Dynasty

by Elegant, Robert;

  Comrade Shao-chi squeezed his subordinate’s arm. The tramping boots were returning along the alley. James cocked his head and, a moment later, laughed mirthlessly.

  “It’s rifle fire,” he whispered. “Some distance away.”

  “Are you sure?” The civilian deferred to the soldier’s experience. “Sounds like another patrol.”

  “No!” James answered decisively. “Rifle and machine-gun fire.”

  “The Japanese, no doubt. Drunk again and shooting for joy. Some joy!”

  “No, not that,” James insisted. “They’re regular volleys. A fire-fight somewhere to the southwest.”

  “Ah, well,” Comrade Shao-chi smiled, “the more confusion, the better for us.”

  The volleys were an unremitting drum-fire above the ornate arches of the Lukouchiao nine miles away. That structure, crowned with rows of guardian lions, was called Marco Polo Bridge after the Venetian who had come to Peking in the thirteenth century when the city, called Kambalac, was the capital of the Mongol Empire of Kublai Khan. The bridge carried the road across the broad Yungting River to the gates of the walled town of Wanping. As they had so frequently, Chinese and Japanese troops were once again clashing. The Chinese garrison defending Wanping returned the Japanese fire from the balustraded, forty-foot-thick wall. But the incident was destined to be different from other incidents.

  On the balmy Sunday night, the Imperial Japanese Army had ordered a “reconnaissance in force.” Private Yoshimoto Eijiro of the Guards Regiment had not returned to his barracks that evening. The Japanese captain commanding was officially charged only to find Private Yoshimoto, but his infantry company had been strengthened with three field-guns. The Imperial General Staff was determined to demonstate Japan’s power to the feckless, insolent Chinese. Lieutenant General Katsuki Kiyochi had received his orders directly from the militant new Cabinet that took office on June 5, 1937. No longer would the Japanese exercise patient restraint while the Chinese sought to heal the split between the Communists and Nationalists—and impertinently defied Japan’s might.

  The Emperor’s infantrymen hammered on the gates with rifle butts, and the field-guns trundled into position.

  “Oi, ni!… Kai-kai … Wo-men lai … kan-kan … Yi ko Jih-pen ping … mei-yu-la.” A lieutenant screamed in pidgin Chinese at the uncomprehending sentry. “Hey, you.… Open … open. We come … look look.… One piece Japanese soldier … have not got.”

  The bewildered Chinese private summoned his sergeant, who regarded the formidable Japanese array and called his lieutenant. The alarm ranged upward through the ranks, and ten minutes later the sleepy Chinese captain commanding the Wanping garrison listened to the Japanese lieutenant’s half-intelligible expostulations. When their meaning finally emerged from the gabble of broken Chinese, the Nationalist captain tried to temporize.

  “We’ll have a look for your man just as soon as it’s daylight,” he offered. “I’m sure he’s not here, but no one could find him in the dark anyway.”

  “Dzai shuo!” The Japanese lieutenant demanded, “Say again.”

  His temper rising, the Chinese captain shouted in pidgin Mandarin: “We look-look your soldier when come light. I know he no can be here, but anyway in dark no can find.”

  “Sudeni! Sudeni! Haieranakereba narain!” the Japanese captain snapped at his lieutenant. “Immediately! Immediately! We must enter!”

  Obediently, the Japanese lieutenant repeated to the dark figures on the wall: “Right now! Right now! We must come look-look. We demand … demand!”

  “Wait till daylight.” The Chinese captain’s reply was equally decisive. “Then we’ll search. Japanese troops may not enter Wanping.”

  “So be it,” the Japanese captain snapped, having found his casus belli. His samurai sword slapping against his side, he strode into the night. His lieutenant followed, trailed by five privates carrying long Nambu rifles. The points of light twinkling from their fixed bayonets slowly receded into the enveloping gloom and were extinguished.

  “Faced the dwarf bastards down this time,” the Chinese captain told his officers. “Just a little firmness—and they give way.”

  A row of fireflies winked red in the darkness. Half a second later, the high-pitched rattle of Nambu rifles resounded against the brick wall, and the Chinese officers threw themselves down behind the parapet. A machine gun coughed in asthmatic spasms.

