by Adam Hall
I knew of course what Croder would say.
Follow your instructions.
His small pointed teeth nibbling at the words like a rat with a corncob, one hand stroking the metal claw that he used for the other, his black eyes watching for your reaction, ready to catch any sign of hesitation, of weakness, ready to pull you off the mission and throw you out of London and into Norfolk for refresher training, executive replaced, stroking the metal claw, ready to bury it into your guts if you were found wanting, following your instructions, oh, the bastard, follow your instructions.
'Chong, can we make any kind of detour?'
'Mean get past the block?'
'Yes.'
He began chewing faster. 'Jeez, I dunno.' I waited for him to run it through his head. 'Thing is, sure, we could try, yah, but we couldn't use our lights. They'd see us, I mean they'd see we weren't on any kind of a regular highway. Be on a pretty rough surface west of here, but of course this baby can handle what you might call inclement terrain, so high off the ground. Sure, we could try it. That what you want to do?'
'Yes.' He started the engine. 'But take an angle,' I told him. 'Go south about half a mile if the ground's all right, then stay parallel with the east-west road.'
'You got it.'
I think he was pleased, in his quiet way, hadn't wanted to give up and go back. 'Chong, have you ever been in trouble?'
Argot for intensive action: getting out of a trap, battling unequal odds, running a frontier under fire, things like that.
'What kind of trouble?'
He didn't work in London, wasn't used to the idiom.
'Say, breaking out of an interrogation cell and leaving dead.'
'Oh, right, yeah, couple of times.' He turned his small head to look at me. 'I tote a capsule.'
'I just wanted to know what your status is.'
'We get into trouble tonight,' he said, 'I aim to kick any asses around I can find." Working his gum. 'Call me reliable.'
He looked ahead and put the big truck at a slope of shale and gunned up. With the lights off we couldn't always make out what was ahead of us; the moon was a hazy crescent high and beyond the flying snow.
Pepperidge would not of course have given me an amateur. It was nerves, that was all: I'd never worked with this man Chong and if those people up there at the roadblock caught the outline of this truck they'd come and ask questions. The snow made a light screen but this thing was as big as an elephant.
'Can we work our way south a bit more?"
'Guess not. There's ravines down there, not big ones but we get a wheel jammed and we could break the axle.'
Crash of metal from behind us as we took a bump, skewing across loose stones and swinging back.
'Take it slower,' I told Chong.
'You got it. But sometimes, see, you got to take a run at a slope or you don't have enough momentum.'
'Keep the sound down as best you can.'
'Yes, sir.' He fished in a pocket. 'Care for some gum?'
'Not just now.'
He spat out of the window and peeled the packet. 'Saves my nails. You worked in Beijing?'
'No.'
'I was born there. Mom and Dad fighting like cats when I left school, so I shipped out on a freighter to San Francisco, five or six years there, got involved with a private detective agency and took in most of the cities across the States, did a few things for the CIA kind of under the table, then I shipped out again to London, got into a very interesting situation getting a Nicaraguan vice-consul out of a hostage deal at the embassy in Gloucester Road — that time I was still on the unofficial payroll of the CIA, but it brought me in touch with your outfit. They wanted someone like me in Beijing, bilingual native with a little experience in what they called the "clandestine arts" — those guys kill me — so I said okay.'
The wheels began spinning again across loose shale and he played with the steering and got us straight. 'Then you know what happened? I found I was Chinese again, and see, I had a kind of advantage in Beijing — I could sink right down into the daily life and look out from there with what you could call Western eyes and see what was really going on, and at first it didn't bother me too much — this was in Mao's time but I learned to live with it because I was in your outfit now, sending stuff in to London, and they were very pleased.' He slowed the truck and we rolled carefully down a slope with the brake shoes moaning in the drums. 'Then something happened that kind of changed things. I had a sister, see, and she had a kid, couple of years old, good husband, I liked him, still do, works in a coal mine, and then they made a law you couldn't have more than one kid, keep the population down, and she made a mistake and had another one and they towed her and a lot of other women naked behind a truck through the streets as punishment, and that was what really changed things for me, see.' He turned to look at me. 'That really changed things. I told my director I wanted different work, where I could get at these people with my bare hands, you know, the police and the PSB and the KCCPC and the military, any son of a fucking gun I could get near, so I could practice my clandestine arts, you understand me?'
The slope levelled out and he gunned the engine again. 'You wanted to know my status, and now you do.'
His big fur hat bobbed as we took the bumps, his thin body coming right off the seat over the bad ones, his small gloved hands playing on the thick rim of the wheel. I didn't say anything, but it reassured me, what he'd said; if we got into anything sticky on this trip I wouldn't have to carry him.
Sometimes the moon came out as the wind took the snow and cut swatches through it, letting the light reach the ground.
'What happened at the rendezvous, Chong?'
He caught the truck as it skewed again over the stones. "I guess it was more or less routine. Your DIP sent a guy along to see if the hotel had any surveillance on it, and it did. So we took it from there.'
