AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“You’re burning up,” David said.
Hulan shook her head. “Of course. It’s about forty degrees centigrade and ninety-nine percent humidity.”
Outside, David thought. In the jet it was a comfortable seventy-two.
“If I could have a little water,” she continued, “I’m sure I’ll be fine. I’m probably just dehydrated.”
Henry got up and pulled a bottle of Evian out of the refrigerator. Hulan unscrewed the top and drank straight from the bottle. She looked over at David and said in a voice that made it clear she wanted no argument, “Really, I’m fine.”
What could he do but take her word for it? David glanced over at Henry, who only shrugged. His look seemed to say there wasn’t much you could do if a woman wasn’t going to be square with you.
“Mr. Knight,” Hulan said, “you’re going to a lot of trouble for Sun. Are you ready to tell us why?”
Henry stared pensively out the window, then, without looking at David or Hulan, he plunged in. “As you know, I was sent to China during World War II. I flew in over the Hump—the Himalayas. You always hoped you’d make it over, but you wore your parachute just in case. Then you’d get to Kunming in Yunnan Province. We had all kinds of names for that place—City of Rats, Black Market Town. First we stayed in these thatched huts. Rats lived up in the straw thatching, and when you woke up you’d see their beady little eyes staring down at you. There were so many rats that the army announced a rat-tail redemption campaign. In three months the locals turned in over a million tails, but that still didn’t put a dent in the number of rats. The army did an investigation and found over a hundred rat farms that had been started just to cash in on the campaign. That’s what Kunming was like.”
Anne’s fax still hadn’t come through, but David was anxious for Henry to get to the point. “How did Sun get over to Kunming? I thought he was from Shanxi Province.”
“I never said I met him in Kunming,” Henry responded. For a moment it seemed he wouldn’t continue. Then he sighed and said, “I told you before that I wanted to spend my life in China. What I didn’t say was that I’d had that desire long before I ever got here. As a kid, I wa
s fascinated with the place. I was particularly interested in old religious sites. I know it sounds crazy and maybe it was. You can imagine what my father thought! Things were different back then. I was only the third generation in my family to be in America and only the first to be born here. My father expected me to go into the family business and I did, but that didn’t stop me from studying on my own or finding a Mandarin tutor. When the war broke out, everything changed, especially after the army found out about my interests. It’s surprising what an armchair archeologist knows. I’d spent years studying the early Buddhist cave sculptures of Yungang, Luoyang, and Gansu. But I’d also researched the lesser-known cave sculptures of Tianlong Shan, which lay in the mountains to the south of Taiyuan. I wasn’t the only person interested in those caves. A few years before, the Japanese had sent a team of art historians to Tianlong. They documented everything and published several books which were very popular in Japan.”
“So in 1937, when the Japanese invaded, they knew exactly what to look for,” Hulan concluded.
“The Japanese chopped off the heads of the Buddhas and carved out the relief sculptures from the walls. They were systematic and thorough. But as the war progressed, those caves offered something besides art.”
“Protection,” David said.
“That’s right. They fortified themselves up there, and it seemed there was no way to rout them out. Even today the caves aren’t that easy to reach, but back then the only way up was by foot across the mountains. It wasn’t that the altitude was so bad—the ‘mountains’ are really just large hills on an already high plateau—but that the terrain was rocky, steep, and unstable. The Japanese looked to be up there for good. The Joint Intelligence Collection Agency thought I was the perfect person to go and take a look-see.”
Japanese-Occupied China had covered a huge area. The Japanese were able to control strategic garrisons, but vast areas inhabited only by peasants and missionaries were left alone. It was through these areas that intelligence operatives traveled. “I flew into Xian, where we had other intelligence people,” Henry continued. “Bishop Thomas Meeghan had an orphanage there for Chinese boys, who were trained to be totally reliable. A couple of those kids took me east. We rode on—I don’t know what you call it—one of those things you pump up and down on a railroad track? We traveled at night, stopping for food and shelter at American, French, or Norwegian missions.”
