'They're not sure yet — it's just an assay. They're going to drill a hundred meters down and take samples. The geologists say there should be copper in this region.'

'That's your full story?'

He looked at me. 'You think anyone in the People's Liberation Army's going to question it?'

'Possibly.'

'Tell you something. What the average soldier in the PLA has got in his head is rice.'

I let it go. It shouldn't come to that; if they were going to see us they'd have seen us by now.

The snow had almost stopped; isolated flakes drifted, black against the sky and turning white as they settled on the dark green of the truck. The shadows were sharp now, and rocks stood out, their flint surfaces glinting in the light.

'Chong. Where are you going to put him?'

'I got crates back there, one of them empty. He can breath okay, gaps where the lid goes. We can pile a whole lot of drilling gear on top, see. He'll be snug as a bug in there, got a blanket and some cushions, nothing too good for that guy.'

A front wheel caught a loose rock and threw it upward and it banged on the underside of the truck like a gunshot. Reaction from the nerves and it worried me. The effects of the the shiatsu had worn off a little, or it was simply that I was standing back in my mind and seeing the whole thing in perspective from overhead: the truck, small from that distance, crawling across the dark terrain a mile and a half from the group of army vehicles and the flashing red lights, a mouse creeping across the floor under the nose of a cat, not a pleasant simile, no, uncomfortable, unnerving.

'You weren't there,' Chong asked me, 'in Beijing, that time?'

The time of Tiananmen. It was how they all spoke of it these days, as 'that time.'

'No.'

'I was there.'

The rocks glinting ahead of us, bright now, too bright, the shadows too black, too sharp. I turned my head.

'The worst thing, the way I remember it-'

'Chong,' I said, 'they've seen us.'

Headlights in the dark.

Chapter 18: Flower

'Your papers say you're a tourist.'

'Yes.'

'Then what are you doing in this truck?'

'I'm a geologist. I'm interested in minerals.'

'But how did you come to be in this truck?'

'I met this man in a bar. He's going to show me the mining camp. They're going to drill for minerals.'

'Okay,' Chong said, 'that'll stand up. Like I say, they got their gourds full of rice.'

He didn't sound nervous.

Headlights bouncing over the rocks. They were too bright for us to see what kind of vehicle it was, but it must be small, bouncing like that, perhaps a military jeep.

'Is there a gun in this truck?'

Chong looked at me. He wasn't chewing any faster than usual. I liked that. 'I guess not,' he said. 'It's instant jail, they find one on anybody in this town. We need a gun?'

'No.'

'You carry one?'

'No.'

He lifted his gloved hands off the rim of the wheel and dropped them again. 'Got these.'

If there'd been a gun in the truck I would have told him to throw it across the scree, out of sight.

The beams of the headlights swung away, sweeping the black shale and sending the shadows jumping like choppy water, then coming around in a half-circle and lining us up dead ahead and closing in, blinding us through the windshield. He didn't trust us, hadn't just come up alongside.

Above and between the headlight beams there was movement and a glint of metal, something quite long, perhaps an assault rifle.

'Don xia che!'

'He says we have to get out,' Chong said.

The shale was gritty underfoot. We stood by the doors, one on each side of the truck.

'Ju qi shou lai'

Chong raised his hands and I did the same.

He'd switched off his engine when we'd seen the headlights; the engine of the jeep was still running. Nothing happened for a while. The soldier was watching us, standing in the middle of the jeep, the light bouncing off the rocks and the front of the big Jeifang and glinting on his gun, then he dropped onto the ground and came toward us, the shale scattering under his combat boots. He said something to me, his voice barking, and I looked at Chong.

'Ta bu hui zhongwen,' Chong said.

Telling him I didn't speak Chinese. The man concentrated on Chong, talking to him, getting answers. Then Chong took his coat off and the soldier frisked him, kicked at his leggings, stood back, then came over to me. Chong started to follow him but the man swung around and shouted, and Chong stood still.

I took off my parka and dropped it onto the ground. The soldier frisked me, keeping the muzzle of the assault rifle lodged against my stomach. Then he stood back. He wasn't a young recruit. I'd say he was over thirty, looked experienced, seasoned, with a strong squat body under a heavy military coat, insignia on the sleeve, perhaps a sergeant.

The exhaust gas from the jeep drifted on the air. The snow had stopped, and there would be moonlight across the ground here when the glare from the jeep had gone. The night was still, the temperature below freezing. I could feel the heat from the huge radiator of the truck, smell the tires, the diesel oil in the tank. Sound would carry well on a night like this, cold and with no wind now. A man would get nowhere, in stealth, over this kind of ground.

Not of course that either Chong or I would have any chance of using stealth, of getting anywhere; I was just analyzing incoming data: visual, acoustic, tactile, olfactory, because at some time we would have to make an attempt to get away from this man, this soldier, this strong-bodied sergeant in his warm greatcoat, who was eyeing me from underneath the red star oh his cap as if I were something he'd found on a rubbish dump.

I didn't like him.

'Chong. Tell him I want to put my coat on.'

Translation.

'He says you can. He wants to know all about you. I give him the story you told me, okay?'

'Yes.'

Gooseflesh. It was too late to do anything if Chong hadn't tested this man to make sure he didn't understand English. But he must have done that. I was to expect, if we remember, professional procedures from anyone Pepperidge would send in. The director in the field, one of his calibre, can ask for blind faith from his executive, sometimes, many times, where the difference between life and death is on the cards.

I put my parka back on while the sergeant watched me; then he walked over to Chong, not turning his back on me, walking sideways a little, keeping me within the periphery of his vision field where the eye detects only movement. He held the big gun level, aimed at Chong's diaphragm, and they began talking.

It wasn't conversation. The sergeant had this gutteral bark, loud and unpleasant to the ear. His squat body jerked forward sometimes from the waist, to put emphasis on what he was saying. Chong looked relaxed, arms hanging, head angled forward by a degree — I liked that too: he wasn't on the defensive, had the confidence of a man who can do no wrong.

'Ta zai ze cheli ganshao?'

Why was I with him in the truck, perhaps, if I were a tourist.

'Ta shige dizhixuejia. Dui kuang chan you xingqu.'

I am not normally worried by guns, for several reasons. They're often held by amateurs, who don't know they should keep their distance when they're using them as a threat, and then it's only a matter of how fast you can move before they can fire. A gun also allows false confidence, and that can be fatal, has been, in my own experience, fatal to those who have held a gun on me. So normally they don't worry me, except that I don't like the bang they make: I am by nature a quiet soul.

This man, though, worried me, with his gun. He wasn't an amateur, and even with a thing this size he was keeping his distance. There was no question of whether Chong or I could move fast enough to make a strike before he could fire. Nor was the gun giving him any feeling of false confidence. He was a professional soldier, trained in the armoury and at the butts, trained to man a roadblock and conduct an interrogation of enemy prisoners.