The Girl from Junchow Read online

  In his heart he was certain their search for Jens Friis was doomed to failure, but he never uttered a word of this to Lydia. The Soviet State was too massive and too resolute a fist to prize open, and anyway their father was surely dead by now. Few could survive in those terrible camps where conditions were so harsh. The slave work in mines or on railways or canals or roads in freezing Siberian temperatures was brutal. Worse than brutal. Life out there was too thin, a brittle thread too easily snapped. The death rate was unimaginable.

  Nevertheless, Alexei had come. Why?

  Night after night on their long journey into Russia, he’d lain awake in bed in the early hours of the morning in some flea-bitten hostel or other smoking cigarette after cigarette. He’d been forced to listen to the snores and loose farts of the other men in the Soviet communal dormitories while he considered and discarded one plan after another. In reality he knew planning was pointless. They had no way of knowing what lay ahead, so what purpose did it serve?

  None. Absolutely none. But he was military trained and could no more stop his thoughts making precise preparations than he could prevent this sudden burst of hope at the sight of the commandant’s wife. He looked across at his sister on the station platform. She was totally unaware of how she drew eyes to herself, envious eyes. Not for her drab brown coat or her straight young back. Not even for her flame-colored hair, which she’d tucked under her woolen hat as he’d instructed, but which crawled back out in rebellious tendrils as soon as she wasn’t paying attention.

  No. Not for any of those did the eyes follow her. It was because there was an irrepressible air about her, an energy that they all envied, all craved. There was something unbroken, untamed in the way she swung her head or darted her eyes. They envied her that. However much he clothed her in drooping coats and stuck ugly hats on her head, he couldn’t hide it. He lit himself another cheroot and saw Lydia turn her head, give him a soft, almost shy, smile.

  He knew why he’d come. He’d come for her.

  “WE’RE CLOSE NOW.”

  Alexei’s words caught Lydia by surprise. They were about to climb on to the train. Just when it seemed they’d be stranded for yet another interminable day, the train had announced itself with a belch of smoke. The crush of passengers surged around them on the platform but the big Cossack grinned, holding them back from the steps to make space for Lydia. Alexei offered a hand to help her up the steps into the train, and that was when he said, “We’re close now.”

  “It’s taken us long enough.” She felt a rush of affection as she gripped his hand.

  “It’s just a matter of narrowing the distance, day by day.”

  “I know, and we’re getting better at it, Alexei. We’re close now and we’ll stay that way.”

  He hesitated, but he returned the pressure of her fingers. Only then did it occur to Lydia that she may have misunderstood. Alexei may not have been talking about them—about himself and her. He could have been referring to the fact that they were getting closer to the camp. Suddenly she felt mortified at her blunder.

  “Lydia.” Alexei leapt up on the step behind her and touched her shoulder. “I’m glad I came.”

  She turned and looked at him. “I’m glad you did too,” she said.

  LYDIA TUCKED THE RUG TIGHTLY AROUND HER KNEES AND SANK deeper into her seat between Alexei and Popkov. The train carriage was full but most of her fellow travelers were dozing. An old man over by the door was snuffling into his moustache.

  “What part of Russia do you hail from, girl?”

  Lydia felt pleased by the question. It made all the aching hours of hard work worth the effort. For months now she’d spoken nothing but Russian and was even finding herself thinking in Russian now. The words seemed to fit inside her mouth as if finally they belonged there. From the moment they left China, Alexei and Popkov adamantly refused to speak anything but Russian to her.

  She’d groaned and moaned and whined, but Alexei wouldn’t budge. It was fine for him. He’d lived in Leningrad until he was twelve years old and had the advantage that even in China after the Bolshevik Revolution his mother, Countess Serova, had insisted on speaking her native tongue within the home. So no problems for him. The words flowed from him like black Russian oil, and even though he spoke English as elegantly as any English country squire, he refused to let even one word of it pass his lips.

  Lydia had cursed him. In English. In Russian. Even in Chinese.

  “You bastard, Alexei, you’re enjoying this. Help me out here.”

