The aide nodded. Every good officer under whom he had served had a strong sense of history. He just hoped the general was wrong--facing off with the Chinese, even with the firepower they had ama.s.sed, was not a welcome thought.

IN BEIJING, GENERAL Tudeng Quing was offering President Jintao a possible solution.

"If we pull all but two thousand troops out of Tibet, concentrating those left only in Lhasa, we could divert the rest to Urumqi in the Xinjiang Province. They could be in place starting tomorrow."

"How many?" Jintao asked.

"Say a thousand by plane in the next few hours," Quing said. "The tanks and armored carriers have a nine-hundred-mile journey. Running them full out at forty miles an hour with refueling and such, they could be in place tomorrow this time."

"We don't have any troops closer?" Jintao asked.

"Airborne, we can bring them in from anywhere," Quing noted.

"It's the armor we need--other than Tibet, the closest armored division we require is almost twice that distance away, and the trip is over rougher terrain. My aides have calculated three or four days minimum."

Jintao sat back in his chair and stared at the ceiling. Then he turned to Legchog Raidi Zhuren, the chairman of the Tibet Autonomous Region, who had so far remained quiet.

"Will two thousand troops give you a sufficient level of security until we can replace your armor in four or five days?" Jintao asked.

"Mr. President," Zhuren said. "Tibet has been quiet for years--I don't see that changing any time soon. Now, if I may be excused, I should be leaving for my return to Tibet."

Jintao turned to General Quing. "Order it done."

Next, Jintao turned to the Chinese amba.s.sador to Russia.

"You," he said loudly, "figure out what the Russians have planned.

If they are planning to annex Mongolia, let them know we won't stand for that. The Mongols conquered us once--I'm not going to give them a chance to try it again."

Within two hours of the meeting, the first Chinese transport planes began to land at Lhasa Airport and began ferrying troops north to Xinjiang Province. In the haste to counter the Russian threat, the organization of the Chinese army in Tibet would suffer. Junior officers would be placed in charge of partially staffed battalions. Weapons and ammunition would be depleted. The mission and purpose would be compromised.

CABRILLO WAS NAPPING in the rear of the Gulfstream when his secure telephone buzzed.

"Go ahead," he said, instantly awake.

"It's me," Overholt said, "with good news. The NSA just called the DCI, who called me. The Russian bluff is working. Transport planes are leaving the airport in Lhasa and hauling troops north. In addition, a column of tanks has just left the city and they're traveling at breakneck speed. Everyone said it's looking up so far."

Cabrillo glanced at his watch. "I'll be there in about an hour or so.

Are we all set up for the meeting?"

"It's all taken care of," Overholt said.

"Good," Cabrillo said. "If we reach an agreement there, I'll continue north."

"You really think you can sell everybody on this idea?" Overholt asked.

ll 336.

"This mission's like an onion," Cabrillo said. "Every time I peel back a layer, there's a layer underneath."

"That's not the half of it," Overholt said. "The Dalai Lama has a new plan."

"I can't wait," Cabrillo said.

"I think you're going to like it," Overholt told him.

THE OREGON DOCKED off Ho Chi Minh City. The team that would enter Tibet was transported by sh.o.r.e boat to land. Then they were driven in a Vietnamese air force truck to the airport, where the C-130 sat waiting. The total Corporation force would number a baker's dozen.

Six men--Seng, Murphy, Reyes, King, Meadows and Kasim-- would be tasked with the offensive operations. They would link up with the Dungkar already inside the country and direct them in the proper targets to hit first. Crabtree and Gannon, who were already in Bhutan awaiting the team's arrival, would handle supply and logistics. Adams and Gunderson would fly, while Lincoln was in charge of setting up and operating the Predator drones. Huxley was tasked with setting up a medical facility to treat anyone wounded or injured.

The thirteenth member was Cabrillo. He would arrive after he finished his pair of meetings.

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To the untrained, the mission looked like suicide: a dozen or so against a force that was close to two thousand. Odds of one hundred and fifty-plus to one. It looked like a bloodbath in the making. A trained observer, however, would be praying for the Chinese troops. First, one had to consider the Dungkar, the shadowy underground Chinese opposition thought to number in the thousands in Lhasa. When unleashed, the Dungkar would burn with a fever that only comes when fighting an enemy on home soil. Second was the element of surprise. The Chinese were not planning for a concentrated and expertly executed coup d'etat in the next twenty-four hours. The third was the most basic. It is almost a certainty that a well-planned offense will defeat an unplanned defense every single time.

