by David Poyer
The Celestial Mountains.
Somehow while they’d wandered spring had come. Fierros squinted up at the sun, then back at the snowcapped peaks that still towered, distant as ever.
“So, is this Tajikistan?” Teddy asked him.
The airman wagged his head. “We gotta be close.”
“Close ain’t gonna cut it, Ragger. One step this side of the border, we’re recaptured murderers. The other side, free heroes. We’ve got to find out where we are.”
The airman covered his face with his hands. “I don’t have a map. Anyway, we can’t go any farther.”
Teddy looked at Trinh. The now-fully-blind Vietnamese was a ghost animating scraps of hide and rag. A shriveled mummy, crouched trembling over a stick. Teddy figured he himself probably looked just as bad, with the useless, dragging limb. No. Fierros was right. They were done.
“All right.” He sighed. “Time to see what the fat lady’s gonna sing.”
* * *
THE trail meandered down into a valley. After some time it joined another, which jogged for miles beside a creeklet that chuckled noisily over rounded sparkling stones bright as jewels. The snow-fed water was so crisp and cold that when he knelt to drink it made his teeth ache in their sockets.
They’d followed it for a couple of hours when from behind echoed a snorting, a dry padding, the jingle and squeak of harnesses and hooves. They flinched and stood aside.
The leader rode a white pony with a long shaggy mane. Dark-faced, mustached, he wore a turban and a black wool scarf pulled over his face. A long wood-stocked rifle, so old Teddy didn’t recognize the make, was slung over his shoulder, and a curved knife was stuck into his belt. Teddy and Fierros returned his nod. Behind the horseman a long string of camels set each padded foot delicately as ballerinas on the rocky, slanted path. The camels eyed the strangers distrustfully from heavily lashed lids, craning their necks for balance as they lurched and swayed downward. Huge bundles and pallets, some nearly as large as the animals’ bodies, were lashed on their backs. From the way they puffed and grunted, the weight must have been enormous.
A shout; Teddy caught a glimpse of another horseman on the heights behind them. Yet a third came galloping up from the rear of what seemed to be an endless caravan of the staggering, burdened camels.
Trinh grasped his shoulder. “What is it?” he quavered.
“A caravan, Major. Camels. Guys on horses.”
“Look like fucking bandits,” Fierros muttered.
“Yeah, but they’re probably just traders. Bundles of cloth and trade-good type stuff on those camels. Let’s tail on at the end of this bunch,” Teddy asided.
“Yeah, but who are they?”
“Who cares? We won’t stick out near as much if we ride into town with the circus.”
Another rider pelted past, kicking up dirt. Trinh yelled in Russian, trying to flag him down and ask where they were. “Priv’yet, droog! G’dye my? V’ kakoi strane eto?” The man barely glanced at them, then urged his pony on.
* * *
THE dogs came out half a mile from the village. Snapping, whining curs. They avoided the caravan, but not the three trailing it on foot. Swinging sticks drove them back. The kids arrived next, running circles around them. The boys looked Han, which made Teddy’s heart sink. Herds of small, filthy-assed sheep grazed around the village, with many lambs among them. He kept dragging his leg along, cutting a groove in the dirt, gouging through shoots of fresh tender grass.
“We need a cover story,” Trinh muttered. “In case this is still China.”
Fierros hissed, “It’s not gonna hold water, Nguyen. Pretty goddamn obvious what we are, if you ask me.”
“It’s still going to take time to report us. So what are we? Stick to the Russian story?”
Teddy murmured, “As good as we’re gonna get, I think.”
The kids circled again, screaming, then pelted back toward the village. Which looked bigger now. A party of men were unloading the camels, watering them, leading them to a corral. This seemed to be a caravanserai, if that was the word. A stopover. Maybe a good place for travelers without papers. Unfortunately, they didn’t have any money, either. The sole thing they possessed of any value was the empty AK. Still, though they got glances, no one seemed interested. They trudged through the unloading and feeding area, past a shallow pond where livestock were sucking up muddy water, and into the outskirts of the rather shabby town.
“We gotta figure out where the fuck we are,” Fierros hissed.
“Ix-nay on the goddam English-ay, Ragger. Just fucking nix on it, okay?”
