The Chinese Agenda (16 page)

'He says,' Dmietriev translated when Rodek had answered, 'that these were definitely soldiers and there were no animals with them. They saw the caravan march off to the east. They did not come up the pass.'

'Moonrise is at 2330 tonight,' Gillon said thoughtfully, ignoring the exchange between Dmietriev and Stowe. 'That means they will pick up our tracks just below the summit. In this pea soup darkness, they probably won't spot them any sooner. But they know damned well that if we are in the area, we've got to cross the pass.' Gillon stood up and paced around a moment. The others watched in silence until he stopped.

'Look,' he said, emblazoning his words with repeated stabs of his gloved hand at the air. '

They must just be guessing that we are in here so far. It looks like they searched the wreckage sooner than we expected. Now they know we weren't killed when the plane crashed. That plateau is the only sensible place to land if you come in by parachute, which we had to do since we weren't in the wreckage.'

'But why up the pass . . . ?' Stowe demanded. 'The wind must have cleared off our tracks down there . .

'Yeah, it would have. But once ,you stand on that plateau, the only way off, unless you are a mountain goat, is up and over the pass. Those ridges are impossible at this time of the year. So they come up the pass, guessing that as soon as it gets light, they'll spot our trail. They must be figuring to camp for the night at..' or just below the summit.'

'Okay, hot shot, so you got them psyched out. Where do we go from here? Sometimes ...'

'Shut up, Stowe,' Jones commanded absently. 'What have you got in mind, Bob?'

Gillon squatted down and took Stowe's flashlight and shone it down onto the snow. With his gloved hand, he drew a picture of the pass, approximating the shoe horn shape as seen from above. To the left, he sketched

the northward-trending ridge and on the right, the southern ridge.

'All right, it's this. When we started down this morning, I noticed a ledge of snow along the face of the left ridge. It's been undercut by the wind and thaw and it's about ready to come down.'

'How do you know that?' Stowe asked, interested in spite of himself.

`Between college and the Army, I spent two winters in the ski patrol at Mammoth. We used to go out in the mornings before the skiers hit the slopes and clear out dangerous snow packs. After two winters, I'm pretty sure I know when a snow ledge is ready to come down.'

Àh,' Dmietriev breathed. 'I see what you are getting at. You mean to blow down that ledge and block the pass.'

'Almost right,' Gillon corrected. 'I'm suggesting that we blow the ledge down right on top of that bunch of ski troops. There's more than enough snow there to do the job effectively. It must be two hundred feet high if it's an inch, and by the time it gets through dragging all the snow that's already on the pass along with it, not only will it block the pass until the spring thaw, but it will take those ski troops out as well.'

Stowe threw back his head and laughed. 'What a ridiculous pipe dream. Do you seriously think you can get those troops out of the way with an avalanche? Nonsense.'

'I do,' Gillon replied softly. 'There is no chance that - anyone caught in that pass with all that snow coming down on them will get away. And if they do, so what? The pass will be closed completely.'

`Yeah,' Stowe shot back. 'But if they do, we're the ones who've had it. If you want to take them out, then we set up an ambush at the top .. . and hit hard. That way we'll make damned certain! '

'And let the Chinese know for sure we are in here,' Jones put in quietly. 'Right now, they are guessing where we are . . . at best. If we ambush and shoot them up, we might as well hang out a sign.'

'I think you are right,' Dmietriev said hesitantly. 'If

it looks like an accident . . . well, then they might he inclined to treat it as such ...'

Òh hell,' Stowe snorted, but Jones interrupted him.

Ì say that Bob is right. Bloodthirsty as it might seem, if we leave those troops alone, they are bound to catch us sooner or later. If we start shooting, some of them may get away and, in any event, tomorrow when the spotter planes are out, if they see bodies all over the slope, the whole country and half the world will know in a matter of hours that we hit them. If they see an avalanche, chances are they won't find any bodies until spring.' Jones studied each one of them for a moment before he said, 'All right, then we do it Bob's way. Sorry, Chuck, but the avalanche makes more sense to me.'

Stowe started to protest again hut, realizing that Jones's mind was made up, subsided into silence without a word.

