Zeb stood at a distance as Meghan thanked Bashi when they returned his coach. The Uyghur bowed in return and handed them a bag.
‘Food,’ he said, at their startled looks. ‘I can guess which direction you are going. You’ll need it.’
Bwana took it from him as if it was weightless, inhaled the aroma and rolled his eyes expressively.
‘If you cook like this, xiangsheng, I’ll stay back and work with you.’
Bashi bowed again at the compliment and watched as they left. He eyed Pasha, who was behind Bear and Roger but made no comment at the stranger’s appearance.
‘There might be people who question you … everyone in the town.’ Zeb warned him softly.
‘Let them. I fitted false number plates on the coach. I will repaint it right away. It will dry quickly in this heat.’
‘You’ve done this before?’
‘What you are planning to do?’ He cocked his head in the direction of the border before replying. ‘No, xiangsheng, but my people … I have helped smuggle many of them to Beijing.’
Zeb’s lips tightened at that. ‘Internment camps.’
‘Shi. They call them education camps. Thousands of Uyghurs are taken to it. It’s a prison. Nothing more than that. They make us sing songs praising the Communist Party, praising the president. They want to destroy our way of life. They want us to become Han Chinese. We’ll never give in,’ he said fiercely. ‘That’s why we work with our mutual friends,’ he said, alluding to Zhao’s activists.
Zeb nodded when Beth tugged his clothing discreetly.
‘We’ve got to leave,’ he said apologetically.
‘Go.’ Bashi beamed at him. ‘Travel safely. Our problems will not go away just like that,’ he said, snapping his fingers. ‘We have a long struggle ahead of us.’
‘We should have killed Hsu,’ Meghan said bitterly when they left the motel to join the rest of the operatives.
‘That wouldn’t help the Uyghurs,’ her sister countered. ‘The MSS would get a new chief and nothing would change on the ground.’
The elder twin kicked at a pebble on the street savagely and mounted the sidewalk to join the rest of the team.
‘Are these your women?’ Pasha asked Zeb as he leered at the twins.
Meghan lunged at him, brushing aside Bear and Roger as if they didn’t exist. She grabbed the terrorist’s head and slammed his forehead against the wall.
‘We aren’t anyone’s women,’ she snarled and shoved him away savagely.
The Taliban chieftain groaned and staggered as he regained his balance. He felt his face with his fingers and grimaced when they came away red. He spat blood on the sidewalk and leaned against the wall to draw shuddering breaths.
‘Behave,’ Zeb told him coldly and pushed him to get him to follow his team.
‘How did you know I was with the Chinese?’ Pasha asked curiously once they hit the plains after leaving Tashkurgan.
‘A Sori villager found your note on a dead person—’
‘Daraa!’ the terrorist exclaimed. ‘He was an Afghan worker in the prison. He cleaned our cells. He had come to China with some drug smugglers and stayed back. I heard him singing one day, and that’s when I knew he was my people. He kept talking of returning to Afghanistan, and that gave me the idea of giving him the note. I had forgotten all about it. It didn’t strike me that he had returned when he stopped coming.’
‘None of the villagers recognized him.’
‘They wouldn’t. He wasn’t from Sori or Sarhad or any of the villages in Badakshan. He was from the south.’
‘Did you tell him who you were?’
‘No. From our talks, I knew he hated people like me. That’s why I didn’t put my name on that note. I hoped he wouldn’t recognize my symbol. But,’ he frowned, ‘if he was dead, how did you know I would be in China?’
‘We guessed,’ Zeb said, shortly. He wasn’t going to tell the terrorist of his deduction. Heck, I don’t even want to talk to him. We aren’t friends. ‘How did you cross the border?’
‘I don’t know.’
He nodded when Zeb stared at him.
‘It’s true. I lost consciousness after a mile or so of escaping from you. From your shot,’ he glared balefully at the operative. ‘I remember falling in the forest, thinking I would die in the cold. The next moment, I woke up in that Chinese prison.’
‘Their soldiers must have crossed the border and found you,’ Zeb guessed.
‘Yes, that’s what I found out from speaking to some of the guards.’
‘Did they know who you were?’
‘No. Every prisoner in that camp is recorded as a Uyghur or a drug smuggler. They had me down as a smuggler.’
It must have been MSS agents who found him. They reported to Hsu, who recognized who Pasha was and ordered them to bring him to China. He probably transferred them to some distant part of the country and warned them to keep quiet about the prisoner.
The Taliban man didn’t ask any more questions when they stopped for a water break two hours later. He crouched on his heels, several feet away from the Agency team, and looked broodingly into the distance, towards Afghanistan.
‘You wouldn’t think,’ Bear wiped his lips and capped his bottle, ‘by looking at him that he’s the most dangerous terrorist in the world.’
‘He knows he’s our captive,’ Zeb commented. ‘He’ll change once he’s back in his country, surrounded by his fighters. He’ll revert to his old self.’
