Ministers of Fire. Mark Harril Saunders
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in the gravel lot behind the high school, as the vapor lights wore out from the game, but she’d miscalculated here: she’d never been outside of Kabul. Two other riders dismounted, and for the first time she noticed the rifles lashed across the pommels—long, black, shining automatics like Jack’s own M-16. Breeden flipped his cigarette toward the nearest hoof, reached back into the plane, and casually brought out a shotgun—a twelve-gauge like her father’s—holding it as if it were as harmless as a broom. April turned to the men, who had drawn their horses back at the sight of the weapon. “I’m the closest thing to heaven they’ll ever get.”
“You’re a hell of a woman, all right,” the pilot observed. “I can’t decide if I like you or not.”
“Do you think these boys know Jack?”
“Might.”
She couldn’t tell if he was implying that knowing Jack might not be an asset right now. He held out the carved walnut stock for the men to inspect. The one who’d been holding the leader’s reins handed them up to the man beside him, who still sat his horse. Then he came forward and weighed the shotgun like an offering in his palms.
The near proximity of the dismounted men, who gave off a rank odor of horses and sweat, was causing fear, the real thing, to run through her like a current. She was guilty, she realized, not only of coming up here with Burling, but of thinking she could handle this. She had run with the boys all her life, run from her brothers straight to Jack, which had upset her mother and scandalized her graduate student friends at Berkeley, with their stoned existentialist boyfriends who didn’t care what women thought, even whipsmart scholarship girls like April Wheeling, who could drink harder and quote Jean-Paul Sartre, Lévi-Strauss, and Fanon better than they could. When Jack went off to Vietnam for the second time, April had finally realized she could want more than boys could give her, but it was hard to break their grip. Beyond the horses, she could see Lucius Burling and the leader coming back across the runway. No Abdul. What did that mean? Trailing them was the stout Chinese man she had seen on the roof of the hotel. The man who’d been holding the leader’s horse barked something at his clan, in a dialect she could barely understand. He removed a thick knife, about twelve inches long, from his garment. Fear gripped her heart when she realized what the man had said.
“Roy?”
The man on the horse trained his rifle on the pilot.
“They said we’re not leaving,” April told him.
Breeden moved his hand to the holster, but the rifle gestured him to take it away. Breeden didn’t do as he was told. She saw him unsnap the holster, and the rifle went off above her, a quick burst that cut Breeden down. He was on his knees, screaming obscenities, as the horses crowded around her. At first it made her feel safer, their bellies pressing against her, the familiar sweet, sharp smell. She had a flash of her father, his long legs in blue jeans hiked high on his backside, climbing stiffly up the hill toward his broken-backed barn, winter sun in the bare trees behind it. Then she felt herself being lifted; her feet no longer touched the ground. Through the dust she saw the knife raised above Breeden’s head.
book
one
Lindstrom’s plane picked up speed as it sliced through the clouds; below the cover, fires burned on the ground. Smoke rose from the crossing of twin brown tracks, and he saw red-brick communes surrounded by fields. The man in the seat beside him—a tall, stiff German with muttonchop sideburns and rectangular glasses that turned an odd purple shade in the sunlight—stirred at the abrupt drop in altitude and slapped himself sharply on the knees.
“Well, now, Jack,” he said, angling an elbow between Lindstrom’s ribs. The German’s use of his first name seemed vaguely insinuating, maybe even coercive. “You are coming to see me, yes?”
The plane settled after floating on a deep breath of air. The German was director of a joint venture power company in Shanghai: earlier in the flight he had invited Lindstrom to his plant, to show him how energy was revolutionizing China.
“I’d like to,” Lindstrom answered, and wondered if he would. It was his tendency to view industry with suspicion. “But I have these plans in Nanjing.”
“Right, right,” the German said heartily. “The missionary business.” He dismissed it with a chop of his hand.
The plane crossed the Yangzi River, its lumbering surface flashing bronze in the hazy spring sun. From a dock along this river, almost seventy years ago now, Lindstrom’s grandfather had embarked with other missionaries up into the gorges in Hubei for a summer retreat, the whole junket paid for by a brewer from Tsingtao. A man of obvious and violent contradictions, Lindstrom’s grandfather hadn’t had any scruples about accepting the invitation, although by that time he was temperate to the point of fanaticism. The gorges they’d visited were about to be dynamited by the German and his indigenous partners for a dam.
“I’m really not a religious man,” Lindstrom said, “but I’ve never been able to resist the possibility of revelation.”
“And that is why you are coming to China?”
“To see the church that my grandfather built.”
“This will be the occasion for your revelation.”
Lindstrom was about to reply, but explaining his motives would only draw attention to himself.
“As a businessman,” the German said, “one cannot be concerned with such things. Nevertheless, power can be—what is the word?”
“Corrupting?”
The German accepted Lindstrom’s trope with a ruthless sort of calm. The plane was cutting through frayed wisps of cloud, and the sun gave off a soiled and monotonous glare. The German’s lenses grew darker. “I’m not speaking in metaphors,” he said. “In China whoever controls the generation of power can be a force for reform. I must believe this.”
Lindstrom let the subject lie. A geopolitical discussion with a power company executive, no matter how endless the potential store of puns, would probably not be that illuminating. Since September 11, everyone possessed a theory about world historical order: doomsday philosophy was epidemic even compared with the 1960s. It rivaled the paranoid epic of the late Cold War. Outside the window, the cruciform shadow of the plane stretched and rippled across the towers and cables of a bridge. The plane moved faster above the water. The fence around the airport approached, and he experienced a pleasurable rush of fear. Beyond the concertina wire stretched a dry landscape of yellow-green grasses and flame-like trees that reminded him of Vietnam.
“You come to my plant,” the German told him as the plane jammed down on the tarmac. He sighed like a man who has just made a lot of money from some defect in human nature. “You will see.”
As the plane slowed to taxiing speed, the Chinese passengers began to get up and trip over each other in the aisle. Outside, a stairway was wheeled across the slabs. Stooping under the bulkhead, the German pulled on a corduroy blazer that had gone out of style in the seventies but was coming back in now. The new global capitalists were adopting a retrograde camouflage, several sizes too small.
Lindstrom slid from his seat and moved forward past studious men and bantering elderly couples, Taiwanese businessmen in clashing Hawaiian shirts, all silenced by the German’s unusual height. Lindstrom shadowed him, grateful for the cover. As he emerged behind the German from the hatch of the plane, heat met them like a curtain, and they flailed for a moment in the new, thicker element. Lindstrom felt himself awakening slowly in an old, familiar place, at once comfortable and frightening. Backstage again, behind the ancient drama of the East, where each person, object, strand of phrase you caught above the diminishing whistle of the engines might be trotted out for use under the great proscenium of communist government.
“You come to see us,” the German said pointedly, “when you are done with the church.”
They were hurrying now across the tarmac, through the greetings and luggage; every face they passed looked amazed. Beyond a low chain-link fence, a BMW waited, with the license