The Chinese Agenda (30 page)

Gillon bit back the sharp retort at Stowe's choice of words. He shook his head, wondering how the devil Stowe had gotten as far as he had with a disposition that automatically set your teeth on edge every time he opened his mouth. But he was too tired to argue and so he contented himself with a nod.

Stowe stared at him for a moment, then shrugged. 'We come halfway around the world, risk our lives climbing all over these goddamned mountains in the dead of winter, nearly get ourselves killed a dozen times and all you can do is nod.'

Gillon answered mildly. 'Right now, I care more about something to eat and a place to sleep. If this damn weather keeps up, none of us are going much farther.'

Tll second that.' Leycock chuckled. 'Let's get something cooking before we do anything else.' He grabbed his pack and started to undo the straps. Gillon grabbed his arm.

'Wait a minute. Part of the deal that Liu worked out included food. Let them feed us, they've got plenty and we may need what little we have left. In fact,' he added, 'save whatever you can from dinner tonight, just to be on the safe side.'

Gillon's order left them all feeling uneasy as the women came up and silently began to pitch their oversized yurt.

Two more long exhausting days followed as the four

men plodded along in the wake of the fast-moving caravan. They ate mechanically the bland food that was furnished to them and at sunset collapsed into their sleeping bags onl y to rise before dawn to march through heavily forested foothills and mountain slopes. During the three days of the long march they covered nearly fifty miles, which took them along the high, wooded escarpment of the Tien Shan and down into the Jam River valley. On the evening of the third day the caravan halted on a ridge overlooking the riyer, which in spite of the fierce cold and high winds, still tumbled and flashed between snow-and ice-encrusted banks in its plunge from the Subarcho Glacier ten miles northwest to the desert sixty miles southeast. As soon as the yurt had been rigged by the women, they collected their food bowls and dragged their packs inside and slumped down on the soft sheepskins and ate silently, too tired even to talk, while the interior warmed slowly from the smoky fire. The only blessing so far had been the fact that Liu's expected blizzard had failed to materialize.

Gillon dug out his maps and studied the area between the valley and the glacier. Àll right, gentlemen,' he announced finally. 'Tomorrow we leave these marching fools.'

The other three sat up quickly, interest overriding their weariness. Àll right! Leycock chortled. 'It's about time. Another day of this and my feet are going to fall off.'

He crawled over to the maps and Gillon laid a finger on the ridge where they were camped. 'This is where we are now.'

`So where do we go from here?'

Gillon moved his finger, tracing out a route that followed the river upstream.

`We'll cross the river with the caravan, and follow it west to where the valley narrows as the river comes through this gorge. From there, we'll go squthwest along the edge of the glacier to the Kara Bure Col. It's five miles to the border from there.'

Stowe bent over the one-inch-scale map, studying it intently, then shook his head.

'It looks damned rough. Nearly eighteen thousand feet ...'

'Want to stay with the caravan?' Leycock asked. `Hell no ...

'Then shut up.'

Dawn brought a pale band of cloud across the 'northern horizon. Gillon dragged himself, still exhausted, from his sleeping bag to the iron cold of the morning. He shivered and wrapped his parka around him while the women struck the tent and brought food to them before the start of the day's march. Gillon raised his binoculars and studied the river valley below. The ridge on which they were camped was heavily wooded but as the slope descended toward the river, some five hundred feet or more below, the trees grew sparser until they had almost disappeared along the stream bed. Despite the river's fury as it thundered down from a series of falls at the head of the valley, Gillon could see why the caravan route led this way. The river broadened a mile downstream, spilling out over a wide, probably marshy area. In places, the river rippled over the bottom at a depth of less than two feet. The current was swift, but its shallowness would make fording relatively simple. Gillon did not, however, like the hour or so of exposure that would be needed to take the caravan across. But there apparently was no other choice unless the caravan climbed some eight thousand or more feet and crossed the Subarcho Glacier itself. According to the map, the -river narrowed again further downstream, probably growing swifter and deeper as it plunged through the foothills to the southeast before it disappeared into the salt flats of the Taklamakan Desert.

