by Greg Dragon
Noting how little of her battery remained, she turned the phone off and stuffed it into her pocket. When she was finished cleaning, she settled down again onto the sleeping mat to wait.
Over the drone of the wind, she noticed a new sound, a bit like the wind, yet different. It grew louder. Something about it felt artificial.
Pourquoi es-tu inquiet, ma cherie? whispered the memory of her mother’s voice.
The constant tension inside of her once more flared. Something wasn’t right. Unable to sit still, Angel rose and shuffled over to the door and pulled it open. Darkness and cold swept in, pressing the fire down against the ground. Wood shifted, sending a cloud of sparks spiraling toward the ceiling and out through the vent.
Before her, the village lay as silent and still as always. She stepped out and turned her gaze toward the hills to the west. They would be invisible, of course. Except they weren’t; their tips were tinged with the orange of morning light. Puzzled, she wondered if the time on her phone had been incorrect, or if she’d accidentally fallen asleep without realizing it since checking.
For several seconds more, she stared at the horizon without comprehending, but then the droning sound grew suddenly louder and the ground began to shake. Behind her in the yurt, objects rattled and fell to the ground. A giant, dark shape suddenly appeared above the yurt, blanking out the stars. It screamed toward the hills. Angel ducked instinctively and watched as the airplane passed over the village.
A half minute later, a tiny thread of light appeared, a bridge between the glowing orange hills and the now distant object in the sky. The light began to expand and pour down the slopes like lava.
Angel cried out in horror as she realized the truth before her: The burial ceremony and all the villagers were being incinerated.
Chapter Twenty Two
Angel stumbled back into the yurt, hitting the center post with her body and falling to her knees and scattering the fire. A thousand thoughts entered her mind, a thousand accusations, a thousand questions. How could they do this? How could they just go and kill hundreds of innocent people? Why would they?
It’s your fault.
She pushed herself off the ground with a strangled cry, as if the act would distance her from that terrible thought. No no no . . . . She didn’t want to believe she’d brought this upon these people.
The glow from the distant burning now filled enough of the sky that it leaked in through the door, a wan flickering sheen which flared briefly before falling away again. The plane had circled and dumped another spray of napalm. She scanned around her, though she wasn’t sure why or what she was hoping to see inside the yurt. Nothing would change what was happening out there or reverse the horrible truth that the people of the village were all dead.
The reality of her own danger slammed into her with the shock of ice water. They weren’t going to stop, those men out there. They would come here and burn the village, too, knowing that there might be witnesses. She needed to run, to save herself.
The droning sound grew fuller, and she ran once more to the door and fell against it as her heart slammed into her throat and her breath hitched in her chest. The plane was curving off to the right, still quite a distance from the village. She watched it circle around, then disappear out of view behind her. It reappeared several moments later around the other side, flying low along the fringe of the community where the outermost structures stood. She thought it might return to the hill, when a streak of fire arrowed to the ground two hundred meters away, spewing from beneath the airplane. Even from this distance, she could feel the heat as the flaming chemical hit the ground and incinerated everything it touched.
Yurts and pens, everything went up in a blaze, popping from the heat, exploding. Fences caught fire, and the flames raced along the dry wood as if they were fuses. Animals, already panicked by the high whine of the engines, broke through their cages and stampeded away. Some of them carried the fire on their bodies as they streaked across the grassland, spreading the destruction.
Angel grabbed her pack and ran. She weaved her way through the scattered yurts, quickly losing her orientation. The plane circled around for another go, and she cowered in the shadows as it passed, hoping to not be seen. Hoping she weren’t caught in the middle of the plane’s next drop zone.
The car! Get to the car!
But which way was it? She couldn’t seem to remember where the road was anymore, or where Jian had parked it. Had they driven in from the right? The left? She spun around, whimpering. The droning grew louder again. And then she saw the vehicle, parked beside a rack of drying yak pelts at the edge of the village, and suddenly everything fell back into place again.
She started to sprint toward it, but the smoke was burning her throat and eyes and she tripped. The backpack flew from her grip. Stumbling back to her feet, she held her arms out before her and tried to run again, then tripped over her pack. She grabbed it, scrambled once again, stood.
Which way!
She’d gotten turned around. She couldn’t see!
There! Go!
The smoke thinned and there it was. She’d get in and drive away, that’s what she’d do. No lights and no brakes, just a dark shape on the ground. Drive and hope they didn’t see her or the dust she kicked up. There was already enough black smoke that she stood a chance of getting away.
And yet, at the same time, she knew that there was no chance of that at all.
Another load of napalm was dropped, closer by a hundred meters. The smell of it burned her lungs, nearly doubled her over with pain. She staggered the last several meters to the car.
She wrenched the door open and threw her bag in and followed it with her body. “Keys!” she shrieked in terror. She’d forgotten to look for them! Her heart exploded in her chest, and yet it felt as if she was being crushed at the same time. The car was useless without the—
In the glow of the burning yurts, she saw Jian’s keys glinting in the ignition. Crying out, she twisted them and pumped the accelerator. The engine roared to life, coughed, and very nearly died.
