“Fucking hell!” Aussie roared. “Whaddya mean someone’s kidnapped her? Who?”
“We don’t know, Aussie,” David Brentwood said. “First thing we knew about it was she was missing the refugee check this morning.”
“Well what about the fucking gate? The guards, for Chrissake?”
‘They said the guys who picked her up were SAS — ID and all.”
“Right!” Aussie said, grabbing his Heckler & Koch 9mm submachine gun. “Let’s get a few fuckin’ answers.”
The SAS men with him — Salvini, Brentwood, and Choir Williams, among the “bravest of the brave” in Freeman’s book — didn’t dare tell him he’d just blown his bet about not swearing for a week. The Australian was in a murderous mood. His blue eyes actually seemed to darken as he strapped on extra magazine belts. “Let’s go!”
“Where?” Brentwood said.
“To find the fuckers! For Chrissake!” Aussie said.
David Brentwood put his arm on Aussie’s shoulder. “Cool it, digger — the MPs’ve found an abandoned Humvee down by the river. By now she’s in Chinese hands.”
The information hit him like a blow to the solar plexus, and he was shaking his head, trying to will it not to be true.
“No, mate,” he said to David Brentwood disbelievingly. “Must be some mistake.” Suddenly he looked up. This man who was renowned in the troop for not being afraid to face the truth — to give you a realistic SITREP, knowing how to separate hope from fact — was now ashen faced. “The airport,” he said. “Maybe Freeman had her moved—”
“No, Aussie. Listen up now! We’ve checked,” Brentwood said, adopting the Aussie’s idiom. “She’s gone, mate.”
Aussie seemed to murmur something, letting the Heckler & Koch fall to the bunk where it bounced, the blankets stretched tightly, as per regulation, as if it had dropped on a small trampoline.
“Freeman wants to see us,” Salvini put in.
Aussie looked up hopefully. “Right — what’s on?”
Salvini instantly regretted he’d mentioned Freeman, as Aussie in his state had leapt to the conclusion that Freeman had already drawn up some kind of rescue op, but he hadn’t. He had something far more pressing.
The problem had begun, or rather had taken shape, some seventeen hours ago when in Lhasa the PLA major had waited for the Dutchman, Hartog, to start out on his visit to the Potala Palace, whose grand, sweeping whitish gray edifice against the blue sky seemed impregnable and more majestic than even the white-topped mountain fastness beyond.
The PLA major, Mah, had asked to listen to the Public Security Bureau’s tapes of the foreigner, William Hartog, in room 206. The tape for room 206 was mainly silent, except for the sound of the toilet flushing and the tinkling, at times mournful, songs of Tibet, probably coming from the foreigner’s Walkman. He knew foreigners became glued to their Walkman sets and would carry them in the most inappropriate places. Mah, whose job, apart from the other duties he had, was to monitor the tapes for the Holiday Inn, went into room 1219, one of the two China Travel Service offices on the Holiday Inn’s ground floor.
The men who had been on the last watch were tired but tried not to show it, sitting up attentively with their earpieces looking like huge green earmuffs, afraid of Major Mah’s displeasure. He came there on his weekly rounds or “foreigner check,” as they called it.
“He has flushed the toilet six times,” Man charged, as if it were a personal affront.
The technicians looked at one other — yes, they certainly agreed it was six times.
“And that Tibetan music,” Mah said derisively. “Listening to it at the same time.”
“Ah,” the technician said. ‘The music I think comes from his room while he is doing his business on the toilet.”
Mah sometimes wondered where it was they’d got these troops from to police Tibet. They were country bumpkins, most of them — not at all like Cheng’s elite shock troops or the tougher “PLA Second Artillery Army,” those who guarded the ICBM sites.
“Why do you think,” Mah asked contemptuously, “that he flushes the toilet six times?”
“Perhaps there was an obstruction,” one of the technicians proffered confidently.
“Maybe,” the other technician said, “he was full of shit! Ha, ha!”
Mah turned such an iron face toward the hapless technician that he cringed. “Are you the people’s official clown?” Mah asked. Before the belittled man could think of any response, Mah kept on, tapping the man’s head as if talking to an idiot. “If there was an obstruction, rock brain, the toilet would most likely have overflowed after it had been flushed six times in a row.”
“He’s not on the toilet,” the first technician said suddenly, surprised by his own revisionist thought.
“Ah!” Mah said. “Now we are thinking. Maybe he’s doing something else?”
“He’s — he’s in the bedroom,” the oldest of the technicians said, visibly excited by his deduction.
“Doing what, comrade?” Mah pressed.
“He’s recording over the music tape. He’s talking very close to it…. The toilet is to cover his voice. He must have spoken very softly.”
Mah nodded, then picked up the phone, pressing the number for the front desk. “And of course he might have a thing about flushing toilets and the music could mean he likes Tibetan music.”
The front desk answered.
“Major Mah here. Last night a foreigner, Mr. Hartog, he gave you a tape to mail.”
“Yes, sir, and a fax.”
“Has the fax gone?”
“Yes, Major. Almost immediately. It was another of his messages about Tibetan remedies.”
“Has the cassette tape been posted?”
“No — it’s due to go in another few—”
“Send it to me immediately. And your copy of the fax.”
Scanning the copy of the fax — it was in telegraphic style, no doubt to save money — Mah saw that Hartog had instructed the recipients to classify his Tibetan remedies discovered so far under the following letters of the English alphabet: ISNLNCIEAABTAKMMEREM. It was signed “Willi.”
Man now turned his attention to the cassette tape. They all sat silently as Mah had the technician run the tape fast forward. There was a gabble of music — the same as picked up by the room mike if Mah wasn’t mistaken — but no voice. They tried the other side and played it fast forward. Fast music gibberish again — no sustained pauses — no European voice. Nothing. Maybe the tape was no more than noise cover with no message at all?
The silence in the room was more intense because of the terrible snarling and nipping and yapping of one of the packs of wild dogs who, because the Buddhist monks would not harm any living creature, strayed wild around Lhasa and the other Tibetan villages. Some of the dogs had been shot for sneaking into PLA camps looking for food. Some had rabies. Mah was trying to concentrate, and told one of the men to have the desk get someone out to disperse the mongrels. Had his mother tongue been English it is just possible that Mah might have disassembled the fax’s message right away. He looked at it again. ISNLNCIEAABTAKMMEREM and the last word, “Willi.”
What struck Mah as odd was that several of the English characters, or rather letters, were repeated, such as M and the two As. If a medicine — if anything — was to be classified, why mention the same letters (M and A) twice? And why Willi instead of William? Was he just using a nickname — or was the Dutchman being economical again by not signing his full name? But if he’d been economical he’d hardly use the same letters twice.
In Tibet it was 8:00 a.m., in Amsterdam one in the morning, but in the small shop on the Osterdok near the railway station out of which Hartog worked when in Amsterdam that fax had already been decoded by his MOSSAD assistant and cleared for Tel Aviv as “most secret” and for “immediate” transmission to UNCOMFARE — U.N. Commander Far East, General Douglas Freeman.
“Willi” had five letters, thus the message broke down into a five-line message, so that “ISNLN” became
I
S
N
L
N
and the message read
ICBM
SITE
NEAR
LAKE
NAM.
Lake Nam, at the foot of the Nyaiqen Mountains, was twenty-five miles long, the largest salt lake in Tibet.