by Ian Slater
The Siberians had had enough, and moved on to Irkutsk. All that later historians would note about the “small action” at a place called the Kultuk Tunnels was that Americans had come under “repeated Siberian attacks during a last-minute evacuation.” Nothing was mentioned in the historical account — because no one knew — that Thomis had shot himself in the foot in the hopes of being one of the first “wounded” taken out, but had in fact been one of the last, along with Emory.
* * *
Major Truet had been told at West Point never to exaggerate a man’s exploits when writing him up for a commendation, that battle-experienced officers could smell a “puff” job a mile away. And so he simply wrote what he saw as the truth: namely that Private First Class John D. Thomis of Charlie Company Second Battalion U.S. III Corps had, despite sustaining a leg wound from the enemy and being under repeated attacks by the enemy on C Company positions, not only held his ground, but in the best traditions of the service, had thrown himself into the breach, fighting off repeated attempts of the Siberians who were trying to destroy the helicopter evacuating his comrades. Private Thomis had kept firing until he ran out of ammunition, at which point he used his rifle itself as a weapon in close-quarter combat, securing precious seconds during which the helo, with his comrades aboard, could take off.
For his “valor at the Kultuk Tunnels,” Private First Class Thomis was awarded the Silver Star. Only Emory, his head swathed in bandages now, and some said still suffering from concussion, opined, “Shit — that son of a bitch couldn’t walk to the chopper. That’s why he was shootin’ where he was, man. Otherwise he’d have been the first son of a bitch on the Huey.”
“Bullshit!” they told Emory. Thomis had the 7.62mm slug that had penetrated his foot. It was Siberian, all right.
“Shit!” countered Emory. “There was enough bullets on the ground for you to start a collection. Son of a bitch couldn’t walk, so he tried usin’ me as his goddamned crutch. I got to be the nigger again, man!”
It made no difference — the La Roche tabloids were making Thomis a hero. The photograph on page one showed him in Alaska, Dutch Harbor — the first stop on his repatriation home — smiling broadly, his leg in an impressive cast, which seemed to reach out to you from the picture, and with an enormous cigar given him by a smiling Douglas Freeman, before Thomis had left Siberia. It was the only smile the general had given anyone that day.
Freeman was so angry, Norton thought he would self-destruct. There were only ten hours till the official cease-fire went into effect.
“By God, those bastards in Washington are doing it to me again! I swear to God, Norton, if you were getting laid and hear climax, those sons of bitches would tell you to stop. My God, don’t they understand?” His right fist slammed into the map of Manchuria, badly denting the area around Manzhouli and causing a red rain of ChiCom unit position pins to fall to the floor. “Those rice-sucking jokers in Beijing have no intention of withdrawing.” Not caring that a group of reporters who had suddenly materialized like rabbits from the warren upon word of the cease-fire were entering the HQ hut, Freeman whipped off his reading glasses, jabbing them at the line mat marked the Siberian-Chinese border. “Can’t they read a goddamn map in Washington? These Chinks have no intention of relinquishing the territory they’ve taken from Second Army.”
“Isn’t it, uh, Siberian soil, General?” asked a correspondent from The London Times.
“No, by God. It’s ours! We paid for it — at Skovorodino and Baikal. Or have you forgotten? We, the Americans, kept the Siberian-Chinese border intact. Why, hadn’t been for us, there’d be no border. Chinese’d have moved in ages ago.”
“But General,” interrupted the Paris Match correspondent, “wasn’t the A-7 incident started by the Siberians who were there? How do you make it out to be American?”
It was a trap, but Freeman saw it immediately, the reporter trying to get him to say it was Americans who had started the fighting, given that he said the area had been won and paid for by Americans.
“It’s American because we lost good men on that damn mountain. Special Forces. That’s why. Good men.”
“Sir?” It was the stunning redhead from CBS. “General, does this mean you have no intention of ceding A-7 and the surrounding areas to the Chinese?”
“One more question,” interjected Norton, quickly giving his warning glance to the general, giving Freeman a second or two to think about his career as well as the political implications of a no answer — which would in effect be going directly against the president.
