The Chinese Agenda (31 page)

'Damn you, damn you!' Leycock screamed, stumbling forward to his knees. 'Stop .. . we'

ve got to stop or we'll freeze to death!'

Gillon started forward, oblivious to the weapon; then, suddenly realizing, fell back a step, his hands hanging loosely at his sides. His knees buckled and he too all but collapsed into the snow.

Àll right,' he choked. 'We'll stop . . . but only for a few hours.'

Leycock got to his feet and wearily shrugged out of his pack. Together, they pitched one tent, driving the pegs deep into the hard-packed snow with their carbine butts. Leycock dragged their packs inside and laid out the sleeping bags. then called to Gillon, who had remained kneeling in the snow by the last peg, staring with un-eyes at the now almost invisible disk of the moon. Leycock crawled over, grabbed his arm and half dragged him into the tent. Gillon roused long enough to crawl into his sleeping bag. He was asleep before he had zipped it closed.

It was two hours short of dawn when Gillon woke abruptly. The silence was almost absolute – interrupted only by Leycock's curiously ragged breathing in the high, thin air of the plateau. For nine days they had never really been free of sound; aircraft engines, the incessant wind, the crunch of snow underfoot and the eerie gunshot-like report of cracking trees in the intense frost, the action and noise of the caravan. But now there was silence and it was oppressive. Gillon twisted, pulled aside the tent flaps and looked out. The night was utterly black at first and then he saw the pale glimmer of the moon to the west. The ice mist had thickened to a shroudlike consistency and the air was utterly still. Not the faintest breath of wind stirred and as the mist settled it began to burn the exposed skin of his face and hands. He shivered and re-closed the flaps, then dug the Primus stove out of his pack, moving awkwardly in the confined space of the tent and the encumbrance of his sleeping bag. He stared blankly at the pale blue flame as it cast a

dim light in the tent while the pan of snow melted, then roused long enough to add tea leaves, a double portion for each of them, and the water boiled quickly. The boiling water early reminded him that he and Leycock were running for their lives across one of the highest mountain ranges in the world. They had crossed the southern slope of Janart Peak the previous afternoon and were now on the 16,000-foot-high plateau beneath Pobeda Peak, the highest mountain in the Tien Shan at 24,000 feet. He felt the tension of the situation begin to tighten his stomach muscles into a hard cramp and he knew that it would not relax until he was safely across the border – or dead. He swore to himself, more in exasperation with his own recalcitrant body than at the circumstances that had placed him in this situation. The water took on a darker color than the surrounding gloom and he nudged Leycock, then poured two mugs full of the lukewarm liquid and dug out the last of the foil-wrapped ration packs. Leycock had two remaining and they each had part of the hard-baked, unleavened bread left that was a main staple in the Kalmuck diet. After that, he estimated that in their physical condition and at these altitudes and temperatures, they had at best an additional twenty-four to thirty-six hours before they would be too weak to move. He recalled an account he had read of Scott's death in the Antarctic less than fifty miles from an emergency cache of food and his own bewilderment as to why they had not been able to exert that last two or three days' effort to reach it instead of slowly dying of starvation in their tent. Now he felt he understood. Leycock woke slowly and Gillon had to shake him violently several times to get him into a sitting position. The strong tea helped to revive him enough to eat and Gillon knew that unless they got out soon, they were finished. He had come to depend on Leycock's strength and never failing sense of humor, but the past nine days of violent exercise at high altitudes had taken their toll. Leycock's face was sunken and pinched and pale patches which indicated the beginnings of frostbite were visible on his nose and forehead. His eyes peered out dully between the lowered hood and the ten days of bearded stubble giving him that haunted concentrationcamp-inmate look. Gillon knew that his face must look the same.

