The Chinese Agenda (25 page)

At that Gillon sat up. 'Without being controlled .. . what do you mean by that?'

Àha. Now you're interested, hey? These people have been traveling these routes for nearly twenty-five hundred years. A little thing like governments and armed soldiers are not going to stop them. So both Red China and the Soviet Union have made a deal with the remaining caravan masters. If they will register their caravans and routes, they will not be taxed heavily and will be allowed to cross the border at selected points. And that's fine for some of these people. But others are less civilized. They do not like governments and do not recognize their right to tell them where they can and cannot go. These Kalmucks are strictly traders. They start their annual trek about this time each year. It takes them two months and they arrive in mid-June,

just as the fair begins.' `How do you know they will take us in?' Gillon asked. `The caravan master owes me a favor, a damned sizable favor. So there is no need to worry about that.'

Gillon sighed. 'Okay, so where do we meet this paragon of stealth?'

Liu grinned and pointed to the map. 'About eight miles south of the pass, there's a flat meadow at eight thousand feet. If my guess is right, we should meet them here at sunset.'

Ànd from there ... ?'

Ànd from there, the caravan moves southwest, crosses the north and south forks of the Jam River and, staying on this side of the border, marches to the Kok-shal River. From there, they go upriver and cross into the Soviet Union in the Atabashi Mountains and finally into Afghanistan. But you won't dare stay with them that long. Once the Reds find you're not inside their net or at one of the logical border crossings, they'll start searching in earnest for that caravan. When they find it, they'll search it from top to bottom. So you are going to leave the caravan about three days' march south, cut back north until you reach the southern slopes of the Tengri Khan. You'll cross the Tagrak-Yailak Glacier and the border will be right in front of you. From there on you are on your own.'

Gillon was silent for a moment, studying the map. Leycock and Dmietriev watched for his reaction. Stowe had been squatting on his heels, staring around at the soldiers as if it did not matter one bit to him what they did. Now he asked suddenly, 'What do you mean, we're • on our own? Where the hell are you going to be?'

Liu stared hard at Stowe a moment before answering. The silence stretched out uncomfortably while the two men watched each other.

'We have other plans,' Liu said finally. 'We'll discuss them later. Gillon knew by the tone of Liu's voice that he would say no more at the moment and there was no use in pressing him. He stood up quickly to head off any further protest from Stowe.

'All right, Jack. There doesn't seem to be any other way out of here . . . and you know this territory better than any of us. Let's go find your caravan.'

'Wait a minute,' Dmietriev objected, and remained where he was as Leycock got slowly to his feet.

'Yeah, let's wait a minute,' Leycock said quietly.

'Get up!' Gillon snarled at Dmietriev, ignoring Ley-cock. Startled, Dmietriev made as if to rise, then sank back onto his heels. Gillon took a step forward.

'I said get up.'

Dmietriev glanced from him to Leycock and then to Stowe, who was watching with a grin. Dmietriev started to shake his head, then thought better of it and got to his feet, face red with anger.

'I said we follow the plan Jack's laid out . . . it's the only chance we have to get out of here. Anyone who doesn't like it is on their own.'

'And that means,' Liu said slowly, 'that I'll shoot anyone who stays behind so the Reds can't find out what we're up to.'

Dmietriev nodded curtly and stamped away to his tent. Leycock followed thoughtfully and with a glance at the ring of Chinese troopers, Stowe went after them. Gillon took a deep breath. He had weathered that crisis, but he knew a next one would not be so easy.

The combined group trailed through the forest, two point men skiing ahead while, the main party followed

on snowshoes. Liu had detailed two men to lag behind to watch their rear and periodically, they came skiing up to report while two more were dropped back to re-place them.

'Took us about a month during the first winter to work out this technique,' Liu explained to Gillon. 'We learned a lot those first months . . . and it cost us a lot. We came in with twenty-five men. Now we have sixteen. But we lost only two men this winter; one got separated from his patrol and froze to death, and the radio operator who was killed yesterday. The others were all lost last winter . . . and all because we hadn't learned to take the right precautions.'

