doing. This hasn’t been easy, and I doubt it’s going to get easy.
Hours, at the outside, and China so far away.”
“I know. We’ll do it.”
Absentmindedly the president’s hand pressed against his suit jacket.
Through the expensive cloth, he could feel his wallet. The smiling man with the cocky fedora appeared in his mind. There seemed to be a question in his eyes. He longed to ask him what it was. Instead, he banished him.
The E-2C’s slipstream blasted Jon clear of the Hawkeye in seconds, and, except for the brush of air against his cheeks, he had the sensation that he was floating motionless in space. Not moving at all. Still, he was falling at an incredible rate — more than one hundred miles an hour.
In the nearly windless sky, he needed to know his altitude and what his course toward the drop zone was. Battling the forces of air and gravity, he raised his right wrist to look at the LED displays of his altimeter and GPS unit. He was still twenty thousand feet up, directly on course.
The lack of wind was his best ally.
Fortunately, this was no precision jump, although there were mountains no more than a few miles away. To know when to open the chute, he needed to keep his eyes on the altimeter. As long as the wind remained calm, he should be falling at the proper angle to hit the field dead center. Bad use of words, he told himself. Call it “on target.”
He was feeling almost euphoric as he planed on his air cushion.
Abruptly, the GPS unit began to blink. It was a warning that he was off course. Jaw tight, he maneuvered his falling body to alter the shape of the air cushion, and he made a slow turn. The GPS unit stopped blinking.
Relieved, he was about to check the altimeter again when his wrist began to vibrate. It was the alarm that warned he was nearing the vertical point of no return. Once he dropped to that height, it would be too late to open his canopy. His heart began to pound. He forced his body upright and pulled the ripcord handle.
There was a momentary whispering of air above as the tightly packed parachute unfolded. He looked up, hoping … and his body suddenly lurched against the harness straps. The canopy was open, the harness had held, and he was back on schedule.
All noise vanished. He threw the ripcord handle away. He swung gently and floated downward, the black canopy flaring above. The GPS unit reported he was slightly off course, and he corrected by pulling on the steering lines. The one thing he must not do was collapse the canopy by steering too wildly. Once steady on course again, he looked down and saw lights closer than he expected. That always happened. The ground seemed to rush up faster than you anticipated, because as you drifted, you had no idea of your descending speed.
He looked down again. The lights came from windows in scattered clusters of houses and villages. In the middle was darkness — a wide, black space.
That had to be his target area, at last.
He silently thanked the satellite photos of the Dazu area, all those navy people who had calculated the drop, and the windless weather. He jettisoned everything he could — oxygen tank, gloves, insulated flight cap. But as the ground sped up toward him, it was still invisible.
Worriedly, he checked his altimeter. Still one hundred feet. A matter of just a few seconds to impact.
When he saw the ground clearly — a plowed field as advertised — he felt suddenly comfortable. He knew exactly what to do. He relaxed, spread his feet apart, bent his knees, and hit. As his shoes sank into the soft, broken earth, a dull wave of pain rolled through him, a legacy from the beating this morning. He pushed the pain from his mind. He bounced up slightly, settled back, caught his balance, and heaved himself upright. The rich scent of the dark soil filled his mind. The canopy flowed silently to the earth behind.
Alone in the night in almost the middle of the field, he listened. He heard quiet insect sounds but not the distant noise of motors. The Chengyu Expressway from Chongqing to Chengdu was somewhere close, but at this late hour on a Sunday night, few cars would be traveling. Shadowy in the distance, black stands of trees stood like sentries. Quickly, he removed all his instruments and harnesses, stripped off the insulated jumpsuit, gathered up the black chute, and used his entrenching tool to bury everything, except the GPS unit. He had finished covering the cache when he heard a faint noise, distant and metallic. As if two small pieces of metal had bumped into each other.
He waited. Tense, straining to hear in the night. A minute. Two. The faint noise did not occur again.
He unhooked his MP5K minisubmachine gun, removed the harness that had held it stationary during his jump, and slung the weapon over his shoulder. Next he dug a shallower opening and laid the entrenching tool and harness inside. He used his hands to pile soil over it.
Brushing the dirt from his hands, he unslung the MP5K, read the GPS unit to find his directions, and hooked it to his gun belt. At last, he headed across the field toward the line of trees. They were a darker, more ragged black against the lighter black of the night sky. As always, he scanned around, watching the horizon, the distant lights, and the tree line.
Within two minutes, he thought he saw movement at the edge of the trees.
Thirty seconds later, he dove onto his stomach, his submachine gun grasped in both hands. He picked night binoculars from his gun belt, snapped them over his eyes, and examined the row of timber. There was a small structure inside the trees that could be a shed, a cottage, or a house. It was too vague in the binoculars’ greenish light for him to be certain. He thought he saw a farm wagon and a two-wheeled cart, too.
None of it moved. Nothing. Not even a cow or a dog.
Still, he had seen something. Whatever it was, it appeared to be gone.
He waited another two minutes. At last, he hooked the binoculars back onto his gun belt. He checked the luminous dial of the GPS unit again, climbed to his feet, and moved off.
Once more, he heard the noise. His throat tightened. Now he knew exactly what it was: A pistol hammer had been cocked. As he hurried on, the shapes seemed to rise from the field itself, as if from mythical dragon’s teeth. Shadows encircled him. Shadows with weapons, all trained on him. Crouched in the dark field, his MP5K ready in his hands, Jon tensed to make a move, any move. “I wouldn’t, if I were you. The lads are rather nervous.” He saw a stir in the dark ranks around him. They had blackened faces but no uniforms. Instead, they wore baggy clothes and close-fitting wool caps. In the same instant, he also realized that the voice that had cautioned him in good British English was familiar.
Even as he thought all this, the ragged troops parted, and the speaker walked through. “Someone named Fred Klein said you might care for help.”
There was a flash of white teeth as Asgar Mahmout smiled briefly and continued forward, the same old AK- 47 slung muzzle down over his shoulder. He held out his hand. “Good to see you again.” Jon shook it, and the Uighers closed in protectively, watching over their shoulders for trouble. “Christ, man,” Asgar said, staring. “Your face looks like dog vomit. What the devil happened to you?”
Chapter Thirty-Five
After Jon gave him a brief rundown of his escape from Feng Dun and his killers, Asgar Mahmout shook his hand again in admiration. Meanwhile, Jon counted twenty Uighers, including Asgar. They wore that same odd mixture of colorful, baggy Uigher clothes and loose Western garb as in Shanghai. Most were cleanly shaved, while a few had thin, drooping mustaches like Asgar’s. They said nothing. Asgar explained they spoke bad Chinese and no English.
Jon surveyed the field. The dark eyes of Asgar’s men were looking nervously all around. “We’d better get out of here.”
Asgar spoke to them in Uigher. With Jon shielded in the center, the group moved off. To the left were fields of rice paddies, their watery surfaces reflecting like black mirrors in the starlight. Farther off were low mountains— purple inkblots against the night. That would be where the Buddha Grottos were carved, including the Sleeping Buddha, where Li Kuonyi would meet Mcdermid’s representative — probably Feng Dun.
