Sword of Shiva - Страница 13

He’d spent the last several decades trying to avoid politics and violence, and he now had an unwitting ringside seat to an event that threatened to hold both of these corruptive influences in large measure.

Part of him was tempted to turn away from the window, and not allow himself to be drawn into the coming clash, even as an onlooker. But another part of him knew that the search for enlightenment is also the search for truth. Whatever happened in Barkhor Square this morning, the Chinese government would apply its colossal influence to controlling public opinion after the fact.

Like it or not, Reverend William H. McDonald was about to become the witness of history. If any truth at all was going to emerge from today’s events, it would be up to him to draw it forth.

Bill fumbled with the window latch, and then spent several seconds wrestling the balky window open a few inches. As the gap widened, the chanting voices of the crowd became louder and easier to make out.

He found his cell phone, and scrolled through the icons until he located the one that activated the phone’s video camera. Even through the window panes, the images on the screen of his phone were sharp and clear. He wasn’t sure if the phone’s tiny built-in microphone was sensitive enough to record the sounds drifting up from the street below. He didn’t know how to check, or how to adjust the audio levels (if such a thing were possible).

He decided to add a bit of personal narration, to provide some context for the video, in case the audio was too low or muffled to be intelligible.

“My name is William H. McDonald,” he said. “It’s approximately nine-thirty in the morning, on Saturday the twenty-third of November. I’m standing at the window of my second story room, in a guest house overlooking Barkhor Square, in the Tibetan city of Lhasa.”

He panned the camera phone right and left, taking in as much of the crowd as he could manage. “As you can see, a large group of people — I’m guessing that it’s somewhere between several hundred and a thousand — are gathered in the square. They are chanting, but I only know a handful of Tibetan words, so I’m not sure what exactly they’re saying. But I want to make it perfectly clear that this is a peaceful gathering. There have been absolutely no signs of violence or unruly behavior. This is not a mob. If this is a rally or a protest, it’s calm and orderly.”

He paused for several seconds, trying to decide whether or not to add anything else.

“I don’t know if my camera is recording their voices,” he said. “I hope it is, because this chant, or song… whatever it might be… is beautiful. I’ve never heard anything like it.”

His voice fell silent again, but he continued to move his little camera around to cover the crowd from every angle he could get from his limited vantage. He thought about going down into the square, to capture some of this from street level, but he decided against it. He probably had a better view of the crowd from up here, and if the police showed up—when they showed up — they would take away his phone the instant they recognized it for what it was. If he stayed up here, out of the way, he thought he had a fairly good chance of getting his phone and the video recording out of the country intact.

The reaction forces were not long in coming, and McDonald was careful to record their arrival.

“I see three trucks converging on the square,” he said. “Each truck contains thirty — maybe fifty — armed men, dressed in what appears to be riot gear. I can’t tell if these are soldiers, or some kind of police tactical squads, but they are definitely loaded for bear.”

“They’re climbing out of the trucks now, deploying in three positions. Doesn’t look like they’re trying to form a perimeter, or surround the crowd.”

McDonald’s narration halted again. He listened for several seconds to the unbroken chanting of the crowd. The people in the square had seen the armed squads arrive and deploy, but there was no move to fight or escape.

The crowd seemed to huddle more tightly together, as if drawing courage and determination from one another. The pitch of the chanting seemed to waver, but it didn’t quite falter. The singsong cadence continued, regaining its strength.

McDonald was about to comment on this, when he heard the thumps of the first gas grenades. He saw several smoking canisters arc into the crowd, and watched the protesters recoil from the billowing clouds of white vapor.

Teargas. He had encountered it during chemical warfare defense training in Army boot camp, and he had seen it used several times in Nam. He recognized the retching, face-clutching motions as every person who caught even a whiff of the stuff tried to stagger blindly away from the source of their sudden pain. The orderly crowd disintegrated into a chaos of lurching, frightened individuals.