“I,” began Freeman, “am going to obey my orders, as General Schwarzkopf did.”
Norton felt the tension draining out of him. It was a brilliant answer under pressure, at once making it clear that he would obey the president, yet it was politically obscure enough, Schwarzkopf having had to withhold his impulse to pursue the withdrawing Iraqi army because of the presidential order, and in so doing, allowing Saddam Insane to begin rebuilding his entire army both during and after the ceasefire. Which was precisely what Freeman was afraid the Chinese would do — rebuild the bridge and start shunting divisions, massing them all along the Manchurian-Siberian border from A-7 eastward.
What wasn’t so brilliant of Freeman, what Norton hadn’t been able to run interference for, was when Freeman, going full bore, had used the word “Chinks” instead of “Chinese.”
* * *
Jay La Roche loved it. On his private jet en route to Dutch Harbor to see Lana — who was “playing at nurse,” as he derisively put it to Francine — he shook his head with undisguised glee at the headline his tabloids had seized:
CHINKS LIARS! CHARGES FREEMAN
CEASE-FIRE OFF TO ROCKY START
The fact that when the tabloids hit the streets in the U.S. there were still eight hours, till midnight precisely, until the cease-fire would actually begin and the special mandate of the Emergency Powers Act would be rescinded, was lost amid the outcry of every minority group in America. They charged that Freeman, protected by the Emergency Powers Act, had shown his true colors, indulging in racism and bigotry.
With the naïveté that often coinhabits genius, Freeman frequently underrated the wiliness of the press. He had no such prejudice against the Chinese and had meant no harm — said he meant no harm. He recanted, indeed he told the press how highly he respected the Chinese as a civilization. “A great people. By God, first ones to invent gunpowder!” Norton nearly had a stroke the moment Freeman said it, and had to corral the female correspondent from the L.A. Times who had heard the remark to tell her that if she used the “gunpowder” quote, she’d never again receive press accreditation anywhere in the Far East theater. “Will I need it again?” she challenged shrewdly.
“Well, miss,” Norton had replied, completely unashamed of his outright act of censorship, “what do you think the Chinese will do during the cease-fire? Go home to Beijing?”
“Are you saying this is a Yugoslavian cease-fire?” she asked, smiling.
Norton gave a noncommittal shrug. “Your phrase — not mine. Look at the map,” he said casually. “What would you do if you were the Chi—”
“Norton!”
“General?”
“Pardon me for interrupting, miss, but you can hear this, too. We’ve reports coming in from Baikal that some Siberian fighter aircraft haven’t got the message. About the cease-fire. There’s been reports of strafing. I have to go and talk with this — this Chinese joker at A-7. Goddamn colonel. I won’t go till they have a three-star commander there. The bastards!” He looked at the reporter. “And that’s off-the-record.”
“Which part, General? The strafing or the three-star bit?”
He forced a grin. “The three-star bit. Don’t want people back home to think I’m… proud. What I am proud of is my boys.”
A lie and a truth in one sentence, thought the correspondent. He was proud of his boys, but as vain as any Manchu that had sat on the Peacock Throne. “I’ll just report that
enemy elements are still—”
“Elements—hell! They’re MiG-29s and they’re shooting at my boys.”
“Are the reports reliable, General?”
“Hell, yes. We’ve got SAT pics of them rising from forward fields around Irkutsk.”
It was another half-truth, though the general didn’t realize it. The Siberians were still fighting, but they weren’t strafing. What they were doing was trying to shoot all the Marsden-matting forward air strips being laid down at a frantic rate by Seabees flown in, under Freeman’s orders, from Khabarovsk. The general was doing a little last-minute reinforcing himself.
Indeed, while he was talking to the correspondent, in response to an AWAC report that four of Yesov’s MiG-29 Fulcrums were flying in diamond formation over Baikal, a nine-plane mission of B-52s from Nayoro under his orders with midair-refueled F-16 Strikers were flying high, 35,000 feet above the AA missile envelope, toward Lake Baikal.
