by Ian Slater
For Nie, a politician, the political reality always subsumed the narrower military perspective, yet he now clearly approved of unhesitating military action, explaining, with the smoothing, consensus-seeking gestures of his hands, that while of course it was regrettable that the People’s Liberation Army would find it necessary to fight, from an internal political perspective a xiao guz muo zan dou — a skirmish — or two on the northern borders of their grossly overpopulated country would have a salutary result. For quite apart from rebuffing the Japanese, it would have the time-proven effect of diverting domestic dissatisfaction away from Beijing’s widely unpopular anti-inflationary policies and its ruthless hunt for dissident elements.
Cheng agreed it was axiomatic that internal dissent would be far less tolerated by the masses whose attention would of necessity shift to that of concern for a foreign devil at China’s gates along the ancient northern wall of Genghis Khan. Besides, Cheng knew an external enemy in any country had the effect of burying, or at least subsuming, internal squabbles within the party as well as on the street. Such a move of course would also consolidate Nie’s power.
Cheng’s attack, with the Central Committee’s unanimous backing, was set for dawn, April 25.
Cheng said nothing about the plan he had set in motion against Freeman. For Nie and the others, Freeman, for the most part, was an open book — a career soldier of fifty-five who bore an uncanny resemblance to an American actor and whose strategies and tactical brilliance had earned him four stars and the grudging respect of even enemy commanders. His reputation had grown rapidly since his daring attack on Pyongyang earlier in the war and his brilliant defense against the Siberian Aist — giant hovercraft — offensive on Lake Baikal. On the lake he had what little artillery he had brought with him on the airdrop fired into the ice around his paratroopers’ positions at the lake’s end. This bombardment had created a jagged sea of auto-size bergs that the Aists could not negotiate. The result had been known as “Freeman’s Basra,” a telescoping pile of wreckage that looked like the destruction meted out to the retreating Iraqis along the highway from Kuwait.
CHAPTER SIX
If Freeman’s victories were an open book, he had a few secrets he shared with no one. One of them was that, fit as he was, he detested having to keep it up. Jogging and physical exercise made you too damn hot and sweaty— unless, of course, you were in combat. Then you were so busy, so fearful, at times — usually after — so exhilarated you didn’t notice. But he had to force himself to run at least four miles a day to stay in shape, and go easy on the buttered popcorn. Monterey’s beach was perfect, the sand making it more exhausting, making him feel doubly heroic, and at the end he could walk into the ocean. That, as Marjorie said every time, would “cool you off right enough.”
For the past three days, Freeman hadn’t seen the figure on the dunes, and this morning the general was particularly relaxed, going over the old battles in his mind as he jogged along the water-firmed beach.
He remembered the armored battle in the Yakutsk region of Siberia where it had plunged to minus sixty degrees, at which temperature metal became brittle and the waxes in the hydraulic lines of the Siberian tanks, but not the American Abrams M1A1, separated out, the oil’s constituent waxes then clogging the tanks’ arteries in the same way as lumps of cholesterol clog the bloodstream. The T-72s and some T-80s had suddenly become sitting ducks, whereas the American tanks burst through the snow berms at forty miles per hour like exploding icing sugar, picking the Siberians off. It was one of the most beautiful things Freeman had ever seen, and he was thinking of it now as suddenly he saw the lone figure on the dunes once again.
Freeman’s world was a Hobbesian one: one in which only the sword, or the threat of it by the sovereign — whether the sovereign was one or many — guaranteed peace and tranquility, and so it was the most natural thing in the world for him to pat the bulge beneath the waistband of his jogging trousers to make sure that the Sig Sauer was snug and ready. His wife had been fatally wounded by a Siberian Spetsnaz — a special-forces sleeper who, along with so many others, had been inserted during the heyday of the love-in between Gorby and the New York Times and who, when activated to take out Freeman earlier in the war, had surprised his wife in the house instead, Freeman having been delayed on the flight from Washington. The intruder fatally wounded her, and she died a few hours later in the Monterey Peninsula Hospital.