That was where the Corporation excelled.

Already, most of the Chinese forces inside Tibet were heading north in a helter-skelter deployment that had left little time for planning and even less for preparation. The troops left around Lhasa were not the cream of the crop; they were the leftovers--the administration clerks, mechanics and painters, plodders and planners. The officers were not combat trained, would not be knowledgeable about their individual soldiers'

strengths and weaknesses, and would lack a complete picture of where all the parts fit together.

Right now in Tibet, the army was a jigsaw puzzle without a design.

KASIM WALKED FROM the truck and approached the C-130 radio operator. "What have you got from inside?" he asked.

"We have another plane circling out of sight of the Chinese deployment, capturing their signals and bouncing them here," the operator said. "Right now, most of the communications pertain to laying fuel dumps on the road north. The tanks are outrunning the fuel supply."

"Have you heard from the tail?" Kasim asked.

The operator, a Chinese American formerly employed by the Defense Intelligence Agency and now attached to the CIA proprietary air line supplying the C-130, scanned his notes. "As of nineteen thirty Zulu time, the rear of the convoy had pa.s.sed through Naggu."

"They're making good time," Kasim noted. "At this speed, they will pa.s.s through Amdo before eleven p.m. and then another two hours or so and they will make the border with Tsinghai Province."

The operator stared at a cla.s.sified satellite photograph and compared it with a detailed Defense Mapping Agency map. "The pa.s.s at Basatongwula Shan will slow them some; it's riddled with steep mountains and tight turns. The alt.i.tude is almost sixty-one hundred meters."

"Twenty thousand feet," Kasim said. "That's high. The border's about two hundred fifty miles from Lhasa," Kasim noted, "and our reports state these are the older Type Fifty-nine tanks. That gives them a range of two hundred seventy miles on a tank of diesel, or about a hundred more if they have the external fuel tanks mounted."

The operator nodded. "I've been watching the progress. The Type Fifty-nine on a road can top out around fifty kilometers an hour or thirty-plus miles an hour. Normally, however, they cruise at something like twenty miles an hour."

"What are you saying?" Kasim asked.

The operator smiled and reached for a pack of cigarettes. He tapped one from the pack, lit it with a Zippo lighter, then took a drag. Blowing out the smoke, he answered.

"What I'm saying is that these boys are running at nearly full speed no matter what the cost in fuel usage. They will need to stop in Amdo and fill the tanks so they can make the pa.s.s. Then they'll have a run downhill that will take them to Kekexili for the next stop."

"So when they reach there sometime around breakfast Easter day,"

Kasim said, "they will be four hundred miles from Lhasa, with a twenty-thousand-foot pa.s.s in between them and us."

"Sounds about right," the operator said.

"Thanks for the help," Kasim said.

A line of Vietnamese air force airmen carried the last of the crates aboard the C-130. Hanley stood off to the side, talking to the Vietnam340 .

ese general in charge of the arrangements. Kasim watched as Hanley handed the man an envelope, then the two shared a laugh. Hanley shook the general's hand, then walked over to the C-130.

"Mr. Hanley," Kasim said, "I have a plan."

THE GULFSTREAM G550 carrying Cabrillo and the Golden Buddha landed at Amritsar, India, and Cabrillo and the icon were flown in a helicopter the rest of the way to Little Lhasa, near Dharamsala in the northern Himachal Pradesh region of northern India.

The aide quickly ushered him in to his meeting with the Dalai Lama.

"Your Holiness," Cabrillo said as he entered and bowed his head slightly.

The Dalai Lama stood silently, staring at Cabrillo for a full minute.

Then he smiled.

"You are a good man," he said at last. "Langston told me--but I needed to be sure for myself."

"Thank you, sir," Cabrillo said. "These are the papers that we recovered from inside the Buddha," he said, handing them to the Dalai Lama's aide. "I'll need them transcribed before my meeting with the Russians."

"Copy them and translate them into English," the Dalai Lama ordered his aide. "Mr. Cabrillo will need to leave again shortly."

The Dalai Lama motioned to a long couch, where Overholt was already seated. Cabrillo sat on the end and the Dalai Lama slipped between the two men. "So explain the plan," he said.

