In Danger's Path (28 page)

“Sir?”

“‘In any bureaucracy, one may expect to find, near the top, a certain percentage of assholes,'” the DDO said. “You might want to write that down.” Then he turned to Lieutenant Colonel Banning: “He's all yours, Ed.”

He touched McCoy's shoulder and walked away.

“You owe him,” Banning said. “If I hadn't bumped into him in the hall, you would have been doing push-ups and knee bends at the Country Club by the time I found General Pickering.”

“Who is he?”

“The number-two guy around here, the Deputy Director (Operations), he's on our side. I'm not sure about the other clown. Come on. I'll show you the White Room, and put you to work.”

In order for McCoy to gain entrance to the White Room, it was necessary for one of the two armed guards on duty outside the unmarked door to compare his face with the photo on the identification badge, and then to check a typewritten list under a
TOP SECRET
cover sheet to make sure his name was on it. He then nodded to the other security officer, who unlocked the door to the room.

The room was windowless, illuminated with concealed lighting. Thick carpets covered the floor and sound-absorbing material was on the walls. A lectern and a projection screen were at one end of the room, a motion picture and slide projector at the other. The large central conference table showed signs of use; it was littered with paper, some of it crumpled, dirty coffee cups, and empty Coke bottles.

The door was closed, and immediately a whirring noise came from the film and slide projectors. The projectors were automatically shut off when the door was opened, McCoy realized. A moment later, a map flashed onto the screen.

Shit, that's the goddamned Gobi Desert! I thought that operation was canceled, or at least on hold!

Well, what the hell did I expect?

“We've been in here for the best part of two days,” Banning said. “Without accomplishing very much. You are hereby appointed,
vice
Lieutenant Colonel Banning, cleaning officer.”

“Which means?”

“You will pick up every scrap of paper and put it in a burn bag. You will then telephone Classified Files—the number's on the phone—and they will come and collect everything—maps, slides, notes, and the burn bag, or bags—and haul it off. Then you will go outside and sign a certificate stating that the White Room is clean—meaning of classified material; somebody will come and deal with the Coke bottles and coffee cups—and it is available for use by others.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

“Let me give you a quick run-through of where we are on Operation Gobi—which frankly is nowhere. And then you can perform your cleaning officer duties and go home. Where is home, by the way?”

“I'm at the Lafayette,” Ken said.

“If you're uncomfortable in the General's apartment, you can bunk with me for a couple of days until we can find you something.”

“I'm not in General Pickering's apartment,” McCoy said. “I'm in the American Personal Pharmaceuticals suite.”

“Ernie's with you?”

McCoy nodded.

“Then you go home to Ernie and tell her to do something about your sunburn. You really look awful.”

“I feel awful.”

Banning walked to one end of the room and stood in front of the map projected on the screen. “What is needed, Ken, is a weather station in this area,” he gestured at the map, “to give what Colonel Hazeltine describes as reports of atmospheric fronts and conditions there.

“Now, we have reason to believe that a few Americans are already in the neighborhood, some former Marine guards at the Peking legation, the rest retired Marines, soldiers, and Yangtze River patrol sailors. And their wives and children.” He paused. “At any point, Ken, ask questions.”

“Aye, aye, sir,” McCoy said. He slipped into one of the upholstered chairs and reached for a coffee pitcher.

“Communication with them is spotty at best, and we don't know where they are, and we can't ask them, because they have no cryptographic capability. And, to repeat, the communications are lousy.

“Ideally, we would make up a meteorological team—that's a minimum of four men, and about a ton of equipment, much of it expendable: weather balloons, for example, which will be consumed at the rate of two or three a day, and have to be resupplied, if we ever get that far—and send it in by airplane. Since no airplane has the range to make it back and forth from one of our bases, even if it wasn't intercepted, that means it would be a one-way mission.

“But since we don't know where our people are, or where the Japanese are, it doesn't make any sense to send in a team on an expendable airplane. Or should I say an expendable team on an expendable airplane? We need knowledge of the terrain, and the disposition of Japanese forces. We have neither.”

“Zimmerman spent four months in the Gobi Desert,” McCoy said.

“What?” Banning asked in disbelief.

“When he first went to the Fourth Marines, 1938, somewhere around then, there was a bunch of people from the
National Geographic
magazine who went up there. The Fourth Marines provided the truck drivers. Zimmerman was one of them.”

“You sure about that, Ken?” Pickering asked.

“Yes, sir. He told me about it. There's hardly any sand, he told me, it's mostly flat and rocky.” He hesitated. “I think he went back up there after the explorers left.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Out of school?”

“Sure.”

“I think he was involved in smuggling,” McCoy said.

“Smuggling what? And from where to where?”

“Jade and fancy vases out of China into India, and gold back from India. Or stuff from Russia, through some other country inside Russia.”

“Kazakhstan?”

“I think so.”

“You're telling me Zimmerman was on a caravan smuggling things into India and the Soviet Union?”

“No, sir. Zimmerman was bankrolling the smugglers—actually his woman was, with Zimmerman's money. He—or Mae Su—bought the jade and the vases et cetera, in China, and then sent them out on caravans. The caravan guys got a percentage of what they sold it for.”

“How did he know he would ever see the caravan people again?” Banning asked incredulously.

“Sometimes…when
everybody's
making money, people are honest,” McCoy said. “And Zimmerman's not the sort of guy anyone wants to cross,” he added matter-of-factly.

