A Death in China Page 19

  They landed in driving rain and gusting wind, ankle-deep in water-killers dressed for the country in dark, rough civilian clothes without nationality. In the distance, at night, they might pass for peasants. Close up it would be harder. Stratton's peasants bore a Russian AK-47, Chinese grenades, a silenced East German pistol, a Thai killing knife and a cyanide capsule. On his back, each man carried a folding bicycle. They looked superficially like Chinese machines, but were half as heavy and twice as fast. Stratton had insisted. A question of image: See a man on a bicycle and you assume he lives nearby and knows where he is going. He belongs.

  The same reasoning had ordained the timing. It was midnight, and the helicopter would return one hour before dawn unless Stratton called earlier. They might have come later, but anything moving in the Chinese countryside between midnight and dawn would alarm sentinels accustomed to seeing nothing move at all. Even midnight was cutting it fine, Stratton knew, but he had not dared come until the village was asleep.

  They watched in silence as the chopper clawed for the clouds on muffled engines.

  It was the seventh time Stratton had endured that particular parting. The seven loneliest moments of his life.

  Even in the mud, the bicycles worked like a charm.

  They were the only thing.

  A sentry materialized, wraithlike, from the shelter of a tree about a mile from the village. PLA.

  The sentry hollered something that was lost in the wind. Bobby Ho, riding point, head down, waited until he was within ten yards of the man, until the pistol would bear. He answered in Chinese.

  Maybe the man had heard the helicopter. Maybe Bobby Ho said the wrong thing. The sentry coiled, unslinging his rifle. From their shelter by the tree, two more wet soldiers emerged. The six Americans slithered off their bikes into the mud like a satanic rank of marionettes.

  It ended quickly, but one of the sentries managed a single shot. It ricocheted like flat doom through the blackness.

  For five breathless, unbearable minutes, Stratton's team crouched by the road, safeties off, ears aching, praying. No one came. The sentry had died in vain.

  Bobby Ho tried to break the tension.

  "These Chinks ain't even tryin'," he whispered in jocose mimicry of the fat colonel. It didn't sound funny.

  The single guard at the head of the village main street died in silence for his sloth. He must have felt the blade administered by a saturnine Puerto Rican named Gomez, but he never saw it. Stratton left Gomez and a fireplug Tennessean named Harkness to watch their back door.

  They met the boy a few minutes later, creeping through such stillness and total absence of color it gave Stratton the eerie sensation that the entire village was a two-dimensional fantasy.

  Bobby Ho flushed the boy from a pile of rags in the imperfect shelter of a shop doorway. Panofsky grabbed him, roughly clamping his jaw. The boy wriggled, a minnow in the maw of a shark. Stratton saw the knife come up and winced.

  "Wait!" Bobby Ho hissed. "He can't be more than twelve, all skin and bones."

  The knife wavered. Panofsky looked over at Stratton. Everybody knew the rules.

  It wasn't even a judgment call. Stratton made it one. It was Bobby Ho's play.

  Panofsky's eyes flashed with anger.

  In a sibilant, harsh undertone, Bobby Ho tongue-lashed the boy in Chinese.

  Stratton watched the boy's eyes: flat, emotionless. They showed intelligence, but no surprise, no curiosity. And most of all, no fear.

  At length, the boy nodded. Bobby Ho stepped back.

  "It's all right."

  Again Panofsky looked at Stratton.

  "Let him go," Stratton said. Sometimes you break the rules.

  The rag boy massaged his neck. With arrogance that could only have been inherited, he turned his back and stalked away, vanishing within seconds up an alley on pencil legs that seemed unequal to their sixty-pound burden.

  "I told him we are on a secret training exercise with foreign friends, and that if he ever interrupts the PLA again, I will personally shoot him and everybody in his family."

  "I hope he believed you."

  "He believed me."

  Panofsky snorted. Bloomfield grunted. Stratton sent them up to the far end of the main street to share their scorn.

  Lights burned inside an old movie house that now featured Mao slogans on its sagging marquee. Bobby Ho prised open a side door. They cached the Kalashnikovs in the shadow outside; assault rifles are useless for close work.

