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By Root 1325 0

among the burial mounds that overlooked a village near Hungjao, sent on ahead like a beagle to sniff out the land and draw any surprise fire. Still half stunned, the blood from his nose dripping on to the Reader’s Digest in his hand, he waited among the rotting coffins until the shooting subsided and the bandits returned from the village with their looted bicycles, bed-rolls and sacks of rice. Recognizing that Captain Soong was the real leader of this bandit group, he had tried to make himself useful to the Chinese. But Captain Soong did not want Jim to run any errands for him. The war had changed the Chinese people – the villagers, the wandering coolies and lost puppet soldiers looked at Europeans in a way Jim had never seen before the war, as if they no longer existed, even though the British had helped the Americans to defeat the Japanese.

The trucks stopped at a crossroads. Captain Soong jumped from the Opel and strode over to the Buick. Without thinking, Basie held Jim’s arm. Basie had been prepared to see him die, and only Jim’s lavish descriptions of the booty waiting for the bandits in the stadium at Nantao sustained Basie’s interest in him.

A tornado of dust seethed around the three vehicles as they reversed and set off along a disused canal. Within half a mile they stopped on a stone bridge above a deserted village. Captain Soong and two of his men dismounted from their truck, joined by the Frenchman in the Buick and the coolie with the stave. The Australians sat in the front of the car, drinking from a wine jar and ignoring the shabby dwellings. Usually Captain Soong would have called Jim and sent him to ferret through the buildings, but the village was clearly abandoned, looted many times over by the bandit groups in the area.

‘Are we going back to Shanghai, Basie?’ Jim asked.

‘Soon, Jim. First we have to pick up some special equipment.’

‘Equipment you stored in the villages? Equipment for the war effort?’

‘That’s it, Jim. Equipment the OSS left here for us while I was working undercover with the Kuomintang. You wouldn’t want the communists to get it, would you, Jim?’

Both of them went along with this pretence. Jim stared at the empty village, its single mud street divided by an open sewer. ‘There must be a lot of communists here. Is the war over, Basie?’

‘It’s over, Jim. Let’s say it’s effectively over.’

‘Basie…’ A familiar thought occurred to him. ‘Has the next war effectively begun?’

‘That’s a way of putting it, Jim. I’m glad I helped you with your words.’

‘There are still a lot of words I haven’t learned, Basie. I’d like to go back to Shanghai. If I’m lucky I might see my mother and father today.’

‘Shanghai? That’s one dangerous city, Jim. You need more than luck in Shanghai. We’ll wait till we see the US Navy tie up alongside the Bund.’

‘Will Uncle Sam soon be here, Basie? Every Gob and GI Joe?’

‘He’ll be here. Every GI Joe in the Pacific area…’ Basie sounded unenthusiastic at the prospect of being reunited with his fellow countrymen. Jim had questioned him about his escape from Lunghua, but Basie was sly and evasive. As always, whatever happened after the escape had long since ceased to interest him. He remained the same small, finicky man worrying about his hands, ignoring everything but the shortest-term advantage. His one strength was that he never allowed himself to dream, because he had never been able to take anything for granted, whereas Dr Ransome had taken everything for granted. However, Dr Ransome had probably died on the death-march from Lunghua, while Basie had survived. Yet now, for the first time, the prospect of the treasure-store in the Olympic stadium had sprung the safety catch of Basie’s caution. Jim assiduously fed the cabin steward’s vision of enough wealth to return him in luxury to the United States. He assumed that Basie had heard on the camp radio of the imminent march to the killing-grounds, and had bribed a night-watchman to conceal him in one of the Nantao godowns.

Sitting beside Basie as he polished his nails, Jim realized that the entire experience of the war