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.