Shadow of the Dragon

20

John Clark marked the police minders as soon as he boarded the aircraft. Both were Han Chinese men in their forties, seated three rows behind him on either side of the aisle. They read magazines, looking up periodically with feigned disinterest. The one on the right had thinning hair and a long, horselike face. He was dressed like a businessman coming home from a conference, open-collared white shirt, rumpled suit, an overcoat he kept in his lap like a blanket. He talked on his phone a lot — or pretended to. The other was slightly doughy with a blue ball cap and puffy blue ski jacket over a corduroy sport coat that looked too tight to button. Clark noted Horse Face’s shoe that stuck half out in the aisle. It was well worn, sturdy, and didn’t quite match the business suit. The Uyghurs who’d boarded in front of Clark recognized the minders for what they were as well, and leaned slightly away when they shuffled past, as if the men were contagious.

Clark had the entire row to himself. The China Southern Airlines flight was only around half full, but most of the passengers were Uyghur men. None of them wanted to risk being seen chatting with a foreigner by the two police minders.

The steady hiss of air flowing across the fuselage of the shabby but serviceable Airbus changed to a burbling roar as the pilots deployed flaps and slowed the plane in preparation for landing. Clark’s ears popped, alerting him to the aircraft’s descent. He hated airports, and didn’t particularly enjoy being crammed into a flying metal tube. But he wasn’t apprehensive about flying itself. At best, he was ambivalent. For him, slipping the surly bonds of earth was simply a means to an end. Some found the idea of flying a romantic notion. Good for them. Clark understood, a little.

He felt that way about the sea.

The pilots kept the cabin on the chilly side, so most passengers wore their coats or at least a heavy wool sweater during the flight. Most of the Uyghur men wore black fur hats pulled low over their eyes, like the winter hat worn by Brezhnev in all the newsreels. Others wore ball caps, or snap-brims. A couple of the older ones wore large fur Kyrgyz hats, similar to a Russian ushanka but wider at the earflaps, perfectly suited to their long white beards and Turkic features. Dark eyes and aquiline noses peered back and forth at the gathering twilight out of the windows on each side of the plane.

Clark watched the ground rise up to meet him out the window to his left. A dusty haze hung over the dull gray of the city and muted brown of the surrounding countryside. Patches of grimy snow clung to the shadows. The canal along the highway leading from the airport northeast of the town flowed full of chocolate-brown water. A convoy of three white-topped military troop carriers rolled down the highway east of the city. Pickups and larger trucks shared the roads with taxis and scooters.

Clark could already feel the grit of dust in his teeth and the chill on his neck just from looking out the window. It was no wonder everyone on the plane wore winter hats.

The plane bounced once, crabbing into a stiff crosswind before straightening up and settling onto Kashgar Airport’s only runway.

The police minders followed Clark off the plane and then jumped ahead when he was held up at Immigration and Customs. He was sure he’d see them again. No doubt about that.

The uniformed Han officer grunted as Clark slid his Canadian passport and visa, courtesy of Adam Yao’s friend in Beijing, across the counter. The officer perused it with the jaundiced eye of someone accustomed to being lied to on an hourly basis.

He asked Clark a couple perfunctory questions about the purpose of his trip. For his part, Clark tried very hard to hide the predatory edge in his eyes by acting bewildered. The three-thousand-mile trip from Ho Chi Minh City via Guangzhou and Urumqi had sapped him, and he was able to play weary traveler without acting. The officer barked something unintelligible, making the bewildered look easy to sustain.

It sounded as if he’d asked Clark if he had a jeep.

Clark shrugged and tapped his ear. It was better for the officer to think he was simply dealing with an old deaf guy rather than to be offended because Clark couldn’t understand his English.

“You have the GPS?” the officer pantomimed, using his index finger like a compass needle. “For navigation.”

“On my phone,” Clark said, honestly.

“Mobile phone!” The man snapped his fingers. “Give to me.”

Clark fished the phone out of his jacket pocket and passed it to the officer without argument.

“Extra battery?”

Clark dug out the spare charging block as well.

“Passcode!

“I…”

“Passcode or I do not give back,” the man said. He gazed up at Clark without lifting his head.

Clark gave him the code to unlock the screen.

The officer scrolled, perusing the various icons, then said, “Do not use in China.”

“The phone?”

The officer gave a disgusted shake of his head, then pointed to the map icon on the screen, raising his voice for the deaf Canadian at his station.

“No JEEPS in China.”

“I understand,” Clark said. “No GPS.”

The officer slid the phone and passport back, but kept the extra battery for himself, giving no explanation. It was a small sacrifice to the Immigration and Customs gods.

One problem down, Clark moved to the next. He traveled with just a carry-on, so he made his way directly through the terminal, past the crowd of passengers. They squatted on tiny plastic stools by their bags, eating instant noodles or shanks of meat, while they waited for flights that rarely departed on schedule.