Freeman could tell by the way the man — Chinese, in a jogging suit — was standing on the dune, staring out to sea, not bothering to turn in the general’s direction, that he was waiting for him again. Or was he one of California’s legion of ecofreaks — kill all the people but save the whales! And was the stranger the same man as a few days ago?
“Morning,” Freeman said, not altering his pace, merely nodding as he passed. The man nodded back.
Son of a bitch looks suspicious, Freeman thought, and immediately thought after that maybe he wasn’t. He looked lithe, wiry, and unusually tall. But somehow, maybe because of the smart matching jogging outfit and the Nike pumps — very modern — in some indefinable way Freeman didn’t place him as a party member. But then they’d hardly send someone in a baggy Mao suit with “party” written all over him.
Two hundred yards further on Freeman stopped and began some leg stretches. Love a duck — the Chinese jogger was doing T’ai chi, moving with that graceful deliberation that for once made westerners stare at the Chinese rather than the other way around.
Now ahead, a hundred yards further on up the beach, he saw another figure, and off to his left another appeared atop the dunes.
“Bad news, Dick!” Freeman was speaking as if Colonel Dick Norton were by his side. “One in front of me, one behind, and one on the left flank.” The sea was to his right. Boxed in.
“All right, you bastards,” Freeman muttered beneath the crash of the sea. “You’re going to have to come and get me.” Up on the highway he could hear the hum of tires and saw a Winnebago go by — then a bus and a motorbike, but they might as well have been on Mars.
“Well, Dick, I told you to build up the U.N. line — get things ready in case of a punch-up — and over here I’ve fouled up, my friend.” He was doing a few push-ups, during which he could see all of them at one glance. He stopped the pushups. Foolish to get his heartbeat up too much — could make his aim a little shaky. Still, he wasn’t fool enough to think he could get three of them. Two, maybe, but not three. He looked up and saw that T’ai Chi was now moving toward him, hands in his pockets. “Well, Dick, last time I saw a jogger with his hands in his pockets, son of a bitch was playing with himself. Don’t like it. You hear that, Sig? Time I played a little pocket billiards myself.” He knelt down, as if going into another exercise routine, which immediately reduced his target size. He felt under the jogging suit for the grip — had it, and turned the gun barrel out, still under the cloth, pushing off the safety. He figured T’ai Chi would be within good range in about sixty, seventy seconds, and began the count.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Five thousand miles away it had been a slow morning along the U.N. line. Everything was quiet, and only the four-man SAS/Delta troop of David Brentwood, Salvini, Choir Williams, and Aussie Lewis were unhurriedly busy, checking all their equipment from the transparent mags for the Belgian P-90 to the pencil flares and hand-held, cigarette-pack-size GPSs — geosynchronous positioning systems — they all carried. Jenghiz, the Mongolian interpreter-guide they had assigned them, was fluent not only in the Khalkha Mongol dialect that was used by three-quarters of the population but also the dialects of the Durbet Mongols who lived in and about the mountainous region north of the tableland between Siberia and China that the rest of the world called Mongolia. Jenghiz also spoke the tongue of the Darigangra inhabitants of eastern Mongolia, and that of the Kazakhs, Turvins, and Khotans that made up less than 10 percent of the sparsely populated country the size of Texas.
With Jenghiz they would be going in over the wall, not the Great
Wall of China but the big rampart of Genghis Khan in northeast Mongolia, near the Mongolian-Chinese border, and over the two-mile-high Hentiyn Nuruu Mountains south of the Siberian-Mongolian border and eighty miles northeast of the Mongolian capital of Ulan Bator. It was a high country that, unlike the steppes and the Gobi Desert south and east of it, was one of fast-running rivers, deep gorges, and wild, windswept mountains, outcrops of larch and spruce hanging grimly onto rock faces, battered by the winds that alternately came out of Siberia to the north and Chinese Inner Mongolia to the south.