  “Return fire,” the Chinese commander shouted. “Return fire at will.”

  The Chinese aimed their rifles and machine guns at the winking red lights that betrayed the Japanese position. Though the troops exchanged fire for more than two hours, neither side suffered notably. The Chinese were protected by the town wall and the Japanese by the darkness. But both sides fired their volleys jubilantly. The Chinese rejoiced at finally standing up to the arrogant intruders, while the Japanese were determined to teach their opponents the folly of defying their invincible arms.

  Shortly after 3:30 on the morning of July 8, 1937, the Japanese commander’s tenuous patience broke. He spoke a few words, and the crump of field-guns rumbled over the crackle of small-arms fire. Within Wanping, the defenders’ morale plummeted from exultation to despair. Tile roofs collapsed amid fountains of dust; terrified women shrieked; and the old town walls trembled with each explosion.

  Since Chinese small arms were impotent against Japanese artillery, the Japanese marched triumphantly into the town a half-hour later. They did not find Private Yoshimoto, who had crept into his barracks just before midnight, when the engagement began. They did, however, create the pretext for further “punitive operations” to deter further Chinese armed defiance. Japanese reinforcements swarmed out of occupied Manchuria, accompanied by the tanks, heavy artillery, and motorized transport the Chinese lacked. Japanese warplanes circled virtually unchallenged over Peiping and the Western Hills. The second Sino-Japanese War had begun.

  The first Chinese counterstrategy was criss-crossing Peiping’s streets with trenches—not in anticipation of a last-ditch stand, but to hamper any sortie by Japanese troops from the Legation Quarter. When a detachment of cavalrymen rode out of that enclave, the Chinese opened fire, wounding one soldier and forcing the others to retire. Flush with their easy victory, the Nationalists closed in on the cavalrymen. They were more disappointed than dismayed to find that they had repelled the U.S. Horse Marines who had guarded the American Legation since the Boxer Rising.

  No further action took place within Peiping. Instead, Japanese troops captured railway junctions to encircle the city before slaughtering a battalion of the Thirty-seventh Division at Nanyüan, fifteen miles away. The commanding general of the Chinese XXIX Army Corps withdrew from the city on July 26, 1937. Rather than fight a hopeless battle and risk destruction of the ancient capital’s architectural and artistic treasures, the Chinese surrendered Peiping to the Japanese without resistance.

  Two days later Tientsin fell. With its chief port in Japanese hands, North China was indefensible. The few remaining Chinese who still advocated compromise were shouted down. After a forty-two-year truce, roiled by armed clashes and diplomatic confrontations, China and Japan were again formally at war. Few of the Western statesmen and journalists who deprecated the outbreak of hostilities realized that World War II had just begun on the plains of North China. The leaders of both Chinese factions, Nationalists and Communists alike, prepared for a protracted war of attrition, which, they were confident, would eventually end with Japanese exhaustion or with Japanese defeat by Western intervention.

  Colonel James Sekloong and Commissioner Liu Shao-chi were indistinguishable amid the few blue-clad spectators who, blank-faced and silent, watched the triumphant entry of the Imperial Japanese Army into Peiping on August 8, 1937. Their underground apparatus had been expanded to more than three hundred by the influx of ardent students after the belated formal Nationalist–Communist agreement to unite against the Japanese. Their immediate objective was rallying the people of North China to subvert Japanese m
ilitary rule. Their long-term objective, as defined by Mao Tse-tung, was unchanged: to increase their own strength and to infiltrate every layer of society, particularly governmental organs and essential services like water and electricity, in order to facilitate the ultimate Communist conquest of China.

  “It’s come at last,” Comrade Shao-chi mused. “The final era of imperialistic wars Lenin foresaw. The capitalists will destroy each other—and the masses will pick up the pieces. Within a decade, the masses will rule China.”

  “Under the leadership of the Communist Party, of course, Comrade!”