* * *
“Sleduyte menya.” Follow me, intoned Sergei Marchenko in the usual calm, devil-may-care voice that had become as legendary as his Fulcrum’s “Yankee Killer” motif. Suddenly caught in a series of buffeting air pockets, his left wing dipped, and just as quickly his tetka— “auntie,” as he called his rechevaya instruktsiya, or voice guidance system — came on, telling him to correct the yaw.
“Yes, sweetheart,” he responded, heard a bang, and felt his right wing going. He was in a spin. The sound and sight of black smudges against the blue told him that he’d been hit — orange speckles of American AA could be seen erupting from the blackish-green taiga that was spinning up at him at a frightening rate. In eight g’s, the crushing pressure on his chest feeling like a locomotive rolling over on him, Marchenko involuntarily gasped for air, his wing man hearing him on the intercom. Disorientated in the spin, Marchenko punched the krasnuyu knopku ChP—red panic button — on his control column, but it couldn’t stop the spin. He hit another series of air pockets, the spin momentarily decreasing.
Finally managing to reach down between his legs, he felt the rubber loop and pulled. He heard the bang of the eject rocket, felt the jerk, was thrown two hundred feet into the air, heard another bang — the small drogue chute out, slowing him. Then the main chute opened, the ejection seat dropping away from him, his chute a black mushroom in the late evening’s cerulean-blue, the Americans not shooting at him as he floated down, swept westward in a fast airstream across Kultuk into the Siberian taiga.
* * *
In all, Marchenko had bailed out only three times, but his reputation for survival fed more stories, eagerly pumped up by the sleazier western tabloids, that it was six times. Novosibirsk encouraged the lie, for the defeated Siberians were badly in need of heroes. The fact that he had been downed by AA gunfire became quickly changed to him having been hit by some new kind of Stealth missile the Americans were developing, or possibly by one of the new Mach-3 needlepointed AA Starstreak missiles. Marchenko’s photo, the bruises to his face caused by the ejection carefully masked by makeup, appeared on page one of Novosibirsk’s official United Siberian next to his old MiG-29.
“What will you do now?” asked a reporter.
“Get another plane. Fight again!” Marchenko had answered. It was understood by the Novosibirsk reporters to be a joking, quick-witted response. Quick-witted it might have been, but it was no joke. Marchenko meant what he said, fully expecting to be called on once again.
* * *
For Shirer, later that night, the sight of the long stick of bombs falling away into the blue, and the trails of silent orange explosions blossoming rapidly in the green-black taiga, should have been more rewarding than it was. But while gunner Murphy was chatting away excitedly on the intercom about how there wouldn’t be any “motherfucker airfields” left for the “mothers to fly out of,” so accurate had been the nine-plane load of over 380,000 pounds of five-hundred-pound contact bombs and cratering munitions, Frank Shirer felt guilty that he couldn’t join in Murphy’s excitement. No matter that in the closing hours the B-52s had rendered the Siberians’ three most important airstrips beyond Irkutsk useless. For Shirer, the news of Marchenko’s downing by an AA battery was a bitter disappointment, for his determination to get back to flying — real flying— had once again been thwarted.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
From his forward HQ at Nizhneangarsk, Freeman insisted that before he would go to A-7, all prisoners must be exchanged. This list included the commando, Smythe, whom, or so it was claimed by the Democracy Movement, the PLA had cut down from the pier five railing as soon as they’d seen Robert Brentwood rescuing the other prisoner. All other prisoners would be exchanged, responded General Cheng on the phone, but not the man Smythe. “He is a spy.” This told Freeman Smythe was alive and that the underground information was correct, that the PLA, fearing his rescue, had got him off the bridge only a moment or so before the explosion.
“I insist he be returned,” said Freeman.
“This is not possible,” retorted an implacable Cheng. “He is ill.”
“Then we will release all Siberian prisoners but not PLA prisoners.”
“As you wish,” said Cheng.
* * *
“I told you, Norton,” Freeman said after the phone hookup. “Those Communists bastards don’t give a shit about their own people.”
