by Ian Slater
“And you?” Now he dared to look up at her. “You cannot stay here.”
“No.”
“You must take a taxi.”
“Where?”
“The place I will give you. They will help hide you from the police.”
She smiled, doing up her blouse. “You are not a turtle.”
It was the only time he smiled. “You must wait here. I will go for a taxi.”
“I have no money for a taxi—”
“No matter. We must help each other.”
At that moment Alexsandra could have cried, taken him in her arms, made love — done anything that would make this young man happy.
“Wait here,” he instructed her. “I will send up a friend and he will take you to the taxi stand down from the hotel.” He walked toward the door, hesitated, glancing back — the noise of the toilet subsiding. He walked closer to her. “You must not walk out too quickly. It will raise suspicion. You must be—”
“Natural,” she said. “Unafraid.”
“Just so.”
* * *
Ten minutes passed, her fear more intense with every second, every footfall she heard. Soon there was the sound of a trolley — more footsteps, fading; then knocking on the door. Her heart jolted. What a fool she’d been — but where else could she have gone? The door opened. Another porter, a smaller, stockier man, a little older than the other, beckoned to her quickly while looking down the corridor.
Once in the lobby, he led her to a taxi, and though she tried to walk more slowly than usual, the intense cold quickened her pace and in a moment she was inside the taxi and whisked out into the night. How the Chinese loved secrecy — it came with their mother’s milk, from having to contend all their lives with the paranoia of the regime. “I will let you out next street,” said the driver, whom she could not see beyond his dim outline behind the wheel. “You go out next street — to your left. There will be another taxi waiting. Ask to go to Stalin Park for the festivities.”
Before she could answer, the cab had stopped. She knew nothing of festivities in Stalin Park — it must be thirty below, the only people out those watching the ice sculptures and—
The driver reached over and quickly pushed open the door. “Out!”
The cab was gone. Alexsandra found herself alone again in the darkness as she started hesitantly to walk down the two blocks, crusted snow crunching beneath her feet so loudly that she felt everyone in the street must hear her. She saw the dark shape of another cab. Sensing a trap, she stopped. The air was pungent with coal smoke that made the fog seem heavy and gritty, even more suffocating than it had been in the hotel. She glimpsed a small flame illuminate the darkness, the waiting cab driver lighting a cigarette. She breathed in deeply, felt giddy, almost slipping on an icy patch as she steered herself resolutely but nervously toward the cab. Her whole body felt in the grip of a deep, damp cold, and she thought of the tea she’d had at the hotel— Long Jin. She would remember the tea forever, even if—
“Ganjin!” Hurry up! came the driver’s rough command, and the back door flew open. She stood there, hesitating, trying to think.
“Stalin Park — yes?” said the driver.
“Yes.”
“Then hop in. We must hurry!”
As they drove off, the taxi quickly gaining speed, she thought it impossible that he could find his way through the dimly lit, fog-swirling world, but at one point she could see the speedometer needle quivering on a hundred kilometers an hour. They hit a dip and for a second she was suspended, her head tapping the car’s roof before she crashed back down on the seat. She smelled and felt dust all about her, as granular as that from the Gobi Desert. The car braked. A Mao-suited figure — a woman, how old it was impossible to tell — opened the door.
“Come,” and the next moment she found herself following the bent black figure down a narrow hutong to a small mud brick house pungent with the smell of something overripe, on the verge of rotting, and vegetables frying. She was shown to a single-cell-sized room, a lone tallow candle burning on a small wall table, flickering in a draft.
“You must stay here,” the woman told her. “The busybodies are everywhere. Worse now there is war.”
The busybodies, she found out, as the old woman brought her tea, were the neighborhood grannies — nosey parkers with red armbands. Fanatically loyal to the party and much more feared than their male counterparts, these were the bullies of the one-child-a-family rule and other party edicts, spies who, despite their age or because of it, were much more dangerous than the police — for their job, and one they followed with zeal, was to know everything that was going on with everyone in the street.
“Sooner or later they would find out,” the old woman told her. “So we will try to get you north as quickly as we can.”
