The Einstein Papers (10 page)

The night was clear and cool. The dim yellow beam from the cycle’s headlight shared illumination duties with the full harvest moon. Taft glanced down at the odometer. Three hundred miles to go. At the current rate of speed they would cross the border around four in the morning. He leaned to one side to bank the motorcycle around a curve.

Two hours later, and 222 miles north-northeast of Alma-Ata, Kazakhstan, a chill wind carrying the cold of a thousand northern nights swept through the open rear cargo door of a U.S. Air Force C-130 Hercules sitting on a dirt field one mile from the Chinese border. A pool of light from inside the plane puddled on the ground outside. Blowing across the steaming cup of coffee, the pilot of the C-130, Dewey Brable, took a sip of the hot liquid, then set it on the rear ramp and lit a Marlboro cigarette.

“Feels strange to be inside the Soviet Union,” Brable said to Taft’s boss, Retired General Earl Benson, who stood smoking a cigar alongside the ramp.

Benson chose not to answer. Instead he shouted into the plane to the radio operator, “What’s their location now?”

Checking his direction-finding set mounted alongside the radar, the air force lieutenant measured the distance with calipers and shouted back, “Under two hundred miles, sir.”

“Good,” Benson said.

“How did we receive permission to land here?” Brable asked Benson.

“The Commonwealth of Independent States is our ally now,” Benson said.

“Any chance of you telling me what agency you work for?”

“No chance in hell,” Benson said, smiling. “Now, where did you get that coffee?”

Jumping from the helicopter while its main rotor was still turning, Jimn raced into the security building in Lanzhou. Walking quickly down the hall toward the interrogation room, his polished black boots tapped out a muted staccato. He stopped at the door to the room containing Deng Biao. Motioning to the guard to move, Jimn opened the door. It took him only a second to make the identification. He stared at Biao, then the interrogator, before speaking in a cold voice. “This had better not be the person you think is Choi.”

Twitching with fear, the interrogator said in a rush, “I was not the one to make the identification. I’m only handling the questioning.”

“And what did you find out?” Jimn asked.

“He claims to be an archaeologist.”

“He may be-because he sure as hell isn’t Choi, you stupid ass,” Jimn screamed.

He walked to a nearby cell and looked at Leeds. “Where were you night before last?”

“I was having dinner with the mayor of the town of Xining. You can call him and verify this,” Leeds finished.

“Where did you purchase your boots?”

“I bought them in Hong Kong. The British army swears by them.”

Storming from the room Jimn ran to a telephone to check with the mayor of Xining. When Leeds’s story checked out, Jimn telephoned the prime minister.

Twelve minutes later two Chinese fighter jets blasted from the runway at the Lop Nur Nuclear Weapons Testing Center and streaked toward Urumqi. At the same instant, refueled and parked in front of the Advanced Weapons Facility, Yibo was unbuckling himself from the passenger seat of the helicopter when the call came through from Jimn.

“We’ve been had,” Jimn said. “Fly west to Urumqi like we’d planned.”

The pilot and Yibo immediately lifted off from the base in Qinghai and flew west.

In the confusion that had been generated, the Chinese troops dispatched to search the train in Urumqi were ordered to stand down and return to their barracks. The cargo train Taft and Choi had ridden was already in Urumqi and being unloaded. To search the train for Choi would be pointless-it was, by now, almost empty.

“A transport plane is arriving,” Jimn informed the ground commander. “Load the troops aboard.”

Flown west to a landing strip near Yining, they were divided into search teams to patrol the border with Kazakhstan.

The Chinese prime minister, angered he had been fooled, ordered two converted cargo planes that were equipped with sophisticated sensors detecting both heat and movement, to fly from their base near Chengdu. With in-air refueling, they could be over the China-Kazakhstan border in two hours. The instruments on board were capable of detecting and cataloguing the presence of life down to the size of a turtle. If the troops somehow missed Choi, the sensors wouldn’t.

The net around Taft and Choi was finally being pulled tight.

