The Chinese Agenda (11 page)

Dmietriev glanced at his watch as he continued. `So you were put under arrest as soon as you landed at Ala Kul ... I trust it did not prove onerous?'

He was met by a stony silence and chuckled. 'We knew that the Chinese would be arriving within hours of your aircraft . . . we could only hope that it would be after and not before. Both of your arrivals coincided so closely in fact that we did not have time to explain to you what was happening . . . which from my standpoint was just as well, as your reactions were certainly convincing.'

`You are saying then,' Stowe broke in, 'that this whole business was just a sham to convince the Chinese that the Russians had nothing to do with this mission . . . ? You really didn't expect them to believe that, did you?'

Dmietriev laughed. 'If you were a bit more familiar with the art of diplomacy, my friend, you would see that as having no bearing on the matter at all. Of course they did not believe us . . . but that is not what they were asking. The Chinese Government warned my government that there would be serious repercussions if we allowed the mission to take place. So we agreed that the mission would be halted by simply arresting you and your friends and turning you over to the Chinese Government.

`Now that we have done so, we are no longer responsible for what happens. You see, a Chinese officer stayed behind to report to Peking as well as to the Chinese Embassy in Moscow. He saw you put aboard this transport, saw his fellow officer and the three soldiers go aboard, but did not see either Sergeant Rodek or myself follow. After he boarded the aircraft in which you arrived, a message came for General Lin informing him that two Soviet military personnel would accompany him to Peking . . . Sergeant Rodek and myself . . . to assist in the trial. Of course the message was unimpeachable as it was in the latest Chinese military codes.'

Gillon raised his eyebrows at this news and Stowe, Jones and Leycock exchanged glances.

'Of course, the message was completely false,' Dmietriev continued modestly. `So far as the Soviet Union is

concerned we have complied with the Chinese request. If the escort should prove incapable of controlling their prisoners, that, of course, is their problem.

`So it will appear that you left Ala Kul earlier tonight after General Lin sent a wireless message informing Peking of the time of departure . . . and after being seen aboard by one of their own people. In addition, a second message was sent from this aircraft confirming that we had crossed the border. Our flight records will show that this aircraft left on schedule and radar logs on both sides will show that this same aircraft crossed the border still on schedule. In fact, the pilot was to report his position every half-hour. It has now been fifteen minutes since he last did so and we are wasting valuable time talking. This aircraft will crash in twenty minutes and we do not want to be aboard when it does so. It will appear,' he finished triumphantly, 'that once having overpowered your captors, you were unable to fly the aircraft and it crashed in a remote area of the Tien Shan. Very neat, hey?'

`Very neat is right,' Jones murmured. 'You say twenty minutes? Where will that put us?

`Right in the middle of the scheduled drop zone. Unknown to them and fortunately for us, they were flying very close to the route we would have taken if we had not been discovered. It is the only sensible way to cross the Tien Shan to Urumchi, where normally an aircraft would refuel.'

`So we haven't really lost anything then,' Leycock put in, more a statement of fact than question.

`Nothing but time,' Jones answered. He glanced at his watch. 'We are now about four hours behind schedule. That means that we must camp on the north side of the pass and wait to cross tomorrow . . . tonight really. So we lose more than fifteen hours total.'

`You are right, but I am afraid that can not be helped. And, if we waste any more time, we will lose more than that.' Dmietriev stood up.

'I suggest, Mr. Jones,' he said formally, all trace of his bantering tone disappearing, 'that you have your people change into their cold-weather gear and check their equipment and weapons.'

