The only way, MOSSAD decided, was to get humint— human intelligence gained by someone whose human senses and initiative might prove more successful. After all, an infrared blur could, as General Cheng well knew, come from a hot thermos and yet register on the satellite film as a hot jet motor. Hartog’s job was to pinpoint the Chinese ICBM sites in Tibet.
It was lunchtime, and snow was falling again. It would be melted quickly by the sun, but with the sudden drop of temperature so typical in Lhasa, Hartog headed for the taxi stand across from the market, heading east along Xingfu then left, up Linkuo Lu to the telecommunications office where he sent a cable to Amsterdam asking for more money that he could change into Foreign Exchange Certificates. It was a signal that he had found out nothing about the ICBM sites. The amount he asked for told them the number of weeks he could remain under his visa.
After exiting the communications center he took a rickety cab south and went along Xingfu Xilu to the Lhasa Holiday Inn. Before going into the hotel where he’d registered for three days, Hartog visited the Xinhua Bookstore next door, and there he bought a cassette of Tibetan music, along with some postcards. Coming out, walking back toward the hotel, he heard the usual hissing and “Change marney?”
“No,” he said sternly, without being rude. He suspected that at least one of them might be a Public Security Bureau man — from the foreign sector. If you changed money with them you’d get a good rate and a night in jail for doing it, and then you would be in real trouble.
In the Lhasa Holiday Inn he felt guilty for wasting time and spending it in such comfortable surroundings and knew that soon he would have to risk going off the beaten track for a while and stop along the way at the various army camps where for a few yuan they were known to put you up for a night. The question would be, however, whether it was an ordinary base camp or a special secret camp that served the hidden ICBM sites, wherever they were. He wouldn’t know until the date section in his Rolex watch-cum-Geiger counter began advancing rapidly and noiselessly. And it hadn’t happened yet.
Well, he decided, he might spend only two nights at the Holiday Inn, then he’d rough it, and he knew it would be rough. For a start there would be the wild packs of dogs around Lhasa that were known for their ferocity, and he decided the best idea would be to travel along with the Chang Tang nomads who had survived the wildest parts of Tibet, a place of stark mountains and even starker plains in the north for over a thousand years.
While shaving before going down to the dining room, he put the Tibetan music cassette in his Walkman and played it through the two small square speakers. He thought it terribly discordant. He thought too about ICBM sites, of where they might have been moved to after the crushing B-52 raid against their old sites in Turpan. He thought also of how it wasn’t really in Israel’s interests to go poking around fourteen thousand feet or so above sea level looking for them. But in part MOSSAD’s mission was a payback due the Americans for their rapid help with the Patriots in the Iraqi War and a sign of good faith between Israel and the United States that he knew would be reciprocated if Tel Aviv needed it.
He rode down in the elevator with a PLA major whose satchel was marked “Major Mah, Camp Nam.” Lake Nam, where the camp was situated, was northeast of Lhasa and, if he remembered correctly, was a huge bird sanctuary. Hartog and the major smiled at each other, the major saying something about the weather. Hartog agreed. As they pulled up at the second floor he glanced from habit at his watch. The date had advanced ten days. Like the Russians, the Chinese, for all their newfound expertise, were still notoriously lackadaisical about safety parameters. Hartog made a show of patting his vest pocket for his wallet as if he’d forgotten it and at the ground floor stayed on the elevator and went back to his room. He had to work fast so as not to arouse any possible suspicion by the PLA officer. He pulled the toilet chain and went to work.
When he arrived down in the lobby ten minutes later, he dropped off a postcard to Amsterdam, his forehead glistening in sweat. The Chinese officer looked up from one of the dining room tables and motioned for the Dutchman to come over. Smiling, Hartog produced his wallet from his vest pocket. “Under the bed,” he said.
“Good,” the officer said, pleased he had found it. “Would you care to join me for dinner?”
“Yes,” the Dutchman answered, noticing a large bottle of Tsing Tao beer already emptied. He immediately ordered another two and talked about how changeable the weather was in Lhasa.
“You have been here long?” the officer asked.
“Only two days in Lhasa — two weeks in Tib— the autonomous region.” He had almost said “Tibet.” The officer was starting on his second large bottle of beer, and loosened his belt.
Hartog inquired of the major whether his camp, near Lake Nam northeast of Lhasa, was one of those that would put up trekkers for a night at a modest cost. “Yes, you could stay at our camp,” the major said. “Ten yuan.”
It was high by Chinese standards, but for Hartog a god-sent opportunity.
“I might take up your offer,” Hartog said, adding, however, that it “depends which way I go — east along the Zangbo or back past Lake Nam.”
“Well if you go back past the lake ask for Captain Ling. He’s my executive officer.”
“Thank you, but I may go east along the Zangbo.”
“There would be less rain than back north along Nam.”
“I’ll see,” Hartog said noncommittally, raising his glass for yet another toast “First I want to go and see the Potala Palace.”
“Ah,” the major said, looking around. “I understand everyone loves to go to the Potala.” He wasn’t too drunk, but nevertheless he couldn’t help employing the official Chinese tone of disdain for the Buddhist monastery.
On that note they said good-bye, and at the desk Hartog gave the clerk a Tibetan folk music cassette for the next morning’s post and sent a fax to Amsterdam, struck at once by the irony of being so close electronically to the West but so far away in reality. He read the fax out to make sure that the desk clerk understood.
The herbs which I have found so far should be alphabetized under ISNLNCIEAABTAKMMEREM. Am trying to get more details on Tibetan acupuncture. Willi.
The major ordered more beer be sent up to his room and asked if Hartog would join him. The Dutchman declined gracefully. “Perhaps then,” the major said, “I will see you at breakfast.”
“Yes,” Hartog said, and they waited, watching the floor needle above the elevator doors. They did not speak together going up in the elevator, the major yawning and Hartog watching the floor numbers light up, standing relaxed at the back of the elevator, trying desperately not to show his excitement. Sometimes in the game it was like that: You worked your butt off for weeks and months in godforsaken places all over the world, looking for a clue, and nothing, then you walk into a hotel and what happens? The wristwatch goes crazy. If the Chinese major hadn’t actually been working on or near an ICBM site, Hartog wasn’t a Dutchman.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The knock on Alexsandra Malof’s door in the hut that she shared with several other prisoners who had been rescued by the SAS/D teams startled her at first. It was just past midnight. But the moment she remembered she was in in American refugee compound at Khabarovsk she felt safe, having dropped off while working on a draft of her U.N. speech on behalf of all those Jewish and non-Jewish residents of the JAO. Even so, she did as Aussie Lewis had told her and looked out the hut window first, catching a glimpse of the Special Air Service berets: “Who Dares Wins” in the moonlight. And she went to the door with the gun, a Beretta 9mm that Aussie had told her he’d liberated from the ugliest Chinaman he’d ever seen on the SAS/D dune buggy raid against the Chinese guns.