  “Nyet.”

  “Damn you.”

  He’d smiled that infuriating smile of his and watched her make a mess of it again and again. It had been a lonely start for her, isolated by her lack of words, but now, though she hated to admit it, she realized he’d been right. She’d learned fast, and now she enjoyed using the language her Russian mother had refused to teach her.

  “Russian?” her mother, Valentina, would say in their Chinese attic with a scowl on her beautiful fine-boned face, her dark eyes flashing with contempt. “What good is Russian now? Russia is finished. Look how those murdering Bolsheviks destroy my poor country and strip her naked. I tell you, maleeshka, forget Russia. English is the language of the future.”

  Then she’d toss her long silky hair as if tossing all Russian words out of her head.

  But now in a cold and smelly train rattling its way across the great flat plain of northern Russia, Lydia was cramming those words into her own head and listening to the woman opposite her asking, “What part of Russia do you hail from?”

  “I come from Smolensk,” she lied and saw the woman nod, satisfied.

  “From Smolensk,” she said again, and liked the sound of it.

  Four

  China

  THE CAVE WAS COLD. COLD ENOUGH TO FREEZE the breath of the gods, yet too shallow to risk a fire. Chang An Lo had hunkered down in the entrance, still as one of the brittle gray rocks that littered the naked mountainside all around him. No movement. Nothing. Gray against the unrelenting gray of the winter sky. But outside the cave a thin dusty crust of snow swirled off the frozen scree and formed stinging tumbles of ice in the air that clung to his eyelashes and nicked the skin of his lips till they bled. He didn’t notice. Behind him water trickled down the lichen-draped walls, a whispery treacherous sound that seeped into his mind sharper than the cold.

  Hold the mind firm.

  Mao Tse-tung’s words. The powerful new leader who had wrenched control of the Chinese Communist Party for himself.

  Chang blinked his eyes, freeing them from ice, and felt a rogue kick of anger in his guts. Focus. He fought to still his mind, to focus on what was to come. Let the gutter-licking gray dogs of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Army learn what he had in store for them, discover what was waiting on the rail track in the valley below. Like an alligator waits in the great Yangzte River. Unseen. Unheard. Until its teeth tear you apart.

  Chang moved, no more than the slightest flick of his gloved hand, but it was enough to draw a slender figure from the back of the hollow that the wind and rain had carved out of the rock. The figure, like Chang, wore a heavy cap and padded coat that robbed it of any shape, so only the soft voice in his ear indicated that his companion was female. She crouched beside him, her movements as fluid as the water that seeped into his mind.

  “Are they coming?” she whispered.

  “The snowdrifts across the valleys will have delayed the train. But yes, it’s coming.”

  “Can we be certain?”

  “Hold your mind firm.” Chang echoed his leader’s words.

  His sharp black eyes scanned the mountainous landscape around him. China was an unforgiving land, especially harsh on those who had to scrape a living from its bleak treeless terrain up here where the relentless winds from Siberia raked the surface free of soil like fingernails scraping dirt off the skin. Yet something about this place satisfied his soul, something hard and demanding, the mountains a symbol of stillness and balance.


  Not like the soft humid breezes that he had grown used to in recent months down south in the provinces of Hunan and Jiangxi. That was where the Communist heartland lay. There in Mao Tse-tung’s own hideout near Nanchang, Chang had smelt a sticky sweetness in the air that turned his stomach. It was in the paddy fields. On the terraces. In the Communist training camps. That smell of corruption. Of a man crazed by power.

  Chang had spoken to no one about his awareness of it, told none of his brother Communists of his sense that something at the heart of things wasn’t quite as it should be. They were all, himself included, willing to fight Chiang Kai-shek’s ruling Nationalists and die for what they believed in, yet . . . Chang inhaled sharply. His friend Li Ta-chao had been dedicated to the cause and had died with his sixty comrades in the heart of Peking itself. Chang spat his disgust onto the barren rock. His friend had been betrayed. Executed by slow strangulation. There was nothing definite Chang could point to and say, This is where the corruption lies. Just an uneasy rustle in his soul. A cold wind that cut deep and made him wary.