Smoke was pouring through the village now. In a moment it would blind her. Without bothering to shut the door, she shifted into gear and the car lurched forward. The smoke thinned again, pulled up in a cyclone, and she had a momentary glimpse of the plane in the windshield as it loomed right above her. With a bone-shaking roar, it passed overhead. Had it seen her?
A wall of binding white light rose up behind her, a blast of such intensity that she feared the car would explode. She slammed over something, knocking her teeth together. The door banged shut. The mirrors filled with nothing but flames, a flash of white light that felt as if the interior of the car had ignited. The fire reached high into the air and curled its fingers toward her like a wave, before collapsing inward again. The scene was worse than any hell, both real or imagined. Yurts burned like roman candles shooting flames into the air. And somewhere in the middle of that maelstrom was the one she had just escaped out of.
Chapter Twenty Three
A thick blanket of snow covered the car’s windows, masking the arrival of morning. The sleepless night had seemed to drag on forever, the terror a never-ending ball of fire in Angel’s belly so intense that she could do nothing but withdraw inside of herself. Finally, she became aware of a thin, gray light filtering through.
Her first impulse while driving away had been to flee from this place, flee China entirely, to just take the car and herself to the airport. She could see herself getting on the plane, going home to New York, cowering beneath the blankets of her bed in her little two-bedroom apartment. And when she finally managed to calm her shaking body long enough to call Cheong, she’d tell him he could take this assignment and give it to someone else. She never wanted to see him or this place again.
But her inner journalist fought back, resisting the idea and chastising her for her cowardice. You’re an investigative reporter. You took a vow to expose the miscarriages of justice, no matter where or what they mi
ght be, no matter the personal risk to yourself.
But how could she do that? She couldn’t fight people who clearly wielded such power over governments and held such disregard for life that they could get away with murdering hundreds of innocent people, all to protect their commercial interests.
And what interests might those be, Angel? What exactly are they protecting?
For a long time, those questions dangled like carrots before her mind’s eye, taunting her. And in the end, Angel knew that the only way she could go on without regrets was to stay the course. And that meant going back to the hospital and speaking with Jamie Peters.
She crazy. The ghost of Jian’s voice taunted her. She say crazy thing.
It had been thoughts of Jian that made her turn around and drive back to the decimated village soon after fleeing from it. What if he were somehow still alive? What if there were other survivors? It had taken nearly every fiber of her being to fight her impulse to keep going. With a strangled cry, she turned the car around, cursing herself aloud.
As she topped the rise overlooking the valley, she could not see the plane for all the smoke and the glare of the flames, but she could hear its incriminating buzz, so she pulled off the road and parked behind an elevated outcropping of rock. It was far enough away to be out of sight and out of the plane’s line of flight. But still she’d felt so very exposed, and so she’d gotten out and run across the rock-strewn grassland to another outcropping a half kilometer away. There, between two boulders, she huddled and watched the murderers finish their grisly chore.
Line after line of incendiary was laid out over the village for the next two hours, every square meter methodically carpet-bombed with the exact same precision that the men at the crash site had exhibited. Too wired with emotion and grief, she’d been too scared to even shut her eyes.
An hour after the last pass, with the drone of the plane’s engines no more than a hum in her memory, as the fires continued to burn and release black smoke into the even blacker sky, she finally accepted that the pilot had been satisfied with his job and would not return. Half frozen and stiff from the night’s frigid temperature, she made her way back to the car to await morning, only realizing sometime later that it had begun to snow. She was grateful for it, as the flakes erased the horror in the valley from her view.
But now it was morning, and she had no doubt that the men would return to check their work and verify that there were no survivors. She needed to get down there herself first and then be away.
She flicked on the windshield wipers, but they didn’t work. She could hear the electric motor clicking as it strained to free them from their nests beneath the hood. The windshield remained blanketed.
With tears running down her cheeks, Angel laid her exhausted head back against the seat and shut her eyes.
“I can’t,” she whispered. “I just can’t do this anymore.”
Chapter Twenty Four
As it turned out, the covering on the windows hadn’t been snow, but a fine powdery ash. The dust of the dead, Angel thought morbidly, as she stepped out for the first time that morning into the unmelting powder. The ash blanketed the car and the ground around her a half inch thick. The carbonized remains of kilometers upon kilometers of decimated grasslands. Of three or four hundred yurts. All that had been blackened by a fire which had spread far beyond the boundaries of the village, aided by the winds and the panicked animals in their mad, fatal flight.
Angel was alarmed to discover that the edge of the fire had come to within a hundred meters of the car. She hadn’t seen it, though not because she had slept. She was certain she hadn’t. But rather because the ash had concealed it from her, blinded her from the crime whose aftermath now spread out before her in the clear early morning light.