Trinh, feeling his way with his stick, asked if they saw anyone who looked like a shopkeeper. Teddy scouted a couple of alleys. Flashing back, as he saw dangling sheep carcasses, to Afghanistan.
A leader’s recon, with the Aussie SAS. Bazaar day in a village. Butchered sheep there too, with the severed heads set in front of them. He remembered a long, nicked bayonet with a wooden handle and a hooked quillon that he’d only much later realized must have been for a Martini-Henry. Strong fucking tea, and the harsh burn of the big oval 800 Motrins they called SEAL candy … Maybe he could try his Arabic here. And, just like in Afghanistan, these alleys were lined with blankets covered with twisted, dusty roots, sheepskin coats, rugs, brass trivets and pothooks and lathe-turned cups.
At last an old guy smiled and beckoned him nearer. Teddy made a wait a minute gesture, went back for Trinh, and led him over, while Fierros squatted and studied the inside of his eyelids on the far side of the alley.
He could follow a good deal of the Russian, though from time to time the conversation veered into some other language. Maybe Trinh knew more Mandarin than he’d been letting on. Finally Trinh called them over. “Eto maoi drooz’ya,” he said. “Teodor Fyodorovich, Leonid Andreyevich, this is Gospodin Reyhan.”
“As salaam-aleikum,” Teddy said, giving him the old head, lips, heart salutation. The old guy beamed, and bowed from where he sat.
Trinh said, still in Russian, “Well, you’re a hit. But he says we’re still in Xinjiang. About a hundred kilometers from the Tajik border.”
Teddy tried to keep his face from falling. “Bozhe moi. We need to get home. What’s the best way west from here?”
The old man shrugged, spilling a mix of the other language so fast that Trinh motioned for him to slow down. Reyhan gestured for them to sit. He pointed to a rolled-up carpet and turned to a brazier behind him, and before long they were eating pilaf with little pieces of lamb out of soft blue plastic bowls with their fingers, and drinking that great tea Teddy remembered. He’d never had anything as delicious.
When the old man got up and left with the empty bowls, Trinh leaned in. Murmured, “He says—I think—that he can have someone lead us to the border.”
“We can’t pay. Did you tell him that?”
“I said we’ll give his grandson our rifle when we get there. He seemed surprised we had one.”
“Hooyah. What else? You were talking a long time.”
“Well, he had a lot to say. He thinks we’re Muslim, since you gave him that greeting. Anyway, he says this side of the town is ‘us.’ The other side is ‘Han.’ He told me to come back after dark, but to stay away from the other side today.”
“Specifically today?” said Teddy, but just then the old man came back. He crashed into a table, and Teddy realized the old guy was as blind at Trinh. He thrust a disk of heavy-looking bread into Trinh’s hands, and spoke again, gesticulating, as the Viet hoisted himself from the rug with his stick.
Trinh beckoned them toward the alley. “He says we must leave now. Come back after dark, and be ready to walk. Oh, and we should leave the avtomat here. It is a wonder we got this far into town with it. If the militsy see us with it, we will be arrested.”
They exchanged uneasy glances, but at last left it wedged into an upper beam of the shop and covered with thatch.
In the alley they tore at the bread, still ravenous, wolfing big chunks as t
hey walked. Teddy kept careful track of the turns. They had to find their way back in the dark. He glanced at the sun. Maybe three hours until sundown. Then they’d be on their way. Over the border, to freedom. He munched bread, stomach rumbling. Could it be possible? That they’d make it out of here after all?
They came out onto a larger, paved street, and he stopped dead.
Troops were spilling out of trucks. Jumping down, faces set, holding not worn AKs like the camp guards but the current-issue bullpups. Every fire team had what looked like a squad automatic weapon too. Instead of combat green these guys wore black uniforms, black ballistic gear, black helmets with smoked face shields that erased their features. Strapped to their backs were truncheons and black shields bearing Chinese characters and, oddly, the English word POLICE.
“What’s this—the riot squad?” Fierros muttered, shrinking back toward a fruit stand. Too late. When Teddy wheeled, other troops behind them were sweeping forward, shields and truncheons deployed, flushing protesting shopkeepers out of their stores, burka’d women from their shopping, forcing drivers out of their trucks and riders off their donkeys. Peremptory shouts, muffled by the face shields, echoed in the street.
