Читать книгу Dragon Mountain - Daniel Reid - Страница 8

III

"Have you eaten yet?" he asked. That's a standard Chinese greeting and means basically the same as "How do you do?" in English. It was typical of that wise guy to greet me with such courtesy, as though he'd simply invited me over for dinner, rather than having me dragged there at gunpoint by his goon, One-Eye.

"Not yet," I replied, which immediately obliged him to offer me something to eat. I hadn't had a bite of food for two days and felt famished.

"Good!" he said, snuffing out his cigarette in an ivory ashtray as he stood up. "Dinner is ready. I am so delighted you could come here tonight. As our great sage Confucius said, 'When friends visit from afar, is this not indeed a pleasure!"'

He led me through a round "moon door" into a smaller but equally well-appointed dining room. Scrolls of elegant Chinese calligraphy and delicate landscape paintings adorned the walls; sprays of fresh flowers artfully arranged in antique porcelain vases scented the air—all the traditional trappings of a classical Chinese gentleman were there. In the middle of the room stood a polished rosewood dining table, set for two.

"Please be seated," he said, indicating my place at the table.

We sat silently and appraised each other for a few minutes. He had grown one of those long "Fu Manchu" types of mustaches, which he habitually twisted and tugged with his fingertips. The nail of his left little finger must have been at least two inches long, and it was sheathed inside a gold nail scabbard studded with emeralds, rubies, and sapphires that sparkled in the candlelight. This indicated, in classical Chinese fashion, that he was a gentleman of wealth and leisure, not a man of labor. His smoothly shaven head shined like a bowling ball, and his eyes flickered brightly through narrow lids. Another native girl in Chinese dress appeared from nowhere and poured us a round of hot rice wine—the real Hsiao-Shing wine from the mainland. She also placed a few platters of hot hors d'oeuvres on the table, served us a portion of each, then disappeared as silently as she'd come.

"Welcome to Dragon Mountain, Captain Jack," Ching Wei finally said, hoisting his cup to toast me. "Let us drink to old times. Bottoms up!" His English had improved considerably since I'd last seen him. "How long has it been, Jack?"

"About thirty years."

"Ah, yes, thirty years. We have so much to talk about, and so much time to talk about it. But first, we must eat!" He clapped his hands and the girl returned with the first course, a platter of roasted meat and braised poultry, garnished with coriander, scallions, and a savory sauce.

The girl returned about every fifteen minutes, each time with a fresh platter of the most superb Chinese food I'd eaten in years. One bite was enough to tell me that a genuine culinary artist was at work back in the kitchen. We had everything from bird's nest soup to shark fin stew, and some dishes that I'd never even tasted before. We didn't spoil the meal with serious discussion. Instead, we chatted about the finer points of Chinese cuisine.

By now this whole thing must sound like a fairy tale, so let me backtrack a bit and fill in the background.

I first met Ching Wei back in Chungking, China, during the war. We were both pilots then, assigned to fly supplies over the Himalayan Hump from India into Kunming and Chungking. I was stationed there from 1942 until VJ Day in 1945, when I was transferred back to Shanghai. So I knew Ching Wei for about three years there, after which I never saw him again until that night.

The first time we met was at a Chinese martial arts class that we both attended in Chungking. The weather was so terrible there that we'd often be grounded for days at a time with nothing to do. And with the chronic shortage of fuel, the constant damage to runways from Japanese bombs, and the endless bickering between General Stilwell and the Chinese command, we ended up spending more time on the ground than in the air. The martial arts class helped kill time.

There was a remarkable old Chinese master living in Chungking at the time, and he organized the class especially for Chinese and American officers stationed there. I guess the class was his personal contribution to the war effort. We simply called him "Old Lee" among ourselves, but always "Master Lee" to his face. He came from a long line of martial artists and Taoist mystics, and—believe it or not—his father was still alive then at the ripe old age of 273! To prove it, Old Lee once showed me his father's birth certificate, duly stamped with the official seals of the Kang-Hsi reign in the Ching Dynasty. I once asked his father for the secret to his health and longevity, and he simply replied, "Correct breathing." Anyway, it was fascinating stuff, and it had both recreational and practical health benefits. I always looked forward to the class during those long dismal days we were grounded.

About thirty of us studied under Old Lee—ten Americans and the rest Chinese—but at any given time about half of us were stuck on the other side of the Hump in India. It was like a little fraternity: close bonds of brotherhood formed among most of Old Lee's students. That's the Chinese way.

During my three years with him, I grew quite close to Old Lee. He seemed to like me from the start. Later, I realized that he saw something in me that aroused his profession al interest as much as his personal friendship.

Old Lee said that I was unusually sensitive to the vital force that the Chinese call chi, the essential energy of life that animates all living things. With proper training and lots of practice, Old Lee said, I could learn to focus and direct my chi by virtue of will power, first by practicing martial arts forms, and later by meditation and other internal methods. Old Lee took a dim view of the war-whooping, high-flying, muscle-bound variety of martial arts. Instead, he cultivated the soft, subtle internal powers of chi. "Properly applied," he often said, "four ounces of energy can topple one thousand pounds."

