Quiller Bamboo

The slope levelled out and he gunned the engine again. 'You wanted to know my status, and now you do.'

His big fur hat bobbed as we took the bumps, his thin body coming right off the seat over the bad ones, his small gloved hands playing on the thick rim of the wheel. I didn't say anything, but it reassured me, what he'd said; if we got into anything sticky on this trip I wouldn't have to carry him.

Sometimes the moon came out as the wind took the snow and cut swatches through it, letting the light reach the ground.

'What happened at the rendezvous, Chong?'

He caught the truck as it skewed again over the stones. "I guess it was more or less routine. Your DIP sent a guy along to see if the hotel had any surveillance on it, and it did. So we took it from there.'

It's in the book, under the heading of Protecting the Rendezvous. There are fifty ways of doing that but tonight Pepperidge had chosen this one because it had suited the situation: there were people in the street and the Jeifang had a big profile and I had to climb into it without anyone paying attention and in any case the peep had got to be removed so that he couldn't tag me, so our man had worked out the timing and ten or fifteen minutes before the rendezvous he'd dropped the peep with a discreet nerve strike and then made a show of helping him as he lay on the ground, told someone to call an ambulance, this man was having a heart attack, and by the time the ambulance was on the scene everyone in the street was watching the action while I got into the truck farther along.

'Is he going to follow up?'

'Your DIF?'

'Yes.'

'Sure, told me he would. We need all the info we can get, right?'

Right. Who the peep was, who was running him: the man who'd dropped him would stay close.

There was an inch of snow on the window on my side and I let it down an inch again and saw the red lights still flashing up there to the north, behind us a little now. We'd been going for fifteen minutes but this was virgin rock without even a wagon track and our average speed wasn't much more than walking pace.

'Snow's easing,' Chong said.

'Yes.'

We didn't want that. The light from the three-quarter moon was brighter now across the ground, throwing shadows. It made the going easier but the truck would stand out more against the lights of the town to the south.

'Chong.'

He turned his head.

'What's your cover story for driving overland like this?'

'I'm looking for the new mining site. The research crews have just set up camp, there's no road made yet.'

'What are they going to mine?'

'They're not sure yet — it's just an assay. They're going to drill a hundred meters down and take samples. The geologists say there should be copper in this region.'

'That's your full story?'

He looked at me. 'You think anyone in the People's Liberation Army's going to question it?'

'Possibly.'

'Tell you something. What the average soldier in the PLA has got in his head is rice.'

I let it go. It shouldn't come to that; if they were going to see us they'd have seen us by now.

The snow had almost stopped; isolated flakes drifted, black against the sky and turning white as they settled on the dark green of the truck. The shadows were sharp now, and rocks stood out, their flint surfaces glinting in the light.

'Chong. Where are you going to put him?'

'I got crates back there, one of them empty. He can breath okay, gaps where the lid goes. We can pile a whole lot of drilling gear on top, see. He'll be snug as a bug in there, got a blanket and some cushions, nothing too good for that guy.'

A front wheel caught a loose rock and threw it upward and it banged on the underside of the truck like a gunshot. Reaction from the nerves and it worried me. The effects of the the shiatsu had worn off a little, or it was simply that I was standing back in my mind and seeing the whole thing in perspective from overhead: the truck, small from that distance, crawling across the dark terrain a mile and a half from the group of army vehicles and the flashing red lights, a mouse creeping across the floor under the nose of a cat, not a pleasant simile, no, uncomfortable, unnerving.

'You weren't there,' Chong asked me, 'in Beijing, that time?'

The time of Tiananmen. It was how they all spoke of it these days, as 'that time.'

'No.'

'I was there.'

The rocks glinting ahead of us, bright now, too bright, the shadows too black, too sharp. I turned my head.

'The worst thing, the way I remember it-'

'Chong,' I said, 'they've seen us.'

Headlights in the dark.

Chapter 18: Flower

'Your papers say you're a tourist.'

'Yes.'

'Then what are you doing in this truck?'

'I'm a geologist. I'm interested in minerals.'

'But how did you come to be in this truck?'

'I met this man in a bar. He's going to show me the mining camp. They're going to drill for minerals.'

'Okay,' Chong said, 'that'll stand up. Like I say, they got their gourds full of rice.'

He didn't sound nervous.

Headlights bouncing over the rocks. They were too bright for us to see what kind of vehicle it was, but it must be small, bouncing like that, perhaps a military jeep.

'Is there a gun in this truck?'

Chong looked at me. He wasn't chewing any faster than usual. I liked that. 'I guess not,' he said. 'It's instant jail, they find one on anybody in this town. We need a gun?'

'No.'

'You carry one?'

'No.'

He lifted his gloved hands off the rim of the wheel and dropped them again. 'Got these.'

If there'd been a gun in the truck I would have told him to throw it across the scree, out of sight.

The beams of the headlights swung away, sweeping the black shale and sending the shadows jumping like choppy water, then coming around in a half-circle and lining us up dead ahead and closing in, blinding us through the windshield. He didn't trust us, hadn't just come up alongside.

Above and between the headlight beams there was movement and a glint of metal, something quite long, perhaps an assault rifle.

'Don xia che!'

'He says we have to get out,' Chong said.

The shale was gritty underfoot. We stood by the doors, one on each side of the truck.

'Ju qi shou lai'

Chong raised his hands and I did the same.

He'd switched off his engine when we'd seen the headlights; the engine of the jeep was still running. Nothing happened for a while. The soldier was watching us, standing in the middle of the jeep, the light bouncing off the rocks and the front of the big Jeifang and glinting on his gun, then he dropped onto the ground and came toward us, the shale scattering under his combat boots. He said something to me, his voice barking, and I looked at Chong.

'Ta bu hui zhongwen,' Chong said.

Telling him I didn't speak Chinese. The man concentrated on Chong, talking to him, getting answers. Then Chong took his coat off and the soldier frisked him, kicked at his leggings, stood back, then came over to me. Chong started to follow him but the man swung around and shouted, and Chong stood still.

I took off my parka and dropped it onto the ground. The soldier frisked me, keeping the muzzle of the assault rifle lodged against my stomach. Then he stood back. He wasn't a young recruit. I'd say he was over thirty, looked experienced, seasoned, with a strong squat body under a heavy military coat, insignia on the sleeve, perhaps a sergeant.

The exhaust gas from the jeep drifted on the air. The snow had stopped, and there would be moonlight across the ground here when the glare from the jeep had gone. The night was still, the temperature below freezing. I could feel the heat from the huge radiator of the truck, smell the tires, the diesel oil in the tank. Sound would carry well on a night like this, cold and with no wind now. A man would get nowhere, in stealth, over this kind of ground.