“I was joking,” said the crone, ashamed.

  “I am not,” said Virlomi. “If you don’t want me to use your men in the way I have described, tell me, and I’ll go away and find another place that wants me. Perhaps your hatred of the Chinese is not so fierce as mine. Perhaps you are content with the way things are in this land.”

  But they were not content, and their hatred was hot enough, it seemed.

  There wasn’t much time for training, despite her promise, but then, she wasn’t going to use these men for firefights. They were to be saboteurs, thieves, demolition experts. They conspired with construction workers to steal explosives; they learned how to use them; they built dry storage pits in the jungles that clung to the steep hills.

  And they went to nearby towns and recruited more men, and then went farther and farther afield, building a network of saboteurs near every key bridge that could be blown up to block the Chinese from the use of the roads they would need to bring troops and supplies back and forth, in and out of India.

  There could be no rehearsals. No dry runs. Nothing was done to arouse suspicion of any kind. She forbade her men to make any gestures of defiance, or do anything to interfere with the smooth running of the Chinese transportation network through their hills and mountains.

  Some of them chafed at this, but Virlomi said, “I gave my word to your wives and mothers that I would not waste your lives. There will be plenty of dying ahead, but only when your deaths will accomplish something, so that those who live can bear witness: We did this thing, it was not done for us.”

  Now she never went to town, but lived where she had lived before, in a cave near the bridge that she would blow up herself, when the time came.

  But she could not afford to be cut off from the outside world. So three times a day, one of her people would sign on to the nets and check her dead drop sites, print out the messages there, and bring them to her. She made sure they knew how to wipe the information out of the computer’s memory, so no one else could see what the computer had shown, and after she read the messages they brought, she burned them.

  She got Peter Wiggin’s message in good time. So she was ready when her people started coming to her, running, out of breath, excited. “The war with the Turks is going badly for the Chinese,” they said. “We have it on the nets, the Turks have taken so many airfields that they can put more planes in the sky in Xinjiang than the Chinese can. They have dropped bombs on Beijing itself, lady!”

  “Then you should weep for the children who are dying there,” said Virlomi. “But the time for us to fight is not yet.”

  And the next day, when the trucks began to rumble across the bridges, and line up bumper to bumper along the narrow mountain roads, they begged her, “Let us blow up just one bridge, to show them that India is not sleeping while the Turks fight our enemy for us!”

  She only answered them, “Why should we blow up bridges that our enemy is using to leave our land?”

  “But we could kill many if we timed the explosion just right!”

  “Even if we could kill five thousand by blowing up all the bridges at exactly the right moment, they have five million. We will wait. Not one of you will do anything to warn them that they have enemies in these mountains. The time is soon, but you must wait for my word.”

  Again and again she said it, all day long, to everyone who came, and they obeyed. She sent them to telephone their comrades in faraway towns near other bridges, and they also obeyed.

  For three days. The Chinese-controlled news talked about how devastating armies were about to be brought to bear against the Turkic hordes, ready to punish them for their treachery. The traffic across the bridges and along the mountain roads was unrelenting.

  Then came the message she was waiting for.

  Now.

  No signature, but it was in a dead drop that she had given to Peter Wiggin. She knew that it meant that the main offensive had been launched in the west, and the Chinese would soon begin sending troops and equipment back from China into India.

  She did not burn the message. She handed it to the child who had brought it to her and said, “Keep this forever. It is the beginning of our war.”

  “Is it from a god?” asked the child.

  “Perhaps the shadow of the nephew of a god,” she answered with a smile. “Perhaps only a man in a dream of a sleeping god.”

  Taking the child by the hand, she walked down into the village. The people swarmed around her. She smiled at them, patted the children’s heads, hugged the women and kissed them.

  Then she led this parade of citizens to the office of the local Chinese administrator and walked inside the building. Only a few of the women came with her. She walked right past the desk of the protesting officer on duty and into the office of the Chinese official, who was on the telephone.

  He looked up at her and shouted, first in Chinese, then in Common. “What are you doing! Get out of here.”

  But Virlomi paid no attention to his words. She walked up to him, smiling, reached out her arms as if to embrace him.

  He raised his hands in protest, to fend her off with a gesture.

  She took his arms, pulled him off balance, and while he staggered to regain his footing, she flung her arms around him, gripped his head, and twisted it sharply.

  He fell dead to the floor.

  She opened a drawer in his desk, took out his pistol, and shot both of the Chinese soldiers who were rushing into the office. They, too, fell dead to the floor.

  She looked calmly at the women. “It is time. Please get on the telephones and call the others in every city. It is one hour till dark. At nightfall, they are to carry out their tasks. With a short fuse. And if anyone tries to stop them, even if it’s an Indian, they should kill them as quietly and quickly as possible and proceed with their work.”

  The repeated the message to her, then set to work at the telephones.

  Virlomi went outside with the pistol hidden in the folds of her skirt. When the other two Chinese soldiers in this village came running, having heard the shots, she started jabbering to them in her native dialect. They did not realize that it was not the local language at all, but a completely unrelated tongue from the Dravidian south. They stopped and demanded that she tell them in Common what had happened. She answered with a bullet into each man’s belly before they even saw that she had a gun. Then she made sure of them with a bullet to each head as they lay on the ground.

  “Can you help me clean the street?” she asked the people who were gawking.

  At once they came out into the road and carried the bodies back inside the office.

  When the telephoning was done, she gathered them all together at the door of the office. “When the Chinese authorities come and demand that you tell them what happened, you must tell them the truth. A man came walking down the road, an Indian man but not from this village. He looked like a woman, and you thought he must be a god, because he walked right into this office and broke the neck of the magistrate. Then he took the magistrate’s pistol and shot the two guards in the office, and then the two who came running up from the village. Not one of you had time to do anything but scream. Then this stranger made you carry the bodies of the dead soldiers into the office and then ordered you to leave while he made telephone calls.”

