Force of Arms wi-7, page 6
part #7 of WW III Series
Hartog was interested in various herbal remedies, golden needle acupuncture, and in particular moxabustion, in which small tufts of moxa incense were burned atop a needle so that the warmth could travel down and affect the nerve point. He was also looking for plants that could not only be used to prevent and/or reduce the effects of mountain sickness but could prove curative for a plethora of Western afflictions and diseases. Hartog’s curiosity was equally aroused by the Tibetans’ insistence on there being a balance between wind, bile, and phlegm, that is, the three humors that the Tibetans believe must be in balance if disease is not to gain the upper hand.
Hartog had already watched the fine and intricate art of pulse diagnosis in which various pulses provide a readout, as it were, of the various parts of the sick body. By paying homage to the Tibetan medicines — now called Chinese medicines ever since China had invaded the country of two million in 1950—Hartog was more respected by the locals and was not especially harassed by any of the 120,000 PLA troops stationed throughout Tibet or, as the Chinese preferred to call it, the “autonomous region.” He had become fairly well known in the markets and often advised a PLA member to try this or that remedy for any proffered illness, but always he would take the medicine himself to show good faith. Hartog was one of those patient explorers. He took the time to make copious notes and photographs of the various herbs.
But underneath, Hartog’s pulse wasn’t steady, for he was a very frustrated agent of MOSSAD who, because of Chinese sales of ICBMs to Muslim countries, wanted to know all they could about the missiles ever since the Swedish seismologist had recorded an underground nuclear explosion near the Xinjiang border with Tibet. There was a strong suspicion that, following the B-52 destruction of Chinese ICBM sites on the roof of the world earlier in the war, a new site was now in Tibet. The savings in fuel, launching from fourteen thousand feet above sea level, for example, was enormous. But where the site was, neither satellite nor other ELINT — electronic intelligence — had discovered, much of the movement up the Lhasa Road from the province of Qinghai past Lake Nam having been done either at night or under heavy cloud cover.
The only way, MOSSAD decided, was to get humint— human intelligence gained by someone whose human senses and initiative might prove more successful. After all, an infrared blur could, as General Cheng well knew, come from a hot thermos and yet register on the satellite film as a hot jet motor. Hartog’s job was to pinpoint the Chinese ICBM sites in Tibet.
It was lunchtime, and snow was falling again. It would be melted quickly by the sun, but with the sudden drop of temperature so typical in Lhasa, Hartog headed for the taxi stand across from the market, heading east along Xingfu then left, up Linkuo Lu to the telecommunications office where he sent a cable to Amsterdam asking for more money that he could change into Foreign Exchange Certificates. It was a signal that he had found out nothing about the ICBM sites. The amount he asked for told them the number of weeks he could remain under his visa.
After exiting the communications center he took a rickety cab south and went along Xingfu Xilu to the Lhasa Holiday Inn. Before going into the hotel where he’d registered for three days, Hartog visited the Xinhua Bookstore next door, and there he bought a cassette of Tibetan music, along with some postcards. Coming out, walking back toward the hotel, he heard the usual hissing and “Change marney?”
“No,” he said sternly, without being rude. He suspected that at least one of them might be a Public Security Bureau man — from the foreign sector. If you changed money with them you’d get a good rate and a night in jail for doing it, and then you would be in real trouble.
In the Lhasa Holiday Inn he felt guilty for wasting time and spending it in such comfortable surroundings and knew that soon he would have to risk going off the beaten track for a while and stop along the way at the various army camps where for a few yuan they were known to put you up for a night. The question would be, however, whether it was an ordinary base camp or a special secret camp that served the hidden ICBM sites, wherever they were. He wouldn’t know until the date section in his Rolex watch-cum-Geiger counter began advancing rapidly and noiselessly. And it hadn’t happened yet.
Well, he decided, he might spend only two nights at the Holiday Inn, then he’d rough it, and he knew it would be rough. For a start there would be the wild packs of dogs around Lhasa that were known for their ferocity, and he decided the best idea would be to travel along with the Chang Tang nomads who had survived the wildest parts of Tibet, a place of stark mountains and even starker plains in the north for over a thousand years.