“They’re using gas,” McDonald said. “I’m guessing that it’s teargas. Whatever it is, it’s certainly doing the trick. I think…”

But he never recorded his next thoughts, whatever they were, because his attention was shattered by the sound of gunfire, followed instantly by screams of terror and pain.

He felt a flash of nausea as adrenaline surged into his veins, broadcasting and amplifying the ancient chemical reflex to flee from danger. He could feel his palms begin to sweat, and a strange ringing in his ears that had nothing to do with the after-echo of gunshots.

He looked around quickly, trying to identify the source of the shots. He spotted several members of the riot control squad with their rifles unslung. He jerked his cell phone camera around in time to catch at least a dozen of the uniformed men firing directly into the milling throng of civilians. Sharp staccato muzzle reports, in three-round bursts — assault rifles configured for combat shooting.

All thoughts of narration were gone from Bill McDonald’s brain. He saw some of the protestors — a lot of them — jerk and stagger under the impacts of bullets. Blood flew; people fell to the ground, all to the accompaniment of rapid gunshots and screaming voices. This wasn’t riot control. It was a massacre. But why was it happening?

Not all of the soldiers or policemen were firing. In fact, most of them weren’t. Did that mean that they’d been ordered to fire, but many of them had disobeyed the command? Or maybe they hadn’t been ordered to fire, and some of them had taken the decision into their own hands.

That didn’t make sense. Or did it?

McDonald remembered something in the news about an attack on a trainload of Chinese soldiers a few days ago. Was this some kind of retaliation for that? Either official retribution, or spontaneous revenge, carried out by angry Chinese soldiers who suddenly found themselves with Tibetan protesters in their crosshairs?

The more Bill McDonald thought about it, the more likely this last idea seemed. This protest had been going on for less than an hour. That wasn’t a lot of time for senior Chinese decision-makers to consider and approve a plan to use deadly force against the crowd. Also, the assault, or intervention, or whatever had begun with teargas. That pretty much guaranteed that the crowd would break up quickly. If the plan had been to mow the protestors down, it would have been smarter to corral them together, to allow for greater concentration of firepower.

McDonald continued to sweep the square with his camera. It was nearly empty now, except for the people who were down, and not going anywhere. After the shooting had started, the riot force had made no attempt to stem the escape of fleeing protestors. That also seemed to support the idea that the shooting had been unplanned, carried out in the heat of anger and the flush of violence.

This was the thing he had turned away from in his own quest for enlightenment. The world’s problems could not be solved through the barrel of a gun, the bodies in the square below — maybe eighty or a hundred of them — were proof of that.

Even the soldiers looked stunned by what had happened. They milled around for nearly a minute before they began to shamble toward the downed protestors, to check for signs of life in the bloody unmoving bodies.

McDonald shut off his phone camera, and backed away from the window. In a very short time, maybe only a few seconds from now, the soldiers were going to shake off their disbelief and start looking around for any witnesses to the shooting. A foreigner with a digital video camera would not fare well if they happened to spot him.

He slipped the camera into his pocket, and left the hotel by an exit that opened on an alley opposite the square. Ten minutes later, he was six blocks away, poking through the wares of a shop that catered to tourists. He didn’t need or want any souvenirs, but it gave him plenty of separation from the scene of the incident, and he was determined to stay off the streets until the cleanup was completed and the riot force was long gone.

His hands were still shaking, so he shoved them into his pockets. The plastic form of the phone was smooth and warm against the back of his right hand. No one but him had any idea what was recorded on the phone’s memory card. He planned to be well and safely out of Chinese territory before he revealed the ugly little chunk of history stored on that flat wafer of digital circuitry.

His first instinct was to arrange the first possible flight out of this place, but that might not be a smart move. It was probably wiser to wait three days, and follow the itinerary he’d already established. If he changed his travel plans without warning, the Chinese authorities might wonder why this American tourist was suddenly in such a hurry to depart their sphere of influence. Better to be patient. Safer that way.