Once an Eagle (67 page)

“Seventy-five,” Damon said.

“Yes. Krupp. That is their favorite method of reconnaissance.” Lin Tso-han smiled grimly. “Reconnaissance by fire. Singularly wasteful, but it bolsters their confidence. I imagine we should permit them to continue.” Calmly he went on: “My aide and chauffeur in the front seat, beyond the glass partition, saw none of this; they never thought of turning around. My retinue riding behind me saw nothing amiss, either: they merely thought I'd bent forward to pick up something, or perhaps had dropped off to sleep. And I was paralyzed, panting, each breath a rending thrust of the iron bar; I was sliding into a black whirlpool of pain, sliding and skittering round and round—a whirlpool whose center held this curious, hard stillness, and the thought:
You are one. You and that abandoned baby of the lao pai hsing, the common people—you are one and the same. You thought you were a race apart, but that is a lie, and now you will face it. Now. It—that baby—has been discarded like a piece of rubbish before it could even taste of life, and you have been so favored—if you choose to call it that—that you have tasted all the fruits of this world a thousand thousand times over; until in fact you have grown weary of them. And yet for all your wealth and cunning and expensive tastes, you are the same: she is dying and you are dying. So you are the same: in death and in life.
Round and round the thought went, bright as a polished shield, and I kept turning from it in agony. I wanted to cry out, scream aloud and summon help—and all I could do was gasp and grunt and feebly wave my hands; like that abandoned baby girl …”

Lin chuckled softly, and his eyebrows went up and down. “Of course it was not a fatal heart attack at all. Not even a heart attack. I found out later it was a hiatus hernia and no more—though that trivial ailment can make you believe for a time you are on the edge of the grave. So I was not dying, I was relatively young and healthy again. But everything was altered. I could never again shake off that moment in the car. Why that little girl and not I? why I and not that baby? It went on and on in my head like the crooning of an imbecile: perfectly inane and perfectly irrefutable. I could not keep it out, I could not think of anything else. I was—obsessed. I put up my sword and forsook my pavilion of women and began to read. I had been well educated—that is to say I'd been superbly tutored by German Doktoren and Russian governesses, I was at home in four tongues—and I shut myself up in my beautiful study that looked out over the Yü-tze Valley and read. Everything! Not as one reads customarily, for pleasure or diversion, but to learn. Plutarch, Rousseau, Adam Smith, Descartes, Marx, Thoreau—there was no end to what I wanted to know. Have you ever felt that, Ts'an Tsan?—a hunger for knowledge so desperate you begrudge food and sleep, you cannot wait for another dawn to get on to more and more?” Damon nodded. “Yes. Well, I had that fever. I had to know: it was more important than life.”

From far down the valley there came the bark of a 75 again, rhythmic and desultory, as if for a ceremonial.

“So I read and read, and at the end of six months I was exhausted; but I had come to some conclusions. If a system could produce me—an arrogant, selfish, debauched young murderer and brigand—as an ideal, as something to aspire to, that system was wrong: a world of greed, corruption, favoritism, crushing taxes, the most blatant and ruinous disregard for the rights of man. It was quite simple, really—there was no need to have read all
that
much: I was rotten. And I was the direct product of my society; and so were the slaves I ordered about so grandly, and so was the abandoned girl child.”

He sighed and puffed out his lips drolly. “Then came the difficult part. Everything up to then had been vivid, exciting, the opening up of worlds. Now it became very hard. I had to remake my life, act on all this new-found wisdom and enlightenment—I had to decide on a course of action and hold to it. And I did. I divested myself of my immaculate garde du corps, I gave the women pensions and provided for them one way or another as best I could, I put an end to my military forays and political intrigues.” He sighed again, and rubbed his face with his thin, tapering fingers. “But all of that was relatively easy. The opium was something else … But I did that, too. I broke myself of the craving. I booked passage for Melbourne on a British vessel—and when I returned I was cured.” He turned and gazed at the American, his eyes dark with memory. “You have no idea what that means. No idea.”

“I came off morphine without any help at Angers in 1918,” Damon said quietly.

