iii
Howard squatted on his heels, his back against a tree trunk, and gazed moodily through the trees to the empty dirt road out there in sunlight. Off to his right, he knew, Robert was also crouched, watching and waiting.
It was two in the afternoon, Monday, two days after the dinner in the Blue Coachman. Yesterday he and Robert had spent practically all of the daylight hours out here, seeing no one, hearing nothing. Late last night Robert had come back from Chambersburg, Howard had met him out by route 992, and they had walked in the private road practically all the way to the gate, seeing no one, hearing nothing. And now today they had taken up their vigil again, they had been here three hours now, and they had seen no one, they had heard nothing.
Where were they? Weren’t they ever going to show up again, the yellow bastards? If the Chinese had the house under surveillance, where were they? If they came along this road to meet with Brad, where were they?
From time to time he thought about tomorrow, when Joe Holt would be coming to give Brad a check-up. That was their deadline, the end of the safe period. Brad had promised Evelyn he wouldn’t leave until after Joe had seen him, and there was no reason to suppose he wouldn’t keep that promise. Nor was there any reason to suppose he’d want to hang around very long after Joe’s visit. Any time after tomorrow he could make his move.
And they had no counter-attack, no plan, no anything. They hadn’t even managed to make contact with the enemy. If they didn’t find the Chinese today, or tomorrow at the very latest—
There was a faint crackling to his right. He turned his head and saw Robert coming this way, moving slowly from tree to tree. Howard pushed away from the trunk behind him and straightened to his feet, feeling the stiffness in his back. He stretched, arching his back, and waited for Robert to reach him.
Robert walked over with an irritated expression on his face. “I just don’t know, Howard,” he said. “You’d think we’d have seen something by—”
“Hush!” Howard held up a hand, and they both listened.
“A car,” Robert whispered.
Howard nodded, and moved quickly forward toward the road, Robert behind him. They stopped behind trees near the edge of the woods, hearing the car approach from their left, and after a few seconds a small black Renault went by, traveling at about twenty miles an hour. There were two men in the car, both Chinese, both facing front.
“By God,” Howard said softly.
Robert said, “Do we follow them, or do we go the other way to see where they came from?”
“The other way,” Howard said. “They went down that way, they’ll be coming back. Somewhere they have to turn off this road.”
“We’d better stick to the woods,” Robert said. “Just in case there’s more of them around.”
“Right.”
They started off to the left, staying within the darkness of the woods but keeping the sunlit road always visible to their right. On this side they were walking on Brad’s land, but the woods past the road was part of a large undeveloped tract belonging to the State of Pennsylvania.
They had walked perhaps half a mile when Robert stopped and said, “What’s that?”
Howard, seeing him gazing at the road, looked in that direction too and saw nothing. “What’s what?”
“There’s some sort of turnoff on the other side. Come on, let’s take a look,”
They went over to the edge of the woods, listened, looked all around, and stepped cautiously out into the sunlight. So far as they could tell, they were alone.
Now Howard could see it, too, an even skimpier road that turned off this one and disappeared in among the trees on the far side, away from Brad’s land. As the perimeter road was mostly dirt, with a low line of weeds and grass down along the mound of the middle, this turn-off was mostly weeds and grass, with two dirt ruts to mark where occasional automobiles had passed.
Robert went to one knee beside the turnoff and said, “Howard, look at this.”
Howard went over and looked, and saw nothing.
“Don’t you see?” Robert traced a curve along the ground with one finger. “Here’s a tire track. That Renault has a narrower wheelbase than most of the cars that’ve used this road. You can see its tracks.”
“Maybe you can,” Howard said.
“Yeah, I can.” Robert got to his feet again and peered down the secondary road. “That’s where they came from.”
“Then let’s go look,” Howard said.
“Right.”
They walked side by side along the twin ruts, looking all around, listening. It occurred to Howard that neither of them was armed, and that perhaps they should have been. But all they wanted to do was find the Chinese agents’ base, not engage in a war with them. Still, walking deeper into the anonymous woods, he reflected that it would be a comfort to have a gun in his hand.
The Chinese did. They appeared all at once, stepping out onto the road ahead of them from behind trees, both carrying what looked to Howard’s untrained eye to be some sort of thin machine gun made mostly of lengths of pipe. They were there silently, abruptly, and there was no time for Howard or Robert to think of anything to do. There was nothing to do. They stopped in their tracks.
One of the gunmen motioned with the evil-looking barrel for them to come on, to keep walking forward. Howard said, out of the corner of his mouth, “What do we do?”
“I don’t know.” Now the other one was also motioning, and both were looking slightly irritable and impatient.
Howard said, still out of the corner of his mouth, though it made no real sense to talk that way, “If they wanted to shoot us, they’d have done it already. Maybe we should do what they say.”
“I guess we don’t have any choice,” Robert said. He sounded bitter.
Howard started forward, Robert beside him. They passed between the two agents, who stepped out of the way and gestured with their guns for them to keep moving. They continued to walk on down the road, and without turning around Howard could sense that the two gunmen were following.
The land here sloped gradually downward, and the air was progressively cooler and more damp. This part of the forest was very old, with tall, heavy, thick-trunked trees, their interlaced branches forming a roof that kept out the sun so that there was little undergrowth, only the damp mulch of last year’s leaves and here and there a slender sapling struggling up despite the lack of sunlight. The double-rutted road twisted and curved around tree trunks and odd jutting corners of boulders emerging from the ground.
There was something ahead of them. They walked on, and it was a truck, a huge tractor-trailer, the cab painted green and yellow, the trailer silver with green and yellow lettering, EAST-WEST MOVERS Coast-to-Coast Service. It seemed incredible that anyone had managed to drive that truck in here, but there it was, facing the other way, the rear doors standing open but the space covered by a black cloth hanging from the top. A set of metal steps leaned against the tailgate.
They approached the truck, and now one of the gunmen trotted past them and turned to face them and direct them toward the rear of the truck. They obediently angled that way, and Howard said, “I guess we’re supposed to go inside.”
“I guess so.”
Robert went up the metal steps first, and through a central slit in the black cloth. Howard went up after him, stepped through, and inside Wellington was standing there holding his finger to his lips and motioning to Howard to move in from the entrance. Robert was staring at Wellington with blank-faced astonishment, and two more Orientals were there, both holding long-barreled pistols. As Howard gaped, completely bewildered, the Orientals pushed by him, moving toward the entrance. One of them was silent, but the other murmured, on the way by, “Xin lôi ông.” His voice was nasal, the inflection sing-song.