It was also true that Colonel Hu drank to blot out the emotions that these dread people had engendered in him. When he at last returned from his tour of duty in Cambodia, he had knelt down when no one was watching and pressed his lips lovingly into the soil of his native China.

He drank to forget, but he could not forget. The terror crept through even the most serious drunk. Only when he pa.s.sed out near to dawn was his mind washed clean for a few hours. But when he awoke, the memories rushed back at him again like howling demons until he wished only to rip his own brain apart.

Instead, he steeled himself and got on with his job. And now his job was brainwashing Qi Lin.

This was no easy task. In fact, she presented a number of unique and at first baffling problems. That was quite all right with Colonel Hu. The more difficult the subject, the better he liked it because the deeper his mind was occupied. Work at least kept the hounds inside his head at bay.

The nights were what Colonel Hu dreaded most.

Now his men were asleep, and Huaishan Han had departed, having spent all day with Hu and his special subject; Hu was alone, face to face with the chill solitary night filled as it always was with the scrabbling of nocturnal creatures, the wind rustling down the trees like faraway voices a voices of the dying, of the d.a.m.ned. It was then that Colonel Hu reached for the bottle.

At times, he would not even bother with a gla.s.s; it made the river of surcease flow too slowly.

On this night, consumed by gusty winds that rattled sand from the Gobi against the windows, Colonel Hu lay in a semitorpor. He had not dared to touch liquor while old, crooked-backed Huaishan Han was here. But Huaishan Han had left hours ago and the night grew long. Colonel Hu drank. One hand now grasped the neck of a nearly empty bottle of liquor with the kind of desperation only a drowning man summons up.

Tiny droplets of sweat glistened like sad diamonds in his brush-cut hair. His eyes were filmy with the tread of ghosts marching in an endless parade through the interstices of his skull. His uniform shirt was open at the neck and deep crescents of sweat showed beneath each arm and down the front where the starched fabric clung to his fluttering chest, losing all shape.

His feet were bare; he seemed to feel the squelch of that mixture of mud, blood and offal peculiar to ravaged Cambodia. It had seemed to him that there was no soil left in the country. This putrid compound slid across the valleys, fields, and lakesides like the effluvia of some monstrous volcano.

Colonel Hu started and shuddered, hiccuping. He said something, indecipherable even to himself.

Then he looked up. Qi lin was framed in the doorway.

There was nothing but utter blackness behind her and this stygian color seemed to dwarf her completely, lending her the appearance of a street waif, thin and ill-fed, living from moment to moment.

"Is Huaishan Han gone? Already?"

"What are you doing here?" Colonel Hu asked with slightly slurred diction.

"My sleep was filled with a" Qi lin's quavery voice trailed off. She seemed so young, so a "With what?"

"With life. Teeming life."

Colonel Hu thought of his own sleep and what it was like without the utter oblivion alcohol provided. He shuddered again and swallowed.

He raised his hand, discovered the bottle still in it and waved the thing at her. "Come in." There were guards all around the perimeter of the encampment but none at her doorstep. That was not considered sound psychological practice. "Sit down."

Qi lin did as she was told, perching herself on a bamboo-and-canvas ottoman. She looked like a bird, thin and frail seeming, peering at him with those huge dark enigmatic eyes. They were odd eyes; they had held Colonel Hu's attention from the moment he first saw her. They were bright with intelligence, glossy with a more elemental quality he could not name. They were Chinese eyes, to be sure. But they were also something else. There was a Western aspect to them, as if the epicanthic folds were not complete or had been subtly altered in the formless genetic state. Colonel Hu knew where that came from.

Her eyes held him now, their intensity burning through the deadening liquor like hot sunlight through a morning haze.

"Tell me about your dreams," Colonel Hu said.

"I was in a city," Qi lin said obediently. "It was big, big as a hive. It was built on a hill a on many hills so that the streets were never flat. Never ever. They rose and fell like the ocean tides. It was strange."

"In what way was it strange?"

"I felt perfectly at home there," Qi lin said with a bit of wonder in her voice. "I don't see how that's possible. I know the jungle. I know that is where I have been, where I feel at home. You have told me that time and again."

"It is true."

"Then the city"

"The city is a dream."

"But it felt so real. I dreamt in such detail a the streets, the houses, shops. Even the people."

"What people?" Colonel Hu was sitting up straighter. He ran a hand through his hair, wiped the wetness away on his trouser leg.

