by Ian Slater
* * *
Finding that his eyes got tired after only a small time at the computer screens, Freeman had the reports run out on hard copy and was now going over them for any signs of an earlier than normal thaw, at the same time trying to put himself in Yesov’s shoes should the Siberian commander decide to attack across the westernmost defensive line of the cease-fire, namely Lake Baikal. Freeman marked off possible Siberian jump-off points on the west bank of the four-hundred-mile lake, especially those down around the small port of Baikal at the southern end, which now lay in American hands under the terms of the cease-fire. If Yesov attacked, Freeman decided he would send in Stealth bombers to try to take out the line along the cliffs that formed the southern arm of the Trans-Siberian as it curved about the lake before dipping south into Mongolia. Even with Smart bombs, however, a rail line was notoriously difficult to take out, as ties and rails could by replaced in a matter of hours.
He poured another black coffee and looked at his watch. It was 0400, with only the cease-fire skeleton staff on duty. Even Dick Norton, who tried to keep pace with the general, had gone to bed. At times Freeman felt guilty for not having the time to think more about the welfare of his staff. He hadn’t even thought much about Doreen, his wife, who had died only a short time before and for whose funeral he couldn’t return — the battle for Ratmanov Island raging at the time. But he knew his first responsibility was to Second Army as a whole, knowing that a surprise attack, which neither Washington nor London nor any of the other Allies expected, could presage a disaster. Doreen, he was sure, would have been the first to understand. She had been the ideal serviceman’s wife — uncomplaining, ready to follow at a moment’s notice, and, if the truth be known, the source of much of his earlier strength when, as a young officer, he was trying to make his mark in a field crowded with other veterans of the Iraqi war. He had experienced both hosannas and hoots, the former when he’d led the raid on Pyongyang and reached Baikal, the latter when he’d used fuel air explosives over Ratmanov. La Roche’s tabloids in particular had alternated between making him a saint and a “warmonger.” Presently they were saying that he was a man “obsessed” by war, unable to see that “there could be an end to it.”
They were right, he was a warrior — saw the world with a warrior’s eye — but there was nothing he could do about that. It was the way he was made. When they walked on the spring grass, people marveled at the beauty of swallows sweeping low, so close to yet never quite touching the grass, their darting blue-metal sheen a thing of joy to watch. Freeman enjoyed watching them, too, but he knew that it was the feet of the people visiting the park that scared up insects which the swallows then swooped low to kill, and that this was every bit as much a part of the scene as was the beauty. Even the most tranquil scene he could remember— the tidal pools he and Doreen had seen around Monterey— were in fact miniature seas populated by creatures for whom battle was never ending. You fought or you died.
* * *
Dutch Harbor was in darkness. If the aurora borealis was “kicking up its ‘eels,” Doolittle said, “some ruddy great clouds are in the way, mate.” But his fellow patient, Frank Shirer, wasn’t listening. The flier, his convalescence rapidly coming to an end, was engrossed in the Wall Street Journal that Doolittle had given him. It wasn’t a paper Frank normally perused. Neither did Doolittle, investment to the cockney constituting an eternal mystery. “Stocks” in his family were things Robin Hood was put in if the Sheriff of Nottingham ever caught him. Doolittle dragged heavily on his cigarette, glancing down at the Xeroxed page he’d inserted into the newspaper so that no passersby, including the MD he called “Joe Friday”—”Just the facts, soldier”—could see Frank studying it. “Bit of a fudge,” Doolittle conceded.
“Fudge?” replied Frank. “It’s downright cheating!”
“Well, mate, this is the first time I’ve ever ‘eard that a man who wants to get ‘imself killed is cheatin.’ That’s a new one, that is. Personally, I wouldn’t do it — I’ve already done my bit, squire. For me it’s out on the old compo— disabled soldiers’ pension to you — and a deck chair on Brighton Beach, lookin’ at the birds strolling’ up an’ down. An’ I don’t mean bloody sea gulls. Yep — that’ll do me nicely, that will. Me, the deck chair, wiv a jar o’ Flower’s bitter.” He exhaled, cigarette smoke appearing to come from every orifice in his head behind the bandages that covered the horrible burns he’d suffered during the taking of Ratmanov Island. “And that’s what I’d do if I were you, mate,” he advised Frank Shirer. “Crikey, you’ve already done your bit for king and country. Besides, you got a good-lookin’ bird. That Lana’s a real corker, she is. All you need, mate, is the ruddy beach. Instead, what you want to do? Go up in one of them bloody death traps again.”
