Sword of Shiva - Страница 4

Silva started to follow him toward the exit.

Bowie slowed his pace a fraction to allow her to walk alongside. “Your friends call you Kate?”

Commander Silva smiled. “Only my father can get away with that. Everyone else calls me Kat.”

“With a K?”

“That’s right. With a K.” She smiled again. “It’s a long story.”

Bowie opened the watertight door and motioned for her to step through. When they were on the other side, he dogged the door behind them and they resumed walking.

“How about you?” Silva asked. “Do your friends call you Sam?”

The captain shook his head. “Nope. They call me Jim.”

Silva halted in mid-stride. “They call you Jim Bowie? Really?”

Captain Bowie grinned. “Really.” He started walking toward the wardroom again. “That’s a long story too.”

CHAPTER 2

BARKHOR SQUARE

LHASA, TIBET

WEDNESDAY; 19 NOVEMBER

3:34 PM

TIME ZONE +8 ‘HOTEL’

The helicopter came in low and fast, clearing the ornate golden rooftops of the Jokhang temple by only four or five meters. Flying so close to the 1,300 year old building was a blatant violation of a dozen laws and security ordinances. Any other aircraft that dared such a maneuver would be forced to land, or shot down by ground troops or air forces. Today, the laws and regulations did not apply. Not to this helicopter.

It was an ordinary looking HC-12 °Colibri, the plump dragonfly fuselage noticeably European in design, the paint scheme and markings just as clearly Chinese. But the local police and military commanders knew who was riding in the passenger seat, and no one would be foolish enough to interfere.

The pilot had been ordered to land as quickly as possible, by the absolute shortest flight path. He was following those orders to the letter. He steepened the angle of his approach, practically skimming the top of the tall stone stele at the front gate of the temple wall.

The stele was a rounded obelisk, nearly as ancient as the Jokhang temple itself. The stone had been erected in 822 AD by King Relpachen, to commemorate the Sino-Tibetan peace treaty, which had guaranteed that China and Tibet would forever respect one another’s borders. Eroded by centuries of wind, rain, and snow, the words carved in the porous gray stone were still legible. China’s public proclamation of Tibet’s national sovereignty remained easily visible, for all the world to read. The irony was apparently lost on the occupying Chinese forces. It was not so easily overlooked by the Tibetan locals.

A landing zone had been cleared in the center of Barkhor Square. The usual throng of visitors, pilgrims, and shopkeepers had been pushed back to the edges of the square. The onlookers were now held at a distance by a perimeter of wooden barricades, patrolled by several hundred hard-eyed Chinese soldiers.

Into this temporary enclave, the helicopter dropped the last few meters to the ground, the pilot battling an unexpected crosswind at the last second, before bringing his machine to a brisk landing on the flagstones.

The helicopter’s turbine had barely begun to slow when a dark green military vehicle pulled alongside and a young Army major leapt out, ducked under the spinning rotors, and trotted to the passenger door of the aircraft.

The vehicle was a Dongfeng EQ2050, a near carbon-copy of the American-built Humvee. Officially, it was an all-Chinese design, produced completely from parts manufactured in China. In reality, about half of the vehicle’s parts were imported from the American company AM General, in South Bend, Indiana — the manufacturer of the original Humvee. This detail was carefully ignored by anyone who did not want to arouse the ire of the Communist Party.

The door of the helicopter swung open, and the major snapped to attention.

The man who stepped out into the downwash of the rotors did not seem to be particularly formidable. He was in his mid sixties, lean, and fit, with crisp black hair and a creaseless face that seemed to subtract several years from his appearance. His dark suit and sharp white shirt were neatly tailored, but not of excessively fine quality. The one stroke of extravagance in his appearance was a red necktie of lush raw silk. He looked like a moderately-successful Chinese businessman in a fairly ordinary business suit.

The mechanical wind from the helicopter rotors whipped at his hair. He paid no attention, crossing the distance to the waiting military vehicle in several quick strides. He did not bow his head as he passed beneath the whirling blades of the helicopter rotors. He walked with his head held erect. Perhaps he carried some internal confidence that no machine of the Chinese military would dare to threaten the head that rode upon his shoulders. Or, perhaps his thoughts were so distant that he was unaware of the danger.