"I don't know."

"But you said you dreamt in such detail."

"I did."

"Then describe the people."

"I can't."

"You are lying to me."

Qi lin gasped and her eyes were filled with fear. Such a pity, Colonel Hu thought, because all the gloss went out of them. They were dulled to opacity and then they became merely eyes as everyone had eyes, nothing special at all.

"No!"

"Then tell me!"

"I can't!"

"Tell me! Tell me!" Colonel Hu became aware that he was shouting. He had hold of her and was shaking her violently. He felt a constriction in his throat, a rage suffusing him as the choir of the d.a.m.ned sang its funereal dirge in his inner ear.

Qi lin was sobbing, a tender shoot trembling before the force of a gale. "Oh, Buddha!" she gasped. "Buddha protect me!"

Colonel Hu's rage doubled and he shook her maniacally. "Why do you invoke the name of Buddha here? That is forbidden! Strictly forbidden!"

His rage fell upon her like cruel sleet, blinding her, making her choke and pant for breath. She felt gripped by forces beyond her control, forces which threatened to rip aside the fabric of this life to which she had become acclimated. That would mean a return to the painthe awful, ringing, echoing, reverberating pain, behind which lurked the nothingness that froze her marrow.

Thus she struggled, hurling herself against him so that her tears streaked his cheeks, running into his eyes, salt droplets clinging to his lips, trembling just before he swallowed them.

Colonel Hu felt her against him and he felt warmth. Her tremors went through him. It was as if he was feeling her soul shaking itself apart. And without even thinking, he gathered her into him.

Just as two animals in the wildenemies evenwill seek one another out and share in bodily warmth in order to survive the bitter cold of nature's crudest months, so Colonel Hu acted out of instinct. It was as much for his own survival as it was for hers, though he might not yet understand that.

All he was aware of was the suffering.

"Little one," he murmured. "Little one," hearing her tiny whimpers and within them the anguished cries of the mult.i.tudes who had been mutilated in the name of a blasted, nihilistic ideology without heart or soul. Those same mult.i.tudes through whom he had tramped, their muck seeping into his boots, squelching between his toes.

He felt her curling up against him, her sobs slackening, her tears drying, and with them, the terror in her soul.

Warmth began to suffuse him and he wondered at it because it was a warmth from an outside source. Colonel Hu was not a celibate. He took his pleasure from a variety of women. But all of them had thighs like alabaster, cool and ungiving. Their jade gates were like marble, smooth, drawing from him his hot seed during the clouds and the rain but nothing more.

Now it seemed to him as if he had the sun in his lap instead of this small frail woman who had appeared to him tonight as a girl. And gradually it dawned on him that the heat had worked a specific source in him. His loins were burning up. He was as stiff as stone.

Qi lin moved on him and he groaned.

Unplanned and unwanted. Worse, unthinkable. Nevertheless, Colonel Hu's sacred member arched upward and where it encountered the heat between Qi lin's thighs, the sensation was exquisite.

Colonel Hu did not wish to be aroused but he did not want an end to this life-giving warmth. Thus he hugged Qi lin to him as she hugged him, surrounding her with his arms and being thus surrounded himself.

He told himself that he did not desire her, that he could not, in fact, desire her. Her jade gate was as forbidden to him as invoking the name of Buddha was for her. He had been warned in no uncertain terms. In Qianmen, Jin Kanzhe had said, "Zheige lizi hai mei shu ne." The plum is not yet ripe. But that doesn't mean that she isn't dangerous. On the contrary. She is exceptionally deadly.

Such warmth could never emanate from death, Colonel Hu decided. In his mind, along with the singing chorus of the dead, all he wanted was to hold her. Other parts of him felt differently. He was warring with himself and had not Qi lin herself become an active factor he did not know what the outcome would have been.

That was all made academic, however, because she reached inward and gently grasped the head of his sacred member. The touch was so electric that for a moment Colonel Hu felt robbed of all breath. Volition went as well, and he surrendered to her touch.

In that moment he heard the rain begin to lash itself against the tiny windowpanes like an angry dragon's tail.

Colonel Hu felt the b.u.t.tons at his fly being opened one after another. Each one brought him closer to the heat. He reached up and began to open the b.u.t.tons on Qi lin's blouse. It was rough cotton, as were her drawstring trousers. Not prison garbthat, too, would have been unsound psychological practice.

