by Adam Hall
‘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 ql shdu lad’
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 caliber, 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 guttural 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 armory 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 t
his 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.
More shouting.
‘C’mon over here. He wants us side by side.’
I walked past the big radiator, feeling its heat on the side of my face.
We couldn’t do anything with heat.
‘Not too close, okay?’
I stopped, turning my back to the light, and heard the sergeant’s boots crunching across the shale away from us. He was getting into the jeep. It occurred to me that it could suddenly be over, that he’d positioned us close together in the beams of the headlights so that he could pump out a dozen or so shells from the assault gun and then drive away, they tried to sell some kind of story about being geologists but I think they were just a couple of underground revolutionaries and we’re better off without people like that, send someone to take the truck in to the barracks, leave them where they are, because that was the way of life in the People’s Republic of China now, you wave a placard with the word Democracy on it and they’ll shoot you dead, you kneel on a prayer mat and they’ll burn your monastery from under you, these are the dark ages in a totalitarian country and if you try to run counter to the requirements of the state then the state will require you to be shot, so it is written so it shall come to pass— ‘Zhou!’
‘Walk,’ Chong said.
The engine of the jeep was throttled up a little, and there was more shouting.
‘We keep in front of the headlights.’
Began walking, the jeep behind us, its tires crunching across the ground.
‘Chong. Don’t do anything.’
‘You got it.’
‘If I think there’s anything we can do, I’ll give you time.’
More shouting.
‘Keep in front of the headlights.’
The jeep was turning in a curve and we moved with it, our shadows going ahead of us, reaching into the darkness beyond the range of the headlight beams.
‘Sure, okay, you’ll give me time.’
The spread of light turned in a half-circle and we turned with it, walking, the four of us, two men and two shadow men, across the roof of the world.
We couldn’t do anything with shadows.
The truck came into view again and we approached it from the rear, and there was another shout.
‘Halt,’ Chong said.
Boots rang on metal, then a third shadow moved in as the sergeant walked into the light.
Orders.
‘You stay right where you are, okay?’
Chong went forward to the tailboard and hit the pins clear of the posts and it swung down, banging against the stops.
The sergeant walked past us at a distance of fifteen feet with the gun trained on us; then he climbed the side of the truck and sat on the roof of the cab facing the rear. High on the big truck, he was above the full glare of the beams.
He barked an order, and Chong pulled himself up to the bed of the truck and stood there, waiting, his back to me now, his shadow beside the sergeant’s legs on the rear of the cab.
‘La shi xie shenme?’ Pointing.
Chong looked down, then up at the sergeant again. What are those! Something like that. They’re drilling rods.
‘La xiene?’
Chong began shifting the equipment, dragging the steel bars to one side, heaving a canvas bag off the floor and dumping it out of the way. The sergeant sat with the big gun sloping downward, keeping us both covered.
Some of the equipment was light: short steel rods, five-pound hammers, a set of levers with a strap around them. Chong pulled them aside, stacking them out of the way. I watched him. They would make good weapons.
We couldn’t do anything with weapons.
There were three crates, and that was what the sergeant was interested in. He barked more orders, and Chong snapped the fasteners open and lifted a lid. In the first crate there were instruments of some sort; I couldn’t see into the crates from where I stood because the bed of the truck was more or less at eye level, but Chong was taking a few things out, holding them up. In the second crate there was camping gear for the drilling crew: billy cans, butane stoves, a frying pan, blankets. Chong dropped them back into the crate and swung the lid down.
I knew now.
The exhaust gas came clouding through the wash of light, giving it a bluish tint, and sometimes the engine’s note faltered and picked up again, perhaps because of impurities in the fuel, or a loose spark-plug lead. My shadow stood against the tailboard of the truck, stark, sharp-edged at this distance.
I knew now what the soldier was looking for, what they were all looking for, the soldiers up there manning the roadblock, the soldiers manning the roadblocks in a huge circle right around the city of Lhasa.
Chong worked on the fasteners of the third crate and swung the lid open.
‘Laer shi shenme?’
Chong pulled out a blanket, then a cushion, then another one.