“I’m picking up a couple of fast movers in the area,” the air force radar operator aboard the C-130 said as he adjusted the radar definition. “Twin MIG-29 knock-offs. In addition I have two Chinese cargo planes on a course for the border. They’re two hundred miles out,” the radar operator said as the blips on his screen became more defined, “and it looks like a lone helicopter as well.”

“They’ve seen through the diversion in Lanzhou. They’re on to them,” Benson noted.

“General, I’m receiving a secure transmission,” the radio operator shouted from the rear of the plane. Benson walked forward and received the slip of folded paper.

Overheads reveal twin Chinese prop planes inbound from Chengdu, ETA two hours maximum. Intelligence suggests they are bloodhounds.

Our satellites have recorded the bloodhounds leaving their base, Benson thought to himself. God help Taft now. Feeding the strip of paper into a shredder, he stood quietly for a moment.

One hour and thirty minutes later, the jet carrying Jimn from Lanzhou touched down at the deserted airport in Yining. A single jeep sat on the runway, awaiting his arrival. Jimn bolted down the ramp from the jet and climbed into the passenger seat.

“What is the status of the search?” he said to the driver without preamble.

“The troops are in position at the border as you ordered. The fighter jets ordered to watch overhead have reported nothing as yet. Sensor-equipped planes are due within thirty minutes,” the driver, a captain in the Chinese army, said as he put the jeep in gear and drove away from the jet.

“Take me to the border,” Jimn said.

“Right away, sir,” the captain said as he shifted through the gears.

Twenty miles from the Chinese border with Kazakhstan, Taft switched off the motorcycle’s headlight at the sound of a helicopter passing overhead. Pulling to the side of the road, he waited until the sound of the rotor blades faded in the distance. He was just about to pull back onto the road when a pair of jets roared close overhead.

“When it rains it pours,” Taft muttered as the jets flew past.

Checking his map by the light of the moon, he measured the distance to the dry creek bed where he would turn off the road. Less than two miles. Slamming the motorcycle in gear he twisted the throttle and pulled back onto the road.

“In light of what has happened, there’s no way I would feel comfortable continuing the dig,” Leeds said to Biao outside the police station where the men had just been released.

“I understand how you feel,” Biao said quietly.

“I have radioed the Xining site. They will ship my luggage. I’m leaving immediately for Hong Kong, where I’ll catch a flight home,” Leeds said quickly as he stood by the cab that would take him to the airport.

“I apologize for the trouble.” Biao said. “I only hope your university will not completely pull out of this project.

Leeds shrugged-he could care less.

Jimn shouted orders into his handheld radio as the jeep bumped along the border. Brush and trees grew thickly on the Russian side, obscuring the view. Chain-link fencing, erected by China in years past, ran from the border crossing outside Yining one mile to the north and south. With the current tension between China and the former Soviet Union, the checkpoint crossing was closed up. The road was covered with concrete barricades. On the Chinese side of the border the land was open. The brush and trees were burned off every odd-numbered year to stem the rising tide of smuggling.

“Chang, do you read me?” Jimn said into the radio.

After a pause of almost a minute, Yibo answered. “This is Yibo.”

“Watch the fence line closely from the air. I will start driving south.”

“Very good, sir,” Yibo said. He ordered his pilot to began sweeping back and forth high above the fence.

On orders from their commanding officer, the Chinese troops that had been assembled formed a human wall and began to walk from the fence line east through the burned-out wasteland. They carefully searched the ground for tracks. High overhead, the jets could see little as they passed at two hundred miles an hour. The sensor-equipped planes were still miles away. They would arrive moments too late to help.

Taft stopped the motorcycle and hastily covered it with brush. He walked a short distance away into the woods. Using a pair of infrared binoculars he stared silently at the line of troops to the south of the fence line. His planned crossing point was thick with Chinese troops. Hoisting Choi over his shoulder like a sack of cement, Taft crept close to the border. He would have to alter his plan.

Keying his tiny portable radio unit he gave the signal.

“Three beeps on 750 megahertz, General,” the air force radar operator shouted from the cockpit of the C-130.

“Give me an update,” Benson said to the radar operator.

“Two cargo jets, one hundred miles out. Two fighters are still loitering above the scene. The helicopter is upwind, near the fenced portion of the crossing. It seems to be patrolling the fence line.”