Old Lee also entrusted me with his highest teachings. He knew from long experience that most young adepts end up abusing the powers of the martial arts if taught its innermost secrets too early in life. But he felt that as a foreigner who had taken the trouble to learn the basics of Chinese language and culture, I had demonstrated sufficient sincerity to be taught these esoteric arts the way they were meant to be practiced. So I learned a lot from Old Lee, and in the process we became good friends as well.

Because he taught me so much in private outside of the regular class, some of his Chinese students grew very jealous, especially since I was a foreigner. It didn't seem fair to them that the old man would teach me—a "foreign devil"—precious Chinese secrets that he kept hidden from them, but Old Lee ignored their resentment and trusted his own instincts.

My privileged position with the master irritated Ching Wei more than it did anyone else, and before long he thoroughly disliked me. But in typical Chinese fashion, all this personal discord remained well hidden below the surface. Chinese society demands harmony among classmates and colleagues, even if it's only superficial. Moreover, my superior performance both in class as well as in the cockpit of a plane demanded at least his grudging respect. That's also the Chinese way.

Eventually, it became clear that Ching Wei was doing more than just flying military supplies over the Hump. Somehow, he amassed an enormous fortune in gold, and being young, arrogant, and Chinese, he flaunted it for all to see. He bought a huge villa on the outskirts of town, where only the top brass could afford to live, then filled it with luxuries available only at great cost on the black market and moved in a few fancy women. In those days most of us couldn't find a beer or a cigarette in Chungking for love or money, but Ching Wei had plenty of both and much more to boot. He lived like a Chinese general.

"He is an arrogant and small-minded man," Old Lee used to say of him. "'Dog bones wrapped in human skin.' Pay him no heed." But the rest of the guys really resented Ching Wei's blatant profiteering, even though corruption was so common throughout the Chinese command that there seemed little point in reporting him.

Old Lee and I made frequent excursions into the rugged mountains of western Szechuan, outside Chungking. We visited ancient temples and spent many a night in remote mountain monasteries with raggedy old monks who invariably turned out to be founts of wisdom. Several times we visited an old friend of his who had retired to a distant mountain cave to meditate in complete solitude. His name was Ling Yun, which means "soaring in the clouds." He'd been living in that cave for over five years when I met him. It was during these excursions into the mountains that Old Lee taught me his most important lessons, and I can't blame him for being so secretive about them. In China, the most profound teachings and techniques have always been transmitted orally from master to select disciple, precisely to prevent jerks like Ching Wei from gaining access to them.

My navigator, Sam Conway, and I were in charge of all pilots and crew flying the Hump in and out of China, and it didn't take us long to figure out how Ching Wei was making all his money. Actually, his own navigator exposed him after Ching Wei refused to give him a bigger cut of the action. The navigator was bright enough to know that if he reported Ching Wei to the Chinese command, he'd only get himself in trouble, if not killed, for rocking the boat. So he reported Ching Wei directly to me. That set the stage for what happened next.

His navigator reported that Ching Wei had been using his aircraft to smuggle opium from India to China. Since the Japanese onslaught had cut Chungking off from all domestic Chinese sources of opium, users there paid enormous prices to get the stuff. Back in those days, opium was as much a part of the Chinese diet as rice and tea—and often it was more plentiful than both. Almost everyone smoked the stuff. So, for the fat-cat addicts of Chungking, India became the only viable source, and Ching Wei, the only available supplier, of their precious opium. After the big shots finished smoking the good stuff, the pipe heads were scraped out and the dross was sold again to coolies and clerks who couldn't afford anything better.

Ching Wei's ploy was clever: he had his ground crew in India replace half the military and medical supplies bound for Chungking in his aircraft with opium. The food, medicine, and other supplies he left behind served as the payoff to the ground crew to keep their mouths shut. When he landed in Chungking, his own boys unloaded the crates, juggled the delivery ledgers to account for the missing supplies, and stashed the opium in a warehouse near town. He greased a lot of palms along the way, but since the entire scam depended solely on him and his plane, Ching Wei took the lion's share of profits. Had he not been so greedy, his navigator would never have blown the whistle on him.

This sort of thing was standard operating procedure in the Chinese military, so for a while we let the whole thing ride. But as his greed grew, Ching Wei dumped more and more supplies in India so that he could bring more and more opium into China, causing a critical shortage of food and medicine for the wounded who kept piling up in Chungking's hospitals. Pretty soon Ching Wei was getting as effective as the Japs at killing Allied troops. Sam and I no longer had any choice: we reported Ching Wei directly to the U.S. command.

Colonel Boyd went through the roof when he heard our story. He was ready to go find Ching Wei and shoot him on the spot, but so much bad feeling had already been generated between the Chinese and American commands in the wake of Stilwell's recall from China, that the bust had to be handled just right to be effective.

