Shadow Puppets Part 31

Ambul had asked for only one favor from Alai, after setting up the meeting between him and Bean and Petra. "Let me fight as if I were a Muslim, against the enemy of my people."

Alai had a.s.signed him, because of his race, to serve among the Indonesians, where he would not look so very different.

So it was that Ambul went ash.o.r.e on a stretch of marshy coast somewhere south of Shanghai. They went as near as they could on fishing boats, and then clambered into flatbottomed marsh skimmers, which they rowed among the reeds, searching for firm ground.

In the end, though, as they knew they would, they had to leave the boats behind and trudge through miles of mud. They carried their boots in their backpacks, because the mud would have sucked them off if they had tried to wear them.

By the time the sun came up, they were exhausted, filthy, insectbitten, and famished.

So they rubbed the mud off their feet and ankles, pulled on their socks, put on their boots, and set off at a trot along a trace that soon became a trail, and then a path along the low dike between rice paddies. They jogged past Chinese peasants and said nothing to them.

Let them think we're conscripts or volunteers from the newly conquered south, on a training mission. We don't want to kill civilians. Get in from the coast as far as you can. That's what their officers had said to them, over and over.

Most of the peasants might have ignored them. Certainly they saw no one take off at a run to spread the alarm. But it was not yet noon when they spotted the dust plume of a fast-moving vehicle on a road not far off.

"Down," said their commander in Common.

Without hesitation they flopped down in the water and then frogged their way to the edge of the dike, where they remained hidden. Only their officer raised his head high enough to see what was happening, and his whispered commentary was pa.s.sed quietly along the line so all fifty men would know.

"Military truck," he said.

Then, "Reservists. No discipline."

Ambul thought: This is a dilemma. Reservists are probably local troops. Old men, unfit men, who treated their military service like a social club, until now, when somebody trotted them out because they were the only soldiers in the area. Killing them would be like killing peasants.

But of course they were armed, so not killing them might be committing suicide.

They could hear the Chinese commander yelling at his part-time soldiers. He was very angry-and very stupid, thought Ambul. What did he think was happening here? If it was a training exercise by some portion of the Chinese army, why would he bring along a contingent of reservists? But if he thought it was a genuine threat, why was he yelling? Why wasn't he trying to reconnoiter with stealth so he could a.s.sess the danger and make a report?

Well, not every officer had been to Battle School. It wasn't second nature to them, to think like a true soldier. This fellow had undoubtedly spent most of his military service behind a desk.

The whispered command came down the line. Do not shoot anybody, but take careful aim at somebody when you are ordered to stand up.

The voice of the Chinese officer was coming nearer.

"Maybe they won't notice us," whispered the soldier beside Ambul.

"It's time to make them notice us," Ambul whispered back.

The soldier had been a waiter in a fine restaurant in Jakarta before volunteering for the army after the Chinese conquest of Indochina. Like most of these men, he had never been under fire.

For that matter, neither have I, thought Ambul. Unless you count combat in the battle room.

Surely that did count. There was no blood, but the tension, the unbearable suspense of combat had been there. The adrenaline, the courage, the terrible disappointment when you knew you had been shot and your suit froze around you, locking you out of the battle. The sense of failure when you let down the buddy you were supposed to protect. The sense of triumph when you felt like you couldn't miss.

I've been here before. Only instead of a dike, I was hiding behind a three-meter cube, waiting for the order to fling myself out, firing at whatever enemies might be there.

The man next to him elbowed him. Like all the others, he obeyed the signal and watched their commander for the order to stand up.

The commander gave the sign, and they all rose up out of the water.

The Chinese reservists and their officer were nicely lined up along a dike that ran perpendicular to the one the Indonesian platoon had been hiding behind. Not one of them had his weapon at the ready.

The Chinese officer had been interrupted in mid-yell. He stopped and turned stupidly to look at the line of forty soldiers, all pointing their weapons at him.

