by Ian Slater
The party had given Lin Meiling everything, including her university education in Marxism-Leninism and her unshakable belief in communism despite the vicious attacks from the running-dog lackeys in the Commonwealth of Independent States. Once these had been a brotherly Union of Socialist Soviet Republics, now long betrayed by Gorbachev and Yeltsin and the others, delivered up to the altar of western capitalism.
Oh, they—the West — had tried to topple the party, too, through the agents provocateurs in the Tiananmen Square incident of 1989 when the goddess of Democracy was paraded by the degenerate counterrevolutionaries down Changan Avenue. Well, the party had flexed its muscle and shown who ran China after all. It was flexing its muscle now against the criminal Freeman and his gang. And the party would flex it against any lackeys in England who dared to undo the work begun by the great helmsman, Chairman Mao.
One could see the chaos created in England by the capitalists. The problem was too much freedom — the English and American disease that so affected the young. It even affected Trevor Brenson, who called himself a leftist. The British Labour party was about as leftist as a Tibetan monk. They had no fiber, no toughness to clamp down on the religionist disease, on the free-thought disease of degenerate democracy. Self-indulgence was what they wanted. Trevor Brenson, the Labour party’s much-touted shadow “defence minister,” still claimed he was “socialist,” said he greatly respected Mao, and yet in the bedroom his religion too was self-indulgence.
The party had warned Lin Meiling of what might be required of her to extract information from such a man as Brenson who, despite his Labour party protestations of brotherhood with the workers, was at heart a capitalist lackey. A woman to a capitalist was merely another thing, a plaything, and Trevor Brenson liked to play disgusting games, games that Lin Meiling was sure the great leaders of the party in Beijing would never indulge in. To have sex with Brenson it was necessary to remind herself that she was doing it for the party and greater socialism. If she could find out from Brenson what the Americans were up to in this war, then she could do the party a great service, and no matter her personal sacrifice.
He was late this evening and had rung to say he would not be back at the flat till ten. Liar! He pretended he was hard at work in the shadow cabinet when he was no doubt seeing his wife — the other thing he used from time to time.
Meiling undid the box he had sent her from Harrods — the great socialist store, no doubt. She brushed aside the soft, rustling tissue wrapping, as thin as rice paper, and saw a scarlet bustier and matching scarlet lace panties. He had signed the card, “To M, love T,” careful, as usual, not to use his full name and to write in a hand distinctly unlike that which he usually used — in the event that she might accidentally leave the card around the flat. No doubt the people’s store had thought he was buying the lingerie for his wife, and he would have been sure to pay in cash — no credit card traceable should he be under surveillance by the Tories or MI5. She shrugged off her status as one of his two women— or did he have more? — as easily as she crushed the tissue paper into a tight ball, pushing it into the recycling bag. He was very big on recycling. Well, Lin Meiling determined that when she got what she wanted she would recycle him. It was ten after nine.
* * *
When he walked in at ten he smelled roses and saw her sitting, legs drawn up seductively on the sofa beneath a low, soft lamp that turned the scarlet bustier and panties blood red, her long black hair combed forward, draped over the bustier like a tantalizing curtain. Beside her she had a tall drink, her fingers trailing up and down the frosted glass, her lips parting for a moment over the cherry, sucking it, caressing it with her tongue.
He dropped the briefcase and all but tore off his rain-splattered mackintosh, walking toward her, unzipping himself as he approached.
“No,” she said, and turned away.
“Please!” he urged.
She shook her head like a petulant child, rolling the cherry between her lips, her hair a black sheen whipping back and forth over her breasts.
“I’ll go crazy,” he said.
She shook her head again. “You’re too cold.”
“What-”
“You’re too—” Her hand closed over his erection and squeezed. “You’re too cold.”
“Christ — I’ll — I’ll warm up. I’ll take a shower. All right?”
She smiled.
