Darkness Under Heaven

Look for F.J. Chase's next exciting Peter Avakian thriller in May 2010

China's Ministry of Public Security, which controls the Public Security Police or national police force, has a rank structure of five grades with thirteen levels that roughly correspond to their equivalents in the People's Liberation Army. The system was adopted in 1992 according to People's Police Regulations 1992. They are:

There are six noncommissioned officer (NCO) classes in the People's Liberation Army, from Corporal to Sergeant Major. So I have simplified the army ranks listed above.

The People's Armed Police is a paramilitary force organized along army infantry lines, though without heavy supporting weapons, under the control of the Ministry of Public Security (Police) rather than the army. Having been created from existing army units, they wear an army-style uniform with their own branch insignia and use the army rank structure.

The Ministry of State Security, China's intelligence organization, is highly secretive about its rank structure, as are the Western agencies that study it. So I have arbitrarily decided to use military ranks for their personnel.

There is little agreement among sources as to correct terminology used when translating police ranks into English. So these tend to vary according to the police terms the individual translator finds most familiar. For example, “Constable” for Officer or “Superintendent” for Inspector among English sources in Australia and Britain.

Therefore I've chosen, again totally arbitrarily, to use terms most familiar to American readers.

Come not between the dragon and his wrath.

—William Shakespeare,
King Lear

Wars spring from unseen and generally insignificant causes.

—Thucydides,
History of the Peloponnesian War

War is an act of force, and there is no logical limit to the application of that force. Each side, therefore, compels its opponent to follow suit; a reciprocal action is started which must lead, in theory, to extremes.

—Karl von Clausewitz,
On War

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

D
uck in Beijing was a lot like pizza in New York. Voice an opinion on who made the best and you were guaranteed an argument, if not a brawl.

Peter Avakian had never been to Liqun Roast Duck Restaurant because he'd heard wildly varying opinions on it. Either the best in town, or at least the top five, or an unsanitary dump that served a greasy duck. But tonight wasn't his choice. He was having dinner with the Chinese police. Or, more precisely, the Ministry of Public Security.

He wasn't surprised by the invitation. After two months of negotiating with various Chinese agencies over security arrangements for the 2010 Association of Asian Nations Ministerial Meeting, it was past time they took a run at him.

The restaurant was located in the south central part of Beijing. A very old part of the city, one of the
hutong
neighborhoods that were rapidly becoming endangered species as they fell to the wrecking ball of runaway real estate development.

The taxi let him off at a
zhaimen,
or residential gate. More like a triumphal arch than the entrance to a gated community—a massive brick structure about twenty feet high. Once these gates had led into a series of walled
quadrangle courtyards that belonged to very large, very rich households. But the Manchus were gone, and Communism meant that those princes' places had been subdivided into housing for the masses. Sometimes even the courtyards were filled in to provide more shelter. They were all linked together by the
hutong
alleyways.

Avakian could see through the gate that the
hutong
lane was too narrow for a car. And because of this, as soon as he paid off the cab he was mobbed by a crowd of very aggressive “tour guides” and rickshaw drivers.

“Liqun Roast Duck?”

“I take you there!”

“You never find!”

“You get lost!”

One of the disadvantages of not being tall was that people felt less restraint about putting their hands on you. And Avakian barely reached five foot seven on days when his spine wasn't compressed by a lot of heavy clothing. Normal human instinct was to shove back. But in his travels around the world he'd witnessed enough confrontations where the belligerent natives both outnumbered the foreigner and spoke the same language as the authorities. He just shook his head, no.

Some frustrated entrepreneur shouted,
“Da Bizi!”

Big nose. A traditional Chinese insult for Caucasians. Which brought a faint smile to Avakian's face. That just happened to be the first thing everyone noticed about him. The powerful, curving scimitar he'd inherited from his ancestors in Armenia's Vardenis mountains appeared to take up most of his face. It was brought into even sharper relief by the deep middle age lines that ran from the sides of each nostril down to the corners of his mouth, two crevasses that seemed to have been cut by its great weight.

But he acted as if he couldn't hear. He made no eye contact and walked through them, nudging out his own path, his hands covering his wallet and passport, letting his momentum pull him free from all the fingers tugging at his sleeves.

