China Hand, page 24
Squinting through his injured eye, his face twisted in pain, he charged me. His full-throttled lunge took me by surprise, and as he drove me into the bulkhead, I dropped the shoe. I avoided going down, but then he pressed his forearm against my throat, pinning me against the wall. Snarling, he landed several shots on the top of my head before I could tie him up in a bear hug. The struggle quickly turned into a hockey fight, each of us clutching the other’s shirt with our left hands while pummeling the other with the right. My sole advantage was his injured eye, which left him partially blinded as he tried to fend off my swings.
My edge didn’t last long—he caught me hard on the left cheekbone. My face rattled from the impact, but I didn’t feel any bones break. A few months earlier that shot might have done me in, but a lot had changed. I was now fighting not just for myself but for Lily and her mother and America and—if the general was right—even China. I kept swinging.
We were both weary now, breathing heavily. With our faces only inches apart, I seized an opening and grabbed him by both collars and tried to head-butt him. He jerked back before I could nail him, but that threw him off balance, leaving me just enough room to swivel my hips for a judo throw. It was slower and uglier than any I’d practiced, but it landed him hard onto the small of his back.
I came down on top of him with all my weight. He wheezed loudly. I sat up slightly, tried to pound him left and right, but he rammed his goddamn knee up into my ribs, spilling me to the side.
Clawing his way onto my back, he grabbed me in a choke hold. I’d learned enough to keep my chin tucked tight to my neck to stop him from crushing my windpipe, but that was about all I could do. I elbowed his torso with all my might—to no effect. I tried to lift him up for another judo throw, but he was yanking me backwards so hard I couldn’t gain any leverage, and my failure opened my neck to his forearm. The pressure was agonizing. I couldn’t breathe. I whipped my entire body forward to shake him loose, but that didn’t work, either. He had me as tight as a vise, and my exertions were costing me precious air.
“Help!” I finally croaked to Lily. I had no choice. I was losing consciousness. It was only a matter of time.
Lily burst from the bathroom with the steel rod that she’d pried from the towel rack. She charged at the man with murder in her eyes. Then she stopped.
“Xiong?”
“Leilei,” he gasped, easing his grip slightly.
I sucked air.
“Gan ma?” she asked. What the hell are you doing here?
“Your father sent me!”
Lily’s arm dropped to her side. “What? Why?”
“We’ve been trying to find you.”
“Let him go,” Lily told him, pointing the rod at me.
For several seconds, Xiong kept his hold before pushing me away.
“Who’s he?” I asked hoarsely. With his face and shirt so covered in blood—much of it from my arm—I was surprised even Lily could recognize him.
“My father’s bodyguard. I have known him since I was a little girl.”
That’s where I’d seen him. The formal dinner honoring the general.
“And he’s your kidnapper,” Xiong said. “The IAU teacher!”
“What? No, he is not kidnapping me.” Lily shook her head. “He is helping me leave China because—”
“Your father says that he,” Xiong jabbed his finger at me as he had the knife blade only moments ago, “took your mother, too.”
“Lily, he’s lying.” I said. “He wants the reward—or someone’s threatened to lock him up for life if he doesn’t track you down. You know your father wanted you to leave with me.”
Lily’s eyes shifted between Xiong and me. Was she actually having doubts? With all the stress and fear, was the appearance of her father’s trusted bodyguard enough to make her question the decision to leave, our relationship?
“Lily, he’s working for them,” I said. “They’ve either bribed or coerced him into turning on your father.”
“Them?” she repeated, dropping the rod.
“The Central Government. Your father’s enemies. Your father knew when he chose to leave that they’d do everything possible to prevent him from getting away.”
She was still glancing at Xiong as if she might trust him more than me. And she’d dropped the metal rod, our only weapon.
“He’s CIA,” Xiong said, pointing at me. “Our enemy.”
“You’re CIA?” Lily asked me.
“No!” I replied as emphatically as Xiong. “I mean, not really. When we met I was just a teacher.”