The group, numbering twenty men, drifted through the forest like so many ghosts. It was impossible to wipe away all traces of their passage but each man knew to avoid contact with tree branches where bent or broken needles would tell a sharp-eyed scout that someone had passed; that you stepped lightly both to conserve energy and to soften the impact of snowshoes or skis. Behind the party came three men equipped with drags fashioned from parachutes and filled with snow, which they pulled along behind with ropes. The nylon pillows filled in the tracks; time and wind would level the surface. Morning waned into afternoon and still they moved through the endless forest in the gray half-light that filtered down through the thick cloud cover. They were moving now down a definite slope and if the forest had been more open, they could have traveled faster on skis. But the trees were still too closely spaced for twenty skiers to move safely. The party crossed two large ridges, struggling up extremely steep slopes and then fighting to maintain balance as they came down the far sides. Gillon had about given up on the maps. They were accurate only as far as general direction and gross terrain features were concerned, but were worse than useless for estimating distances and altitudes from which he could calculate the effort that would be required along a given route. They stopped in the late afternoon above a wide valley. The Musart River was somewhere to their left and it was in this area that Liu expected to find the caravan. Gillon was sitting somewhat apart from the rest of the group clustered near the edge of the trees above the gentle slope that led down to the river. All day long he had studiously prevented himself from thinking about the smashed radio and its implications. He had purposefully done so to allow his mind to arrange all the available data into some kind of sequence that would allow him to consider it as logically as possible. Sometimes it worked, sometimes not; he depended on unconscious thinking processes to automatically restructure a sequence of events and fit any odd pieces of data onto the framework of events.

So far, it had, resulted in a confirmation of something that had been nagging at him since Ala Kul. He) wondered just how-in-hell many people knew about this mission. The plane in Rome had been crowded with -at least fifteen people; and then too, how many in the Soviet Union knew the details? Somehow or other, they had been betrayed. And as a consequence, three men were dead . . . Phan, or whatever his real name had been, murdered in Rome; Jones, shot and killed below the pass; and Rodek, shot at the alternate rendezvous. You could extend the shroud, he thought, to include the Chinese general, whose name he had forgotten, the three Chinese troopers and the two pilots killed on the airplane and the Chinese soldiers killed at the pass. Somehow, the Chicoms had learned enough to anticipate every move they made. According to Dmietriev, who may or may not have been telling the truth, the Soviet Government had been taken completely by surprise at the sudden appearance of the Chinese Ambassador at the Kremlin, demanding that the-government halt this mission. And there was the fact that the Chinese had known where both, not one but both, rendezvous points were.

Gillon had long ago learned never to trust anyone and never to let emotions interfere with decisions. Emotional decisions were invariably wrong, and he was learning that if there was a 'Murphy's Law' pertaining to espionage, it would be the classic first rule with a modification. 'If anything . . . or anyone . . . can go wrong, it ... or they ... will.'

Gillon shook his head. Hard fact was too scarce to reach any conclusions. All he knew at this point was that with the radio gone, they were completely isolated from all help. As best they had been able to figure, Ley-cock must have damaged the radio during one of the frequent falls they had all taken during the wind and blizzard of the previous night. When he had taken the faceplate off, Leycock had found two cracked circuit boards. In the middle of Central Asia, there was no way to repair the damaged printed circuits. Gillon sighed deeply. That was that, then. Liu's cara-' van offered their only way out. Gillon was surprised to find how exhausted he was. His legs were as heavy as railroad ties and he wondered how much longer he could go on. Five days of constant travel through high mountains at altitudes above nine thousand feet had sapped them all. Their food supply, even when that of Jack Liu and his men was added, was at a dangerously low point. He had estimated roughly that they had no more than a one-day supply remaining for each man – a one-day subsistence supply of slightly less than 5,000

calories. At these altitudes and temperatures each man required 5,000 calories just to maintain himself. The heavy exertion of climbing and marching with thirty-pound packs added a requirement for an additional

calories, 10,000 calories in all per day.