The evening temperature had barely dropped below ninety degrees, and it was correspondingly humid. The air was full of the Gobi Desert dust the prevailing winds carried into Beijing in the summer. Not to mention plain brown smog. Smog as bad as the Los Angeles basin in the days before catalytic converters. Avakian was wearing one of the dark, conservative, yet extremely lightweight suits he'd had the foresight to have cut for himself in Hong Kong, with a white shirt and equally conservative tie. He also had on a straw dress hat that matched his suit. He shaved his head, and a bald head was not something to be casually exposed to the Beijing summer sun.

The
hutong
alleys were warrens of twists and turns, the doorways in the crumbling brick walls offering little glimpses into other lives. Avakian greeted everyone he saw in Chinese bad enough to make a few of them titter. A mother trying to hurry a stubborn little boy along pointed at him, and he knew she was telling the kid to mind or she'd let the foreign devil get him. A few rickshaws pedaled by, the drivers glancing over at him smugly.

Every so often there were restaurant signs in English on the walls and hanging from the lampposts, so even if he didn't get to Liqun Roast Duck he felt he could find his way out. Otherwise he might be wandering around those concrete alleys until dawn.

He glanced at his watch. He was supposed to be there at 8:00 p.m., and the Chinese considered lack of punctu
ality disrespectful. He was still okay. But something else bothered him. All the local pedestrians had vanished.

Anywhere else in the world that might not be too worrying. But in China there was never no one around. Twenty years ago his first team sergeant, a philosopher-poet masquerading as a tobacco-spitting
Tejano
master sergeant, used to say that millions of years of humans narrowly escaping being eaten by wild animals had given us that almost extrasensory warning of impending danger, which you ought to ignore only if you didn't mind being one of the runners-up in the natural selection sweepstakes.

He stopped and listened. Nothing. Telling himself he was being at least halfway stupid, Avakian turned the corner and continued down the deserted alley. He walked quietly, still feeling uneasy.

But after only a few steps he was halted again by a woman's cry, a sharp one of surprise and panic, from around the next turn. Avakian thought it over for a moment, then moved forward lightly on the balls of his feet. He got in close to the wall and listened, but other than the fact that there were at least two men, and one woman in distress, the voices told him nothing.

He crept to the corner and dropped down low, his head nearly touching the ground. People watching corners always expected heads to appear at head level, so no one ever looked near the ground. He exposed one eyeball, just for an instant.

A well-dressed couple that looked Japanese was being held at knifepoint by three Chinese men.

Oh, great. Avakian sprang to his feet and quietly retreated back to the last turn, pulling out his cell phone and dialing the number of his dinner host, Commissioner Zhou Deming of the Ministry of Public Security. A much better
idea than calling the 110 police emergency number with his limited command of Mandarin.

The connection clicked. “Colonel Avakian, are you having trouble finding the restaurant?”

“Commissioner, I'm in the
hutong
lane and there's a mugging in progress. Three Chinese men robbing a couple at knifepoint.”

A short pause while the commissioner digested that unexpected bit of news. “I will have officers there as soon as possible, Colonel. Do not attempt to become involved.”

“Don't worry about that,” Avakian replied. Before he could pass a description of the three Commissioner Zhou broke the connection. No doubt to call the cavalry. Avakian made sure he switched off the ring tone on his phone. He'd stay there to point the cops in the right direction and make sure no one else stumbled onto the scene.

It was a fine plan, and it only took a few seconds for it to fall completely apart. Suddenly the woman screamed much louder, a scream of pain that was abruptly silenced before its natural conclusion.

Ah, shit. Avakian ducked into the nearest courtyard entrance and looked around for something useful. He grabbed a rake propped up against the wall and snapped off the handle.

As he ran toward the corner he fished the key ring from his pocket and threw it over the wall so it would land farther down the lane.

When the keys clattered on the paving stones Avakian sprinted around the corner. The three Chinese were all looking the other way down the lane, where the keys had landed.

The nearest man turned sharply at the sound of Avakian's footsteps, but not fast enough. Avakian swung
the rake handle in a two-handed stroke over his shoulder. He was aiming for the line of the eyes but the stick caught the Chinese across the nose. The rake handle broke and the Chinese let out a hard grunt. Avakian followed that up with a bloodcurdling yell, which combined with the surprise and shock to send the other two thieves into flight.

But one man wasn't quick enough. Avakian still had a couple of feet of wood in his hand, and as the Chinese turned to bolt Avakian caught him on the back of the head. The Chinese went down, and the rest of the rake handle cracked in half.

