“The planes are pretty,” he said, “but no threat to us.”
He paused for effect before asking rhetorically: “How can the soft-living Americans possibly face the hardships we endure? Could they live on cold rice and dried vegetables, haggard for lack of sleep, lousy, and unbathed? Our proletarian resolution must prevail.”
While Cheng-wu spoke, the commanding officer of the Twenty-eighth Fighter-Bomber Squadron shifted his big body in the cramped cockpit of the Thunderjet emblazoned: Painless Parker. Major George Chapman Parker, Jr., half-regretted the macabre play on the misleading slogan of the California dental firm. Nor was he enthusiastic at attacking ground troops defended only by small cannon and machine guns. But his request for transfer to Sabrejet interceptors had been rejected because the battle required seasoned ground-support pilots. Still, on completing his hundredth mission in two weeks’ time, he would be posted to Arizona for retraining on Sabres. Meanwhile, his squadron could orbit waiting for a target only another fifteen minutes before depleted fuel tanks forced it to return to the comforts of the airfield designated K-14, its base where American Red Cross girls waited with hot coffee and donuts.
Beneath his wings, no more than one thousand feet from the ground, the propeller-driven spotter plane dodged ground fire. That job he wouldn’t have for a spot promotion to full colonel. The risks were enormous, and the spotter couldn’t shoot back. George Parker’s earphones echoed the chatter between the spotter and the ground observers as they tried to pinpoint the target.
“Mosquito Four, this is Badger Three,” the radio crackled. “Can you see the rock formation like a broken arrowhead?”
“Badger Three, this is Mosquito Four. That’s a hell of a description. What color?”
“Mosquito Four from Badger Three. Slate-colored with a snow drift where the shaft of the arrow would be. Come lower. Go to five hundred feet.”
“Badger Three from Mosquito Four. For Chris’ sake, they’re not throwing cream-puffs at me. But I’ll make a pass. Keep directing me. I won’t acknowledge.”
“Badger Three to Mosquito Four, Roger. Come to a heading of one-niner-niner and descend. When you see the arrowhead, mark its tip. We’ve seen sporadic movement there all morning.”
The spotter plane descended on the invisible threads of the ground observers’ guidance. Concealed anti-aircraft cannon fired streams of shells that burst in dirty-gray puffs. The spotter plane trembled in the sky, but held its course.
“Mosquito Four: That’s it. You’re on now.”
“Mosquito Four marking.”
Two rockets streaked from the spotter’s wings. Their explosion raised pillars of red smoke at the tip of the arrowhead.
“Top Tooth to first-echelon Molars,” George Parker’s throat microphone reverberated. “Go in and paste them.”
Across the valley, the ground observers watched three Thunderjets swoop on the hillside. The crump of bombs shook the slopes, and snow geysered high.
“Top Tooth to second-echelon Molars. First sticks hundred yards to left. Correct and go in.”
The second echelon plummeted, silver fuselages glittering in the late morning sun. The Thunderjets pulled up two hundred yards above the arrowhead, and their bombs raised snow flurries fifty yards short of the target.
Peering out of the cave’s slit-entrance, Shih Cheng-wu smiled in satisfaction.
“You see,” he shouted. “They can’t hit us, just as I said.”
George Parker dropped the nose of his Thunderjet, and his wingmen dived in concert precisely thirty-five feet from his wing-tips. The three Thunderjets hurtled toward the hillside at four hundred fifty knots. Ignoring the flak, George Parker bored much closer than his two previous echelons. When the arrowhead, bracketed by red smoke, filled his sights, he triggered the release and rocketed into the sky.
“Another miss!” his first cousin, Shih Cheng-wu, exulted. “Another miss!”
The entire hillside was engulfed by fifty-foot flames when the napalm cannisters ignited. The explosive combustion of jellied gasoline sucked air from the cave. Ten seconds later, Cheng-wu’s lungs collapsed in the near vacuum. Twenty seconds later, torrents of fire rolled into the cave and cremated his body.
