The Road to Gandolfo Read online

  “like my state of Columbia,” muttered Hawkins, removing his foot from the lacquered table. “Why the hell did you pick me out? A lot of people have done a lot of goddamned denouncing. Why am I so special?”

  “Because they are not so famous. Or infamous, if you will—. Although I did enjoy the film of your life. Very artistic; a poem of violence.”

  “You saw that, huh?”

  “Privately. Certain portions were extracted. Those showing the actor portraying you murdering our heroic youth. Very savage, General.” The Communist circled the black lacquered table and smiled again. “Yes, you are an infamous man. And now you have insulted us by destroying a revered monument—”

  “Come off it. I don’t even know what happened. I was drugged and you goddamned well know it. I was with your General Lu Sin. With his broads, in his house.”

  “You must give us our honor back again, General Hawkins. Can’t you see that?” Lin Shoo spoke quietly, as though Hawkins had not interrupted. “It would be a simple matter for you to render an apology. A ceremony has been planned. With a small contingent of the press in attendance. We have written out the words for you.”

  “Oh, boy!” Hawkins sprang out of the chair, towering over the policeman. “We’re back to that again! How many times do I have to tell you bastards? Americans don’t crawl! In any goddamned ceremony, with or without the goddamned press! Read that straight, you puke-skinned dwarf!”

  “Do not upset yourself. You place far too much emphasis on a mere ceremonial function; you place everyone—all of us—in most difficult positions. A small ceremony; so little, so simple—–”

  “Not to me it isn’t! I represent the armed forces of the United States and nothing’s little or simple to us! We don’t trip easy, buddy boy; we march straight to the drums!”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  Hawkins shrugged, a touch bewildered by his own words. “Never mind. The answer’s no. You may scare the lace-pants boys down at the mission, but you don’t shake me.”

  “They appealed to you because they were instructed to do so. Certainly that must have occurred to you.”

  “Double bullshit!” Hawkins walked around to the fireplace, drank from his glass and placed it on the mantel next to a brightly colored box. “Those fags were cooking up something with that group of queens at State. Wait’ll the White House—wait’ll the Pentagon reads my report. Oh, boy! You bowlegged runts will hightail it to the mountains and then we’ll blow them up!” Hawkins grinned, his eyes bright.

  “You are so abusive,” said Lin Shoo quietly, shaking his head sadly. He picked up the brightly colored box next to the general’s glass. “Tsing Taow firecrackers. The finest made in the world. So loud, so bright with white light when they go bang, bang, bang. Very lovely to watch and to hear.”

  “Yeah,” agreed Hawkins, slightly confused by the change of subject. “Lu Sin gave ’em to me. We shot off a motherload the other night. Before the fucker drugged me.”

  “Very beautiful, General Hawkins. They are a fine gift.”

  “Christ knows he owed me something.”

  “But do you not see?” continued the police officer. “They sound like—explosives. Look like—detonating ammunition, but they are neither. They are only show. Semblances of something else. Real in themselves but only an illusion of another reality. Not dangerous at all.”

  “So?”

  “That is precisely what you are being asked to give. The semblance, not the reality. You have only to pretend. In a short, simple ceremony with but a few words that you know are only an illusion. Not dangerous at all. And very polite.”

  “Wrong-o!” roared Hawkins. “Everybody knows what a firecracker is; nobody’ll know I’m pretending.”

  “Between the two of us, I must differ. It is nothing more than a diplomatic ritual. Everyone will understand, take my word for it.”

  “Yeah? How the hell do you know that? You’re a Peking cop, not a Kissing-ass.”

  The Communist fingered the box of firecrackers and sighed audibly. “I apologize for the minor deception, General. I am not with the People’s Police. I am second vice-prefect for the Ministry of Education. I am here to make an appeal to you. An appeal to your reason. However, the rest is quite true. You are under house arrest, and the patrols outside are policemen.”

  “I’ll be goddamned! They sent me a lace-pants.” Hawkins grinned again. “You boys are worried, real worried, aren’t you?”

