Sitting still in the truck reduced the pain in Avakian’s leg to a dull throb. His exertions had left the battle dressing soaked in blood. Although dazed by fatigue he focused his attention on potential trouble on the road ahead. But soon the absence of stimulation and the droning of the engine put his head back against the seat.
Judy kept glancing over to check on him. He was sound asleep. He needed it. And she was loving driving the truck. Having something to do energized her.
She drove through sunburned brown hills and occasional belts of green trees beside the highway. If you could call it that. It was two lanes, and the other was full of coal trucks. Stopped, in the middle of nowhere, as if they’d somehow heard what was up ahead. The drivers kept sticking their heads out their windows, as if they’d never seen a blonde driving a truck before.
The river swung off, and now the bottom of the slope below the highway held small brown riverbeds, long dried-up.
The road straightened out but a new problem presented itself. The road signs were exclusively Chinese. It was nerve-wracking to see a blue sign indicating a branch in the highway, and at the end of both arrows were two or three Chinese characters. There was nothing to do but follow the principle of staying on the road you were on.
But Judy experienced yet more panic as a whole succession of signs kept popping up to announce…something. She thought about waking Pete up, for consultation if nothing else. Then over a low rise a sign with the beautiful Arabic numerals 206. It had to be north to Mongolia so she picked the turn after consulting the path of the sun.
That stomach-churning tension of wondering whether you’d taken the right exit reminded her of trips with her family. Her dad always had her read the map, and if she ever had a stroke one day that was going to be the cause. The tension lasted more than a few miles until she was rewarded with a billboard image of smiling industrious Chinese amid waving grass and heavy machinery that read, in small print at the bottom: Welcome the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. Oh yeah. Thank you, thank you very much. She relaxed and enjoyed the ride for the first time in a long while.
The countryside rolled out to the horizon. Greenish-brown grasslands intercut with solid brown trails and, hauntingly alone out in the middle of all the space, single green trees. As if they’d been put there just to make you wonder how the hell that happened.
At first breathtaking but soon monotonous. But the highway had in store one of the strangest things she had ever seen. So strange that at first Judy thought it might be a fatigue-related hallucination. An undulating landscape of nut brown sand dunes. More dirt dunes than sand dunes, actually. But not dunes in a sea of sand. Dunes in a sea of grass. Lush green grass but lifeless dunes. As if, like the lonely trees before, they’d been plopped down to provide some striking artistic contrast.
She felt a physical pang of sadness as the grasslands became browner and browner as she drove north, finally disappearing altogether. Overgrazing and desertification. A herder’s choice was always between many animals and fewer but higher-quality ones. But high-quality animals were too expensive for poor people to capitalize, and where was the high-quality forage they needed going to come from? So the grass burned away and the deserts expanded.
At first Judy didn’t realize what was approaching. Thinking it had to be incredibly low cloud cover. Then she realized, rolling her window up tight. As soon as she stretched her arm across Pete he awoke with an electric jolt and had the pistol halfway out his holster.
“Whoa. Easy, easy, easy,” she said.
Avakian took stock of his surroundings, not to mention the jab of pain whenever he moved.
“Don’t shoot the driver,” Judy said.
He holstered the pistol. “Sorry.” He yawned and stretched his arms. “How long have I been out?”
“We’ve gone about 150 miles.” She reached over again and felt his forehead and face. No fever. Yet.
Avakian’s first reaction was anger. They should have ditched this truck by now. That transitioned to deep embarrassment. She’d been taking care of him. “You shouldn’t have let me sleep that long.”
“Roll your windows up,” she said. “There’s a sandstorm coming toward us.”
Getting his bearings, he saw the desert and the billowing dust cloud. “Are we okay?” Sort of an all-inclusive question.
“We’re on the 206 Highway in the Autonomous Region of Inner Mongolia.”
“Who says women can’t navigate? Not I.”
“We were lucky,” she said. “The signs were all in Chinese.”
He didn’t talk about luck. “You must be shattered. Let me take over.”
“That’s okay. I’m actually less nervous driving. And you may need to shoot someone.”
Avakian shook his head. “This close to the border there can’t be any more shooting. If it is, it’s us being shot.”
“That was nice to know. Thanks.”
The sandstorm enveloped them. The truck rocked and fine dust blew through gaps in the windows. Judy couldn’t even see the surface of the road right beneath the hood. She had to stop.
Inspector He and the driver were dead. The car was ruined. Commissioner Zhou picked He up off the road and placed him in the car. Shifting into neutral, he let it roll down the slope until it was off the road.