On June 23, 1951, Soviet Ambassador to the United Nations Jakob Malik conveyed the willingness of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and the Chinese People’s Volunteers to discuss a ceasefire. The armistice talks thus initiated were to continue for more than two years before the United Nations and the Communists signed an agreement that left the opposing forces just about where they had been when the haggling began. Tens of thousands were to die in inconclusive battles for insignificant hills during the protracted haggling in the blasted village between the front lines called Panmunjom, the “Shop with the Wooden Door.”
As the first round of talks finally began in mid-July, a letter postmarked Peking was delivered to Sir Charles Sekloong at his offices in St. George’s Building. He fingered the stained envelope, irrationally fearful of its contents. The family had not heard from James in three years.
Charles centered the rice-paper envelope on Sir Jonathan’s old desk, still reluctant to open it. His hand reached for the telephone. But he recalled that he could not reach Mary, who had taken Sarah to “have a look at my middle school on Diamond Hill.”
He smiled fondly. Mary’s attitude had changed radically since the riot. Her resentful contempt for the Chinese race was burned away, though she still derided the stupidity of politicians and bureaucrats—all politicians and bureaucrats, Chinese, British, or Patagonian. Struggling with the influx from China, the Hong Kong civil service dreaded the sudden descents of Lady Sekloong to battle for her refugees. The Colonial Secretariat could not ignore her peremptory demands for food, clothing, shelter, education, and medical services. Lady Sekloong spoke at least once a week with His Excellency the Governor, Sir Alexander Grantham, who, the British Establishment felt, was in any event pandering disgracefully to the Chinese populace of Hong Kong.
The entire Secretariat fervently agreed that Lady Sekloong was not merely a nuisance, but a menace. Her eccentricity was not limited to championing refugees. She harried the mutually profitable alliance of land speculators and those bureaucrats responsible for selling Crown Land; and she had the bad taste to be on excellent terms with the foreign correspondents who had congregated in the Colony after the Communists’ “Liberation” of China. Fearful that the resurgent Communists’ momentum might yet carry them across the indefensible border, the Secretariat dreaded any publicity that drew Peking’s attention to the isolated Colony. The balance was delicate when British troops were fighting in Korea and a British administration welcomed refugees to Hong Kong. Besides, seventy-two civil airliners flown out by their Nationalist pilots stood at Kaitak Airport while the courts pondered the conflicting claims of Peking and Taiwan to their ownership. A flurry of newspaper reports on mistreatment—or, for that matter, excessively good treatment—of refugees might yet bring the People’s Liberation Army over the Shumchon River. Memories of 1941 were still strong, and the guard battalions had gone north to Korea. The survivors nervously recalled the Japanese conquest and occupation, but Lady Sekloong was implacable.
Sir Charles marveled at his wife’s energy, for he felt old and tired. But his inherited stubbornness flouted his doctors’ advice to reduce his intake of the food and liquor that fueled his day’s work. He was impelled to work even harder by the need to consolidate his control of the firm and to exploit the opportunities created by the war. The doctors also warned against overwork, but Charles at seventy-five remembered his father’s long work-days when the Old Gentleman was the same age. Besides, Mary’s change of heart was a tonic to him, though she had only once, and then obliquely, referred to her new feelings.
“Charles, my dear,” she had said two weeks earlier over coffee and brandy, “I no longer feel isolated, an exile in Hong Kong. It is home—for both of us.”
He had half-forgotten the letter on his de
sk. The crumpled envelope barred with thin red stripes was inertly menacing. He finally slit the flap with a silver letter-opener. The flimsy paper bore a few sentences in Chinese:
Respected Parents,
I must report with great sorrow the death of my son Cheng-wu. He was killed by a treacherous air attack while rallying his company to withstand the shameless assaults of American Imperialism against our beloved Socialist Motherland.
I am sure that you will take pride, as I do, in Cheng-wu’s falling with resplendent courage on the battlefield in the just cause. The oppressed peoples of the world will unite and destroy the imperialists.
Your obedient son,
Shih Ai-kuo
Sir Charles Sekloong was unaccountably stirred by the death of the grandson he had never seen. Though James still lived, he too was lost to the family, as lost in life as his elder brother Jonathan and his sister Guinevere were in death. It was unseemly, Charles felt, that he himself should survive his son, his daughter, and, now, his grandson. He might any day receive a similar message from the American Department of Defense or the British War Office regarding George Chapman Parker, Jr., or Henry Haleevie Sekloong. It was almost too much to bear, so soon after the wracking sorrow of his father’s death. Cheng-wu’s death was another warning, a further portent that the House of Sekloong was imperiled.
