had waited for the Dutchman, Hartog, to start out on his visit to the Potala Palace, whose grand, sweeping whitish gray edifice against the blue sky seemed impregnable and more majestic than even the white-topped mountain fastness beyond.
The PLA major, Mah, had asked to listen to the Public Security Bureau’s tapes of the foreigner, William Hartog, in room 206. The tape for room 206 was mainly silent, except for the sound of the toilet flushing and the tinkling, at times mournful, songs of Tibet, probably coming from the foreigner’s Walkman. He knew foreigners became glued to their Walkman sets and would carry them in the most inappropriate places. Mah, whose job, apart from the other duties he had, was to monitor the tapes for the Holiday Inn, went into room 1219, one of the two China Travel Service offices on the Holiday Inn’s ground floor.
The men who had been on the last watch were tired but tried not to show it, sitting up attentively with their earpieces looking like huge green earmuffs, afraid of Major Mah’s displeasure. He came there on his weekly rounds or “foreigner check,” as they called it.
“He has flushed the toilet six times,” Man charged, as if it were a personal affront.
The technicians looked at one other — yes, they certainly agreed it was six times.
“And that Tibetan music,” Mah said derisively. “Listening to it at the same time.”
“Ah,” the technician said. ‘The music I think comes from his room while he is doing his business on the toilet.”
Mah sometimes wondered where it was they’d got these troops from to police Tibet. They were country bumpkins, most of them — not at all like Cheng’s elite shock troops or the tougher “PLA Second Artillery Army,” those who guarded the ICBM sites.
“Why do you think,” Mah asked contemptuously, “that he flushes the toilet six times?”
“Perhaps there was an obstruction,” one of the technicians proffered confidently.
“Maybe,” the other technician said, “he was full of shit! Ha, ha!”
Mah turned such an iron face toward the hapless technician that he cringed. “Are you the people’s official clown?” Mah asked. Before the belittled man could think of any response, Mah kept on, tapping the man’s head as if talking to an idiot. “If there was an obstruction, rock brain, the toilet would most likely have overflowed after it had been flushed six times in a row.”
“He’s not on the toilet,” the first technician said suddenly, surprised by his own revisionist thought.
“Ah!” Mah said. “Now we are thinking. Maybe he’s doing something else?”
“He’s — he’s in the bedroom,” the oldest of the technicians said, visibly excited by his deduction.
“Doing what, comrade?” Mah pressed.
“He’s recording over the music tape. He’s talking very close to it…. The toilet is to cover his voice. He must have spoken very softly.”
Mah nodded, then picked up the phone, pressing the number for the front desk. “And of course he might have a thing about flushing toilets and the music could mean he likes Tibetan music.”
The front desk answered.
“Major Mah here. Last night a foreigner, Mr. Hartog, he gave you a tape to mail.”
“Yes, sir, and a fax.”
“Has the fax gone?”
“Yes, Major. Almost immediately. It was another of his messages about Tibetan remedies.”
“Has the cassette tape been posted?”
“No — it’s due to go in another few—”
“Send it to me immediately. And your copy of the fax.”
Scanning the copy of the fax — it was in telegraphic style, no doubt to save money — Mah saw that Hartog had instructed the recipients to classify his Tibetan remedies discovered so far under the following letters of the English alphabet: ISNLNCIEAABTAKMMEREM. It was signed “Willi.”
Man now turned his attention to the cassette tape. They all sat silently as Mah had the technician run the tape fast forward. There was a gabble of music — the same as picked up by the room mike if Mah wasn’t mistaken — but no voice. They tried the other side and played it fast forward. Fast music gibberish again — no sustained pauses — no European voice. Nothing. Maybe the tape was no more than noise cover with no message at all?
The silence in the room was more intense because of the terrible snarling and nipping and yapping of one of the packs of wild dogs who, because the Buddhist monks would not harm any living creature, strayed wild around Lhasa and the other Tibetan villages. Some of the dogs had been shot for sneaking into PLA camps looking for food. Some had rabies. Mah was trying to concentrate, and told one of the men to have the desk get someone out to disperse the mongrels. Had his mother tongue been English it is just possible that Mah might have disassembled the fax’s message right away. He looked at it again. ISNLNCIEAABTAKMMEREM and the last word, “Willi.”
What struck Mah as odd was that several of the English characters, or rather letters, were repeated, such as
In Tibet it was 8:00 a.m., in Amsterdam one in the morning, but in the small shop on the Osterdok near the railway station out of which Hartog worked when in Amsterdam that fax had already been decoded by his MOSSAD assistant and cleared for Tel Aviv as “most secret” and for “immediate” transmission to UNCOMFARE — U.N. Commander Far East, General Douglas Freeman.
“Willi” had five letters, thus the message broke down into a five-line message, so that “ISNLN” became
I
S
N
L
N
and the message read
ICBM
SITE
NEAR
LAKE
NAM.
Lake Nam, at the foot of the Nyaiqen Mountains, was twenty-five miles long, the largest salt lake in Tibet.
CHAPTER TEN
And now Freeman’s Second Army HQ at Orgon Tal had the location given them by MOSSAD. For Aussie Lewis it could not have come at a worse time, but from Brentwood’s point of view it was a godsend. It was at least something — a danger to the entire Second Army — that might overshadow Aussie’s personal loss of Alexsandra Malof. The revelation of the ICBM sites set alarm bells off all through Freeman’s HQ at Orgon Tal and as far away as Khabarovsk, all within striking distance of the latest Chinese DF5 ICBM.
But for Aussie the news that Second Army’s big B-52 raid earlier in the war on the ICBM complex at Turpan in western China’s desert had not completely taken out China’s long-range rocket capacity could not begin to upset him as much as the kidnapping of Alexsandra. The ICBMs were Freeman’s problem. Alexsandra was his. In his