"I believe the Russians will support your bid to regain your country.

They will offer the muscle to deter the Chinese from making an a.s.sault once we gain control of Lhasa, in return for the rights to develop what you claim those doc.u.ments represent: the vast oil reserves of the Himalayas."

"Their location's known only to us," said the Dalai Lama. "In those 341 doc.u.ments. So--your president got them to the border by offering them the aid package," the Dalai Lama said, "but to fight, they need more."

"Exactly," Cabrillo said.

"And you?" the Dalai Lama asked. "Your company? What were you hired to do?"

"We were hired to steal the Golden Buddha and to pave the way for your return. Once you are back inside Tibet, our obligation would, by the contract wording, end."

"So I would be left--how do you say it?--high and dry," the Dalai Lama said.

"Hard to say," Cabrillo admitted, "and this has bothered me and my a.s.sociates."

"Why?" the Dalai Lama said. "Are you not mercenaries? Once your obligation is over, don't you just blend into the night?"

Cabrillo thought for a minute how to answer this question. He paused and thought as the Dalai Lama waited. "It's a little more complex than that, Your Holiness. If we did what we did just for money, we would have all retired by now. It's more involved than that. In the past, most of us worked for one government agency or another, and we were compelled by Congress, or public opinion, to do things we knew or felt were wrong. We don't do those things anymore. We were formed to make a profit, that's for sure, but as much as we like the money, we are also cognizant of the chances that arise for us to somehow right the wrongs of others."

"You are speaking of Karma," the Dalai Lama said. "Something I am most aware of."

Cabrillo nodded. "We have decided that to leave you alone to fight the Chinese would be wrong. The solution came to us when we realized the significance of the papers inside the Golden Buddha."

"And I a.s.sume your company will profit from such a deal?" the Dalai Lama asked.

"Is that bad?" Cabrillo asked.

"Not necessarily," the Dalai Lama said, "but explain more."

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Ten minutes later, Cabrillo was finished.

"I'm impressed," the Dalai Lama said, "now let me explain mine."

Another five minutes pa.s.sed as the Dalai Lama spoke.

"Brilliant," Cabrillo said when the Dalai Lama had finished.

"Thank you," the Dalai Lama said, "but to sway the vote will take funds--will you bear the cost?"

"We made a little money on a side deal," Cabrillo said, thinking of the $100 million in bearer bonds. "So the costs are not a problem."

Overholt had remained silent as the two spoke. Now he interjected.

"If you can pull this off," he said eagerly, "the president will kiss you."

"Mr. Cabrillo," the Dalai Lama said, "this gives us both an opportunity to keep the bloodshed down, while at the same time offering our actions a legitimacy that is indisputable. If you can make this happen, I will agree to your deal as offered."

"Thank you, Your Holiness," Cabrillo said.

"Good luck, Mr. Cabrillo," the Dalai Lama said. "May Buddha bless your mission."

After a short meeting with Overholt, Cabrillo collected the translated pages and maps, then climbed back in the helicopter and was flown back to Amritsar. President Putin had been promised the meeting would be worth the effort. Cabrillo would not fail to deliver.

JUST AFTER MIDNIGHT, the C-130 carrying the members from the Corporation landed in Thimbu, Bhutan, and the plane was surrounded by a dozen Philippine Special Forces soldiers. Off to the side, the eight Bell 212 helicopters were aligned in a row, with ten feet separating each ship.

A large domed hangar was nearby, with the door open and light spilling out onto the runway. Carl Gannon walked from inside and extended his hand to Eddie Seng. "They tell me you're in charge until the chairman arrives," he said. "Let me show you around."

The others followed Seng and Gannon inside the hangar. "I've man aged to scrounge up radios and have established a link with the Oregon," he said, pointing to a wooden table with a computer and a stack of papers. "The latest data is on top."

Alongside the table were several corkboards displaying maps of Tibet, satellite weather images and other doc.u.ments. A chalkboard was erected on an easel, where Seng could make notes and draw the plans, as well as a large plastic-covered map showing the city of Lhasa that was taped to a piece of plywood and sat atop another table.

Off to the side, milling around an area with a large coffeepot, small refrigerator, and cardboard boxes containing food, were the eighteen mercenary pilots. Murphy made his way to the coffee, poured a cup and greeted an old friend. "Gurt," he said, "you old dog."