Pushed and jostled, the escapees had no choice but to start walking along with the crowd. The men around them muttered angrily in Uighur as from a side street came the growl of a diesel. Teddy’s heart sank further.
A vehicle resembling a truck, but more ominous, beetle-black, topped with water cannon and fronted with a steel dozer blade, rumbled out. Its huge tires squealed on the asphalt as it took position behind them. Two Han peered down through armored glass from its cab. Speakers atop the urban control vehicle began blasting out … music. A jangly, happy tune that didn’t seem to light up the tense, frightened faces around him. Those he could see; the women had drawn their veils even more closely.
They had to get out of wherever this cattle drive was pushing them. But when he tried to fight his way out, dragging Trinh, who had a death grip on his jacket, the townies shoved back, cursing him. “Knock it off, Teddy,” Fierros hissed. “Those troops are looking our way. Pull your fucking hood down.”
“We got to get out of this roundup. They check IDs up ahead, we’re toast.” But he subsided. If he attracted attention, they were toast too.
A central square opened. Other gay jangly tunes floated from the streets leading in. Bright scarlet banners fluttered from lampposts, from metal standards. From the facades fronting the square huge posters of a square-faced Chinese stared out. In some pictures, he looked stern. In others he smiled, or held out his arms to children, who approached him holding up garlands, faces rapt in adulation.
Driven by troops and trucks, the crowds were slowly herded in. Around the square hundreds of folding tables were set up as if for a county fair, with more food than Teddy had seen in a long time: brightly colored oranges and lemons, stacks of the flat bread, vegetables, piles of green and yellow melons and cucumbers, sacks of rice and grain, arrays of brightly labeled cans. Suspiciously well-groomed young peasants stood behind the displays, evenly spaced, at attention.
Teddy’s band and the Uighur townfolk found themselves in what seemed to be the native section, close to an empty central area set off with portable metal fencing. They stood there for upwards of an hour, while the music played on. Then a woman at the far end of the square made an interminable speech in a language he couldn’t follow. The people around him could, though, and didn’t seem to like it. They murmured and scuffed their feet and spat, but glanced at the lines of troops and did nothing more.
Meanwhile, a TV crew drove a van in and began setting up not far from where Teddy and Trinh and Fierros still stood, it having been made clear by the troops that squatting or sitting during the speeches was discouraged, on pain of being truncheoned and hauled off.
At last she concluded and the crowd stirred. The television crew, too, perked up. They donned comm phones and manned cameras, panning to cover the cleared space the portable fencing enclosed.
A troupe of dancers emerged from some backstage area Teddy hadn’t noticed, down a path the crowd opened for them: tall, pretty, round-faced girls with long black braids, all in the same long scarlet tunics over close-fitting scarlet pants. The crowd, suddenly enthusiastic, cheered and whistled and slapped their thighs as the girls posed for a tableau, then broke all at once into a dervish dance.
The other loudspeakers muted as only one tune came up, mad, whirling, wild, the music of the sun and wind on the open steppe. The braids flew as the girls spun on white high heels, skirts flying up over those long red-silk-covered legs, smiling vivaciously.
Obie was as entranced as everyone around him. When the first pickup came barreling in from a side street, only when one of the Uighurs grabbed him and pulled him down did he look that way.
To catch a confused impression of black flags, spray-painted slogans, and men with black scarves over their faces pointing AKs from the truck beds. Then a confused melange of sight and sound. Trinh shouting in his ear. The poppoppop of fire rattling off the buildings. Arms flinging smoking objects. The screech of tires, and a sustained, horrific screaming interspersed with thuds as one of the pickups, swerving into the section reserved for the Han spectators, plowed through human beings one after the other, like a bowling ball through a row of pins.
With heavy, concussive cracks, whatever the guys in the pickups were throwing began going off. The air quaked. Teddy fought free of the hands pulling him down, and stood just as he realized he shouldn’t have.