The third thief was long gone, so Avakian whirled around to see what the first was up to. He was halfway up off the ground, with blood on his face, and probably some in his eyes because he was feeling around for his knife—it was hard to hurt someone when the adrenaline was pumping.

Avakian grabbed him by the hair and yanked the head right onto his knee. Once, twice. Avakian kept putting the boot in. There was a loud crack that had to be bone. It wasn't Avakian's knee, so it had to be either skull or neck. The thief went limp, and Avakian let go of his hair.

That was it. The street fighter's rule: you didn't put them down, step back, and see what they wanted to do next. You put them down so they didn't get back up.

The Japanese woman was on her knees sobbing away; the man was trying to comfort her.

Footsteps from the other side. Avakian swung around, and there was Commissioner Zhou with his pistol in his hand.

“These two?” Commissioner Zhou said in his excellent English, checking the first one who was splayed across the pavement and moaning softly.

“One got away,” said Avakian, breathing hard from his exertions. As soon as it came out he felt embarrassed by his I'm-cool-and-you're-not pose.

The commissioner was now spitting Mandarin into his cell phone. You wouldn't want to be those two muggers, Avakian thought. Big loss of face tonight for the Public Security Ministry, and they were definitely going to pay for it. If they were lucky they'd only get the standard Chinese criminal penalty of one shot from an SKS rifle in the back of the head and their organs sold off to wealthy foreign transplant patients.

It actually hadn't been such a bad scheme. Pick off the rich tourist diners on their way to or from the restaurant. Say the victims somehow managed to surmount the language barrier and call the cops. Well, with a lookout and local knowledge of all the alleyways an easy getaway wouldn't be any problem at all.

Even with a commissioner summoning them, it still took the police a while to make their way down the lanes. Unlike a Western investigation, which would have kept them there answering questions all night long, Commissioner Zhou translated Avakian's statement into the notebook of the first sergeant to appear on the scene and then turned everything over to him. Bad face for commissioners to deal with something so mundane.

Then he turned back to Avakian. “Are you injured?”

“No, Commissioner. I'm fine.”

“Then perhaps you misunderstood my request not to become involved.”

Avakian wasn't really in the mood for an ass-chewing. He knew how reckless he'd been. “No, I didn't. But the woman started screaming like they were hurting her, and I didn't feel as if I had a choice.”

The commissioner stared at him sharply, then seemed to accept it. “You were courageous but foolhardy. And now you must accept my apologies. What happened was unfortunate and inexcusable.”

Avakian knew that Chinese apologies were exquisitely judged things. “Every nation has street crime, Commissioner. No apologies necessary.”

“I would imagine you have lost your appetite.”

“No, not at all,” Avakian said, peeling off his suit jacket because he'd sweated through his shirt.

The commissioner was staring again, as if trying to get a handle on him. Avakian couldn't really blame him. “Then let us proceed to the restaurant.”

“I'll be with you in a moment.” Avakian walked back and left some money under the tines of the broken rake. The loss of any possession wasn't a small thing if you were poor.

The next courtyard was only a short way down the lane. This one had a particularly ramshackle building added to it. Seemingly room by room whenever the owners could afford it, based on the wide range of construction materials and dimensions. There were a couple of parked rickshaws and an enormous pile of split firewood stacked against a brick wall. Two red lanterns hanging over a doorway. And, on the rough projecting concrete block wall of an addition that looked like a large outhouse, a six-foot-high sign of red letters on white. On top, in English, LIQUN ROAST DUCK RESTAURANT. Then three lines of Chinese characters. And again in English, WELCOME OVERSEAS GUESTS ENJOYING TRADITIONAL CUISINE IN OLD CHINESE COURTYARD.

Avakian's first impression: he could see where some might call it a dump.

Passing through the narrow entrance they stepped into a blast of wood smoke and roasting meat. It smelled good. And it sounded like a New York restaurant with a raucous din of diners' voices, cooks yelling and woks clanging. The place was packed, and the décor looked like it hadn't changed in twenty years. He liked it.

The hostess recognized the commissioner, and after a brief exchange of Mandarin led them inside. They had to pass through the kitchen to get into the restaurant. The ducks were hanging up inside a wood-burning brick oven, roasting away nicely. A chef was blowing one up as if giving it mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, a traditional technique to separate the skin from the fat. Avakian grinned. There was your bad restaurant review right there.