I got crates back there, one of them empty. He’ll be snug as a bug in there, got a blanket and some cushions, nothing too good for that guy.
A lot of questions now from the sergeant, and answers from Chong.
‘Wei shenme chule zhe xie dongxi wai zhe xiangzhi shi kongde?’
‘Ling yige xiangzhi mei kong.’
‘You heng duo kong. Da kai xiangzhi.’
Chong went to the first crate, the one with the drilling gear, and opened it.
‘Bu shi laige xiangzhi. Shi di er ge.’
Chong let the lid fall and went to the second crate and opened it. I think the sergeant had asked why there were only a blanket and a few cushions in the last crate and Chong had said there wasn’t room in the other ones, but it didn’t matter very much what construction I was putting on things because the sergeant was standing upright suddenly.
‘Henghao!’
Excitement in his voice, triumph in his whole attitude. He hadn’t found the man he was looking for, the man they were all looking for, but he believed he might have found a potential hiding place for a hunted man in transit, if one needed.
He wouldn’t be sure. Chong might have told him that the empty crate was for the ore samples they’d be bringing back, and that the blanket and cushions had been thrown in there for the drilling crew as an afterthought, but the search the army had mounted tonight from here to the Lhasa River was for Dr. Xingyu Baibing, the notorious dissident, and that was all this sergeant had got on his mind.
‘Hia che!’
Chong came across the tailboard and dropped to the ground, his eyes passing across mine with some kind of message that I couldn’t interpret. He looked calm, still, and I wondered whether he’d been interrogated before; when I’d asked him earlier if he’d seen any action he’d said sure, a couple of times, but that didn’t tell me much. He might have fought some kind of rearguard operation or got clear of an intelligence trap but that kind of experience wouldn’t help him now. The sergeant would keep the assault rifle trained on us until we were back in the cab of the Jeifang and he’d be behind us all the way to the roadblock. Then we would be interrogated, and by professionals.
There wouldn’t be any kind of rearguard action we could fight and we weren’t going to get out of this trap because there wasn’t anything we could do about it now. We couldn’t do anything with heat or with shadows or with weapons and I’d stopped grasping at straws in my mind and started thinking ahead, and all I could see ahead of us was an interrogation cell and their eyes in the shadow of their peaked caps and the instruments, w
hatever instruments they would use. These people had refined the art of torture over thousands of years, but there still wouldn’t be anything more effective than a sharpened twig of bamboo under the eyelids or the nails.
I tote a capsule.
Quite possibly, but a capsule isn’t the answer to everything. If the opposition think you’re a high-level intelligence officer they’ll search you for a capsule and if they find it you’re finished, but even if they don’t make a search you’ve got to reach the bloody thing and pop it and break the shell before they can move in, and there’s something else: you can put a man through Norfolk and throw every psychologist in the place at his head and pass him out with a Suffix-8 after his name in the ultraclassified records as a man who is confidently expected to use a capsule if the circumstances dictate the necessity and that is of course a quote, my good friend, it is a direct quote from the book of rules, don’t you think it’s charming, I mean as a euphemism, meaning as it does that he is confidently expected, this man, this doomed and beleaguered spook, to use his capsule because he believes - and undertakes in his contract to uphold and implement the belief - that his life has less importance than his duty, that he recognizes the highest priority of them all in this circumscribed and exacting trade: to protect the mission.
‘Dakai che dangban!’
Chong moved to the tailboard of the truck.
Yet even then, the capsule trick isn’t foolproof. You may well have passed out of intensive training - intensive? But I joke, my good friend, it’s ruthless, merciless, murderous - you may well have passed out with the exotic Suffix-8 after your name and it may be that the opposition has failed to search you for a capsule, but there will be the moment of decision-making, and that will vary from one man to another, will vary even within each individual according to his personal disposition as he sits under the blinding light with his inquisitors, for you cannot always decide exactly when you will no longer be able to stand this, no longer be able to allow them to do this to you as the sharpened twig of bamboo is thrust again, no longer be able to shut off your mind to what is happening and shift into theta waves, is thrust again and deeper now, deeper, you cannot always decide how long it will be before the instant arrives when you know you would prefer death, and then of course it’s too late to get at your capsule.