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 might 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 r
oad 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 kilometer 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.
In all of his years working situations such as the one here in China, he had never had a breach in containment. Yet, not only had there been one, there had been at least two, quite possibly three in the past twenty four hours.
That damn incompetent horse's ass Aston.
What was worse, he'd come to find out that such breaches were becoming a theme with the damn company, with at least a half dozen other screw-ups happening before Norstrom's team had been brought on board six weeks ago. What the hell was wrong with these incompetents? Why couldn't they get their act together?
You warned them, he thought angrily. You told them there were too many ways things could go south. But not only did they brazenly insist that it was all under control, they put an incompetent prick in charge of calling the shots.
"Just give me leeway to do my job," he'd told them, because he knew those fat cat corporate types would find some way to screw things up, and he didn't want to be around when it happened. Well, it had. And boy was this one hell of a screw up. Not that they'd ever admit it. And no amount of I-told-you-so would make any difference, though it sure as hell would make him feel better.
He stopped outside the tent and braced himself for the inevitable chewing out. Then he raised his fist and rapped his knuckles sharply against the clipboard hanging outside.
"Come!"
He pulled aside the flap and ducked as he entered. Coming in from the blinding light of the day, the interior was stiflingly dark. A single lamp focused its glow downward onto a drafting table, illuminating a mess of papers strewn all over the surface, maps and manifests, names of people, who knew what else. All of it highly incriminating. The air was chokingly hot and dry from a portable gas heater that hummed softly by the entrance behind him.
"Aston?"
"Over here."
Norstrom turned and squinted into the darkness, and in the back right corner he located the elephantine form of Mabry Aston sitting in a folding chair, his elbows on his knees and an unlit cigar between the sausage fingers of his right hand. One end was a flat gray stub, the other a sloppy, tattered mess turned nearly black by the man's overzealous gumming.
Aston spat onto the ground beside his feet, then delicately plucked something off his tongue with fingers that reminded Norstrom of stumpy white turnips. "Got a light?" the fat man asked, his voice gurgling out of his throat.
For the briefest of moments Norstrom imagined using one of his flamethrowers on the man's face. He'd always disliked taking orders from clueless idiots, and most of the corporate people assigned to oversee his contract operations usually were, especially the lawyer types, but he absolutely hated taking orders from soft rich pricks who romanticized the dirty work he got paid to do while fancying themselves as some sort of inscrutable character out of a ridiculous Humphrey Bogart movie, the kind of guy who always got the girl in the end.
"Sorry," he replied, shaking his head. He had a lighter in his pocket, but he'd be damned if he was going to share a closed space with anyone exhaling that crap. His lungs still hurt from the crap he'd inhaled last night in the cockpit of the 88.
Aston sighed, pocketed the cigar stub in his two-hundred-dollar olive drab canvas shirt, which contained enough fabric to make a small pup tent, and heaved his three-hundred-pound mass out of the chair. The thing almost seemed to groan in relief. He waddled over to the table and into the puddle of light looking like a giant, vaguely human-shaped water balloon filled to bursting. His pale skin was hairless and smooth and he smelled of lavender soap, yet despite the obvious primping, his comb-over had a perpetually greasy and disheveled look to it. Norstrom looked down at the top of the man's matted hair and privately shivered in disgust.
Aston cleared his throat. "This had better be better news than yesterday's clusterfu—"
"Might I remind you, Mister Aston, that it never—"
"I don't need a reminder of anything!" Aston interrupted his interrupter. He looked up with watery eyes. His chins waggled as he tried to fetch back control over his emotions. Sweat rolled down his forehead, down his cheek, into his collar. Some of it fell away from the cliffs of his jowls and spattered onto the table. "You have news about the woman then?" he demanded.
Norstrom stood motionless and stared at the short man. He waited until he began to fidget before giving him an answer. "My crew was assigned to finish the cleanup on schedule — ahead of schedule, actually, which they did — not chase after your loose ends. We still have the other site to—"
"That's not what I asked you, Norstrom. Damn it, man!" He picked up a pen, inspected it a moment as if contemplating what to do with it, then hurled it back to the table. It made an unsatisfying clatter before disappearing into the shadows of the tent. Norstrom didn't react to the pitiful display of indignation. "I asked about the woman!"
"We're still dealing with that. I told you I needed unfettered access to
the lab at the factory and—"
"Not without one of my men! I told you that!"
"—also your sign-off on the clean up before I can even begin to shift resources."
"Resources?" Aston sputtered. "Is that what this is about? Money? You think you're not getting paid enough?"
"It's about protocol."
"To hell with your damn protocol! This isn't your precious military! Just do your damn job, Norstrom. Think for yourself for once, or I'll find someone else who can!"
Norstrom didn't answer. He simply gave his head and eyes a barely perceptible dip toward the requisition on the table.
"Christ, all right, I'll sign. Are you absolutely sure you've wiped out every trace of evidence? It's all burned away?"
Norstrom pulled a pen from his pocket and handed it over and watched as Aston scribbled his name on the paper. With the form now notarized, Norstrom tucked it away; he didn't bother asking for his pen back.
"The crash site has been fully sterilized. So has the hill." A muscle twitched in his cheek, the only sign that anything bothered him. "And the village has been cleared, too. You can be assured of that. I am very good at my job, very thorough."
Aston harrumphed. "Thorough perhaps, but also careless. You allowed someone to infiltrate the crash site. You let someone break into your supply truck and steal a hazmat suit and escape in a god damn forklift! That was sloppy—"
"Mister Aston," Norstrom said, keeping his voice low and steady, "I told you to stay away from the site until we'd finished. If you hadn't shown up when you did, hadn't demanded that every single one of us waste a precious hour of our time to hear you prattle on about some useless thing, that site would not have been left unguarded."
"Prattle?" Aston squealed indignantly. "Don't tell me it— It was not useless!"
"I am telling you, because you seem incapable of grasping what it means to let me do my job."
THE FLENSE: China: (Part 2 of THE FLENSE serial) Page 5