Jack Ryan 11 - Bear And The Dragon (69 page)

“'My lieutenant come,'” Yu Chun translated. The sergeant was clearly relieved, now able to dump the situation on someone else, who answered directly to the captain at the station.

“Good, let's go back to the truck and wait for him,” Wise suggested. Once there, Mrs. Yu lit up an unfiltered Chinese cigarette and tried to retain her composure. Nichols let the camera down, and everyone relaxed for a few minutes.

“How long were you married, ma'am?” Wise asked, with the camera shut off.

“Twenty-four years,” she answered.

“Children?”

“One son. He is away at school in America, University of Oklahoma. He study engineering,” Chun told the American crew.

“Pete,” Wise said quietly, “get the dish up and operating.”

“Right.” The cameraman ducked his head to go inside the van. There he switched on the uplink systems. Atop the van, the mini-dish turned fifty degrees in the horizontal and sixty degrees in the vertical, and saw the communications satellite they usually used in Beijing. When he had the signal on his indicator, he selected Channel Six again and used it to inform Atlanta that he was initiating a live feed from Beijing. With that, a home-office producer started monitoring the feed, and saw nothing. He might have succumbed to immediate boredom, but he knew Barry Wise was usually good for something, and didn't go live unless there was a good reason for it. So, he leaned back in his comfortable swivel chair and sipped at his coffee, then notified the duty director in Master Control that there was a live signal inbound from Beijing, type and scope of story unknown. But the director, too, knew that Wise and his crew had sent in a possible Emmy-class story just two days earlier, and to the best of anyone's knowledge, none of the majors was doing anything at all in Beijing at the moment -- CNN tracked the communications-satellite traffic as assiduously as the National Security Agency, to see what the competition was doing.

More people started showing up at the Wen house/church. Some were startled to see the CNN truck, but when they saw Yu Chun there, they relaxed somewhat, trusting her to know what was happening. Showing up in ones and twos for the most part, there were soon thirty or so people, most of them holding what had to be Bibles, Wise thought, getting Nichols up and operating again, but this time with a live signal going up and down to Atlanta.

"This is Barry Wise in Beijing. We are outside the home of the Reverend Yu Fa An, the Baptist minister who died just two days ago along with Renato Cardinal DiMilo, the Papal Nuncio, or Vatican Ambassador to the People's Republic. With me now is his widow, Yu Chun. She and the reverend were married for twenty-four years, and they have a son now studying at the University of Oklahoma at Norman. As you can imagine, this is not a pleasant time for Mrs. Yu, but it is all the more unpleasant since the local police will not allow her to enter her own home. The house also served as the church for their small congregation, and as you can see, the congregation has come together to pray for their departed spiritual leader, the Reverend Yu Fa An.

“But it does not appear that the local government is going to allow them to do so in their accustomed place of worship. I've spoken personally with the senior police official here. He has orders, he says, not to admit anyone into the house, not even Mrs. Yu, and it appears that he intends to follow those orders.” Wise walked to where the widow was.

“Mrs. Yu, will you be taking your husband's body back to Taiwan for burial?” It wasn't often that Wise allowed his face to show emotion, but the answer to this question grabbed him in a tender place.

“There will be no body. My husband -- they take his body and burn it, and scatter the ashes in river,” Chun told the reporter, and saying it cracked both her composure and her voice.

“What?” Wise blurted. He hadn't expected that any more than she had, and it showed on his face. “They cremated his body without your permission?”

“Yes,” Chun gasped.

“And they're not even giving you the ashes to take home with you?”

“No, they scatter ashes in river, they tell me.”

“Well” was all Wise could manage. He wanted to say something stronger, but as a reporter he was supposed to maintain some degree of objectivity, and so he couldn't say what he might have preferred to say. Those barbarian cocksuckers. Even the differences in culture didn't explain this one away.

It was then that the police lieutenant arrived on his bicycle. He walked at once to the sergeant, spoke to him briefly, then walked to where Yu Chun was.

