The Silk Road Saga: Part 2 - Silk Navigator

7 - The Hunter

Mr J looked at the screen with a quiet fury. His anger was reflected in the image. A swirl of indistinct reds. They had lost contact with one drone as soon as the sandstorm hit. Its air filters clogged up and it overheated. The second drone flew up high and was still operating. It hovered above the sandstorm, relaying the same useless image of a billowing red cloud. Shifting and shapeless.

Someone muttered that the Uighurs had been lucky to escape, but Mr J didn't believe in luck, not anymore. Design was at work here. He had been outfoxed by that pathetic cripple, the professor. Tea dripped down the wall, marking the spot where he had smashed his cup a minute beforehand. No one moved to clear away the mess. Mr J had always been feared by his subordinates, as was only proper for a senior member of the Ministry, but ever since he had returned from the past he had started to inspire a new level of terror. The drone operator who came to provide him with a status report was unbale to stop his hands from shaking. There was also a nervous tick in his eye. This observation pleased Mr J. Terror induced a blank conformity that suited his purposes perfectly.

"Bring up a map of the immediate area" ordered Mr J.

The screens in the command centre flashed up a detailed map of the Taklamakan.

"Show me the nearest known caves" said Mr J.

Red dots puckered the map, showing the known cave systems of the Taklamakan as detailed by the Ministry. Their business was intelligence and when trying to supress a dissident movement there was no better knowledge than the whereabouts of each potential bolt hole and weapons dump.

"Send men to search every cave within a hundred mile radius" said Mr J.

"But sir, some of those caves are unmapped. They could go on for miles. There's no knowing how long that might take" piped up one of the junior analysts.

Mr J fixed him with a stare that withered the analyst into silence. The minister dialled in, asking for an update. The whole control room fell silent. The only sound was the steady hum of hard drives. She was perfunctory and gave little away, but Mr J knew that his failure had disappointed her. It was unwise to make a habit of failure. She informed him that he had all the ministries resources in Xinjiang at his disposal. Mr J thanked her and promised to capture the girl and eliminate the dissidents. The minister dialled off. The call had lasted less than thirty seconds. Mr J made up his mind. He needed to be on the ground, he was too far removed from things in Beijing. It was impossible to get a sense for your mission unless you could taste the same air as the enemy, feel the same earth beneath your feet and the same heat overhead.

"Get my car. I'm going to the airport. And make sure they're expecting me" said Mr J.

The sense of relief in the control centre was palpable.

"Keep tracking that sandstorm. Let me know where it's heading" said Mr J.

Six hours later he was on the tarmac at Urumqi airport. It was late afternoon. The cicadas sung furiously. The helicopter blades soon drowned them out. Mr J let his shirt flap madly in the downdraft. Then he was up in the air once more, looking down on Urumqi in all its bland provinciality. They left the city behind, briefly skirted over a low lying range of verdantly forested mountains, before sweeping across endless tundra. It stretched on for eternity. Barren nothingness. Dust clung to the air, irritating his eyes and throat. There was nothing endearing about this landscape. It was hostile to human habitation. They were in the rain shadow of the Himalayas and it was indeed a shadowland, skeletal and stark. Yet somehow human beings still subsisted off it, living in miserable clusters of huts that passed for villages.

With the onset of evening the helicopter came upon a vast swathe of dramatically sculpted sand, a swirling canvas that changed from one day to the next; the Taklamakan desert. His prey was in there somewhere, skulking, hiding, waiting to be found. The helicopter slunk low over the sand, hugging the ground like a pregnant insect. It's downdraft sketched patterns in the dunes, tracing their progress with a series of smoothly blown concentric circles. After a little while they came upon the scene of last night's attack. Equipment was still strewn across the camp. Vehicles were parked haphazardly, their engines burnt black. Men wandered round in a daze. Order needed to be restored.

The helicopter landed. Mr J disembarked as the stars sprung into life overhead. He found the chief scientist and reprimanded him for his lack of resilience. This was a set-back, nothing more. He should see to it that the laboratory was restored and made ready for the return of the test subject. It would only be a matter of time before she was captured and the experiment could resume. The dead were loaded onto the helicopter and whisked back to Urumqi. Mr J took the last working 4x4 and set out into the Taklamakan. He had a theory about the sandstorm, a theory that precluded the need for a helicopter. Technology would be little use where he was headed.

"The security teams haven't found anything significant. Only a few caches of rifles and some camouflage, but not the girl" crackled the voice over the radio.

It was as Mr J expected. He had to cover every base, but he didn't expect them to hide somewhere so obvious as a nearby cave. It would have only delayed the inevitable.

"There's something else sir. The sandstorm, it's moving" said the voice.

"What do you mean, moving?" asked Mr J, his curiosity piqued.

"It's moving towards the mountains. Sandstorms usually follow the direction of the wind and the wind blows off the mountains, but this one, this one is acting strangely" said the voice.

"Send a unit to follow the sandstorm" said Mr J.

"I'm sorry sir, could you repeat that?" crackled the voice.

"I said send a unit to follow the sandstorm, is that understood" repeated Mr J.

"Yes sir" said the voice.

Mr J look at the map on his phone, it was overlayed with the direction of the sandstorm. It was heading, slowly but constantly, towards the Karakorum mountains over the border. If they made it into Pakistan then his life would become more difficult. No helicopters, no jeeps. It would be back to tracking them on foot. Mr J accelerated away from the camp, pursuing the sandstorm across the desert. The wind was up, the chase was on.