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by Ian Slater


  “The admiral wanted you to know that if he can be of any assistance he will gladly give it.”

  Freeman grunted, his tone somewhere between gratitude and frustration. He appreciated the admiral’s gesture, but it was just that, a gesture. Too vague a promise. Besides, Freeman was no longer C in C Second Army, and he told Colonel Wei this. He had effectively been relieved of his command. Didn’t Taipei read the papers? The La Roche tabloids had been screaming FREEMAN FIRED! for a week. Besides, ID was so easily forged in an age where they were using Xerox color copiers to pass on forged banknotes. “Why the hell didn’t you call me at the house?” Freeman demanded, still suspicious. “Instead of this cloak and—”

  “Your house is being watched, General. Your phone lines are tapped.”

  “By whom?”

  “We do not know.”

  “We?”

  “At the consulate,” the man said, hesitating. “I can give you other contacts to verify my credentials if you—”

  “It’s all right,” Freeman said. “What’s Admiral Kuang say — specifically?”

  “Only that if you should need his assistance he will do whatever he can.”

  “You don’t seem to understand. I’ve lost command of Second Army. Furthermore, I’m merely an instrument of national policy. I can’t do what the United States government doesn’t want me to do.”

  “We understand, General, but you may yet be returned to command.”

  “Huh — that’d be a miracle,” Freeman commented, looking again at the two other men. Then he knew who they must be. “Goddamn it! They’re bodyguards,” he said, smiling at Wei. “For once the fairies’ve done something right.”

  Still, Freeman wondered, would bodyguards be assigned after you were no longer a threat to the enemy? Well, hell, ex-presidents had bodyguards for life. Was it too much conceit that after his victories he would have earned the wrath of vindictive losers — that they might send someone after him?

  “We feel,” Wei continued, choosing his words as carefully as a chef selecting his tomatoes for the day, working around it. “We feel that things are in a state of flux in the disputed area between Siberia and Manchuria and that—”

  “The world’s in a state of flux, Colonel,” Freeman interrupted. “It’s her natural condition.”

  “Perhaps, but the signs are more propitious than I think you realize, General. For yourself.”

  “Even if you’re correct — again, what can I do?”

  “Should the occasion arise, you would send the word ‘mercury’ to our consulate. This would activate certain procedures with Admiral Kuang.”

  “Don’t dance with me, Colonel. Does ‘mercury’ mean you’d intervene militarily?”

  “This is possible.”

  Colonel Wei flew into Freeman, knocking him to the harder sand by the water’s edge, blood and bone from his shattered cheek spurting over the general’s chest, turning the white foamy sea pink.

  “Jesus—” Freeman began. Wei’s eyes were frozen in shock, the shot having killed him the instant the depleted uranium bullet had exploded in his brain, creating a hole the size of a fist in the back of his head. Another bullet thudded into him, and Freeman felt a warm sensation flooding over his stomach. Now the general had the Sig Sauer out and, pushing Wei off him, but snuggling in close to the body, took careful aim. The Sig Sauer bucked twice, and the man by the water seemed to hesitate, trembling, looking as if he were shot, but he kept coming.

  The man from the dunes had disappeared only to reappear moments later, his head barely visible through the windshield of a four-wheel-drive Jeep Renegade coming straight at Freeman, who fired again to his left. The man by the water crumpled at the sea’s edge, the waves issuing over his body, their forward motion rolling cumbersomely toward die beach, the undertow sucking at him, and wet sand pouring over his legs back into the sea.

  The four-wheel-drive was now hurtling down from the dunes a hundred feet away when Freeman fired one, two, three, four, five at the windshield. One of the shots found the target, the four-wheel-drive flipping onto its side, careening for a bit on the beach, making the drier sand squeak like the sound of piglets, its wheels still spinning at the sky. Freeman knew he had only a few shots left and ran toward the vehicle from the off side. The man was dead, and Freeman couldn’t see where he’d been hit until he realized he hadn’t been hit at all. The windshield was a milky spider’s web; little glass had flown out. Instead, what must have happened was that as soon as the windshield had been hit, turning opaque, the man had instantly stuck his head out far left to see where to steer when the vehicle flipped, digging deep into the dry sand, his head taking the impact full on and now lolling like a rag doll’s.