Lin smiled. “Ah. Then you do have an idea. A good idea. Yes.” He nodded. “Well, then I went abroad. To France and Germany. But not for pleasure. I studied and read, I attended the Sorbonne, I talked with professors and military men and politicians and farmers. And everything I saw I related to China. For, foolish as I was, headstrong and self-indulgent and arrogant as I was, I loved China even then—more than I knew. And slowly, inexorably, I came to this conclusion: the Kuomintang has failed us. It's as though your Washington had died in 1781, and Hamilton—a very selfish Hamilton with a large and greedy family—had seized control of the government, put to death all your Paines and Jeffersons and reinstated the British taxes and military occupation that had brought on your War of Independence. Chiang has turned back, not forward: immense corruption and the oppression of the lao pai hsing are the order of the day. You have seen it for yourself. And so for me the choice was clear …

“But it was difficult!” He laughed once, his teeth short and even in his broad mouth. “That Bible of yours! You have no idea how strange it sounds to an Oriental. And yet parts of it are so moving. There is one place in particular I often think of: the place where the young man comes running to Jesus and asks him what he should do to inherit eternal life, and Jesus answers, ‘Sell whatsoever thou hast, and give to the poor, and come and follow me.' And then it says of the young man: ‘And he was sad at that saying, and went away grieved: for he had great possessions.' Well, I had them, too—greater perhaps than Jesus' sad young man. But I sold them all, and gave to the poor.” He opened his hands. “And here I am.” He laughed again, softly. “But I must confess I expect no treasure in heaven.”

 

The mountain loomed
above them, blue-black, its spines and ravines softened in the late afternoon light. The wind was bitter. Lying on his belly behind a low ridge Damon chafed his hands and blinked repeatedly; his eyes kept tearing in the cold, and the drab, lonely village wobbled and wavered as though under water. He thought somberly, I'd give a hundred dollars for a cup of steaming hot coffee right now. A hundred dollars cash. He felt an overpowering need to urinate, although he'd relieved himself less than half an hour ago, and his jaws trembled as if he had palsy. For the past two hours they had been working their way down toward the village, and were now deployed in a wide arc less than a hundred and fifty yards away. A soldier ten feet from Damon had a huge broadsword slung across his back; the blade looked silver in the dull light.

Wu T'ai. Eight or nine battered dwellings huddled around a large building with a horned roof of blue tiles, where the remainder of the Japanese garrison was. Damon looked at his watch: less than three minutes now. If everything went according to plan. How could anything go according to plan with this scarecrow outfit, weapons from the dark ages and no hot food for two days and this wind? God, it might be possible without the
wind
—

A soldier came around the corner of the nearest building: flat, toadstool helmet and mustard-colored overcoat, tightly buttoned, moving with the deliberate, languid gait of a sentry. He was short and stocky and was carrying his rifle at sling, with the long bayonet fixed. Damon felt his head contract tautly into his shoulders, but the sentry's eyes passed indifferently over the hillside; yawning, he clapped his hands together, and then leaning against the wall of the house began methodically to pick his nose. The enemy. A cold, unhappy young man very far from home, who would soon be dead. Damon thought of the two German boys outside the farmhouse at Brigny that hot July morning so long ago. Now here he was again hiding and watching, at the other end of the earth. He glanced at Lin Tso-han, who was crouching behind a great boulder twenty feet away; but the guerrilla leader's expression was completely unreadable.

Beside him the Eskimo stiffened; and following his gaze Damon saw two figures coming along the road from the south. Two old women bent nearly double under huge loads of twigs. The Japanese sentry, watching them, pushed himself away from the wall and called something, waving one arm as though to hurry them. The two figures hobbled nearer; one of them answered something in a thin, croaking voice. The soldier shouted again and uttered a harsh burst of laughter, shocking in the cold air. They were very near him now. Then the sentry must have seen or suspected something, because his left hand snapped the sling off his shoulder, but he was too late. There was the flash of a knife, a short, sharp cry. The soldier stiffened, then slumped, and for an instant the three figures drew together in what looked like a swift and violent embrace. Then the Japanese was lying in the road. One guerrilla had his rifle, the other was buckling on his cartridge belt; they darted away between two houses to the right of the post.

