The Altman Code - Covert One 04

by Robert Ludlum

  Asgar stared at Jon as if he were a magician. “It was a trick. Li and Yu’s trick. It’s not them. Those poor people are impostors. Perhaps some of her fellow actors, that she hired. They and the two guards were sacrifices, scene decoration to make the real Li Kuonyi and Yu Yongfu’s ruse believable. But--?” “Yes,” Jon said. “But.” As he spoke, down below Feng hunched again and searched the dead woman. When he stood once more, he held a small object. “What the deuce did he find?”

  “I’d guess a miniature microphone, receiver, and speaker. That’s how Li put on the charade, and why she was the only one who spoke.” In the valley, Feng seemed to realize the same thing. He raised his head and scanned the mountainside above the Sleeping Buddha. When he saw nothing, he whirled and barked more orders in Chinese. “He’s telling them—“ Asgar began.

  Jon jumped up, shouting, “Now we fire! Fire! Fire!” Asgar echoed the order in Uigher, and their part of the hillside erupted. All twenty-two assault rifles opened a blistering fire on Feng’s trapped men and soldiers.

  Monday, September 18.

  Washington, D.C.

  The low sun of late afternoon probed through small gaps in the heavy drapes that shut off Fred Klein’s office in Covert-One’s new headquarters from the outside world. Still, the outside world loomed large in Klein’s office. His face, haggard from lack of sleep and missed meals, bristled with a ragged six-day growth of gray beard too rapidly turning white. His heavy, red-streaked eyes appeared permanently fixed on the ship’s clock on his wall. His head was cocked sideways in the direction of the blue telephone. Had there been anyone to see, they would have thought him paralyzed, hypnotized, in a trance, unconscious, or dead, because he had not moved in so long. Only his chest rose and fell slightly as he breathed. When the blue phone rang, he jerked alert and nearly fell from the chair as he grabbed the receiver. “Jon!”

  “He’s not called?” the president asked.

  Disappointment and tension radiated from his low voice. “No, sir.”

  “We have two hours. Or less.”

  “Or more. Ships can be unpredictable.”

  “The weather in the Arabian Sea is calm and clear all the way to the Persian Gulf and on to Basra.”

  “Weather isn’t the only variable, Mr. President.”

  “That’s what scares me, Fred.”

  “It scares me, too, sir.” Klein could hear the president breathing. There was a slight echo from the other end of the connection. Wherever he was calling from, the president was alone. “What do you think is happening? in ... where is Colonel Smith?”

  Klein reminded him, “Dazu, Sichuan. At the Sleeping Buddha.” The president fell silent. “They took me there once. The Chinese. To all those carvings.”

  “I’ve never seen them.”

  “They’re remarkable. Some are nearly two thousand years old, carved by great artists. I wonder what we’ll leave of use for those alive a thousand years from now?” The president was silent again. “What time is it there? At the Sleeping Buddha?”

  “The same as it is in Beijing, Sam. China gerrymandered their time zones into a single one to make it convenient. It’s about four a.m. there.”

  “Shouldn’t it be over? Shouldn’t we have heard? Not even a word about my father?”

  “I don’t know, Mr. President. Colonel Smith knows the time frame.”

  Klein could sense the president’s nodding. “Yes, of course he does.”

  “He’ll do his best. No one’s best is better.”

  Again the affirmative nodding somewhere in the White House, as if the president were sure it would all work out, although a large part of him feared it would not. “I have to get the manifest, and then I have to get a copy to Niu Jianxing in Beijing. But now it’s too late, isn’t it?

  There’s no time to get even a copy to China and hope that’s enough to convince the hardliners. They’d laugh at a fax, or at a copy sent over the Internet. They could be too easily counterfeited. Or at least, if we’re right and there’s someone inside Zhongnanhai who wants war, there’s no way he’d have to believe anything short of the actual manifest.”

  “Jon will think of something,” Klein said reassuringly. But he had no idea what that could be.

  Neither did the president. “In an hour, maybe less, I’ll tell Brose to give the order. We’re going to have to board the Empress. I don’t see any way around it, dammit. You did your best. Everyone did their best.

  All we can do now is hope and pray the Chinese back off, but I don’t see that happening.”