His name was Lu Shi, and he was the First Vice Premier of the People’s Republic of China. Technically that made him the second most powerful man in the Chinese government, junior only to the Premier himself, Xiao Qishan. In reality, Lu’s role as Xiao’s subordinate was no more than a polite fiction.

Premier Xiao was not a young man, and his health had been declining steadily since his most recent heart attack. The old dragon had earned his position, and the honors that went along with it. Lu Shi was quite content to let Xiao wear the formal title for whatever weeks or months he had remaining to him, but no one in the senior ranks of the Communist Party had any serious doubts about who was running the country.

Even if there had been such doubts, Lu was Chairman of the Central Military Commission. That made him the effective commander-in-chief of the entire Chinese military. When the appearances were stripped away, Lu Shi was secondary to no one.

A half-pace behind Vice Premier Lu came a pair of solidly-built men in identical dark blue suits. Their faces were humorless, and their eyes scanned the crowd and the assembled military personnel with the same calculated degree of suspicion. Both men were Bao Biao, a Mandarin term most often translated as bodyguard, but more properly rendered as protector, or defender.

Lu Shi disappeared into the open rear door of the vehicle, followed immediately by his two guards, and then the military officer.

The crowd watched from the edges of the perimeter, many of them curious about the identity of the oddly imperious businessman who had dropped out of the sky into their midst. Who was this stranger, and how did he command such sway with the military and the police?

For most of the onlookers, those questions would never be answered. The soldiers shifted several of the wooden barricades, and guarded the procession of the car until it had left the square and disappeared into the streets of Lhasa.

The helicopter’s turbine began to pick up speed again. In two or three minutes, the aircraft was lifting away into the sky.

When it was gone, the soldiers began packing up the wooden barricades. In a few minutes more, the soldiers were gone, and people began flooding back into the square. Beyond the aroused curiosity of the crowd, there was no sign at all that anything out of the ordinary had occurred.

* * *

Lu Shi stared vacantly out the side window as the streets of Lhasa scrolled past. Colors and shapes slid into his field of vision and then slid out again, without making any impression on his conscious mind. His eyes were unfocused, and so were his thoughts.

For a man whose intellect was practically the stuff of legend, such an utter lack of acuity was — quite literally — unheard of. For the first time in his life, Lu Shi could not make himself think. Moreover, he didn’t really want to think.

One of the heavy-grade military tires hit a pothole. The vehicle’s stiff suspension did little to cushion the impact, transmitting the shock directly into the passenger compartment, and sending a jolt up the spine of every passenger. The ride was not smooth; the seats were not at all like the well-padded luxury of the limousines that Lu Shi traditionally rode in. He didn’t notice.

His fingers absently fidgeted with his red silk necktie. It had been a gift many years before, from Lu Jianguo. Even the mental recognition of his son’s name brought a tremor to his hands.

Unwanted images came surging into his brain. Photographs of the burned and twisted wreckage of the train… Video footage of the wreck site… Smoke still rising from the smoldering remains of the passenger cars. Soldiers and emergency crews carrying stretchers loaded with the bodies of the wounded and the dead.

Lu Shi clenched his eyes shut, and tried to block out the visions of blood and mangled flesh.

None of the photographs or accident footage he had seen contained the face of Lu Jianguo. For that small blessing, he could be grateful. He had not been forced to look upon images of his son’s broken body. But Lu Jianguo had been there, among the dead and the dying, unrecognized by the first rescue teams to arrive. Known only to the medical personnel and the soldiers as another injured passenger: another victim of the carnage.

Somewhere in Lu Shi’s mind — below the threshold of conscious awareness — fear, and anger, and grief were circling like sharks. But for now, his emotions were as paralyzed as his higher thinking processes.

His fingers went through the motions of straightening his necktie, tightening the knot, smoothing the silk, loosening it a fraction, and then beginning the sequence again.