“Who are you?” asked Alexsandra, cupping the tea as much for warmth as for nourishment. “I mean — not your name — but why do you do this? You are so kind to a stranger.”
“Tiananmen,” said the woman simply. “There are many like us,” and suddenly a burden was upon her and she shuffled away.
Young Xiao Ping, a kitchen helper at the Fandian Hotel who had been sent to the Baltic legation by the porter to deliver the note, had no difficulty whatsoever. Despite snow now falling heavily, and the poor street lighting as in all Chinese cities — the recent order of the Harbin people’s council to dim streetlamps still further adding fuel to the rumors of war — Xiao Ping simply wrapped the message about the Nanking Bridge in a clean linen pillowcase from the Fandian Hotel, the hotel’s monogram carefully removed, and tossed it over the legation wall, well away from the main gate, which might be under surveillance. The rock-weighted pillowcase landed softly in the compound on the other side of the wall. It hadn’t occurred to Xiao Ping to wrap it in any other color than white, and in any case by morning it was completely covered with snow.
* * *
“Where is she now?” asked Latov, seated at the Siberian consulate table at the banquet celebrating the Chinese lunar new year, the Public Security Bureau man standing behind him, in a waiter’s uniform, informing Latov that the PSB car had had difficulty following her from the hotel in the fog. To have followed the cab too closely would have given the PSB car away.
“You idiots!” said Latov, though still smiling, raising his glass as his Chinese host began an interminable speech about the new and glorious socialist brotherhood between the new United Siberian Republic and the People’s Republic of China.
“Don’t worry, comrade,” the PSB man assured him. “We know the general area. All we have to do is carry out a house-to-house search. And we have already identified at least two contacts she made at the hotel. Two porters.”
“Have you picked them up?”
“No, we were waiting until we told—”
“Do so. Immediately.”
“Must I remind you, comrade,” replied the PSB man, offended by the Siberian’s tone, “that you are our guest in Harbin?”
Latov did not even deign to turn about, bored though he was with his Chinese host’s babbling about socialist brotherhood. “And you forget, comrade,” he told the PSB man, “that we’ve purposely let her escape so that we might break this entire northern ring of spies and saboteurs. If you fail, it’ll be your head in Beijing, comrade.”
“And yours, comrade, in Novosibirsk.”
“Where are my men?” snapped Latov. He meant the Black Berets.
“At your legation.”
“Tell them I want them to be in on the search for her. They know what she looks like.”
It was a stupid thing to say, and Latov regretted it the moment he had uttered it, feeling the PSB man’s contempt almost immediately.
“We have no difficulty recognizing foreigners, comrade.”
“You mean barbarians?” said Latov.
“As you wish.”
“I want my men involved in the search,” insisted Latov. “You find out who’s hiding her. But when that�
�s done, she’s to be brought back to me. That was the agreement. She’s a Siberian national.”
“She’s a Siberian whore.”
“As you wish, but she is my whore and I will punish her.”
“We will see.”
“You’ll do as you’re told, comrade, or else you’ll find yourself on the Amur front.”
“You mean the Black Dragon front, comrade?”
“It’s forty below up there, comrade.”
“We Chinese are used to the cold.”
Latov gave a contemptuous snort and reached for his wine. “It’s forty below and the Americans are shooting at you, comrade.”
“Not for long,” said the PSB man. “We know how to deal with Americans. We defeated them in Korea. They ran away.”
“Well…” Latov conceded, finally seeing the sniping was getting them nowhere. “That’s one thing we can agree on, comrade. We both want to defeat the Americans. So you find the girl and let my men return her to me. Agreed?” Latov waited. “I apologize for any untoward remark.”
The PSB man nodded curtly. He knew the barbarian didn’t mean it, but nevertheless it allowed the PSB to save face. Nodding abruptly, he left.
“What was all that about?” Latov’s wife asked him.
“Ah—” said Latov dismissively, reaching for black fungus, a Manchurian delicacy, “a prisoner giving us trouble.”
“Since when are you concerned with Chinese prisoners?”
