by Ian Slater
“Quite so, I’m afraid,” agreed British liaison officer Brigadier General Soames, representing Her Majesty’s government in the crisis. “Canadians are rather reserved in this area, I’m afraid. Not their line of country at all, really. They wait to be invited. RSVP, if you get my drift.”
“I do,” said President Mayne glumly. “Novosibirsk must love it.”
“Oh yes. Novosibirsk, St. Petersburg — they’re very fond of Ottawa. Home away from home. Cold as well.”
The only thing seriously challenging the CIA’s theory of the origins of the torpedoes was that the dredged remains of the two that had sunk Santa Fe and killed over 140 U.S. sailors indicated that several critical gearing sprockets had been constructed of nylex, a steel-hard plastic sheathed in fiberglass. The only reason for this would have been to make them undetectable at airports where, contrary to somber international agreement, metal detection scans of diplomatic bags were routinely carried out by CIA “ground crews.” All of which would suggest that the two torpedoes could had been smuggled in by air, piece by piece. Whatever the reason, in a concomitant sabotage attack in San Diego, eight F-4 Phantoms were total write-offs, the forty-million-dollar-apiece aircraft destroyed not by the explosion of the airfield’s ammunition dump, as was first reported, but by surface-to-surface handheld “shoot and forget” missiles of undetermined type, most likely twenty-one-pound, night-firing, U.S. Dragon antitank guided missiles with a one-thousand-yard effective range.
Out on the harbor another handheld missile struck only one of the densely packed planes in the forward starboard parking area of the carrier John F. Kennedy, but five McDonnell Douglas F-18 Hornet fighters disintegrated as the fire from the first spewed out, engulfing the other four. Five men were killed on the carrier’s deck, two in PRIFLY control, eleven injured forward of the island, and three were still unaccounted for. In all, a court-martial was a certainty for the senior officer on duty at the time, unless he could explain to the board of inquiry why, contrary to general practice, the five planes were parked on the flight deck instead of being distributed around various shore bases until the carrier had cleared port. The fact that one of the shore bases had been hit at about the same time would be no defense.
A motor pool’s cyclone-wire fence at Fort Hood, Texas, was penetrated and twenty-five “Hummers,” or “Humvees”—the army replacements for the old Jeep — were destroyed by fire. It was later discovered that this act of sabotage, however, was sheer vandalism by local teenagers, completely unconnected with the more highly organized and selective attacks launched in other parts of the country by now reactivated “sleepers.”
* * *
Five thousand miles away, under cover of the blizzard, Minsky’s six batteries of Siberian BM-21 multiple rocket launchers broke the cease-fire, unleashing their salvos at 1100 hours, delivering 2,160 122mm rockets on a quarter square mile within two and a half minutes — the most intense bombardment by MLRs, or tube artillery, since the Iraqi War.
For the American III Corps stationed at Port Baikal on the forward line of the cease-fire, along the southwestern edge of the lake, it was nothing less than a catastrophic eruption, high V’s of jagged ice blocks, snow, and black frozen earth exploding in their midst. Over 230 were killed outright, hundreds more wounded by the hot, metallic rain of the shrapnel, scores of others concussed by the simultaneous pummeling of air that accompanied the massive rocket offensive. Within the next three minutes, by 1105 hours, the Americans’ 155mm howitzers were returning fire, at least those whose crews had not been taken out by the Siberian MRL attack.
Ground sensors at III Corps HQ indicated Siberian armor moving east rapidly toward them, already deep into the DMZ. Over a hundred American Abrams M1A1 fifty-five-ton main battle tanks moved forward to meet them, another hundred opening fire from their revetment areas behind the frozen lake’s treeline, their 120mm guns in defilade position, though the Siberian tanks’ exact positions could not be ascertained because of the anti-infrared smoke screen created by Minsky’s armored personnel carriers. Forward Siberian observers, however, could see the U.S. infrared blurs that were the III Corps echelons’ exhausts, the Siberian observation point then directing the Siberian self-propelled 122mms as the latter opened fire in a sustained thunder whose shock waves denuded trees of snow in the taiga.