Doolittle took another heavy drag on the Player’s, leaned back and shook his head, hands together, head smoking again like a double boiler about to blow. He leaned over and, tapping the Xerox of the Snellen eye chart, told Frank conspiratorially, “Best day’s Monday, see? When old Joe Friday ‘sn’t around. The new doc’s a bit unsure of ‘imself, so ‘e’s followin’ the same bloody routine day after day. Same chart, same sequence. Ail you have to know is which letter’s where. Right? He puts ‘is black patch stick over your good eye and asks you what you see. You can make out the blur wiv your bad eye can’t you?”
“Yes — just.”
“There you are, then. ‘E points to the third blur in the fourth row and you’ve got it. ‘Cause you memorized the chart. Right? Piece o’ cake!”
The smoke came pouring down from the cockney’s nostrils like a dragon, and Frank drew back out of range.
“They’re so many guys ‘e’s got to do, see?” explained Doolittle. “Even if he changes the routine from one blur to another, you memorize the chart, you’ve got it. Besides, you got one big thing going for you, old cock.”
“Yeah,” said Frank wryly. “I could be court-martialed.”
The cockney laughed; which was appropriate, Frank thought. Doolittle wouldn’t be the one on a charge.
“Nah, mate. Listen — what you forget is, none of these guys wants to pass the test. What they want — what you’d want, if you weren’t so bloody daft — is to get home fast as they can, start usin’ the old joystick in bed, not up in the blue fucking yonder.”
For Doolittle, his “plan to put one over” on the authorities — in this case, a greenhorn MD fresh from medical school and not yet wise to the ways of the army — was a bit of a lark. But to Frank it meant a restless night of old dreams, of Adolf Galland, the one-eyed German Luftwaffe ace, of the British ace Douglas Bader and the Canadian Rosin, who, after a seven-year court battle with the army, had won the right to be a paratrooper, despite having only one eye. Visions of Lana invaded the dreams as she fought her way through the crowd of pilots, not saying a word; and through it all there was the crackle of fighter pilots mixing it up in a furball, a Soviet MiG-29 going into the radar-defying stall slide, Sergei Marchenko, the Mikoyan Works emblem on the Fulcrum’s fuselage, coming at the Tomcat at Mach 1.2 in a steep dive, the MiG’s thirty-millimeter cannon winking, followed by two white puffs as two Aphid air-to-air missiles streaked toward Shirer, his copilot yelling, “I’ve been hit”—and all because of information overload on the one good eye, misreading the Heads-Up display. He pulled the Tomcat hard out of the “Finger Four” formation, going into the scissors so as to get Marchenko to overfly him, get the Tomcat into the MiG’s cone. But then it was the Tomcat, his radar intercept officer screaming, Marchenko’s Fulcrum now in the Tomcat’s cone of vulnerability. There was a bang, the Cat shuddering violently and Frank screaming at his RIO to get out. The next second he pulled the strip, heard the explosive bolts go, felt the wind tearing at his face, like rushing through some vast refrigerator, and heard the snap of his chute opening, the RIO’s on fire, going down like a Roman candle.
“Shush!” said a calming voice. “You’ll wake the whole ward.” And then the voice was gone. It
was dark, only the dim pinpoints of light on the IV drip monitors telling him he was still in hospital.
They had been the same nightmares that had plagued him for weeks, nightmares that he hadn’t told Lana about and which had been responsible for his sudden mood shifts— unlike him, but which, he knew, Lana had noticed with increasing anxiety. And so finally, now, with the arctic wind howling mournfully about the hospital at Dutch Harbor, he made the decision. To hell with the nightmares. There was no way he wanted to live the rest of his life, like so many, haunted by regret. He’d have to find out in the only way he knew how. He’d do a bit of a “fudge,” as Doolittle had put it. Besides, before they put him in a cockpit, he’d have to pass on ground simulators. There he wouldn’t kill anyone if his single-eye vision couldn’t cope. The worst he’d do would be to flunk the course. He’d risk a court-martial in the event that the green doctor wasn’t as green as Doolittle figured.