  “They will ask us to describe this man.”

  “Then describe me. Dark. From the south of India.”

  “They will say, if he looked like a woman, how do you know she was not a woman?”

  “Because he killed a man with his bare hands. What woman could do that?”

  They laughed.

  “But you must not laugh,” she said. “They will be very angry. And even if you do not give them any cause, they may punish you very harshly for what happened here. They may think you are lying and torture you to try to get you to tell the truth. And 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 rock-falls 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, insect-bitten, 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 suicide.

  They could hear the Chinese commander yelling at his part-time soldiers. He was very angry—and very stupid, thought Ambul. What did he think was happening here? If it was a training exercise by some portion of the Chinese army, why would he bring along a contingent of reservists? But if he thought it was a genuine threat, why was he yelling? Why wasn’t he trying to reconnoiter with stealth so he could assess the danger and make a report?

  Well, not every officer had been to Battle School. It wasn’t second nature to them, to think like a true soldier. This fellow had undoubtedly spent most of his military service behind a desk.

  The whispered command came down the line. Do not shoot anybody, but take careful aim at somebody when you are ordered to stand up.

  The voice of the Chinese officer was coming nearer.

  “Maybe they won’t notice us,” whispered the soldier beside Ambul.

  “It’s time to make them notice us,” Ambul whispered back.

  The soldier had been a waiter in a fine restaurant in Jakarta before volunteering for the army after the Chinese conquest of Indochina. Like most of these men, he had never been under fire.

  For that matter, neither have I, thought Ambul. Unless you count combat in the battle room.

  Surely that did count. There was no blood, but the tension, the unbearable suspense of combat had been there. The adrenaline, the courage, the terrible disappointment when you knew you had been shot and your suit froze around you, locking you out of the battle. The sense of failure when you let down the buddy you were supposed to protect. The sense of triumph when you felt like you couldn’t miss.

  I’ve been here before. Only instead of a dike, I was hiding behind a three-meter cube, waiting for the order to fling myself out, firing at whatever enemies might be there.

  The man next to him elbowed him. Like all the others, he obeyed the signal and watched their commander for the order to stand up.

  The commander gave the sign, and they all rose up out of the water.

  The Chinese reservists and their officer were nicely lined up along a dike that ran perpendicular to the one the Indonesian platoon had been hiding behind. Not one of them had his weapon at the ready.

  The Chinese officer had been interrupted in mid-yell. He stopped and turned stupidly to look at the line of forty soldiers, all pointing their weapons at him.

  Ambul’s commander walked up to the officer and shot him in the head.

  At once the reservists threw down their weapons and surrendered.

  Every Indonesian platoon had at least one Chinese-speaker, and usually several. Ethnic Chinese in Indonesia had been eager to show their patriotism, and their best interpreter was very efficient in conveying their commander’s orders. Of course it was impossible to take prisoners. But they did not want to kill these men.

  So they were told to remove all their clothing and carry it to the truck they had arrived in. While they were undressing, the order was passed along the line in Indonesian: Do not laugh at them or show any sign of ridicule. Treat them with great honor and respect.

  Ambul understood the wisdom of this order. The purpose of stripping them naked was to make them look ridiculous, of course. But the first people to ridicule them would be Chinese, not Indonesians. When people asked them, they would have to say that the Indonesians treated them with nothing but respect. The public relations campaign was already under way.

  Half an hour later, Ambul was with the sixteen men who rode into town in the captured Chinese truck, with one naked and terrified old reservist showing them the way. Just before reaching the small military headquarters, they slowed down and pushed him out of the truck.

  It was quick and bloodless. They drove right into the small compound and disarmed everyone there at the point of a gun. The Chinese soldiers were all herded naked into a room without a telephone, and they stayed there in utter silence while the sixteen Indonesians commandeered two more trucks, clean underwear and socks, and a couple of Chinese military radios.

  Then they piled all the remaining ammunition and explosives, weapons and radios in the middle of the courtyard, surrounded them with the remaining military vehicles, and set a small amount of plastique in the middle of the pile with a five-minute fuse.

  The Chinese interpreter ran to the door of the room where the prisoners were being held, shouted to them that they had five minutes to evacuate this place before everything blew up, and they should warn the townspeople to get away from here.

  Then he unlocked the door and ran out to one of the waiting trucks.

  Four minutes out of town, they heard the fireworks begin. It was like a war back there—bullets going off, explosions, and a plume of smoke.

  Ambul imagined the naked soldiers running from door to door, warning people. He hoped that no one would die because they stopped to laugh at the naked men instead of obeying them.

  Ambul was assigned to sit up front beside the driver of one of the captured trucks. He knew they would not have these vehicles for long—they would be too easy to spot—but they would carry them away from this place and give some of the soldiers a chance to catch a quick nap in the back of the truck.

  Of course, it was also possible that they would return to the rest of the platoon to find them slaughtered, with a large contingent of Chinese veterans waiting to blow them to bits.

  Well, if that happened, it would happen. Nothing he could do in this truck would affect such an outcome in any way. All he could do was keep his eyes open and help the driver stay awake.

  There was no ambush. When they got back to the other men, they found most of them asleep, but all the sentries awake and watchful.

  Everyone piled into the trucks. The men who had slept a little were assigned to the front seats to drive; the men who had not slept were put in the backs of the trucks to sleep as best they could while the truck jolted along on back roads.

  Ambul was one of those who discovered that if you’re tired enough, you can indeed sleep sitting up on a hard bench in a truck with no springs on a rough road. You just can’t sleep for very long at a time.