Ambul's commander walked up to the officer and shot him in the head.

At once the reservists threw down their weapons and surrendered.

Every Indonesian platoon had at least one Chinese-speaker, and usually several. Ethnic Chinese in Indonesia had been eager to show their patriotism, and their best interpreter was very efficient in conveying their commander's orders. Of course it was impossible to take prisoners. But they did not want to kill these men.

So they were told to remove all their clothing and carry it to the truck they had arrived in. While they were undressing, the order was pa.s.sed along the line in Indonesian: Do not laugh at them or show any sign of ridicule. Treat them with great honor and respect.

Ambul understood the wisdom of this order. The purpose of stripping them naked was to make them look ridiculous, of course. But the first people to ridicule them would be Chinese, not Indonesians. When people asked them, they would have to say that the Indonesians treated them with nothing but respect. The public relations campaign was already under way.

Half an hour later, Ambul was with the sixteen men who rode into town in the captured Chinese truck, with one naked and terrified old reservist showing them the way. Just before reaching the small military headquarters, they slowed down and pushed him out of the truck.

It was quick and bloodless. They drove right into the small compound and disarmed everyone there at the point of a gun. The Chinese soldiers were all herded naked into a room without a telephone, and they stayed there in utter silence while the sixteen Indonesians commandeered two more trucks, clean underwear and socks, and a couple of Chinese military radios.

Then they piled all the remaining ammunition and explosives, weapons and radios in the middle of the courtyard, surrounded them with the remaining military vehicles, and set a small amount of plastique in the middle of the pile with a five-minute fuse.

The Chinese interpreter ran to the door of the room where the prisoners were being held, shouted to them that they had five minutes to evacuate this place before everything blew up, and they should warn the townspeople to get away from here.

Then he unlocked the door and ran out to one of the waiting trucks.

Four minutes out of town, they heard the fireworks begin. It was like a war back there-bullets going off, explosions, and a plume of smoke.

Ambul imagined the naked soldiers running from door to door, warning people. He hoped that no one would die because they stopped to laugh at the naked men instead of obeying them.

Ambul was a.s.signed to sit up front beside the driver of one of the captured trucks. He knew they would not have these vehicles for long-they would be too easy to spot-but they would carry them away from this place and give some of the soldiers a chance to catch a quick nap in the back of the truck.

Of course, it was also possible that they would return to the rest of the platoon to find them slaughtered, with a large contingent of Chinese veterans waiting to blow them to bits.

Well, if that happened, it would happen. Nothing he could do in this truck would affect such an outcome in any way. All he could do was keep his eyes open and help the driver stay awake.

There was no ambush. When they got back to the other men, they found most of them asleep, but all the sentries awake and watchful.

Everyone piled into the trucks. The men who had slept a little were a.s.signed to the front seats to drive; the men who had not slept were put in the backs of the trucks to sleep as best they could while the truck jolted along on back roads.

Ambul was one of those who discovered that if you're tired enough, you can indeed sleep sitting up on a hard bench in a truck with no springs on a rough road. You just can't sleep for very long at a time.

He woke up once to find them moving smoothly along a wellpaved road. He stayed awake just long enough to think, Is our commander an idiot, using a highway like this? But he didn't care enough about it to stay awake.

The trucks stopped after only three hours of driving. Everyone was still exhausted, but they had much to do before they could get a real meal, and genuine sleep. The commander had called a halt beside a bridge. He had the men unload everything from the trucks. Then they pushed them off the bridge into the stream.

Ambul thought: That was a foolish mistake. They should have left them neatly parked, and not together, so that air surveillance would not recognize them.

But no, speed was more important than concealment. Besides, the Chinese air force was otherwise engaged. Ambul doubted there'd be many planes available for surveillance any time soon.

