think any of them have thought more than five minutes past a successful revolution? They’re suicidal, all of them. Maybe they want freedom, maybe not, but what unites them is that they want to be part of something enormous to make their lousy lives mean something. Hand them a country and they’ll probably just go shoot themselves. What they want is martyrdom, Alan. And that’s what you’re going to give them, because it’s going to blow up in your face.”
After another half mile, still stunned by the unprecedented flow of words, Alan finally found his tongue. “Then why are you helping me?”
The rarest of all of Tran Hoang’s expressions: a smile-a big, open smile that displayed a row of large teeth, two of them crooked. “You think I don’t want martyrdom, too?”
Alan blinked at the road that was darkening with the descending sun. Two days later, even after flying to Hong Kong, checking in, and in the stairwell of the Peninsula, switching coat and hat with Tran Hoang and leaving again, after meeting with a stern Chinese woman he knew as Hu, waiting for dark and boarding a small fishing boat headed for Xiayong-even after all that, he thought that Tran Hoang, perhaps, was more insane than he was.
3
He’d spent more than a month with them. That, perhaps, had been a mistake. He’d slept among them and eaten with them and cleaned with them and, through an interpreter, joked with them. He’d met their women and babies camped out in the forest, and he’d listened to stories of injustices that were so massive in their waste of human lives that he couldn’t bring himself to share his own. He was a child of misery compared to their fully fleshed adulthood, and at times, he felt ashamed of the self-pity that had brought him so far.
Yet there really was no way out of it now. Upon arriving, he’d told their leader, Li Qide, that it had to be done soon, but “soon” was a different concept in the woods. Besides, they saw no point in doing it before the Games, when an action, even a failed one, would be so much more effective. He’d tried to argue with Li Qide, but, knowing their stories, how could he say aloud that he just wanted to get back to his wife?
He’d had no contact with anyone outside their camp for the past month, and by now their anger had supplanted his own. He was no longer exacting vengeance for his own insult but for the insult of the people he’d briefly joined. The smells they were familiar with were now familiar to him: the pungent cooking oil, the horse manure and the shabby outhouses, the aroma of human sweat mixed with pine and fir trees, the stink of sour pickles and fire-burned chicken.
Now, finally, it was the eighth of August, and he’d been traveling for nearly three days. A horse to Leishan, and then catching a ride to Guiyang, where he was introduced to a guide who drove him as far as Zhengzhou. There, he picked up this clattering old Mercedes and continued on his own with the aid of a map notated in English. He’d made it through three roadblocks populated by nervous soldiers, but his American passport, in the name of George Miller, and gift packages of Marlboro Reds made his progress smoother.
On the other hand, the roads were anything but, choked with holes and ridges like tiny mountain ranges, and he feared for his tires. They held, though, and he stuck to his route leading inexorably toward the capital.
“Me journalist!” he told a soldier at the last roadblock before Beijing’s outer ring road as he held out his passport. The soldier, a short man with a wide face, looked confused as he examined the document. Alan pointed at his own chest. He was wearing the suit he had brought into the country and not worn again until yesterday, cleaned and pressed. He was painfully conscious of how loose it hung on him now. “Journalist! New York Times!”
For this, too, he had a press card and a forged slip of paper from the Foreign Ministry, both under the name of George Miller. Also, in a gutted catalytic converter, attached by two bolts under the car, were the disassembled pieces of a Chinese M-99B sniper rifle and scope, good for a distance of up to six hundred meters, though he wouldn’t need that much range.
The soldier, still looking confused, went to confer with his comrades.
There was a second line at the roadblock, where trucks were checked over with mirrors on wheels and eager Kunming Wolfdogs. Though he didn’t see how it started, he looked over at the sound of shouting to see a man being wrestled down from a truck with canvas walls so sooty that Alan couldn’t make out the characters written on them. The young man was silent, though he fought against the two soldiers holding him-they were the ones who were shouting, possibly for help. Then one of the soldiers stumbled back and fell on his rear end, and the truck driver broke free, running madly away, in the direction of Beijing. Rifles were unslung, warnings shouted, then, when the driver was about a hundred yards away, the soldiers began shooting. The driver weaved, thinking he could swerve out of the way, but what he didn’t know-and what occurred to Alan-was that soldiers the world over are bad shots. There’s no point slowing yourself with evasive maneuvers, because there’s no greater chance of them hitting a straight line than a swerving one.
After about ten seconds, the driver fell onto his face, as if diving into the road, and his left arm flopped for five more seconds before it also dropped.
Alan’s soldier ran back and, breathing heavily, handed back his papers and started shouting. Alan stared back. The soldier slapped the roof of his car and pointed straight ahead. “You go! You go!”
Alan started up the car and drove ahead, past the corpse surrounded by five soldiers, all of whom seemed unsure what to do.
A tall Nigerian couple in colorful desert wear. Russians in tracksuits, singing. Australian tourists-spinsters- gawking. Drunk Argentineans waving soccer scarves. Austrian girls in traditional mountain dress, blond hair in Heidi braids, followed by short, immaculately dressed Sri Lankans walking mute. American shoppers creeping into crowded hutongs. Red Guards on Tiananmen, looking out of their depth among the hordes of foreigners. The Bird’s Nest stadium, Gothic twisty modernism floating in a city of cubes. Painted cars, blaring horns, traffic police with white gloves waving desperately. Bicycles, thousands of bicycles.
Yet he kept thinking of a truck driver, and a left arm twitching.
He knew where he was going, but it was only noon. He drove carefully, taking in as much as he could before night fell and he would have to flee this place, never to return.
The problem with conspiracies-with functional ones, at least-is that each individual is only responsible for one small part of the overall plan. Trust is imperative. He had learned to trust the Youth League, even though their trust in him was misplaced. However, not even trust could ensure that the boy they had assigned to bring the truck of explosives into the city had succeeded. For all he knew, the dead driver he’d seen had been the one. So, more than trust, it took faith. Faith in events proceeding as planned, and the extreme faith that human error would not be an issue.
Of course, there wasn’t only one truck; there were four. Each would enter through a different compass point, and if only one made it through there would be enough munitions to complete their task: four buildings, simultaneously. Nothing so grand or impossible as the Bird’s Nest or the Great Hall, but important buildings that were nonetheless lightly guarded. Simultaneity was the key. “Like al Qaeda,” Li Qide had said, eager to show his knowledge, as if Osama bin Laden had invented the concept of parallel attacks.
There were at least three more like Alan, men with nothing more than guns and scopes who, like him, would wait in prearranged apartments across from the main targets in order to catch the survivors. Alan had insisted on this. “Bombs are passive,” he explained. “With this we show that the Youth League is not afraid to stay and fight. They won’t be expecting it.”
After an hour of battling traffic, he felt that he had absorbed enough of Beijing’s new face. He headed over to the district called Haidian.
It wasn’t easy finding the street, even with the help of Li Qide’s notations, but eventually he found the Haidian Theater, with its broad, flat face and Chinese characters running down the side, and followed Zhongguancun north, past the ring road, to reach a leafy street whose sign matched the pictograms on the map. The apartment, as promised, was painted green, and an open archway led to a courtyard, where he parked among a scattering of old cars. An old woman slowly crossed the courtyard, carrying a paper bag blackened by grease. He waited until she was gone, then reached under his seat for the wrench. He slipped out and sank to the concrete, his cramped legs shouting back at him, and slid as far as possible under the filthy car. He worked on the bolts and soon held the blackened catalytic converter shell in his hand. He pulled it out, got up, brushed off his clothes, and locked the car door. Carrying the long cylinder like an architect with his plans, he climbed the iron stairs to the fourth floor
