The Secret Cardinal

59

The black plume rising against the vivid blue sky provided an unmistakable visual marker of the Harbin’s crash site. Liu squirmed impatiently in the rear seat behind the weapons operator, irritable about how the scale of the terrain made distances deceptive.

‘How much longer?’ he fussed.

‘Just a few minutes, sir,’ the pilot replied calmly. He had carried VIPs before.

As they neared the site, the plume grew from a thin reed of smoke into a thick black column. Flames licked furiously at the skeletal frame of the helicopter, liquefying soft metals and devouring anything that would burn.

Three Tibetans sat on the ground upwind of the blaze. They watched the helicopter circle, looking for a level place to land, but made no move to flee or welcome the new arrivals.

The Harbin hovered over a relatively level patch of earth, extended its landing gear, and touched down. The pilot kept the blades running in case the ground proved unstable, and Liu and Peng exited from the rear doors. Both were dressed in flight suits and helmets, and they crouched as they ran beneath the nearly invisible main rotor.

‘You there!’ Liu shouted as he approached the Tibetans. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘Watching the fire,’ Norbu replied in halting Chinese.

‘Did you see what happened?’ Peng asked calmly.

‘We saw smoke and came to see what was burning. It is a very large fire.’

‘Did you see anything else, any other aircraft?’

‘We saw two. One was damaged and one was not. The men in gray put the damaged one in the fire. They did not want you to find it. They also put their dead in the fire.’

‘Please describe the men,’ Peng asked. ‘How many and what did they look like?’

‘There were two men. An elder, Chinese like you, and a tall foreigner.’

‘No others?’ Liu demanded.

‘They are dead.’

‘What happened after they burned their dead?’ Peng asked.

‘The two men flew away on a strange machine.’

‘Where did they go?’

Norbu and the others pointed west, in the direction of the village of Rutog.

‘Why didn’t you stop them?’ Liu said angrily.

‘The old one was a holy man,’ Norbu explained.

‘You spoke with these men?’

‘Yes.’

Liu stepped away in a rage, trying to gather his thoughts. He pointed at the burning wreckage. ‘That was a military helicopter. Its job is to defend China against foreign aggression. When you discovered a foreigner here, in China, next to a destroyed Chinese helicopter, did you not think this foreigner might have been the cause?’

‘We did not see what happened,’ Norbu replied calmly. ‘We do not know the cause of the accident.’

‘Thick-headed fools!’ Liu shouted. ‘The foreigner shot it down!’

Liu pulled out his pistol and shot Norbu in the head. Norbu’s brothers tried to flee but were shot before they could scramble to their feet.

‘Why did you do that?’ Peng asked, stunned by Liu’s brutality.

‘They were criminals,’ Liu replied as he replaced the spent rounds in his pistol.

‘These men had done nothing.’

‘They abetted foreign invaders and a fugitive enemy of the state. Their inaction was both criminal and unpatriotic.’

‘But that’s a matter for the courts to decide.’

‘And I have just saved the Ministry of Justice a considerable amount of time and money in reaching the same conclusion,’ Liu replied confidently. ‘Come, there’s still hope we can catch Yin.’

Liu and Peng climbed back into the helicopter and plugged their helmets back into the communications system.

‘Sir,’ the pilot said, ‘there’s been a report of an unusual aircraft flying low over the outskirts of Rutog about twenty-five minutes ago.’

‘How far is Rutog?’

‘Under five minutes.’

‘Get us there.’