While the noncoms were distributing captured supplies among the men, they were told some of what their commander had learned from listening to the captured radios during the drive. The enemy kept speaking of them as paratroopers and a.s.sumed they were heading for a major military objective or some rendezvous point. "They don't know who we are or what we're doing, and they're looking for us in all the wrong places," said the commander. "That won't last long, but it's the reason we weren't blown while we were driving along. Plus, they think we're at least a thousand men."

They had made good progress inland, those hours on the road. The terrain was almost hilly here, and despite the fact that every arable inch of China had been under cultivation for millennia, there was some fairly wild country here. They might actually get far enough from this road before night that they could get a decent sleep before taking off again.

Of course, they would do most of their movement by night, most of their sleeping by day.

If they lived through the night. If they survived another day.

Carrying more now than they had when they first came ash.o.r.e the previous night, they staggered off the road and into the woods alongside the stream. Heading west. Upstream. Inland.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

FAREWELLS

To: [email protected] From: [email protected] Re: Ripe Encryption seed:[?]

Decryption key: Is this Bean or Petra? Or both?

After all his subtle strategies and big surprises, it was a petty murder attempt that tagged him. I don't know if the news of the shooting down of an IF shuffle even penetrated the war coverage where you are, but he thought I was aboard. I wasn't, but the Chinese named him as the smoke, and suddenly the IF has legal basis for an Earthside operation. The Brazilian government is cooperating, has the compound on lockdown, The only trouble is, the compound seems to be defended by your little army. We want to do this without loss of life, but you trained your soldiers very well, and Suri doesn't respond to my feeble attempts to contact him. Before left, he seemed to be in Achilles's pocket. That might have been protective coloration, but who knows what happened on that return trip from China?

Achilles has a way of getting to people. An Indian officer at MinCol who had known Graff for years was the one who fingered me for the shuttle, because the fact that his family was in a camp in China was used to control him, Does Achilles have a way to control Suri? If Suri commands the soldiers to protect Achilles, will they?

Would it make a difference if you were there? I will be there, but I'm afraid I never quite trusted your a.s.surance that the soldiers would absolutely obey me. I have a feeling that I lost face when I fled the compound. But you know them, I don't.

Your advice would be appreciated. Your presence would be very helpful. I will understand if you choose to provide neither. You owe nothing to me-you were right when I was wrong, and I jeopardized everybody. But at this point, I'd like to do this without killing any of your soldiers, and especially without being killed myself-I wouldn't want to pretend my motives are entirely altruistic. I have no choice but to be there myself. If I'm not on the ground for the penetration of the compound, I can kiss my future as Hegemon good-bye.

Meanwhile, the Chinese don't seem to be doing so well, do they? My congratulations to the Caliph. I hope he will be more generous to his conquered foes than the Chinese were.Petra found it hard to concentrate on her search of the nets. It was too tempting to switch to the news stories about the war. It was the genetic disease that the doctors had found in her as a child, the disease that sent her into s.p.a.ce to spend her formative years in Battle School. She just couldn't leave war alone. Appalling as it was, combat still held irresistible allure. The contest of two armies, each striving for mastery, with no rules except those forced on them by the limitations of their forces and their fear of reprisal in kind.

Bean had insisted that they search for some signal from Achilles. It seemed absurd to her, but Bean was positive that Achilles wanted them to come to him.

"He's on his last legs," said Bean. "Everything's turned against him. He thought he'd positioned himself to take my place. Then he reached too far in shooting down that shuttle, just at the moment that the Crescent League pulled China out from under him. He can't go back there, can't even leave Ribeirao. So he's going to make whatever plays he has left to make. We're loose ends. He doesn't want to leave us dangling. So... he's going to call us in."

"Let's not go," Petra had said then, but Bean only laughed. "If I thought you meant that," he said, "I might consider it. But I know you don't. He has our babies. He knows we'll come."

Maybe they would and maybe they wouldn't. What good would it do those embryos if their parents walked into a trap and died?

