A Death in China - Carl Hiaasen [80]
The same reasoning had ordained the timing. It was midnight, and the helicopter would return one hour before dawn unless Stratton called earlier. They might have come later, but anything moving in the Chinese countryside between midnight and dawn would alarm sentinels accustomed to seeing nothing move at all. Even midnight was cutting it fine, Stratton knew, but he had not dared come until the village was asleep.
They watched in silence as the chopper clawed for the clouds on muffled engines. It was the seventh time Stratton had endured that particular parting. The seven loneliest moments of his life.
Even in the mud, the bicycles worked like a charm.
They were the only thing.
A sentry materialized, wraithlike, from the shelter of a tree about a mile from the village. PLA.
The sentry hollered something that was lost in the wind. Bobby Ho, riding point, head down, waited until he was within ten yards of the man, until the pistol would bear. He answered in Chinese.
Maybe the man had heard the helicopter. Maybe Bobby Ho said the wrong thing. The sentry coiled, unslinging his rifle. From the shelter by the tree, two more wet soldiers emerged. The six Americans slithered off their bikes into the mud like a satanic rank of marionettes.
It ended quickly, but one of the sentries managed a shot. It ricocheted like flat doom through the blackness.
For five breathless, unbearable minutes, Stratton’s team crouched by the road, safeties off, ears aching, praying. No one came. The sentry had died in vain.
Bobby Ho tried to break the tension.
“These Chinks ain’t even tryin’,” he whispered in jocose mimicry of the fat colonel. It didn’t sound funny.
The single guard at the head of the village main street died in silence for his sloth. He must have felt the blade administered by a saturnine Puerto Rican named Gomez, but he never saw it. Stratton left Gomez and a fireplug Tennessean named Harkness to watch their back door.
They met the boy a few minutes later, creeping through such stillness and total absence of color it gave Stratton the eerie sensation that the entire village was a two-dimensional fantasy.
Bobby Ho flushed the boy from a pile of rags in the imperfect shelter of a shop doorway. Panofsky grabbed him, roughly clamping his jaw. The boy wriggled, a minnow in the maw of a shark. Stratton saw the knife come up and winced.
“Wait!” Bobby Ho hissed. “He can’t be more than twelve, all skin and bones.”
The knife wavered. Panofsky looked over at Stratton. Everybody knew the rules. It wasn’t even a judgment call. Stratton made it one. It was Bobby Ho’s play.
Panofsky’s eyes flashed with anger.
In a sibilant, harsh undertone, Bobby Ho tongue-lashed the boy in Chinese. Stratton watched the boy’s eyes: flat, emotionless. They showed intelligence, but no surprise, no curiosity. And most of all, no fear.
At length, the boy nodded. Bobby Ho stepped back.
“It’s all right.”
Again Panofsky looked at Stratton.
“Let him go,” Stratton said. Sometimes you break the rules.
The rag boy massaged his neck. With arrogance that could only have been inherited, he turned his back and stalked away, vanishing within seconds up an alley on pencil legs that seemed unequal to their sixty-pound burden.
“I told him we are on a secret training exercise with foreign friends, and that if he ever interrupts the PLA again, I will personally shoot him and everybody in his family.”
“I hope he believed you.”
“He believed