The two police minders, Horse Face and Doughboy, resumed their tail before Clark made it out the glass doors. Blowing yellow dust muted the glow of the streetlamps, forcing Clark and everyone else to bow their heads against the biting wind. The two minders trotted to keep up as he skirted a group of construction workers in hard hats laying rebar for a new sidewalk between the buses and taxi stand.

He’d let them follow him for now. But sooner or later, he’d have to lose them or lie to them.

Clark was, in fact, extremely good at lying. Sociopathy within proper bounds, the shrinks at Langley called it. Clark had never considered himself a spy in the strictest sense of the term. He was an operator, had been since he was a pup. Operators lied to get where they needed to be — or, more often than not, to get out of the grease after the job was complete. He grabbed intel when he came across it, of course, but in the main, he used other people’s intel to go in, do his thing, and then slip away.

A good percentage of the time his thing had to do with getting some spy out — or killing one.

Hala Tohti helped load boxes of oiled noodles onto the back of her aunt’s scooter. Her aunt’s normally olive skin was chalky pale. She’d been up at all hours of the night, sewing, cooking, reading, anything but sleeping.

“I can take these to the market,” Hala said, nodding at the noodles.

“I will be fine,” Zulfira said.

A cold wind howled up the dusty street, picking up bits of trash and causing them to dance under the light posts, bristling with security cameras. Zulfira pulled her woolen scarf around her neck and shivered.

“I think you may be ill,” Hala said.

“I said I will be fine.”

The busy Jiefang Night Market was only a few blocks away, but Zulfira swayed in the wind as if she might fall over before making the short trip.

Zulfira climbed aboard the scooter with unsteady legs. “I will drop off the noodles to Rami and return at once,” she said, head bent against the wind. “Chop the meat while I am gone. We must have dinner ready when Mr. Suo arrives.”

Hala’s throat convulsed, making her warble like a frightened child — which made her angry with herself. “What if he comes while you are gone?”

“Ren sent word. Mr. Suo is delayed with meetings. He will be here in two hours. Plenty of time.”

Hala knew better than to argue. She was a guest in her aunt’s home.

Hala watched her aunt’s scooter disappear into the dusk before going back into the house. She was no stranger to work — and there was always plenty of it to do. Her mother had taught her to make savory rice plov, and chop mince and vegetables to fill dough for samsa, by the time she was six. She could joint a chicken with her eyes closed, especially with her uncle’s razor-sharp cleaver.

She stood on a stool while she worked, chicken carcass on a flat board, cleaver in her right hand. Holding a drumstick — yellow foot and claws attached — away from the breast at an angle, she pressed the cleaver against the joint and popped it away, setting aside the neatly separated leg. What else could she do? She saw the way the fat bureaucrat Suo and his secretary, Ren, looked at both her and her aunt. Oh, Fat Suo liked Zulfira, but Hala was old enough to realize men looked at her as well with glazed eyes and sagging jaws. Fat Suo would be back soon, looking at her like she was a sweet. But Zulfira was strong. Zulfira would protect her.

Hala had seen it before, at the dance and gymnastics academy in Nanjing. Coaches sometimes looked at the older girls that way. They took them on walks or to their offices upstairs. None of the girls ever said what happened when they came back to the dormitory, but they cried a lot. Some of them got so sick that they had to leave the school.

Sometimes, early on when she was still only seven years old and she’d just been identified as a gymnastics prodigy and sent away to train for the glory of the Motherland, Hala wished she would get sick so she could go home like the other girls. Later, when she was old enough to understand some of it, she learned the girls hadn’t gone home. They’d left the school in shame, to have babies. Hala had grown up around farm animals and understood the basics, but not the narrow-eyed looks some of the coaches had when they looked at the older girls.

Then she turned ten, and things changed — a lot.

One evening, after practice, Mr. Yun, who trained the boys on the pommel horse and rings, brought her a small piece of cake wrapped in wax paper. Student diets were strictly controlled, but Mr. Yun’s gifts became more and more frequent. Each time he gave her anything, he gave her a funny stare. She thought it made him look like his eyes were crossed. Sometimes he even touched her hand, but she was always so hungry, so she’d taken the sweets and wolfed them down without thinking. Then, Mr. Yun had whispered in her ear during supper that she should meet him in the corner, where they stacked the mats — and not to tell anyone. He’d given her a small piece of white cake, filled with cream that was so deliciously sweet and wonderful that it made her head buzz when she ate it. Mr. Yun rested his hand on her upper arm, squeezing her softly. He promised there were more treats where that came from if he and Hala could become secret friends.

Mr. Yun leaped away when the gym door opened, hands raised, as if Hala was on fire and he did not want to be burned. His wife had just stood there in her white T-shirt and red track pants, blinking at him for what seemed like forever. Mrs. Yun was a strong woman, but she grew smaller and smaller that night. Her entire body began to tremble, her chest heaving enough to rattle the whistle hanging on the lanyard around her neck. She summoned Hala over with a flick of her wrist and walked her to the dormitory without a word.