When she heard the torrential downpour and saw steam emerging from beneath the bathroom door, she got up from the sofa and, kneeling on the carpet, one eye on the bathroom, she went quickly through his briefcase.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The first visible signs of Ulan Bator were its six high smoke stacks. Unlike the ghers, the round, canvas-skinned huts of the Mongolians that were kept warm by burning camel dung, the capital was heated by more modern methods, including coal and a nuclear power plant. The four SAS/D troops and Jenghiz paused to hide their packs, only Salvini allowed to take the small but powerful radio under his del along with his Browning 9mm.
They had a short rest and checked their flat-folding PVSs, or night-vision goggles, before beginning what they hoped would be the final ten-mile leg of their hike to Ulan Bator and to the capital’s Gandan Monastery.
Since perestroika and glasnost, part of the Mongolians’ determination to make their country their own was their determination to allow more religious freedom, though even in this, Mongolia aped Soviet example. The Communists, like those in Beijing, still hated religion for two reasons: Not only did religion pose an alternative to the only way, the party way, but in Mongolia it had encouraged males to take holy orders in the lama monasteries — over seventy of them — and because the monks were required to be celibate this had led to a drastic fall in population.
The Mongolian hordes, who under Genghis Khan had ruled all China and whose kingdom had included much of Europe, were now reduced to no more than 2.9 million in the entire country — a country twice as big as Texas. Freeman believed that this fact alone would play a decisive part in the secret request the SAS/D troop was entrusted with.
Though thoroughly atheistic, the Mongolian president, since glasnost, had made a practice each evening of going from the Great Hural, the People’s National Assembly, to the Gandan Monastery to pray by either prostrating himself before the Buddha or spinning a prayer wheel on the Gandan Wall. It was unlikely, Freeman believed, that the president, with such a small population, would refuse to let the American Second Army have free transit across its territory into China. But Freeman held it as an article of his faith that the difference between doing it and asking to do it first marked a profound difference between totalitarianism and democracy, and for this he’d been willing to dispatch the four SAS/D men to see the president. There was always the danger, of course, that the Mongolians could inform the Siberians of the American intention, but it was a chance Freeman was prepared to take in the belief that the Mongolian president would be loath to put himself in a squeeze between Freeman’s Second Army and Marshal Yesov’s army, which so far at least was abiding by the cease-fire.
* * *
The absence of any helos in the sky was taken by David Brentwood’s troop as a good sign, and as Jenghiz led them through the silken dust on the outskirts of the flat Ulan Bator, the pale green foothills of the Hentiyn Nuruu took on a peaceful deeper mauvish hue beneath a darkening royal-blue sky that reminded David of the grasslands of the big sky country in Montana.
It was so peaceful that he was now viewing the accident with the trip wire as a blessing in disguise, for it had forced them to take the risk of a daylight hike out in the open, over the protruding fingers of the foothills down to the plain, a journey they would not have otherwise attempted till nightfall. It meant that they were now well ahead of schedule, and Brentwood thought of Freeman’s quoting the ancient Chinese warrior Sun Tzu, that an army is like water, that it must adapt itself to the terrain and circumstance. It was exactly what the SAS/D team was doing, using the explosion of
the Claymore not as an impediment that had set plans awry but as a new opportunity.
Brentwood fought the temptation to be pleased with himself, but Freeman’s directive to approach the Mongolian president at the monastery in the evening fit in perfectly. If nothing happened to stop them they should reach it within a few hours, with Jenghiz leading the way across the vast Sukhbaatar Square in the center of the city toward the Gadan.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Chinese divisions continued to mass across the Amur, and with the weather clearing, though for how long no one knew, it seemed that only the threat of close air attack by the U.S. Air Force, particularly the presence of AC-130 Spectre gunships firing their deadly, seven-barreled Vulcan machine guns and 105mm howitzers, had stemmed crossings by the Chinese troops. But while the awesome power of the gunships was part of the reason for a pause in the Chinese advance, there was a much more pressing cause.
