Carl Hiaasen - A Death in China

Bobby Ho flushed the boy from a pile of rags in the imperfect shelter of a shop doorway. Panofsky grabbed him, roughly clamping his jaw. The boy wriggled, a minnow in the maw of a shark. Stratton saw the knife come up and winced.

"Wait!" Bobby Ho hissed. "He can't be more than twelve, all skin and bones."

The knife wavered. Panofsky looked over at Stratton. Everybody knew the rules.

It wasn't even a judgment call. Stratton made it one. It was Bobby Ho's play.

Panofsky's eyes flashed with anger.

In a sibilant, harsh undertone, Bobby Ho tongue-lashed the boy in Chinese.

Stratton watched the boy's eyes: flat, emotionless. They showed intelligence, but no surprise, no curiosity. And most of all, no fear.

At length, the boy nodded. Bobby Ho stepped back.

"It's all right."

Again Panofsky looked at Stratton.

"Let him go," Stratton said. Sometimes you break the rules.

The rag boy massaged his neck. With arrogance that could only have been inherited, he turned his back and stalked away, vanishing within seconds up an alley on pencil legs that seemed unequal to their sixty-pound burden.

"I told him we are on a secret training exercise with foreign friends, and that if he ever interrupts the PLA again, I will personally shoot him and everybody in his family."

"I hope he believed you."

"He believed me."

Panofsky snorted. Bloomfield grunted. Stratton sent them up to the far end of the main street to share their scorn.

Lights burned inside an old movie house that now featured Mao slogans on its sagging marquee. Bobby Ho prised open a side door. They cached the Kalashnikovs in the shadow outside; assault rifles are useless for close work.

Inside, the building smelled of molding concrete, stale tobacco and rancid bodies. Wooden chairs, neatly arranged, filled the pit of the theater. Empty, every one of them. The stage had been divided into four separate rooms, each with double doors facing the audience. All the doors were closed. From behind one set rose a high-pitched monotone that gave Stratton goose bumps.

"… Delano Roosevelt… Harry S. Truman… Dwight David Eisenhower… John Fitzgerald Kennedy… Lyndon Brains Johnson… Richard-"

"Baines," a deeper voice interrupted. "Lyndon Baines Johnson."

The first voice resumed, a record returned to its groove: "Lyndon Baines Johnson … Richard Milhous Nixon… "

The voices were Chinese. Stratton looked at Bobby Ho, who gave an elaborate shrug. A teacher and his student. What else could they be?

Stratton gestured and Bobby Ho nodded. He would check the area around the stage and watch Stratton's back.

The basement, intelligence had said. The prisoners are held in the basement.

They are paraded upstairs for onstage interrogation classes.

Stratton found the stairs without trouble. He went down with a gentle rush until he came to a stout wooden door. He nudged it open with his boot and let the pistol precede him.

Blackness. Absolute. And a terrible smell: fresh soap thinly overlaying the smell of fear and anger. Stratton let a cone of light from his Czech torch play around the room, and came within a heartbeat of firing at a sound in the far corner. Two rats, red-eyed and territorial.

It took Stratton fifteen minutes to explore the basement thoroughly. Six cells.

Stratton toured them, one at a time. In the fourth, scratched into the cheap concrete, a lover's testament had survived its author: "Rick amp; Connie Houston '70." With the leaden movements of an old man, Stratton visited the remaining two cells. In the last one, he found traces of blood the cleaners had missed.

They had come too late. How long? A day? Two? Stratton would never know and never forget. He ran the back of his hand across his lips to moisten them and tasted ashes. He had only another instant to mull his disappointment.

From above came the unmistakable sound of boots hammering the tired floorboards.

Not furtive. Authoritative boots.

Stratton listened from the head of the stairs. Two men, speaking Chinese. Plus the student and his professor. At least four. He and Bobby Ho had played against worse odds than that.

From the back of the theater came Bobby Ho's voice. Stratton understood none of the words. He understood too well what they meant. The tone was enough: arrogant, strong, with a touch of exasperation. An officer's voice, informing more than explaining.

Bobby Ho was playing the cover story, singing loudly enough to alert Stratton.

The cover was pretty much what Bobby Ho had told the ragged boy: He was a PLA officer down from Peking on a training mission with East Germans en route to North Vietnam to help the heroic struggle there. It was not a bad story. There were plenty of Caucasian instructors with the Viets, even some Germans. In the jacket of his pocket, Bobby Ho had a set of orders that looked like the real thing.

It might have worked. But it didn't. Three or four voices speaking at once drowned out Bobby Ho. The shouts grew louder. Wood smashed. Bodies fell.

Stratton didn't hear Bobby Ho again until he screamed.

Stratton rammed through the door with the pistol ready. The neatly ordered folding chairs lay in matchstick piles. In their chaos stood four Chinese, two uniformed, the other two in bureaucrats' white short-sleeved shirts, their red books of quotations clutched protectively. As Stratton's eye recorded, his brain raced to establish target priority. The student and his professor were unarmed.

Shoot last. The other two both had pistols. One was pressed against the head of a kneeling Bobby Ho. Its owner was screaming at Stratton.

Stratton let his gun arm come down, slowly, with emphasis. He reversed his grip on the pistol. Holding it by the butt, he walked toward the Chinese.

"Vas is los?" Stratton demanded in his own officer's voice.

The man with Bobby Ho barked something that brought the student and professor to life like wind-up dolls.

"Comrade Commissar Wu… " they began together.

"… instructs you to put down the gun and to raise your hands," concluded the professor.

Stratton forced a rictus grin.

"English. Nein. Deutsch." He tapped his chest. "Kamerad."

After a cursory search, they tossed Stratton into one of the rooms on the stage.

He was alone for twenty-seven minutes by his watch. An important eternity. He listened to them working on Bobby Ho. The shouts became one-sided, the screams dwindled to pathetic groans.

When they came for Stratton, they brought Bobby Ho unconscious. Stratton tried not to look at him.

There were still four of them. No one had left, so without phones, they had made no attempt to spread the alarm. Stratton asked himself why. Were they swayed by the cover story? Or were they simply in a hurry, trying for good information before seeking help?

The commissar was a lean, gray-haired man in PLA green with red tabs and a four-pocket tunic reserved for officers. The other uniformed man, balding and pot-bellied, wore the blue and white of the police. Stratton marked him as a local.

The policeman did the heavy work. He jabbed Stratton in the belly with a truncheon. When Stratton involuntarily clammed forward, the policeman struck him on the head.

The professor screamed: "How many men in your unit? Where are they? What is your mission? Talk or die, imperialist running dog!"

"Deutsch."

It lasted about ten minutes. The policeman enjoyed his work. An expert, a fat man with bad breath, who stung without maiming. Stratton rolled with the blows and calculated his chances. The student, nearest the door, held a Chinese carbine with familiarity. The professor was unarmed. The policeman had his club and a holstered pistol. The commissar held a heavy Chinese military pistol.

Stratton, fighting the pain, babbling in the few words of German he knew, realized that Captain Black was finished. Sooner or later they would alert the PLA garrison outside of town and that would be that.