While shaving before going down to the dining room, he put the Tibetan music cassette in his Walkman and played it through the two small square speakers. He thought it terribly discordant. He thought too about ICBM sites, of where they might have been moved to after the crushing B-52 raid against their old sites in Turpan. He thought also of how it wasn’t really in Israel’s interests to go poking around fourteen thousand feet or so above sea level looking for them. But in part MOSSAD’s mission was a payback due the Americans for their rapid help with the Patriots in the Iraqi War and a sign of good faith between Israel and the United States that he knew would be reciprocated if Tel Aviv needed it.
He rode down in the elevator with a PLA major whose satchel was marked “Major Mah, Camp Nam.” Lake Nam, where the camp was situated, was northeast of Lhasa and, if he remembered correctly, was a huge bird sanctuary. Hartog and the major smiled at each other, the major saying something about the weather. Hartog agreed. As they pulled up at the second floor he glanced from habit at his watch. The date had advanced ten days. Like the Russians, the Chinese, for all their newfound expertise, were still notoriously lackadaisical about safety parameters. Hartog made a show of patting his vest pocket for his wallet as if he’d forgotten it and at the ground floor stayed on the elevator and went back to his room. He had to work fast so as not to arouse any possible suspicion by the PLA officer. He pulled the toilet chain and went to work.
When he arrived down in the lobby ten minutes later, he dropped off a postcard to Amsterdam, his forehead glistening in sweat. The Chinese officer looked up from one of the dining room tables and motioned for the Dutchman to come over. Smiling, Hartog produced his wallet from his vest pocket. “Under the bed,” he said.
“Good,” the officer said, pleased he had found it. “Would you care to join me for dinner?”
“Yes,” the Dutchman answered, noticing a large bottle of Tsing Tao beer already emptied. He immediately ordered another two and talked about how changeable the weather was in Lhasa.
“You have been here long?” the officer asked.
“Only two days in Lhasa — two weeks in Tib— the autonomous region.” He had almost said “Tibet.” The officer was starting on his second large bottle of beer, and loosened his belt.
Hartog inquired of the major whether his camp, near Lake Nam northeast of Lhasa, was one of those that would put up trekkers for a night at a modest cost. “Yes, you could stay at our camp,” the major said. “Ten yuan.”
It was high by Chinese standards, but for Hartog a god-sent opportunity.
“I might take up your offer,” Hartog said, adding, however, that it “depends which way I go — east along the Zangbo or back past Lake Nam.”
“Well if you go back past the lake ask for Captain Ling. He’s my executive officer.”
“Thank you, but I may go east along the Zangbo.”
“There would be less rain than back north along Nam.”
“I’ll see,” Hartog said noncommittally, raising his glass for yet another toast “First I want to go and see the Potala Palace.”
“Ah,” the major said, looking around. “I understand everyone loves to go to the Potala.” He wasn’t too drunk, but nevertheless he couldn’t help employing the official Chinese tone of disdain for the Buddhist monastery.
On that note they said good-bye, and at the desk Hartog gave the clerk a Tibetan folk music cassette for the next morning’s post and sent a fax to Amsterdam, struck at once by the irony of being so close electronically to the West but so far away in reality. He read the fax out to make sure that the desk clerk understood.
The herbs which I have found so far should be alphabetized under ISNLNCIEAABTAKMMEREM. Am trying to get more details on Tibetan acupuncture. Willi.
The major ordered more beer be sent up to his room and asked if Hartog would join him. The Dutchman declined gracefully. “Perhaps then,” the major said, “I will see you at breakfast.”