He bared her firm ripe b.r.e.a.s.t.s at the same time that she wrapped her hand around his naked member. He shuddered and drew her b.r.e.a.s.t.s against his mouth. His lips opened to encompa.s.s the point of first one then the other.

Qi lin, licking her palm with her tongue, used the moisture to aid her ministrations. A storm tossed Colonel Hu as the storm outside bowed the tall trees, lashed at the groundcover and the buildings of the encampment.

Colonel Hu wanted with such desperation to touch her bare thighs that his fingers shook as they attempted to unknot the drawstrings. In the end, Qi lin was obliged to help him.

She slipped the trousers off without putting her feet to the floor. She was partly nude, since her blouse, though open, was still on, and this inflamed Colonel Hu even more. His sacred member was trembling as much as his hands.

He caressed her thighs and found them warm, not cool as alabaster. The flesh was smooth and soft beneath his callused fingers. The backs of his hands brushed against the thick thatch of hair and he inhaled quickly.

Qi lin, turning her palm in a circular motion across the head of hissacred member, guided him to the portals of her jade gate. She left him there, the bloated tip throbbing against her.

Colonel Hu groaned in antic.i.p.ation. He felt the unutterable softness of her brushing against his sensitive flesh and he felt the almost painful drawing up of his sacred sac.

He felt her slim arms come up over his shoulders, caressing his hairless skin. Her moist lips came forward, burying themselves in the side of his neck so that he felt little electric thrills race downward into his crotch. All sensation was gathered there. He felt comfortably bottom heavy as blood flowed into his engorged p.e.n.i.s.

Fingers in his ears and *he could stand it no longer. With a deep, drawn-out groan he heaved his hips upward, slicing through the fluttering portals.

At that instant, Qi lin's grip became sharply painful. One hand was on either side of his head, her left elbow braced against his face. Using the heel of her right hand as pressure and her left elbow as fulcrum, Qi lin jerked his head violently to the left.

The motion should have been enough to break his neck. She performed the maneuver quite correctly, just as she had been taught in the Gong lou-fu. It was Colonel Hu's amorous thrust that had changed all the vectors.

She heard a sharp crack, to be sure, but this was followed by his explosive string of expletives and her insides turned to water.

Colonel Hu felt a singing in his ears. His vision was blurred and there was pain somewhere along his nervous system. He was in a state of semishock and his physical reactions at least were sluggish because of the pooling of blood in his lower belly and thighs.

Yet his mind knew instantly what had occurred, and Jin Kanzhe's words bubbled up to him again. She is exceptionally deadly.

His hands were pinioned by her lithe thighs and he tried to free them. Pain lanced at him, canting his head at an angle. The chorus of the d.a.m.ned bleated shrilly in his head like lambs to the slaughter. His mind was filled with the yellow bilious skies of Cambodia, stained by napalm, rent by bombs and artillery fire.

She had hurt him badly. Twice he might have been killed during his tour of duty but was spared. His joss was good. He was not going to die now. Bunching his muscles mightily, he freed one hand and slashed it across her chest. She cried out but his extremity felt as heavy and unresponding as a sack of cement. His vision had cleared somewhat but there were still inconstant patches of blurriness that made him sick and dizzy with vertigo.

Oddly, insanely, he was still inside her, poking and prodding as he fought at her. The pain had not withered him and he could not understand that. He punched her in the stomach but he lacked any real momentum because they were at such close quarters.

He freed his other hand and hit cruelly at her breast. Then he felt her arms come around his head and he knew that she was going to try it again. He fought her with all the strength he had left in him. The trouble was that he was seated and thus much of his superior strength was negated. Too, she had damaged a number of nerve networks in her first attack.

Colonel Hu used his spatulate thumb, digging into the soft flesh at her collarbone. He had gone for her carotid but she had twisted, deflecting him. Now she had hold of his head and was applying pressure.

He gasped and swallowed, almost bit his tongue in two. He choked and coughed, tasting the salty sweet taste of his own blood.

He dug inward farther and felt a bone snap. She cried out and jammed her elbow into his eye, blinding him. Dizzied, Colonel Hu nevertheless raised his hand upward, feeling the slack place she had left open when she had retaliated. Felt her neck and elation soared within him. The carotid! Jammed his thumb inward in a vicious strike and felt the pressure come off his head for an instant.