If they were caught, Jenghiz was to destroy Freeman’s sealed message. The cover story given them by Colonel Dick Norton would be that while patrolling the U.N. DMZ, the Pave Low M-53J chopper had lost its NOE — nap of the earth — radar, and in one of the many dust storms that plagued Mongolia they had lost their way, straying into Mongolian airspace, the Mongolian interpreter as lost for recognizable landmarks as they were. It had happened before, both in the almost featureless expanse of the Gobi Desert to the southeast and to those pilots trying to negotiate their way around the Hentiyn Nuruu.
But Aussie Lewis reckoned the Mongolians wouldn’t buy it. They certainly didn’t buy any incursions on their territory by the Chinese from Inner Mongolia, whom they hated.
“This is different,” David Brentwood assured Aussie. “We’ll be wearing U.N. identification — armbands, et cetera.”
“Yeah, until we reach the insertion point,” Salvini said. “But what if they come across us while we’re changing into our Mongolian garb? You know what they do to spies.” He paused. “You know what we do to spies.”
“We’re not at war with them, boyo,” Choir Williams said. “It’d be mighty embarrassing, that’s all.”
Aussie chimed in, “Maybe, Choir, but Sal’s got a point. We could be embarrassed for twenty-five years’ hard fucking yakka in some friggin’ coal mine!”
“Hey!” David Brentwood said, checking over the clothes they’d slip into in order to travel down through the mountains to Ulan Bator on Dick Norton’s, that is, Freeman’s, “preventive medicine” mission. David’s tone was older than his twenty-five years. He was cutting short the worry talk. “No one twisted your arms, you know. You guys volunteered. Norton told me that was the general’s first directive for this mission. You know the conditions. We get caught, we get caught. Uncle Sam can’t do anything. You want to Cry about it, don’t go!”
It was about the worst insult you could deliver to the elite commandos of Special Air Service or Delta Force. These were men who had gone deep into enemy country from the coast only a few weeks before the cease-fire to help a stranded SEAL detachment near Nanking. These men had been together on Ratmanov Island — had gone down into the labyrinth of tunnels to “sweep” out the Spetsnaz.
“We’re not complaining,” Aussie said. “Just looking at it square in the face, Davey. I think Freeman’s doin’ the right thing. It’s just—”
“Aw, why don’t you admit it, Aussie?” Salvini said, his Brooklyn accent at its height. “You don’ wanna leave little Olga!”
“Big Olga!” Choir added.
Aussie slipped an elastic band around two 9mm mags. “Don’t be so fucking rude!”
“Don’t take any pictures of her,” David said easily, smiling to break the tension now his point had been made. “Remember, no personal effects.”
“All right if I bring my dick along?” Aussie countered.
David Brentwood, essentially a shy individual, shook his head at the Australian’s unrelenting vulgarity.
“Just keep it in your trousers, boyo,” Choir Williams advised. “It might get shot off otherwise.”
Salvini thought this was very funny.
“Oh you’re a riot,” Aussie told them. “A regular fucking riot. If anybody’s going to be missing their member it’s the first Mongolian who pokes his nose—” Aussie stopped and winked at Jenghiz, the interpreter-guide. “No offense, Ghiz.”
“No off fence,” Jenghiz said, his good-humored smile of pearl-white teeth framed by a drooping black mustache. It made him look somewhat sinister despite the fine, bright teeth, and Aussie suspected that he grew it more to bug the Han Chinese who for the most part couldn’t grow one and who in general regarded facial hair as the sign of barbarians — except when one was old.
“Listen up!” Aussie said. “Ten-to-one I’ll be the first to spot a Mongolian. Choir? Sal? What do you say?”
Choir Williams, who’d lost and made money from the Australian’s obsession with gambling before, was careful to set the ground rules. “How will we know for sure?”