She stared at me, making no move to come closer, confusion in her eyes.
I offered the only response I could. “I love you, Lily.”
Her head moved slowly from Xiong to me. Then she looked past both of us to her mother standing in the cabin doorway.
“Lily, Xiong is lying,” Mrs. Jiang said. “Everything your father and I told you was true. China’s going in the wrong direction. The best thing we can do is cooperate with the Americans. And you’ll be safe from your father’s extremist enemies.” She stepped up to the injured bodyguard. “You…you have betrayed our family.”
He grabbed her by the shoulders and started shaking her. “You know I don’t want to hurt you, but you’re leaving me no choice. Stop this foolishness. Tell your daughter to behave,” he added with a glance at Lily.
As he turned back to Mrs. Jiang, she plunged a knife into his chest, her stern gaze as unforgiving as the blade.
I looked at the floor, where Xiong’s knife had fallen near the door, and then at Xiong, where it had now come to rest.
He sank to his knees. Both his eyes were open, the damaged one as red as his shirt. He moaned horribly.
Mrs. Jiang turned and hurriedly locked the cabin door.
Xiong clutched the haft of the blade. For a moment, I thought he’d yank it out and try to stab Lily’s mother, but instead he spilled forward onto the floor, driving it farther into his heart.
“Drag him into the bathroom, quick,” Mrs. Jiang told me. “Lily, get towels and clean the blood up.”
Far from shocked by the violence, Lily’s mother had become a field general herself, dispatching her troops decisively.
I quickly wrapped a shirt around my wounded arm, which was crusting over but still seeping blood, then grabbed Xiong’s heels and pulled his heavy body into the bathroom. He barely fit. As I reached for his neck to check his pulse, I feared that he’d spring to life. But the only part of him that moved was the stream of blood still seeping from his ghastly wound.
Lily bent over and started to clean up the blood in the cabin. Moments later, she straightened, giving up. There was too much on the floor. Her face was as wet and red as the rags in her hands. Her mother took them from her and threw them into the bathroom.
I looked at the cabin door, worrying who would pound on it next.
CHAPTER 43
The knife in Xiong’s chest was our only real weapon.
With a groan that drew a glance from Mrs. Jiang, I headed into the bathroom, closing the door behind me. I was determined to spare Lily and her mother the gruesome scene.
I rolled Xiong over and found that his fall had left only about an inch of the haft protruding from his chest. I figured that would be enough for me to grab. I was wrong. I hadn’t anticipated how difficult it would be to dislodge that blade with only my fingertips. Grotesque as it was, I forced my fingers deep into that warm flesh to grab the knife firmly until I could feel the handle in the palm of my hand. I pulled it all the way out, producing a horrible sucking sound and a gush of fresh blood.
My hand and arm appeared to have gone through a meat grinder.
I turned on the faucet and rinsed the knife before washing out the long gash on my forearm. I stepped over Xiong’s body and edged out of the bathroom. Lily never looked over, but Mrs. Jiang nodded her approval.
I returned the gesture as I slipped the knife into my jacket pocket, then sat down and took a deep breath.
The ferry crossing was scheduled to take fifteen hours. I was already exhausted, but we couldn’t be certain that Xiong had been searching for us on his own. I had to stay alert. I also needed to try to keep my wounded arm functional and not infected. Lily dabbed the long cut with antiseptic hand wipes, then tied a fresh shirt snugly around it.
After a few hours in which every sound made us tense up and exchange nervous glances, we figured the absence of any discernable ship-wide search meant that we might be in the clear. But we also had no doubt that the Chinese were employing their increasingly sophisticated technical prowess to analyze every possible point of departure from the country. And we couldn’t exclude the possibility that ferry employees—or our fellow travelers, no matter how sleepy-looking—had noticed the arrival of a tall Westerner not long after the boarding of two Chinese women, all of whom matched faces on the news and wanted posters.