He got up, put the hospital robe around him, and made his way quietly through the ward and to the right, toward the TV room. He could hear that someone else was watching — an old Johnny Carson rerun — Buddy Hackett telling a joke about a guy yowling, “Wah — wah — wah,” with awful genital pain. “… So the guy goes to see doctor after doctor. Finally the only thing they could do, they said, was to remove his testicles. They didn’t have any other answer. After his operation, the guy goes to a men’s clothing store, buys a new suit, asks for a couple of ties, and asks for size thirty-four waist underpants. The clerk says he should get a size thirty-six. The guy tells the clerk he knows what he wants and it’s a size thirty-four. Clerk runs a tape measure around the guy’s waist and says, ‘No, sir. If you wore a thirty-four you’d have terrible pain in the testicles.’ Wah — wah — wah!”
Shirer roared laughing; he was feeling so good now that he’d made the decision. The man watching the show, another pilot who’d also been wounded over Ratmanov, was just sitting there, hands tremulous. “You okay?” asked Frank.
The pilot shook his head but kept looking up at Frank. For help. Shirer saw a packet of cigarettes in the man’s robe pocket, and though he didn’t smoke, he took one and lit it up for the guy and sat with him, watching the Carson show. The longer he sat there, the more he wondered if somehow he should take the guy’s condition as a warning — remembering one time how a top gun on Salt Lake City who graduated top of the class got shot down after fifteen missions. Everyone thought he was fine after, and he was, for seven more missions. Then bam! Everything came apart. Now, just hearing the sound of going on afterburner made him a head case.
When you were young you never thought you’d crack up.
* * *
It was the first time in months that General Freeman had seen his aide, Dick Norton, unshaven and in pajamas, the flannelet bottoms sticking out from underneath the greatcoat like red-and-white-striped barber poles. As he came through the door and pulled the blackout curtain aside, a flurry of snow blew in after him like an angry ghost. Despite the fact that his quarters were only ten yards from the HQ Quonset, Norton already looked half frozen. Freeman knew it must be urgent.
“Minus forty,” said Norton, handing the general the SITREP, the buff-colored situation report folder with a crimson stripe across the right-hand corner and marked “Top Secret.” It told Freeman there was marked activity all along the Siberian-Chinese border. The Chinese had been moving up the Shenyang army at night, but here and there in gaps through the cloud cover infrared satellite photos had detected them.
“Only thing we can do, Dick, is to keep a close eye on it. I want to see all SITREP reports over China, Secret and above. Hopefully, of course, everyone else is right and I’m wrong and the cease-fire’ll hold. Maybe the Chinese are just being prudent — taking precautions. As I would. But if it doesn’t hold, I don’t want to be caught with my pants down.”
“No, sir.”
“Meanwhile — long as the Chinese keep out of it, we won’t bother them.”
The door flew open. A sergeant, his voice muffled by the khaki scarf that hid his face up to his eyes, staggered in, dusted with snow. Not bothering to look up, and certainly not expecting the general to be up and about at this hour, he stamped the snow off his boots, proclaiming to the skeleton headquarters staff, “I don’t think this fuckin’ berg’ll ever thaw out!”
“Good!” answered Freeman to the startled soldier. “If we have to engage, son, I want hard ground under our tracks!”
CHAPTER TEN
“I must be sure,” insisted Yesov.
“I promise you, Marshal.” It was Kirov, head of the KGB’s “new and improved”—as Novosibirsk sarcastically put it — First Directorate, covering Canada and the U.S. “Once the signal arrives in—”
“Yes, yes, I know all that. But this is not enough, that your people are ready. The point is, your operation must precede my operation. That is vital. For me to begin ‘Concert,’ the American convoys must lose their ability to reinforce Freeman’s Siberian garrison.”
“Marshal, I can assure you — everything’s in order. You can start Operation Concert as you have planned. My people will already be doing their part. This I guarantee.”
