Darkness Under Heaven (37 page)

S
itting still in the truck reduced the pain in Avakian's leg to a dull throb. His exertions had left the battle dressing soaked in blood. Although dazed by fatigue he focused his attention on potential trouble on the road ahead. But soon the absence of stimulation and the droning of the engine put his head back against the seat.

Judy kept glancing over to check on him. He was sound asleep. He needed it. And she was loving driving the truck. Having something to do energized her.

She drove through sunburned brown hills and occasional belts of green trees beside the highway. If you could call it that. It was two lanes, and the other was full of coal trucks. Stopped, in the middle of nowhere, as if they'd somehow heard what was up ahead. The drivers kept sticking their heads out their windows, as if they'd never seen a blonde driving a truck before.

The river swung off, and now the bottom of the slope below the highway held small brown riverbeds, long dried-up.

The road straightened out but a new problem presented itself. The road signs were exclusively Chinese. It was nerve-wracking to see a blue sign indicating a branch in the highway, and at the end of both arrows were two or
three Chinese characters. There was nothing to do but follow the principle of staying on the road you were on.

But Judy experienced yet more panic as a whole succession of signs kept popping up to announce…something. She thought about waking Pete up, for consultation if nothing else. Then over a low rise a sign with the beautiful Arabic numerals 206. It had to be north to Mongolia so she picked the turn after consulting the path of the sun.

That stomach-churning tension of wondering whether you'd taken the right exit reminded her of trips with her family. Her dad always had her read the map, and if she ever had a stroke one day that was going to be the cause. The tension lasted more than a few miles until she was rewarded with a billboard image of smiling industrious Chinese amid waving grass and heavy machinery that read, in small print at the bottom:
Welcome the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region.
Oh yeah. Thank you, thank you very much. She relaxed and enjoyed the ride for the first time in a long while.

The countryside rolled out to the horizon. Greenish-brown grasslands intercut with solid brown trails and, hauntingly alone out in the middle of all the space, single green trees. As if they'd been put there just to make you wonder how the hell that happened.

At first breathtaking but soon monotonous. But the highway had in store one of the strangest things she had ever seen. So strange that at first Judy thought it might be a fatigue-related hallucination. An undulating landscape of nut brown sand dunes. More dirt dunes than sand dunes, actually. But not dunes in a sea of sand. Dunes in a sea of grass. Lush green grass but lifeless dunes. As if, like the lonely trees before, they'd been plopped down to provide some striking artistic contrast.

She felt a physical pang of sadness as the grasslands became browner and browner as she drove north, finally
disappearing altogether. Overgrazing and desertification. A herder's choice was always between many animals and fewer but higher-quality ones. But high-quality animals were too expensive for poor people to capitalize, and where was the high-quality forage they needed going to come from? So the grass burned away and the deserts expanded.

At first Judy didn't realize what was approaching. Thinking it had to be incredibly low cloud cover. Then she realized, rolling her window up tight. As soon as she stretched her arm across Pete he awoke with an electric jolt and had the pistol halfway out his holster.

“Whoa. Easy, easy, easy,” she said.

Avakian took stock of his surroundings, not to mention the jab of pain whenever he moved.

“Don't shoot the driver,” Judy said.

He holstered the pistol. “Sorry.” He yawned and stretched his arms. “How long have I been out?”

“We've gone about 150 miles.” She reached over again and felt his forehead and face. No fever. Yet.

Avakian's first reaction was anger. They should have ditched this truck by now. That transitioned to deep embarrassment. She'd been taking care of him. “You shouldn't have let me sleep that long.”

“Roll your windows up,” she said. “There's a sandstorm coming toward us.”

Getting his bearings, he saw the desert and the billowing dust cloud. “Are we okay?” Sort of an all-inclusive question.

“We're on the 206 Highway in the Autonomous Region of Inner Mongolia.”

“Who says women can't navigate? Not I.”

“We were lucky,” she said. “The signs were all in Chinese.”

He didn't talk about luck. “You must be shattered. Let me take over.”

“That's okay. I'm actually less nervous driving. And you may need to shoot someone.”

Avakian shook his head. “This close to the border there can't be any more shooting. If it is, it's us being shot.”

“That was nice to know. Thanks.”

The sandstorm enveloped them. The truck rocked and fine dust blew through gaps in the windows. Judy couldn't even see the surface of the road right beneath the hood. She had to stop.

 

Inspector He and the driver were dead. The car was ruined. Commissioner Zhou picked He up off the road and placed him in the car. Shifting into neutral, he let it roll down the slope until it was off the road.

Commissioner Zhou could not stay there and look at them. He threw off his vest and began walking back.

Two kilometers down the road a truck appeared around a bend. Commissioner Zhou held up his hand, but the driver gave no sign of slowing down. So he held up the rifle instead. They stopped for that.

A coal truck. Empty. As always in Chinese trucks, a driver and a co-driver. Both plainly terrified.

He stepped up on the running board and flashed his credentials at the driver. “Ministry of Public Security. I must have a ride to the next town.”

“Back to Zhangjiakou?” the driver asked.

Commissioner Zhou had to stop and think. Go back after having not only failed, but lost his men? “No. Take me to Huade.”

He walked around the front and opened the door. The co-driver pulled in his feet, as if to make room for him to go behind the seats. Commissioner Zhou stared at him until he got up and went behind the seats himself.

There was no small talk. Chinese did not make small talk with the police. It could only bring trouble. They
drove in silence, Commissioner Zhou watching his cell phone for a signal.