We found out from his navigator when Ching Wei's next opium run was scheduled, and that afternoon Colonel Boyd decided to inspect all incoming supplies personally. Inspections were, of course, routine, but they'd always been conducted by Chinese officers who were paid to inspect things, as the Chinese put it, "with one eye open and one eye closed."

Ching Wei landed right on schedule and taxied to a halt at his usual spot on the tarmac. It was a cold, overcast day, with drizzling rain. Ching Wei's crew swarmed around the plane and began unloading the cargo bay just as Colonel Boyd and three armed aides came squealing around the corner in a jeep. They screeched to a halt right in front of his open cargo bay, while Sam and I watched the whole thing from a discreet distance.

You should have seen the look on Ching Wei's face when he stepped off the ladder to find the colonel and his aides prying open his crates with crowbars. He protested loud and long and made dire threats, but all to no avail. The colonel inspected every single crate, and when he'd completed his tally, he found a total of 1,800 pounds of raw opium stuffed into various boxes marked "Medical Supply" and "Food." He arrested Ching Wei, loaded the crates of opium onto a truck, and drove straight over to the Chinese command, with both the culprit and the evidence in hand.

To make a long story short, the Chinese finally court-martialed Ching Wei, but only after heavy pressure from General Chennault, who vowed to bring the matter to the personal attention of his good friend and patron Madame Chiang Kai-shek herself. No one in China ever wanted to get on the wrong side of that ruthless dragon lady, especially on the subject of opium, for not only did she personally detest the Chinese opium habit, she was also a devout, God-fearing Christian with a missionary zeal to stamp out what she referred to as "China's Shame." So Ching Wei was officially court-martialed rather than given the usual slap on the wrist, and to further mollify the U.S. command, they handed him a stiff ten-year sentence in the brig, but needless to say Ching Wei never served a day of it. As I recall, it cost him $10,000 per year to get his sentence reduced to zero, which means he had to cough up a $100,000 bribe—a hell of a bundle in those days.

A few weeks later, a mangled corpse was hauled into town on an oxcart. The peasant who brought it in complained that the body had "fallen from the sky" and landed in his pigsty, killing a pregnant sow. Since the body wore a Chinese uniform, the old farmer had brought it to the Chinese military base in town for disposal—and to demand compensation for his sow. The corpse belonged to Ching Wei's navigator.

Before hurling him to his death, Ching Wei must have forced the navigator to tell him how he'd reported the scam directly to me, because a few days later he confronted me on the street as I walked home from Old Lee's place. Neither my Chinese nor his English were very good back then, so it was almost a comical encounter.

"Why you telling Amelicans me selling opium?" he demanded, barely able to contain his rage. "Now no plane, no business, no face!"

"Forget about face, Ching Wei, yours isn't worth saving." If there's one thing I can't stand about the Chinese, it's their absurd attachment to "face." Here they were, losing their asses in the war, and all they worried about was gaining "face."

My remark made him so furious that he had to switch over to Chinese to express himself. "Puck your mother's stinking cunt!" he shouted for openers, invoking the favorite Chinese curse. "You know perfectly well that half the officers in Chungking play the black market! Why not report them all?"

"The others buy and sell cigarettes, beer, soap, and other things, but they're not depriving dying men and orphans of the food and medicine they need to stay alive." I fished for a Chinese flourish and came up with "Yours is the worst kind of drunk!" I'd meant to say "crime," not "drunk," but the two words are pronounced exactly the same except for the intonation, and I blooped it.

He laughed at that, but not for long. "I should kill you here and now!" he threatened. Ching Wei, like most Chinese, would never face a dangerous adversary alone, so I knew he had a couple of armed goons standing by in the alley.

"Go ahead. If you kill me, the colonel will come after you again, and you know there's no place left to hide in China except Chungking, unless you want to take your chances with the Japs. And if the colonel doesn't get you first, Old Lee will. You know perfectly well that the master does not tolerate fighting among his students."

He'd been smirking, but when I mentioned Old Lee, his face grew dead serious. "The master knows of this?"

"He knows everything. In fact, he saw through you long before the rest of us did."

That clearly upset him. "You filthy bastard of a barnyard sow! I will let you go this time, but remember these words: somewhere, some day, I will find you again, and then we will settle our accounts!" With that parting shot, he spun around on his heels and disappeared down the alley, his henchmen muttering and shuffling behind him.

So that's how I met Ching Wei. When I left Chungking in 1945, I never thought I'd see him again. In fact, I'd completely forgotten about him until that evening at Dragon Mountain. I had no idea how he ended up in Burma, but I intended to find out.

"Did you enjoy the food?" he asked politely as we sipped fragrant jasmine tea. The last dish had just been cleared from the table.

"Excellent! That's the best Chinese food I've had in a long time." That was no lie. Despite my predicament, and with the help of all the good food and drink, I felt great. This would not be the last time I forgot my real situation in Ching Wei's presence.

"Good! Now let us take brandy and cigarettes in the parlor. We have business to discuss."