“Yes,” Hartog said, and they waited, watching the floor needle above the elevator doors. They did not speak together going up in the elevator, the major yawning and Hartog watching the floor numbers light up, standing relaxed at the back of the elevator, trying desperately not to show his excitement. Sometimes in the game it was like that: You worked your butt off for weeks and months in godforsaken places all over the world, looking for a clue, and nothing, then you walk into a hotel and what happens? The wristwatch goes crazy. If the Chinese major hadn’t actually been working on or near an ICBM site, Hartog wasn’t a Dutchman.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Khabarovsk
The knock on Alexsandra Malof’s door in the hut that she shared with several other prisoners who had been rescued by the SAS/D teams startled her at first. It was just past midnight. But the moment she remembered she was in in American refugee compound at Khabarovsk she felt safe, having dropped off while working on a draft of her U.N. speech on behalf of all those Jewish and non-Jewish residents of the JAO. Even so, she did as Aussie Lewis had told her and looked out the hut window first, catching a glimpse of the Special Air Service berets: “Who Dares Wins” in the moonlight. And she went to the door with the gun, a Beretta 9mm that Aussie had told her he’d liberated from the ugliest Chinaman he’d ever seen on the SAS/D dune buggy raid against the Chinese guns.
“Yes?” she asked cautiously.
“Miss Malof?”
“Yes.”
“Captain Lourdes.” He held up his tag identification. “We’ve been told by Freeman’s headquarters to escort you to the airstrip. General Freeman says you can bring anything you want but make it snappy.”
“And this?” She showed him the Beretta.
“No problem this end,” he said. “What New York authorities will say is up to them. We’d like to take off before dawn, miss, just in case the Chinese do put up a few aircraft.”
“A few what?”
“Sorry, miss, didn’t mean to frighten you with talk about enemy aircraft, but it’s not just that really. There’s a typhoon on the way and the pilots would like to outskirt it if possible.”
“Yes, very well,” she said softly, and gathered her bag, already packed, and followed them out beneath the beautiful moonlit sky to the Humvee that would take them to the airport.
They pulled up at the gate, showed their ID, the GI there saying, “Good luck,” to Alexsandra.
“Thank you,” she said, and as they started off again noted the faint, sweet odor of the spring earth about to break open with a profusion of flowers any day now. She also had a sense of déjà vu, not so much that she’d been in the same place but doing the same thing as a child, her smell memory triggered by the strange odor of chloroform. Well past the gate she felt her shoulders suddenly held back, and felt chloroform-soaked cotton pressed hard against her face. She squirmed and tried to scream but there was no use; she was out of it in seconds, slumped in the Humvee’s front seat.
“How long to the Black River?’ one of the men asked. He was referring to the Amur, which the Chinese, who had hired them, habitually called the Black River.
“A half hour,” the leader said. “Then it’s up to the Chinese. All we were asked to do was to deliver her unharmed. Keep her from getting on that plane. Now remember, once we get to the river and hand her over to the Chinks we get rid of this SAS battle dress garb and we’re back to being just four Khabarovsk traders busy with our import-export business.”
The other three men laughed — they were from Hong Kong, where they had worked for the arms manufacturer Jay La Roche before he was murdered. With the reversion of Hong Kong to China threatening their roles as European entrepreneurs unless they kowtowed to Beijing, they were the perfect middlemen — men without a country, between China and the West.
“Hope we get more business like this,” one of the four kidnappers said.
“No,” said the man who called himself Lourdes and who was doing the driving. “Not like this. This is a one-time fee from the Chinese. Seems she’s important to Nie.”
“Lot of trouble to go to for a bit of tail,” one of the men in the back joshed.
Lourdes had shifted down as they neared the Amur River that separated Manchuria from Siberia. “No, it’s all politics,” he said. “They want to put her on trial.”
“A show trial,” one of the men in the back said. “Better her than me.”
“Okay, shush,” the driver said. “Remember the trace for the cease-fire is the river here. American patrols’ll be past this point in about ten minutes. Soon as they’re gone we send her across.”
CHAPTER NINE
“Fucking hell!” Aussie roared. “Whaddya mean someone’s kidnapped her? Who?”
“We don’t know, Aussie,” David Brentwood said. “First thing we knew about it was she was missing the refugee check this morning.”
“Well what about the fucking gate? The guards, for Chrissake?”