“I’m not. She’s Siberian.”
“One of our people?” said Latov’s wife, surprised.
“No. A Jew.”
“Oh — Stalin knew what to do with them.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
In less than two hours American III Corps had suffered twenty percent casualties, seven thousand killed or wounded, against Yesov’s first echelons. Anything over thirty percent casualty level and the U.S. commanders knew that III Corps would no longer have enough fire power to withstand an onslaught by a second echelon Siberian attack. The printout on the analysis computers in Freeman’s Khabarovsk headquarters was unequivocal. The LER — loss exchange ratio — of 22.6:1 would mean that the troops manning the 155mm howitzers and the M-1 tanks on Lake Baikal’s southwestern shore would have to destroy twenty-three Russian guns for every American gun lost merely to stay even. To make matters worse, 155mm batteries had to be diverted left and right of III Corps’ defense line — that is, south and north of III Corps’ front at Baikal — in order to meet Yesov’s flanking attacks. This meant in the next hour that as the tracks of the M-1 tanks fought to grip the watery mirror finish of the lake — translucent in places down to thirty and sixty feet — the cold statistics of the loss exchange ratio jumped to 50:1.
The Apaches were swarming now over the vast, snow-covered taiga from the Primorskiy range, their 4,400-yard fire-and-forget Hellfire air-to-ground missiles streaking down in crimson balls, taking out thirty-two targets, Siberian T-80s, in spectacular explosions, of which fourteen were actual tanks going up. The remaining eighteen were poddelki—fakes — Yesov’s vertical aerial mines and mobile mounted ZSU twenty-three-millimeter Shilko AA gun quads and Kuadrat surface-to-air missiles taking out eleven of the sixty Apaches.
It was such a loss rate that Freeman knew he couldn’t sustain III Corps’ present position, the situation aggravated by the blizzard, which prevented any effective close fighter air support. And so, his counterattack effort in tatters almost as quickly as he had launched it, Freeman, in an order that all but choked him, instructed the remaining 29,000 men of II Corps to effect forthwith a fighting withdrawal across the seventeen-mile-wide lake and to set up a second line of defense in the taiga along the lake’s eastern shore. Hopefully it would give him time to rush in support, both men and materiel, from Khabarovsk, and Skovorodino, the latter atop the Amur River hump.
* * *
It was the only thing Freeman could do. And Yesov knew it. Refusing to yield to Minsky’s impatience, the marshal had held his massive, taiga-hidden formations in place, waiting for the temperature to fall while the lake, remaining frozen, would result in a less hard ice/air interface. This widened the V’s, or the cone-shaped eruptions, of the Siberians’ howitzers exploding on the lake, sending more shards of splinter ice and white-hot metal fragments even lower to the ground over an even wider area.
The perimeter of the American II Corps was now a bloody mess of body parts, interspersed with the junk of shattered matériel and gutted tanks burning fiercely, the explosions of their fifty rounds of high explosive, squash head, and discarding sabot ammo killing and maiming more Americans than Yesov’s howitzers.
* * *
In the U.S., the latest and, to date, most devastating attack of Operation Ballet was that experienced by the U.S. Navy during a five-minute heavy mortar barrage of Miramar Naval Air Station. This attack totally destroyed or put out of action an entire squadron of twenty-six F-15E Strike Eagles — a confidence-shattering display for the American “top guns” of just how vulnerable high-tech aircraft were to the determined and highly trained infiltration units. All ten men in the two SPETS mortar crews were killed by perimeter guards at Miramar, but not before shrapnel from their last 200mm, fifty-five-pound rounds sliced open the fuel tanks of two Lockheed “Fat Alberts.” The cavernous transports, replete with the new snow/taiga pattern, replacing their old NATO green/gray/khaki splotch camouflage, were in the process of loading 650 marines to relieve British Commonwealth cease-fire troops guarding the Allies’ R&R barracks along the Amur River outside Khabarovsk. In the explosion, so enormous local residents thought it was a nuclear bomb, 570 marines died, some killed by their own ammunition set off by the fire, all of them charred beyond recognition, most, teeth showing through the black leathery grins, still strapped to their seats.
