The same reasoning had ordained the timing. It was midnight, and the helicopter would return one hour before dawn unless Stratton called earlier. They might have come later, but anything moving in the Chinese countryside between midnight and dawn would alarm sentinels accustomed to seeing nothing move at all. Even midnight was cutting it fine, Stratton knew, but he had not dared come until the village was asleep.

They watched in silence as the chopper clawed for the clouds on muffled engines.

It was the seventh time Stratton had endured that particular parting. The seven loneliest moments of his life.

Even in the mud, the bicycles worked like a charm.

They were the only thing.

A sentry materialized, wraithlike, from the shelter of a tree about a mile from the village. PLA.

The sentry hollered something that was lost in the wind. Bobby Ho, riding point, head down, waited until he was within ten yards of the man, until the pistol would bear. He answered in Chinese.

Maybe the man had heard the helicopter. Maybe Bobby Ho said the wrong thing. The sentry coiled, unslinging his rifle. From their shelter by the tree, two more wet soldiers emerged. The six Americans slithered off their bikes into the mud like a satanic rank of marionettes.

It ended quickly, but one of the sentries managed a single shot. It ricocheted like flat doom through the blackness.

For five breathless, unbearable minutes, Stratton's team crouched by the road, safeties off, ears aching, praying. No one came. The sentry had died in vain.

Bobby Ho tried to break the tension.

"These Chinks ain't even tryin'," he whispered in jocose mimicry of the fat colonel. It didn't sound funny.

The single guard at the head of the village main street died in silence for his sloth. He must have felt the blade administered by a saturnine Puerto Rican named Gomez, but he never saw it. Stratton left Gomez and a fireplug Tennessean named Harkness to watch their back door.

They met the boy a few minutes later, creeping through such stillness and total absence of color it gave Stratton the eerie sensation that the entire village was a two-dimensional fantasy.

Bobby Ho flushed the boy from a pile of rags in the imperfect shelter of a shop doorway. Panofsky grabbed him, roughly clamping his jaw. The boy wriggled, a minnow in the maw of a shark. Stratton saw the knife come up and winced.

"Wait!" Bobby Ho hissed. "He can't be more than twelve, all skin and bones."

The knife wavered. Panofsky looked over at Stratton. Everybody knew the rules.

It wasn't even a judgment call. Stratton made it one. It was Bobby Ho's play.

Panofsky's eyes flashed with anger.

In a sibilant, harsh undertone, Bobby Ho tongue-lashed the boy in Chinese.

Stratton watched the boy's eyes: flat, emotionless. They showed intelligence, but no surprise, no curiosity. And most of all, no fear.

At length, the boy nodded. Bobby Ho stepped back.

"It's all right."

Again Panofsky looked at Stratton.

"Let him go," Stratton said. Sometimes you break the rules.

The rag boy massaged his neck. With arrogance that could only have been inherited, he turned his back and stalked away, vanishing within seconds up an alley on pencil legs that seemed unequal to their sixty-pound burden.

"I told him we are on a secret training exercise with foreign friends, and that if he ever interrupts the PLA again, I will personally shoot him and everybody in his family."

"I hope he believed you."

"He believed me."

Panofsky snorted. Bloomfield grunted. Stratton sent them up to the far end of the main street to share their scorn.

Lights burned inside an old movie house that now featured Mao slogans on its sagging marquee. Bobby Ho prised open a side door. They cached the Kalashnikovs in the shadow outside; assault rifles are useless for close work.

Inside, the building smelled of molding concrete, stale tobacco and rancid bodies. Wooden chairs, neatly arranged, filled the pit of the theater. Empty, every one of them. The stage had been divided into four separate rooms, each with double doors facing the audience. All the doors were closed. From behind one set rose a high-pitched monotone that gave Stratton goose bumps.

"… Delano Roosevelt… Harry S. Truman… Dwight David Eisenhower… John Fitzgerald Kennedy… Lyndon Brains Johnson… Richard-"

"Baines," a deeper voice interrupted. "Lyndon Baines Johnson."

The first voice resumed, a record returned to its groove: "Lyndon Baines Johnson … Richard Milhous Nixon… "

The voices were Chinese. Stratton looked at Bobby Ho, who gave an elaborate shrug. A teacher and his student. What else could they be?

Stratton gestured and Bobby Ho nodded. He would check the area around the stage and watch Stratton's back.

The basement, intelligence had said. The prisoners are held in the basement.

They are paraded upstairs for onstage interrogation classes.

Stratton found the stairs without trouble. He went down with a gentle rush until he came to a stout wooden door. He nudged it open with his boot and let the pistol precede him.

Blackness. Absolute. And a terrible smell: fresh soap thinly overlaying the smell of fear and anger. Stratton let a cone of light from his Czech torch play around the room, and came within a heartbeat of firing at a sound in the far corner. Two rats, red-eyed and territorial.

It took Stratton fifteen minutes to explore the basement thoroughly. Six cells.

Stratton toured them, one at a time. In the fourth, scratched into the cheap concrete, a lover's testament had survived its author: "Rick amp; Connie Houston '70." With the leaden movements of an old man, Stratton visited the remaining two cells. In the last one, he found traces of blood the cleaners had missed.

They had come too late. How long? A day? Two? Stratton would never know and never forget. He ran the back of his hand across his lips to moisten them and tasted ashes. He had only another instant to mull his disappointment.

From above came the unmistakable sound of boots hammering the tired floorboards.

Not furtive. Authoritative boots.

Stratton listened from the head of the stairs. Two men, speaking Chinese. Plus the student and his professor. At least four. He and Bobby Ho had played against worse odds than that.

From the back of the theater came Bobby Ho's voice. Stratton understood none of the words. He understood too well what they meant. The tone was enough: arrogant, strong, with a touch of exasperation. An officer's voice, informing more than explaining.

Bobby Ho was playing the cover story, singing loudly enough to alert Stratton.

The cover was pretty much what Bobby Ho had told the ragged boy: He was a PLA officer down from Peking on a training mission with East Germans en route to North Vietnam to help the heroic struggle there. It was not a bad story. There were plenty of Caucasian instructors with the Viets, even some Germans. In the jacket of his pocket, Bobby Ho had a set of orders that looked like the real thing.

It might have worked. But it didn't. Three or four voices speaking at once drowned out Bobby Ho. The shouts grew louder. Wood smashed. Bodies fell.

Stratton didn't hear Bobby Ho again until he screamed.

Stratton rammed through the door with the pistol ready. The neatly ordered folding chairs lay in matchstick piles. In their chaos stood four Chinese, two uniformed, the other two in bureaucrats' white short-sleeved shirts, their red books of quotations clutched protectively. As Stratton's eye recorded, his brain raced to establish target priority. The student and his professor were unarmed.

Shoot last. The other two both had pistols. One was pressed against the head of a kneeling Bobby Ho. Its owner was screaming at Stratton.

Stratton let his gun arm come down, slowly, with emphasis. He reversed his grip on the pistol. Holding it by the butt, he walked toward the Chinese.