'Not so much. Thing is, when they block every goddam highway, means they're probably in a ring right around the town.'
Traffic was coming past us from the north, running into the screen of snow and breaking it up, sending it into eddies as the wind took it again.
'This snow. Is it going to settle?'
'Guess not. The ground's too dry. It'll maybe pile up into drifts against the scree, that's all. It's too cold for it to keep on coming down.' He moved his gum to the other side of his mouth. 'We go back?'
A ring around the town, Jesus, it wouldn't matter where we went, we'd run into a block. In a minute I asked him, 'If I weren't with you, would you have any trouble getting through?'
He thought about it. 'I can't answer that. I mean sure, in the ordinary way, maybe I'd get through okay, my cover's watertight, I've got my contract I can show them, this is one of my regular routes and everything, but see, it depends what they're looking for, what they want, they can just say, look, I don't give a damn if you're the king of Siam, you just turn around and get your ass back down that highway. With these people you can't make any predictions.'
'Switch this bloody engine off, will you?' I got the window down as far as it would go, blast of cold air but at least it was fresh. Snow blew against the side of my face, and I put a gloved hand up. The wind hit the truck, rocking it on its springs. I didn't know, suddenly, what we were doing here: with a ring of military checkpoints set up around the town there wasn't a chance of reaching the monastery and bringing Xingyu Baibing back through an armed blockade.
Your instructions are to get the subject to Beijing as soon as possible.
Pepperidge.
No go.
'Chong, was there a phone anywhere along the road we've just come up, any building we could phone from?'
'Guess not.'
'Are you sure?'
'Yeah.'
He was probably right. The only buildings I'd seen were sheds, barns, ruined temples.
'Then where is the nearest phone?'
'Way back down there on Dongfeng Lu, the Telecommunications Office.'
Thirty minutes away. We don't often feel like asking for instructions at the highest level from London when we're stuck in the field with the odds stacked and the chances thin because we know the situation and the environment better than they do; but tonight I thought there was a case for putting a signal through, phoning Pepperidge: We're cut off by roadblocks set up by the military and there's very little chance of bringing this thing off until at least the morning, if then, so please signal London and see what they say.
I knew of course what Croder would say.
Follow your instructions.
His small pointed teeth nibbling at the words like a rat with a corncob, one hand stroking the metal claw that he used for the other, his black eyes watching for your reaction, ready to catch any sign of hesitation, of weakness, ready to pull you off the mission and throw you out of London and into Norfolk for refresher training, executive replaced, stroking the metal claw, ready to bury it into your guts if you were found wanting, following your instructions, oh, the bastard, follow your instructions.
'Chong, can we make any kind of detour?'
'Mean get past the block?'
'Yes.'
He began chewing faster. 'Jeez, I dunno.' I waited for him to run it through his head. 'Thing is, sure, we could try, yah, but we couldn't use our lights. They'd see us, I mean they'd see we weren't on any kind of a regular highway. Be on a pretty rough surface west of here, but of course this baby can handle what you might call inclement terrain, so high off the ground. Sure, we could try it. That what you want to do?'
'Yes.' He started the engine. 'But take an angle,' I told him. 'Go south about half a mile if the ground's all right, then stay parallel with the east-west road.'
'You got it.'
I think he was pleased, in his quiet way, hadn't wanted to give up and go back. 'Chong, have you ever been in trouble?'
Argot for intensive action: getting out of a trap, battling unequal odds, running a frontier under fire, things like that.
'What kind of trouble?'
He didn't work in London, wasn't used to the idiom.
'Say, breaking out of an interrogation cell and leaving dead.'
'Oh, right, yeah, couple of times.' He turned his small head to look at me. 'I tote a capsule.'
'I just wanted to know what your status is.'
'We get into trouble tonight,' he said, 'I aim to kick any asses around I can find." Working his gum. 'Call me reliable.'
He looked ahead and put the big truck at a slope of shale and gunned up. With the lights off we couldn't always make out what was ahead of us; the moon was a hazy crescent high and beyond the flying snow.
Pepperidge would not of course have given me an amateur. It was nerves, that was alclass="underline" I'd never worked with this man Chong and if those people up there at the roadblock caught the outline of this truck they'd come and ask questions. The snow made a light screen but this thing was as big as an elephant.
'Can we work our way south a bit more?"
'Guess not. There's ravines down there, not big ones but we get a wheel jammed and we could break the axle.'
Crash of metal from behind us as we took a bump, skewing across loose stones and swinging back.
'Take it slower,' I told Chong.
'You got it. But sometimes, see, you got to take a run at a slope or you don't have enough momentum.'
'Keep the sound down as best you can.'
'Yes, sir.' He fished in a pocket. 'Care for some gum?'
'Not just now.'
He spat out of the window and peeled the packet. 'Saves my nails. You worked in Beijing?'
'No.'
'I was born there. Mom and Dad fighting like cats when I left school, so I shipped out on a freighter to San Francisco, five or six years there, got involved with a private detective agency and took in most of the cities across the States, did a few things for the CIA kind of under the table, then I shipped out again to London, got into a very interesting situation getting a Nicaraguan vice-consul out of a hostage deal at the embassy in Gloucester Road — that time I was still on the unofficial payroll of the CIA, but it brought me in touch with your outfit. They wanted someone like me in Beijing, bilingual native with a little experience in what they called the "clandestine arts" — those guys kill me — so I said okay.'
The wheels began spinning again across loose shale and he played with the steering and got us straight. 'Then you know what happened? I found I was Chinese again, and see, I had a kind of advantage in Beijing — I could sink right down into the daily life and look out from there with what you could call Western eyes and see what was really going on, and at first it didn't bother me too much — this was in Mao's time but I learned to live with it because I was in your outfit now, sending stuff in to London, and they were very pleased.' He slowed the truck and we rolled carefully down a slope with the brake shoes moaning in the drums. 'Then something happened that kind of changed things. I had a sister, see, and she had a kid, couple of years old, good husband, I liked him, still do, works in a coal mine, and then they made a law you couldn't have more than one kid, keep the population down, and she made a mistake and had another one and they towed her and a lot of other women naked behind a truck through the streets as punishment, and that was what really changed things for me, see.' He turned to look at me. 'That really changed things. I told my director I wanted different work, where I could get at these people with my bare hands, you know, the police and the PSB and the KCCPC and the military, any son of a fucking gun I could get near, so I could practice my clandestine arts, you understand me?'