Àll right, then.' Gillon took a deep breath. 'It won't take more than two or three small charges to loosen that ledge and drop it straight down the pass. Andre, what explosives do we have?' Dmietriev got to his feet, went to his tent and returned with several waxpaper-wrapped cubes of plastic material and handed them to Gillon.

`They are frozen, but that does not matter.'

Gillon took the cubes and laid them on the sleeping bag.

`Gelignite?' he asked

Dmietriev nodded. 'A very special type.'

Gillon stared at the paper-wrapped cubes. 'Hell, the temperature must he near zero. This stuff is too unstable to carry around.'

Dmietriev grinned and shook his head. 'We do not have to worry about patents, so we changed the formula by reducing the amount of collodion cotton from four to two and a half per cent. This makes the nitroglycerin much more stable and preyents exudation.'

Gillon nodded doubtfully. 'I'll take your word for it. We'll use three to be certain and connect them with a fuse. What kind of igniters do you have?'

Andre reached into his parka and pulled out a handful of metal tubes, pointed at one end, with a terminal at the other to attach the leads.

`They are very sensitive and can be ignited electrically by screwing the lead into the bulb socket of a flashlight.' 'Clever.'

'All right then, take what you have to and get going,' Jones ordered. 'You should be able to reach the pass well ahead of the Chinese. How about climbing the ridge?'

Gillon thought for a moment, going over the shape of the north-western ridge in his mind.

'There is a sharp hogback just above the pass,' he answered slowly. 'I think we can get up that way. If not, we can go straight up under the snow ledge. It's riskier that way, but it can be done.'

He paused, loath to ask what he had to next, but there was no help for it. Ì'm going to need help. Rodek is exhausted and Leycock will be too tired to climb. I'll send him down as soon as we get up there. Stowe, you and Dmietriev will have to come with me.'

Dmietriev nodded but Stowe started to shake his head, then changing his mind, shrugged and got up, walked over to his pack, pulled the carbine out of its case and slung it across his shoulders without a word.

Gillon nodded approvingly. 'That's a good idea, just in case there is a surprise waiting for us. The moon should be up in a few hours, so we'll take the skis as well and on the way back, we can ski to the tree line.'

He turned to Jones. 'If you hear the avalanche go, get Rodek up and be ready to go.'

Jones nodded. 'All right. If you get back before dawn we should still be able to reach the rendezvous point by tomorrow night.'

Gillon walked over to his pack, picked up his carbine and strapped his ski case on. With the snowshoes in one hand, he walked back over to where Jones stood beside Stowe's tent.

'Look,' he said, keeping his yoke pitched low so that the others could not hear. 'There's no need to keep a guard now. You get back into your tent and sleep until Leycock gets back.'

Jones shook his head and Gillon gave him a disgusted look. Àll right, Doctor,' he relented. 'Just be careful 'up there. And watch out for our independent friend. Don't take any nonsense from him. There just isn't room for two super chiefs on this crew.'

'I don't intend to. He and I have had one set-to and if it comes to that, we'll have another. Sooner or later, he'll learn.'

Jones clapped him on the shoulder and watched as they faded into the trees.

Night had clamped down heavily on the forest by the -time the three men moved out for the pass, each using his flashlight carefully to avoid stray flashes of light that might betray them to the aircraft they could hear droning above. The low-branched spruce trees with their short, stiff needles lashed at unwary faces in the misleading light from the torches, and Within minutes all three of them had pulled ski goggles and wind masks on for protection.

It took them nearly three hours of heavy going in the darkness to break out of the trees. There, Gillon found that the sky had misted over, dimming the stars that ordinarily would have been bright enough to allow them to travel quickly over the open snow. But a high ice layer had moved in to suffuse and dim the starlight enough to mask uneven spots and

-depressions in the snow, forcing them to a cautious pace. Here in the open they did not dare risk the use of flashlights.

