"Mongol Mash"

Standing on the platform, last stop before the border, FBI Special Agent Dawna Shepherd focused on her surveillance target, but not so intently that she ignored her other traveling companions.  Two men had tracked her every move during the 37 hours since she’d boarded the Trans-Mongolian railway.  A comparatively affluent Western woman who was not part of a tour group, Dawna knew she appeared to them to be their perfect victim.  And now she felt them closing in.

Protectively, she patted the left front pocket of her fisherman’s vest and edged to the front of the passengers gathered on the broad pavement separating the tracks from the Russian border outpost and station buildings.  Beyond the crowd, the fenced pavement gave way to a parched and unpeopled plain that stretched to the horizon.  Dawna shoved damp frizz off her moist forehead, her crisp blonde curls flattened by the heat.  The only trees were fifty yards farther along the platform.  Yet passengers lingered under the relentless afternoon sun, watching a dozen well-coordinated Amazons tossing balls to one another.   The touring USA women’s junior basketball team was using the lengthy stop to run a pass and block drill.  Top players, they represented eleven different colleges and had been a team for only one month.  Dawna was impressed by their choreography, the synchronization they’d achieved.

Forward Alyssa Norgaard was moving to the center of the dance and Dawna stretched on her tiptoes to track her rangy subject.  Alyssa and her teammates were as tall as Dawna, six-foot-three, but even without her usual height advantage, she easily spotted the trademark reddish ponytail.   Alyssa wrestled the ball away from Jerrie Justin whose dimpled cheeks were red with exertion below her ebony brush-cut.  Alyssa’s ponytail flared out above them, a proud strawberry-blonde banner.

Dawna spotted Lupe Navarro on the sidelines.  She was the team’s coach and Dawna’s former roommate from their days as college players at the University of Texas.  Lupe was the reason the FBI agent had traveled undercover across Siberia.

The coach yelled a command and the workout tempo ratcheted up.  Dawna heard Alyssa grunt as she grabbed for the ball, saw sweat shining on her pale face, felt her own T-shirt growing moist.

Suddenly, a choked groan came from the crush of female bodies.  Dawna concentrated on sorting out arms and legs in the play that had gone down.  But the pair of Mongolian men tracking her had chosen this moment to run their own play, she realized as a body smashed into her right hip.

The shorter and stockier descendant of Ghenghis Khan --she’d labeled him “Smokes” because he always had a cigarette pack in his hand--had slammed her on the right.  No surprise that equally sturdy “Beer”--a lover of Baltika in tall cans--was in position on her left to fake breaking her fall as he slid grasping fingers into that front vest pocket where she’d lured him.

He ended up kissing the pavement, one arm jerked up behind his back, Dawna’s knee pinning his lower spine.  She recognized the classic pocket-picking maneuver and glanced up to confirm that his partner had disappeared.  Smokes was no longer a threat.  Her tension eased.

“Leave me alone,” she said to her captive.  “Or I will break your arm.”  She twitched the limb higher by way of translation.

He let out a defeated moan.

Satisfied, she released him.  She watched him take off towards the tail end of the train.

“May I help you?” a male voice asked, the question laden with the polite diffidence of the world traveler. 

Dawna turned to face Magnus, the thirty-year-old Norwegian backpacker who had the fourth bunk in the railway compartment she shared with Alyssa and Jerrie.  He was as tall as she, but bonier, with sparse mud-colored hair.  His faintly tanned skin was one shade lighter than his dusty boots and faded trekking shorts.  He peered at her through black-framed spectacles.  “Do you want me to find a policeman?”

“No, thanks.”  Dawna didn’t want to draw more attention to herself.  Her FBI job was a secret from all but two others riding the train.  “No harm done,” she added.

“Unfortunately, we cannot say the same of our bunk-mate,” Magnus said, tilting his head toward the silent ballplayers.  “Alyssa should have a doctor attend to that cut.”

Dawna followed his gesture towards the team crouched around a fallen Alyssa.  Dark-eyed Lupe met Dawna’s gaze for an instant.  She turned back to Alyssa and pressed surgical gauze against the ballplayer’s temple.  Below the patch, blood streaked her bleached cheeks, dotted her work-out jersey.

“What happened?”  Dawna asked Magnus.

He shrugged.  “One minute she was playing ball, the next minute she was on the ground, bleeding.”

Precisely the move Dawna had been looking for.  And she’d missed it.

Read the whole story in the March 2006 issue of ALFRED HITCHCOCK’S MYSTERY MAGAZINE