The Chinese Agenda (5 page)

'We'll reach the jump-off point just after dawn,' Jones volunteered. 'If it will do us any good.'

Gillon looked up in surprise at the sudden bitterness in his voice. 'Why do you say that?'

Jones twisted in the seat. 'Because I just got a radio message a little while ago. Peter Lin was found dead in his apartment this morning.'

He noticed Gillon's blank stare. 'Pete was Phan Duc Phnom. He and I have been together for nearly three years.'

'Three years,' Gillon repeated. 'I thought he was a Laotian government official.'

Jones nodded. 'He was . .. but we also worked together.'

'I see,' he said, not sure what it was that he did see. 'How did it happen?'

'Somebody from the embassy went to his apartment to

pick up some papers. No one answered the door and they got the landlord to let them in. The place was torn apart and Pete knifed to death. It was made up to look like a robbery but that's nonsense. Pete held a third-degree black belt in Kenpo Karate. No one, not even two or three people with knives, could have gotten close to him.'

The cobwebs were gone now and Gillon had to lean closer to hear Jones as he had deliberately pitched his voice low so that the other two would not hear.

`There are too damned many people who know about this shindig . . . in Rome, Washington, Moscow, wherever. You can't maintain secrecy with .that many people involved.' And he smacked the seat rest in anger.

Gillon nodded and suddenly he felt the cold, fey touch of death, and shivered involuntarily. Both men knew that Lin must have talked. A dose of carefully administered hypnotic, and his killers would have found out all he knew . . . providing, Gillon thought, that the killer knew generally what kind of questions to ask. Which meant that if he had been at all successful, he would have to be familiar with the broad outlines of the mission, and that meant that he must have been aboard the aircraft in Rome.

Gillon sat for a moment, mulling this chilling fact over in his mind. Finally, he had to ask the question. 'How much did he know?'

Jones looked at him, face noncommittal.

Ònly the barest facts. He knew about the strike team in Sinkiang, about the data they were supposed to have . . . no specifics, just what you know, that a combined American/Soviet team was being put together.'

'Did he know where or when . .. anything at all in any detail?'

Jones thought for a minute. 'No,' he said slowly. 'No, no way. I didn't know myself until I read through the operations plan about two hours ago. I doubt if there are more than five or six people anywhere who know the full details.'

'Who?' Gillon prompted.

'How the hell . . . ?' Jones started to snap, then

thought better of it. Gillon waited patiently while Jones thought it through. Probably the Director of Planning at headouarters, maybe his staff aide, the Soviet intelligence chief and possibly one or two of his people . that should be all. These plans aren't even typed up by one Person. Pages are spread at random through several typing pools.'

'No one else. How about somebody in Rome? That idiot general, maybe?'

`No, I doubt it. No one is ever trusted with full details of any plan unless they absolutely need to know.'

Gillon was silent for a moment. staring out the window. There was something missing here, some question that hadn't been answered. but for some reason it completely escaped him for the moment. He shrugged irritably and told Tones what had occurred to him, that the killer may have been in the group that hoarded in Rome.

`So,' he finished. 'it could he that after we threw them off, they decided that shaking your friend down to learn anything more was worth the gamble.'

'Could be,' Jones responded dubiously. 'If that's the case, then they are damned desperate and might go after somebody else, figuring that if they can put enough pieces together they can puzzle out the plan. That would mean, then,' he finished slowly, 'that they have a pretty good idea of what's going on. And now they are looking to fill in the pieces.'

He was silent a long time, then reached over and slapped Gillon on the knee. 'Maybe you aren't out of the jungle vet, buddy.'

'I never figured I was,' Gillon replied soberly.

Jones leaned even closer. 'Don't say anything to the other two yet. No sense in having everyone upset.'

Gillon nodded, he could sec the sense in that. 'Which brings up a question. How much do you know about these other two birds?' Against his will, he was beginning to take more of an interest in the mission. Then the stupidity of that position dawned on him. Win, lose or draw, they would all need to depend on one another. It was, imperative that he know as much about the other

two as possible, their strengths and weaknesses particularly.

