The American's head snapped back toward the rongpa. "From the north? West? Not on the road?" He glanced at Shan. "All of you?" When Lhandro nodded, Winslow quickly produced a map from his hip pocket. "Show me," he said with a new, urgent tone. "Tell me who you saw, where exactly you were. I need to know if-"
A frightened cry split the air. The little girl shot back out of the gap, frantically crying for her mother. In her hand was a jagged piece of paper that showed a man's smiling mouth and chin. Someone had ripped away the top half of her treasured photograph. Shan looked back up the slope at Dremu, who had stopped and dismounted. The Golok wasn't waving at them, Shan realized with a chill, he was frantically trying to call them away, to warn them.
But in the next instant Nyma darted into the gap in the rocks, Lhandro at her heels. Lokesh pulled on Shan's sleeve as though to restrain him, to keep him from following. "Go," the old Tibetan urged, pushing Shan toward Dremu. "Get to the Golok."
People were scattering, running up the slope in every direction. When he looked back Lokesh was gone. Without a second thought Shan ran through the gap toward the road.
He stepped into the brilliant sunlight to find a body lying on the gravel. It was Lhandro, moaning, holding his scalp. Blood oozed between his fingers. Nyma knelt over him. Lokesh stood nearby, his arms pinioned behind him by two large Chinese in the green uniforms of the People's Liberation Army. A dozen more soldiers stood deployed in a V-shape facing the opening in the rock to trap anyone emerging from the far side. Two grey troop trucks were parked on the road behind them, each with a fierce looking snow leopard painted on the front door. Between the heavy vehicles, sitting on a folding metal chair, was an officer watching with satisfaction as his trap filled. A cigarette dangled from his mouth. As Shan watched the man began writing on a clipboard balanced on one knee, with the casual, amused air of a scorekeeper at an athletic event.
Someone grabbed his hand roughly and Shan suddenly realized he had been bound to Lokesh, his left wrist fastened to Lokesh's right wrist, not by manacles but by a thin piece of wire, its ends twisted tightly together so that any movement was painful.
They were prisoners again.
Part Two
Chapter Five
More than twenty villagers were lined up against the rock, all wearing expressions of defeat, hands at their sides, waiting as two soldiers checked their identity papers. Their faces told Shan the villagers had been through such checks often. Some suppressed anger, some fear. All suppressed indignation at being treated like outsiders in their own land. "Where's your papers?" Shan had heard a Tibetan boy shout out at a knob at a Public Security checkpoint just three months before. The knob had shackled the boy and in an hour's time the youth had been on the way to a year's imprisonment.
The villagers moved slowly when asked to reach inside their clothing to produce their papers, and watched not the sergeant who barked orders at them but a second soldier, behind the first, who held a semiautomatic rifle, an AK-47, barrel pointed down, hand on the trigger guard. It was impossible to predict what would happen when Public Security or the army came to such a place. More often than not any Tibetans who had their registration papers would be released. But if the patrol had a mission beyond merely sweeping for illegals, even those with perfect papers might be detained. In slow seasons some enforcement officials were known to pick up innocent Tibetans and detain them until they offered up an accusation. "Everyone is guilty of something," an interrogation officer had once declared to Shan, "we just don't have time to investigate them all."
Nyma pulled Lhandro into a sitting position. Blood trickled down his left temple, where he had obviously been struck, probably by the butt of a rifle. The nun put her arms around him, like a protecting mother, and glanced at Shan with moist eyes. She knew about such patrols, too. The villagers might be left alone, but Nyma, who had insisted she was not a real nun, could still be sentenced to prison for wearing the robe of a nun without a license from the Bureau of Religious Affairs.
"That yak, it ran like an antelope," Lokesh said quietly, toward the sky. The nearest soldier made a growling sound and raised the butt of his gun, warning Lokesh to be silent.
Shan looked at his old friend. At least they had been able to see the American with the yak, Lokesh meant. It was a prisoner's game Shan and Lokesh had often played during their years in the gulag. Fix an image in your mind and let it fill your awareness, blocking out the pain and hunger and fear. Shan remembered once coming back in a prison truck from a road construction site where several old monks had collapsed in weakness and been beaten and dragged away by the guards, too weak to do their work because their breakfast and lunch had consisted of a thin gruel made of ground corncobs and water. "I saw a snowflake land on a butterfly today," one of the battered lamas suddenly said, and earned a blow to his skull from a guard's baton for breaking the rule of silence. But by the time they had reached the prison every man in the truck had been smiling serenely, their minds filled with the image of the butterfly.
They would be taken to an army prison first, Shan suspected, then he would be separated from Lokesh. Lokesh's only crime was not having papers to travel outside Lhadrung, where he had been released from prison. But once they focused on Shan they would quickly discover the tattoo on his arm, and check it with Public Security computers. They would treat Shan as a fugitive from the gulag, and to such men a fugitive was like fresh meat thrown to starved dogs. He fought the temptation to look back toward the hills beyond the village, where another fugitive, without a tongue, hid.
The man in the chair tossed his cigarette to the ground, stood, and stepped toward the team checking papers. He impatiently ordered the soldiers to stop, then surveyed the expanding line of villagers. After he rose he strutted along the line with an imperious air, pausing to light another cigarette with an elegant gold lighter, and tapped the shoulders of several of those in line, ordering them away with a gesture of his index finger. A middle-aged woman a few feet down the line suddenly stepped forward and pointed to Shan and his three companions.
"They aren't from our village," she shouted, "just remember that, we never saw them before. We never helped them!"
Shan sighed. He didn't resent the woman's words. No doubt she had been before security squads before, had learned from the Chinese that the best way to protect herself and her family was to deflect official attention to others. But he felt sorry for the way she would feel later, and the way her neighbors would look at her.
The officer paused and stared at Shan, as if noticing him for the first time, taking the cigarette out of his mouth and blowing a stream of smoke in Shan's direction before he turned back to the line. He was finished in another minute, having dismissed all the women and children, and all the younger men. Every man remaining in the line was at least thirty years old, Shan guessed. The officer walked along the line again and dismissed two more men. They were older but short, less than five and a half feet tall, the shortest in the line.
At a snap of the officer's fingers the two soldiers who had been checking papers sprang back into action, scrutinizing the papers of the six men remaining with louder voices and rougher actions than they had used before. The officer paced impatiently as they worked, finishing his cigarette in three long inhalations, then lighting another from its butt. They were at the fifth man in the line when he lost interest and stepped inside the two lines of soldiers that still guarded the boulders. They weren't a patrol, Shan realized. They were what the purbas called a snatch team. They were looking for someone in particular.