“A curse,” he muttered thickly, “a curse on the family for what I’ve done. We are being dispersed.…”
His fumbling fingers found the bell-push under the desk. Their tips slipped maddeningly on its glossy surface before he could exert sufficient pressure to summon his secretary. His cheeks were empurpled, and pain lanced his temples. A red mist obscured his vision.
“Mary!” he cried when the door opened. “Get me Mary! I must see her immediately.”
Why didn’t the damned girl understand? Why did she stand there gawping as if she couldn’t hear him? Why did she stare so? He summoned all his strength and spoke loudly: “Mary!”
That final effort burst the massive cerebral aneurism. Sir Charles Sekloong died less than a year after his deeply resented and deeply loved father, who had dominated his life.
May 28, 1957–February 22, 1959
“I had to come home,” Albert Sekloong told his grandmother with unblinking American facetiousness. “I was tired of explaining why I didn’t have a handle to my name.”
Lady Mary listened with unconcealed pleasure, though she had cautioned herself against marring her resumed relationship with Jonnie’s younger son by appearing proprietorial. She had seen him only for brief visits since he was sent to the United States in 1941 at the age of seven. But she congratulated herself again for having early discerned the promise that was burgeoning in the young man of twenty-three who had returned to Hong Kong five months earlier at Christmas of 1956.
“It wasn’t so bad at the Wharton School,” he continued. “They were only interested in money. But, all the time I was working on my MBA at Harvard, people kept asking the same dumb questions. ‘If your great-grandfather was a Sir and your grandfather, too, if your brother’s a Sir, why aren’t you Sir Sekloong or Sir Al or Lord Whosis?’ I had to come home. In Hong Kong I’m a Sekloong. And that’s enough.”
“How did they know about your illustrious ancestry?”
“I guess I told them,” he admitted. “But, honestly, Grandma, they kept pressing me, like some kind of freak.”
Lady Mary hid her smile behind her fan. Albert’s youthful arrogance, cloaked by self-mockery, recalled Harry Sekloong, while his instinctive sense of position was reminiscent of those quintessential men of Hong Kong, Charles and Jonnie. Both had felt the Colony owed them deference, which they reciprocated with civic service. Sir Jonathan had instilled in them the Chinese gentry’s traditional sense of responsibility for the less fortunate of the village—and their village was all Hong Kong.
“There was a girl from Radcliffe,” Albert went on. “Japanese, but really kittenish. Called me Sir Bertie.”
Lady Mary enjoyed Albert’s disarmingly casual chatter. Like his father, he knew just how to use his charm. But an even quicker mind than Jonnie’s animated the dark, regular features that were lit by the hazel Sekloong eyes when he smiled. Her youngest grandson possessed both Sir Jonathan’s acute commercial brain and his compulsive competitive drive. As had the Old Gentleman, Albert attacked the citadels of commerce like an ardent knight-errant.
Perhaps the frailty of age led her to see in the young man the traits of those other men she had loved. Instilled with the Sekloong mystique, she had almost overlooked the obvious fact that Albert also inherited the detached acuity of his grandfather Judah Haleevie. Sir Jonathan himself had acknowledged: “Judah owned a better financial brain than mine, though he lacked ruthlessness.” Yet Albert’s purpose was blatant. He was already pressing her to give him “greater responsibility,” which they both knew meant more power. She would, she knew, gradually yield, while retaining her own over-riding veto. She also knew he would be trying to elbow her off the throne in a few years—if she lived that long. On May 28, 1957, she was just a month away from her seventy-seventh birthday.
“They call me Lady Mary, which I’m not.” She responded to Albert’s banter over the title.
“But you are Lady Mary,” he flattered. “You couldn’t be anything else.”
“Your other great-grandfather, the Bandmaster, would have roared with laughter at hearing me called Lady Mary. He always warned I’d ‘coom doon wi’ a boomp’!”
“But you haven’t, have you?” Albert objected logically. “And neither will the House. Grandma, what about my proposals? We’ve got to expand fast in electronics and plastics.”