  The Communist sighed once more. “Yes. The idiots who started this thing have been shipped to mining collectives in Outer Mongolia. It was lunacy; although I’ll grant them you were a temptation, General Hawkins. Have you any idea the volumes of scurrilous attacks you’ve made on every Marxist, Socialist, and, forgive me, even vaguely democratically oriented nation on the face of this earth? The worst examples—I should say best examples of demagoguery!”

  “A lot of that crap was written by the people who paid me to speak,” said Hawkins, a bit reflectively. And then he quickly added, “Not that I didn’t believe it! Goddamn, I believe!”

  “You’re impossible!” Lin Shoo stamped his foot as a child might. “You’re as insane as Lu Sin and his band of growling paper lions! May they all crack many rocks and fornicate with Mongolian sheep! You are simply impossible!”

  Hawkins stared at the Communist—both at the furious expression on his face and the brightly colored box of firecrackers in his hand. He had made a decision and both of them knew it.

  “I’m also something else, slant eyes,” said the lieutenant general, approaching Lin Shoo.

  “No! No! No violence, you idiot—–” It was too late for the Communist to scream. Hawkins had grabbed the cloth of his tunic, pulled him swiftly off his feet and chopped Lin Shoo beneath the mandible.

  The vice-prefect of the Ministry of Education slumped instantly into unconsciousness.

  Hawkins grabbed the box of firecrackers out of Lin Shoo’s hand and raced around the lacquered table into the sleeping quarters. He grabbed the blanket nailed across the window, folded back a tiny section on the edge and looked outside at the rear of the house. There were the two policemen chatting calmly, their rifles at their sides. Beyond them was the sloping hill that led down to the village.

  Hawkins released the blanket and ran back into the main room, dropping immediately to his hands and knees and scrambling obstacle-style toward the front door. He stood up and silently opened it a crack. The two flanking policemen were about forty feet away and were as relaxed as the troops in the rear. What’s more, they were looking down the descending road, their attention not on the house.

  MacKenzie took the brightly colored box of firecrackers from under his arm, ripped off the lightweight paper and shook out the connecting strings of cylinders. He wound two separate strands together, twisted both fuses into one, and removed his World War II Zippo from his pocket.

  He stopped; he sucked his breath, angry with himself. Then, holding the strands of firecrackers at his side, he walked casually past the windows into the bedroom and removed his holster and cartridge belt from another nail in the thin wall. He strapped the apparatus around his waist, removed the Colt .45 and checked the magazine. Satisfied, he shoved the weapon into its leather casing as he walked out of the bedroom. He circled the armchair in front of the Han Shu mantel, stepped over the immobile Lin Shoo, and returned to the front door.

  He ignited the Zippo, and held the flame beneath the twisted fuse, then opened the door and threw the entwined strands onto the grass beyond the porch.

  Closing and bolting the door softly and swiftly, Hawkins dragged a small red lacquered chest from the foyer and forced it against the thick, carved panel. Then he raced into the sleeping quarters and pulled back a small section of the window blanket and waited.

  The explosions were even louder than he remembered; made so, he guessed, from the combined strands bursting against one another.

  The guards at the rear of the house were jolted out of their lethargy; t
heir weapons collided in midair as each whipped his off the ground. Rifles in waist-firing position, the two men raced toward the front of the house.

  The moment they were out of sight, Hawkins yanked down the blanket, crashed his foot into the thin strips of wood and thinner panes of glass, shattering the entire window. He leaped through onto the grass and started running toward the fields and the sloping hill.

  CHAPTER THREE

  At the base of the hill was the main dirt road that circled the village. Like spokes from a wheel, numerous offshoots headed directly into the small marketplace, in the center of the town. A semipaved thoroughfare branched outward tangentially from the circling road and connected with a paced highway about four miles to the east. The American diplomatic mission was twelve miles down that highway within Peking proper.

  What he needed was a vehicle, preferably an automobile, but automobiles were practically nonexistent outside the highest official circles. The People’s Police had automobiles, of course; it had crossed his mind to double back around the hill to find Lin Shoo’s, but that was too risky. Even if he found it and stole it, it would be a marked vehicle.