Apart from the terrible loss of life, it wasn’t the millions of dollars wasted in destroyed equipment that shook Americans, who well understood their industrial capacity was still the best in the world. But all over the country the ghosts of Vietnam arose in the American psyche, invaded by memories of the infamous Tet Offensive, when the North Vietnamese Army, through infiltrators, had brought the war to the Americans’ doorsteps in Saigon, a turning point in the only war America had lost. Worse, the attacks on the sub at Bangor in Washington State and on the carrier John F. Kennedy in San Diego were the first on the West Coast since the Second World War, when one of the big Japanese I-class subs had shelled the oil installations near Santa Barbara, and Point Estevan on Canada’s Vancouver Island. That enemy was again bringing the war to the forty-eight contiguous U.S. states, and the repercussions of this shook Washington to its foundations.
* * *
Trainor couldn’t remember the president being so angry. As Mayne subconsciously massaged his forehead, reading the reports streaming in from Hillsboro, San Diego, Bangor, and Miramar, his aide knew, if no one else did, that the President of the United States was on the verge of a migraine attack, so that the next file Trainor brought him contained two sumatriptan pills taped to a report of the marines who had been killed in the attack on Miramar. The sumatriptan were perfectly legal and, Trainor knew, were prescribed for more than one senator, but in the rough-and-tumble world of politics, Trainor was as discreet as possible with the medication, fearing that some boozy congressman, doing three times as much damage to his body with his afterwork martinis, might make political capital of it.
It was a grim morning all around, the simultaneous successes of the attacks on Hillsboro, Bangor, Miramar, and the rest proof positive that Novosibirsk’s network of “sleepers” were wreaking havoc on American morale, quite apart from the human and materiel carnage they’d already inflicted on America’s ability to wage war.
“How long till I go on?” Mayne asked Trainor.
“Two minutes, Mr. President.”
Mayne closed the latest damage reports and went over his speech once more. As the red light went on and Mayne cleared his throat and shuffled his papers, readying for hi
s extraordinary address to the nation, David Brentwood, Lana Brentwood’s younger brother, attached to Britain’s SAS and now on a long-awaited honeymoon in the Canadian Rockies, was being urgently summoned, like so many other Americans, for immediate return to active service.
* * *
Across the Pacific it was dusk along the Black Dragon River on China’s northern border, and Colonel Soong, commanding the Fourth Battalion of the People’s Liberation Army’s Shenyang XVI Corps, was readying his nine hundred men to overrun the position just north of Manzhouli, from where the Chinese army had first been shelled and which had precipitated their entry into the war. Soong had designated five attack points so as to break up the enemy’s fire, which he estimated was battalion size with three batteries of eight guns each, together with a headquarters battery containing communication and fire control. With about ten men per gun crew plus ammunition and support troops, the U.S. battalion on the hill, Soong estimated, would number around five hundred men.
It had been a fierce fight, with the enemy’s 155mms having the advantage of the high ground even as they had pulled back to the horseshoe-shaped summit of the mountain designated A-7 in the Argunskiy range, and Soong knew it would become even fiercer, the dead lying everywhere as he ordered his three companies to regroup for yet another assault. Nearby, off to his left, he saw what he guessed must have been one of the most forward American fire-control spotters, the man’s torso missing an arm, his other sliced neatly through. The American’s shoulder patch, stuck to his shoulder’s shattered bone and showing the screaming eagle of the Eighty-first Airborne, had been cut neatly in half by shrapnel, as if sliced through with a band saw, blood congealing purple against the snow in the fading light.
Soong took it as a good omen, and, crouching, made his way through the dead clumps of uprooted aspen and pine, their earth-clogged roots dark against the now freezing snow, the acrid stench of cordite and the singed-meat smell of burning bodies heavy in the air. Soong was so occupied making sure the slope leading down to the river, still a half mile ahead, wasn’t mined, that he didn’t notice a mottled-green-camouflaged enemy helo — American — a Blackhawk UH-60A, hung up in tall pine a hundred yards to his right.