  No one had heard any shots against the noise of the surf, but someone passing up on the highway had seen the overturned Renegade and the body at the surf’s edge. When the police arrived they couldn’t find any ID on the two men.

  “You have any idea who they were, General?” asked a blonde whose figure couldn’t be disguised despite the state trooper uniform.

  “No,” the general answered. “I’d only be speculating.”

  “Go ahead, General,” she encouraged him.

  “Guo An Bu — Chinese Intelligence Service — External Affairs.”

  “Why would they be after you, General?”

  “Don’t know,” Freeman said, “unless they think I’m another Subutai.” The general was staring out at the sea, not in the near distance but as if somehow he could see all the way to China. “Subutai,” he explained, “served Genghis Khan. Marched all the way from China to the Hungarian plain. At one stage his armies covered four hundred miles, took several cities, and fought two great battles, conquering Poland and all of Silesia — in less than thirty days.” He paused, oblivious to me policewoman’s stare. “Before that, he’d taken Russia. And before that, Genghis Khan had taken all China. By God, what an army!”

  “General-”

  “What — oh. Sorry, officer. No, what I mean was there’s a good chance it was politically motivated, but I don’t want that to get into the press.”

  “Politically motivated, sir?”

  “Yes, that’s what I think. Chinese don’t want me in the picture, which makes me believe that Wei — that joker over there — was right. Maybe the cease-fire over there isn’t worth the paper it’s written on.”

  “You mean the Chinese were trying to assassinate you, General?”

  “Either that,” Freeman said, “or”—flashing a smile—“someone in Washington!”

  Everyone laughed. It happened now and then at a homicide — the tension had to snap. But as the ROC colonel was carried away, Freeman’s jaw clenched. No matter what army — when a soldier went down like that, having risked all, knowing the odds, it never failed to move him. At that moment he felt as if Wei were a son in a way that transcended time and borders. Hearing the roll of the sea, he felt that he had been with Subutai, that destiny had thrown Wei upon him to protect him — that God had used the ROC colonel as a shield and that therefore Freeman’s time had not come. Yet.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Sergeant first class Minoru Sato was fifty-two years of age, one year away from mandatory retirement in the Japanese Defense Force. The company to which he was attached was part of the Second Asahikawa Division, one of the JDF’s northern army’s four divisions. Under the constitution, the JDF did not get to take either the type-61 or -74 tank or the FH 70. Also denied them were the 155mm howitzer and the self-propelled 106mm recoilless rifle. By stretching the definition of what constituted “small arms,” the two-thousand-man JDF unit was permitted to take LAW antitank launchers and antipersonnel mines, as these came under the heading of self-defense. But for the JDF’s purposes the restrictions were not seen as any impediment to what was thought would be basically a U.N.-sanctioned observer team on a ten-by-five-mile strip of the U.N. ‘s DMZ. In any event U.S. armor and artillery were in effect “on call” should they be needed in some unfores
een circumstance. And at least the two battalions that made up the JDF force were equipped with top-of-the-line type-89 5.56mm rifles.

  With a thoroughness for which the Japanese were known in their industrial policy, the JDF battalion organized itself promptly into a classic perimeter defense, with the JDF commander true to his U.N. mission playing no favorites — both the western and eastern sectors of the perimeter that fronted American garrisons no less manned than the southern side of the five-by-ten-mile sector where JDF troops looked across the Amur River into Manchuria.

  The Japanese were determined to look and to be as professional as possible — after all, this was only the second time Japanese troops had been abroad since World War II over sixty years ago, and the nation would be watching, expecting them to meet the highest standards. Japanese pride was not about to be embarrassed by any attack — even by Chinese bandits who in this sparsely populated region of Manchuria could come down from the high country across the river and conceivably launch a raid across the river on the Siberian villages. In fact Beijing had warned the U.N. central command before the Japanese Defense Force had even been despatched that it, Beijing, could not be responsible for the actions of Chinese border brigands. The admission constituted something of a loss of face for Beijing, apparently conceding that part of the People’s Republic was not completely under Communist control. But Beijing’s caution about brigands was seen by Washington as a genuine effort to forestall any possible misunderstanding should a local warlord and his followers forge over the river and cause the PLA to be blamed for violating the cease-fire.