Jones nodded and struggled up out of the seat. Ley-cock tried to make him sit still, but Jones insisted that he was all right. Gillon watched as he got to his feet, still protesting. Jones was moving carefully, holding his head erect, as if even the slightest movement hurt him. Great, he thought, they hadn't even started yet and already one of the group was injured, and injured worse 'than he was willing to admit. Gillon had a premonition, sitting on the armrest of the seat in the warm, well-lit cabin of the aircraft, that there were drastic days ahead for Jones as well as for the rest of them. Shaking his head, he followed Jones and Leycock to the rear of the cabin to sort out gear. Stowe busied himself with checking and loading weapons. Dmietriev disappeared into the cockpit and after a moment, Rodek came hurrying back through the cabin to his duffle bag. He placed it on a seat, opened it and began to pull out cold-weather clothes and weapons similar to their own. Two AK-47 machine guns were included and two large-caliber pistols that Gillon could not identify. Two long paper-wrapped parcels were produced from the galley, where they had been hidden behind an oven unit, containing skis and snowshoes for both Russians. The other bag contained hiking packs, sleeping bags and wax-paper-wrapped blocks of gelignite explosive. Whistling soundlessly, Rodek went to work and Gillon stopped for a moment to watch him. Rodek inserted an igniter into each block of explosive and lined them up on the seat one after another. When he had finished, six two-pound blocks of gelignite stood in a row, enough to blow the entire aircraft to kingdom come and then some.

While Rodek went about his own tasks, the four Americans completed a final distribution of supplies to the packs. Then each of them stripped down and struggled into the insulated underclothing and one-piece snowsuits. Gillon found that his suit fitted as if it had been tailored for him. Jones watched, grinning, and admitted that his uniform sizes had been obtained from the Army. 'We made allowances for any weight you might have gained since.'

Gillon snorted. 'I weigh less now than I did the day I resigned.' They finished just as Rodek completed dressing and pushed past and into the cockpit. A moment later, Dmietriev came hurrying out.

'Five minutes,' he snapped. 'You will find a cargo parachute in one of those bags. I suggest that you lash everything together and the first one out the door will have to be responsible for watching it go down.'

He threw off his own clothing and began to dress quickly. 'There are also six parachutes in the galley. I supervised their packing myself this afternoon; you can be quite certain they will open.'

This was one phase of the exercise that Gillon was not looking forward to at all. His entire jumping experience consisted of the U.S. Army airborne course at Fort Benning, nearly twelve years before, and he had not jumped since.

Leycock and Stowe fetched the chutes from the rear of the cabin and dumped them down on the floor. Stowe held one up, a standard backpack type which Gillon recognized as a sport parachute that provided a great deal more steerability than the standard military chute.

'Just a backpack ... where are the safety chutes?'

'Sorry.' Dmietriev grinned. 'No way to get them aboard. You will just have to take your chances and rely on the Soviet Air Force.'

The news apparently did nothing to cheer Stowe, from the scowl he gave Dmietriev, but he slipped his chute on anyway and buckled it up.

Dmietriev unfolded a map and spread it out on his knees. He studied it for a moment, then called Jones over to him. As Jones got up from the seat and made his way back to the Russian Gillon couldn't be sure but he thought he noticed a slight stagger in his walk. The two of them bent over the map for several minutes, then, satisfied, Jones nodded, made some notes on his own map-and came back up the aisle. Dmietriev folded his map and slipped it into his parka, then glancing at

his watch once more, hurried back up the aisle, parachute dangling from his ann.

'All right, you guys,' Jones called out, 'let's get finished up. Three minutes to the jump zone.'

Rodek stepped out of the cockpit and gathered up his pack and parachute. An air of expectancy began to build as Jones chivied them forward to the crew hatch. Dmietriev was standing half in and half out of the cockpit door from where he could keep an eye on the control panel. The aircraft was flying so slowly that they were being buffeted from side to side by the winds. Dmietriev had stopped the air-conditioning system and the air was rapidly growing thin . . . and very cold. Stowe and Rodek dragged the body of one of the Chinese soldiers out of the way and Jones started to undo the hatch. Dmietriev glanced over his shoulder, caught Rodek's eye and nodded. Rodek knelt and fussed with the gelignite charges he had placed in seats on both sides of the fuselage in back of the wings. Dmietriev jammed a long crowbar through the rubber seal and worked it into the crack between the hatch and the coaming. He motioned to Gillon and together they heaved once, twice and on the third time, the hatch slammed open, punched through the two-hundred-mile-an-hour slipstream by the cabin's higher air pressure. Instantly, the cabin was full of whirling debris as the air rushed out and he grabbed a seat back to steady himself against its tug. The temperature plummeted abruptly and Gillon gasped in surprise at its icy clutch.