“What is this?” he asked in Mandarin. He recoiled when the TV camera and microphone entered the conversation. What is THIS? his face demanded of the Americans.

“I wish to enter my house, but he won't let me,” Yu Chun answered, pointing at the sergeant. “Why can't I go in my house?”

“Excuse me,” Wise put in. “I am Barry Wise. I work for CNN. Do you speak English, sir?” he asked the cop.

“Yes, I do.”

“And you are?”

“I am Lieutenant Rong.”

He could hardly have picked a better name for the moment, Wise thought, not knowing that the literal meaning of this particular surname actually was weapon.

“Lieutenant Rong, I am Barry Wise of CNN. Do you know the reason for your orders?”

“This house is a place of political activity which is ordered closed by the city government.”

“Political activity? But it's a private residence -- a house, is it not?”

“It is a place of political activity,” Rong persisted. “Unauthorized political activity,” he added.

“I see. Thank you, Lieutenant.” Wise backed off and started talking directly to the camera while Mrs. Yu went to her fellow church members. The camera traced her to one particular member, a heavyset person whose face proclaimed resolve of some sort. This one turned to the other parishioners and said something loud. Immediately, they all opened their Bibles. The overweight one flipped his open as well and started reading a passage. He did so loudly, and the other members of the congregation looked intently into their testaments, allowing the first man to take the lead.

Wise counted thirty-four people, about evenly divided between men and women. All had their heads down into their own Bibles, or those next to them. That's when he turned to see Lieutenant Rong's face. It twisted into a sort of curiosity at first, then came comprehension and outrage. Clearly, the “political” activity for which the home had been declared off-limits was religious worship, and that the local government called it “political” activity was a further affront to Barry Wise's sense of right and wrong. He reflected briefly that the news media had largely forgotten what communism really had been, but now it lay right here in front of him. The face of oppression had never been a pretty one. It would soon get uglier.

Wen Zhong, the restaurateur, was leading the ad-hoc service, going through the Bible but doing so in Mandarin, a language which the CNN crew barely comprehended. The thirty or so others flipped the pages in their Bibles when he did, following his scriptural readings very carefully, in the way of Baptist, and Wise started wondering if this corpulent chap might be taking over the congregation right before his eyes. If so, the guy seemed sincere enough, and that above all was the quality a clergyman needed. Yu Chun headed over to him, and he reached out to put his arm around her shoulder in a gesture that didn't seem Chinese at all. That was when she lost it and started weeping, which hardly seemed shameful. Here was a woman married over twenty years who'd lost her husband in a particularly cruel way, then doubly insulted by a government which had gone so far as to destroy his body, thus denying her even the chance to look upon her beloved's face one last time, or the chance to have a small plot of ground to visit.

These people are barbarians, Wise thought, knowing he couldn't say such a thing in front of the camera, and angry for that reason, but his profession had rules and he didn't break them. But he did have a camera, and the camera showed things that mere words could not convey.

Unknown to the news crew, Atlanta had put their feed on live, with voice-over commentary from CNN headquarters because they hadn't managed to get Barry Wise's attention on the side-band audio circuit. The signal went up to the satellite, then down to Atlanta, and back up to a total of four orbiting birds, then it came down all over the world, and one of the places it came to was Beijing.

The members of the Chinese Politburo all had televisions in their offices, and all of them had access to the American CNN, which was for them a prime source of political intelligence. It came down also to the various hotels in the city, crowded as they were with businessmen and other visitors, and even some Chinese citizens had access to it, especially business people who conducted their affairs both within and without the People's Republic and needed to know what was happening in the outside world.

In his office, Fang Gan looked up from his desk to the TV that was always kept on while he was there. He lifted the controller to get the sound, and heard English, with some Chinese language in the background that he could not quite understand. His English wasn't very good, and he called Ming into his office to translate.

“Minister, this is coverage of something right here in Beijing,” she told him first of all.

“I can see that, girl!” he snapped back at her. “What is being said?”