  Hawkins circled the village, keeping to the high ground above the road. They would be coming after him. He could stay in the hills indefinitely; that didn’t bother him. He had bivouacked underground in the mountains of Cong-Sol and Lai Tai in Cambodia for months at a time; he could live in the forests better than most animals. Goddamn, he was a pro!

  But it was also pointless. He had to get to the mission and let the Free World know what kind of enemy it was sucking up to. Enough was enough, goddamn it! They could send out radio messages, barricade the whole complex, and fight it out until the offshore carriers sent in air strikes to pinpoint pulverize, even if it meant blowing up half of Peking. Then the copters could come in and get them out.

  Of course, the civilians would shit in their pants, but he would control them. Teach the fancy pants how to fight. Fight! Not talk!

  MacKenzie stopped his fantasizing. Below to the right, coming around the bend in the road about a quarter of a mile away was a lone motorcycle. On it was a shee-san police official, a kind of Chinese state trooper. The answer to a prayer!

  Hawkins rose from the tall grass and started scrambling down the hill. In less than a minute he was at the edge of the dirt border. The bike was still around the curve out of sight, but he heard it coming closer. He threw himself down on the dirt in the middle of the road, drawing his legs up to appear smaller than he was, and lay perfectly still.

  The motorcycle’s engine roared as the driver came around the curve, then sputtered as it skidded to a stop. The shee-san got off the bike and whipped out the kickstand. Hawkins could hear and feel the quick footsteps as the trooper approached.

  The shee-san bent over him and touched his shoulder, recoiling at the recognition of the American uniform. Mac moved. The shee-san shrieked.

  Five minutes later Hawkins had stretched the shee-san’s tunic and pants over his rolled-up trousers and shirt. He slipped the trooper’s goggles over his eyes and put on the ludicrously tiny visor hat, using the chin strap to hold it in place, a cloth pimple sitting on the crew-cut, grayish black hair. Fortunately for his sense of well-being, he had a cigar. He chewed the end to its desired juiciness and lighted up.

  He was ready to ride.

  The diplomatic attaché ran into the director’s office without saying a word to the secretary or even knocking at the door. The director was threading his teeth with dental floss.

  “Excuse me, sir. I’ve just received the instructions from Washington! I knew you’d have to read them!”

  The director of the diplomatic mission, Peking, reached for the cable and read it. His eyes widened and his mouth opened in astonishment. A long strand of dental floss, caught in his teeth, extended down to the desk.

  He saw the roadblock cutting off his entry onto the Peking highway. It was about three quarters of a mile down the semipaved thoroughfare; a single shee-san patrol car and a line of troopers stretching across the road was all he could distinguish through the fogged-up goggles.

  As he drew nearer, he could see that the guards were shouting to each other. One trooper stepped in front of the line and began waving his rifle in the air—hysterically—back and forth, a signal for the approaching rider to stop.

  There was only one thing for it, thought Hawkins. If you’re going to buy a goddamned grave, buy it big! Go out with all weapons on repeat-fire, blazing barrels of thunder and lightning; go out with the screams of the Commie bastards ringing in your ears!

  Goddamn! He couldn’t see for the fucking dust, and his goddamn foot kept slipping off the tiny fucking gas pedal.

  He slapped his hand to his holster and pulled out the .45.

  He couldn’t focus worth shit, but by Christ, he could squeeze the trigger! He did so repeatedly.

  To his astonishment the shee-san did not fire back; instead they dove into the mounds of dirt and sand, screaming like hysterical piglets, scampering into and over the mounds of dirt, burying their asses from the firepower of his single .45 weapon.

  Goddamn! Disgraceful!

  Unless his goggles were playing tricks with the dirt and cigar smoke and the onrushing blurs, even the trooper in front—an officer, by Christ; he had to be—even he didn’t have the balls to fight back.

  An officer!