  Inside, the building smelled of molding concrete, stale tobacco and rancid bodies. Wooden chairs, neatly arranged, filled the pit of the theater. Empty, every one of them. The stage had been divided into four separate rooms, each with double doors facing the audience. All the doors were closed. From behind one set rose a high-pitched monotone that gave Stratton goose bumps.

  "… Delano Roosevelt… Harry S. Truman… Dwight David Eisenhower… John Fitzgerald Kennedy… Lyndon Brains Johnson… Richard-"

  "Baines," a deeper voice interrupted. "Lyndon Baines Johnson."

  The first voice resumed, a record returned to its groove: "Lyndon Baines Johnson … Richard Milhous Nixon… "

  The voices were Chinese. Stratton looked at Bobby Ho, who gave an elaborate shrug. A teacher and his student. What else could they be?

  Stratton gestured and Bobby Ho nodded. He would check the area around the stage and watch Stratton's back.

  The basement, intelligence had said. The prisoners are held in the basement.

  They are paraded upstairs for onstage interrogation classes.

  Stratton found the stairs without trouble. He went down with a gentle rush until he came to a stout wooden door. He nudged it open with his boot and let the pistol precede him.

  Blackness. Absolute. And a terrible smell: fresh soap thinly overlaying the smell of fear and anger. Stratton let a cone of light from his Czech torch play around the room, and came within a heartbeat of firing at a sound in the far corner. Two rats, red-eyed and territorial.

  It took Stratton fifteen minutes to explore the basement thoroughly. Six cells.

  Stratton toured them, one at a time. In the fourth, scratched into the cheap concrete, a lover's testament had survived its author: "Rick amp; Connie Houston '70." With the leaden movements of an old man, Stratton visited the remaining two cells. In the last one, he found traces of blood the cleaners had missed.

  They had come too late. How long? A day? Two? Stratton would never know and never forget. He ran the back of his hand across his lips to moisten them and tasted ashes. He had only another instant to mull his disappointment.

  From above came the unmistakable sound of boots hammering the tired floorboards.

  Not furtive. Authoritative boots.

  Stratton listened from the head of the stairs. Two men, speaking Chinese. Plus the student and his professor. At least four. He and Bobby Ho had played against worse odds than that.

  From the back of the theater came Bobby Ho's voice. Stratton understood none of the words. He understood too well what they meant. The tone was enough: arrogant, strong, with a touch of exasperation. An officer's voice, informing more than explaining.

  Bobby Ho was playing the cover story, singing loudly enough to alert Stratton.

  The cover was pretty much what Bobby Ho had told the ragged boy: He was a PLA officer down from Peking on a training mission with East Germans en route to North Vietnam to help the heroic struggle there. It was not a bad story. There were plenty of Caucasian instructors with the Viets, even some Germans. In the jacket of his pocket, Bobby Ho had a set of orders that looked like the real thing.

  It might have worked. But it didn't. Three or four voices speaking at once drowned out Bobby Ho. The shouts grew louder. Wood smashed. Bodies fell.

  Stratton didn't hear Bobby Ho again until he screamed.

  Stratton rammed through the door with the pistol ready. The neatly ordered folding chairs lay in matchstick piles. In their chaos stood four Chinese, two uniformed, the
other two in bureaucrats' white short-sleeved shirts, their red books of quotations clutched protectively. As Stratton's eye recorded, his brain raced to establish target priority. The student and his professor were unarmed.

  Shoot last. The other two both had pistols. One was pressed against the head of a kneeling Bobby Ho. Its owner was screaming at Stratton.

  Stratton let his gun arm come down, slowly, with emphasis. He reversed his grip on the pistol. Holding it by the butt, he walked toward the Chinese.

  "Vas is los?" Stratton demanded in his own officer's voice.

  The man with Bobby Ho barked something that brought the student and professor to life like wind-up dolls.

  "Comrade Commissar Wu… " they began together.

  "… instructs you to put down the gun and to raise your hands," concluded the professor.

  Stratton forced a rictus grin.

  "English. Nein. Deutsch." He tapped his chest. "Kamerad."

