Ian Slater - Warshot

There were two of them. The cell exploded in cordite smoke and the ripping tar-paper sound of the AK-47’s burst, both men hit, one already dead on the floor, the other flung back against the corridor wall as if bodily lifted and thrown by some giant hand.

She was running down the grimy corridor, her left hand swishing the hair away from her eyes, right hand gripping the submachine gun, her breath steam as she ran into the colder air bleeding in from the entrance of the jail. As she reached the door, she swung the AK-47 in the direction of the duty guard’s desk, and seeing he wasn’t there, realized he must have been one of the two she’d shot. When she pushed hard, opening the door, the frigid air outside stung her.

Someone shouted, but she was already beyond the penumbra of the lone arc light outside the jail — into the dark, where she dropped the heavy gun in the snow and kept running, glimpsing fog rising from the Songhua River by Stalin Park on her left as it spread smokelike, coursing eerily about the multicolored ice sculptures of Zhaolin Park. One of the city’s old Soviet onion-domed spires pierced a bluish blur of moon. Fog was everywhere, spilling out from the boat dock to Sankeshu Station. She could hear police whistles behind her. Glancing back, she glimpsed a dim shape — one of the ice sculptures, a dragon, headless in the fog.

Not knowing where to go — the foreign consulates friendly to America and its allies bound to be the first to be cordoned off — she paused in the pitch-black dampness, seeing the fog clearing, cloud swallowing the moon, and she leaned against a high wall, suddenly feeling dizzy from her exertion and weak from having gone so long without food or water.

She made the decision to go to the Guoji Fandian Hotel on Dazhi Street. Latov had taken her there a couple of times. The manager would no doubt recognize her — two barbarians for dinner — but wouldn’t be surprised to see her, the hotel catering to many international tourists. If only she could get to a friendly foreigner who would get the message out about the massive Chinese buildup taking place via the Nanking Bridge. It was a long shot, but there would still be foreigners caught in China by the war, waiting for exit visas from the Public Security Bureau. It was risky, but if she did it with brio, she might succeed. If she did, she knew she would save thousands of American lives and hit back at Latov and his Chinese comrades. Their one big mistake — a typically Chinese delay, she thought — was not to have issued her immediately with the bright orange prison clothes which would have doomed any effort to simply walk into the lobby of the Fandian.

The first foreigner she saw as she entered was a small, blue-striped-suited man with moustache, bald head, and wrinkled brow — obviously a European. He wouldn’t do. Even sitting he looked harried, a worrier, his gaze fixed on the lobby’s slime-rimmed, dried-up fish pond, its fountain encrusted with a coppery greenish detritus, the man looking at it forlornly, as if his future was as bleak as that of the nonexistent fish.

A second man, an Indonesian, wearing a Muslim songkok cap, his bags by the reception desk, looked more promising. Medium height, potbellied, smiling, talking with the Chinese clerk, he seemed at ease as he filled in the card, then pulled the English edition of China Daily from the pile on the counter and moved off toward the restaurant. Unhurried, he was skimming the front page with only a modicum of interest, turning the paper over, revealing a gold wristwatch as he did so. An affluent man, and Indonesia a neutral in the war. If she could get to him, maybe…

She decided it was too risky. His business connections with China would be too precious for him to risk doing anything for her. She might offer herself as the price — ask him to send the fax and wait for a confirmation of receipt before keeping her end of the bargain. But he could turn her in just as easily after. She could hear a siren in the distance.

A porter — early twenties by the look of him, Eurasian— was being bawled out by the manager, who was calling him a lan xuesheng —”a lazy student”—and “a turtle,” the worst kind of insult, telling him to hurry up and take the Indonesian’s suitcases up to a second-floor room. The incident convinced Alexsandra that the Indonesian would be a bad choice, for only someone who traveled a lot in China would choose the second floor over the higher, more scenic suites above the ground-level smog. Room service was quicker on the second floor, and when the elevators broke down, with or without an accompanying fire, you had a chance to get out from the second floor, the fire escapes any farther up sure to be too decrepit and ill-maintained to work. She watched the student sullenly pick up the suitcase, heard him murmur, “Cao nide xing!” —Fuck your name! — to the empty fish pond, and followed him up the first flight of stairs to the second floor, eager to get to him before he reached the two women floor minders who, in stained white smocks, would be smiling, asking her room number so as to jot it down for future reference — fornication with unregistered guests being strictly forbidden in the people’s hotels.

“ Wo shi Meiguo ren,” I am an American, she whispered to the porter, the energy she’d expended catching up with him on the stairs exhausting her. “ Ni keyi bangmang ma?” Can you help me?

He took her to be an American. She was a big nose and white — her Chinese fractured. He glanced at her but did not pause, and kept walking down the stained red paisley carpet that clashed incongruously with a Guilin mountain design of turquoise silk tapestry that covered most of the waterstained wall. The air was heavy with stale cigarette smoke, and this, combined with the kerosene-fired heat, made it difficult for her to breathe. The two white-jacketed minders folding linen were putting it desultorily on a trolley. One of them asked her the room number.

“Er ling si,” 204, said the porter grumpily as he strode on impatiently with the heavy suitcases.

Once he opened the door, she stepped inside and closed it behind him. She began to speak. Quickly he held up his finger, shaking his head vigorously. It was her fatigue that had made her so momentarily careless. Of course, not all foreign-designated rooms would be bugged, but you could never be certain which ones the Public Security Bureau had decided to listen to on any given night. He indicated the bathroom and tried to flush the toilet. It didn’t work and it took him a minute to reconnect the chain to the pull lever.

When finally it gurgled loudly and coughed, she moved closer to him. “I want you to take this to the Baltic legations,” she told him, keeping her voice as low as possible despite the noise of the toilet. The Estonians, Lithuanians, and Latvians, she knew, shared the same trade legation in Harbin, and if a message could be got to them, they would love nothing better than to pass it on to the Americans. Only now she realized her mistake, the sudden alarm in his face telling her he’d completely misunderstood, having thought she, like most foreigners, had wanted to change money, getting more yuan on the black market than from the official exchange rate. Perhaps he didn’t even know there was a war going on yet. Beijing’s iron-fist control over the media made it more likely than not.

“I cannot give you money,” she told him truthfully. “I have none. They took it all away at—” He stared at her. Did he understand or not? She felt unable to go on, her legs trembling from fatigue and tension. Seeing a thermos on the table by the frost-covered window, she poured a cup and, her fingers shaking now, tore open a bag of green tea, spilling half of it, stirring the leaves frantically, watching them swell, and blowing on the hot liquid. The student porter looked at his watch, as if that would somehow enlighten him about what had happened. Alexsandra sipped the tea. It was glorious. It seemed to give her instant strength. Sitting on the edge of the bed, seeing her disheveled appearance in the wall mirror, she put down the tea, turned to him and slowly, without taking her eyes off his, opened her blouse.