Chinese officers were reporting deficiencies in the small arms supplied to the northern armies — dozens of men having been seriously wounded, some having lost limbs and/or been killed when grenades exploded as soon as the pin was pulled, others having weapons exploding in their faces. Under such conditions of substandard equipment, an advance was deemed unadvisable by General Cheng and an investigation promptly launched. At first it was suspected that La Roche Industries had wilfully furnished defective munitions — that is, until several grenade fragments were collected and sent to Harbin for closer forensic inspection.
Cheng doubted that La Roche, already in trouble in the U.S., suspected of supplying arms to certain countries against congressional edict, would be likely to jeopardize his lucrative multibillion under-the-table arms business by shipping poor-quality arms and ammunition to his prime customer. Confirmation that Cheng was right came when scientists, rushed up from Turpan’s First Artillery Regiment — the name the PLA gave to its missile contingent — determined that while serial numbers made it clear that the defective grenades had indeed been American made, they were not from any of the La Roche batches.
Further investigation along the Amur revealed that the arms in question had been among those stolen from American soldiers in brothels along the river towns of the DMZ. Cheng immediately ordered all such arms and ammunition destroyed, but by now they were mixed up with standard issue and the testing was a hazardous, painstaking, and extremely time-consuming business, as in order to find a single round that had been tampered with, every round had to be examined carefully.
The incident told Cheng and Freeman something important about each other. Cheng learned that the American general’s much-touted attention to detail was as great as it was reputed to be, while Freeman’s intelligence services, fed the information by underground Democracy Movement agents like the Jewish woman, Alexsandra Malof, learned that Cheng was not as cavalier as, say, Lin Biao had been in the Korean War about sacrificing the lives of his men if he could avoid it. In fact Cheng would rather pause, even though it gave Second Army time to reinforce the crossing points, and make sure everything was in order before he would strike. Of course it also gave Cheng more time to reinforce his side of the river.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
It was 1:00 p.m. Jay La Roche and his guards were met by a barrage of cameras and microphones as he made his way up the steps of New York’s central criminal court building, his head held high, looking sneeringly at the blind statue of Justice as though confident that nothing could touch him.
It took only minutes for the charges to be read and less time for La Roche’s lawyer to get him off scot-free — the reason stunningly simple. Jay La Roche had been arrested under the Emergency Powers Act, which ended at midnight, Washington time, on the day of his arrest, and under which a suspect could be arrested without being Mirandized. But having been arrested at 11:40 p.m. Alaskan time meant that he had in fact been arrested at 3:40 a.m. Washington time, that is, three hours and forty minutes after the Washington deadline, thus rendering his arrest “technically” invalid, as he had not been Mirandized. That is, Jay La Roche had been arrested and not advised of his rights under a law that no longer was in force.
It was pandemonium in the courtroom, and even more flashbulbs and TV crews crowding the corridors than had been on the steps when La Roche had entered the building. As he exited a free man, he walked down the steps of the courthouse unhurriedly, pausing halfway so that his picture in his own tabloid would show him released beneath blindfolded Justice, who had shown impartiality under the law. He made a grave face about how he was of course innocent of the charges of trading with the enemy and he would have “much preferred” to have been cleared on other evidence but that in the “present political climate” during wartime he doubted that he could have received a fair trial.
* * *
Lana, still in shock, called Frank Shirer and as it was 1:30 p.m. in Dutch Harbor when she made the call, she woke him up at 10:30 at Lakenheath — all air crews having already turned in while waiting for a decision to come down as to whether or not they would be going on the China mission.
“Set free?” he asked Lana.
“Yes, absolutely—”
“I don’t believe it,” Frank said, and then made a remark about lawyers that all but turned Lana’s face red with embarrassment.
“I know,” she agreed. “I can’t believe it either.” She sighed. It was part pain, part resignation. “I suppose we were all naive in thinking they’d get him. The rich get richer and the poor—”
“The bastard!” Shirer cut in, his tone one of bitter resentment. It meant more than La Roche was free again. It meant that the divorce Lana had longed for — a divorce that would have been much easier to get if he’d been convicted— was now as far off as ever.