  “No, sir. Neither do I.”

  The silence was longer. The voice that finally came was sad, tragic:

  “It’s the idiocies and tragedy of the Cold War all over again. Only this time, the weapons are more advanced, and we may be standing alone. In two hours, we’ll know.”

  Tuesday, September 19.

  Dazu.

  At the base of the mountains, where the trail led up and over into the valley of the carvings, David Thayer slept, tired by the unaccustomed activity and tension of the night. Chiavelli watched the old man, the Chinese-made AK given him by Asgar Mahmout resting across his lap in the dark interior of the battered limo. He had been greatly impressed with Thayer’s ability to keep up and suspected that his exhaustion came less from activity than from tension.

  The tension, especially here under the stifling branches and brush hiding them, of doing nothing but waiting was affecting even Chiavelli.

  He found himself dozing, only to jerk awake to the beating of his own heart. He took longer and longer to distinguish between dozing and being awake each time he opened his eyes. This time, as he awoke with a painful whip of his neck, it was only seconds before he knew he was actually awake, and that the sound in his ears was not the pounding of his heart.

  It was many feet walking on the road. Heavy feet, booted, and moving in an all-too-familiar rhythm. Marching feet, coming toward them.

  David Thayer had heard them, too. “Soldiers. I know the rhythm. Chinese soldiers, marching.”

  Chiavelli listened intently. “Ten? Twelve? A squad?”

  “I’d say so.” Thayer’s voice was shaky.

  “On the road, no more than five hundred yards away. A quarter of a mile.”

  “We ... we’re off the road,” Thayer decided nervously. “The brush and branches should hide us.”

  “Maybe, but what are they doing here at this hour? It’s oh four hundred.

  Four a.m. They couldn’t have discovered you’re missing, or there’d be an army out there. They wouldn’t be walking. No, these guys are after someone or something else, and I’ve got a bad feeling.”

  That scared the old man, but he tried to hold up. “You think it’s about Colonel Smith and the Uighers’ mission. But how could anyone know? It’s more probable they have no connection at all to what’s happening at Baoding Shan.”

  “Can we take the chance? Do nothing?” Chiavelli answered his own question: “Absolutely not. If they’re heading for the valley, they’ll blindside Jon, Asgar, and the Uighers.”

  “We’ve got to help!”

  “I’ll try to hold them here. At least, to slow them down.”

  “What about me?”

  “Stay here, keep quiet, and you should be safe. If I don’t come back, you’ll have to drive yourself to the Uigher hideout.”

  Thayer shook his head. “Unrealistic. I haven’t driven anything in fifty years, Captain. And the last time I counted, two guns were always better than one. That hasn’t changed. You’re not protecting me by leaving me alone. Give me a gun. I haven’t fired a weapon in fifty years, either, but one doesn’t forget how to aim and pull the trigger.”

  Chiavelli stared at the white hair, the parchment skin, the determined look. “You’re sure? The worst that’ll happen if they discover you here in the limo is they’ll send you back to the prison farm. Klein’s extraction team should be ready by now. It’s smart for you to stay here and keep your head down.”

  Th
ayer held out his hand. “I have a Ph. D., Dennis. I’m officially smart.

  Give me the gun.”

  Chiavelli stared. Thayer seemed completely calm. There was a stray moonbeam that glowed through the brush. In its light, he could see Thayer’s eyes were smiling, as if mortality and death were longtime companions. Chiavelli nodded, understanding. Of course, the old man was right.

  Chiavelli put Jon’s 9mm Beretta in the gnarled hand. The hand was steady. Then he opened the car door on his side, which faced away from the road, and cautioned Thayer to be quiet. They slid out through the camouflage covering and hid behind it. The moon was directly overhead.

  They raised up enough to see the road was a luminous white ribbon and soon spotted Chinese soldiers approaching at a brisk march. There were ten soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army, led by an infantry captain.

  Chiavelli whispered, “How many men in a squad of PLA infantry?”

  “I don’t know.”

  They had no more time to think about that. Chiavelli took careful aim with the AK-47 and squeezed off a single shot.

  The first of the marching soldiers cried out and dropped to the ground, holding his leg and writhing.