Commissioner Zhou could not stay there and look at them. He threw off his vest and began walking back.
Two kilometers down the road a truck appeared around a bend. Commissioner Zhou held up his hand, but the driver gave no sign of slowing down. So he held up the rifle instead. They stopped for that.
A coal truck. Empty. As always in Chinese trucks, a driver and a co-driver. Both plainly terrified.
He stepped up on the running board and flashed his credentials at the driver. “Ministry of Public Security. I must have a ride to the next town.”
“Back to Zhangjiakou?” the driver asked.
Commissioner Zhou had to stop and think. Go back after having not only failed, but lost his men? “No. Take me to Huade.”
He walked around the front and opened the door. The co-driver pulled in his feet, as if to make room for him to go behind the seats. Commissioner Zhou stared at him until he got up and went behind the seats himself.
There was no small talk. Chinese did not make small talk with the police. It could only bring trouble. They drove in silence, Commissioner Zhou watching his cell phone for a signal.
When they passed the shot-up police car the driver looked over at Commissioner Zhou but said nothing. The co-driver cleared his throat as if to speak. The driver grunted loudly. A clear warning, and enough to keep his partner quiet.
When the highway rose up and crested a low ridge Commissioner Zhou got a cell phone signal. “Stop the truck.” He climbed out so as not to share his business with the two yokels.
He called the Ministry in Beijing, at first having the switchboard connect him with a fellow commissioner in the Bureau of Border Controls and Frontier Inspection. He gave the description of Avakian and his companion Doctor Rose and told them to alert the border post at Erenhot.
Back to the switchboard and the Regional Bureau for the telephone number of that north Zhangjiakou police station. The lines must have been working in that direction, because the same sergeant answered the phone.
“This is Commissioner Zhou. From last night.”
The sergeant had sobered up and lost his stammer. “The station is open and alert, Comrade Commissioner!”
“I have an urgent mission for you. Use the vehicle we left in your car park and proceed immediately west on 110 Highway to retrieve an officer wounded by bandits. Approximately ten kilometers from your location. After you have taken this officer for medical treatment return to the highway, twenty kilometers further west. You will find your patrol car with two officers who have been killed. Recover their remains with all honor. Their weapons are in the trunk. Do you understand?”
“At once, Comrade Commissioner.”
“Do not fail me. Now give the number of the Bureau at Huade.”
A thrashing of papers and the sergeant read out the number. Commissioner Zhou wrote it onto his hand. He broke the connection and dialed it, reaching the Deputy Director at Huade. Providing the description of the two Americans and the truck, he requested that an alert be issued and a car and driver be placed at his disposal when he arrived. They rarely received requests from Beijing Ministry officials, so he knew there would be a sense of emergency.
Finished for now, he got back on the truck. “Take me to the Public Security Bureau headquarters in Huade as quickly as possible,” he told the driver. “And I will no longer trouble you.”
There was still a chance. He could not tell the Ministry about his failure and his dead until he had something to balance them.
It was an hour before the sandstorm passed through and they were able to continue. Sand had drifted across the highway, in some places an inch or more thick. Avakian opened the door and brushed out as much of the dust as he could. It was in their eyes and mouths and felt like a layer of fine sandpaper on their skin.
Now there were signs for Erenhot.
“That’s the border town,” Avakian said. “Maybe thirty miles.”
“Have you given any thought to how we’re going to get across?” Judy asked.
“Only how we’re not going to cross. We’re not going to present our passports and ask to leave. Other than that, as you know by now I’m a firm proponent of Occam’s Razor.”
“The simplest solution is the best.”
“Correct.”
The only problem with that, which she didn’t mention out loud, was that the simplest solution seemed to involve things like crawling into manholes and floating down rivers that hadn’t been the beneficiaries of a clean water act.
Commissioner Zhou felt himself being shaken. He had fallen asleep.
“Sir,” said the driver. “We are at Huade Public Security.”
Commissioner Zhou checked his wristwatch. Time kept slipping from his grasp. He started out the door but held up. Taking out his card case, he jotted a few lines on the back of two of his business cards before passing them to the driver and his helper. “If you should ever find yourselves in trouble with the authorities, show this card. If that does not suffice, call the number and I will assist you.”
“Thank you, sir,” said the driver, bowing deeply. Such a thing was like gold to a Chinese truck driver.
The commissioner entered the headquarters waving his credentials, so there would be no consternation over his rifle. “I am Commissioner Zhou, from the Ministry,” he told the desk sergeant. “Are you aware of the alert I issued?”
