Authors: Eliot Pattison
Shan gave an impatient nod in reply. “But one of these field teams left behind some of their equipment.”
“Which team number?”
Shan gestured toward Winslow. “What team do you think? The one headed by the American.”
Strangely, the man seemed to deflate. “Ah,” he said slowly, “Melissa.” His eyes clouded.
“You knew Miss Larkin?”
“Sure. I mean—” the man searched their faces warily as if trying to assess how slippery the ground had become. “She brings things for us when she visits. Fossils sometimes. Pretty pink quartz. Once some American sweet biscuits. She is…” he studied their faces again, then fixed his gaze on the computer, “easy to remember.” When he felt Shan’s inquisitive stare, he sighed and continued in a more distant voice. “Once when she was here there was a big storm and the electricity was gone. No one could work. Most people went to the operations center and drank all day. But Miss Larkin, she made a fire here, in a big iron bucket,” he explained, pointing to the center of the concrete floor. “Some of us sat around it and told stories. She taught us American songs that day. Row, Row, Row Your Boat,” he said in English, having difficulty with the r’s. “Jingle Bells. Oh Susannah.”
“But that last time she was here, she wanted something special, didn’t she?” Shan suggested. “She left food supplies at Yapchi because she had to carry something else.”
The man tapped a few more keys at the computer, then sat down heavily on a nearby stool. A new screen appeared, showing resupply orders for the Yapchi camp. “She said she didn’t have time to do all the paperwork.” He looked around the warehouse, suddenly wary not of Shan and Winslow but of the shadows beyond them. “Said no one would miss them, that months would go by before anyone would ask for them and I could reorder by then. I said only six, but she insisted on taking all twelve.”
“Twelve what?”
The man winced. “It didn’t make sense. I still think about it sometimes. I still don’t understand.” He looked into Shan’s face with a pleading expression. “I’ll have replacements by next month.”
“Twelve what?” Shan repeated.
“Dye markers,” the man whispered. “Used to mark currents, or measure the flow of water. Where we usually work, in the new fields, it’s almost like a desert. The markers were all covered with dust. I reported that they had all expired,” he said, as if once he had decided to confide in Shan, as a fellow Han who shared the burden of dealing with Americans, he had to tell it all, “too old to use. I didn’t check. Probably true,” he added quickly.
“You just did your job. She was a team leader, after all,” Shan said and looked at the screen. There was a line blinking at the bottom of the screen, the last entry under Larkin’s name. Replenish, it said, and referenced a date. The date was tomorrow. He pointed at the line of text.
“Resupply,” the man said hesitantly. Shan leaned over and moved the cursor to the line and clicked the mouse. A new list appeared, with the same date, and map coordinates. Butane fuel cylinders. Blankets. Five hundred feet of rope, and seismic charges. Four cases of seismic charges.
As Shan studied the screen a chill crept down his spine.
“Why, if it’s for Larkin’s team,” he asked slowly, “would you keep this in the system?”
The color drained from the man’s face and he stared at the screen a long time before answering. “I don’t put the supply assignments in the system, just assemble the supplies for the orders that appear on the screen. That team may still be working. I hear they haven’t found her body,” the man said in a subdued, worried voice. Then, as he saw Shan’s intense interest in the screen, he stood in front of the monitor.
“She asked you to keep the replenish order in the system when she was here,” Shan stated. The man had mixed his tenses in speaking of Larkin, using the present tense sometimes even though he had obviously heard of her death.
“No, it’s a mistake,” he groaned, “just a mistake for this to be in this system. It doesn’t mean anything.”
“You mean she asked for a special resupply and later someone asked you to take it off?”
The man looked at Winslow with a pleading expression now. “A good woman,” he said in broken English. “Row, row, row your boat,” he said with a forced smile. “Baltimore Orioles.”
“You mean the Office of Special Projects,” Shan said.
The words brought a cloud to the manager’s face. “He said take her listings off our screens. I must have forgotten this piece.”
“Special Director Zhu said take off the resupply request?” Shan asked. “Cancel it?”
The man in the blue shirt hunched his shoulders forward, and seemed to draw into himself, getting smaller. “Not cancel it,” the man whispered to his feet, looking more frightened than ever. “Just take it off our screens.” He stepped in front of the computer and turned to face the entrance to the warehouse, as though guarding the screen. Or hiding it.