  At the same time, Thayer held the Beretta in both hands and fired. The bullet struck the road twenty feet in front of the column, sending up a geyser of dirt. The nine soldiers jumped into the undergrowth, dragging their injured comrade with them. Seconds later, they returned a barrage of fire in the general direction of the limousine, but not directly at it.

  Chiavelli whispered, “They don’t know where we are yet. They’re firing wild.” A voice barked in Chinese, and the gunshots ceased. Chiavelli and David Thayer waited. Sooner or later the soldiers would have to advance, but the longer they remained hidden, the better. Thayer’s face seemed flushed. Chiavelli had that heightened sense of reality combat always brought. A light sweat covered him. Another bark, and Thayer shuddered.

  The nine rose in unison from the brush lining the road on both sides and charged, their moonlit white eyes searching for the enemy, and shooting as they came. Thayer leaned around the rear of the limo and fired three quick shots. His aim was better this time, and a cry of pain from the brush rewarded him. “Maybe we can drive them off,” he exulted, perhaps remembering all the pain of more than fifty years of captivity far from home. The soldiers dove for cover in a panic, leaving the man Thayer had hit trying to crawl from the road on his own. They were as poorly trained as everyone in the service had told Chiavelli to expect.

  Obviously, they had no combat experience. He doubted whoever was barking orders would get them to charge again in a hurry. Chiavelli and Thayer stayed down, out of sight, counting the minutes and waiting. Time crawled. Twenty minutes, and still no attack. Good minutes, since they kept the squad away from the Sleeping Buddha. Then Chiavelli caught a silvery flash. Moonlight had reflected off something, perhaps the dial of a wristwatch. He had an uneasy feeling, then a sensation of sound and movement. Suddenly, the bushes seemed to be crawling toward them, not ten yards away. “Fire!” he whispered wildly. “Open fire, Mr. Thayer!

  Fire!” His AK-47 on top of the car, he ripped off a long string of bullets as the Beretta screamed with gunshots next to him. But the angle was bad, and they had to stay up on their toes in order to see well enough to aim. Suddenly, two shots exploded into the limo. The hot smell of burned metal singed Chiavelli’s nose. Shots sounded from behind.

  Voices shouted in Chinese. Thayer’s skin turned as ghostly white as the moon. “They’re telling us to freeze, drop our weapons and surrender, or they’ll kill us. We can still—“ “Absolutely not. Forget it.” He had promised he would keep the president’s father safe, and a return to prison was better than being dead. As long as they both remained alive, he still had a chance of being able to continue to protect him. “We’ve held them a half hour at least. Sometimes a half hour can make all the difference.”

  He gave the AK-47 a shove and let it fall on the far side of the limo.

  He raised his hands high over his head.

  Trembling, David Thayer dropped the Beretta and put his hands on the top of his Mao cap. His few hours of freedom had ended. “Alas,” he whispered.

  The eight soldiers in front, supporting their two wounded, rose from the brush and advanced. They picked up the discarded weapons, grinning as two more soldiers appeared behind Thayer and Chiavelli. Apparently, there were twelve men in a PLA infantry squad.

  The officer—a captain with his pistol out—stopped in front of them, speaking angrily. Thayer translated, “He’s asking who we are. He’s figured out we’re Americans. He ... oh, God.” He glanced at Chiavelli.

  “He wants to know whether we’re part of the spy team with Colonel Jon Smith.”

  In the valley of the Baoding Crescent, Feng Dun’s surviving gunslingers and soldiers had taken cover and were beginning to return a weak, sporadic fire.

  “Cease fire,” Jon told Asgar.

  “You’re sure, my friend? Some are still alive and kicking. Shouldn’t we go down and mop up? At least, make sure that monster Feng Dun is dead.

  I’m fairly certain I hit him.”

  “No! Fan out and search the slopes wherever Li Kuonyi could have hidden but seen what happened. The survivors will run away now.”

  “You think--?”

  “She and Yu are up there somewhere with the manifest. Let’s find them.”

  Asgar gave the order, urging his men to sweep through the vegetation at a dog trot, circling around Feng’s remaining men. “It’s less than an hour until dawn, and that firefight will have been heard halfway to Chongqing.”