  After a cursory search, they tossed Stratton into one of the rooms on the stage.

  He was alone for twenty-seven minutes by his watch. An important eternity. He listened to them working on Bobby Ho. The shouts became one-sided, the screams dwindled to pathetic groans.

  When they came for Stratton, they brought Bobby Ho unconscious. Stratton tried not to look at him.

  There were still four of them. No one had left, so without phones, they had made no attempt to spread the alarm. Stratton asked himself why. Were they swayed by the cover story? Or were they simply in a hurry, trying for good information before seeking help?

  The commissar was a lean, gray-haired man in PLA green with red tabs and a four-pocket tunic reserved for officers. The other uniformed man, balding and pot-bellied, wore the blue and white of the police. Stratton marked him as a local.

  The policeman did the heavy work. He jabbed Stratton in the belly with a truncheon. When Stratton involuntarily clammed forward, the policeman struck him on the head.

  The professor screamed: "How many men in your unit? Where are they? What is your mission? Talk or die, imperialist running dog!"

  "Deutsch."

  It lasted about ten minutes. The policeman enjoyed his work. An expert, a fat man with bad breath, who stung without maiming. Stratton rolled with the blows and calculated his chances. The student, nearest the door, held a Chinese carbine with familiarity. The professor was unarmed. The policeman had his club and a holstered pistol. The commissar held a heavy Chinese military pistol.

  Stratton, fighting the pain, babbling in the few words of German he knew, realized that Captain Black was finished. Sooner or later they would alert the PLA garrison outside of town and that would be that.

  Then the Chinese made their mistake.

  From the night came the sound of small arms fire. Stratton heard the pop of Chinese weapons and the crack of the AK-47s. The PLA already knew. The shooting flustered the Chinese. The commissar spoke in English for the first time.

  "There is no time for this. Pick up your friend."

  Stratton stared dumbly. Only when they all began to shout and wave did he allow himself to understand.

  He picked up Bobby Ho the way a mother bundles an injured child. Blood from Bobby's mouth ran off the shoulder of Stratton's jacket. There was a jagged hole where his teeth had been. Stratton held his head gently and pressed him close.

  Bobby Ho rasped a final sentence into Stratton's neck.

  "It was the kid… sorry, Tom… "

  Bobby Ho spun from Stratton's arms and lunged for the student. The carbine, shockingly loud in the small room, cut him in half. Impelled by momentum that the bullets did not reverse, the corpse of Bobby Ho collided with his killer.

  The commissar was too slow. A bullet from his pistol plucked at Stratton's ribs.

  Stratton's open palm drove the commissar's nose into his brain.

  Then Stratton had the pistol. He shot the policeman twice, and then the student as he writhed to free himself from Bobby Ho's last embrace. The professor burst from the room, vaulted off the stage and darted among the chairs, a frenzied hurdler. Stratton shot him in the back.

  Outside was a holocaust. Two trucks burned at the far end of the street, and along either side civilians spilled from single-story hutches whose thatched roofs burned with a hungry crackle. The PLA had arrived in force. Stratton counted eight or nine rag doll figures in army khaki sprawled around the trucks.

  Stratton saw Panofsky go down hurling a grenade. Bloomfield dove after him. He didn't make it.

  Screaming, waving his assault rifle to scatter peasants who seemed more curious than frightened, Stratton headed back up the street the way he had come. Two knock-kneed soldiers emerged from an alley. Stratton took them with a short burst. He ran back to where he had left Gomez and Harkness. An old man brandishing a cane appeared from nowhere. Stratton clubbed him with the rifle.

  He found Harkness's body propped against a tree, and then Gomez, firing methodically at dancing shadows from behind a low concrete wall.

  Together they broke away from the village and into the black, beckoning fields.

  Stratton's wound bled freely. Every step was a fresh souvenir of defeat. After about fifteen minutes he could go no farther. He huddled in an irrigation ditch, Gomez beside him. The Chinese had paused at the edge of the village. To regroup, to await orders, or simply to separate soldiers from civilians. It made no difference. They would come soon enough.

  "What a fuck-up," Gomez growled.

  Stratton gasped for breath, wincing with pain.