“Yes, Comrade Commissioner. The deputy director has ordered it enforced. Inspector Yan of the Criminal Bureau is expecting you.”
“Take me to him quickly.”
An officer rushed him through the building to the desk of an Inspector 1st Grade who came to attention.
Commissioner Zhou blasted through the preliminaries. “I am Commissioner Zhou from Beijing. Any word on the American spy I am hunting?”
The inspector was slightly rattled by his manner, as most Chinese would be. “Nothing as yet, Comrade Commissioner. All stations and highway units have been alerted.”
All this time wasted to tell him nothing. Avakian was almost certainly long gone. “I require a car and driver to take me to Erenhot. Immediately.”
“This is very difficult, Comrade Commissioner. Our resources are limited and all our units committed.”
Always a no before a yes. “This American spy has murdered six Ministry officers. Perhaps more as we waste time here. This is a state emergency, and my mission comes from the Minister of Public Security himself. I will now walk outside to the front of this building. If a car to take me to Erenhot does not appear within five minutes I will telephone the minister personally with a report of this bureau’s obstructionism.”
The car was there in four minutes.
“Pull over to the other side of the road and park in front of that truck,” said Avakian. “I want to talk to the guy.”
“If you don’t mind me asking,” said Judy. “Out of a hundred truck drivers taking a leak by the side of the road, why do you want to talk to him?”
“Because my mother always used to say that when you saw a truck full of hay you should make a wish.”
“Of course. I should have known.”
“And also because he’s a Mongol driving a truck with Chinese plates. Because he’s my age, which means he might speak some Russian. And because he’s carrying hay, which means he came from Mongolia.”
“I’ll understand later, won’t I?”
“You will if this works.”
Avakian grabbed her bag and let himself down gingerly. The Mongol was zipping himself up, more than a little concerned about the bearded bedraggled foreigner with one leg of his bloodstained jeans flapping open. His hand dropped into his pocket, and Avakian figured there was a knife in there.
He opened both hands in a peaceful gesture. “Speak Russian?” he asked in his very bad Russian.
The Mongol nodded warily and replied in that language. “A little. American?”
Avakian did not confirm or deny. “You—me. Talk. Do business?”
Another wary nod told him to continue.
“You. Take over border.” Avakian pointed to the truck. “I. Back. Secret. No tell border guard.” He knew how to say border guard, at least. “No tell none. You take other side—safe—I give you 150,000 yuan.” He unzipped Judy’s bag to show him the color of his money. “Understand?”
During this little chat the Mongol’s expression had shifted from outright skepticism, to impending dismissal, to holy shit.
“Think,” said Avakian. “You work one hour. Big money. Border guard, you tell Zhangjiakou fighting. Afraid. Go back. But.” At that he held up a warning finger. “You tell border guard I,” a wave of the hand toward the truck, “truck—you die number 1.” He showed him the pistol. “Understand? Tell me.”
The Mongol replied in much better Russian. “I hide you in back of my truck. Take you across the border. You pay me 150,000 yuan.” And at that point he stopped. “Yes?”
“Yes,” Avakian said, relived he’d gotten through.
“I tell border guard I scared of fighting in Zhangjiakou. Go back home. I tell border guard about you, you kill me.”
“First thing,” said Avakian, having dug up the right words in the interim.
“150,000 yuan?” said the Mongol.
Avakian nodded. He knew that had to be a couple years pay, if not more. He was counting on the nearly universal Asian belief in fortune and luck.
The Mongol gestured toward their truck.
“You want?” said Avakian.
The Mongol nodded.
“You take,” said Avakian. “After border.”
The Mongol grinned. “Okay,” he said in English, holding out his hand.
Avakian shook it. An ancient human custom that may have originated with the Mongols. Done in order to confirm that your weapon hands were empty. “Money after.”
“Money after,” the Mongol confirmed, still grinning.
While he conferred with his assistant, Avakian hobbled back to Judy. “Grab my bag, darlin’. We’re leaving.”
“What’s up?” she asked.
“They’re going to give us a ride across the border.”
“Just like that?”
“I venerate human nobility,” said Avakian. “But I rely on human greed.”
By the time they packed up and made the way over the Mongols were hard at work in the back of the truck. The driver stuck his head out the top and waved them up.
It was another open-topped FAW. Red. There was a ladder on the front of the cargo bed just behind the cab.