“Ah, yes. It is associates of the man Yu who was shot by the police two days ago...also his widow...this is evidently a funeral ceremony of some sort -- oh, they say that Yu's body was cremated and scattered, and so his widow has nothing to bury, and that explains her added grief, they say.”

“What lunatic did that?” Fang wondered aloud. He was not by nature a very compassionate man, but a wise man did not go out of his way to be cruel, either. “Go on, girl!”

“They are reading from the Christian Bible, I can't make out the words, the English speaker is blanking them out...the narrator is mainly repeating himself, saying...ah, yes, saying they are trying to establish contact with their reporter Wise here in Beijing but they are having technical difficulties...just repeating what he has already said, a memorial ceremony for the man Yu, friends...no, members of his worship group, and that is all, really. They are now repeating what happened before at the Longfu hospital, commenting also on the Italian churchman whose body will soon arrive back in Italy.”

Fang grumbled and lifted his phone, calling for the Interior Minister.

“Turn on your TV!” he told his Politburo colleague at once. “You need to get control of this situation, but do so intelligently! This could be ruinous for us, the worst since those foolish students at Tiananmen Square.”

Ming saw her boss grimace before setting the phone down and mutter, “Fool!” after he did so, then shake his head with a mixture of anger and sorrow.

“That will be all, Ming,” he told her, after another minute.

His secretary went back to her desk and computer, wondering what was happening with the aftermath of the man Yu's death. Certainly it had seemed sad at the time, a singularly pointless pair of deaths which had upset and offended her minister for their stupidity. He'd even advocated punishing the trigger-happy policemen, but that suggestion had come to nothing, for fear of losing face for their country. With that thought, she shrugged and went back to her daily work.

The word from the Interior Minister went out fast, but Barry Wise couldn't see that. It took another minute for him to hear the voices from Atlanta on his IFB earphone. Immediately thereafter, he went live on audio and started again to do his own on-the-scene commentary for a global audience. He kept turning his head while Pete Nichols centered the video on this rump religious meeting in a narrow, dirty street. Wise saw the police lieutenant talk into his portable radio -- it looked like a Motorola, just like American cops used. He talked, listened, talked again, then got something confirmed. With that, he holstered the radio and came walking directly to the CNN reporter. There was determination on his face, a look Wise didn't welcome, all the more so that on the way over, this Lieutenant Rong spoke discreetly with his men, who turned in the same direction, staying still but with a similar look of determination on their faces as they flexed their muscles in preparation for something.

“You must turn camera off,” Rong told Wise.

“Excuse me?”

“Camera, turn off,” the police lieutenant repeated.

“Why?” Wise asked, his mind going immediately into race mode.

“Orders,” Rong explained tersely.

“What orders?”

“Orders from police headquarter,” Rong said further.

“Oh, okay,” Wise replied. Then he held out his hand.

“Turn off camera now!” Lieutenant Rong insisted, wondering what the extended hand was all about.

“Where is the order?”

“What?”

“I cannot turn my camera off without a written order. It is a rule for my company. Do you have a written order?”

“No,” Rong said, suddenly nonplussed.

“And the order must be signed by a captain. A major would be better, but it must be a captain at least to sign the order,” Wise went on. “It is a rule of my company.”

“Ah,” Rong managed to say next. It was as if he'd walked headfirst into an invisible wall. He shook his head, as though to shake off the force of a physical impact, and walked five meters away, pulling out his radio again to report to someone elsewhere. The exchange took about a minute, then Rong came back. “Order come soon,” the lieutenant informed the American.

“Thank you,” Wise responded, with a polite smile and half bow. Lieutenant Rong went off again, looking somewhat confused until he grouped his men together. He had instructions to carry out now, and they were instructions he and they understood, which was usually a good feeling for citizens of the PRC, especially those in uniform.

“Trouble, Barry,” Nichols said, turning the camera toward the cops. He'd caught the discussion of the written order, and managed to keep his face straight only by biting his tongue hard. Barry had a way of confounding people. He'd even done it to presidents more than once.