Leycock stumbled forward with the backpacks and duffle bags lashed into a single large bundle and placed them near the door. He opened the cargo chute pack and extracted the rip cord, which he tied to a seat stanchion. It was difficult to hear over the wail of air rushing past the aircraft and Leycock pointed to himself and then down, indicating to Jones that he would go first. Jones nodded in a distracted way and Gillon started to move toward him, then thought better of it. There was nothing that could be done now in any case. There was no turning back. Unless this aircraft crashed somewhere in the mountains or reappeared on the southern side of the Tien Shan,' their carefully constructed diversion would be for nothing and Chinese fighter aircraft would reach them before they could get back across the border. Through the open hatch, he could make out the dark silhouettes of the surrounding peaks reaching almost level with the aircraft. He glanced into the cockpit and located the altimeter; it read 18,000 feet, hardly higher than some of the, peaks around them. Dmietriev stepped out of the cockpit, glancing at his watch again, and motioned them to gather around him.

'We are coming up on the jump zone.' He shouted to make himself heard above the scream of air past the open hatch.

`Jump when I give the signal and all go out as fast as possible. As each man lands, shine your flashlights so that the others can find you. Do you all understand?'

They nodded and he turned to Rodek, who had come up after finishing with the last of the charges. Rodek nodded and shouted in Russian.

'He says,' Dmietriev translated at the top of his voice, `that the fuses are set to go off in ten minutes. That should give us plenty of time. The aircraft will be fifty miles southeast of us when it crashes.'

Gillon was conscious of his laboring lungs as they fought to draw in sufficient oxygen, as well as an icy feeling that had nothing to do with the cold wind blowing in through the open hatch. He felt giddy and nauseated. The sickly gleam of the lights in the foggy interior of the cabin emphasized the shadows on each face, accentuating the apprehension that each of them felt. The remaining minutes passed slowly and Gillon swallowed hard several times. He was aware that he was sweating heavily and he knew that his tightly clenched hands would be shaking badly if he had not shoved them hard into his parka. Each of the six men stared desperately at the open doorway, each conscious of his own fear, none daring to look at his companion, frightened even more of what he might see in the face of the man next to him than of what dangers lay in wait below.

Dmietriev hurried back into the cabin to check the fuses a final time. A moment later, he returned to the doorway and peered out into the night, then stepped back and tapped Leycock on the shoulder. Without hesitation, Leycock kicked the bundle of packs and duffle bags through the doorway and followed the instant the static line snapped free. Jones was right behind, then Rodek. Stowe made a perfect start, vaulting out to drop feet first. Gillon stepped to the door right behind him, placed both hands oil either side of the frame, took a shallow breath of the icy fluid into his lungs and pulled himself out.

He had pulled harder with his right arm than with his left and had twisted so that he was looking back at the aircraft. He was aware of the fuselage sliding past as he began to drop, slowly at first, so that he seemed for an instant suspended next to the airplane looking back at Dmietriev, who had just stepped to the hatch. Then with breathtaking speed, it disappeared and with it his point of reference. Then began the silent flow of cold air past his body and the sensation of falling deserted him until the shock of the opening chute snapped him up like a broken puppet on a string. He glanced up to see the square canopy opening like a black and white flower above his head. Just past the edge of the chute he could see Dmietriev's chute beginning to billow. Gillon, remembering his first, painful lessons at Fort Benning, caught the harness lines and pulled hard to the left to steady his descent. Quickly, the pendulum motion canceled and the chute came under control. He could see the drifting canopies of the others strung out in a curving line, as if they were all sliding down an invisible cable. The terrain below was all but invisible; the snow-covered mountains were little more than pale blurs in the starlight and only the faint images of jagged peaks could be discerned around him. Above, the Milky Way wheeled across the sky, presenting itself for inspection in a way that only the parachutist ever sees. The crisp, thin, cold air of the high altitude carved each star from crystal and fixed it to the deepest black velvet. He looked for Dmietriev again and finally spotted him, some thousand feet behind and several hundred feet above, his chute fully opened and the black dot that was the Russian intelligence operative dangling