“I’ll take both bags,” Judy said, in a tone that brooked no discussion. “You just get yourself up, nice and easy.”
“Yes, Doc.” Avakian used both hands and one leg, rolling over the top onto the hay. The Mongols had pulled bales out like building blocks to create a hollow pocket near the bottom. It sure looked like they’d done this before. Maybe he hadn’t needed to be all that persuasive.
The Mongol pointed the way down. He made a gun with his finger, aimed it at the cab, and mimicked the sound of a gunshot. Smiling all the time.
“What’s that all about?” said Judy.
“Promised I’d kill him if he hosed me,” said Avakian.
They even arranged a bale to make a comfortable seat. For 150,000 Avakian would have expected no less. They sat down and the Mongols set the bales on top of them. Lights out. They could hear and feel the bales thumping down, and the tarp being pulled back over the top.
“Are you sure you can trust these guys?” Judy whispered in his ear. “Wait a minute. Forget it. That had to be the stupidest question I ever asked in my entire life. And at the worst possible time.” She kissed his cheek. Still no temperature.
“Comes down to this,” Avakian whispered back as the truck started moving. “You go to Vegas, you bet your life on black, and you watch while they spin the roulette wheel.”
Commissioner Zhou’s driver was a young officer 2nd grade who seemed overjoyed to have the opportunity to drive a hundred miles down a highway at top speed. He was also a terrifyingly bad driver, a rural boy who had probably never even set foot in a car until he joined Public Security.
To keep his mind off that Commissioner Zhou worked his phone the entire trip, hounding both the border post and the Erenhot Bureau. The bureau promised to begin sweeping both the highway and the town for the truck.
The car swerving caused him to look up from his phone just in time to watch the driver move into the oncoming lane in order to pass a truck. The boy was following his orders, he thought, dropping his head to dial again. The car shook, which made him look back up to see a car coming head-on, disregarding the police car and the flashing lights his own driver seemed serenely confident in. “Get over!”
The driver swerved back into the right lane, missing both the truck and the oncoming car by centimeters. “Be careful, you fool!” Commissioner Zhou snapped, as the phone in his hand rang. “Commissioner Zhou,” he said into it.
“Comrade Commissioner, Inspector Kuang of Erenhot. We have found your truck. Ten kilometers outside the city limits on 206 Highway.”
Commissioner Zhou cut him off with, “What of the Americans?”
“The truck is abandoned. There are gunshot holes in it and signs of blood. We have alerted all hospitals and medical stations.”
He must have wounded one of them. “Good work, Inspector. I am very close. Look for them on stolen motorcycles. They have done this before.”
“We will alert our units, Comrade Commissioner.”
Despite his words Commissioner Zhou was not encouraged. For Avakian to have left the truck without being chased meant he had found something else. Now the vehicle description was worthless to the border post.
“Lights ahead, Comrade Commissioner,” the driver reported.
“Stop at the truck.”
Officers were dusting it for fingerprints. A sergeant was in charge.
“Commissioner Zhou, Beijing.”
The sergeant saluted. “Sergeant He, Erenhot city bureau, Comrade Commissioner.”
“What did you say your name was?”
“Sergeant He.”
A common enough name, but it had given him a start. “Report, Sergeant.”
“Ten bullet holes in the truck, Comrade Commissioner. Observe this one in the door.” The sergeant opened it. “And the blood on the inside, floor, and passenger seat. A substantial wound caused by the bullet through the door. Expended 5.7mm rifle casings inside the cab. No other evidence so far.”
“Witnesses?”
“None yet, Comrade Commissioner.”
Without another word to the sergeant, Commissioner Zhou walked slowly around the truck. On the southbound side of the road yet facing north. Why not park on the normal side of the road?
The Erenhot patrol cars had parked both in front and behind the truck, in the soft sand beyond the highway pavement. And the vehicles in front were parked directly over the tire prints of another truck. The wind had barely blown sand into the tread marks. “Sergeant!”
He came running. “Yes, Comrade Commissioner?”
“Make a plaster impression of these truck tire marks before your fools drive over them again.”
“Yes, Comrade Commissioner. My apologies.”
Commissioner Zhou was already running for his car. Yokels. “Quickly, to the border,” he told his driver.
Who left his own sandstorm speeding away.
Would Avakian try the crossing, or would he brave the fences and mines? It was difficult to believe he would try to bluff his way across. Every westerner was taken aside for intensive examination, and all Americans automatically detained. This was not common knowledge but Avakian would of course suspect it. As for himself, he had no choice. He would have to stake everything on the border crossing. Deep in thought he chanced to glance out his side window. “Pull over,” he ordered.
