Ian Slater - Force of Arms

Suddenly she stopped and looked at the student. “The Chinese Communist pigs are at war with the United States. Now whose side are you on?”

“Yours, but my family and—”

“Never mind your family,” she said sharply, almost hysterically in her own fright. “Never mind my family — the few they left. Whose side are you on?”

“I am against the Communists of course.”

“Then act like a man, damn you, or give me the gun. Give it to me anyway — it bulges in your Mao suit, padding or not. It’ll fit better in my overcoat pocket.”

“Yes, of course. Ha, ha. Do you know how to use a gun?”

“Are you serious, Wei Chen?”

“No. Ha, ha.” They were both going to die.

She could feel her stomach trembling and tightening, and for a moment she thought she’d black out. Why had she lost her temper like that — why hadn’t she offered to go back to the hotel — figure something out on the way? She didn’t know. She had been so cool, so calm, so many times to survive in her life — perhaps she couldn’t do it anymore? Perhaps something in her had finally snapped and she was going mad.

By sheer luck when they reached the railway station— Alexsandra, silent and hollow eyed from her prison ordeal, the student close to nervous breakdown — their train, the 7:30 from Beidaihe to Shanhaiguan, came rolling in, and the student was engaged in an argument with the ticket clerk, who said tickets to Shanhaiguan were not valid if you stopped off at Beidaihe. The student looked at Alexsandra. “Ha, ha!” Big trouble, he meant — until Alexsandra simply said, “Give her more money.”

“You don’t know much,” she told the student as they boarded the hard class.

“Ha, ha, I guess you’re right.”

The student kept watching the great clouds of steam curling and swirling up from around the engine, half expecting a squad of police to emerge through them at any time. He looked at her apprehensively, too, wondering, and a steely, hollow-eyed face gave him the answer. By God, she would shoot them. Unable to break the tension after another cloud of steam revealed no one, the student excused himself quickly and headed for the toilet. “You can’t use that!” a train attendant told him brusquely. “Not while you are in the station. Where do you think you are — at home?”

“Ha, ha! Sorry.” His face was grimacing in pain. Suddenly the train shunted, steam poured out and up into the air, and the carriage began to jerk forward, becoming progressively smoother. He made to go in.

“Not till we are out of the station!” the attendant yelled at him.

“Ha, ha,” he said, his legs crossed, taking a deep breath and turning spastically toward the window.

Soon the train was out of the station, picking up speed, and he ran in. The noise of the train clicking across the sleepers, amplified by the toilet tube, became a sustained roar.

On his way back to his seat he knew the police would be there. Perhaps he could sit away from her, but the train was full. He passed several families who had already opened glass jars of tea and were eating cold slices of fatty meat. As he made his way further down the aisle he was struck by people’s mouths moving and he unable to hear them for the roar of a large goods train passing them toward Beidaihe. Perhaps he was going deaf.

“Feel better now?” Alexsandra asked.

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry for being so rude with you. I’m afraid I need more sleep.”

“Ha, ha,” he said, and this time it meant, I wish you would and give us both some rest. She had closed her eyes but was kept awake by more troop trains roaring by. “Tickets?” came a conductor’s voice.

“You show them,” Alexsandra said.

“Yes,” the student said, but he found his hand was trembling. She took the tickets from him. “I’ll do it.” He was alarmed — if the conductor questioned the ticket purchase she would probably shoot him.

Julia felt herself manhandled off the yak and carried from the whiteness of the hailstorm into the blackness of a cave in the rock ridge.

What she didn’t realize was that the old man had been carrying her on a circuitous path on the rocky ridge so that any pursuers following the snow tracks would come to a dead end on that part of the bare ridge in the lee of the wind where only hail and not snow had become wedged in the fractures.

When the old man put her down by the cold remains of a fire she ached in anticipation, but there wasn’t to be the slightest sign of smoke — worse still, the faintest whiff of it and the Chinese would be on them. Her headache was bad, utterly untouched by aspirin. She toyed with the idea of a morphine shot in her small first-aid kit but didn’t like the idea of it doping her out so that, along with the pain, she’d be of little use to the old man should the Chinese come upon them.

The old man left her yogurt, butter, cheese, and tsamba, the roasted barley flour that she could eat dry or with the butter. He motioned to her not to light a fire. She found it difficult to follow his meaning, her headache so pervasive that only part of his message managed to penetrate. By way of an answer, or rather a question, Julia took out the long-lasting Nuwick heat-and-light survival candle and, her sheer will fighting the pressure in her head, explained that it did not give off smoke or any odor.

“I go,” the old man said as he tapped his watch. “Come back.” She nodded that she understood he would return. Before he left, he bent down behind her, and she could feel the rough skin of his herder’s hands biting deep into the back of her skull. Stiffly resistant at first, she now relaxed, surrendering to the old man’s deep massage. From the small first-aid book that came with her pack, Julia knew that the nomads had much more hemoglobin in their blood than others, which protected them from altitude sickness, so that she doubted whether the massage would do any good. Surprisingly, however, though it didn’t take the pain away, it reduced it to a more bearable level, and she could think straight enough to be concerned that his long fingers were now reaching the top of her breasts. Was this part of the drobka —ritual — of caring or was this a straight-out grope? Whether he sensed her unease the further down he reached or whether some other imperative moved him, he stopped abruptly and walked back to the entrance to the cave, which was at the end of a rough, S-shaped corridor at times no more than five feet in diameter. Though she lost sight of him once he passed the S bend, she could hear his fading footsteps.

Five minutes had passed when she heard footsteps again, faintly at first but then growing, making a crunchy sound on the pebbles that had accumulated in the cave. Whoever it was was not yet around the S and so remained hidden. She drew out the .45 and moved to a kneeling position, her hands shaking not only from fear but from the mountain sickness. She released the safety.

Running the half mile west along Changan Avenue — the Avenue of Eternal Peace — for the Zhongnanhai, Aussie and his reconnaissance patrol caused no interference but only drop-jawed stares of the early-rising citizens of Beijing as they bicycled down the avenue, there being fewer than usual about at this time of the morning because of the rain that had followed the monsoon’s tail and that was still falling.

Then from up ahead there came two short cracks and more. Immediately Aussie signaled the reccy patrol to split — five on the southern side of the meridian, his group of four on the right-hand side, both groups moving toward the Zhongnanhai Gate from where the shots had come and where the two guards were lying down for better aim in front of the high, varnished red gates.