The Chinese Assassin Read Free Page B

attached by a silver chain to a metal knob which he used to knock out his pipe. I came to know every stitch of the prancing blue and gold horses embroidered on these ornaments and later I learned that Toktokho had taken them as the spoils of victory from the body of the leader of a camel train, whom he had fought and killed in a fair fight before liberation. Every night without fail he put them on ceremonially, like battle honours, when he returned from his riding. He also wore two sheaths on the belt— a large one for his dagger and a small one for a steel tooth pick which he used to fork lumps of mutton fat from the feeding bowls.
    In those fevered times while the second sheep-shearing was taking place outside I slipped, without caring, from wakefulness to unconsciousness—and sometimes approached equally carelessly near to death . Each day throughout this period, I learned later, old Tsereng was riding the five miles to the scene of the crashed Trident to watch the flurry of activity taking place there.
    The dried saltmarsh in which the wreckage had come to rest was cordoned off with ropes and guarded by large contingents of armed Soviet troops Toktokho did not approach the cordons but watched discreetly from behind an outcrop of rock on a rise in the ground several hundred yards away. Though he was old, his eyes were still almost as keen as in his youth and when I recovered he reported faithfully to me all that he had seen.
    He was out at dawn on the first morning when they began hauling the blackened and charred bodies of Marshall Li n Piao and the others from the still-smouldering skeleton of the aircraft. ‘They were loaded immediately and without ceremony into a covered military lorry which remained at the scene without moving for several days. A constant stream of vehicles jolted back and forth across the roadless steppe from Ulan Bator in great clouds of dust, bringing high-ranking Soviet military officers and civilians to the site along with frequent groups of Mongolian Party and government leaders. An encampment of military tents was eventually set up dose by.
    By night the area was lit by huge arc-lights. The Russian troops, who had ordered all curious arats away from the cordon ropes in the first few days with much shouting and menaces, fired off their guns indiscriminately into the surrounding darkness every night, laughing loudly as they did so.
    On the third day after the crash, Toktokho saw a sudden and asto un ding change in the pattern of activity at the site. By then he was watching through binoculars from the rock knoll which ro s e from the plain quite near to where he had found me. Just before noon, he saw the soldiers begin un l oading the nine charred bodies again from the lorry. They removed them from their canvas bags and laid them out carefully on the ground, side by side on white sheets. Then the tented camp, which had grown quite large by this time, was struck in great haste and all the Russian troops on guard were marshalled quickly into transport trucks and driven away. Only four high-ranking officers from the Soviet Union remained t alk i n g to the Mongolian officials for a few minutes. Then they, too, drove slowly away across the steppe, but in the opposite direction to that taken by their troops, leaving the Mongolians alone. Through his binoculars Toktokho saw the Russian officers halt their vehicle in a slight depression in the ground about two miles away. They then climbed on top of it and, like him continued to survey the site through their field glasses.
    A few minutes later a contingent of soldiers in uniforms of the army of the Mongolian People’s Republic arrived and took up guard positions around the perimeter of the cordoned-off area and the larger sections of the remaining wreckage A special concentration of troops was stationed shoulder to shoulder in a square around the spot where the row of corpses was laid out. They stood to attention, their weapons held clenched across