  James reassured himself by reaffirming the dogma that had sustained the Communists through the bleak decade following the terrible year 1927. The professional soldier, who had fought against the overwhelming Nationalist Extermination Campaigns, was less optimistic than his civilian chief as to the “inevitable outcome” of the new struggle against even greater odds. A worm of doubt still gnawed at his faith in the Marxist-Leninist doctrines to which he had pledged his life. He knew that serving the just revolutionary cause was the only possible occupation for a patriot. Yet he wondered if the sages Karl Marx and V. I. Lenin had adequately allowed for the irrepressible human factor. He had seen his comrades contend for personal power within the Communist hierarchy as ferociously as they fought their Nationalist enemies. Even a dedicated Communist was, James knew, not a secular saint, but a human being. Though they strove for the masses’ welfare and for a strong China, too many good Communists were obsessed with attaining and using power—often through betrayal or assassination. Moscow, the holy city of Marxism-Leninism, was itself no different. During the months he spent there with Chou En-lai after their escape from Canton, James had found that even the leaders of the Comintern struggled unceasingly against each other for power and position.

  “We shall prevail, of course,” James repeated.

  “Of course,” Comrade Shao-chi replied negligently. “Who else is there?”

  His chief’s absolute confidence was irritating, since James suspected that Liu Shao-chi, too, was attempting to reassure himself. James was, moreover, worried about his wife, Lu Ping, the half-educated daughter of a bankrupt small-holder whom he had married in the Kiangsi Soviet Area in 1929 without informing his parents.

  Ai-jen, “loved person,” was the Party’s new term, though James thought of Ping as chi-tze, “wife.” Their “revolutionary relationship” was, however, more responsive to the Party’s demands than to their personal needs. Lu Ping seemed untroubled by their prolonged separations. Even in bed, when they could whisper unheard, she expressed no particular concern at their own infrequent meetings or her own separation from their young son. Though he had renounced Catholicism upon joining the Party, James yearned for a normal, monogamous family life. Unlike Liu Shao-chi, he could neither take casual mistresses nor divorce one wife to marry another as personal desire and political expediency directed. The Party encouraged sexual flexibility, though it did not absolutely require such demonstrations of a good Communist’s liberation from “bourgeois inhibitions.” But Lu Ping had given her body and her spirit wholly to the Communist Party that had rescued her from the servitude of an arranged marriage to a small landholder. She sometimes seemed to rejoice in their disrupted private life as further proof of her revolutionary dedication, and sometimes, he feared, she slept with other male comrades to prove her “revolutionary emancipation.”

  James deliberately swept his mind clear of personal concerns. Self-discipline was essential to a field officer when hundreds of lives hung on his decisions. Locking away his private fears was equally essential to survival in the half-world of the underground movement. A moment’s abstraction could lead to a fatal error, the minor indiscretion that would unmask him to the Japanese or the Nationalists. When Comrade Shao-chi and he entered the eating shop called the Old Dumpling King, James’s mind was totally concentrated on their coming meeting with their eight cell leaders.

  The eating shop was a convenient rendezvous, since men came and went as they pleased for an obvious purpose. The meeting on July 7, the night of the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, had been scheduled for a warehouse in the old Tartar City to avoid establishing a regular routine the police might mark. However, Comrade Shao-chi had judged the Old Dumpling King safe again on August 8 as the Japanese marched into Peiping and massed for a new assault on Shanghai.

  The conspirators slipped into the atmosphere redolent of spices and cooking oil singly or in pairs. Some lingered over their chiao-tze before vanishing into the loft above the shop. Others hurried through the grimy backdoor toward the noisome latrine in the backyard. An hour passed before all ten men had climbed the rickety outside stairway to the loft, leaving two student lookouts at the table at the foot of the interior stairway.

  The conspirators’ features were obscured by the darkness in the loft. Despite the 80° heat, some also pulled scarves over their faces. Comrade Shao-chi preferred discomfort to rashness and further insisted that all his agents use false names. James was known as Old Tang, and he called his leader Mr. Wu. If any one were arrested, he could not reveal the other conspirators’ identity under torture.

  “You’ve all seen the latest directive,” the pale Commissioner said. “The Anti-Japanese War has begun, and we are joining the Kuomintang in a United Front. Today we’ll go over each group’s assignment.”

  A slight, bespectacled youth gestured for attention. James knew the Peking University student he had himself recruited and given the incongruous Party-name Hsiao Hu, Small Tiger.

