the mountainside above the Sleeping Buddha. When he saw nothing, he whirled and barked more orders in Chinese. “He’s telling them?” Asgar began.
Jon jumped up, shouting, “Now we fire! Fire! Fire!” Asgar echoed the order in Uigher, and their part of the hillside erupted. All twenty-two assault rifles opened a blistering fire on Feng’s trapped men and soldiers.
The low sun of late afternoon probed through small gaps in the heavy drapes that shut off Fred Klein’s office in Covert-One’s new headquarters from the outside world. Still, the outside world loomed large in Klein’s office. His face, haggard from lack of sleep and missed meals, bristled with a ragged six-day growth of gray beard too rapidly turning white. His heavy, red-streaked eyes appeared permanently fixed on the ship’s clock on his wall. His head was cocked sideways in the direction of the blue telephone. Had there been anyone to see, they would have thought him paralyzed, hypnotized, in a trance, unconscious, or dead, because he had not moved in so long. Only his chest rose and fell slightly as he breathed. When the blue phone rang, he jerked alert and nearly fell from the chair as he grabbed the receiver. “Jon!”
“He’s not called?” the president asked.
Disappointment and tension radiated from his low voice. “No, sir.”
“We have two hours. Or less.”
“Or more. Ships can be unpredictable.”
“The weather in the Arabian Sea is calm and clear all the way to the Persian Gulf and on to Basra.”
“Weather isn’t the only variable, Mr. President.”
“That’s what scares me, Fred.”
“It scares me, too, sir.” Klein could hear the president breathing. There was a slight echo from the other end of the connection. Wherever he was calling from, the president was alone. “What do you think is happening? in … where is Colonel Smith?”
Klein reminded him, “Dazu, Sichuan. At the Sleeping Buddha.” The president fell silent. “They took me there once. The Chinese. To all those carvings.”
“I’ve never seen them.”
“They’re remarkable. Some are nearly two thousand years old, carved by great artists. I wonder what we’ll leave of use for those alive a thousand years from now?” The president was silent again. “What time is it there? At the Sleeping Buddha?”
“The same as it is in Beijing, Sam. China gerrymandered their time zones into a single one to make it convenient. It’s about four a.m. there.”
“Shouldn’t it be over? Shouldn’t we have heard? Not even a word about my father?”
“I don’t know, Mr. President. Colonel Smith knows the time frame.”
Klein could sense the president’s nodding. “Yes, of course he does.”
“He’ll do his best. No one’s best is better.”
Again the affirmative nodding somewhere in the White House, as if the president were sure it would all work out, although a large part of him feared it would not. “I have to get the manifest, and then I have to get a copy to Niu Jianxing in Beijing. But now it’s too late, isn’t it?
There’s no time to get even a copy to China and hope that’s enough to convince the hardliners. They’d laugh at a fax, or at a copy sent over the Internet. They could be too easily counterfeited. Or at least, if we’re right and there’s someone inside Zhongnanhai who wants war, there’s no way he’d have to believe anything short of the actual manifest.”
“Jon will think of something,” Klein said reassuringly. But he had no idea what that could be.
Neither did the president. “In an hour, maybe less, I’ll tell Brose to give the order. We’re going to have to board the Empress. I don’t see any way around it, dammit. You did your best. Everyone did their best.
All we can do now is hope and pray the Chinese back off, but I don’t see that happening.”
“No, sir. Neither do I.”
The silence was longer. The voice that finally came was sad, tragic: “It’s the idiocies and tragedy of the Cold War all over again. Only this time, the weapons are more advanced, and we may be standing alone. In two hours, we’ll know.”
At the base of the mountains, where the trail led up and over into the valley of the carvings, David Thayer slept, tired by the unaccustomed activity and tension of the night. Chiavelli watched the old man, the Chinese-made AK given him by Asgar Mahmout resting across his lap in the dark interior of the battered limo. He had been greatly impressed with Thayer’s ability to keep up and suspected that his exhaustion came less from activity than from tension.
The tension, especially here under the stifling branches and brush hiding them, of doing nothing but waiting was affecting even Chiavelli.
He found himself dozing, only to jerk awake to the beating of his own heart. He took longer and longer to distinguish between dozing and being awake each time he opened his eyes. This time, as he awoke with a painful whip of his neck, it was only seconds before he knew he was actually awake, and that the sound in his ears was not the pounding of his heart.
It was many feet walking on the road. Heavy feet, booted, and moving in an all-too-familiar rhythm. Marching feet, coming toward them.
David Thayer had heard them, too. “Soldiers. I know the rhythm. Chinese soldiers, marching.”
Chiavelli listened intently. “Ten? Twelve? A squad?”
“I’d say so.” Thayer’s voice was shaky.
“On the road, no more than five hundred yards away. A quarter of a mile.”
“We … we’re off the road,” Thayer decided nervously. “The brush and branches should hide us.”
“Maybe, but what are they doing here at this hour? It’s oh four hundred.
Four a.m. They couldn’t have discovered you’re missing, or there’d be an army out there. They wouldn’t be walking. No, these guys are after someone or something else, and I’ve got a bad feeling.”
That scared the old man, but he tried to hold up. “You think it’s about Colonel Smith and the Uighers’ mission. But how could anyone know? It’s more probable they have no connection at all to what’s happening at Baoding Shan.”
“Can we take the chance? Do nothing?” Chiavelli answered his own question: “Absolutely not. If they’re heading for the valley, they’ll blindside Jon, Asgar, and the Uighers.”
“We’ve got to help!”
“I’ll try to hold them here. At least, to slow them down.”
“What about me?”
“Stay here, keep quiet, and you should be safe. If I don’t come back, you’ll have to drive yourself to the Uigher hideout.”
Thayer shook his head. “Unrealistic. I haven’t driven anything in fifty years, Captain. And the last time I counted, two guns were always better than one. That hasn’t changed. You’re not protecting me by leaving me alone. Give me a gun. I haven’t fired a weapon in fifty years, either, but one doesn’t forget how to aim and pull the trigger.”
Chiavelli stared at the white hair, the parchment skin, the determined look. “You’re sure? The worst that’ll happen if they discover you here in the limo is they’ll send you back to the prison farm. Klein’s extraction team should be ready by now. It’s smart for you to stay here and keep your head down.”
Thayer held out his hand. “I have a Ph. D., Dennis. I’m officially smart.
Give me the gun.”
Chiavelli stared. Thayer seemed completely calm. There was a stray moonbeam that glowed through the brush. In its light, he could see Thayer’s eyes were smiling, as if mortality and death were longtime companions. Chiavelli nodded, understanding. Of course, the old man was right.
Chiavelli put Jon’s 9mm Beretta in the gnarled hand. The hand was steady. Then he opened the car door on his side, which faced away from the road, and cautioned Thayer to be quiet. They slid out through the camouflage covering and hid behind it. The moon was directly overhead.
