They'd gotten halfway up the hill when they were spotted. "The Japanese were above us in the caves and below us too," Henry recalled. "It was like target practice for them. Any of us moved and bam!" Henry smacked his hand, the sound startling in the small confines of the Gulfstream. "One of those mission kids got his arm shot off. The other kid got a bullet in the gut. His intestines were hanging out, and he was trying to stuff them back in."
Henry shook his head as the memories came back. "We were all going to die up there. Sun Gan stepped forward-well, it was hardly that. He crawled along the rock face, trying like the rest of us not to get his head blown off. When he disappeared I thought, that's it. He's run off and I'm dead. By the time Sun got back, the two mission kids were dead. I hadn't been able to do much for them. One kid bled to death; the other blew his brains out. He knew what would have happened if he'd been captured. So Sun, this little kid, comes crawling back, takes in the two dead guys, sizes me up, and tells me what we're going to do. 'You're here for a job,' he said. 'So am I. ' And he slithers off into the darkness, leaving me alone."
Henry snorted. "I'm thinking, not on your fucking life am I following you! But here's the thing. I couldn't go up and I couldn't go down, because the enemy was in both places. And staying there wasn't much of an alternative either. The Japanese would have found me eventually. I was looking at a quick execution if I was lucky, or a prisoner of war camp if I wasn't. So I started crawling along behind Sun. This meant creeping along those damn cliffs at the same elevation, circumnavigating that fucking mountain. The whole exercise was dangerous, suicidal. But you know, you can sit still and die, or you can move forward and die."
Henry leaned over, resting his forearms on his knees, looking weary. "I'm eighteen fucking years old. I'm thinking, if I'm going to die, I'm going to do it on my own terms. And maybe, just maybe, I'll see those caves in the process." His mouth spread in a toothy grin. "Okay, I was young, dumb, and stupid. That's why they send boys to war. They don't know any better."
After a moment he continued. "Finally we come up over the back of the mountain. There was a moment when I think each of us thought, I could just crawl down this mountain, hole up somewhere, and wait it out. The impulse to live is strong."
David and Hulan knew what Henry meant. They'd been there themselves.
"Maybe because Sun was an orphan, maybe because it was his homeland, he stood firm. We crouched together and he mapped out a plan. He brought me into it, because I knew the caves better than he did. The sun would be up in a couple of hours. If we were going to make our move, it had to be now. Well, you can guess the rest. We made it. Sun saved my life."
"You're not getting off that easily," David said. Henry looked over at Hulan. She too looked at him expectantly. "Just as Sun planned, we dropped down over the top of the cliff with ropes and swung right into those caves like we were a couple of Tarzans. The Japanese were surprised, but ready enough. It was a classic hand-to-hand fight. We were outnumbered, but not as badly as I thought. There were only eight men up there. I don't know how many were down below on the mountain. We were out of there before they could reach us. But still, the men in the caves had gotten sleep. They'd had fires to keep them warm. They'd eaten. They'd been up there for months, while I'd been pumping my way across the interior, climbing that mountain, watching friends die. I think the only reason we lived was because we expected to die. We had nothing to lose, so we beat them back. We had to kill them. I mean, we couldn't take them captive. What were we going to do, seesaw them back across China to Xian and on to Kunming? And they had to kill us too as a point of honor. We left the bodies where they dropped and met again in the largest cave, where there are two huge Buddhas-each about fifty feet tall. These statues were still in good shape, because the heads were too big to get out of the cave. But all the smaller ones had been vandalized and shipped back to Tokyo. I was looking at what was left in wonder, when this soldier-not dead obviously- pulls out a gun and aims right at me. I was completely oblivious-standing in that cave was a dream come true-when Sun shot him. So see, I would have been dead a couple of times over if it hadn't been for him." Henry fell silent. The only sound was the drone of the G-3's engine. "Sun's hiding in those caves," David guessed.
"If not in the caves, then somewhere on that mountain," Henry agreed.
For a moment everything seemed settled, but Hulan wasn't satisfied.
"You're sure that Sun was mission-educated?" she asked.
Henry nodded.
It explained Sun's near-perfect English, but why hadn't this been in his dangan, which said that-far from being an orphan-his parents were from the reddest class, the peasant class? How could all this have been kept a secret? How had this not come up during the various purges that had so shaken China over the years?
"And you say you didn't have contact with him again until seven years ago?" Hulan continued. "So much has happened in China. How did you find him, and weren't you surprised at what he'd become?"
"I didn't see him again until 1990, but that doesn't mean I'd lost contact with him," Henry admitted. "After our escapade I stayed in China for another two years. I did everything I could for the boy. I brought him west to Xian and later to Kunming. I made sure he ate, and he began to grow and fill out normally. He picked up more English, but what can I say, he was around soldiers so his language was pretty much in the gutter. Still, I gave him books. In those days almost everyone in China was illiterate, so I made sure he learned to read and write in his own language too."
As Henry spoke, Hulan began to put the pieces together. Sun's dangan said that he'd been involved with the local Communist party from an early age. Was it possible he'd already been a Communist when he'd gone to the mission? Had he been sent there by the local cadres? It explained his attitude on the mountain. If he'd been a Nationalist, he'd never have fought the Japanese, because the threat of retribution was so great. And later, when Sun had gone west with Henry, he would have been able to report not only on the Nationalists but the Americans as well. It made sense, but again, none of it was in the dangan.
"Once my tour was up," Henry was saying, "my dad wanted me to come home, which I did. But I still wanted a life in China. My father continued to take a very dim view of that idea, but I was working on him. In the meantime I kept sending money back to help Sun. The Chinese called it 'tea money.' But after the war the Nationalists and the Communists went back to their own bloody fight. In 1949 Chiang Kai-shek was beaten back to the island of Taiwan, Mao marched into Beijing, and the Bamboo Curtain fell. Both of you weren't even born yet, but back then anti-Communist sentiment was strong, vicious. To have any contact with China became very dangerous. By 1950 an embargo was in effect, McCarthy was doing his mad dog thing, and little tea money at all crossed the Pacific."