Empire of Women & One of our Cities is Missing (Armchair Fiction Double Novels Book 25) (21 page)

V.
 
The City—Saturday morning Dr. Stewart Roswell

CHEN PHIANG took us two blocks from the
Dragen house to a garage apartment at the rear of a Chinese restaurant.
 
The American planes were still raiding the
harbor and above us the sky filled with cotton puffs from the exploding anti-aircraft
shells.
 

We stumbled up the wooden stairway and
Chen Phiang knocked on the door of the apartment—three times before it was
opened.
 
The soldier and a Chinese spoke
rapidly in Cantonese and the door was flung wide to us.
 
Chen Phiang put George Knight on a
couch.
 
Three women bent beside him,
rubbing his
hands
and working pillows behind his
head.
 

The man and Chen Phiang deluged each
other with a flood of shrill Chinese.
 
Their meeting was highly emotional.
 
They threw their arms around each other—the small, dark-haired
Chinese-American and the enormous man in the Communist uniform.
 
Abruptly it was over.
 
The soldier departed.
 

The Chinese shook my hand.
 
His face still quivered with emotion; his
fingers were trembling, warm with sweat.
 
I told him who we were and how we had escaped from the Soviet
headquarters.
 
He glanced at George
Knight—still unconscious—and said in a tone of deep humility,

“The Quaker teacher does an honor to my
home.”
 

“You know him?”

“Only his books.
 
We are Buddhists, but all men of honor speak
to the same end.”
 

The three women brought a bottle of
rubbing alcohol and washed Knight’s face.
 
The Quaker opened his eyes.
 
Their
kindness he accepted and understood at once, without words.
 

The Chinese told us his name was Lin
Yeng.
 
The three women were sisters, his
wife Barbara and the beautiful teenager’s Charlotte and Betty Sutong.
 

Lin Yeng could tell us very little about
Chen Phiang, except that the soldier was a cousin, held for years in a Chinese
concentration camp—or so they had always believed…

The next morning George Knight walked
without my help into the front room of the apartment for breakfast—slowly,
that’s true, and dragging his right foot painfully, but under his own power.
 
Considering how thoroughgoing Zergoff’s
education of the Quaker had been, Knight had made a remarkable recovery.
 

The Yengs had spread a round, teakwood
table with bamboo mats and blue-glazed china.
 
I saw the traditional, handleless teacups and the round rice bowls.
 
But instead of tea, they gave us Coca-Cola to
drink.
 

We heard footsteps on the stairs and
Chen Phiang flung open the door.
 
His
uniform was soiled and disheveled.
 
His
flat, Oriental face was drawn tight with fatigue.
 
He stood by our table, twisting his cap in his
hand.
 
Lin Yeng offered him food, but he
turned it down.
 

“We’ll take it all soon enough,” he
answered darkly.
 
“Eat while you
can.”
 
He said he had been on emergency
duty all night—a search detail.
 
General
Zergoff had two hundred men combing the harbor area for Knight and me.
 
The force was later increased to five
hundred.
 
Chen Phiang volunteered for the
duty, to misdirect the search if it came too close to his cousin’s apartment.
 
His determination to save us had become the
driving force of his being.
 

“The Russians will order a house to
house search shortly,” Chen Phiang declared.
 
“Not this morning, perhaps.
 
We
still can’t spare the manpower.
 
But
before that happens, I must get you away from the city.”
 

“How?”
Lin Yeng asked.
 
“The roads are barricaded.”
 

“There is a mountain place near
here.
 
I have heard talk of it.
 
Some of our men were sent to look for a
certain Dr. Clapper.
 
If he is hidden so
well, you might be, too.”
 

I glanced at Knight.
 
“Clapper does have a cabin somewhere between
Running Springs and Big Bear.”
 

“When the time comes,” the Chinese
soldier asked, “can you show me the proper road?”

“Yes.”
 

“I will find transportation for us.
 
Our submarines fought a naval battle last
night.
 
No one knows the outcome, but we
expect an American task force to try a landing sometime today.
 
They will be repulsed, naturally, but in the
beginning there will be much confusion.
 
That will be our opportunity to escape.”
 

When the soldier turned to leave, Lin
Yeng stopped him at the door.
 
He said he
had a gift of courtesy and he handed Chen Phiang a six-bottle carton of
Coke.
 
“In America, cousin, this is our
national drink.
 
A friend of America
will use nothing else.”
 
He repeated very
slowly, “Nothing else.
 

“Drink no water,” Lin Yeng went on.
 
“Go unwashed and unclean.”
 

When Chen Phiang was gone, Barbara Yeng
said anxiously, “I do hope he understood.”
 

“I made it as plain as I dared,” her
husband replied.
 

“Not to me,” I told them.
 

“When the milk collectors came during
the night,” Lin Yeng explained, “they told us.
 
They were taking the warning to every American family.
 
The Soviet bombers cut the irrigation canals
that cross the
desert,
and the water still flowing to
the city was affected by radiation.
 
Before the week is out we’ll have a water famine, but long before that
every person who drinks the city water will undoubtedly suffer radiation
poisoning.
 