Then blinding pain hit him between his thighs, pain that shot upward, turning his stomach inside out, clamping his heart between iron fists.

His thumb came away and Qi lin got the placement right and jammed the heel of her right hand against the side of his head.

Snap like thunder and Colonel Hu arched up as if struck by lightning. Qi lin let go and crawled off him. She kept her eyes on him as she picked up her trousers, backing away across the room. She put them on, b.u.t.toned her blouse, wincing with the pain of the small bone he had broken.

Outside, the night was alive with rain, silvery and flickering in the lights. She knew where he kept his gun and, taking it, checked it for ammunition. It was fully loaded. She jammed it into the waistband of her trousers and, grabbing up his military jacket, slung it around her shoulders. Then she went out into the unquiet night.

Colonel Hu, alone again, fell from his ungainly position in the chair. The fall revived him somewhat. His head was at an unnatural angle. He could hear a sound akin to a gushing water faucet and wondered at it.

He could not stand nor could he sit. Instead, he crawled. It took him a long time to reach the open door. He saw only intermittently. In between, like a landscape quickly revealed in lightning bursts, he saw the Khmer Rouge camp that had been his home for nearly two years. He heard voices shouting, harsh, guttural, the growling of hungry wolves. He heard the flowering of the bombs, bringing with them the pink flecks of flesh and slimy organs that stuck to one's face and clothes like glue.

Saw, also, the bowed backs and exposed napes of necks so obscenely vulnerable of those found wanting by Angka, the mysterious Khmer Rouge hierarchical organization that seemed forever shrouded in shadowy rumor. The pistol shots, rhythmic and rapid, as those deemed ant.i.thetical to Angka were coldly executed. A merciful death, he had been informed by a grinning monkey of a lieutenant. "In the old days," he said laughing, "when we were still struggling for power and did not yet have your benevolent backing, we could not afford to waste a bullet. We used clubs to beat them to death." He had spat. "That was the better way, I think. It developed fort.i.tude among our own soldiers."

Out in the storm, Colonel Hu was dying. He was only dimly aware of his surroundings. Consciousness was turned on and off in bright, pain-filled bursts. Within one of these machine-gun-fire episodes of lucidity, Colonel Hu realized that the sound of the gushing faucet that was following him was emanating from inside himself. His lungs felt heavy and full. It was a labor merely to take a breath.

He curled up on the ground. The rain beat down on him and the mud crept through his toes. That was his last memory, the squelching of the muck, the ground-up paste of humanity feeding upon itself, combining with the earth.

In time the wailing of the d.a.m.ned disappeared altogether, memory in a mist, an end to their hideous strength.

It took Jake almost three hours to get into the heart of Tokyo from Narita Airport. It was nothing special, just modern-day j.a.pan. The superhighways were clogged with b.u.mper-to-b.u.mper traffic from start to finish and, when he was at last dropped off at the Okura, he was as exhausted as if he had taken yet another plane ride to a different time zone.

While the porter was opening his bags for him, Jake threw all the papers he had picked up at Narita onto the bed. There wasn't one whose front page wasn't filled with news of the Yakuza wars.

The police were working around the clock but as was usual in acountry where violent crime was, by and large, not a way of life, they were having minimal success.

The special anti-Yakuza task force had been beefed up at the direct urging of Prime Minister Nakasone. Some arrests had been made the latest one as recently as early this morningbut the raid had netted only underlings. The Yakuza oyabun remained at large and, in Asahi Shimbun, at least, there was a blistering editorial aimed at the incompetence of the police.

Of Mikio Komoto there was no mention whatsoever, though his clan was often cited in the detailing of the war. Was that good news or bad? Jake was unable to read the portents.

Alone in the room, he thought of Bliss. Her voice was only a phone call away yet he made no move for the receiver. He did not want to speak with her now, did not want any soft emotion to creep around inside him. Softness or any lack of concentration could get him killed here.

He stared into s.p.a.ce. His father's voice swam in his head. His father's presence. There was a senescent aroma when he was near Jake that was peculiar to him: warm, rich, comforting. It reminded Jake of the beach at Shek-O where they would sit for hours in the sunshine, the wavelets of the South China Sea lapping around their ankles. Speaking of many things a and sometimes of nothing at all. Merely being together. Basking in the closeness that the intervening decades had made new, unique, more powerful.

Gone. All gone.

We have many enemies in many countries. They will seek to smash the yuhn-hyun.