  “I know.” Jon trotted ahead over the difficult terrain. He looked left and right at the long Uigher line as they searched. He knew their chances were slight, plus time was running out. They had little time to locate Li and Yu, get the manifest, and somehow send it to Washington.

  Suddenly, gunfire echoed from less than a hundred yards ahead. Jon wrenched his head around, staring at a spot directly above and to the left of the Sleeping Buddha. Gunfire from an assault rifle—and response from a single pistol.

  “Hold it,” Jon called to Asgar. He crouched in the brush.

  Asgar raised his hand to stop his fighters and lowered it palm down to tell them to go to ground and be quiet. He whispered, “What do you think, Jon?”

  “Feng maybe?”

  Asgar grimaced in regret. “We should’ve hied ourselves down to examine the bodies in the valley.”

  “There wasn’t time. We had to try to get to Li Kuonyi first.”

  “If it’s Feng, it seems we failed.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not.”

  Motioning his men to move quietly, Asgar joined Jon. Minutes later, the line of Uighers approached a clearing. Asgar signaled to stop at the edge where they could retain cover. Jon nodded to their left. The clearing ended at the cliff above the crescent of carvings, where someone looking down would have a direct view of the valley as well as the slope and walkway in front of the Sleeping Buddha.

  “Li Kuonyi could’ve seen everything from there,” Jon said.

  Asgar sighed and nodded.

  On their right, an assault rifle fired a short burst of three from a towering rock formation, where clusters of large boulders jutted above the trees and brush. It was some fifty yards from the edge of the cliff, overlooking the Buddha valley.

  The gunfire was answered by a single pistol shot from a grove of trees closer to the edge, directly in front of where Jon, Asgar, and the Uighers hid. The bullet exploded sharp, deadly stone chips from the rock formation.

  “Look,” Asgar said.

  Only ten yards from the cluster of rocks, closer to where Jon and the Uighers watched, was a smaller rock group. A large tree had fallen across the boulders, and Jon saw movement behind it. As he studied it, the assault rifle squeezed off another short burst from its higher vantage point, detonating wood splinters from the fallen tree.

  A low, mesmerizing voice Jon had
hoped never to hear again said in English, “A neat trap, Madame Li. As good as any I’ve seen. Your hired hands killed many of my men, but—unluckily for you—failed to kill me.”

  Li Kuonyi, her musical tones as calm as if she were greeting a visitor in her Shanghai living room, spoke from behind the fallen tree, protected from the rear by the rocks. “I also failed to get the money. I expect you have that, which makes me surprised that you returned.” Feng said, “I still need the invoice manifest, and I suspect, dear lady, you’ve run out of ammunition. You should be dead, and I’d have it, except for your friend over there in the trees. I wonder who he could be?”

  Asgar whispered, “Why are they speaking English?”

  “Damned if I know,” Jon said. “Maybe Feng’s got some men hidden somewhere that he doesn’t want to know what they’re saying.”

  Li Kuonyi was mocking: “There are many things you don’t know, Feng.”

  A man’s voice sounded nervously from next to her: “You should’ve kept the manifest when you had it, Feng. None of this would’ve happened. No one would’ve been hurt.”

  “Ah? A pleasure to hear you again, boss. Foolish of me to believe you’d kill yourself, even for the future of your family. But, then, your salvation was Madame Li’s doing, wasn’t it? My mistake. I knew who the man was in your house long ago.” Li Kuonyi said, “You always did talk too much, Feng. Since you say you want the manifest very much still, we might be interested in the money in your possession.”

  “All business as usual, Madame? The same arrangement as before, I trust.

  Mcdermid’s two million in exchange for the manifest.”

  “Of course.”

  “Then we have a deal. Does the woman do all your talking now, boss? Ah, well, we can’t all be men.”

  There was a scramble of movement in the smaller rock formation. Yu

  Yongfu stood up, red-faced, pushing away Li’s restraining hands. “I am

  as much—“

  The savage explosion of bullets ripped down from Yu’s throat to his crotch. Blood sprayed black into the night. A furious return fusillade from the nearby grove nearly drowned out Li Kuonyi’s agonized scream.