“Not sure, Jon. But Toktufan says a small boat can get close. He’s worked the waters around there.”
“All right.” Jon picked up his backpack, pulled out a black plastic pouch, and extracted a detailed topographic map of the Shanghai area laid over a satellite photograph. He checked the water depths, had Asgar point out exactly where the pagoda and beach were, and wrote down the latitude and longitude coordinates in his small waterproof notebook.
When they were finished, he rolled up the maps.
Alani reminded him. “Don’t forget your hats.”
Jon put on the decorated Uigher skullcap and then a brimmed straw hat.
The women started for the hole in the wall. Jon followed.
Asgar stopped him. “We go a different way.”
When the others had left, and the brick section had been restored, Asgar led him through the rooms to the farthest bedroom. He pushed a box bed aside, lifted a section of the linoleum-covered floor, and pointed down in the narrow black hole it exposed.
“This way is for us.”
Jon was dubious. “Am I going to fit?”
“It widens below. Hope you don’t have severe claustrophobia.”
“I don’t,” Jon assured him.
“I’ll go first, old boy. Don’t worry. Piece of cake.” Asgar sat, dangling his legs in the narrow hole. He looked down once and dropped.
Jon followed, barely squeezing past the floor. The tomblike odors of dirt and rock filled his head. He scraped his shoulders all the way down to the bottom of a dark, dank, wood-braced tunnel. A flashlight was alight ahead, where the tunnel narrowed again. He saw Asgar’s feet and legs.
Asgar’s voice was muffled. “Bigger men than you have passed through fine. Just keep your eyes on my feet and the light. It’s about twenty-five of your American yards.”
Then the light moved, and the feet faded into the dusty shadows ahead.
Jon followed, feeling for the first time in his life what claustrophobia was— breathing when it felt as if there were nothing to breathe, certain that in the next second he would be buried alive. His lungs tightened, and blood throbbed at his temples.
Time seemed to stop as he told himself to inhale, to crawl. Inhale.
Crawl. Follow the feet, as the dark tunnel seemed to swallow him.
At last the air changed. It stank, fetid and thick. Jon gulped like a dying fish.
“Hurry,” Asgar urged and crawled up to his feet.
Quickly, Jon followed. They had emerged into a dark culvert at the end of a stench-filled alley. For Jon at the moment, he could not remember a more beautiful sight.
Asgar trotted ahead, and Jon, still breathing deeply, stumbled after until they passed through an open iron gate and entered a street where two Land Rovers waited at the curb. Hands pulled him into the second vehicle, and he found himself packed into the rear, where the seat had been removed. Three men and two women pressed against him. He recognized Toktufan, Mierkanmilia, and the two makeup artists. The fifth was a stranger, but all were dressed with bits and pieces of traditional Uigher clothing. Alani rode in the front passenger seat, and Asgar drove.
“Why two Land Rovers?” Jon whispered.
“Decoy. In case the police are watching.”
The first Land Rover, similarly loaded, headed off.
They waited. Then, five minutes later, they left, too, turning through dark streets in the early morning hours, until they reached a lighted main road where there was traffic, but not much.
Asgar glanced back. “We’re going to take the Huhang Expressway toward Hangzhou. We’ll stand out like a sore thumb: Eight country bumpkins from Xinjiang, heading south for Hangzhou, like your Okies in the nineteen- thirties. We’ll look like a joke, not a threat — we hope. If the Public Security people aren’t already following us, or fell for the decoy, we might just make it.”
Chapter Thirteen
Under the black night sky, the countryside took on a spectral air of shadows and wavering mists. Jon used a public phone in Gubei New Town in the Changning District to dial a number in Hong Kong. In French, he discussed a proposed business deal that was legitimate, if checked upon.
The conversation contained his innocent-seeming code for a rescue by sea, and it related the time and coordinates. As soon as he hung up, the contact would relay the information to Fred Klein.
“The line sounded clear, no sign of being tapped,” he told Asgar as the Land Rover resumed its tortuous passage over the bad road that sliced through the rocky, rolling land.
“They were listening,” Asgar assured him. “Any long-distance call will be checked, especially to Hong Kong. What’s good is that low-level employees do the monitoring, and for them it’s routine. They seldom catch anyone unless they’re terribly obvious. This time though, the service knows you’re here, so they’re certain to have ordered a special alert. But if your contact’s a solid, long-term cover, you may be all right.”
Jon grimaced. “Thanks.”
They had been stopped twice at routine checkpoints before they left the city, causing amusement among the police. They had been let through with little trouble. Jon began to relax. Thirty minutes later, they were on the expressway, lightly traveled at this late hour, and more than halfway to Hangzhou. A few kilometers later, they turned off onto a two-lane rural road near Jiaxing, heading southeast toward the coast and the East China Sea.
Even in the darkest hours before sunrise, there continued to be other vehicles — a few passenger cars and an intermittent stream of pickups driven by small farmers, their produce piled perilously high in their truck beds. Smaller entrepreneurs rode bicycles, pulling two-wheeled carts with specialty items to sell in Shanghai.
Asgar drove steadily but slowly, not wanting to attract attention. “If the security police are watching, they’ll wait until we hit the beach and the mission’s in progress. They’ll want to capture the rescue team, too. But we’ve got time, so there’s no sense in taking unnecessary chances by speeding. With luck, they’re not following us anyway.”
Jon agreed. He settled back and closed his eyes. Everyone but Asgar dozed, awaking occasionally to the clean salt tang of the open sea and the sour odor of mudflats.
At Zhapu, they turned northwest toward Jinshan. Here on the coastal road, the pickups and bicycles flowed in both directions — north to Shanghai and south to Hangzhou. An occasional police car passed, but the officers either paid no attention or grinned broadly at the sight of the unsophisticated rubes.
Finally, the Land Rover pulled off, so Asgar and Alani could check their position. They consulted and used a penlight to scan the map. Alani looked back and said something in Uigher. Toktufan squeezed into the front seat between them. A heated discussion in Uigher began, with Toktufan pointing at the map and then ahead, and Alani trying, apparently, to pin him down to an exact location.
She offered him a pen to mark the map. He shrugged, waved off the pen, and continued to gesture insistently.
Clearly Toktufan was the one who knew exactly where they were going but strictly by visual aids in the dead of night and from the seat of his pants. This did not make Jon feel secure, or apparently Alani or Asgar.
Swearing under his breath in Uigher, Asgar pulled back onto the road and drove on, while Toktufan surveyed the shadowy gloom.
“You sure he can find this beach?” Jon asked.
“He’ll find it,” Alani said. “The only question is when.”
“It’ll be dawn in a couple of hours.” She turned in her seat and smiled her small, mocking smile. “You wouldn’t want your life to be dull now, would you, Colonel? Excitement and adventure. That’s why you became an agent, isn’t it? Incidentally, if you aren’t CIA, what are you?”