“You mean Zhu found out the replenishment order was still in the system,” Shan said slowly, glancing at Winslow, who was busily writing down the map coordinates, “and he said continue with it. But he is taking over the resupply assignment?”
The man’s voice had grown hoarse. “Like the rest of us, I guess. He hopes she still lives.”
But no, Shan realized as he hurried Winslow out of the building, it was because Zhu hoped to make sure she didn’t.
“How could—” Winslow began when Shan had explained his suspicion.
“The dye markers,” Shan explained. “We saw the dye markers being used the day before we saw Zhu in the mountains. He told us she had been killed a week before. He filed reports stating as much. But he was lying. She was in the mountains, near us, just the day before. No one else was using the markers. No one else had any markers. Zhu reported her killed to make sure no one else would interfere.”
“Interfere with what?”
“I don’t know. I think Zhu is going to deliver those supplies. He reported her dead. What if he lied, what if he wanted everyone to give up on her so he could find her? Zhu, and maybe Public Security, had decided she’s dangerous. What if it was because he wanted to make her dead now that everyone had accepted the lie that she was dead? Make her dead now, or take her somewhere for interrogation. She’s a ghost now. Zhu can do anything and no one would know.”
Winslow stared at Shan. “Impossible,” he said, but Shan didn’t see disbelief in the American’s eyes. He saw cold fury, and fear, and a glimmer of helplessness.
Shan surveyed the compound as they walked around the perimeter of the square, stopping by the vehicles they passed to watch the reflections in the window glass. “We can’t leave Somo.” The man from the dining hall, the one in the brown jacket, now wearing sunglasses, was two hundred feet away, standing by a parked truck, speaking in low tones into his little radio. Across the compound Shan saw two more men in brown jackets, listening to radios, briskly walking toward them now. An open vehicle, a jeep, pulled up beside the men. Zhu was in the front passenger seat, wearing his sunglasses, slapping a knob’s truncheon against his palm.
“She has people who take care of her,” Winslow said. “Purbas.”
“She came with us,” Shan said. “We’re being watched. Her friends will pick her up eventually. With Tenzin arrested, she can do no more here.”
But Shan was wrong. Five minutes later a heavy dump truck moved slowly across the yard, raising a thick plume of dust. It turned so that its path took it between them and their followers. It slowed as it approached. Someone was standing on its wide running board.
“Christ, it’s her,” Winslow gasped, and instantly the two men darted through the dust cloud to the truck. Somo motioned them onto the board and they leapt, landing on either side of the woman, Shan holding onto the side mirror, Winslow the handle used for climbing into the high cab.
Moments later they were beside the huge lot of idled equipment they had passed the night before. The truck slowed and Somo motioned for them to jump, following them a moment later.
“Why not stay on, get in back?” Winslow asked, brushing the dust from his sleeves.
Somo pointed to the main gate, where the truck was coming to a halt. Two army trucks were parked there, a squad of soldiers deployed on either side of the gate beside several men in brown jackets.
“Checkpoint. Effective this morning, everyone in and out of the base has to be cleared by the army. The 54th Mountain Combat Brigade,” she added tersely, as she turned and led them into the maze of equipment, finding refuge behind the lowered blade of a huge bulldozer. They sat in the shadow as she quickly explained that Larkin had indeed been at the base in the past month, when she was supposed to be in the mountains above Yapchi, and she hadn’t used the computer just for a few electronic messages to her office in the United States. The American geologist had used the only terminal in the entire venture that had a link to her company’s mainframe computer, and for two hours, timed to be in the middle of the night at the company’s headquarters in America, she had fed geologic data into the computer.
“But why?” Winslow asked. “She can’t have a secret deposit of oil. The oil belongs to the venture. She knows that. What could be so secret? So urgent?”
“More importantly,” Shan said, “what could an American geologist lost in the mountains possibly be doing that would cause Zhu to want her dead?”
“Modeling,” Somo reported in a puzzled tone. “That’s all anyone knows. That’s what the big American computer is used for. Modeling geologic data.”
“But what the hell is so secret?” Winslow pressed. “She works for an oil company. And why the computer back home?”