Hala had always thought Mrs. Yun liked her, or at least respected how hard she trained, but the next day, she called Hala to her office and told her she was worthless as a gymnast. Hala tried to apologize, though she didn’t know what for. Mrs. Yun only became angrier and slapped her across the cheek. The blow had knocked out a tooth, which seemed to surprise Mrs. Yun. She’d cried, still shaking, then chided Hala for chewing the collar of her sweatshirt, and called her a stupid, stupid little girl. There was no longer a spot for her at the school. Hala would be put on a train that very afternoon. She would return home to live with her aunt.

Mrs. Yun and the other coaches were surely angry because Hala was doing so much better than their pretty Chinese students. But no, it wasn’t that. They’d known she was Uyghur when they sent her to the school. Had it been the sweets? Hala had figured it out while she packed her things and said good-bye to her friends. It wasn’t because she’d broken the rules of her diet. Mrs. Yun was angry with her because Mr. Yun had put his hand on her shoulder — and looked at her like she was one of his sweets.

That was the past, Hala thought, and resumed dismembering the chicken. There was nothing she could do about it now—

The handle on the front door shook, sending a gush of fear down her back. She jumped, nearly dropping the cleaver, then dipped her head, teeth searching for, then biting, the collar of her shirt.

The door swung open slowly and Zulfira stepped in.

Hala relaxed a notch. “Did you forget some—”

“He is here,” Zulfira said, chin quivering.

“Suo?”

Zulfira swallowed hard. She nodded, lips set tight, red in the face, like she was holding her breath.

The fat bureaucrat darkened the door behind her, suitcase in hand. Smiling cruelly, he waved at Hala as if he were a welcome relative, there to visit for the holidays. He had every right to stay — according to the law. Some might even call it duty. Provincial bureaucrats in Xinjiang were ordered by Beijing to see to the needs of backward Uyghur families, stopping in to visit at all hours, and spending the night.

Civilizing them in a decidedly uncivilized manner.

Fat Suo dropped his suitcase to the floor and tossed his head at Hala. “Put that in your aunt’s room, child, if you would be so kind. And stop sucking on your shirt!”

Hala let the damp collar fall away. She froze, mouth open, looking at the large case. How long did this fat baboon intend to stay?

Suo’s face began to darken.

“Go ahead,” Zulfira said, before turning to the fat man. “Please sit and make yourself comfortable in my home. Your assistant said that you would be late, so I was going to deliver my noodles to the market before making dinner.”

Suo smiled again. “Do not trouble yourself with a meal,” he said. “My meeting ended earlier than expected and I had some rice and pork at the office… Does that offend you? That I ate pork?”

“You may eat whatever you wish,” Zulfira said. “But I do not.”

“I see,” the fat man said. He clapped his thick hands and then held them together, fingers interlaced in front of his face as he looked back and forth from Zulfira to Hala. “In any case, I have already eaten. I am tired. Perhaps you could show me the bedroom.”

Zulfira nodded to the door off the kitchen. “Through there.”

“It is awfully cold, my dear,” Suo said. “Perhaps you might come and warm my old bones.”

“I… I think it would be best if I slept by the stove.”

Hala noticed for the first time that her aunt had already moved a stack of quilts out of the bedroom and put them in the corner of the main room.

The fat man touched his lips with clenched hands, peering over his knuckles in thought. “The girl is small, but I suppose she could warm my—”

“No!” Zulfira said. She touched her belly. “It is just that… I… my husband has only been gone a few months, and I am…”

Fat Suo scoffed. “With child?”

Zulfira chewed on her bottom lip but didn’t deny it.

Suo put a hand on Zulfira’s shoulder, caressing as if trying to calm an animal. Hala clenched her fist, ready to fly at the fat man, but Zulfira flashed her a look.

Suo gave a wry chuckle. “Have you heard of the wild horses of Kalamely Mountain?”

Tears pressed from Zulfira’s lashes as she clenched her eyes. She shook her head.

“Przewalski’s horses, they’re called,” Suo said. “Runty little beasts, in the great scheme of things, but they are thought to have been native to Asia many thousands of years ago. A few dozen were reintroduced here in Xinjiang, probably decades before you were born. There are still not very many, less than two hundred, so I am told.” Suo cocked his head to one side and then ran a knuckle down Zulfira’s cheek. “Every single foal is important to the people who are trying to grow this herd… but the stallions do not care about the herd as a whole. They only care about the foals that come from their loins. Did you know, for instance, that when a stronger stallion finds, shall we say, a pregnant mare whose mate he has killed or is no longer around for one reason or another, he simply mounts the mare with such force as to make certain that there is no chance that any progeny but his own survives?” Suo laughed, throwing up his hands. “Of course, we are not horses. There is no need for rough behavior—”

“So long as the mare remains civil,” Zulfira said.

“Something like that,” the fat man said and chuckled.

Zulfira folded her arms tight across her chest. “Where is your assistant?”

“Ren is busy taking care of another matter.”

A tear ran down Zulfira’s cheek. “What of Hala?”

Suo took her hand. “She may sleep by the stove.” His voice was husky now. “Unless my hand is forced, I have no interest in foals.”