That means even more misery
and a gruesome, painful death for those who consume the water.”
 

VI
.
 
The
Valley—Friday
night Jerry Bonhill

THE plan was Yorovich’s.
 
He said the Russian car would head straight
for the hotel as soon as the driver spotted Clapper’s Cadillac.
 
He wanted us to be concealed on both sides
of the street, with rifles taken from a sporting goods store.
 
We were to fire in front of the car and
behind it, trying to make enough noise to suggest a large guerilla
force.
 

In the meantime, from the second floor
of the hotel, he would demand the surrender of the Soviets—in Russian, the
parade-ground arrogance of a Russian officer.
 
The psychological confusion should do the trick.
 
Yorovich wanted Thatcher to have the
submachine gun and to be posted with him in the second floor.
 

“If anything goes wrong,” he said,
“Thatcher, shoot to kill.”
 

“I have one objection,” Cheryl put
in.
 
“You should have the submachine
gun, Boris.
 
Pat would be more use to us
down here.”
 

The Russian blushed.
 
His dark face was suddenly boyish and it was
very easy for me to remember, then, that he was no older than I was.
 
“I didn’t think you’d want me—that is, if I
had that weapon in my hands I could—”

“Give him the keys to the car,” I told
Pat.
 

Yorovich looked at me with inexpressible
gratitude.
 
He tried to say something,
but all he was able to do was
swallow—
hard.
 
Thatcher handed over the keys.
 
The Russian ran into the street and unlocked
the trunk compartment of the Cadillac.
 
Three seconds later he was on his way up the stairs, the gun cradled in
his arm.
 

“Let’s snap to it,” I said to the
others.
 
“Who’s going outside with
us?”
 
They volunteered unanimously, even
Jim Riley and the colored boy, Ted Fisher.
 
I sent them into the kitchen of the coffee shop.
 
I asked Hank Jenkins to stick with them—more
to keep him off the streets than because I thought the kids needed
watching.
 
The rest of us filed through
the sporting goods store, snatching up rifles and boxes of cartridges.
 
An emergency seems to generate its own brand
of efficiency.
 
In less than two minutes
we were concealed on both sides of the street.
 

The Soviet jeep entered the village.
 
At an open window in the second floor of the
hotel I saw Boris Yorovich stiffen and raise his gun to his shoulder.
 
The jeep moved toward us.
 
I counted four infantrymen, all of them
armed with submachine guns.
 
The two in
back were standing, scanning the walks, their weapons cocked against their
upper arms.
 

The jeep was in front of the hotel.
 
In the stillness I heard the driver say very
distinctly, “The Cadillac matches our description of Dr. Clapper’s car.”
 
Afternoon sunlight, slanting over the hills,
fell on his face.
 
He was very young and
very tired.
 
The faint shadow of a blond
beard was on his chin.
 

Then Yorovich’s command echoed over the
street.
 
I saw the sudden fear and
indecision in the young Russian’s eyes.
 
All four men looked up.
 
Simultaneously the drug-store door banged open and Willie Clapper
staggered out.
 
They snapped their guns
to their shoulder.
 
“I’m Clapper!” he
cried.
 
“Don’t shoot.”
 

From our concealed positions we began to
fire.
 
Yorovich’s voice barked
again.
 
Bullets from his submachine gun
lashed across the hood of the jeep, shattering the windshield.
 
The four men dropped their weapons and raised
their hands.
 
It was over.
 

No, it was just beginning.
 
We swarmed around the car.
 
Thatcher scooped up their weapons.
 
I pushed the captives into the hotel.
 

We put the Russians on a lounge.
 
Yorovich came down the steps and stood
looking at them, the submachine gun draped carelessly over his arm.
 
He grinned and said something in
Russian.
 
They stared at him, their eyes
wide with fear.
 
He spoke again and
stiffly they reeled off their names and the other information he
demanded.
 

Andrei Trenev.
 
Infantryman, eighteen, a small, fair-haired,
blue-eyed boy conscripted from
a
Ukranian farm
co-cooperative.
 

Vasili Shostovar.
 
Paratrooper, twenty, shallow-chested,
beady-eyed, dark-haired, a mechanic from a Moscow implement depot; he had a
two-year trade school education and appeared more sophisticated than the
others.
 

Igor Morrenski.
 
Air-corps sergeant, seventeen, small and
sturdy, with a broad, peasant face vaguely suggesting Mongol ancestry; he came
from Stalingrad, where he had worked on a farm co-operative.
 

Feodor Psorkarian,
Paratrooper, seventeen.
 
A
tall, handsome, wild-eyed boy with an unruly shock of yellow hair and laughter
on his lips.
 
A
Cossack and proud of it.
 
Of them all, perhaps the most adaptable personality.
 

Virginia Grant took over the job at that
point.
 
“I think, we’ll get you some
respectable clothes,” she said.
 
“I
disapprove of uniforms.
 
Jerry, take them
up to the men’s shop and let them pick out something to wear.”
 
So I’d get her point, she repeated it firmly,
“Let them do the choosing.”
 

Shostovar protested like a good
dialectician:
 
we had no right to take
their uniforms.