditions,” he said.

  “Hey, I thought it was some kind of sign,” she said. “You don’t often see tail lights stacked up on top of each other. Did you notice the other wreck next to it?”

  “No, I think I missed it in all the excitement.”

  “I think that was the first, and the guy who flipped did what you did.”

  “I’m not used to SUVs. These things really will roll on you, won’t they?”

  “That was two,” Judy said. “My mom always used to say bad stuff comes in threes.”

  “Just what I needed to hear. Thanks.”

  Despite the bad joss, things calmed down after that. At every change of jurisdiction there was a toll booth, but they were waved right through.

  However, when they approached Exit 5, the interchange with the Xuanda Expressway, a blinking arrow directed traffic to the right. And a mile farther a line of stopped traffic in the right lane.

  Avakian stayed in the left. “We’ll keep portraying the arrogant general,” he said, to forestall any debate.

  Now traffic cones showed up in the lane divide. And more arrows.

  Police lights flashing up ahead. Avakian turned his on. Two cruisers were parked on the highway, directing all traffic onto the exit. There was just enough room for him to get by on the left. He turned on the siren. As he reached the cruisers a cop came running across the highway, waving his flashlight.

  Avakian, still at speed, blew past them onto the empty highway. He kept one eye on the rearview mirror, but neither of the cruisers gave chase.

  “Ah…?” Judy said.

  “Go ahead.”

  “What if the road’s out, or there’s an accident?”

&nb
sp; “I’ll go four-wheeling overland if I have to. Or I’ll turn around and come back. But I’m not getting stuck in a traffic jam on some detour I know nothing about with signs I can’t read. No way.”

  “Fair enough,” Judy said. “Those cops seemed pretty excited.”

  “Cops are always like that when you break the rules.”

  “That must have been our number three,” she said.

  “We’re almost in Zhangjiakou, which is the biggest city around. If we can just get into the city, even if there is some kind of construction tie-up we’ll be able to make it around. Better be ready with the map.”

  Judy began thumbing through his English-Chinese road atlas. “How do you spell that?”

  “Z…h…a…n…g…j…i…a…k…o…u.”

  “Okay, found it.” She checked the distance scale on the map. “A million people in that? It’s about the size of my hometown.”

  “A million people live in the area around it,” said Avakian. “I seem to recall that the actual downtown has less than twenty thousand.”

  Mountains were looming up on all sides of them. And city signs now made regular appearances.

  “The road’s in pretty good shape,” Judy said. “Why haven’t we seen any accidents or construction?”

  “You’re reading my mind,” Avakian replied.

  The highway was now paralleling railroad tracks on the left. It was kind of creepy being the only car on the road. Avakian had to keep reminding himself not to let the old imagination run wild, but those bad feelings just kept coming.

  They went over a little rise and at the top gained a good view of the area up ahead. Everything was black. It was like a line drawn right down the middle of the landscape, light on one side and dark on the other. No streetlights, no lights in windows.

  “Power failure?” said Judy. “Maybe that’s why they closed the highway?”

  “Could be.”

  Then the breakdown lane was filled with vehicles. Showing no lights at all, and apparently no occupants. They seemed to be abandoned. This was really getting weird. He didn’t say that out loud, of course. No sense in making Judy nervous.

  Judy was thinking it was even creepier than the foggy bridge. An abandoned vehicle or two wasn’t an unusual sight on a highway, but she’d counted over twenty of them so far. Something wasn’t right. She didn’t want to mention it to Pete, though. He had enough on his hands driving. Great, look at that. “More fog up ahead,” she said.

  Avakian leaned his head closer to the windshield. That wasn’t fog. He brought his window down and the blast of cool night air provided the answer. “That’s smoke. There’s a fire around here somewhere. Pretty big one, too.”

  “That must be why the power’s out and everything’s shut down.”

  “Maybe,” he said noncommittally.

  But he did slow down. They were now getting the usual view of a city’s outskirts. Warehouses, more development, a greater building density every mile. Superficially everything looked right, except for the power outage, but it wasn’t the China he knew. Where unless you locked yourself in a room you were never alone, always surrounded by masses of people. He didn’t think a blackout would make that any different. Driving down that highway was like being in one of those 1950s nuclear war movies, where the wind blew papers on deserted streets in a totally empty city.

  “This just isn’t right,” he said.

  “Thank God someone said that out loud,” said Judy. “What do you think is going on?”

  “If I had the faintest idea, believe me, I’d share it with you.”

  “You think we should keep going?”

  “I don’t see any alternative. But I hate doing something because I can’t think of anything better.”

  Now the breakdown lane was a solid mass of abandoned vehicles. And they were right at the edge of the city proper.

  Judy said, “Pete, there’s a whole bunch of people off to the side of the road.”

  Avakian speeded up. The highway narrowed a bit and curved. As they came around the bank there was a crowd of people right in the middle of the road.

  Avakian wasn’t stopping to see what was going on. He turned on the flashing blue lights.

  It was like setting off an explosion.

  A barrage of rocks came raining down on the Mercedes, one skipping across the windshield and cracking it lengthwise.