By 2200 hours, they were in sight of the top of the pass, which appeared as nothing more than a great blot in the blurred sheet of snow. Gillon stopped several hundred feet 'short of the summit and whistled softly. Receiving no reply, he whistled again. They glanced at one another. Dmietriev nodded and they separated to provide a more widely spaced target as they moved closer to the top of the pass. On the south side, the side from which they were approaching, the last several hundred yards were up a fairly steep incline and in the dim starlight it reared above them like a pale cliff. Gillon whistled again, his imagination pinpointing the spots on his body where Chinese carbines were zeroing in.

This time Leycock heard them and whistled back. As they trudged the last few hundred feet to the summit, muscles screaming with the agony that Gillon had anticipated that morning, he stepped from the concealment of a snow bank and stood waiting for them. As they came level with him, Stowe curled his gloved hand around his flashlight and shone the yellowish beam into Leycock's face. Even in the misleading light, Gillon could clearly see that he was exhausted. His face was gray and pinched with the cold and he shivered uncontrollably. Together, they completed the last few paces to the top. Gillon and Stowe went forward a few more feet to examine the sweep of snow below for any sign of movement while Dmietriev questioned Leycock.

There was nothing moving below as far as they could tell in the darkness, and they listened carefully as Ley-cock described his trek down the pass that morning and the long back trail that he had made before he stumbled onto the Chinese ski troops.

`Where was that?' Dmietriev demanded.

Leycock slung his carbine. 'About six miles below the pass. Rodek and I saw an aircraft, a two-engined transport, circling way off to the north. We guessed that it was about over the southern end of the plateau. It dipped down below the ridge and then we didn't see it again until it flew over that ridge just east of that peak over there.' He pointed into the gloom and added, `You can't see it now. Anyway, it looked like it was taking off, but we couldn't be sure. So we flipped a coin to see who went down to take a look. I lost.' He chuckled.

`So then, I went straight down the pass after the aircraft disappeared and then to the left

-into the trees along the west end of the glacier. It was a longer route, but I didn't want to stay in the open ... Anyway, about two hours after I started, I cleared a small ridge and spotted a line of troops heading in the direction of the

lamasery. I wasn't sure about that; even with the glasses they were too far away. Anyway, I figured that they wouldn't find anything on either the plateau or at the lamasery and would make for the pass sooner or later. So I cut across that small valley at the north end of the glacier below the plateau and that's where I almost ran into them. There were about fifteen of them and I got out of there in one hell of a hurry.'

Gillon dropped the glasses, letting them dangle on his chest. Rubbing his eyes against the bitter cold, he asked, 'What was the wind like up here today?'

'The wind?' Leycock repeated stupidly. He massaged his face and took a deep breath. 'Oh

. . . yeah, the wind. A good steady blow until about 1500. Then it died away to nothing. But I doubt if there are any tracks left to find, if that's what you're thinking. Anyway, I stayed well west of the trail that we took last night. Unless they are going to cross clear over, they won't find tracks, even if the wind left any to find.'

'How many did you say?' Stowe asked.

'I'd guess about fifteen altogether. I didn't stop to count them because they were strung out and I was worried that they might have some point men out that I hadn't spotted.'

Gillon felt rather than saw Stowe nod in the darkness. 'Then we had better get busy on your damned avalanche,' he murmured, pulling back his parka cuff to peer at his watch. '

It's going to be risky as hell since we don't know how many are out there.'

'Have you seen anything since-you got back up here?' Gillon asked, ignoring Stowe. Leycock nodded. 'Just once at sunset. About two miles below the base of the pass. I saw them just after I reached the top and Rodek went down. It looked like they had stopped to eat, because I thought I saw a flashlight.'

Gillon stared hard through the glasses once more but the darkness was so intense that they could have been a hundred yards from him and he wouldn't have seen them. Moonrise was still an hour away and if Leycock was right, he estimated that it would be a close race between the moon and the Chinese troops. At best, they would have an hour of light in which to work. At worst, they would arrive together. Behind him he heard Leycock ask, 'What avalanche?'

Stowe described what they had come to do and then in a brusque voice ordered, 'You had better get down below to the camp and get what sleep you can.'

Gillon opened his mouth to protest, then thought better of it. There was just the faintest hint in Stowe's voice that he was expecting Gillon to disagree.