He turned away and saw the caravan master striding toward him. This was the first time they had been so honoured since their first morning with the caravan. Other than the women who rigged and struck the yurt and brought their food and the ever present, ever change, ing guards, they had been studiously avoided by the rest of the caravan. Gillon saw Leycock step out of the yurt and stretch widely, then, as he saw the caravan master coming toward them, stoop and turn. to call to

the others inside. Leycock then sauntered over to stand in back of and to Gillon's right. Gillon noticed that he had his carbine slung over his shoulder. The caravan master, a short man, but broad and appearing even more so in his bulky cold-weather clothes, stopped in front of Gillon. His eyes flicked first to Leycock and then to Stowe and Dmietriev as they both emerged armed from the yurt. The caravan master bobbed his head in the jerky half-bow that seemed to be a standard greeting. He pointed to Gillon, then to Leycock, Stowe and Dmietriev in turn and finally swept an arm around to indicate the caravan. He stopped and waited to see if Gillon understood. Gillon nodded to show that he did.

The caravan master muttered approvingly and pointed next to the sky and waved his hand from horizon to horizon to signify the path of the sun. Gillon nodded again and to cut short a lengthy pantomimed explanation, he stooped down and drew a long line in the snow with four dots following another line away to the west. He sketched in a curving track and pointed to it and the sun.

The caravan master again rumbled approval and pointed to Stowe's carbine. Gillon nodded and sketched a long line leading from the caravan to the southwest, drew three crescent moons and the stick outline of an airplane. The caravan master nodded, squinted closely at Gillon, then shaking his head, strode away, bellowing orders as he did so. The four men, feeling somewhat superior, grinned at each other and wandered back to the yurt, where an old woman had just deposited a plastic pail of some steaming, incomprehensible, gooey concoction of grain and unknown meat. It tasted horrible, but it was starchy and filling and they ate, if not with relish, at least with appetite. If they had waited even a few more minutes, Gillon thought later, they could have wiped out the entire caravan at one pass. It happened so suddenly that the caravan came to an abrupt halt, milling in panic as they were midway out of the trees. The high-pitched turbine whine was screened by the trees and the ridge behind and the Migs were on them without warning. At the first ear-splitting roar, Gillon glanced up in time to see the second Mig flare out over the tops of the trees. Its silver shape was nothing more than an impression before the concussion of the first bomb threw him into the snow. Through the reddish haze that covered his eyes, Gillon saw billowing clouds of snow and smoke spurt up along the line of march and the Migs were banking around for a second run. They were using bombs, he thought stupidly, hardly able to credit what he was seeing; antipersonnel bombs and the air was full of whining shrapnel and the snow was already littered with bodies, women, children, men and animals. Other animals raced in panic through the trees. One horse sheered back along the line of march, caroming off trees in its frantic efforts to escape the deadly bombardment. Gillon watched, frozen, as the horse galloped toward him and then was gone into the forest. The Migs made a third pass and this time their machine guns stuttered and the snow and ground beneath were churned into mud as the metal carved trees into kindling and sent great, jagged splinters whizzing through the air.

The Migs disappeared as abruptly as they had come and without knowing how or why, Gillon was running back along the length of the stricken caravan. Bodies, some reduced to mere bloody bundles of rags, were scattered in the snow. Here and there, a dying camel screamed shrilly and kicked and thrashed in agony. Gillon moved helplessly, shouldered aside rudely whenever he stopped by the uninjured men of the caravan, who glared at him with hate-filled eyes before they turned away. Eyen if he could have spoken their language, he knew it would have been useless to offer the excuse that their own greed for the money and weapons he had offered was as much to blame as his presence.

A woman lay dead, her face a bloody mass where the shrapnel had slashed into her. It was impossible to tell who she had been or how old she was. A few feet beyond, a camel quivered, struggled one last time and fell

back stiffly and slowly relaxed, its great, wide eyes hazing as it died. The smoke of the bombing lay heavily in the trees for a moment, then stirred sluggishly with the breeze. Gillon leaned against a tree, sick to his soul. It was as bad as any village in Vietnam or Laos . . . after a Viet Cong raid or an Allied shelling or bombing .,. . the results were always the same.

He turned away and started back, moving with a purpose now: to find the other three. He searched among the huddled wounded where those who had escaped the effects of the bombs were beginning to bring some order out of the chaos of smoke and blood. Gillon, where the hell are you?' A moment later Leycock was running toward him. `For God's sake, I've been looking all over hell . . . are you okay?'

Gillon nodded brusquely. `Where's Stowe and Dmietriev?'