‘Why didn’t you let him tell Faroukh where we were?’
‘The Taliban wouldn’t have kept it among themselves. The news would have leaked … the Chinese would have heard of it, while we were here. I’m sure Hsu didn’t let anyone know that it was Pasha in their camp. Once the Chinese government learned that, who knows how they would have reacted? Their president could have got the PLA to stop us, and then things would have gotten sticky.’
‘It will leak, though,’ Roger argued, ‘that the MSS had Pasha. Once he’s back in Sori. He’ll go on TV, he’ll tell the world where he was.’
‘That’s Hsu’s problem,’ Zeb shrugged. ‘I’m sure he’ll come up with something that sounds plausible. That his agents didn’t recognize Pasha and believed him to be Uyghur.’
He got to his feet and wiped his hands against his combat trousers.
‘Are you okay?’ he said, walking toward the terrorist. ‘It’s going to get harder from now on.’
‘You’re concerned about me, American?’ Pasha spat.
‘I should have killed you that night. I should have shot you in the head instead of your thigh. You got lucky. I would like nothing better than to break your neck here, but we promised to get you back alive.’
The terrorist looked at him with hawk-like eyes. ‘How will we cross the border?’
‘You’ll find out.’
They reached the plains on the Chinese side of the border by eight pm.
‘You’ll have to wear this,’ Zeb told Pasha when they were a mile away from the wire. He brought out a blindfold from his pocket and dangled it in the air.
‘That?’ their prisoner took a step back. ‘How will I see where I’m going?’
‘We’ll guide you,’ Bear said grimly and tied the black strip around the terrorist’s eyes.
We can’t let him see our drones or the graphene sheets.
He ignored the killer’s curses and swearing as he directed the man over the uneven landscape and forced him to the ground when they were half a mile from the crossing.
He folded the corners of a spare graphene sheet and stapled them to make rough pockets. ‘Make sure they stay inside,’ he said, guiding Pasha’s hands and feet into the pockets. ‘And keep the edge over your head.’
‘How can I do all that when I can’t see?’ the terrorist snarled.
‘You’ll have to, if you want to live.’
The Taliban man grouched and protested, but relented when he realized he wasn’t going to be given any choice. He dug his elbows into the ground, crawled and found a rhythm as Zeb guided him with soft commands.
Our going will be slow, but that will work in our favor. The darker it gets when we reach the wire, the better.
‘Drones are in the air,’ Beth said softly seventy-five minutes later. Zeb trained his NVGs on the wire as he ordered Pasha to a stop.
‘Can’t see anything,’ he murmured into his mic.
‘The wire’s right there,’ Bear exclaimed, ‘a hundred yards away.’
‘I mean patrols.’
‘No patrols,’ Meghan, a dark shape to his right, whispered. ‘The guards are as alert as last time.’
‘They must know their fence alarm went down,’ Chloe mused.
‘I’m sure they do,’ Zeb thought aloud. ‘But if it’s happened before, often enough, then they mustn’t be worried.’
They waited nevertheless, while the drones circled and fed their data. ‘I can’t see soldiers hiding anywhere,’ Beth called out presently. ‘I’ve got my bird to fly around the guard posts and zoom out as well.’
‘Neither can I,’ Meghan echoed.
‘Let’s go,’ Zeb decided. ‘Same formation as before. Two of us at a time, while the rest of us provide cover.’
Bear and Chloe went first, while Bwana and Meghan stood by, with their Barretts aimed at the guard posts.
‘Hole’s still there,’ the petite operative confirmed when the couple reached the breach they had made earlier.
If the alarms go down frequently and there are no patrols, Zeb thought, they wouldn’t have discovered it.
Bwana went next, with Pasha ahead of him.
‘Don’t make a sound. Do exactly as I say,’ the operative warned him as he followed the terrorist, who muttered an unintelligible curse. The Taliban warlord didn’t protest, however. He bowed his head and crawled forward slowly, breathing harshly from the effort.
‘He hasn’t complained once,’ Roger commented once he and their friend were out of hearing.
‘He has a strong incentive,’ Beth retorted. ‘He wants to stay alive and get back to his people.’
Zeb watched them until the shapes merged in the darkness and exhaled in relief after several long, tense moments when Bwana radioed them.
‘We are through. His sheet got stuck in the wire; that slowed us.’
‘Did it rip?’ he asked, with concern. Any tear would expose their body heat.
‘No. He stayed still when I ordered him to. I removed the barb and pushed him through.’
The twins went next, followed by Broker and Roger, and then Zeb set off. He hurried, ignoring the agony in his elbows. Sweat dripped off his forehead and blurred his vision, but he carried on without stopping. He was fifty feet away now and could see the outline of the fence in the darkness. The guard posts were two tall silhouettes in the distance, to either side.
‘STOP!’
He froze when Meghan whispered urgently and was about to ask why, when he heard it.
The sound of an approaching vehicle.