  “Can we trust the Nationalists, Mr. Wu?” the student asked. “Won’t they turn on us after we’ve beaten off the Japanese dwarves?”

  “Of course we can’t trust the Nationalists,” Comrade Shao-chi replied. “Can they trust us? But we must work with them—for the moment.”

  “And, Small Tiger,” James added sardonically, “don’t worry too much about what happens after our victory. There’ll be lots of time to worry later, unless the dwarves withdraw. And that’s as likely as a hen’s crowing.”

  “I must stress one point,” Comrade Shao-chi added. “Our ultimate objective is unchanged. We will destroy the Nationalists. We will liberate the Chinese people. The masses will rule under the guidance of the Communist Party and the leadership of the proletariat. For the moment, we fight the Japanese to overthrow the Nationalist exploiters.”

  “I understand,” Small Tiger acknowledged. “Your instructions, Mr. Wu?”

  “The general line is: expansion, infiltration, intelligence gathering, and disruption—in that order. We must prepare for the struggle against the Kuomintang by strengthening ourselves and struggling against the Japanese. Your group, Small Tiger, will collaborate with the dwarves, serving them as interpreters, informants, technicians, clerks, and …”

  “Collaborate!” The student-leader protested vehemently. “I’d rather be a guerrilla in the hills than collaborate.”

  “I said collaborate.” Comrade Shao-chi’s low voice was implacable. “Infiltration is a primary mission. Your group will first infiltrate and subsequently execute specific instructions as received. You have sworn to obey the Party’s orders—and the Party has determined that your proper role is pretended collaboration.”

  James mopped his perspiring face with a hand towel to conceal a smile. He had suggested Small Tiger’s assignment—and anticipated his protests. The veteran colonel was amused by his mental picture of the weedy young student scrambling over the hills carrying a rifle he could not use among hardy peasant guerrillas who would walk him into the ground within hours.

  “Each man will serve to the utmost of his ability according to his qualifications,” Comrade Shao-chi continued inexorably. “Old Tang will remain my deputy, while organizing and commanding sapper squads. He is best qualified to carry out principled terrorism and assassination. Small Tiger’s group will …”

  The clatter of breaking dishes and voices raised in shrill dispute rose through the cracks between the floor boa
rds. As arranged, the loud quarrel between the lookouts warned of a raid. Comrade Shao-chi broke off in midsentence, and the conspirators poured down the rickety outside stairway as heavy boots clattered on the interior stairs. After waiting twelve seconds, James was the fifth man through the door. Clambering over the backyard wall, he glanced back. Four cell leaders were at his heels, but Small Tiger was kicking in the grip of a stout Peiping policeman. A squat Japanese Kempeitai sergeant was raising his pistol. Small Tiger, James reflected wryly, had begun his collaboration earlier than planned. He could be invaluable if he followed his instructions and yielded—after convincing resistance—to the Kempeitai’s demands that he become their double agent.

  The Kempei’s pistol cracked. A gust tugged at James’s left shoulder as he tumbled over the wall. Racing for the maze of hu-tungs, he clapped his hand to his shoulder. His palm was red and sticky. The bullet’s impact had numbed his nerves, and he felt no pain. He automatically followed the escape route mapped in his mind. Communist Colonel James Sekloong’s personal war against the invaders had begun—with first blood to the Japanese.

  Nationalist General Thomas Sekloong barely noted the formal Japanese occupation of Peiping. The High Command had already written off the city, and he was overwhelmed by the volume of papers passing across his desk. Following the XXIX Army Corps’ withdrawal from Peiping, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek’s Military Secretariat was obsessed with the impending threat to Shanghai, the Orient’s largest city.

  After their rapid victory in North China, the exultant Imperial General Staff in Tokyo confidently predicted that all China would be conquered in three months’ time. The Japanese were convinced that the Nanking Government would be incapable of coherent resistance when it was deprived of financial sustenance and its trade was choked by the loss of the cosmopolitan port on the mudflats of the Yangtze River. The conquest of Shanghai would shatter the Nationalists and force the Generalissimo to accept Tokyo’s stringent terms for peace.