When they passed the shot-up police car the driver looked over at Commissioner Zhou but said nothing. The co-driver cleared his throat as if to speak. The driver grunted loudly. A clear warning, and enough to keep his partner quiet.

When the highway rose up and crested a low ridge Commissioner Zhou got a cell phone signal. “Stop the truck.” He climbed out so as not to share his business with the two yokels.

He called the Ministry in Beijing, at first having the switchboard connect him with a fellow commissioner in the Bureau of Border Controls and Frontier Inspection. He gave the description of Avakian and his companion Doctor Rose and told them to alert the border post at Erenhot.

Back to the switchboard and the Regional Bureau for the telephone number of that north Zhangjiakou police station. The lines must have been working in that direction, because the same sergeant answered the phone.

“This is Commissioner Zhou. From last night.”

The sergeant had sobered up and lost his stammer. “The station is open and alert, Comrade Commissioner!”

“I have an urgent mission for you. Use the vehicle we left in your car park and proceed immediately west on 110 Highway to retrieve an officer wounded by bandits. Approximately ten kilometers from your location. After you have taken this officer for medical treatment return to the highway, twenty kilometers further west. You will find your patrol car with two officers who have been killed. Recover their remains with all honor. Their weapons are in the trunk. Do you understand?”

“At once, Comrade Commissioner.”

“Do not fail me. Now give the number of the Bureau at Huade.”

A thrashing of papers and the sergeant read out the number. Commissioner Zhou wrote it onto his hand. He broke the connection and dialed it, reaching the Deputy Director at Huade. Providing the description of the two Americans and the truck, he requested that an alert be issued and a car and driver be placed at his disposal when he arrived. They rarely received requests from Beijing Ministry officials, so he knew there would be a sense of emergency.

Finished for now, he got back on the truck. “Take me to the Public Security Bureau headquarters in Huade as quickly as possible,” he told the driver. “And I will no longer trouble you.”

There was still a chance. He could not tell the Ministry about his failure and his dead until he had something to balance them.

 

It was an hour before the sandstorm passed through and they were able to continue. Sand had drifted across the highway, in some places an inch or more thick. Avakian opened the door and brushed out as much of the dust as he could. It was in their eyes and mouths and felt like a layer of fine sandpaper on their skin.

Now there were signs for Erenhot.

“That's the border town,” Avakian said. “Maybe thirty miles.”

“Have you given any thought to how we're going to get across?” Judy asked.

“Only how we're not going to cross. We're not going to present our passports and ask to leave. Other than that, as you know by now I'm a firm proponent of Occam's Razor.”

“The simplest solution is the best.”

“Correct.”

The only problem with that, which she didn't mention out loud, was that the simplest solution seemed to involve
things like crawling into manholes and floating down rivers that hadn't been the beneficiaries of a clean water act.

 

Commissioner Zhou felt himself being shaken. He had fallen asleep.

“Sir,” said the driver. “We are at Huade Public Security.”

Commissioner Zhou checked his wristwatch. Time kept slipping from his grasp. He started out the door but held up. Taking out his card case, he jotted a few lines on the back of two of his business cards before passing them to the driver and his helper. “If you should ever find yourselves in trouble with the authorities, show this card. If that does not suffice, call the number and I will assist you.”

“Thank you, sir,” said the driver, bowing deeply. Such a thing was like gold to a Chinese truck driver.

The commissioner entered the headquarters waving his credentials, so there would be no consternation over his rifle. “I am Commissioner Zhou, from the Ministry,” he told the desk sergeant. “Are you aware of the alert I issued?”

“Yes, Comrade Commissioner. The deputy director has ordered it enforced. Inspector Yan of the Criminal Bureau is expecting you.”

“Take me to him quickly.”

An officer rushed him through the building to the desk of an Inspector 1st Grade who came to attention.

Commissioner Zhou blasted through the preliminaries. “I am Commissioner Zhou from Beijing. Any word on the American spy I am hunting?”

The inspector was slightly rattled by his manner, as most Chinese would be. “Nothing as yet, Comrade Commissioner. All stations and highway units have been alerted.”

All this time wasted to tell him nothing. Avakian was almost certainly long gone. “I require a car and driver to take me to Erenhot. Immediately.”

“This is very difficult, Comrade Commissioner. Our resources are limited and all our units committed.”

Always a no before a yes. “This American spy has murdered six Ministry officers. Perhaps more as we waste time here. This is a state emergency, and my mission comes from the Minister of Public Security himself. I will now walk outside to the front of this building. If a car to take me to Erenhot does not appear within five minutes I will telephone the minister personally with a report of this bureau's obstructionism.”

The car was there in four minutes.

 

“Pull over to the other side of the road and park in front of that truck,” said Avakian. “I want to talk to the guy.”

“If you don't mind me asking,” said Judy. “Out of a hundred truck drivers taking a leak by the side of the road, why do you want to talk to him?”

“Because my mother always used to say that when you saw a truck full of hay you should make a wish.”

“Of course. I should have known.”

“And also because he's a Mongol driving a truck with Chinese plates. Because he's my age, which means he might speak some Russian. And because he's carrying hay, which means he came from Mongolia.”

“I'll understand later, won't I?”

“You will if this works.”

Avakian grabbed her bag and let himself down gingerly. The Mongol was zipping himself up, more than a little concerned about the bearded bedraggled foreigner with one leg of his bloodstained jeans flapping open. His hand dropped into his pocket, and Avakian figured there was a knife in there.