`Leycock by reputation and Stowe by both reputation and experience. Both of them are extremely capable men. You rarely get the chance to pick the people whom you will work with on an assignment . . . they pretty much do that through some magical psychological testing and computer matching and, as usual, they fouled this one up. Leycock, I might have picked based on what I know of him; but not Stowe, not ever.'

Gillon raised his eyebrows in an elaborate questioning pose and Jones shrugged.

`You're going to find out anyway, so I might as well tell you now. Stowe doesn't work for the Agency. He's a National Security Council boy. Supposedly . . . there are only ten of them . . . they are the elite and they report directly to the President when they are on assignment. Stowe is one of those damnable know-it-alls who thinks that he's the only person capable of doing anything right. There is no love lost between the Agency and the NSC operatives, because we are senior, but they are completely independent of Agency control . . . except when on a combined effort assignment.'

Jones glanced over his shoulder but Stowe was asleep in his seat. 'This mission was approved on the highest levels and, as usual, the President assigned operational responsibility to the Agency.'

Oh hell, Gillon thought to himself. This whole damned thing isn't weird enough, but that we have to have interdepartmental politics involved as well.

'Anyway,' Jones went on, 'Stowe has the reputation for being an overbearing ass, even though he is apparently capable enough. I expect to have some discipline trouble from him before the mission is out, but nothing more than that. Otherwise, I've always found that he knows what he is doing and since he spent some time in Tibet a few years ago he should be able to handle himself in the mountains.'

`You say you worked with him before?'

Jones glanced out the window. 'Yes,' he replied in a tone that indicated this was forbidden territory.

'What about Leycock?' Gillon asked, deciding that he might get further if he played the game.

' 'Another one of us mountain men. He's been with the Agency since he left the Army ten years ago. His last assignment, according to his record, was leading a counter-reaction team in Bolivia.'

'And just what is a counter-reaction team?'

'A fancy way of saying anti-guerrilla unit. It's the latest fad in counter-insurgency warfare. Supposedly, it's designed to work in areas where the insurgency is still in Phase One ... a backwoods operation, in other words, with hit-and-run tactics and no pitched battles. The counter-reaction teams are recruited from the local countryside and usually include a policeman, some farmers, a few businessmen from the city, a doctor and a lawyer . . . they try and get a cross section of the local society, in short. Then they train these people and send them into the bush after the guerrillas to meet them on their own ground. Each group consists of about twenty men and they are supported and supplied by helicopter. The idea is based on the old British local forces idea that worked in Malaya. The U.S. uses it quite a bit in Laos these days.'

'I see,' Gillon nodded. 'Then Leycock led one of these outfits in Bolivia . . . after Guevara, I would imagine.'

'Well, some of his units, yes, and quite successfully too. They worked pretty high in the Andes, so he knows his way around in the mountains . . . or so his record tells me.'

Gillon shook his head. 'I sure hope it's right. The Tien Shan is going to be one devil of a place to find out that some clerk mixed files.'

Jones nodded agreement. 'Before that, he was in Cambodia and then-southern Laos with the Special Forces, a Montagnard unit, I believe. They are supposed to have made some raids into North Vietnam. You might ask him about them since you both worked the same neighbourhood.'

Jones stretched and shook his head. 'God, I'm exhausted. Want some more coffee?'

Gillon shook his head and Jones stood up. 'Then I

think I'll go up front and get another cup and see if anything else has come in from Rome.'

Gillon nodded and went back to staring out the window at the clouds. He had never considered that his army days in Indo-china had qualified him as an expert in covert-style warfare. But for all he knew, they were counting guerrilla experience as college credit these days. He was happy to discover that at least one of the qualifications for membership in this select group of idiots was mountain experience . . . actual on-theground experience and not classroom textbook experience. He well knew what they could expect from the terrain, altitude and weather once they got into the Tien Shan –

assuming they made it that far. May was not the most ideal month to hike into ten-to fifteen-thousand-foot passes.

