Anthony Grey - The Chinese Assassin

A train of fifty camels was passing that night, black shapes swaying through the wind, darker than the distant mountains. The pale northern light that glimmers all through the sleeping hours in summer and early autumn on those steppes was already brightening the bottom of the sky across the Soviet border to the north.

Old Tsereng Toktokho, wrapped against the cold lash of the night wind in his peaked hat of fur and the heavy sheepskin coat that was almost as old as he was, sat astride his restless horse watching the camels go. His eyes never scanned his herds directly as they shifted around him. His gaze, even in darkness, seemed always to sweep the deep distances of the harsh and endless tundra that he loved. His face was like the saddle on which he sat, creased and tanned almost black by years of merciless beating from wind and sun. But though old, he was stubborn and still brave. Thats how he came to be among the last arats in Mongolia living outside the communal co-operatives. And thats how he came to save my life.

He had just tipped a long draught of kumiss into his great throat from the leather bottle that always hung at his belt, when he heard the first sound of our Trident far away down the sky to the south. There was nothing like kumiss for keeping out the chill Mongolian wind, he told me many times in the months he hid me and sheltered me from death. But although I helped him with the milking of the mares in June and drank it to please him, I never learned to love kumiss like old Tsereng. Although it resembled strong beer , it was too fizzy for me. It had a sour caste that reminded me of burned almonds and to my nostrils it always reeked unpleasantly of the stables.

His horse had picked up the unfamiliar sound of the jet engines first. It was the twitching of the animals ears and his sudden stamping that alerted the old man. Immediately he loosened the ear flaps of his fur hat to hear better. I know all this because he told me every detail a thousand times during the long winter nigh t as we lay on the pile d furs in hi s yurt warmed by the pungent breath and body heat of the sheep, goats and yaks crowded in all around us, some pregnant, some already with their bleating young. I always concentrated on every word he said, even when Id heard it all before. I had to, to prevent my eyes wandering to the stocky bodies of his wife and daughter, who invariably threw off all their clothes and sprawled naked on their furs among the animals in the stifling heat. Only when the wind really howled through the seams in the felt walls did they wrap themselves in their fur coats for the night.

The Trident had been specially equipped with military radar when it was in service with the Pakistan Air Force and that enabled us to fly at a very low level under the Soviet detection scanners. We roared over the Kerulen River, flying at little more than two hundred f e et, heading north-west. The border of our beloved Peoples Republic of China was 400 miles behind us and we had crossed it just before two oclock in the morning, at an even lower altitude.

It was almost three oclock when Toktokho detected the first sounds of our approach. He was deeply mystified, because the few scheduled air services from Peking to Ulan Bator never passed that far to the east. Our track, although most of us inside the aircraft were then ignorant of the fact, was taking us directly from Peitaiho on the coast near Peking to I rkutsk on the far shore of Lake Baikal in the Soviet Union. Toktokho strained his eyes into the darkened sky as the roar of our jet engines, grew louder, scattering his terrified herds in all directions around him. The arats of Khentiiaimat are simple nomads, little touched by the passage of time. They are deeply fearful of the great extremes of the elements in one of the remotest regions of the vast bowl of Central Asia. Many of the elderly among them still even worship secretly at the ancient shrine on Delger Haan, in defiance of the principles of Marxism-Leninism under which the revisionist puppet state of the Peoples Republic of Mongolia is supposedly governed.