Lily curled into a fetal position on a bunk, eyes open, no doubt in shock after witnessing her mother’s grisly slaying of a man she’d known and trusted all her life. Mrs. Jiang’s shoes lay on the floor beneath her, stained red, one from smashing Xiong’s face, the other splattered by my own blood. Mrs. Jiang sat erect on a chair, staring straight ahead at the cabin door, either not noticing her daughter’s fraught condition or preparing herself for even worse to come. As for me, I was dazed by all that had happened, but felt no regret—it had been him or us. I just wanted to make it to Incheon, be done with this ordeal, and begin my life with Lily. I kept my attention riveted to the door, determined that no one was going to stop us.
After sailing for another twenty minutes—with Lily still balled up on the bunk, eyes wide, as though she feared the demons of dreams most of all—I sat beside her and took her hand. It felt lifeless. She looked lost.
Someone knocked on the door.
The three of us startled. I squeezed the handle on the knife and extended my right arm—painfully reopening the wounds—to ensure that I could still use it. Then I stepped slowly toward the entry. Bracing myself, I unlatched the door and opened it a crack.
Oh my God! “It’s Will,” I said to Lily and her mother as I threw open the door. “You’re alive!” I ushered him inside. “How—”
He shoved a pistol toward my face. “Against the wall, all of you.”
What?
We backed toward the bathroom, hands in the air. Will mule-kicked the cabin door shut—with the leg that had been shot, which made no sense. I must have been staring at it because he read my reaction right away.
“That was chicken blood at the bank, Andrew. Sorry to put you through so much grief, buddy.”
Buddy? “What the hell—who are you?”
He inhaled so strongly that his nostrils flared, like he was bracing himself for a storm. “China cracked our communications. They caught me and offered a crash course in how joints shouldn’t bend and places bamboo shouldn’t go. They said I could spend the rest of my days getting tortured, or I could cooperate and help them roll up the CIA’s network for trade bait to get the general back—do that, and live happily ever after in Beijing with all my limbs. I chose door number two.”
This was Will? His anguish and urgency on the sidewalk had been so real. I couldn’t believe the depth of his betrayal. “But how?”
“When you used that phone to call Tom, you helped me complete my side of the bargain. He’d been under such deep cover for so long, no one would have known about him otherwise—including me. And then they rounded up Ed and everybody else you led them to on our little trip around China. Tom was smart enough to put a bullet in his own head before they could take him.” I might have heard envy in Will’s voice. “But, hey, General Jiang is safe so congratulations—mission accomplished,” he added cynically.
“You don’t have to do this,” I pleaded. “Let’s get the fuck out of here. All of us.”
He kept his gun leveled at me. “You don’t get it, Andrew. I had no choice—and now you don’t, either. Once Xiong tracked you down he radioed for help and they sent a warship after this tub. Now I know why he went silent.” Will glanced at the blood smears on the floor. “I guess I trained you well, but now you’re done. There are a dozen Chinese marines onboard. I did you a huge favor by convincing them to let me bring you all out peacefully. If you want to do this the hard way, Andrew, you’ll be the first one to get shot.”
Mrs. Jiang was glaring at him. “Don’t do this. You can’t trust anything the Party leadership says. They’ll keep forcing you to do their bidding—then discard you when you’re no longer of use. And now you know what they’ll do to us.” She looked at Lily.
For a moment, I thought he might be listening to her, but I was deluding myself.
“There’s no other way!” Will shouted. “You think we’re going to fight off those Marines with one gun and a knife? We’re going on deck, all of us, and then we’re taking a little boat trip. And I swear I’ll shoot you if you take one step out of line.”
He marched us out of the cabin, where two Chinese marines with bullpup rifles were waiting on either side of the door. Will was right—there was no way we could have made it to Korea.
One of the soldiers mumbled into a radio, then they led us down the corridor in close formation—Lily and Mrs. Jiang side by side, then me right in front of Will, who was so close behind that the muzzle of his pistol kept brushing against my back.