A rattling of bolts came from the troops behind them. He glanced back to see they’d discarded shields and truncheons, and were aiming rifles. He grabbed the also-standing Trinh, and pulled him down as the first volley of full-automatic 5.8mm crackled out over their heads. Trinh grunted and flinched as he went down. Somehow the troupe had disappeared, whisked away. The troops’ fire followed the careening trucks, but was knocking down civilians in the shrieking, stampeding crowd as well. The panicked mob rushed the carefully arranged produce displays, upsetting the tables and smashing windows in their desperation to escape the escalating carnage in the confined square, which was rapidly filling with smoke.
Teddy and Fierros and Trinh kept hugging the blood-spattered asphalt. Someone was shouting commands. The riot troops quick-stepped forward, paused to fire again, then advanced once more. Teddy laced his fingers over his skull and lay very still as heavy black boots marched over him. He tensed for a bayonet-thrust or a shot, but it didn’t come. When the soldiers were past he low-crawled to Fierros, who was lying with hands clenched over his head. “Ragger,” he shouted.
“Here…”
“Nguyen. Nguyen!”
But the splatter behind the Viet’s head told him the Major had dropped a split second too late. Caught one of the rounds the troops were firing over them, as Teddy had pulled him down. He lay with head cocked, little Ho beard mashed into the glistening asphalt, a puzzled expression on his seamed face. His skull leaked a gray-and-red gruel.
“Nguyen,” Teddy said again, hand on the old Viet’s birdlike shoulder. Patting it, one last time.
Then, a few yards away, he spotted the rifle.
One dropped, obviously, by the wounded trooper who blinked dazedly at him, lying beside it. Teddy crawled over. Grabbed the rifle, and racked the charging handle as a renewed crackle of fire swept the square.
He glanced at Trinh once more. Then dropped to a knee, grunting as his dead leg all but buckled, and tried to get a sight picture. The optic was queerly perched, too high, too far back on the carry handle. His thumb groped for a safety.
He panned across a bloody, heaped massacre. The pickups were on the far side of the square. One lay wrecked and burning, but the others were still rolling, black flags fluttering, weaving this way and that as they ran down fleeing figures. They’d thrown all their bombs, apparently, but AK fire still popped.
On this side, the government forces were still firing hard. Only not at the attac
kers, but into the remains of the crowd, trapped between them and the buildings, execution-style. Bodies littered the pavement. Screams and moans filled the air. The four-power scope pulled in an old man’s arms raised in plea, a woman’s openmouthed scream as she shielded a child. He stared. He’d seen ugly scenes before, but never an SS-style massacre of civilians by troops.
The optic found a soldier speaking into a radio. The crosshairs settled on the back of his helmet. Not more than a hundred yards. Teddy’s finger curled. A two-stage let-off. The recoil rocked him back only slightly. Effective straight-line design. It looked weird, but he liked this rifle. His sight picture came back down perfectly, but the trooper wasn’t there. He was crumpled to the pavement.
Teddy swept the sight left, then right. Picked out another noncom and fired again. Now if he could only find whoever was giving them orders—
A hand clutched his shoulder. “Oberg. Fuck’re you doing?”
“Taking down baddies. They’re enemy. Remember?”
“We got three seconds to get out of here before they figure out you’re sniping them.”
“We aren’t getting out, Ragger. There’s another rifle over there. Grab it and let’s go down shooting.”
But the black-clad soldiers had caught on. They were scattering, taking cover. Abandoning their execution-style fusillade, but turning on him. The first shots cracked around them. Bullets whacked and hummed off the pavement.
Teddy flicked the selector to full auto and hosed them down. The return fire slackened, but picked up again as his magazine went dry. And out of the street behind the troops a huge silhouette lumbered, snorted, shouldered its way forward. One of the beetle-black riot trucks, its bulldozer blade raised threateningly.
Teddy rolled for the cover of the TV van, but someone was clutching his leg. The wounded trooper whose rifle he’d grabbed. Teddy buttclubbed the guy until he felt like letting go, and ripped his mag pouch off. Reloaded, he fired out another magazine, ducking out for short bursts. From the other side, Fierros was fumbling at his rifle, but not seeming to understand how to operate it. The volume of incoming kept building. And somebody had a light machine gun. It began ripping chunks out of the van every time he ducked out.