  It was certainly nothing he could mention to Kuan. He turned to her now and studied her intense young face with its straight brows and high broad cheekbones. It wasn’t what any man would call a pretty face, but it possessed a strength and determination that Chang cared for. And when she smiled—which was rare—it was as if some dark demon vanished from her spirit and let the light inside her glow bright as the morning sun.

  “Kuan,” he murmured, “do you ever think about the lives we take when we commit ourselves to an action like this? About the parents bereaved? About the wives and children whose hearts will break when the knock comes to their door with the news?”

  Her body shivered close beside his shoulder and she turned her head quickly to face him, the soft pads of her cheeks red with cold. But he could sense the shiver was not one of horror, could see it in her eyes, hear it in the shallow rhythm of her breathing. It was a shiver of excitement.

  “No, my friend, I don’t,” she said. “You, Chang An Lo, are the one who planned this operation, who guided us here. We followed you, so surely you’re not . . .” Her voice trailed away, unwilling to give life to the words.

  “No, I’m not altering my plan.”

  “Good. The train is coming, you say.”

  “Yes. Soon. And Chiang Kai-shek’s dung eaters deserve to die. They massacre our brothers with no hesitation.”

  She nodded, a vehement jerk of her head, her breath coiling in the gray air.

  “We are at war,” Chang said, his eyes on the gun at his belt. “People die.”

  “Yes, a war we will win so that Communism can bring justice and equality to the people of China.” Up on the godforsaken icy mountain ledge, Kuan smiled at Chang and he felt the heat of it warm just the outer edge of the cold void that lay black and empty in the cavern of his chest.

  “Long live our great and wise leader, Mao,” Kuan said urgently.

  “Long live our leader,” Chang echoed.

  The doubts were there in those four words. His own ears could hear the weakness in them, little worms of disbelief burrowing deep, but Kuan’s eyes sparkled with conviction, satisfied with his echo. Her neat little ears had not detected the worms.

  Chang rose to his feet and drew a long slow breath, stilling the unsettled beat of his heart. In front of him the mountain fell away steeply to the narrow gully below and rose again in a sheer bleak rock face on the opposite side. No villages or cart tracks or even wild goat trails in sight, just the empty treeless landscape strewn with rocks cocooned in ice, and the twin snakes of silver metal that cut through the base of the valley. The rail track.

  For a brief moment he allowed himself to wonder how many Chinese lives had been lost, how many rockfalls had come crashing down on their heads, turning the rails red as they were laid on the ground. It was the fanqui, the Foreign Devils, who dynamited its path through the valley. They’d come and stomped all over China. They laid down their metal roads, indifferent to the voice of the land itself, their big elephant ears deaf to the anger of the spirits of the mountain.

  First the European uniforms marched over the land, swarming like flies across the yellow dust and stealing its wealth, but now it was the Nationalist Army of that strutting peacock, Chiang Kai-shek. He was tearing everything from under the feet of the Chinese people, even the grass in their fields and the green shoots in the paddies. It made Chang An Lo’s heart ache for them and for this vast and beautiful Middle Kingdom.

  “Kuan,” he said, tasting ice on his lips. “Contact Luo, then Wang. Tell them to lay the charges.”

  The young woman at his side slid the khaki canvas burden from her shoulder to the ground and began to unbuckle its straps and turn the dials with efficient skill. Kuan had trained as a lawyer in Peking but now was a radio expert, and it was her job to keep the various Communist cadres in constant touch on this mission. She worked well, with no fuss. This pleased Chang and made her an easy companion to him. He trusted her. Her only weakness was her stamina in the mountains.

  As she murmured into the mouthpiece, he closed his eyes and opened his mind. He turned his face northward, directly into the bitter wind that raced down from Siberia, and he breathed it deep into his lungs, let its teeth bite at the soft tissue within him.

  Was she there? His fox girl. Somewhere across the border in that foreign land?

  Could he taste her in the Russian wind?