  Flinching and involuntarily shutting his eyes at the impact, Avakian just as instinctively floored the gas pedal and locked his elbows tight against his body to keep the wheel straight no matter what.

  The engine roared and the SUV lurched forward. His next move was to kill the headlights. He could do that without taking a hand off the wheel, but he didn’t want to reach down. “Shut off the flashing lights!” he yelled to Judy.

  He didn’t see her do it, but the lights went off and the road went black. The cargo window on his side exploded, and a flash of light appeared on the right.

  The Molotov cocktail hit Judy’s side with a crack of glass and a whoosh of flame.

  Judy yelled, “Oh shit! Shit, SHIT, SHIT!”

  Avakian grabbed the back of her head and pushed her down.

  The crowd parted as they sped through, but it was wishful thinking to imagine everyone hadn’t bent down to pick up a rock reload.

  Avakian had his head so low he could just see over the dash, which saved his life when his window blew out in a shower of glass and the projectile skimmed over his head. Then one young bravo darted out in front of them and something very large punched through the center of the windshield and passed between them into the back seat. A second after the rock the shuddering boom of a frontal impact as the thrower didn’t get clear in time.

  When Avakian got his eyes open again and his head up he had to lean over because the windshield was so cracked it was opaque and he could only see through the open hole. His death grip on the steering wheel had kept them more or less in a straight line. There was hardly a piece of glass left on the vehicle. The wind was whipping in from everywhere but no fire followed it inside—the Molotov cocktail had burned itself out. A metal car body wasn’t easy to set fire to, and whoever made the cocktail had used only gas and added nothing to thicken it and make it stick to the target.

  Now they were past the mob and still moving Avakian allowed himself some faint hope that they might make it.

  Until he saw more people up ahead, and a roadblock made from a couple of vehicle hulks piled up with furniture and who knew what other junk.

  All this happened in a span of literally seconds because his right foot was still on the floorboard and they were approaching ninety miles per hour.

  Off to his left the unmistakable white blossom of an AK-47 muzzle blast, and the equally unmistakable sound of bullets breaking the sound barrier. All he could do was steer for the junction of the two hulks and hope German engineering was up to the challenge. He grabbed Judy’s shoulder and yanked her back upright against the seat in preparation for the impact. As the roadblock came up he tried but failed to keep his eyes open.

  The Mercedes hit the barricade like a cannonball, and that was exactly what it looked, sounded and felt like. Roadblocks generally worked because most people balked at driving their cars into them, but unless they were made out of concrete or steel rails they weren’t going to stop an SUV going flat out. But it wasn’t going to do the SUV any good either. Force equals mass times acceleration squared.

  Pieces of everything from the roadblock blew out like fragmentation. The airbags all deployed, and there were a lot of airbags in a Mercedes. The front end buckled but it punched through the block and kept going.

  When the Mercedes finally came to rest and Avakian opened his eyes they were nearly two hundred yards farther down the road. And as a rebuke to the man who didn’t believe in luck the SUV was sitting sideways in the street pointing directly at a very narrow alley.

  Stunned and deafened, Avakian had absolutely no idea whether the engine was running or not but put
his foot back on the gas anyway.

  Incredibly, the Mercedes shuddered forward. But there were no longer any tires, and shudder was all the wounded SUV did, the rims screaming on the road and throwing up showers of sparks. This only slightly masked the sound of an engine that was not long for the world. The axle was definitely dead and it took nearly a complete turn of the wheel to keep it lurching in a relatively straight line.

  Avakian got it into the alley entrance only because that happened to be the direction the vehicle was moving anyway. The body scraped against the wall.

  They were not going any farther and he was thinking about how long it took to run two hundred yards. He twirled the wheel three full revolutions and managed to wedge the Mercedes sideways against the walls of both buildings.

  He popped his seat belt and hopped up with both knees on his seat, ramming his shoulder against the windshield. It came out in flapping pieces that he punched onto the hood.

  Releasing Judy’s seat belt and without checking her physical condition in any way he lifted her up and threw her through the open windshield. Followed by his bag.

  As he bent down to grab hers he noticed the bizarre sight of the tear gas grenades still retained securely in the cup holders. He yanked out his pistol, leaned between the seats, and fired four rounds into the gas cans in the back. On his way out through the windshield opening he grabbed two grenades.

  Rolling off the hood there was Judy standing in the alley, holding both bags, apparently in traveling condition. He pulled the pin on a grenade and whipped it into the back of the Mercedes.

  A tear gas grenade was nothing more than a container filled with CS chemical powder, the irritant agent, mixed with a pyrotechnic that when burned produced an aerosol. And CS burned hot. So when the ignition charge in the grenade set fire to the CS powder, it also set fire to the gasoline Avakian had released to be vaporized.

  When the two-second delay went off there was a loud whoosh and the alley lit up.

  Avakian grabbed his bag from Judy and Judy by the arm and they ran. He’d heard shouting on the other side of the Mercedes just before one of the gas cans inside blew up and drowned out every other sound.