“Not yet.” Her mind dwelt still on the uncertainty of fate. “But we could still coom doon wi’ a boomp. There’s too much playing soldier, grande dame, and landed squire. Someone has to mind the store.”
“Let them play. I’ll be the storekeeper. We only need one, you know.”
Although she was not quite ready to tell him, Lady Mary had already decided to try Albert by giving him a free hand in his new enterprises. She herself was more interested in solid real estate: new office buildings, blocks of luxury flats, and hotels throughout Southeast Asia as well as Hong Kong. She and Sarah were toying with manufacturing furniture to take advantage of the growing export market for Oriental furnishings. There was, however, no harm in venturing into the new, technological industries, as long as they didn’t affect the fundamentals. Albert also wanted to expand their small airline interests, and she was receptive, remembering Harry’s enthusiasm for aviation. But she would be quite certain that each new enterprise was solidly grounded before proceeding to the next. The House of Sekloong could bide its time.
Her grandson’s enthusiasm was exhilarating to Lady Mary who had, after Charles’s death, withdrawn for three years, letting her managers direct a holding operation. The European taipans in the Hong Kong Club had observed with mock regret that the House of Sekloong was faltering because it lacked aggressive leadership. What, they asked, could one expect of an old lady?
The old lady had ignored those taunts. She knew that Charles, who had rendered splendid homage to his father, would have wished her to observe deep mourning in the Chinese fashion. Losing Charles after more than fifty years had almost destroyed her; the shock had been even more devastating for being unexpected. She had belatedly learned that Hong Kong had become her true home and the Chinese her people. Her own dependence upon Charles had been so integral to her existence that she had not realized its full extent until his death.
Her new collaboration with Albert was as invigorating as a magical elixir. But she had no intention of allowing either Albert or death to nudge her off the throne of the House of Sekloong for some time to come. She was enjoying her return too much.
Lady Mary was also eager to see the new drama played out in China. The effective administration exercised by the People’s Republic had reawakened her hopes that the Chinese might finally learn
to rule themselves. She could not approve of the Communist Party’s doctrinaire ruthlessness, which had inflicted great suffering. She could hope that a China united under a strong government for the first time in more than one hundred fifty years was moving toward stability and—if not prosperity—fair shares for all of its meager resources.
James Sekloong would have been wryly amused by his mother’s optimism had they communicated with each other. His own appraisal of China was far less sanguine than that of the woman he considered a hopeless old reactionary. Still, he rarely thought of his family, except as a minor embarrassment. After drawing a curtain of silence between himself and the Sekloongs, James had taken other precautions. When the Shanghai authorities were deciding just which expropriated mansions would best serve as a rehabilitation center for the city’s prostitutes, James had suggested his half-uncle Gregory’s thirty-six-room villa on the Avenue Joffre in the former French Concession. The Party, he knew, had duly noted his emancipation from bourgeois family ties.
At fifty, he had on June 2, 1957, just been promoted to full general and deputy commander of the multiprovincial Peking Military Region and the Peking Garrison. Nonetheless, the man who called himself Shih Ai-kuo was troubled. His insider’s view of the state of the People’s Republic of China contrasted with his mother’s guarded optimism. His mood was bleak when he alighted from his Russian-built Zis staff car at the Eastern Entrance of the monumental Great Hall of the People on the Plaza of the Gate of Heavenly Peace.
The white-gloved honor guard saluted with gleaming rifles tipped by glittering bayonets. The guardsmen were chosen for their stature and their clean-cut handsomeness; their uniforms were so precisely tailored that they looked like oversized tailor’s dummies. James’s own uniform was a travesty of revolutionary austerity. Five red stars were embroidered on his gold shoulder boards, and his sleeves were bedizened with gold braid. The peaked cap with the enameled red star chafed both his forehead and his sense of propriety. He preferred the sensible, soft cloth cap he had worn before the Military Affairs Commission reorganized the People’s Liberation Army two years earlier. Ten People’s Marshals were created, his old commander Lin Piao among them; commissioned officers were sharply delineated from noncommissioned personnel; and those officers were dressed in gaudy Russian-style uniforms like actors in a Viennese musical comedy.
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