It's in the book, under the heading of Protecting the Rendezvous. There are fifty ways of doing that but tonight Pepperidge had chosen this one because it had suited the situation: there were people in the street and the Jeifang had a big profile and I had to climb into it without anyone paying attention and in any case the peep had got to be removed so that he couldn't tag me, so our man had worked out the timing and ten or fifteen minutes before the rendezvous he'd dropped the peep with a discreet nerve strike and then made a show of helping him as he lay on the ground, told someone to call an ambulance, this man was having a heart attack, and by the time the ambulance was on the scene everyone in the street was watching the action while I got into the truck farther along.
'Is he going to follow up?'
'Your DIF?'
'Yes.'
'Sure, told me he would. We need all the info we can get, right?'
Right. Who the peep was, who was running him: the man who'd dropped him would stay close.
There was an inch of snow on the window on my side and I let it down an inch again and saw the red lights still flashing up there to the north, behind us a little now. We'd been going for fifteen minutes but this was virgin rock without even a wagon track and our average speed wasn't much more than walking pace.
'Snow's easing,' Chong said.
'Yes.'
We didn't want that. The light from the three-quarter moon was brighter now across the ground, throwing shadows. It made the going easier but the truck would stand out more against the lights of the town to the south.
'Chong.'
He turned his head.
'What's your cover story for driving overland like this?'
'I'm looking for the new mining site. The research crews have just set up camp, there's no road made yet.'
'What are they going to mine?'
'They're not sure yet — it's just an assay. They're going to drill a hundred meters down and take samples. The geologists say there should be copper in this region.'
'That's your full story?'
He looked at me. 'You think anyone in the People's Liberation Army's going to
question it?'
'Possibly.'
'Tell you something. What the average soldier in the PLA has got in his head is rice.'
I let it go. It shouldn't come to that; if they were going to see us they'd have seen us by now.
The snow had almost stopped; isolated flakes drifted, black against the sky and turning white as they settled on the dark green of the truck. The shadows were sharp now, and rocks stood out, their flint surfaces glinting in the light.
'Chong. Where are you going to put him?'
'I got crates back there, one of them empty. He can breath okay, gaps where the lid goes. We can pile a whole lot of drilling gear on top, see. He'll be snug as a bug in there, got a blanket and some cushions, nothing too good for that guy.'
A front wheel caught a loose rock and threw it upward and it banged on the underside of the truck like a gunshot. Reaction from the nerves and it worried me. The effects of the the shiatsu had worn off a little, or it was simply that I was standing back in my mind and seeing the whole thing in perspective from overhead: the truck, small from that distance, crawling across the dark terrain a mile and a half from the group of army vehicles and the flashing red lights, a mouse creeping across the floor under the nose of a cat, not a pleasant simile, no, uncomfortable, unnerving.
'You weren't there,' Chong asked me, 'in Beijing, that time?'
The time of Tiananmen. It was how they all spoke of it these days, as 'that time.'
'No.'
'I was there.'
The rocks glinting ahead of us, bright now, too bright, the shadows too black, too sharp. I turned my head.
'The worst thing, the way I remember it-'
'Chong,' I said, 'they've seen us.'
Headlights in the dark.
Chapter 18: Flower
'Your papers say you're a tourist.'
'Yes.'
'Then what are you doing in this truck?'
'I'm a geologist. I'm interested in minerals.'
'But how did you come to be in this truck?'
'I met this man in a bar. He's going to show me the mining camp. They're going to drill for minerals.'
'Okay,' Chong said, 'that'll stand up. Like I say, they got their gourds full of rice.'
He didn't sound nervous.
Headlights bouncing over the rocks. They were too bright for us to see what kind of vehicle it was, but it must be small, bouncing like that, perhaps a military jeep.
'Is there a gun in this truck?'
Chong looked at me. He wasn't chewing any faster than usual. I liked that. 'I guess not,' he said. 'It's instant jail, they find one on anybody in this town. We need a gun?'
'No.'
'You carry one?'
'No.'
He lifted his gloved hands off the rim of the wheel and dropped them again. 'Got these.'
If there'd been a gun in the truck I would have told him to throw it across the scree, out of sight.
The beams of the headlights swung away, sweeping the black shale and sending the shadows jumping like choppy water, then coming around in a half-circle and lining us up dead ahead and closing in, blinding us through the windshield. He didn't trust us, hadn't just come up alongside.
Above and between the headlight beams there was movement and a glint of metal, something quite long, perhaps an assault rifle.
'Don xia che!'
'He says we have to get out,' Chong said.
The shale was gritty underfoot. We stood by the doors, one on each side of the truck.
'Ju qi shou lai'
Chong raised his hands and I did the same.
He'd switched off his engine when we'd seen the headlights; the engine of the jeep was still running. Nothing happened for a while. The soldier was watching us, standing in the middle of the jeep, the light bouncing off the rocks and the front of the big Jeifang and glinting on his gun, then he dropped onto the ground and came toward us, the shale scattering under his combat boots. He said something to me, his voice barking, and I looked at Chong.
'Ta bu hui zhongwen,' Chong said.