At that moment Lin raised his arm and a dozen men leaped to their feet and ran down the slope in perfect silence; and from the opposite hillside another group came hurrying, flowing down over the rocks, fanning out to each side of the blue-tiled building. There was a shout, two rifle shots—and then the flat snapping of a Nambu: quicker, higher pitched than a Browning. Damon looked again at Lin; the desire to go down there was almost overwhelming. The Nambu stopped, started again, and the firing rose to a sudden roar, like grease in a pan. Lin raised his arm and he and the rest of the group ran down the slope, spreading out to the right of the building; he thought he saw Lin vanish down the alley between two hovels that the guerrillas had used. Damon glanced at the Eskimo and P'ei Hsien, who had been detailed as his bodyguards; neither was paying any attention to him—their eyes were riveted on the long, blue-tiled building, which seemed larger now in the falling light; figures came and went like shadows. There was a stuttering flash from the window on the side facing him, and he could hear the Nambu chattering away, a slithering, slapping sound. They'd shifted it, then. If there was only one. If there were two—

A figure was crawling along the base of the wall, below the winking light of the Nambu. Lying very still, like an old bundle of rags right under the barrel. Then suddenly, magically, an arm went up; there was a flash of pure orange light as the grenade exploded inside, and the Nambu was silent. There was the hollow crash of another grenade, then another. The figure vaulted into the room, followed by two more; and gradually the rifle fire died away in a desultory, trivial popping.

Got it. They'd got it. Just as Lin said they would. Principle of Surprise, Principle of Economy of Force, Principle of Simplicity. Of course Lin would not put it that way. “Tactical superiority is the answer,” he had said the day before, in his precise, musical French. “The problem is to achieve tactical superiority. It is always possible.”

“What do you mean—it's
always possible?
” Damon had demanded.

Lin had smiled, his eyebrows had lifted and fallen. “Careful planning, patience, distraction, decoy, diversion, feint, any ruse that will work—”

“Any at all?”

“Any at all. But above all the feint. We call it: The Principle of Pretending to Attack the East While Attacking the West. And once the attack is launched, unwavering decision. If you do these things, if you select the most vulnerable spot in the enemy's anatomy, isolate that particular element—you will have achieved tactical superiority over him at that moment in time, even though he may have an over-all strategic advantage …”

Beside Damon P'ei had scrambled to his feet. “Ting hao, Ts'an Tsan,” he said in his high, clear voice. “Pao huai-la, tao-la—”

All at once the boy spun around and pitched forward on his face, slithering on the stones; and Damon heard the snap of the rifle shot. Something stung his cheek, bits of stone: the ricochet sang away like a band saw. He turned his head, and his heart misgave him. Six or seven Japanese, helmeted, their rifles long and bright in the dusk, running toward them, high on the mountainside. Where had they come from? Another shot droned through the air. He struck the Eskimo on the shoulder and shouted: “Ch'iang tai!” and in English, “There! Over there! …”

The Eskimo, who had started to go to the aid of P'ei, turned, raised the Lebel with calm deliberation and fired. One of the Japanese stumbled and fell. The rest kept coming in a lumpy, bandy-legged run, swelling out of twilight like squat giants. Damon started to reach for P'ei's rifle; a bullet sang by his head and he ducked. The Eskimo, his face completely expressionless, fitted another round in the chamber, plucked back the bolt and fired again. Damon raised his head. No one. They'd taken cover. Damn fools—they could have had them in a rush. Another slug struck a rock nearby, showering them with chips of stone and dust. The Eskimo fired again, and started to hunt for another bullet in his pocket. Damon thought of all the clips for Lebel rifles he had seen in '18, the crates of small-arms ammunition and Springfields and grenades, the mountainous dumps from Bar-le-Duc to Sancerre, and groaned. The Japanese would rush them in a minute, another minute. He pulled his pistol out of its holster and ran back the receiver in a shivering spasm—looked around him wildly, thinking, Did I have to do this? really do anything like this? I could learn their God damn goofy tactics without getting into this kind of a stupid, crazy—

The Eskimo fired again and clawed another cartridge out of his pocket. No cover. There was no cover all the way over to that houselike clump of rock. Fifty yards, sixty. In a moment the patrol would get up and rush them, and they would take no prisoners. That was for sure. He poised near the edge of the shallow depression, estimating his chances. It was nearly dark, the edges of rock melted into one another softly. But now, looking back, it seemed bright as midday in a desert. The Eskimo was probably down to five or six rounds, maybe less. In another few minutes he'd run out, and this patrol or whatever it was would be in their laps. He'd give it just—