  "Did you call for help, for the chopper?"

  "Bloomfield had the radio," Stratton whispered.

  "Shit. I got no ammo left."

  Stratton checked his own rifle. One magazine remained.

  "They're all around us, Captain. I can feel it. And the civilians are worse than the fucking soldiers. Crazy bastards. One guy came at us with a cleaver."

  Stratton knew what the next question would be, and he dreaded it.

  "How are we gonna get out of here, Captain?"

  "Pickup is in about thirty-five minutes," Stratton gasped. "Do you think you can find where we left the beacon? It can't be more than a mile or so."

  "I can find it."

  "Go. I'll stay here and keep them busy till the last minute. When the chopper comes I'll be right behind you."

  "Sure," Gomez muttered in a way that meant it would never happen. "Adios."

  "Good luck," Stratton called, and waited alone to die.

  The bugs were bad. He ignored them. Every time he shifted, his jungle boots squished in the mud. He held perfectly still. The second hand crawled around the face of his watch like a turtle with palsy. He willed himself not to look at it.

  The flames were dying now, but enough light remained to make the village a perfect target. The Chinese recognized that. They could not know how large was the force opposing them, and they were in no hurry to find out. Stratton blessed their fear.

  Stratton heard officers hollering and the whine of new trucks arriving, but it was nearly twenty minutes before the first infantrymen burst from the closest buildings and dove for cover. They were in range, but Stratton did not fire. To fire was to die.

  He waited another agonizing five minutes. Then he crouched and with all his strength hurled the last grenade as far as he could off to the left, away from the route of escape. The night ignited once more: the grenade, followed by Chinese carbines, firing blind. Tracer bullets streaked along the treeline like orange meteors.

  Stratton slithered from the ditch and trotted for the landing zone.

  He had nearly made it when he heard a grunt and the thrashing of a desperate struggle about thirty yards ahead. In the moonlight he saw a figure wielding a pole, a ghostly jouster.

  A scream pierced the night, and then a terrible, expiring "Madre… "

  Stratton crashed forward like a murderous boar, the Kalashnikov on full automatic. Before him, squat gray shapes rustled away. Peasant killers.

  Systematically
, Stratton cut them down. One. Two. Three. Four.

  It had not been a pole, but a pitchfork, and it had impaled Gomez as he lay on the moist earth beside the homing beacon that would bring the rescue helicopter.

  Gomez was dead when Stratton reached him, the pitchfork deep in his chest.

  Mindlessly Stratton knelt by his friend's body and activated the ultrasonic beacon. Already he could hear the invisible helicopter, waiting for the signal.

  From behind he heard whispers from approaching Chinese soldiers as they skittered between clumps of cover.

  Stratton glanced down at Gomez and smothered a moan. He passed a grimy hand across parched lips. All he could do was wait; it would be a very near thing.

  Wait in silence for deliverance, for the sight of the rope ladder peeling out of the chopper's belly. Pray that the chopper came before the Chinese found him.

  Stratton heard a noise and knew instantly that the helicopter would come too late, an eternity too late.

  It was a squelch in the mud, and he whirled to face it. Another gray shape, only a few yards away. It had been watching him; he should have sensed it.

  Stratton sprang forward, his hand working on the Thai blade at his belt. The shape had no gun or he would already be dead. But it could scream, and if it screamed, he would be discovered.

  In three frantic bounds he reached the peasant. It was a young woman. She cried out and backed away, her eyes wild. The distant throb of the chopper blades grew louder. A minute or two, maybe more.

  The woman turned to flee.

  Let her go?

  But she would scream. He knew she would scream. She ran in awkward steps, her arms around her belly. Stratton swiftly caught her, sobbing. Not this time, Bobby Ho. Not again.

  With his left hand Stratton jerked back the girl's head, and the fire's glow shone on the flesh of her neck. He killed her with a single savage thrust.

  Still she screamed, a thin, piteous wail lost in the clatter of the descending helicopter and the confused shouts of the Chinese soldiers. She screamed for her life, and that of the child who lay heavy within her. Two senseless deaths.

  Thomas Stratton did not care.