The U.S. M1A1s immediately returned fire, but their maximum four-thousand-meter range was of no avail, falling into dead air, the Siberians’ self-propelled 122mms’ thirteen-mile overreach putting Minsky’s batteries well outside harm’s way from the American tanks’ fire.
Apache squadrons now rose en masse from behind the protective barrier of the 3,200-foot Primorskiy mountain range north of Port Baikal, heading low across the Angara River, intent on redressing the imbalance, and on the “hi-pole” Siberian radars the Apache gunships appeared like so many gnats.
“At least sixty,” Minsky’s aide informed him, all heading for the Siberian armor, obviously leaving the less agile and, for the helicopters at least, less dangerous, less mobile, self-propelled Siberian artillery until later, their first priority undoubtedly Minsky’s scores of front-line T-80s.
The fate of the Apaches, however, only confirmed Freeman’s countless warnings to Washington about how the cease-fire would prove to be nothing more than a time for the Siberians to dig in. Minsky’s phalanx of AA guns and missile batteries, dug in and waiting beneath their snow “lizard” pattern camouflage nets, were about to create a bowel-chilling sense of déjà vu at American HQ in Khabarovsk, the frantic atmosphere of unrelenting radio traffic filling Freeman’s control center with the nightmarish visions of the Siberians’ deadly feint on the Never-Skovorodino road. There, fake inflatable Siberian tanks, lamps for infrared inside, had suckered Freeman’s gunships into the Siberian-held territory where the Apaches were destroyed in a deadly crossfire of AA guns, missile batteries, and vertical area mines, bloodying Freeman’s Second Army in what was the lowest point in the American pre-cease-fire campaign.
* * *
Freeman had been awakened as soon as the attack on Baikal was radioed through, and entering the din of the HQ Quonset at Khabarovsk, he was advised by Dick Norton that in addition to the attack on III Corps at Port Baikal, large formations of Siberian motorized infantry were moving north against III Corps from fifty miles south of Baikal, around Kultuk; and north of Baikal, a second Siberian-armor-led spearhead was materializing, heading south from Maloye Goloustnoye.
A schoolboy could have seen it was a pincer movement, as Freeman had predicted, designed to hit III Corps frontally and from both sides, to encircle the 36,000 men of American HI Corps.
What to do about it, however, given the worsening blizzard conditions, was an entirely different matter. The problems were legion. Despite state-of-the-art Doppler radar, CAS — close air support — Freeman’s immediate and obvious first step, wasn’t possible now in the whiteout conditions. Unless he wanted to risk dozens of collisions between the fighters and the swarms of Apache gunships and other helicopters below, already rushing ammo resupply westward from Kabansk, eighty-five miles northeast of Baikal across the lake.
To add to his worries, Freeman was informed that patrols out of Kultuk near the cliff-top tunnels high above the lake, a small but important railhead held by a company under a Major Truet, were completely cut off from Port Baikal fifty miles to the north.
Freeman would have been even more worried had he known that many of the Siberians’ three thousand attacking tanks were towing Siamsky bliznets—”Siamese twin”— T-72 mock-ups, infrared signatures from the hauled mock-ups being emitted through the use of cheap twelve-volt battery-powered heaters. This doubled the potential targets for the Apache gunships, at least for those that could manage to get below the whiteout or fly closer to the ground than could the fighters. A Hellfire optically tracked antitank round for each of these targets, even if the helos got through Baikal’s AA ring defense, guaranteed the depletion of the Americans’ already strained supply
of the expensive ninety-five-pound missiles. The logistics involved in a battle area more than twice the size of Iraq were rapidly limiting Freeman’s options.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
When the PLA guard came into the cell, he was smiling, telling Alexsandra Malof he had brought her some refreshment: bai chi—”white tea,” he explained in perhaps the only English he knew, tipping up the thermos and handing her the hot water — without a speck of tea in it. “Ha! Ha!”