And it would be a trap. Not a fair trade, not a bargain, my freedom for your babies. No, Achilles was not capable of that, not even to save his own life. Bean had trapped him once before, forced a confession out of him, which led to his being put in a mental inst.i.tution. He'd never go back there again. Like Napoleon, he'd escaped from one captivity, but from the next there'd be no more escaping. So he wouldn't go. That much both Bean and Petra agreed on. He would only summon them to kill them.

Yet still she searched, wondering how they'd even know when they found what they were looking for.

And while she searched, the war kept drawing her The campaign in Xinjiang had already moved eastward into the fringes of Han China. The Persians and Pakistanis were on the verge of encircling both halves of the Chinese army in western India.

The news about the Indonesians and Arabs operating inside China was a little more oblique. The Chinese were complaining loudly about Muslim paratroopers performing terrorist attacks inside China, and threatening that they would be treated as spies and war criminals when they were caught. The caliph responded immediately by declaring that these were regular troops, in uniform, and the only thing that bothered the Chinese was that the war they had been so willing to inflict on others had finally come home. "We will hold every level of the Chinese military and the Chinese government personally and individually responsible for each crime against our captured soldiers."

That was the language that only the presumed victors could afford to use, but the Chinese clearly took it to heart, immediately announcing that they had been completely misunderstood, and any soldiers found to be in uniform would be treated as prisoners.

To Petra, though, the most entertaining aspect of the Chinese posturing was that they kept referring to the Indonesian and Arab troops as paratroopers. They simply could not believe that troops landed on the coasts had got so far inland so quickly.

And one other little bit of information. One of the American newsnets had a commentary by a retired general who almost certainly was being given briefings about what American spy satellites were showing. What caught Petra's attention was when he said, "What I can't understand is why the Chinese troops that were moved out of India a few days ago, to meet the threat in Xinjiang, are not being used in Xinjiang or being sent back into India. Fully a quarter of the Chinese military is just sitting there not being used."

Petra showed this to Bean, who smiled. "Verlomi is very good. She's pinned them down for three days. How long before the Chinese army inside India simply runs out of ammunition?"

"You can't really start a betting pool with just the two of us," said Petra.

"Stop watching the war and get back to work."

"Why wait for Achilles to send this signal that I still don't think he's going to send?" asked Petra. "Why not just accept Peter's invitation and join him for the storming of the compound?

"Because if Achilles thinks he's luring us into a trap, he'll let us get inside without firing a shot. n.o.body dies."

"Except us."

"First, Petra, there's no us. You're a pregnant woman, and I don't care how brilliant you are at military affairs, I can't possibly deal with Achilles if the woman who's carrying my baby is standing there in jeopardy."

"So I'm supposed to sit outside watching, not knowing what's going on, whether you're alive or dead?"

"Do we have to have the argument about how I'm going to die in a few years anyway, and you're not, and if I'm dead but we rescue the embryos you can still have babies, but if you're dead, we can't even have the baby you've already got inside you?"

"No, we don't have to have that argument," said Petra angrily.

"And second, you won't be sitting outside watching, because you'll be here in Damascus, following the war news and reading the Q'uran."

"Or clawing my own eyes out in the agony of not knowing. You'd really leave me here?"

"Achilles himself may be trapped inside the Hegemony compound, but he has people to run his errands everywhere. I doubt that many of them were lost when the China connection dried up. If it dried up. I don't want you leaving here because it would be just like Achilles to kill you long before you came anywhere near the compound."

"So why don't you think he'll kill you?"

"Because he wants me to watch the babies die."

Petra couldn't help it. She burst into tears and bowed over her desk.

"I'm sorry," said Bean. "I didn't mean to make you-"

"Of course you didn't mean to make me cry," said Petra. "I didn't mean to cry, either Just ignore this."

"I can't ignore it," said Bean. "I can barely understand what you're saying, and you're about to drip snot on your desk."

"It's not snot!" Petra shouted at him, then touched her nose and discovered that it was. She sniffed and then laughed and ran into the bathroom and blew her nose and finished crying by herself.