by Adam Hall
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, whatever 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.
So you have to compromise.
Chong heaved at the tailboard. He wasn't a strong man, too thin, too light. But he was winning: he'd got it to shoulder level. The sergeant watched him struggling.
You have to compromise. You leave it as late as you can, and then decide. You go into the cell and look around and see what they've got for you, how serious they are, how professional, and you look at the people who are going to work on you, and make a decision. If they look as if they're prepared to take things to the limit and you don't feel within you at this particular moment the ability, the spiritual, almost supernatural ability to go through anything, anything at all, then you go as fast as you can for the capsule and crack it with your teeth, finito.
'La shi shenme?'
Sergeant shouting.
I knew my capabilities, what they would be when we arrived in the interrogation cell. But I didn't know what his would be, Chong's, and it worried me because he knew where Xingyu Baibing was, and that would be their only question.
'La shi shenme?'
The sergeant had moved to the tailboard. I couldn't quite see what was happening because Chong's body was in the way, but I think he'd tried to hide something, push it among the other stuff in the truck, and the sergeant had seen him, wanted to know what it was.
'Na guolai gel wo!'
Chong gave it to him, some kind of wallet, and the sergeant opened it, holding it in the glare of the jeep's headlights, and I was close enough to see a wad, two wads of Chinese banknotes with elastic bands round them.
'Zhe yonglai gan shenmede?'
'Xunllan gongren de gongzhi.'
Wages, for the drilling crew? There wasn't any drilling crew.
They were Y100 banknotes, if both wads were the same. It looked as if there were two lots of perhaps fifty. At a rough guess, the equivalent of?1,000 sterling. The sergeant was looking at them, looking at Chong. Chong was saying nothing. The engine of the jeep throbbed steadily in the background; the exhaust gas clouded blue in the headlight beams.
It's on record that the pay of a sergeant in the People's Liberation Army runs at about Y200 a month. This one was looking at twenty month's pay.
'Ni xiang huiluo wo?'
'Dangran bushi.'
Asking Chong, perhaps, if he was trying to bribe him. But he couldn't be. There wouldn't be any price on the honor and prestige of this man if he could find the archenemy of the People's Republic of China, Xingyu Baibing. Chong would know that.
'Henghao!' The sergeant pushed the wallet inside his greatcoat and went on talking, and when he'd finished Chong turned to me.
'Okay, he says we have to stay right where we are. When he's back in the jeep we have to get into the cab of the truck and head for the roadblock up there. He follows us. Christ sake don't make any kind of move, okay? He's mad at me.' He turned back to the sergeant and gave him a careful bow.
The sergeant began walking backward to the jeep, keeping the assault rifle at the hip.
'You know the worst thing, for me,' Chong said, 'about Tiananmen? They turned the lights out before they started the massacre. Don't you think that was obscene?'
The sergeant swung his assault rifle into the jeep and Chong took his glove off and put a hand into his pocket and there was a dull flash and the sergeant bloomed like a huge crimson flower in the night.
'Don't you think that was obscene,' Chong said, 'turning the lights out?'
Chapter 19: Bells
Something brushed my foot, a rat, I think.
I stood still, just inside the doorway. It was as far as I had got. I watched the two great beams of timber, above my head and to my right. There was a gap there, where the balustrade along the second floor had broken away. The movement had been there, just now. I had seen it when I had come in.
They were everywhere, the rats. You heard them squeaking. It was winter, and they were desperate for shelter all over the town, desperate for food.
The movement had been just there, in the gap along the balustrade, or what I'd thought was movement. This was the door the abbot had shown me earlier. I could come in this way without disturbing the monks: I'd told him it was important to me, not to disturb them in their prayers, their daily life, and in part it was true. But he understood. It mattered more to me that I wasn't seen coming or going.
The moon was high in the south, its light slanting in rays through the breaks in the timber where the roof on that side had been destroyed; the rays were gray, substantial, like a milkness in water, because of the incense they burned in here, and the yak-butter lamps with their smoky wicks. I was used to the smell of this place; it was pungent, a presence; it only faded after I'd been back here for an hour or so.
Dpal Idan mgon po…
It was close on midnight, a time, I suppose, for the last prayers of the day. The chanting was not loud; it came from the big hall on the east side of the monastery, where the huge gilded Buddha sat, brought here from a gutted temple after the uprising, the abbot had told me.
Po spyan hdren na a…
Small bells rang at intervals. The chanting and the bells didn't worry me; the whole ruin was already alive with sound: in the intense heat of the sunshine during the day the timbers swelled, and at night cooled; their straining was as familiar and as particular to this place as its smell, and I was used to it. It was a kind of silence, and unfamiliar sound would alert me.
Movement again and I caught it but not in time to identify it before it was gone. I kept still, waiting for minutes, then took a step across the earth floor, sighting again from a new angle. At this point hallucination began, the eyes becoming jaded by the unchanging view, the mind presenting phantasmagoria for them to look at. I let them close and stood for minutes on end, clearing the images.
Perhaps it had been the same kind of illusion when I'd come in, the movement I'd seen, thought I'd seen. Or possibly there were owls here. It was time to go forward, find the first ladder and climb. Xingyu Baibing was in danger, here now; the police and the PSB had called in the military to help in the search and they'd set up roadblocks everywhere and soon they'd be beating on every door in the town, searching every building, house, hotel, temple, monastery.
Chong was waiting outside with the big Jeifang.
It had taken three hours to get here, moving overland and keeping clear of the roads and their intersections, coming up against terrain that wouldn't allow
even the big truck across it, turning back a mile and going north again, keeping a watch on the lights flashing far in the distance.
'Little thing I learned from the CIA.'
We'd been bumping and rattling for nearly two hours since we'd left the jeep, over rocks that split under the weight of the front wheels and sent bright slivers flying through the moonlight. I was waiting for a tire to blow.
'How to make them?'
'Yes.' The little remote-control bombs. 'They were designed for automobiles and planes, but I've used them a few times on people. They're good. I call them people-boomers. I got a few bigger ones stashed away, building boomers. You need any, you tell me.'
He'd driven the military jeep half a mile and run it into a ravine deep enough to hide it from level sight. They'd see it all right from a chopper in the morning but we couldn't do anything about that; all we wanted was enough time to get to the monastery and take Xingyu Baibing to a new hide-out. There was no hope of getting him to the airport now.
We'd left the sergeant to the birds.
'He'll be picked to the bone inside of two hours from first light,' Chong said when he got back into the truck. 'There's a sky-burial site a couple of kilometres from here, that direction. The birds know where to come. Then, get a wind, the rest should be covered in silt, but the military are going to look for the bastard anyway, once they find the jeep.' He peeled some chewing gum. 'Did me a whole lot of good, you know? Drop in the ocean, sure, but I got a real kick out of looking at all that red in the moonlight, head coming off — did you see the head coming off? Kind of making a personal statement, lighting one little lamp in Tiananmen, you know the trouble with guys, I mean guys as distinct from gals? They're so fucking romantic. Glory of war, all that shit.'
I let him go on talking as we drove the big Jeifang north; he didn't want any answers, any questions. I was getting to know him; underneath the easy manner there was rage burning, in the name of Tiananmen.
'We got enough gas,' he said after a while, 'for maybe another fifty kilometres, this kind of ground, if the tires hold out, got two spares. Got food, I brought some army rations, canned stuff, last awhile, the two of you.'