He knew she wouldn’t think it funny, but he’d underestimated her energy despite having gone thirty-six hours without food or water. Most prisoners were so cowed, they had no strength left for a retort. He certainly wasn’t used to a mere woman prisoner causing trouble, but that’s what he got. With a flick of her wrist, she threw the boiling water into his face, the completely unrelated thought racing across her mind that the Chinese made the best thermoses in the world. The moment he yelled, hands to his face, she kicked him hard in the groin and he collapsed, the submachine gun rattling on the damp flagstone floor. The last time she’d seen a soldier prone was the Siberian who’d raped her in Baikal. She lifted the wooden stool high above her and brought it down on the man’s head, the green cloth of his PLA cap turning dark with blood in the dirty yellow light of the passageway as she frantically pulled the slung AK-47 from his arm. She could hear footsteps — two, perhaps three, guards — coming down the hall toward her cell. She stood back from the door.
There were two of them. The cell exploded in cordite smoke and the ripping tar-paper sound of the AK-47’s burst, both men hit, one already dead on the floor, the other flung back against the corridor wall as if bodily lifted and thrown by some giant hand.
She was running down the grimy corridor, her left hand swishing the hair away from her eyes, right hand gripping the submachine gun, her breath steam as she ran into the colder air bleeding in from the entrance of the jail. As she reached the door, she swung the AK-47 in the direction of the duty guard’s desk, and seeing he wasn’t there, realized he must have been one of the two she’d shot. When she pushed hard, opening the door, the frigid air outside stung her.
Someone shouted, but she was already beyond the penumbra of the lone arc light outside the jail — into the dark, where she dropped the heavy gun in the snow and kept running, glimpsing fog rising from the Songhua River by Stalin Park on her left as it spread smokelike, coursing eerily about the multicolored ice sculptures of Zhaolin Park. One of the city’s old Soviet onion-domed spires pierced a bluish blur of moon. Fog was everywhere, spilling out from the boat dock to Sankeshu Station. She could hear police whistles behind her. Glancing back, she glimpsed a dim shape — one of the ice sculptures, a dragon, headless in the fog.
Not knowing where to go — the foreign consulates friendly to America and its allies bound to be the first to be cordoned off — she paused in the pitch-black dampness, seeing the fog clearing, cloud swallowing the moon, and she leaned against a high wall, suddenly feeling dizzy from her exertion and weak from having gone so long without food or water.
She made the decision to go to the Guoji Fandian Hotel on Dazhi Street. Latov had taken her there a couple of times. The manager would no doubt recognize her — two barbarians for dinner — but wouldn’t be surprised to see her, the hotel catering to many international tourists. If only she could get to a friendly foreigner who would get the message out about the massive Chinese buildup taking place via the Nanking Bridge. It was a long shot, but there would still be foreigners caught in China by the war, waiting for exit visas from the Public Security Bureau. It was risky, but if she did it with brio, she might succeed. If she did, she knew she would save thousands of American lives and hit back at Latov and his Chinese comrades. Their one big mistake — a typically Chinese delay, she thought — was not to have issued her immediately with the bright orange prison clothes which would have doomed any effort to simply walk into the lobby of the Fandian.
The first foreigner she saw as she entered was a small, blue-striped-suited man with moustache, bald head, and wrinkled brow — obviously a European. He wouldn’t do. Even sitting he looked harried, a worrier, his gaze fixed on the lobby’s slime-rimmed, dried-up fish pond, its fountain encrusted with a coppery greenish detritus, the man looking at it forlornly, as if his future was as bleak as that of the nonexistent fish.
A second man, an Indonesian, wearing a Muslim songkok cap, his bags by the reception desk, looked more promising. Medium height, potbellied, smiling, talking with the Chinese clerk, he seemed at ease as he filled in the card, then pulled the English edition of China Daily from the pile on the counter and moved off toward the restaurant. Unhurried, he was skimming the front page with only a modicum of interest, turning the paper over, revealing a gold wristwatch as he did so. An affluent man, and Indonesia a neutral in the war. If she could get to him, maybe…
She decided it was too risky. His business connections with China would be too precious for him to risk doing anything for her. She might offer herself as the price — ask him to send the fax and wait for a confirmation of receipt before keeping her end of the bargain. But he could turn her in just as easily after. She could hear a siren in the distance.
