Shadow Puppets Page 0,102

let me tell you right now, you are perfectly free to tell them that you think it may have been the same person who lived in that little cave near the bridge. You may lead them to that place."

She turned to the child who had brought her Peter Wiggin's message. "Bury that paper in the ground until the war is over. It will still be there when you want it."

She spoke to them all once more. "None of you did anything except carry the bodies of the dead to the places I told you to carry them. You would have told the authorities, but the only authorities you know are dead."

She stretched out her arms. "Oh, my beloved people, I told you I would bring terrible days to you." She did not have to pretend to be sad, and her tears were real as she walked among them, touching hands, cheeks, shoulders one more time. Then she strode out along the road and out of the village. The men who were assigned to do it would blow up the nearby bridge an hour from now. She would not be there. She would be walking along paths in the woods, heading for the command post from which she would run this campaign of sabotage.

For it would not be enough to blow up these bridges. They had to be ready to kill the engineers who would come to repair them, and kill the soldiers who would come to protect them, and then, when they brought enough soldiers and enough engineers that they could not be stopped from rebuilding the bridges, they would have to cause rockfalls and mudslides to block the narrow canyons.

If they could seal this border for three days. the advancing Muslim armies would have time, if they were competently led, to break through and cut off the huge Chinese army that still faced them, so that the reinforcements, when they finally made it through, would be far, far too late. They, too, would be cut off in their turn.

Ambul had asked for only one favor from Alai, after setting up the meeting between him and Bean and Petra. "Let me fight as if I were a Muslim, against the enemy of my people."

Alai had assigned him, because of his race, to serve among the Indonesians, where he would not look so very different.

So it was that Ambul went ashore on a stretch of marshy coast somewhere south of Shanghai. They went as near as they could on fishing boats, and then clambered into flatbottomed marsh skimmers, which they rowed among the reeds, searching for firm ground.

In the end, though, as they knew they would, they had to leave the boats behind and trudge through miles of mud. They carried their boots in their backpacks, because the mud would have sucked them off if they had tried to wear them.

By the time the sun came up, they were exhausted, filthy, insectbitten, and famished.

So they rubbed the mud off their feet and ankles, pulled on their socks, put on their boots, and set off at a trot along a trace that soon became a trail, and then a path along the low dike between rice paddies. They jogged past Chinese peasants and said nothing to them.

Let them think we're conscripts or volunteers from the newly conquered south, on a training mission. We don't want to kill civilians. Get in from the coast as far as you can. That's what their officers had said to them, over and over.

Most of the peasants might have ignored them. Certainly they saw no one take off at a run to spread the alarm. But it was not yet noon when they spotted the dust plume of a fast-moving vehicle on a road not far off.

"Down," said their commander in Common.

Without hesitation they flopped down in the water and then frogged their way to the edge of the dike, where they remained hidden. Only their officer raised his head high enough to see what was happening, and his whispered commentary was passed quietly along the line so all fifty men would know.

"Military truck," he said.

Then, "Reservists. No discipline."

Ambul thought: This is a dilemma. Reservists are probably local troops. Old men, unfit men, who treated their military service like a social club, until now, when somebody trotted them out because they were the only soldiers in the area. Killing them would be like killing peasants.

But of course they were armed, so not killing them might be committing