“Well,” Aussie said, “it’s not very difficult. If the fucker starts shooting—”
Choir and Salvini bet ten-to-one they’d spot the first Mongolian after the drop — after they started making their way down from the mountains toward Ulan Bator, where they hoped they would be able to make contact with the pro-Siberian but anti-Chinese government. Since Gorbachev’s perestroika and glasnost the Mongolians, though only with a population of just over two million, had started to go their own way and, despite the presence of Siberian garrisons, were determined to make their country their own as fer as they could. There were bound to be Russian patrols, but Brentwood’s team was to avoid all combat if at all possible and make its way to Ulan Bator with a message that Freeman had once jocularly called, “Let’s make a deal.”
“By the way,” Aussie said, “anyone hear about that poor bastard Smythe?” He was referring to one of the SEAL members who’d been captured by the Chinese, General Cheng refusing to give the American back in a prisoner exchange because the Chinese were maintaining that as Smythe was out of uniform when captured and therefore a “spy,” he was not to be accredited normal POW treatment.
The fact that Smythe was hardly a spy, decked out as he’d been in SEAL rebreather and wet suit, was of no account to the Chinese, and the fact that Smythe — a man in his early thirties with a wife and two young children back in Maine — hadn’t been shot was not due to any compassion on the Chinese part but because Cheng wanted to “question” him in greater detail about the SEALs. In short, they wanted to torture him.
“Last I heard,” David Brentwood told Aussie, “was that intelligence reports from the Democracy Movement underground said that they’d moved him from Nanking to Beijing. More interrogation probably.”
“Poor bugger,” Aussie said. “And that Jewish sheila— the one who was — you know — the one who was smuggled out of Harbin north to us.”
“What sheila?” Salvini pressed.
“The Jewish bird who told our side Cheng was moving masses of troops across the Nanking Bridge — on their way north.”
“Oh,” Sal said. “Her. Yeah, I remember. Someone told me she got back to the JAO.” He meant the Jewish Autonomous Region or Oblast wedged between Manchuria and Siberia, of which it had ostensibly been a part.
“Or what used to be the JAO before we got here,” Sal added. “She’s still around. Why?”
“Heard she’s some looker,” Aussie said. “Enormous—”
“Yes, okay,” David said, “we know. Enormous eyes.” They all laughed, even Jenghiz, who didn’t always understand their English. They said in the SAS/Delta Force that if Aussie wasn’t in a firefight he was in bed.
Two minutes later they were told the Pave Low was ready, its big noise-suppressed rotors impatiently chopping the air.
“Still bloody loud,” Aussie commented.
“Like your ties!” Salvini joshed.
With that, they were all aboard, and once the rear ramp closed, swallowing them up, the Pave Low’s big bulbous nose — the chopper’s fuselage flanked by two scallop-shaped fuel tanks — lifted, the rear rotor higher, the chopper’s down-push kicking up hard crystalline snow that chafed the faces of its ground crew, who did not know whether they’d see the Pave Low again.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The man who’d been assiduously practicing his t’ai chi was now no more than twenty feet away.
“General Freeman?”
“Yes,” Freeman answered, now squatting on his haunches, arms akimbo, doing breathing exercises. “Who are you?”
“Colonel Wei. Republic of China.” His English was impeccable. “I am with the consulate in New York. Admiral Lin Kuang was sorry you were unable to discuss ideas with him and has sent—”
“Identification!” Freeman demanded, standing up, now indicating the Chinese behind him near the water and the other one on his flank up on the dunes. “Those your people?” Freeman added, his tone curtly businesslike.
“No,” the man calling himself Wei said. “We might have a problem in that regard, which is why I—”
“Why did you wait?” Freeman said, accepting the consulate identification card and driver’s license with residency address and the home address in Taiwan. “Why didn’t you approach me back there?” He indicated the dunes further behind him up the beach.
“I did not know — I still do not know, General, who these other two men are. I thought they might try to stop me.”
“Or me,” Freeman said, handing him back the identification. “What do you want to see me about?” The general’s eyes were still on the other two men, one a hundred yards to his right down the beach and the other about the same distance up from him atop the dunes, the brownish green dune grass stubble blowing stiffly in the wind.