“I–I don’t know what to say, Frank. I—” He could tell she was crying. In the Dutch Harbor Hospital she’d seen some of the worst injuries of the war: melted skin where once there’d been a man’s face, a mangled stump of splintered bone and flesh that had once been a limb, and the smells— the vinegary stink of fear, the eye-watering stench of pus-filled gangrene. With all this she could cope, but the trapped feeling of being sealed in a marriage gone sour with no release in sight was too much.
“Hang on, honey,” Frank told her lamely. “We’ll beat it — Lana?”
“Yes,” she replied, but it was so desolate a response that he felt it in his gut and was left too with that desolate feeling that only a telephone can give in its awful illusion of nearness shattered by the reality of being so far apart, the feeling that teased you into thinking you could do something against the cold reality of knowing you could do nothing. In his pain he selfishly wished that she hadn’t called.
When he went back to his bunk he couldn’t sleep. The thought of her thousands of miles away in the wind-blown loneliness of Dutch Harbor, a speck in the vast darkness of the world, brought tears to his eyes, and with them the animal urge to be with her, to feel her warmth, to give her his, to be in her, to possess her so that he tossed and turned, nothing but the low moan of a channel storm blowing about the eaves of the Quonset hut for company and the gray dawn creeping.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Aussie Lewis didn’t think the day would ever come when he’d be happy to see a Siberian, but now in the gathering purple dusk the presence of other Caucasian faces, no doubt Siberian advisers and the like, afforded Brentwood’s group added protection as they lost themselves in the crowds milling about the temple. Long shafts of golden moonlight shone through the pillars, the beams getting thinner and thinner as the moon passed in a golden wafer through cloud.
At the entrance to the temple several pilgrims were prostrate, while in the temple itself others moved so silently that all that could be heard was the wind sweeping down from the Hentiyn Nuruu, the shuffle of feet, and the soft whir of prayer wheels whose spokes, containing the little paper messages that the Buddhists believed would find their way to Heaven, spun about like small merry-go-rounds. The notorious Mongolian cold was already see
ping up from the ground like dry ice, the change dramatic and particularly uncomfortable for Salvini, who had worked up a sweat during the long hike dressed in his del. The only firearm he, like the others, carried into the city was his 9mm Browning, and it was irritating his skin beneath the silk-lined tunic.
Soon the official presidential party arrived, the president’s entrance to the holy place as low-key as they’d been briefed it would be. Now everything depended on Jenghiz handing the president Freeman’s sealed note, the same size as those that were inserted in the prayer wheels, requesting free passage for the American troops in the hostilities against China. If anything went awry, David Brentwood knew that even with the 9mms hidden under their dels it would be “dicey,” as Aussie was wont to say.
As Jenghiz, in a silent, respectful attitude of prayer, made his way closer to the president, the latter, acting as yet another pilgrim with no special prestige within the temple, bowed his head to the Buddha in respect. One of the bodyguards cast an eye over the crowd in the darkened temple, its candlelight casting huge, flickering shadows on the monastery’s temple walls. The four SAS men moved into the throng of worshippers, trying to form a rough protective semicircle around Jenghiz as he faced the Buddha. Aussie Lewis said a prayer of his own — that there would be no fighting in the holy place. The Buddhists subscribed to the theory of nonviolence, but he knew the presidential guard wouldn’t.
It was then, however, that Aussie felt strangely uncomfortable. Was it that, the Claymore explosion aside, everything had gone so smoothly — too smoothly, almost — that there was an air of unreality about it all, as if they were somehow going through the well-rehearsed motions of a play written by someone else? Perhaps, he thought, it was the relative silence of the monastery itself and the almost ethereal sight of the saffron-robed monks, some with small scarlet skullcaps on their heads, the whole atmosphere added to by the thick aroma of incense in the air. It had been only seconds since Jenghiz had pressed the piece of prayer paper into the president’s hand, but now Jenghiz, having said his prayer, was talking to one of the bodyguards.