No one said a word as we climbed the stairs to the main deck, where a half dozen more armed Chinese soldiers were ushering passengers down a separate stairway. “That’s it, you’re doing fine,” Will said to us as we moved into the open air. He sounded friendly, a man whose job was almost done. He pointed off the stern. “Now you can see where we’re headed.” Trailing a mile away on the starboard side was a massive Chinese destroyer, so large it seemed to fill the horizon.
“Just a little farther to that rope ladder.” Will prodded me with the pistol.
I was trying to look over the side for the boat that would take us to the warship when we heard the helicopters. All of us turned to the bow as two gray choppers, not more than fifty feet above the water, streaked toward the ferry.
“What the…” Will mumbled as one of the copters climbed and circled the vessel, “Navy” on the tail. A gunner was visible on the open side. The other chopper rose almost directly above us, a large antiship missile mounted underneath pointed directly at the Chinese destroyer.
There was a gunshot, then several more. One of the Chinese marines on the deck was firing at a SEAL scrambling over the starboard gunwale in full combat gear not more than thirty feet from us—before the shooter was cut down in a hail of fire from the circling helicopter. Two other SEALs climbed aboard the port side. The marines started firing at them.
Mrs. Jiang suddenly turned and leapt at Will. “Run!” she yelled at Lily.
As Lily raced toward the SEALs. Mrs. Jiang grabbed his gun. It went off. Will looked startled as she staggered backward and fell, blood darkening a small hole in the front of her coat.
I jumped him from the side, gripping his trigger hand. He got off one wild shot, which grazed the bloody bandage on my wounded arm, before we crashed to the deck behind a lifeboat. Bursts of gunfire came from behind and above us. I heard Lily scream and then glimpsed several more Chinese marines emerging from below deck to fire at the SEALs as I clung with both hands to Will’s pistol.
“Let go!” he growled as he punched my head. “I don’t want to kill you.” I was smashing his hand against the deck, trying to break his grip, but might as well have been trying to hold back the tide.
All around us a fierce gunfight raged. I heard glass shattering and bullets pinging off the hull and saw wood chips exploding off the lifeboat.
Will seized my hair and tried to yank my head back. Maybe he didn’t want to kill me, but he was doing a fair imitation of trying.
I strained forward and sank my teeth into the base of his thumb so hard I was down to the knuckle bone in an instant, trying like hell to tear his thumb off.
He grabbed at my face with his left hand, though with my jaw grinding down harder he didn’t get to my eyes, if that’s what he had in mind. But then he bashed his forehead into my temple, stunning me almost senseless and popping the gun from my hand. The weapon slid to a stop several feet away.
Will climbed on top of me, punching the back of my head. When I rolled over to defend myself, he hammered a hard punch that landed right above my eye. I tried to turn away and cover up, but he locked onto my throat. Gasping, I made another futile attempt to throw him off but failed. I was only dimly aware of the gunfire all around as the world began to turn black.
“I’m sorry,” he said, easing the pressure slightly on my neck. “I really am. I’m gonna make a run for it. You’re one of the good guys. I wanted to be, too.”
He looked up at the gunner in the helicopter drawing a bead on him, then launched himself toward the gunwale on the starboard side.
Several bursts from the helicopter overhead chewed up the deck, trailing his sprint until he dove headfirst over the guardrail, a twenty-foot drop to the sea. I saw a splotch of blood on the white paint. He’d been hit, I assumed. How seriously, I didn’t know.
I was trying to recover my senses when a final exchange of fire rose from an upper deck and the circling helicopter, which was placing what sounded like individually aimed rounds.
Seconds later, the gunfire ceased and I heard only the whup-whup-whup of the helicopters’ rotor blades.
“Bridge is secure,” one of the SEALs said nearby.
I rose to my feet, searching for Lily. A medic was leaning over her prone body. I raced over to them, hoping the soldiers wouldn’t shoot me. Fortunately, they’d been well briefed. Two men rushed to my side.
“Name?” one shouted.
“Andrew Callahan.”