  Freeman, on the other hand, dismissed Cheng’s plea as “Beijing bullshit!” claiming that it was a “goddamned façade, a ready-made excuse for the PLA to hit and run wherever they like and then blame it on some bandit.”

  “Why would they bother?” he was asked by Washington.

  “Because it’s a hidden message to us that says, ‘You boys want a U.N. line, fine — but be prepared to lose men in “border raids” over the next twenty years.’ Same as Korea. There are still people in the U.S. who don’t know we lose men every year in ‘incidents’ on that damn Thirty-eighth parallel. This ‘bandit’ cover is Beijing’s way of reminding us that we’re stuck here to garrison the U.N. line and to pay for it — a trace ten times longer than the Korean DMZ — for the next twenty years.”

  “Douglas,” they said in Washington, “is just looking for a fight. Get him out of here. Fast.”

  And now he was sitting with Marjorie on the eve of April the twenty-fourth, watching the JDF set up camp on the U.N. line. At one point he could do nothing more than shake his head in disgust and disbelief. CBN was already interviewing members of the Japanese contingent.

  “Beautiful,” Freeman said, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “Look at the background for this interview — you could plot their sections, strong points, and battle positions to the nearest yard. CBN’s giving us an aerial shot now — Jesus! Why don’t they just send the plans to Beijing and be done with it?”

  “Well,” Marjorie said — she’d long given up on Douglas’s blasphemy—”I’m sure it will all work out for the best, Douglas.” She was an “all-for-the-best” lady — she could have turned the battle for Hue into an “all-for-the-best” event. She was getting on his nerves, and he was trying to think of a way of telling her that from now on he had decided to stay up at Fort Ord. He figured his duty to his dead wife, to give Marjorie a chance to “look after you,” had long been fulfilled. Though he was watching an earlier taped newscast of the JDF near Poyarkovo, it was already dawn there and a phone call from a sympathetic colleague at the Pentagon informed him that Poyarkovo was as of this moment under heavy attack — U.S. fire-support teams being rushed from both the western and eastern sectors of the rectangle to try to help the JDF hold. The forward slope nearest the Amur, or Black Dragon, as the Chinese called it, was already under heavy 81mm mortar assault.

  By the time the Americans got there it was too late for the JDF to regroup and retake the forward slope they’d lost. Now they had to fell back along a five-point reverse slope defense behind a crest on the northern side of the river, the forward half of the five-by-ten-mile area already lost to waves of what were being called “Chinese irregulars.”

  The Japanese were in shock. While they had quickly placed LAW antitank teams and machine gun nests on either flank, producing a withering fire, a tank ditch as the TRP — target reference point — the Chinese, none of whom were dressed in army garb, were running through the mine fields. As one man fell, another used him as a stepping stone just as the Russians had done at Stalingrad. And Chinese were already using bamboo ladders to cross the eight-foot-wide by five-foot-deep antitank ditch only yards below the crest. But where had so many Chinese come from, taking the JDF by complete surprise?

  That question was about to be answered by a reconnaissance flight immediately ordered by Colonel Dick Norton.

  * * *

  A Stealth F-117B fighter was at Sapporo Airfield in northern Japan, but a hairline fracture had been found in its RAM (radar-absorbing material) contoured intake grid. The concern was that the fracture, under the enormous stresses imposed on the aircraft, might suddenly become something much larger, possibly radiating out to the wing. In any event this was the reason that the carrier USS Salt Lake City in the East China Sea was contacted and ordered to launch immediately a photo reconnaissance of the Poyarkovo area.

  Though by now the F-4 Phantom, the wondrous fighter of an earlier age, was all but extinct, relegated to a secondary role as a quick photo recon aircraft, it was at this moment exactly the right plane in the right place and so was given the mission to find out just how much ChiCom activity was going on along the sector of the U.N. line now under attack and how many troops were massing on the southern bank of the Amur, in Manchuria. Was this a local warlord action or merely a tactical probe for something much larger?

  As the carrier steamed into a saffron China dawn, twin ribbons of steam rose and broke ghostlike from its angled deck catapults, and the deck director, a yellow dot against the wide gray expanse of sea and sky, watched as the F-4’s deck crew swung into action. Suddenly the plane had the most important mission aboard, a return to its old glory, the Phantom’s twin nose wheels rising slightly as they passed up over the shuttle, the catapult bridle looped over the shuttle and onto the two wing forgings.