Leycock rubbed his forehead as he answered and Gillon saw that his face was pale and the pupils of his eyes dilated. Leycock swayed and, for a moment, Gillon thought he had been hit, but he recovered and answered.

... I don't know ...'

But Gillon did not wait for him to-finish. He trotted off back down the line again, checking each body, each cluster of dazed and injured along the way. For ten minutes they searched back and forth along the length of the caravan until Gillon stopped suddenly. `Listen ...'

Leycock stared at him, but Gillon was already run ning ahead to the edge of the trees. Leycock followed and when they broke out into the open on the rim of the valley, Gillon waved him to silence.

For a long moment, they stood silently, listening to the faint sounds borne on the wind from the southern end of the valley. Then Leycock recognized the thin whine of a gas turbine engine and the heavier beat of the helicopter blades above the whimpering of the wounded behind them.

`Helicopters,' Gillon whispered at almost the same instant. `Helicopters, we've got to get out of here .. He swung around but Leycock stopped him.

`Dmietriev and Stowe ... we can't just leave them ...'

`They are dead,' Gillon snarled. 'What else? We can't find them. They are either dead or gone. Either way, there is nothing that we can do for them. If we don't get out of here now, we'll be dead too. How long do you think it will take them to mop up what's left?'

`We can't leave them here,' Leycock shouted. 'You don't know they're dead . . Gillon swore viciously. 'No, I don't, but in a few minutes they will be and so will we. We came to get the information that Jack Liu had for us and we got it. Unless we take it out, none of this makes any sense and none of them were ever worth a damn. It turns out to be one big joke. So you go to hell!' Gillon started off into the trees and after a moment, Leycock followed.

For the rest of that long day, Gillon climbed through the somber forest toward the glacier, hardly aware of Leycock struggling along behind. Restricted now to the northern side of the river, the map indicated that they must climb ridges that reached to twelve and thirteen thousand feet, cross one of the most treacherous glaciers in Asia and the midslopes south of Janart Peak at 15,000 feet. In spite of the implacable hatred which obscured everything else, he was well aware that he must manage to elude heavy Red Chinese patrols to cross the border into the Soviet Union. It was an impossible task; but Gillon no longer cared whether or not it was possible. It was something that he would do. His indifference toward the Red Chinese had become a consuming hatred, for all that they had been the butt of the Kalmucks' jokes and rudeness. That he would deliver the packet of information to the Soviets, he no longer doubted. And he would deliver it gladly on the chance that the Soviets would use the information to initiate a pre-emptive strike that would destroy a regime. that would order and carry out such wanton killings. All through the endless afternoon, wherever there was a break in the trees to the east, they could see the thin plume of smoke that marked the valley where the bombs had fallen and set fire to the forest, making of it a grand

funeral pyre. Gillon pushed himself to the limit of his endurance and then beyond, not stopping even for the briefest rest, knowing that within hours, the Chinese troops would have found the bodies of Stowe and Dmietriev – and their own tracks leading up the ridge. As the afternoon waned into evening, he began to hear aircraft high above flying endless search patterns over the forest.

Darkness fell and still Gillon pushed on, ignoring Leycock's exhausted urgings to rest. The trees had begun to thin and by the time the shaven moon had risen, they were climbing upward through open terrain, pitched steeply on the southern face of a wide ridge that, according to the map, gave onto a narrow plateau, on the far side of which rested the Subarcho Glacier. Beyond the glacier was a last terrible climb of two thousand feet to a pass that gave onto the border. The sky had clouded over during the afternoon with high, thin cirrus that covered the sky from horizon to horizon. As the night advanced the mild wind blowing from the peaks above died and the air grew still and cold. A thin mist began to fill the air, a mist composed of tiny ice crystals, and which burned bare flesh wherever it touched. The moon was a pale disk through the ice, which, as the night progressed and the mist thickened, began to disappear. Leycock stopped and screamed at Gillon, screamed with all of the same frustration and tension that was serving to drive Gillon on. Gillon did not hear him, the profanity and curses that Leycock flung at him did not register. Leycock stumbled after him, panting hoarsely in the thin air, and grabbed at his shoulder. Gillon, shocked into awareness by the abrupt check, whirled. Leycock ducked, parried the straight-arm punch and slammed Gillon in the chest with a flailing elbow strike that smashed him back into the snow. Gillon rolled with the force of the blow and was on his feet in the same motion, but Leycock had fallen back and Gillon found himself staring into the muzzle of his carbine.