“How did you know where to go?”
“It was a network,” Henry said. “The missionaries and the peasants didn’t want the Japanese there. They were sympathetic to what we were doing. If a B-29 ran out of fuel flying back from a bombing raid on Japanese-Occupied China and the crew had to bail out, all they had to do was show the Allied patch they wore inside their jackets and they were passed west through the network. We wore those same patches. They were like a passport. Anyway, we kept to the main railway line which divides the country between north and south and eventually runs through Taiyuan.”
“Which is where you finally met Sun Gan,” David said.
“Everything we told you before was true,” Henry said. “Sun was just a scrawny kid when I first met him. At first I thought he was about eight years old, but he was thirteen. Half of his life had been during wartime. He hadn’t had much food or nourishment other than what the local mission gave him. But the kid was smart. Street smart, of course. You had to be a good scavenger in those days to survive. But it was more than that. He seemed to understand what we wanted, and then he got it for us.”
“So what did he do? Save your life?”
Henry smiled patiently. He was going to tell his story in his own way.
“Taiyuan—the whole province actually—has a bloody history because of its strategic position as the gateway to the fertile plains to the south. The Japanese understood this, which was why they were there. At that time we didn’t know about the atom bomb. We thought, despite Chiang’s desires, that we were going to have to fight the Japanese back inch by bloody inch. If we were ever going to take back China, Taiyuan would be—as it has always been—vitally important. I was some dopey know-nothing kid with a secret passion that suddenly had value. We had air reconnaissance, but the brass wanted me to sneak up the mountain and see just how fortified the Japanese were. Sun Gan tagged along with us—part scout, part mascot, part translator. But because he was from Shanxi Province, he understood the land in a way none of the rest of us did—not even the other Chinese.”
They’d gotten halfway up the hill when they were spotted. “The Japanese were above us in the caves and below us too,” Henry recalled. “It was like target practice for them. Any of us moved and bam!” Henry smacked his hand, the sound startling in the small confines of the Gulfstream. “One of those mission kids got his arm shot off. The other kid got a bullet in the gut. His intestines were hanging out, and he was trying to stuff them back in.”
Henry shook his head as the memories came back.
“We were all going to die up there. Sun Gan stepped forward—well, it was hardly that. He crawled along the rock face, trying like the rest of us not to get his head blown off. When he disappeared I thought, that’s it. He’s run off and I’m dead. By the time Sun got back, the two mission kids were dead. I hadn’t been able to do much for them. One kid bled to death; the other blew his brains out. He knew what would have happened if he’d been captured. So Sun, this little kid, comes crawling back, takes in the two dead guys, sizes me up, and tells me what we’re going to do. ‘You’re here for a job,’ he said. ‘So am I.’ And he slithers off into the darkness, leaving me alone.”
Henry snorted. “I’m thinking, not on your fucking life am I following you! But here’s the thing. I couldn’t go up and I couldn’t go down, because the enemy was in both places. And staying there wasn’t much of an alternative either. The Japanese would have found me eventually. I was looking at a quick execution if I was lucky, or a prisoner of war camp if I wasn’t. So I started crawling along behind Sun. This meant creeping along those damn cliffs at the same elevation, circumnavigating that fucking mountain. The whole exercise was dangerous, suicidal. But you know, you can sit still and die, or you can move forward and die.”
Henry leaned over, resting his forearms on his knees, looking weary. “I’m eighteen fucking years old. I’m thinking, if I’m going to die, I’m going to do it on my own terms. And maybe, just maybe, I’ll see those caves in the process.” His mouth spread in a toothy grin. “Okay, I was young, dumb, and stupid. That’s why they send boys to war. They don’t know any better.”
After a moment he continued. “Finally we come up over the back of the mountain. There was a moment when I think each of us thought, I could just crawl down this mountain, hole up somewhere, and wait it out. The impulse to live is strong.”
David and Hulan knew what Henry meant. They’d been there themselves.