What she saw was an alien moonscape, monochromatic and barren, devoid of all life. No breeze came to sweep the ash away; the air was as still and cold as a morgue’s. But with each step she took, the gray dust lifted delicately, curling into the air before settling again on the tops of her shoes.
In the distance, morning sunlight was just beginning to pierce a notch in the opposite hills and spill over into the valley. The sky was colored sepia by the soot that still hung in the air. Much of the land remained in shadow, and it was difficult to discern any details.
Nothing moved; nothing caught her eye. If any animals had escape unharmed — and Angel doubted many had — then they were long gone, fled into the neighboring valleys and beyond. All that remained on the ground were humps of smoldering rock and mortar and the burnt chemical stench of the fire. Any corpses would be too small to identify.
But she had to be sure. Of course, this carried a great deal of risk, especially now that morning had broken. That the men who had done this hadn’t already returned only seemed to suggest that they were overly confident of their success and that the formality of checking required no such haste. More importantly, that they weren’t still here further indicated that no one had witnessed her driving away.
Maybe her run of bad luck had reached the end of its course.
She cleared the windows, then got back inside and started the car. Checking the gauges, she saw that she had just under a half tank of petrol remaining. The cans in the back provided an extra ten or so liters, more than enough to get her back to Bairin Zouqi, but probably not enough to make it all the way to Chifeng.
She steered back toward the road, gently guiding the vehicle over the uneven terrain. The pavement was evident only by its relative flatness. The tires left a telltale trail of crushed ash behind her, but there was nothing she could do about it.
Entering the village, she was struck numb once again by the utter destruction. Nothing had been spared. It had all gone up so quickly, the fire so utterly thorough and hot and fast, that little remained still smoldering.
She stopped and got out, and the ground was cold to the touch. Nowhere did she see any tracks in the ash. There were no survivors, of this she was now certain. Nevertheless, she made her way around the edge of the village, driving as fast as she dared and hoping the tires hit nothing sharp enough to puncture them. The circuit brought her to the point closest to the hills, yet she saw nothing to suggest that anyone had come from that direction.
The sun was now high enough to illuminate nearly the entire valley. With her heart and the taste of death sharing space in her throat and tears of despair running streaks down her cheeks, Angel returned to the road and left Baoyang Village for the last time.
* * *
She didn’t realize she was weeping openly until she tasted the salt of her tears on her lips. How long she’d been driving like that, numb on the outside yet filled with such pain and anger inside that all she could do was focus on the road ahead of the car, she had no idea.
With a start, she recognized the unmarked turnoff which Jian had pointed out two days before, the road which would take her to Wenbai and the Goh Li Xhia factory. She wrenched the wheel to the left, realizing that it was the next logical place to look for clues, and the car slid onto the gravel road. Pebbles pinged against the frame.
The road slowly ascended toward a distant rise, wending its way between the larger stone outcroppings. Halfway there, she came to a railroad crossing and a small structure, the twin of the station back in Baoyang. She guessed that this was where the workers must have disembarked at the beginnings of their shifts and then returned when they were finished. The factory could not be far beyond. Feeling exposed and deaf inside the car, she pulled it around to the back of the structure and parked it in the shadows beneath the overhang, then returned by foot to the road, backtracking a ways to make sure the vehicle wasn’t visible.
The road continued for another half kilometer before reaching the top of the rise. A heavy chain had been strung from one side to the other, blocking vehicular access. A metal sign dangled from the center. The notice was in Chinese, but the large red circle told her everything she needed to know.
Below, not more than a ki
lometer or so and situated on a low hump in the center of the valley, stood the factory. It appeared to be deserted.
Seeing it, she knew she should just go back, get in the car, and drive to the hospital in Bairin Zouqi before committing to doing anything else. Alone, she was ignorant of what dangers might lay before her. Jamie Peters would be an immense help, with her familiarity with the building, its layout and operations, and she might even be able to provide a way in.
Still unwilling to leave, Angel tested the chain’s firmness, as well as that of the anchor posts on either side of the road. Without a key for the padlock, nobody was getting through. And the ground beside the track was too rocky and uneven to go off-road around the barrier, not without doing some serious damage to the bottom of Jian’s car. If she broke an axle or ruptured a line, she’d be stranded out here in the middle of nowhere and likely a sitting duck for the men she’d escaped from back there. Getting caught wouldn’t help her or Jamie one bit.
She stood there a few more minutes looking down at the silent building. Then she stepped over the barrier and began her descent.
Chapter Twenty Five
Stasey Norstrom jumped from the passenger seat in the cab of the truck and waited for it to move past him before marching stiffly to the tent that contained the command center and the man from whom he took his orders. To say that he was troubled would be a serious understatement. Disturbed would be closer to the truth, though still far from accurate. He was beyond disturbed; he was . . . . Well, to put it bluntly, he was furious enough to skin a wildcat with nothing but his bare hands and teeth.