  Smell her?

  Hear the clear bell of her laughter?

  He wouldn’t say her name, not even inside his mind. For fear that the whisper of it would betray her and bring the forces of vengeful spirits down on her copper-fire head inside Russia itself. She had stolen something from the gods and they did not forgive.

  “It is time,” he said with an abruptness that took Kuan by surprise.

  “Now?” she asked.

  “Now.”

  Quickly she buckled up the canvas straps, but by the time her cold fingers had finished the job Chang was already moving fast down the mountainside.

  DEATH. IT SEEMED TO STALK HIM. OR DID HE STALK IT?

  All around him bodies lay torn to shreds, limbs and torsos blasted to limp chunks of flesh and bone that were attracting crows before they were even cold. One head, a young man’s with black blood-streaked hair and one eye missing from its socket, perched on a boulder ten meters from the wreck of the train and stared straight at Chang. A head, no body. Chang felt the finger of death touch his heart till he shivered, turned away, and walked down the broken line of the train. Glass crunched under his feet.

  Carriages at both ends had been blown apart by the dual explosions. Ripped open into a raw and tangled twist of metal and timber, bodies spewed out like wolf bait on the icy ground. As Chang prowled past the carnage, he hardened his heart against the screams and reminded himself that these men were his enemies who were traveling south with the sole purpose of slaughtering Communists, determined to destroy Mao’s Red Army. But somewhere deep beyond his reach, his heart wept for them.

  “You.”

  He pointed at a young soldier in the gray uniform and red armband of the Chinese Communist forces who was dragging a bleeding figure from the wreckage. The wounded man was a Nationalist Army captain, judging by the uniform he wore, and his gut had been torn open by the explosion. He was trying to hold in his bloody innards with his hands, cradling them, but one end of his intestines had slipped from his grasp and trailed behind him. It was unwinding as the young Communist pulled him free, yet the Nationalist captain didn’t scream.

  “You,” Chang said again. “Stop that. You know the orders.”

  The young soldier nodded. He looked as if he would vomit.

  “Only those who can walk will travel with us. The rest . . .”

  In a slow, reluctant movement, while Chang stood over him, the young soldier slung the rifle off his back. Despite the ice in the air, sweat formed on his brow. He had the heavy features and broad hands of a farmer’s son, a peasan
t away from home for the first time in his life. And now this.

  Chang recalled his own first killing, seared into his soul.

  The soldier nestled the rifle to his shoulder exactly as he’d been taught, but his hands were shaking uncontrollably. The man on the ground didn’t beg, just closed his eyes and listened to the wind and to what he knew would be the last beats of his heart. Abruptly Chang drew his own pistol, leaned down to the captain, placed the muzzle at his temple, and pulled the trigger. The body jerked. Chang bowed his head for a split second and commended the man’s spirit to his ancestors.

  Death. It seemed to stalk him.

  THE TRAIN’S MASSIVE STEAM ENGINE HAD BUCKED OFF THE damaged track and plunged nose first down the bank, but just managed to stay upright. Behind it lurched the baggage wagon at an odd angle, but the only baggage it was carrying came in twenty long wooden boxes, four of which had splintered open in the crash. Chang’s heart raced at the sight of them. He leapt inside the wagon, feet braced against the buckled slope of the floor, and rested a hand possessively on one of the open boxes.

  “Luo,” he called.

  Luo Wen-cai, the young commander of the small assault force, clambered up awkwardly after him. A slow-healing bullet wound in his thigh hampered his usual quick movements, but nothing hampered the grin that shot across his broad face.

  “Chang, my friend, what treasure you have found for us!”

  “Tokarev rifles,” Chang murmured.

  This was even better than he’d expected. This haul would please Chou En-lai at Party headquarters down south in Shanghai and put rifles where they were needed—in the military training camps, in the fists of the eager young men who came to fight for the Communist cause. Chou En-lai would preen himself and sharpen his tiger claws as if he’d hunted them down himself. This success would gain him even greater support from the mao-zi, the Hairy Ones.