  The bridle’s slack was taken up, the cable now looking like a huge black rubber band stretched beneath the nose strut, which now rose to full flight attitude, and the wings. On deck the bitterly cold wind whistled about the plane’s canopy, kerosene fumes mixing with the salt air of the sea, the pilot watching the deck director raise his hands, turning them as if he were securing twin-valve wheels aboard a submarine. It was the signal to go to full afterburner thrust. The howl of the notoriously smoky J79 engine became a banshee scream, the fighter straining full against the bridle.

  The yellow-jacketed deck officer dropped to one knee, right arm extended sideways, pointing seaward out over the deck. His action was immediately followed by the Phantom, as the plane, its pilot slammed back hard against the Martin-Baker ejector seat, was hurled aloft in 2.4 seconds in less than a two-hundred-foot run. The Phantom banked sharply to the left and headed toward the blurred squiggle of gray that was the Manchurian coast.

  * * *

  General William Beatty, the man with whom Washington had replaced Douglas Freeman as C in C Second Army, had surprised the joint chiefs in Washington with the speed with which he’d dispatched his troops to help the Japanese Defense Force plug the gap at Poyarkovo, even though he was not in time to help much. As the Chinese withdrew, they left behind them a savaged and demoralized JDF, Master Sergeant Sato and officers killed at the river’s edge.

  In fact, more Chinese — over two hundred — lay dead than Japanese and Americans, but the shock effect of the Chi-Corns’ attack had been total. American observers were quick to note how many of the Japanese had been either decap
itated or had limbs hacked off despite, it was believed, having been dead already as a result of the fusillade of small-arms fire from the waves of Chinese infantry. Most of the Chinese dead had fallen victim to the JDF’s mine field; the Chinese, in an eerie action reminiscent of the kind of fanatical Japanese defense that Americans had come to expect in World War II, had used the bodies of their dead and dying comrades as stepping stones in a crazy path of human flesh to cross the mine field.

  General Beatty immediately ordered the American First Battalion of II Corps to pursue the Chinese irregulars or whoever they were across the Amur to destroy them and/or teach them the lesson that this was one U.N. peacekeeping force that wouldn’t sit still and tolerate such violations of the DMZ.

  By 1400 hours the American First and Second Battalions had crossed the slow-thawing ice of the Amur River and were engaging rearguard elements of the fleeing Chinese force on the river’s southern — that is, Chinese — bank, the Americans of II Corps already taking dozens of prisoners but struck by the speed of the Chinese withdrawal. Beatty wisely ordered pontoon bridges at the ready should a sudden thaw in the unpredictable spring weather weaken the ice and so temporarily cut off the U.S. supply line. He then ordered two more battalions across the river. It was the high point of his career and his downfall. It wasn’t that he had exceeded his mandate in ordering the battalions across the border — in this Washington and Tokyo, pushed by outraged public opinion in both countries over the number of Japanese and American soldiers killed, fully supported Beatty’s action.

  Freeman had called the Pentagon the moment he had heard news reports of Beatty’s counterattack. But his warning, having to go through normal channels, was treated merely as an advisory which, while it stunned those in Washington who never thought they’d hear Freeman back away from a fight, arrived too late to have any effect. By now more U.S. and Japanese troops had been committed, and General William Beatty was within hours of earning the epithet of “Batty Beatty.” Freeman had seen immediately — from the rapidity of the hit-and-run Chinese attack — that this was a typical ChiCom guerrilla tactic. More than that, it was a classic maneuver right out of the pages of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War about trapping your enemy by withdrawing or, as Freeman called it, a “sucker play.” Subutai had used the same tactic at the Battle of Sajo River in 1241, withdrawing across the river, dummying the Hungarians after him, before suddenly turning in a massive broad-stroke movement, snapping shut the trap. And this is precisely what Cheng’s troops did as they wheeled about in the hills around Xunhe, a village three miles south of the river. Their numbers were swollen to ten times their original four thousand by troops from the Harbin-based Twenty-three Army Corps, who had been rushed forward on a forced march the night before from supposedly “destroyed” barracks sixty-five miles west of the river on the single lane road along the Xun River valley.

 

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