Actually, they reminded him of the guys on the caravan ponies. So, obviously, these were the Uighur bandits-slash-terrorists he’d heard about back at the Team briefings. How long ago that seemed.…
The Central Asian states had been fighting Islamic insurgencies long before 9/11. Spilling over China’s western borders, the rebels were giving Beijing a hard time too. The local version of the al-Qaeda and Taliban he’d fought, himself, in Afghanistan.
The terror attack in town squared with that. It suddenly registered that the old merchant had known about it too. He’d warned them not to be in the Han part of town that day.
Teddy was still mulling all this when they shoved him to his knees in front of the lectern. Their captors settled on blankets and began chatting in low voices. One kept working the bolt on his AK, and complaining in a whine. Jerking the bolt, and flipping cartridges out. Making a wagging motion with his hand, as if the rifle wasn’t ejecting right.
Now, to the side of the stone lectern, Teddy noted a large curved sword. Fierros cleared his throat. Breathed, so low Teddy could barely hear him, “Who are these dudes?”
He must be getting nervous. Well, Teddy was too. That was a hell of a mean-ass sword, and it looked well used. The tripod-mounted videocam next to it didn’t look promising either.
Well, at least Trinh had missed this. A bullet in the brain was better, any day, than a twitchy amateur executioner with a dull blade and bad aim.
Fierros whispered, “Al-Qaeda? ISIS?”
Teddy pitched his answer so low he could barely hear himself. “Islamics. Not sure what brand. Better let me do the talking.”
“We’re not still Russians, are we?”
“No, that wouldn’t be smart. Like I said, let me talk.”
One of their escorts said something in the language he didn’t know — not Han, probably Uighur — and slammed his shoulder with a rifle butt. The message was clear: You guys, shut the fuck up. Which he did, trying to sit back in a way that hurt his leg as little as possible.
Not too long after, three men came in carrying AKMs. They set them against the cave wall and eased themselves down on the blankets. They looked terribly tired and two were wounded, to judge from the bloody bandages and the wincing as they adjusted their crossed legs. Teddy recognized the one in the center. The driver of the pickup, the guy who’d gestured him aboard with the pistol. The one with the half-white mustache. The handgun was stuck into his belt now, one of the old high-velocity Tokarevs that made you deaf shooting them, but that penetrated helmets and body armor. Not a bad choice for a gunfight, actually. The guy pulled down the book, and Teddy nodded. He’d seen this before, with the Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines. On the operation to steal the rocket torpedo, with Commander Lenson’s TAG team.
It was a drumhead court. The kind that really only pronounced one sentence, and finished up with somebody’s noggin bouncing on the floor.
The Uighurs conferred among themselves, glaring at the captives. Teddy kept glancing at the guy who was fiddling with his rifle and complaining. Finally he reached over and took it out of his hands.
Before they could react he had the magazine out, chamber cleared, and top cover off. He flipped the rifle upside down and shook the piston assembly out onto the blanket. Just as he’d figured, a handful of crud fell out with it. Somehow, probably by dropping it, the guy had gotten sand inside the gas port holes, clogging the piston inside the tube. Which meant it stopped feeding. Yeah, that happened, even with Kalashes. But it was super easy to fix. He stripped the grit off the piston with his sleeve, blew the tube clear, and squinted through the barrel to make sure it was clear too. He reassembled the weapon, worked the action, and laid it back down in front of the rebel.
Who looked with astonishment from him to the judges. Who were also staring, no longer whispering among themselves.
After a few seconds they cleared their throats and seemed to regain some self-possession. The questioning began with the guy on Teddy’s left, in Han Chinese. He wanted to know who they were and why they’d been firing at the police. Or at least, Teddy assumed that was what he meant by jingcha.
He’d been doing some thinking about this even before Fierros surfaced the issue, but held up a hand while he formulated his answer. Trying to project confidence. Dignity. Finally he said haltingly, in his prison Chinese, “Women shi mengyou. Wo shi meigyo ren.”
We are allies. I am an American.
The judges gaped, lifting their eyebrows. White ’Stache looked especially doubtful. He shot some rapid Han Teddy only partially caught. He leaned to Fierros. “Ragger, did you catch that?”
“Something about… how we got here? How we came to Xinjiang, I think.”
The judge on the right put his oar in, jabbing a finger threateningly. “Zhe shi shui de ne? Ta shi meiguo?”
“I think he wants to know if I’m American too. These guys have a way different accent than the guards.”
“Well, goddamn it, answer him.”
Bit by bit, fumbling with a language neither was overfamiliar with, they managed to get across that they were both both fighters, prisoners, captured in the great war raging far to the east and south. They had escaped from the prison camp, and fled over the mountains. “If war still on, we are on same side. We, and you, all brave fighters.” Or at least, that was what Teddy hoped he was saying.
The center guy cocked his head. He seemed to have as much trouble following what they were trying to say as they had putting it out. Their interlocutors conferred in mutters. Then one said something that Teddy made as, “What camp?”
“Camp 576.”
Impressed looks. “That is a hard place. Much sickness. They mine the rock that rots the bones. No one escapes from there.”
“We did,” Obie told him. “But we were five in number when we started.” He explained about Maggie and Vu and Trinh: one giving his life on the live wire, to help them escape; one lost in the mountains; the third shot by the Chinese in town.
The judges nodded, apparently reassured by the high loss rate. White Mustache pressed, “You are American. Army? Air Force?”
Teddy had thought about this. He figured guys like this, out in the hinterlands, might know what U.S. Navy SEALs were. Then again, they might not. There were three initials, though, that pretty much everybody in the world recognized.
“Colonel Fierros here is with the United States Air Force. I’m with the CIA,” he told them.
The effect was everything he’d hoped for. Shock, recoil, outrage; then heated debate. Two of his judges almost came to blows under the torches. But finally Middle Guy shushed them. He pulled the old pistol from his belt and threw it down on the blanket. Pointed at it. Said a word that Teddy figured had to be “disassemble.”
Five seconds later it lay field-stripped into barrel, guide, slide, recoil spring, barrel bushing, slide stop pin, magazine, hammer assembly, and frame. He gave it a beat, then reassembled it. Four seconds.
They brought him a clayey gray paste in waxed paper and the sort of junk drawer a geek teenager might accumulate, filled with old batteries, broken radios, scrap wiring, miscellaneous electrical shit. Then sat back and fingered their beards, watching.
Teddy sniffed the plastic — nearly odorless — and figured it for Semtex, or maybe a Chinese rip-off of the Czech explosive. It didn’t look recently manufactured, but the binder was still malleable. He rooted around in the junk box and came up with a bent nail. He also found a spring-loaded switch.
His mimed request for a tool produced a pair of battered pliers. Which might work…