Two bicyclists. Mongols. Pedaling for the border with their bicycles piled high with shopping bags. Everything was cheaper in China.
No other witnesses on the highway. Only vehicles that had long since passed by. But these two were just slow enough that they might have seen something.
Commissioner Zhou had risen when so many had not because he knew that nothing happened in China, nothing, without being seen by someone. The trick was always to find them, and make them talk.
The bicycles halted before his outstretched hand. “Speak Chinese?” Commissioner Zhou asked. With the police car behind him he did not bother with credentials.
One Mongol shook his head. The other said, “Yes, sir.”
“Did you see the green truck back on the highway? Abandoned?”
The Mongol gave a negative shrug.
“Papers,” said Commissioner Zhou.
Two Mongolian passports were handed over. They seemed to be in order. “What can you tell me about the people in the truck?”
“Nothing, sir. We saw nothing.”
The other trick was to know when you were being lied to. “Maybe you remember something at the station,” Commissioner Zhou said. “Get in the car.”
“What of our bikes, sir?”
“We have no room for bikes. Leave them here. Unless you remember seeing something.” Their bicycles and goods would most certainly be gone when they returned.
A brief conversation in guttural Mongol. “We saw two people with the truck, sir. A man and a woman.”
Despite his swelling excitement, Commissioner Zhou was careful not to react to that. “What did they look like?”
“Foreigners, sir.”
“Mongols?”
“No, sir. White foreigners. Both of them. The woman was blond. The man limping.”
“Where did they go?”
“Into the back of a red truck, sir. Filled with hay.”
“License number?”
“We did not see it, sir.”
“The driver?”
“Just a truck driver, sir.”
“Which way did the truck go?”
“North.”
Commissioner Zhou threw the passports at them and frantically dialed the number of the border post. As it rang he shouted to his driver. “The border crossing. Use the siren.”
Knuckles rapped on the back of the cab.
Avakian put his arm around Judy. “We’re at the crossing. Not a sound.”
Right after he said that Judy was seized with an irresistible impulse to start drumming her feet on the floor. She actually felt like she had to grab ahold of her knees to stop herself.
The truck stopped, and those brakes really squealed. The hay shifted, rocking back and forth around them as if threatening to come crashing down. Avakian had always loved the smell of hay, but couldn’t help wondering if Judy had allergies.
He could hear the driver speaking Chinese to someone. It sounded cordial. He only caught the word Zhangjiakou.
The engine started up, and they were moving again. The truck seemed to make a bit of a turn. Shit, they weren’t getting sent over for inspection, were they?
The truck stopped again. More talking. He couldn’t make out anything on either side this time.
Moving again. He didn’t know how much more of this he could take. A siren behind them, getting louder. They came to a sudden stop. Both cab doors slammed. Son of a bitch! Getting out of the line of fire.
Feet clomping on the ladder and the tarp being pulled back.
Avakian turned Judy toward him so he could kiss her in the darkness. And took his arm from her so he could draw the pistol. Time for that last stand around the flag. The hay above them began to move.
Commissioner Zhou’s driver came up the emergency lane of the four-lane border highway. When he jammed on the brake they went off the pavement and skidded into the soft sand, nearly knocking down a lamp pole.
An arch stretched across the width of the highway. It was painted like a rainbow. There was a white guardhouse with a red roof, and a metal accordion fence that could be pulled all the way across the highway if necessary. Two army light tanks were posted on either side.
He ran up to the guard on the northbound side. “Commissioner Zhou.”
A salute. “Yes, Commissioner, we are expecting you.”
“Have you seen the red truck?”
“Was it not a green truck, Comrade Commissioner?”
“Red. Red, I say. Filled with hay. You were not told?”
“No, Comrade Commissioner.”
At that precise moment an officer stuck his head out from the guardhouse and shouted, “Alert for any red truck filled with hay, trying to leave. Must be stopped.”
The guard turned to Commissioner Zhou with his mouth open. “Comrade Commissioner, one just went across.”
Commissioner Zhou gave no sign that he had heard. He was standing before his countrymen, his subordinates. He could not lose face.
They would not let him resign. No, they would send him to Tibet. The freezing cold. The altitude sickness. Not Lhasa, but some forsaken town with yak butter tea and yokels who did not wash. They would not let him keep his rank. It would be years of standing in the snow on anti-riot duty. Beating up locals for having pictures of the Dalai Lama. That would be his fate.