Some of the equipment was light: short steel rods, five-pound hammers, a set of levers with a strap around them. Chong pulled them aside, stacking them out of the way. I watched him. They would make good weapons.
We couldn't do anything with weapons.
There were three crates, and that was what the sergeant was interested in. He barked more orders, and Chong snapped the fasteners open and lifted a lid. In the first crate there were instruments of some sort; I couldn't see into the crates from where I stood because the bed of the truck was more or less at eye level, but Chong was taking a few things out, holding them up. In the second crate there was camping gear for the drilling crew: billy cans, butane stoves, a frying pan, blankets. Chong dropped them back into the crate and swung the lid down.
I knew now.
The exhaust gas came clouding through the wash of light, giving it a bluish tint, and sometimes the engine's note faltered and picked up again, perhaps because of impurities in the fuel, or a loose spark-plug lead. My shadow stood against the tailboard of the truck, stark, sharp-edged at this distance.
I knew now what the soldier was looking for, what they were all looking for, the soldiers up there manning the roadblock, the soldiers manning the roadblocks in a huge circle right around the city of Lhasa.
Chong worked on the fasteners of the third crate and swung the lid open.
'Laer shi shenme?'
Chong pulled out a blanket, then a cushion, then another one.
I got crates back there, one of them empty. He'll be snug as a bug in there, got a blanket and some cushions, nothing too good for that guy.
A lot of questions now from the sergeant, and answers from Chong.
'Wei shenme chule zhe xie dongxi wai zhe xiangzhi shi kongde?'
'Ling yige xiangzhi mei kong.'
'You heng duo kong. Da kai xiangzhi.'
Chong went to the first crate, the one with the drilling gear, and opened it.
'Bu shi laige xiangzhi. Shi di er ge.'
Chong let the lid fall and went to the second crate and opened it. I think the sergeant had asked why there were only a blanket and a few cushions in the last crate and Chong had said there wasn't room in the other ones, but it didn't matter very much what construction I was putting on things because the sergeant was standing upright suddenly.
'Henghao!'
Excitement in his voice, triumph in his whole attitude. He hadn't found the man he was looking for, the man they were all looking for, but he believed he might have found a potential hiding place for a hunted man in transit, if one needed.
He wouldn't be sure. Chong might have told him that the empty crate was for the ore samples they'd be bringing back, and that the blanket and cushions had been thrown in there for the drilling crew as an afterthought, but the search the army had mounted tonight from here to the Lhasa River was for Dr Xingyu Baibing, the notorious dissident, and that was all this sergeant had got on his mind.
'Hia che!'
Chong came across the tailboard and dropped to the ground, his eyes passing across mine with some kind of message that I couldn't interpret. He looked calm, still, and I wondered whether he'd been interrogated before; when I'd asked him earlier if he'd seen any action he'd said sure, a couple of times, but that didn't tell me much. He might have fought some kind of rearguard operation or got clear of an intelligence trap but that kind of experience wouldn't help him now. The sergeant would keep the assault rifle trained on us until we were back in the cab of the Jeifang and he'd be behind us all the way to the roadblock. Then we would be interrogated, and by professionals.
There wouldn't be any kind of rearguard action we could fight and we weren't going to get out of this trap because there wasn't anything we could do about it now. We couldn't do anything with heat or with shadows or with weapons and I'd stopped grasping at straws in my mind and started thinking ahead, and all I could see ahead of us was an interrogation cell and their eyes in the shadow of their peaked caps and the instruments, whatever instruments they would use. These people had refined the art of torture over thousands of years, but there still wouldn't be anything more effective than a sharpened twig of bamboo under the eyelids or the nails.
I tote a capsule.
Quite possibly, but a capsule isn't the answer to everything. If the opposition think you're a high-level intelligence officer they'll search you for a capsule and if they find it you're finished, but even if they don't make a search you've got to reach the bloody thing and pop it and break the shell before they can move in, and there's something else: you can put a man through Norfolk and throw every psychologist in the place at his head and pass him out with a Suffix-8 after his name in the ultraclassified records as a man who is confidently expected to use a capsule if the circumstances dictate the necessity and that is of course a quote, my good friend, it is a direct quote from the book of rules, don't you think it's charming, I mean as a euphemism, meaning as it does that he is confidently expected, this man, this doomed and beleaguered spook, to use his capsule because he believes — and undertakes in his contract to uphold and implement the belief — that his life has less importance than his duty, that he recognizes the highest priority of them all in this circumscribed and exacting trade: to protect the mission.
'Dakai che dangban!'
Chong moved to the tailboard of the truck.
Yet even then, the capsule trick isn't foolproof. You may well have passed out of intensive training — intensive? But I joke, my good friend, it's ruthless, merciless, murderous — you may well have passed out with the exotic Suffix-8 after your name and it may be that the opposition has failed to search you for a capsule, but there will be the moment of decision-making, and that will vary from one man to another, will vary even within each individual according to his personal disposition as he sits under the blinding light with his inquisitors, for you cannot always decide exactly when you will no longer be able to stand this, no longer be able to allow them to do this to you as the sharpened twig of bamboo is thrust again, no longer be able to shut off your mind to what is happening and shift into theta waves, is thrust again and deeper now, deeper, you cannot always decide how long it will be before the instant arrives when you know you would prefer death, and then of course it's too late to get at your capsule.
So you have to compromise.
Chong heaved at the tailboard. He wasn't a strong man, too thin, too light. But he was winning: he'd got it to shoulder level. The sergeant watched him struggling.
You have to compromise. You leave it as late as you can, and then decide. You go into the cell and look around and see what they've got for you, how serious they are, how professional, and you look at the people who are going to work on you, and make a decision. If they look as if they're prepared to take things to the limit and you don't feel within you at this particular moment the ability, the spiritual, almost supernatural ability to go through anything, anything at all, then you go as fast as you can for the capsule and crack it with your teeth, finito.
'La shi shenme?'
Sergeant shouting.
I knew my capabilities, what they would be when we arrived in the interrogation cell. But I didn't know what his would be, Chong's, and it worried me because he knew where Xingyu Baibing was, and that would be their only question.
'La shi shenme?'
The sergeant had moved to the tailboard. I couldn't quite see what was happening because Chong's body was in the way, but I think he'd tried to hide something, push it among the other stuff in the truck, and the sergeant had seen him, wanted to know what it was.