Silently, they forced the inadequate rations down with gulps of tea, then rolled their sleeping bags, struck the tent and folded the stiffened fabric into Leycock's pack. Gillon had donned his face mask and settled snow goggles over the eye holes. Over his parka, he pulled the rainproof poncho to shield himself as much as possible from the tentacles of ice mist that seemed to search out every gap in the fabric of their cold-weather clothing. Leycock followed his lead and, wordlessly, they shouldered their packs and carbines and, compasses in hand, started forward. The glimmer of moonlight through the clouds cast no appreciable light and Gillon used his flashlight freely, knowing that the mist made its dim, frozen light invisible beyond a few feet. Within an hour, they were climbing up through the jumble of ice and rock that led to the northern reaches of the Subarcho Glacier. No one in his right mind would have attempted this climb in the darkness, but both men knew only too well that they had no other choice. They traveled as carefully as was possible, testing for hidden crevices and faulty snow bridges, and a small amount of luck remained with them. Temperatures had been low enough in recent weeks that the winter's accumulation of snow had frozen into solid neve that at least provided firm footing. It would have been different, Gillon knew, if temperatures had been even a few degrees higher, as this would have been sufficient to increase the internal movement of the ice to twist and wrap the surface into dangerous configurations, opening up chasms in the ice that the heavy snows of winter could not have bridged.

Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the darkness thinned as they struggled across the rugged surface with its great blocks of ice, twisted and smashed by the passage of the glacier across the stubborn rock of the mountains. It was well toward midmorning before they were finished with the glacier and clambered down —onto the wind-packed snow of the high slopes once more. Here the travel was faster – or would have been if their reserves of strength had not been exhausted. The sun was a pale ghost of silver light gliding through the ice cloud. On the one hand, Gillon was grateful for the concealment offered, while at the same time he cursed the bitter, strength-sapping touch of the mist. While it remained, there was no chance that the Chinese would be able to spot them from the air. Within an hour, they had both become shrouded in suits of frost whose coldness penetrated the insulation of their clothing, even without benefit of wind. Gillon stared around at the mountains, half hidden in the frozen mist. They were climbing up through a narrow pass, or col. On either side, the peaks closed in around them the higher they climbed, funneling their route into a pass which the map indicated was less than two miles ahead. The oppressive silence held sway for a moment more: then he heard, faintly in the distance, a booming begin to grow into a steady roar, sounding very much like the roar of jet aircraft engines being run-up prior to takeoff. For a moment he was puzzled by the sound and he and Leycock exchanged half-puzzled, half-apprehensive glances as the booming sped toward them. A barely seen shadow, like the forward wall of a highexplosive bomb concussion, swept down the pass toward them, and seconds later the wind struck in full fury, screaming through the rocks and ice. They half turned and crouched, shielding themselves against the wind.

Only once before had Gillon encountered such a wind and that had been deep into the High Sierras of California, years before. He had heard the same distant booming then, far off among the peaks, and the wind had come sweeping down through the passes at thirty and forty miles an hour. That night it had rained with all the fury of a hurricane and before morning the storm had become one of the worst summer blizzards that he had ever experienced. As they struggled forward, Gillon could only hope that this wind did not presage another such storm for them.

All through the interminable day, Gillon and Ley-cock struggled upward against the mountains, the temperature and now the wind, taking what advantage the covering mist offered. They stopped briefly for rest every

hour and for fifteen minutes at noon to eat. More time than that, they both knew they could not spare.

By midafternoon, the mist was beginning to dissipate somewhat under the repeated onslaught of the wind; but it remained a thick layer of cloud above the twentythousandfoot level. A dare-devil pilot, one who aid not care the least about his own life, could have flown in to search for them . . . but even so, visibility was so poor that one moment'

s inattention, and the mountains would destroy the aircraft. They reached the top of the pass at 18,000 feet three hours before dark. The cloudwreathed peaks of the central Tien Shan lay before them, clothed in majestic robes of newly fallen snow and highlighted on their higher slopes by the pale sun. Heavy snow clouds clung tenaciously to the peaks, wrapping them in angry rolls of gray and black. The sight of the peaks and their coverings of snow and cloud sloping down into the deep valleys below was breathtaking; a sharply etched lithograph done in grays, whites and steel blues. To the north of where they stood reared the fortress-like Pobeda Peak and beyond was the Tengri Khan. Both peaks were enmeshed in a battle with the snow cloud that surmounted their 24,000-foot masses. Gillon turned away from the twin peaks to examine the valley directly below them when Leycock grabbed his arm and pointed back down the pass. Gillon swung around and peered into the mist. At first, there was nothing to be seen but the sun-brightened mist and snow. Then the movement of two unsubstantial black specks riveted his attention. Gillon shrugged out of his pack and quickly dug his binoculars out of his pack.