“I asked,” Somo explained. “Seismic data from the field is inputed and the computer extrapolates mineral deposits, using thousands of calculations and data about known fields. Predicts underground geologic structures. Identifying patterns of mineral tracers to point to big ore or oil bodies.” Somo shrugged. “Some geologists use the computer more than others. Larkin had used it before, often. And oil companies are secretive. They don’t want others knowing what they’re finding,” she added.
Shan recalled Jenkins’s description of the American woman. Larkin was a perfectionist. “But she would have to get permission,” he suggested. “Someone would have had to approve it.”
Somo sighed. “Yes and no. There are access codes that have to be fed into the computer to start the program. Entering the codes means you have permission.”
“And Larkin had the codes.”
“Larkin used code numbers registered in Mr. Jenkins name. But he was at Yapchi at the time.”
“Maybe he had approved it,” Winslow said.
“Or maybe not,” Shan suggested. He looked at Somo. “Why would they speak so freely with you about the computer? You’re a stranger.”
Somo frowned. “Not to everyone.”
“Meaning other purbas?” Shan asked.
Somo did not reply.
The roar of an engine suddenly erupted through the stillness of the equipment yard. A grey utility truck sped by.
“They’re looking for us,” Shan said.
“We’re going,” Winslow said. “Back to Yapchi.”
“There’s no transportation arranged,” Somo said, searching the yard behind them with a worried expression. “No truck to Yapchi for two days. And even then, the army will be at the gate.”
“We have to,” Winslow insisted, and his voice dropped. “We have to keep Melissa from dying again.”
They sat behind the bulldozer blade for more than an hour, listening to the sound of the utility vehicle moving through the yard and up and down the access road to the highway. Winslow stared absently into the red clay soil beneath them. Shan pulled the ivory rosary from his pocket and rolled the beads between his fingers.
The truck sped by again.
“I asked people here about Tenzin,” Somo recalled suddenly. “No word of the abbot of Sangchi being captured or returned to Lhasa. A prominent lama like that, the Bureau of Religious Affairs had a lot invested in him. The head of my school walked out last year in a protest, tried to run away to India. They caught him but he wasn’t sent to prison. Sent to somewhere else. Two months later he was back at work, giving speeches about the dangers of reactionaries and leading criticism sessions against other teachers.”
Shan considered her words in silence. “You mean political officers might work with Tenzin.”
“The government had so much invested him already,” Somo said. “I think they will try to rehabilitate him. Reprogram him. Maybe with doctors. Maybe with special religious trainers from the howlers.”
Her matter-of-fact tone chilled Shan. He recalled Gendun’s words in the hermitage, when the lama had expressed concern over Tenzin. Tenzin was going north, because someone had died. It was the abbot of Sangchi who had died, Shan knew now. But no matter how hard the abbot tried to find a new Tenzin, the government would demand the old abbot back, the tame abbot who had helped so many of their political campaigns.
Shan looked at Somo. It was the slenderest of reeds, only a remote flicker of hope. But if they had not been imprisoned it was possible Lokesh and Tenzin could be found, and saved. He stood up and surveyed the equipment yard. “If no truck is scheduled then we have to find one that is not scheduled,” he said in a determined voice.
Winslow sighed, and stood. “First I have to get to that equipment drop site,” he said indicating the map in his pocket.
“In the mountains above Yapchi?” Somo asked skeptically. “By tomorrow? Impossible. It’s over two hundred miles.”
But Winslow was already jogging back toward the compound.
Minutes later they walked down one of the long alleys between the housing units, ducking into the shadows twice when they heard the sound of a truck nearby, then again when a helicopter flew low overhead. It was early afternoon, and the units appeared to be empty, the workers all engaged in jobs, or waiting for jobs in the buildings around the square.
When Shan opened the door to his assigned trailer the unit was lit only by the sunlight coming in the small high windows. But someone leapt up from a bunk at the back of the unit, hastily buttoning his shirt. It was the oily young Han who had taken Shan to the messhall. There was a movement on a bunk behind him and a sleepy face appeared above a sheet, a young woman, naked, with streaked makeup on her face. A single red boot lay on the floor beside the bed. One of the mai xiao nu who had been at the bar the night before. She sat up in the bed looking at them with a surprisingly cheerful expression, slowly raising the sheet to cover her breasts.