“What is the code name you’re using?” inquired Yesov. He wanted no mistakes, no matter how remote the possibility of two operations being accorded the same name.
“‘Ballet,’ sir,” said Kirov, smiling.
The marshal was not known for his sense of humor, and in any case looked blankly then sternly at Kirov, who seemed very pleased with himself with the joining of his, Kirov’s, Operation Ballet with Yesov’s Concert. “This is no joking matter, Kirov. My intention is to kill every American in my sight. Gorbachev — the fool — might have liked them. I do not.”
“Nor I, comrade.”
With that, the marshal of all the armies in the United Siberian Republic abruptly left. He was ready. Despite the sudden drop to minus forty degrees reported in the American sector, the long-range forecast was for a dramatic warming within the week, and only then another plunge in temperature.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The two Black Berets were having a little fun with the Jewess on the way, one holding her tightly in the back of the police van, the other feeling her beneath the long Mongolian peasant skirt she’d worn on the escape route from Baikal through Mongolia to Harbin. Only now did Alexsandra realize why Latov, without as much urging as she had thought would be necessary, had told her about the troop buildup on the Siberian-Chinese border and the movement of troops from the southern military regions across the Yangtze at Nanking, the approach roads to other bridges over the great Yellow River effectively useless because of the early spring floods in the warmer south.
Cold, she was shivering as much from fear as from the musty, bone-eating dampness of the cell in the Gong An Ju’s — Public Security Bureau’s — so-called new jail on Zhongyang Street. The Songhua River that ran past the jail was still frozen, but water beneath the ice seeped into the cells from around the embankment and from Stalin Park. For some reason she didn’t understand, instead of immediately dwelling on her situation — indeed, as she later realized, as a way of denying the terror her capture now held for her — she found herself thinking about how ironic it was that the Chinese, who took such pride in their self-reliance, insisted on retaining and paying homage to two foreigners: parks and streets were still being named after Marx and Stalin when the rest of the world, including the new CIS and the other Soviet republics, had torn down the demagogues of Marx-Leninism.
A Mr. Lo, a PLA guard behind him, turned up promptly, officiously flashing his ID from Harbin’s Public Security Bureau. He asked her, “Ni hui shuo Zhongwen ma?” Do you speak Chinese?
“Hui, yidian.” I can, a little. Her accent was not good.
“Ni hui shuo Yingwen ma?” Do you speak English? Mr. Lo asked.
“Shide,” she replied, and completely disarmed him by asking, “Why can’t China think for herself? Why do you import foreigners to revere?” Not once,
she pointed out, had she seen even a small park named after Mao. Mr. Lo, scrambling for an answer, explained that unlike the “running dog revisionists” of eastern Europe who had “betrayed” Marxism, China had remained loyal. As for her insult that China could not think for itself, he said China had always thought for herself. Mr. Lo explained that the Great Helmsman had expressly forbidden personality cults and the deification of any particular leader. This is why she had seen no Mao parks or statues.
“Did the Great Helmsman tell the Central Committee,” Alexsandra asked, remaining seated calmly on the wooden stool, looking up at him, “to let Novosibirsk push you around? To send troops at their bidding?”
Mr. Lo struck her once, knocking her off the stool. His voice, if anything, was quieter than before. “You are a stupid woman. We do this as a protection against the American imperialists.”
“The Americans won’t invade China,” Alexsandra shot back contemptuously. She had learned enough from her previous interrogations to know that weakness only made them recognize their bullying for what it was, and in their guilt they lashed out — often more viciously than if you stood up to them. The guard hauled her roughly to her feet, putting her back on the stool.
“Ha!” said Lo. “Insolent! You are a stupid woman. You should have babies and concern yourself with wifely duties.”
“One child per family, comrade!” retorted Alexsandra, but Mr. Lo was long experienced, too, in interrogation, and he suspected that her initial defiance was only gongfen—a centimeter — thin. The file he had been sent from her Lake Baikal interrogation had revealed the same pattern: a brazen attempt to tough out the questioning right from the start.
Very well, Mr. Lo thought. He did not have time to mess around with stupid foreigners. The Public Security Bureau had instructed him to find out who were her “cohorts” in Harbin.