Through the glasses, the dots resolved into the figures of two men struggling toward the top of the pass but the mist was still too thick and the distance too great to discern details. Gillon tapped Leycock on the shoulder and motioned to the rocks along the side of the crest. Leycock nodded and wordlessly the two men picked up their packs and carbines and climbed up into the rocks to a point where they would be invisible from below. Gillon laid his carbine across the top of his pack and settled himself to wait, watching the figures below through his binoculars. Within thirty minutes, the two men below them had moved close enough for them to be identified as Dmietriev and Stowe. He and Leycock exchanged surprised glances and Gillon continued to watch through narrowed eyes as the two men came on slowly, stopping to rest often on the last, six-hundred-foot climb up the col. The tracks that he and Leycock had left Would be plainly visible and Dmietriev and Stowe seemed to be following the same, exact route. Painfully, the two men struggled up the last steep stretch and slumped exhausted into the snow below where they were crouched. Gillon nudged Leycock and they slid down out of the rocks to confront the surprised pair. Dmietriev saw them first and jumped to his feet, fumbling for his carbine. Stowe, emaciated and barely conscious, glanced up slowly and the relief in his face was clearly visible.

The four men stared at each other for a long moment until Dmietriev said hoarsely, 'They wiped out the entire caravan.' He turned then to stare off down the far side of the pass toward the magnificence of the twin peaks, his expression one of indescribable sadness.

'We watched them from the top of the ridge,' he continued quietly. 'Troops came in by helicopter and they rounded up anybody left alive, then shot all the animals. The helicopters carried the survivors out and left the troops to start after us.'

Stowe nodded absently as if in confirmation.

'Yeah, we saw some of it,' Leycock said. 'We didn't think that you two had gotten out of the valley.'

There was a sense of unreality in the scene, Gillon thought, of four men quietly discussing the massacre of dozens of people while they themselves sat only a few miles from the scene of their own probable deaths at the border.

'It was very close,' Dmietriev admitted. 'We were almost taken once, near the crest. But we shot at two of the soldiers and were able to hide in the trees until dark. We did not think to catch up with you on this side of the border.'

'You knew that we had gotten away?' Gillon asked sharply.

Dmietriev nodded. 'He saw you go' – he hooked a thumb at Stowe – 'but we did not know about Mr. Ley-cock . . .' Again, that feeling of unreality. For nine days now they had depended every second of their lives on one another, and yet they were not on a firstname basis. Gillon nodded. So Stowe had seen him going up through the trees. Just where in hell had. they all been when the Migs had started their runs? he wondered. He remembered that Stowe had been behind him, which explained why he would have seen him climbing up through the trees. Leycock had pushed on ahead as he often did, as if the pace of the caravan were too slow for him. But he had not been out of his sight . .. he never was. He did not recall where Dmietriev had been at that moment, only that he had been near the end of the caravan, some fifty feet behind him the last time he had checked. Dmietriev, then, had been the one out of sight for a few minutes, just before the Migs struck. Of a sudden Gillon remembered one final item that had not registered until now – from the crest he had seen a red smoke marker streaming upward from the trees to the rear of the caravan. But the Migs had struck from the northeast at an angle to the caravan's line of march, from behind the ridge, where the sound of their engines would be obscured. He had automatically assumed that the flare had been dropped by one of the aircraft, but now that he thought about it, he remembered that the smoke marker had come from the trees several hundred yards behind the caravan. If the marker had been dropped from an aircraft, it would have to have been during the third pass at the earliest. The first had taken them on the flank. The second pass had been made from directly ahead as the aircraft turned to run back along the length of the column. And by then no marker would have been necessary because of the smoke from the bombs. And Dmietriev carried the remaining explosives in his pack, plus four smoke markers which they had intended to use to mark the landing site for their own pickup aircraft. Almost stunned by the sudden realization, Gillon