It was this, the chance to gain additional food supplies, more than the relative security offered by the caravan of Mongol nomads, that had led Gillon to accept Liu's suggestion. He knew now, with their radio smashed beyond repair and Liu's gone as well, that a third factor had been added to the survival equation – weather, Chinese troops, and food. And the equation, rapidly being calculated, was not balanced in their favor – to say the least.

By early evening, they were moving in slow file through thinning trees. The heavy cloud cover had given way in the late afternoon to a broken wrack of cirrocumulus clouds promising more snow. The immense fir trees cast blue shadows for unbelievable distances in the waning afternoon sunlight. The air was intensely cold and their faces were blue and pinched and they shivered constantly, dissipating what little energy remained to them. Gillon estimated that they had traveled nearly twenty miles on 'skis and snowshoes that day and all during those long hours, they had not seen or heard any sign of pursuit.

At 1800 hours, Liu brought them to a halt in a small clearing and gave terse orders to set up a quick camp; then, calling to Gillon to get his skis and follow, he moved out of earshot.

'We'll go down farther into the valley and wait for the caravan. I don't know whether it will be through here tonight or tomorrow, but I'm pretty certain they haven't passed yet. We met them two days back, nearly forty miles north of here.'

Gillon nodded and took the skis out of the pack. He fastened the fiberglass shells together, locked them, then slipped his feet into the bindings and followed Liu down the slope. They skied for several minutes before Liu pulled up sharply beside a clump of bush projecting above the snow.

'If they come, they will follow along that line of trees down there.'

He pointed to a row of trees growing in a straggling line near the bottom of the valley. Liu pushed off again down the slope and Gillon followed. They skied for nearly fifteen minutes, taking a roundabout path to avoid the remaining thicker stands of trees. Gillon found it exhilarating to be on skis once more after the muscle-wrenching drain of the snowshoes.

Liu held up his hands and began to slow. Gillon followed his lead and they came to a stop inside a stand of pine.

`We'll wait here . . . we've a good view of the valley in both directions.' Liu stepped out of his skis and began to tramp around in a tight circle to beat down the soft snow. Gillon did likewise and in minutes they had compressed a circle nearly three feet deep. Liu slashed some pine branches and piled them around the 'well'

they had stamped out to create a fairly snug shelter from the stiffening wind.

`Goddam, it's cold,' Gillon muttered through chattering teeth.

`That's what worries me. In all the time I've been out here, I've never seen a blizzard without an intense cold snap following. And when that happens, usually another, bigger one is right behind. I pity anyone caught up in those peaks when the cold really digs in.'

Gillon turned toward the mountains tearing loftily behind them. The valley was swathed in deep blue, almost smoky shadows as the sun dropped lower. But the peaks to the north, peaks whose flanks they had just left, were glowing madly. The bottom half of the mountains was covered with black fir, patched here and there with white as open spots showed. But higher, above the tree line, the mountains were bleak and uninviting, icecovered and glacial in aspect in spite of the sun's gold tinge, suggesting the coldness of a killer rather than the home of the gentle Chinese gods as the name Tien Shan indicated. ye got yourself a real problem with that orew, haven't you?'

Surprised, Gillon jerked his thoughts away from the peaks. 'Yeah. I guess I have. I wouldn't wish them on my worst enemy.'

`How did you get stuck with them?'

'It wasn't easy.' Gillon told him in greater detail how Jones had called him out into the trees that night to discuss the route and how he had been shot and killed. `There wasn't anybody else who seemed willing to say, let's get the hell out of here . . . well, maybe Stowe would have eventually . . . but I'll be damned if I want my neck in the hands of that pompous jackass.'

Liu nodded silent agreement. 'It looks as if you are stuck with them then.' He was silent a moment, then looked up at Gillon. 'Unless, of course, you want them off your back.'

'How?'

Èasy enough. ump them with the caravan and let them find their own way out. Without that radio, the only way is by foot. I figure to take my people south through the Tien Shan to Afghanistan following an old caravan trail. We'll cross into Kashmir and fly back to Taiwan froth India.' -`That's going to be some trip,' Gillon observed. He knew he should have been surprised, hut then with all that had happened coupled with two years of complete independence, he supposed that he had all along known that Liu would not stay with them.