Telling him I didn't speak Chinese. The man concentrated on Chong, talking to him, getting answers. Then Chong took his coat off and the soldier frisked him, kicked at his leggings, stood back, then came over to me. Chong started to follow him but the man swung around and shouted, and Chong stood still.
I took off my parka and dropped it onto the ground. The soldier frisked me, keeping the muzzle of the assault rifle lodged against my stomach. Then he stood back. He wasn't a young recruit. I'd say he was over thirty, looked experienced, seasoned, with a strong squat body under a heavy military coat, insignia on the sleeve, perhaps a sergeant.
The exhaust gas from the jeep drifted on the air. The snow had stopped, and there would be moonlight across the ground here when the glare from the jeep had gone. The night was still, the temperature below freezing. I could feel the heat from the huge radiator of the truck, smell the tires, the diesel oil in the tank. Sound would carry well on a night like this, cold and with no wind now. A man would get nowhere, in stealth, over this kind of ground.
Not of course that either Chong or I would have any chance of using stealth, of getting anywhere; I was just analyzing incoming data: visual, acoustic, tactile, olfactory, because at some time we would have to make an attempt to get away from this man, this soldier, this strong-bodied sergeant in his warm greatcoat, who was eyeing me from underneath the red star oh his cap as if I were something he'd found on a rubbish dump.
I didn't like him.
'Chong. Tell him I want to put my coat on.'
Translation.
'He says you can. He wants to know all about you. I give him the story you told me, okay?'
'Yes.'
Gooseflesh. It was too late to do anything if Chong hadn't tested this man to make sure he didn't understand English. But he must have done that. I was to expect, if we remember, professional procedures from anyone Pepperidge would send in. The director in the field, one of his calibre, can ask for blind faith from his executive, sometimes, many times, where the difference between life and death is on the cards.
I put my parka back on while the sergeant watched me; then he walked over to Chong, not turning his back on me, walking sideways a little, keeping me within the periphery of his vision field where the eye detects only movement. He held the big gun level, aimed at Chong's diaphragm, and they began talking.
It wasn't conversation. The sergeant had this gutteral bark, loud and unpleasant to the ear. His squat body jerked forward sometimes from the waist, to put emphasis on what he was saying. Chong looked relaxed, arms hanging, head angled forward by a degree — I liked that too: he wasn't on the defensive, had the confidence of a man who can do no wrong.
'Ta zai ze cheli ganshao?'
Why was I with him in the truck, perhaps, if I were a tourist.
'Ta shige dizhixuejia. Dui kuang chan you xingqu.'
I am not normally worried by guns, for several reasons. They're often held by amateurs, who don't know they should keep their distance when they're using them as a threat, and then it's only a matter of how fast you can move before they can fire. A gun also allows false confidence, and that can be fatal, has been, in my own experience, fatal to those who have held a gun on me. So normally they don't worry me, except that I don't like the bang they make: I am by nature a quiet soul.
This man, though, worried me, with his gun. He wasn't an amateur, and even with a thing this size he was keeping his distance. There was no question of whether Chong or I could move fast enough to make a strike before he could fire. Nor was the gun giving him any feeling of false confidence. He was a professional soldier, trained in the armoury and at the butts, trained to man a roadblock and conduct an interrogation of enemy prisoners.
We got these. Chong, lifting his hands off the steering wheel, dropping them back. But our hands weren't going to be enough. I would have liked to know what was in his mind, Chong's, as we stood here in the blinding light. He nursed a
hate for these people, the people in uniform who took orders from the overlords, who themselves had thought fit to turn women into cattle and drive them behind trucks through the streets; but I could only hope that he could control it, his hate, and not let it reach flashpoint and tempt him to rush the gun.
He wouldn't of course do it without thinking: he wasn't mad. But he might let the idea simmer, might watch for a chance. That could be fatal. He might watch for a chance and see it suddenly and take it and get it wrong and go flying back with his feet coming off the ground and the smoke curling out of that thing and the echoes banging their way among the rocks and the people up there at the roadblock turning their heads, go and see what's happening with the sergeant down there, fatal, not just for Chong but for Bamboo, and for Dr Xingyu Baibing, and for me.
I'd have to speak to him, to Chong, if I could. You will not make a move. I repeat: you will not make a move. That is an order. There exists, within the structure of command laid out by the Bureau, a form of ranking that is designed not with any kind of military pecking order in mind, but the concept of safety. It is safer, when a shadow executive is in the field with other people — support, couriers, contacts, sleepers — for this ranking to be recognized and observed, so that everyone knows where he is and what he can do and above all who calls the shots.
'Dao chehoumian qu!'
In any given situation it's the executive who calls the shots, and if this man Chong has been trained in Bureau lore and mores he would know this, and observe them.
'We got to walk to the rear of the truck, okay? He didn't go for our stories. He says you must be a journalist.'
Merde.
I said: 'Don't do anything.'
He didn't answer. I didn't expect him to. Any kind of exchange between us would sound like connivance, and the sergeant would be onto it straight away, no talking, so forth, and that would make things more difficult for us. It was all we had left to save ourselves with, if we could: communication.