“In other words, you believe this story?”

McCoy nodded.

“This wasn't bigtime stuff. Nothing more than a couple of hundred dollars at a time,” McCoy said. “But he and Mae Su have a pretty good-size farm in her village. I went up there a couple of times. They even have a little sausage factory. And they lived good in Shanghai—a lot better than he could live on a corporal's pay. He told me he was saving money for when he retired.”

“But you're sure he's been in contact with smugglers?”

McCoy nodded. “And then they would buy the stuff—mostly icons. You know what they are? Sort of folding pictures of saints painted on wood?”

“I know what they are,” Banning said.

“They would bring the icons smuggled out of Russia, bring them to Shanghai, and sell them to the antique dealers.”

“I don't suppose you were involved in this?” Banning said.

“I thought about it, but I didn't like the odds,” McCoy replied.

“This Chinese wife of his,” Banning asked, thinking out loud. “Where do you think she is?”

“Well, maybe…no, probably, she's playing it safe in the village,” McCoy said. “It's called Paotow-Zi, on the Yellow River twenty, thirty miles from the nearest city. Baotou.”

“Show me on the map,” Banning ordered, went to the table and flipped through a half-dozen large maps until he found what he was looking for, then pulled it from the others and laid it on top.

McCoy found what he was looking for quickly, and held his finger on it for Banning to see. Banning took a compass and made some quick measurements.

“It's a long way from there to the Gobi Desert,” he said.

McCoy didn't argue.

“You said Zimmerman's Chinese wife is ‘probably' playing it safe in this village. Was there anything significant in that?”

McCoy looked uncomfortable.

“What, Ken?” Banning pursued.

“She may be in the middle of the Gobi Desert with some caravan,” he said.

“Doing what?”

“Trying to make it to India. Or, for that matter, into Russia.”

“Into Russia? Why the hell would she want to go into Russia? Or India?”

“That's what Zimmerman told her to do, get into India, go to the first American consulate she can find. Have the consul send word to Zimmerman's mother that she and the kids are in India. And then try to get them to the States.”

“That seems like a pretty forlorn hope,” Banning said. “The American Consul is not liable to pay a lot of attention to a Chinese woman with some half-breed children who says she's married to an American.”

“They're married. Some Catholic priest married them. There's a wedding certificate, and Zimmerman went to the consulate and made some sort of statement that the kids are his.”

“I don't think that will work, Ken. You have to admire him—both of them—for trying.”

“I don't think it will work, either. But strange things happen.”

“What did you say about Russia?” Banning asked. “You said something about them trying to get into Russia.”

McCoy looked even more uncomfortable.

“Let's have it, McCoy,” Banning said very softly.

“I asked Mae Su to try to take care of Milla if anything happened,” McCoy said, meeting Banning's eyes.

“You never said anything about that to me.”

“I didn't want you to get your hopes up. If I were Mae Su, I would be trying to cover my ass, and protecting the kids, and wouldn't want to have to worry about taking care of a white woman with a Nansen passport.”

“And since she's a typical Chinese, she said ‘yes, of course, certainly' and then forgot about it?”

“She said she would think about it,” McCoy said. “Mae Su's all right.”

“You don't really think they're together?”

“I don't know. I've thought about it. On one hand, Mae Su wants to protect her kids, and will let nothing get in the way of that. On the other hand, when I asked her, you weren't married to Milla. I didn't know about that until you told me. But Zimmerman knew, and I'm sure he told Mae Su. A woman married to an American, an American officer, is not the same thing as a stateless woman. Mae Su may have decided that Milla might be useful. Any consulate would do more for a white woman married to an American officer than he would for a Chinese married to a corporal. Mae Su would know that. She's the brains in that family.”

“Jesus Christ!” Banning said.

“Did Milla have any money?”

“Not much,” Banning said. “All I could lay my hands on on short notice. Whatever she could get for my stuff, which probably was damned little. And she had some money of her own—damned little, I'm sure.”

McCoy didn't reply.

“Jesus Christ, Ken, why didn't you tell me any of this before?”

“I didn't think there was anything you could do if you knew,” McCoy said. “I didn't want to open the wound.”

“Because you don't think that they'll…”

“The odds aren't very good,” McCoy said.

“There's nothing wrong with betting on a long shot if it's the only bet open,” Banning said.

McCoy shrugged what could have been agreement.

“The one thing we'd agreed on in here after two days is that we need to talk to someone who knows more about the Gobi Desert than what he's read in the
National Geographic
,” Banning said.

McCoy chuckled.

“So where is Gunny Zimmerman?”

“On his way here,” McCoy said. “Which means he's either still in Brisbane, or in Pearl Harbor, or maybe San Diego. Zimmerman and Koffler—and Mrs. Koffler—are coming on the same orders. They're entitled to thirty-day leaves. There's some kind of a rest hotel somewhere…”

“The Greenbrier Hotel in West Virginia,” Banning furnished.

“I guess the idea was they could hold each other's hands. But I don't think that will last after they get off the first plane. Zimmerman will ‘get lost,' and the Kofflers will go on without him. And I don't think that Zimmerman is interested in going to a rest hotel someplace. So he's probably at Pearl, 'Diego…anywhere…and will check in at Management Analysis when his leave is up. Maybe even before.”