  MacKenzie kept the bike at top-throttle and exhausted the clip of the .45. He careened up and over a mound of dirt and sand and cascaded onto a sloping hill of grass. As the bike was in midair he glimpsed the blurs of screaming heads beneath him and wished to hell he had more ammo. He twisted the handlebars violently so he could angle down and zoom diagonally back toward the road.

  Goddamn! He hit the surface again! He’d broken through the barricade! He was barrel-assing onto the Peking highway!

  The flat concrete was a joy. The spinning wheels of the motorcycle hummed; the wind rushed against his face—clear, intoxicating blasts of clean, dustless air which forced the smoke of his cigar into whirling pockets around his ears. Even the goggles were clear now.

  He took the next nine miles like a star-spangled meteor through an unknowing Chincom sky. Another mile and he would turn into the northern side streets of Peking. Goddamn! He was going to make it! And then, by Christ, the Commie bastards would find out what an American counterstrike was!

  He raced the bike through the crowded streets and careened off the curb at the entrance to Glorious Flower Square, the final stretch to the mission which stood at the end of the small plaza, fronting the street in alabaster, Oriental splendor. There were, as usual, crowds of Pekingers and out-of-towners milling about, waiting to catch glimpses of the strange, huge pink people that came and went through the white steel doors inside the medium-sized compound.

  It wasn’t much of a compound at that; there was no brick wall or high metal fence surrounding the mission. Only a thin latticework of decorative wood, lacquered against the elements, enclosing the clipped grass lawn that fronted the steps.

  The protection was in the windows and doors: iron grillwork and steel.

  MacKenzie revved the bike’s engine to maximum, figuring the noise would part the throngs of onlookers.

  It did.

  The Chinese scattered as he raced down the street.

  And Hawkins damn near fell off the bike’s saddle at what he saw in front of him; what—in a sense—was rushing toward him at goddamn near fifty miles an hour on that short stretch of pavement in Glorious Flower Square.

  There were three sets of wooden barricades—elongated horses—in front of the closed latticework gate! Each horizontal plank was a foot or so above the other, forming a receding escalator wall of thick boards backed up by the delicate, filigreed fence.

  Standing in a line at port-arms were a dozen or so soldiers, flanked by two officers, all staring straight ahead. At him.

  This is it, thought MacKenzie, nothing left but the gesture, the motion—the act itsel
f.

  Total defiance!

  Goddamn! If he only had some ammo left!

  He crouched and headed the bike right into the center of the barricade; he twisted the bar accelerator to the maximum and pressed the foot choke all the way down.

  The speedometer’s needle wavered in a violence of its own as it quivered and shot up swiftly toward the end of the dial; man and machine burst through the air corridor like a strange, huge bullet of flesh and steel.

  Amid the screams of the hysterical crowds and the scattering of the panicked soldiers, Hawkins yanked the handlebars furiously back and slapped the weight of his body against the rear of the saddle. The front wheel rose off the ground like an abstract, spinning phoenix-followed by a mad extension of tail and rider—and crashed into the upper section of the barricade.

  There was a thunderous shattering of wood and latticework as MacKenzie Hawkins shot up, into—and through the tiers of obstructions, a maniacally effective human cannonball that dragged the rest of the weapon with him.

  The bike plummeted down into the path of washed pebbles that led to the steps of the mission. As it did so, MacKenzie was hurled forward, somersaulting over the bars, rolling on the tiny stones until he thudded into the base of the short flight of steps to the white steel door, the cigar still gripped between his teeth.

  Any second now the Chincoms would regroup, the fusillade would begin, and the sharp chops of icelike pain would commence, giving him, perhaps, only seconds before oblivion came.

  But the firing did not begin. Only louder and louder screaming from the crowds and the soldiers. Oriental heads peered over the mass of wreckage, above the shattered planks, in front of the smashed latticework. Most of the soldiers who had thrown themselves on the ground were now on their hands and knees.

  Yet no one fired a weapon. Then MacKenzie understood: he was, technically, within U.S. territory. If he was shot inside the compound it might be construed as an execution on American soil. It could become an international incident. Goddamn! He was protected by lace-pants fol-de-rol! Diplomatic niceties were keeping him alive!