A porter — early twenties by the look of him, Eurasian— was being bawled out by the manager, who was calling him a lan xuesheng—”a lazy student”—and “a turtle,” the worst kind of insult, telling him to hurry up and take the Indonesian’s suitcases up to a second-floor room. The incident convinced Alexsandra that the Indonesian would be a bad choice, for only someone who traveled a lot in China would choose the second floor over the higher, more scenic suites above the ground-level smog. Room service was quicker on the second floor, and when the elevators broke down, with or without an accompanying fire, you had a chance to get out from the second floor, the fire escapes any farther up sure to be too decrepit and ill-maintained to work. She watched the student sullenly pick up the suitcase, heard him murmur, “Cao nide xing!”—Fuck your name! — to the empty fish pond, and followed him up the first flight of stairs to the second floor, eager to get to him before he reached the two women floor minders who, in stained white smocks, would be smiling, asking her room number so as to jot it down for future reference — fornication with unregistered guests being strictly forbidden in the people’s hotels.
“Wo shi Meiguo ren,” I am an American, she whispered to the porter, the energy she’d expended catching up with him on the stairs exhausting her. “Ni keyi bangmang ma?” Can you help me?
He took her to be an American. She was a big nose and white — her Chinese fractured. He glanced at her but did not pause, and kept walking down the stained red paisley carpet that clashed incongruously with a Guilin mountain design of turquoise silk tapestry that covered most of the waterstained wall. The air was heavy with stale cigarette smoke, and this, combined with the kerosene-fired heat, made it difficult for her to breathe. The two white-jacketed minders folding linen were putting it desultorily on a trolley. One of them asked her the room number.
“Er ling si,” 204, said the porter grumpily as he strode on impatiently with the heavy suitcases.
Once he opened the door, she stepped inside and closed it behind him. She began to speak. Quickly he held up his finger, shaking his head vigorously. It was her fatigue that had made her so momentarily careless. Of course, not all foreign-designated rooms would be bugged, but you could never be certain which ones the Public Security Bureau had decided to listen to on any given night. He indicated the bathroom and tried to flush the toilet. It didn’t work and it took him a minute to reconnect the chain to the pull lever.
When finally it gurgled loudly and coughed, she moved closer to him. “I want you to take this to the Baltic legations,” she told him, keeping her voice as low as possible despite the noise of the toilet. The Estonians, Lithuanians, and Latvians, she knew, shared the same trade legation in Harbin, and if a message could be got to them, they would love nothing better than to pass it on to the Americans. Only now she reali
zed her mistake, the sudden alarm in his face telling her he’d completely misunderstood, having thought she, like most foreigners, had wanted to change money, getting more yuan on the black market than from the official exchange rate. Perhaps he didn’t even know there was a war going on yet. Beijing’s iron-fist control over the media made it more likely than not.
“I cannot give you money,” she told him truthfully. “I have none. They took it all away at—” He stared at her. Did he understand or not? She felt unable to go on, her legs trembling from fatigue and tension. Seeing a thermos on the table by the frost-covered window, she poured a cup and, her fingers shaking now, tore open a bag of green tea, spilling half of it, stirring the leaves frantically, watching them swell, and blowing on the hot liquid. The student porter looked at his watch, as if that would somehow enlighten him about what had happened. Alexsandra sipped the tea. It was glorious. It seemed to give her instant strength. Sitting on the edge of the bed, seeing her disheveled appearance in the wall mirror, she put down the tea, turned to him and slowly, without taking her eyes off his, opened her blouse.
He looked away, then looked back, walked toward her, and buried his head between her breasts like a child.
“Will you help me?” she intoned, stroking his head gently. He stood back abruptly, looking down at the floor, ashamed, then nodded. Quickly she scribbled a note and gave it to him. “The Baltic legation. You must throw it over the wall. You understand? Be careful — it will be surrounded.”
