Satori - Don Winslow [52]
Haverford shrugged.
Wooten’s red face turned unusually serious as he said, “I don’t want you mucking around on my pitch, Ellis. You, or Benton, or the both of you. Do I make myself clear?”
“I’m just back to Tokyo, Adrian.”
“Didn’t mean to be inhospitable,” Wooten said. “How are you getting to the airport?”
“Taxi.”
“No need,” Wooten said. “I’ll get one of my boys to drive you. Otherwise they just sit around all day quaffing beer.”
So I’m being escorted out of the colony, Haverford thought.
All right by me, the planning here is about done anyway.
39
WU ZHONG SMASHED his elbow into the wooden post.
A bolt of pain shot up from his forearm, through his wrist, and into his hand, still open in the distinctive “rake” posture that gave bajiquan its name, but Wu exhaled it away and looked back at the splintered wood. His elbow had put a hole three inches deep into the post.
That was bajiquan — it relied on quick, single, devastating strikes. Its great master Li Wu Shen once said, “I do not know what it feels like to hit a man twice.” Had this post been a man, the explosive force of the blow would have shattered his throat or his forehead, or simply stopped his heart. Wu would have continued practicing, but heard the call for prayer from the minaret just a block away.
He slipped into a white kaftan, put on his cap, and stepped out of the dojo onto Nelson Street. The mosque was the largest in Hong Kong, servicing the island’s small but devout Muslim community. The ulama had grown in recent years, as refugees fled from the mainland and found a more congenial home in cosmopolitan Hong Kong than in Chiang Kai-shek’s Taiwan.
As he walked toward the mosque, Wu was glad to be going to prayer. Tonight he would be infiltrated through the New Territories across the border into his homeland. The assignment itself should be nothing, the danger lay in getting in and getting out. A wushu instructor with the KMT Army for years before he retired to civilian life, he would find rough handling if he fell into Communist hands.
Now thirty-five years old, Wu had a wife and three young children who needed him. Still, he could not refuse an assignment like this. It paid well; moreover, it allowed him to strike a blow against the hated Communists, godless Kaffirs who oppressed his people. Not only would he bring home a year’s worth of income, but the American agent promised to provide a shipment of rifles to the nascent rebel movement in Xinjiang.
A tall man with impressively broad shoulders, he had to turn sideways to get through the old doorway of the mosque. He shucked off his slippers, found the prayer mat in its accustomed place, walked into the sanctuary, and knelt. Several other men, all friends from the neighborhood, were already there and had begun prostrating themselves.
Stretching his forehead to the floor, Wu could not get the assignment out of his mind. Killing was as nothing. He had used his mastery of bajiquan to kill many times before — Communists in Shanghai, Japanese in Hunan, and then the Reds again until Chiang gave up the fight and left so many of them to flee for their lives.
Now he was in a new war — a jihad to save his people. If killing helped to achieve that, then so be it. He would do it and if it was God’s will that he survive and come home to his family, then inshallah. If not, at least he knew that the ulama would not let his family starve. A brother would marry his widow and take care of his children.
Comforted by that thought, Wu gave himself over to prayer, and the ritual, as always, felt good to him. Old, solid, and reliable. There was joy in pure worship, peace in the repetition of the ancient words as he chanted, “There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is His prophet.”
40
A BLEARY-EYED LEOTOV stood in front of Voroshenin’s desk.
He had worked all night and now Voroshenin didn’t as much as offer him a glass of tea, although he sipped his own, the white sugar sitting at the bottom of the glass like sand