“Christ! No!” Yates shouted and staggered to his feet as the green truck made a U turn and began speeding in reverse toward Yates’s utility vehicle. Shan leapt up, grabbing the American’s arm as he took a step forward. Yates’ resistance lasted only a moment. They stood, transfixed, as the rear of the truck slammed into Yates’ vehicle, crumbling the fender, jerking forward and back again, pushing the vehicle into the boulder behind it. Then suddenly it was on fire. The green truck swerved away, steering toward them as it gained speed, blaring its air horn as they leaped to the side. It roared past them, out onto the highway.
The American took a step toward his burning truck.
“Yates, wait!” Shan insisted.
“For what?” the American shot back. “I have things in there. I have got to-” But his protest died away as he heard the sirens coming down the road from town.
“Let bystanders tell them what happened,” Shan said.
“What the hell did you do inside?” Yates growled at Shan. “They never could have gotten the alarm this fast.”
His question was answered a moment later. Two black utility vehicles with blinking lights sped into the compound, spraying gravel as they slammed on their brakes and Public Security soldiers poured out of the first. From the second stepped Major Cao and the diminutive Madame Zheng. Shan watched as a witness spoke excitedly with Cao, then pointed at Shan and Yates.
“You must have a death wish,” Yates muttered as the major marched toward them.
Shan said nothing as Cao erupted, demanding to know what Shan had done, did not react when Cao slapped him. He extended his forearm with the license numbers written on it toward the knob officer. “A green truck left here minutes ago. In it you will find the men who killed Director Xie.”
“Idiot!” Cao snarled. “You don’t think I see that everything you do is to distract me from the truth?
“Then why do you suppose they destroyed this American’s truck?” Shan asked in a level voice.
Madame Zheng was behind Cao now, staring toward the burning vehicle. A soldier ran up to her with a section of the shattered bumper, bearing a bumper sticker, with the words, in English, Climbing Rocks! She stared at it, as if it were a vital piece of evidence, and was still staring at it when two knobs appeared from the shadows of the parked trucks dragging a limp body between them.
“Trying to sabotage the fuel pumps as well,” one of the soldiers declared.
Shan’s heart leaped to his throat as he recognized Jomo, his face battered and bleeding, a dark stain down his shirt. The knobs too had batons.
“Who else is with you?” the knob demanded, raising his stick at Jomo.
Shan sprang forward, covering the Tibetan, taking the blow to his own shoulder as the knob struck.
“It wasn’t like that,” Jomo cried as the soldiers tried to pry Shan away. “The man at the fuel station shoved me against a pump. I threw a can of oil at him and it burst open.” Shan saw now that the stain was indeed oil. “I only wanted to stop him.”
“Stop him from what?” Shan asked, dropping to his knees by the Tibetan.
Jomo pulled several sheets of paper from inside his shirt. “He paid me to draw a map of the roads between here and Everest, with the villages and old shrines marked. I thought he wanted to make offerings.” He spoke only to Shan, his face contorted not with pain but with shame. “But then I found him selling copies, selling them to some of the truckers. I threw his money back at him, demanded he give me the maps.”
Cao took a step forward, then halted as he saw the attentive way Madame Zheng listened.
“Why?” Shan asked. “Who needs maps?”
“It’s those monks. The truckers in the dormitory are all excited. Word spreads fast among those kind. Someone is paying a bounty for the escaped monks, or their gaus, those unique ones with lotus flowers from Sarma gompa.”
“Why the gaus?”
“Because the monks will never give them up. If someone brings in one of those gaus the monk will be dead. It’s the proof, for the bounty.”
The fight went out of the knobs. They gazed at Major Cao as Shan pulled Jomo out of their grip. But it was not Major Cao who spoke.
The silent Madame Zheng finally found her voice, the cool, peremptory one of a woman who would brook no discussion of her commands. “The American is bleeding, Major. Get your medical kit.”
Cao glared at Shan, seemed about to strike him again, then retreated as Madame Zheng stepped to Shan’s side.
Shan spoke matter-of-factly to the woman from Beijing as he watched Cao jog away. “I want to see Colonel Tan,” he stated. “Now. I want him to have a meal, a real meal, sitting in one of the front offices with a window onto the street.” Zheng gazed at Shan attentively without responding. “I want the major to stand outside the window, under a streetlight, where Tan can see him.”
Chapter Fourteen
Tan did not notice Shan at first when they brought him into the office, washed and wearing tattered but clean prisoner denims. Although the guards had removed the chains on his feet, he moved into the room with the half steps of the prisoner accustomed to hobbles. He halted, looking down his feet, then saw Shan. His face flushed and he looked away.
“The barber came today,” Tan announced in a flat tone as he reached the window and, as Shan knew he would, as every prisoner did after days in a cell, looked up at the sky. After a moment he gestured to the plate and steaming cartons of food on the desk. “I thought I would be allowed to select my own last meal.”
“Consider this a dress rehearsal,” Shan said. He studied the colonel. Although he stood almost straight, something in his back was preventing him from reaching his usual ramrod posture. A finger was splinted and taped. The tips of four other fingers were covered with bandages. The left side of his face was gray-green with old bruises.
Tan sat with a ceremonial air, letting Shan dish out the food as his left hand squeezed his right, to stop it from twitching. Shan watched him eat, wary that his words might ignite the colonel’s instinctive rancor. After several minutes of ravenously consuming the chicken, noodles, and vegetable rolls Tan paused and, without looking at Shan, pushed the container with the remaining rolls toward him. Shan lifted the container without a word and ate.
When Shan finally found his tongue he spoke into the empty container. “I was only a boy when the Red Guard first appeared,” he said in a low voice. “They started with those sound trucks cruising along the streets, shouting out the Chairman’s verses or demands for people to assemble for political instruction. Sometimes they ordered everyone to surrender things. Books. Anything made in a foreign country. Any correspondence from abroad. Photos of foreigners. I remember an old man down the hall who had a wooden figure of a horse maybe ten inches high, his pride and joy, sent by a cousin who had gone to live in America. They had a trial for that horse in the street, condemned it as a reactionary and beheaded it with an ax. I kept wanting to laugh but my mother was crying. She put her hand over my mouth. After that whenever the soundtrucks came, my mother burst into tears.”
Tan’s hand absently went to his shirt pocket and came away empty. Shan stepped to the door, spoke to the guard, and a moment later a package of cigarettes and matches were tossed onto the desk.
“I wasn’t supposed to be one of them,” the colonel said after he lit a cigarette. “I was just a soldier, a corporal at one of the new nuclear test facilities, at the edge of the desert north of Tibet. They came through in convoys of trucks, with orders from Beijing to go south and construct a new socialist order in the land of the Buddha. It was like they were going on an extended vacation, a party on wheels. They sang songs about the Chairman, held rallies that went on for hours. They scared the hell out of the officers but we were under orders from the Chairman himself to cooperate. They got anything they wanted. Food. Blankets. Weapons, and men who knew how to use them. I was told to escort them to Lhasa. They stopped in towns along the route, organizing processions of old men and women and encouraging their children and grandchildren to throw eggs at them. They forced people into town squares and renamed all their children with Chinese names or conducted struggle sessions with landlords. When I started to turn back in Lhasa their commanders told me the army was for old men, that I could be part of the past or part of the future, that I could be one of the anointed of Mao if I chose.”