“Maybe so, General, but should we press the point? They won’t kill Smythe, now that we’ve made a public issue of it. Besides, our contacts with the Chinese underground report that Beijing wants too much info from him to let him die. Reports are they’ll feed him up first.”
“A show trial?” Freeman proffered.
“Possibly. Smythe’ll have to hold up a sign saying how it was us who began the war, I suppose.”
“He won’t,” opined Freeman. “He’s SAS/Delta.”
“I hope he will. It’d be easier on him.”
“I agree. Can you try to get a message to him via the Chinese underground to say whatever the hell they want him to say. Nobody outside China’ll believe a public confession. You know that. Let him ‘confess’ and we’ll get him out on a fifty-to-one trade.” The general shook his head with the frustration he knew he’d have to live with. “God, Dick, I’d hoped to wrap things up tighter. Wanted to beat the bastards so bad they’d never—”
“If the underground movement rises up, General, maybe you can.”
Freeman’s head whipped around. “How do you mean?”
“General, Taiwan has the best air force and navy in Asia. They’ve never given up the mainland as their home. It’s through their agents we have contact with the Manchurian underground. If people inside rise up like they did before the Beijing massacre, Taiwan could go in — if they thought there was enough internal support.”
“How about external support?” probed Freeman, his blue eyes as intense as winter cold.
Norton gave one of his noncommittal shrugs, but Freeman knew that what it really meant was, I’m not going to say it.
Freeman was plainly excited. “Dick, who’s their head honcho? Taiwan?”
“Political or military?”
“Don’t fart around, Dick.”
“Admiral Lin Kuang.”
“We train him?”
Norton nodded. “Annapolis. Cum laude.”
“Dick, I want you to invite Admiral Kuang to Tokyo HQ. Incognito. We’ll ‘do’ lunch. Everything top of the line. American.”
“Yes, General. You have anything in mind?”
“Yes. I want that man back. He’s a brave man, Dick, and good. Brave men don’t belong in Chinese jails.”
“Yes, sir, but I mean the menu for Admiral Kuang.”
“What — oh, yes. Well, let’s see… soup for starters, clam chowder — Boston cream, not Manhattan. Main course — prime rib. American prime rib, Dick. Range fed. None of that damn chemical-feed crap.”
“Yes, sir,” said Norton, taking notes, the mention of “prime rib” making him hope he’d be at the table with Fre
eman and Kuang. He asked the general about dessert.
Freeman looked up into the cold blackness, and even though it looked like winter, he could smell, feel, that spring was stirring.
“What was that, Dick?”
“What kind of dessert will we offer?”
Freeman turned to him. “You haven’t been listening to me, Colonel.”
Norton looked at him, nonplussed. The general moved closer toward him, his face no more than six inches from Norton’s. “China, Dick! That’s the dessert. China!”
Norton felt himself taking a deep breath. The general, ice encrusting the stars on his helmet, looked southward across the vast taiga. “This is a wanker’s — a Yugoslav — ceasefire, Dick. Those bastards in Beijing are pinning the logistical tail back on their dragon. Well, if it starts breathing fire again, I’m going to give it something to roar about. I’ll chop the son of a bitch off at the neck! You still got that wolf dung in storage?”
Norton looked about nervously for any sign of reporters around the general’s Quonset hut, its frozen arch dripping in the darkness as spring’s thaw crept upon them. Norton saw a “covey,” as the general called photojoumalists, waiting for them by the headquarters. They would probably want some answers about Cheng’s refusal to release Smythe and, now it was suspected, several MIAs — air crew lost along the Amur. Sometimes, as now, Norton was convinced that the photojoumalists and others were less interested in a news story or a picture of Freeman next to his wall charts than they were in the headquarters coffee, said to be the best brewed in the entire Second Army. Proof of his theory came as they entered the HQ with the reporters, not a question being answered before everyone had their mug of steaming brew. Freeman was still agitated following his conversation with Cheng, and Norton knew he’d probably have to run interference for any of the dumber questions asked by any of the neophytes among the group.
Before the correspondents were upon them, Freeman instructed Norton to make sure they had lots of wolf dung ready in the event of a breakdown in the cease-fire.