West but so far away in reality. He read the fax out to make sure that the desk clerk understood.
The herbs which I have found so far should be alphabetized under ISNLNCIEAABTAKMMEREM. Am trying to get more details on Tibetan acupuncture. Willi.
The major ordered more beer be sent up to his room and asked if Hartog would join him. The Dutchman declined gracefully. “Perhaps then,” the major said, “I will see you at breakfast.”
“Yes,” Hartog said, and they waited, watching the floor needle above the elevator doors. They did not speak together going up in the elevator, the major yawning and Hartog watching the floor numbers light up, standing relaxed at the back of the elevator, trying desperately not to show his excitement. Sometimes in the game it was like that: You worked your butt off for weeks and months in godforsaken places all over the world, looking for a clue, and nothing, then you walk into a hotel and what happens? The wristwatch goes crazy. If the Chinese major hadn’t actually been working on or near an ICBM site, Hartog wasn’t a Dutchman.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The knock on Alexsandra Malof’s door in the hut that she shared with several other prisoners who had been rescued by the SAS/D teams startled her at first. It was just past midnight. But the moment she remembered she was in in American refugee compound at Khabarovsk she felt safe, having dropped off while working on a draft of her U.N. speech on behalf of all those Jewish and non-Jewish residents of the JAO. Even so, she did as Aussie Lewis had told her and looked out the hut window first, catching a glimpse of the Special Air Service berets: “Who Dares Wins” in the moonlight. And she went to the door with the gun, a Beretta 9mm that Aussie had told her he’d liberated from the ugliest Chinaman he’d ever seen on the SAS/D dune buggy raid against the Chinese guns.
“Yes?” she asked cautiously.
“Miss Malof?”
“Yes.”
“Captain Lourdes.” He held up his tag identification. “We’ve been told by Freeman’s headquarters to escort you to the airstrip. General Freeman says you can bring anything you want but make it snappy.”
“And this?” She showed him the Beretta.
“No problem this end,” he said. “What New York authorities will say is up to them. We’d like to take off before dawn, miss, just in case the Chinese do put up a few aircraft.”
“A few what?”
“Sorry, miss, didn’t mean to frighten you with talk about enemy aircraft, but it’s not just that really. There’s a typhoon on the way and the pilots would like to outskirt it if possible.”
“Yes, very well,” she said softly, and gathered her bag, already packed, and followed them out beneath the beautiful moonlit sky to the Humvee that would take them to the airport.
They pulled up at the gate, showed their ID, the GI there saying, “Good luck,” to Alexsandra.
“Thank you,” she said, and as they started off again noted the faint, sweet odor of the spring earth about to break open with a profusion of flowers any day now. She also had a sense of deja vu, not so much that she’d been in the same place but doing the same thing as a child, her smell memory triggered by the strange odor of chloroform. Well past the gate she felt her shoulders suddenly held back, and felt chloroform-soaked cotton pressed hard against her face. She squirmed and tried to scream but there was no use; she was out of it in seconds, slumped in the Humvee’s front seat.
“How long to the Black River?’ one of the men asked. He was referring to the Amur, which the Chinese, who had hired them, habitually called the Black River.
“A half hour,” the leader said. “Then it’s up to the Chinese. All we were asked to do was to deliver her unharmed. Keep her from getting on that plane. Now remember, once we get to the river and hand her over to the Chinks we get rid of this SAS battle dress garb and we’re back to being just four Khabarovsk traders busy with our import-export business.”
The other three men laughed — they were from Hong Kong, where they had worked for the arms manufacturer Jay La Roche before he was murdered. With the reversion of Hong Kong to China threatening their roles as European entrepreneurs unless they kowtowed to Beijing, they were the perfect middlemen — men without a country, between China and the West.
“Hope we get more business like this,” one of the four kidnappers said.
“No,” said the man who called himself Lourdes and who was doing the driving. “Not like this. This is a one- time fee from the Chinese. Seems she’s important to Nie.”
“Lot of trouble to go to for a bit of tail,” one of the men in the back joshed.
Lourdes had shifted down as they neared the Amur River that separated Manchuria from Siberia. “No, it’s all politics,” he said. “They want to put her on trial.”
“A show trial,” one of the men in the back said. “Better her than me.”
“Okay, shush,” the driver said. “Remember the trace for the cease-fire is the river here. American patrols’ll be past this point in about ten minutes. Soon as they’re gone we send her across.”
CHAPTER NINE
“Fucking hell!” Aussie roared. “Whaddya mean someone’s kidnapped her? Who?”
“We don’t know, Aussie,” David Brentwood said. “First thing we knew about it was she was missing the refugee check this morning.”
“Well what about the fucking gate? The guards, for Chrissake?”
‘They said the guys who picked her up were SAS — ID and all.”
“Right!” Aussie said, grabbing his Heckler & Koch 9mm submachine gun. “Let’s get a few fuckin’ answers.”
The SAS men with him — Salvini, Brentwood, and Choir Williams, among the “bravest of the brave” in Freeman’s book — didn’t dare tell him he’d just blown his bet about not swearing for a week. The Australian was in a murderous mood. His blue eyes actually seemed to darken as he strapped on extra magazine belts. “Let’s go!”
“Where?” Brentwood said.
“To find the fuckers! For Chrissake!” Aussie said.
David Brentwood put his arm on Aussie’s shoulder. “Cool it, digger — the MPs’ve found an abandoned Humvee down by the river. By now she’s in Chinese hands.”
The information hit him like a blow to the solar plexus, and he was shaking his head, trying to will it not to be true.
“No, mate,” he said to David Brentwood disbelievingly. “Must be some mistake.” Suddenly he looked up. This man who was renowned in the troop for not being afraid to face the truth — to give you a realistic SITREP, knowing how to separate hope from fact — was now ashen faced. “The airport,” he said. “Maybe Freeman had her moved —”
“No, Aussie. Listen up now! We’ve checked,” Brentwood said, adopting the Aussie’s idiom. “She’s gone, mate.”
Aussie seemed to murmur something, letting the Heckler & Koch fall to the bunk where it bounced, the blankets stretched tightly, as per regulation, as if it had dropped on a small trampoline.
“Freeman wants to see us,” Salvini put in.
Aussie looked up hopefully. “Right — what’s on?”
Salvini instantly regretted he’d mentioned Freeman, as Aussie in his state had leapt to the conclusion that Freeman had already drawn up some kind of rescue op, but he hadn’t. He had something far more pressing.
The problem had begun, or rather had taken shape, some seventeen hours ago when in Lhasa the PLA major