‘They said the guys who picked her up were SAS — ID and all.”
“Right!” Aussie said, grabbing his Heckler & Koch 9mm submachine gun. “Let’s get a few fuckin’ answers.”
The SAS men with him — Salvini, Brentwood, and Choir Williams, among the “bravest of the brave” in Freeman’s book — didn’t dare tell him he’d just blown his bet about not swearing for a week. The Australian was in a murderous mood. His blue eyes actually seemed to darken as he strapped on extra magazine belts. “Let’s go!”
“Where?” Brentwood said.
“To find the fuckers! For Chrissake!” Aussie said.
David Brentwood put his arm on Aussie’s shoulder. “Cool it, digger — the MPs’ve found an abandoned Humvee down by the river. By now she’s in Chinese hands.”
The information hit him like a blow to the solar plexus, and he was shaking his head, trying to will it not to be true.
“No, mate,” he said to David Brentwood disbelievingly. “Must be some mistake.” Suddenly he looked up. This man who was renowned in the troop for not being afraid to face the truth — to give you a realistic SITREP, knowing how to separate hope from fact — was now ashen faced. “The airport,” he said. “Maybe Freeman had her moved—”
“No, Aussie. Listen up now! We’ve checked,” Brentwood said, adopting the Aussie’s idiom. “She’s gone, mate.”
Aussie seemed to murmur something, letting the Heckler & Koch fall to the bunk where it bounced, the blankets stretched tightly, as per regulation, as if it had dropped on a small trampoline.
“Freeman wants to see us,” Salvini put in.
Aussie looked up hopefully. “Right — what’s on?”
Salvini instantly regretted he’d mentioned Freeman, as Aussie in his state had leapt to the conclusion that Freeman had already drawn up some kind of rescue op, but he hadn’t. He had something far more pressing.
* * *
The problem had begun, or rather had taken shape, some seventeen hours ago when in Lhasa the PLA major had waited for the Dutchman, Hartog, to start out on his visit to the Potala Palace, whose grand, sweeping whitish gray edifice against the blue sky seemed impregnable and more majestic than even the white-topped mountain fastness beyond.
The PLA major, Mah, had asked to listen to the Public Security Bureau’s tapes of the foreigner, William Hartog, in room 206. The tape for room 206 was mainly silent, except for the sound of the toilet flushing and the tinkling, at times mournful, songs of Tibet, probably coming from the foreigner’s Walkman. He knew foreigners became glued to their Walkman sets and would carry them in the most inappropriate places. Mah, whose job, apart from the other duties he had, was to monitor the tapes for the Holiday Inn, went into room 1219, one of the two China Travel Service offices on the Holiday Inn’s ground floor.
The men who had been on the last watch were tired but tried not to show it, sitting up attentively with their earpieces looking like huge green earmuffs, afraid of Major Mah’s displeasure. He came there on his weekly rounds or “foreigner check,” as they called it.
“He has flushed the toilet six times,” Man charged, as if it were a personal affront.
The technicians looked at one other — yes, they certainly agreed it was six times.
“And that Tibetan music,” Mah said derisively. “Listening to it at the same time.”
“Ah,” the technician said. ‘The music I think comes from his room while he is doing his business on the toilet.”
Mah sometimes wondered where it was they’d got these troops from to police Tibet. They were country bumpkins, most of them — not at all like Cheng’s elite shock troops or the tougher “PLA Second Artillery Army,” those who guarded the ICBM sites.
“Why do you think,” Mah asked contemptuously, “that he flushes the toilet six times?”
“Perhaps there was an obstruction,” one of the technicians proffered confidently.
“Maybe,” the other technician said, “he was full of shit! Ha, ha!”
Mah turned such an iron face toward the hapless technician that he cringed. “Are you the people’s official clown?” Mah asked. Before the belittled man could think of any response, Mah kept on, tapping the man’s head as if talking to an idiot. “If there was an obstruction, rock brain, the toilet would most likely have overflowed after it had been flushed six times in a row.”