“What’s on the radio?” Benson asked.

An air force radio operator, specially selected for this mission because he was fluent in Mandarin answered. “The Chinese troops have been ordered to patrol around the scheduled crossing point.”

“How far is our man’s signal from the border?”

“Less than five hundred yards,” the radar operator answered, his eyes fixed on the flashing light on his display screen.

“Come on, John,” Benson said quietly, “you’ve almost made it.”

Creeping to the edge of the burned area, Taft could see the open space to the border was nearly eighty yards wide. He could only hope that the Chinese had burned the line inside their border and not yards inside Kazakhstan. If he could cross the open area and make it into the woods, he believed he would be inside Kazakhstan. The tree line was the key to living. He had to believe that-it was all that kept him going.

“The ground troops have just located a motorcycle,” Yibo shouted to the pilot of the helicopter. “Fly south about a mile, I wish to check it out.”

At the news of the motorcycle, Jimn also ordered his driver to race south. Screaming into his portable radio, he ordered the troops to locate the trail of footprints and follow them. It was time to bring this to an end. Choi was too valuable to lose.

Taft looked through his night-vision binoculars at the mass of humanity clustered around the motorcycle that had brought the pair to the border. Beams from the soldiers’ flashlights intersected as the troops massed, each trying to get a peek at the cycle. Then, as Taft watched, the beams of light took order and began to march directly toward where he was hiding. Taft had removed his boots; with Choi on his back there was only a single set of prints. It seemed his brilliant plan had fooled no one.

“There’s only one thing to do,” Taft said to himself as he clutched Choi tighter. With his plans in ruins, his only prayer was to sprint across the open space. He hoped he could outrun his pursuers. There was no other option. He began to run to the border as fast as his legs would move. The sound of a whistle reached Tafts ears around the same time a weak beam of light from a flashlight swept past his pounding feet. The soldier who had spotted Taft screamed into the radio to alert the others as he started running after the fleeing pair.

Punching their afterburners in response to the radio call from the soldier, the two Chinese fighters did a 180-degree turn and began to fly south. Yibo’s helicopter was above the motorcycle, about to touch down, when he heard the soldier’s call. The pilot turned toward the troops chasing Taft without an order being given.

Hyperventilating to fill his lungs with air, his legs aching dully, Taft made a dead run across the open expanse. The weight of Choi seemed nonexistent as a rampant explosion of adrenaline coursed through his blood. Sixty yards across the open space, he began up the slope of die hill that formed the border. Taft’s bare feet were pounding the ground with the intensity of a jackhammer in a paint shaker. Nose flared, he screamed a rebel yell.

A Kentucky thoroughbred would have had a hard time keeping pace.

Jimn shouted into the radio. “Fighters, spray the border with your chain guns.”

“What if they cross the border?” one of the pilots immediately asked over the radio as he removed the firing lock from the wing mini-cannon.

“They cannot leave the country alive,” Jimn said loudly. “Keep firing until you bring them down.”

Fifty yards behind Taft the Chinese troops started up the hill. If they had only stopped and taken a shot with their rifles they would have hit him cleanly in the back. Instead, caught up in the heat of the chase, they ran blindly, their rifles held low.

“Go in at an altitude of ten feet,” Yibo shouted to the helicopter pilot.

Dropping down, the helicopter flew just above the troops’ heads. The helicopters powerful spotlight illuminated Taft and Choi just as they crested the hill, jumped over the top, and raced into the woods inside Kazakhstan.

“I’ve got you now,” Yibo said quietly.

Streaking low from the north, the two fighters lined up for their firing run. The lead pilot was seconds from squeezing his trigger and tearing Taft and Choi to shreds when his cockpit was lit up with the blinding light of a phosphorescent rocket. Twisting his control stick, the lead fighter pilot broke off his approach. As trained, the second fighter followed his partner. Both fighters executed a ninety-degree turn to the east.

Seconds after Taft entered the forest that signaled the Kazakhstan border, he was tackled by a man dressed entirely in black. Taft reared his arm back to punch.