Gillon had not been in the mountains in nearly ten years . . . real mountains, mountains over ten thousand feet and covered with snow and glacial ice all year around as distinguished from mountains with rain forest and grasslands. He knew well that they would need both skis and snowshoes to pack in the supplies they would need for a week. There would be no time to teach an amateur what he needed to know to survive a howling blizzard and below-zero temperatures. Ten years and he hoped that he was neither out of condition nor had forgotten how to survive, himself. He continued to stare out the window for a while, watching the extremely few lights that were scattered across the vast, silent steppe some thirty thousand feet below. They had outflown the storm while he slept and the skies were clear. Above them, by shading the double plastic window from the cabin lights, he could see bright, ice-sharp stars and far to the north, on the very horizon, the faint ghost dance of the northern lights. Proof enough that they were moving north. Ala Kul, Jones had told him earlier, was to be the jump-off zone. Try as he might, he could not place Ala Kul even though Jones had explained that it was a large salt lake near the Sinkiang border. He got up and went to the back of the cabin, where Jones was poring over the mission plan and borrowed a map showing the Central Siberian area and the western Sinkiang region. Returning to his seat, be adjusted the overhead light and began to examine the map. After a moment, he found the tiny blue speck labeled Ala Kul, some sixty miles due west of the border. On the southern edge of the lake, he spotted a small Soviet air base, presumably used for border patrol. The airfield lay far enough away to be beyond the range of Chinese radar, but close enough to allow them to fly into the mountains quickly. Foothills overflowed the border at this point and their northern slopes were portrayed as quite ,steep, leading up to an almost sheer massif where they joined the main line of the range, the Tien Shan mountains. An aircraft taking off from Ala Kul could, if it hugged the ground to the border, use the radar shadow of this massif to penetrate the range, drop a load and be gone before the Chinese could spot it by radar. There were one or two advanced radar stations marked along the highest ridges, but the Soviets were apparently not worried about these, as they could not monitor the wide, steep, but very high passes through which a carefully piloted aircraft could slip.

A hand fell on his shoulder an indeterminate time later and he awoke with a jolt.

'join us,' Jones shook him again.

Gillon sat up in the seat shaking his head, surprised to find that he had dozed off. The cabin was brightly lit and strewn with sleeping bags, Primus stoves, cold-weather clothes, carbines, skis, snowshoes and a hundred and one other items.

'We decided that it would be a good idea to see what the bright boys hack in Virginia packed for us. Once we leave the hospitable Soviet Union, it'll he too late to holler for matches.'

Leycock was busily making up four individual packs and Stowe stood up, rubbing the backs of his legs. He turned to Gillon and looked him over slowly.

`Do you know how to use any of this?'

For a moment, Gillon could not decide whether the question was meant as a joke or an insult. Stowe's manner provided no clue and he decided that, this early in the game, the benefit of the doubt was in order.

He nodded. 'Yeah, I do„ I understand that both of

you know your way around in the mountains.' He noticed that Leycock had stopped work and was watching Stowe.

`You do, huh?' Stowe grinned. 'My kid brother does a lot of hiking in the Cascades. But I sure as hell don't count that as knowing how to use this equipment.'

And now he knew. Gillon stepped quickly across the aisle. 'Look, friend. We're going to be together for quite some time. We need to reach an understanding. So, you give me any more smart talk and I'll tear your head off.'

Gillon's move was so quick and unexpected that Stowe stepped back involuntarily. Leycock sat back on his heels and laughed. 'Chuck, I do think that you've met someone who's not going to take any nonsense. I'd leave him alone, if I were you.'

Stowe considered Gillon for a minute, as if deciding which tack to take. Gillon waited patiently, watching his face for any sign of a quick move. Finally, Stowe grinned.

'All right. I apologize. If you say you know, then you know.'

'Darned right, Stowe,' Jones said quickly. 'Gillon cut his teeth on the Swiss Alps when he was a kid. Not only that, but he took the cross-country silver medal in the 1964 Winter Olympics.'

Stowe shrugged. 'All right, then I apologize. I've had to work so long with stumblebums like these that I've come to consider anyone that runs with them a stumblebum ...'