Asian Front wi-6

by Ian Slater

  Also orders whether or not to suit up for chemical attack were so dependent on local conditions that a chaos of countermanding orders could affect an entire offensive anywhere along the Black Dragon River. That a major war was in the offing there was no doubt, for as in the great Russian empire of the czar in 1914, once general mobilization was ordered in China, the scale of the call-up was so vast that it became an unstoppable bureaucratic juggernaut that, under its own momentum, all but demanded a clash of armies.

  * * *

  The man who emerged from the first gher reminded David Brentwood of Eskimos he’d seen — the same broad-boned, tanned face, clear, almond-shaped eyes, and a smile of teeth white as ice. The man’s thick sheepskin del reinforced the impression, for the sun was still not fully up and the deep, creeping-up cold of the semidesert had yet to be driven off, nor had the wind whistling down from the Hentiyn Nuruu abated, the air gritty with the dust and infused with the pungent odor of burning camel dung, its smoke escaping from the gher’s roof vent, causing Salvini’s eyes to water uncontrollably so that he appeared to be weeping.

  According to the ancient custom, the Mongolian opened the wooden door of the gher and welcomed them into the round canvas-and-felt house. As they’d been briefed at headquarters, the four men were careful not to walk on the door’s low board frame but to step over it so as not to bring the gher bad luck.

  Inside the gher it was an island of sheepskin and other hide rugs on the floor, the walls of canvas and felt supported by wooden poles no more than five feet six inches high, spars of wood leading from these to the center where the stove pipe from the stone-based oven met the vent. Again as was customary the four guests were bidden to sit on the westward side, their backs to Nalayh, their faces to the east, the door directly to the right of them, their feet pointing to the stove where camel and cow dung kept smoldering, providing heat not only against the cold but to warm the arkhi, an alcoholic drink of fermented mare’s milk.

  The head man of the gher, careful to sit opposite the four SAS/D troopers, waited until all had partaken of the light orange cheese his wife had passed around. This was the best insurance the troopers could have, for by custom once the cheese had been shared there could be no conflict between host and guest. But as Aussie braced himself for another sip of the arkhi — a small streak of melted yak butter giving it a taste like sour milk — he was ready to reach for the nine millimeter if anything went wrong.

  A wide-eyed child watched him from atop one of the two metal-spring beds, a dark red and Persian blue carpet of silk and wool draped behind the beds on the gher’s wall. Adhering to custom once more, David Brentwood, consulting his phrase book, knew he should avoid “disputatious” subjects — politics especially — and wondered how he might confine himself to generalities about the weather and such. At first this had struck him as being as peculiar to the Mongolians until he realized how during his own childhood he, his two brothers — Robert, the oldest, an SSN commander, and Ray — and his sister, Lana, had been told by their father never to talk about politics or religion. It was no different with the Mongolians’ headman, he decided, except he knew that perestroika and glasnost had worked some magic here, too, and that the party was finding it tougher these days to control the herdsmen or what they spoke about.

  But whatever the customs Brentwood also knew he didn’t have time to pussyfoot around, and so started with the weather, using it to come at the main point from an oblique angle. What he wanted to know was whether they could seek shelter here from the sun till nightfall.

  Whether it was the heat from the vodka-spiced arkhi or from the stove itself, the cold was being driven off, and he felt sweaty about the neck as he finished his question, trusting he had used the correct Mongolian phrase. The headman smiled and, pointing to himself, said, “Little English, me.”

  “Struth!” Aussie said. “That’s good news, mate.”

  “ ‘Struth’!” The headman didn’t understand, but he knew what David Brentwood meant about “bad weather.”

  “Not to be moving—” the old man said, “in bad weather.”

  “Right, mate!” Aussie put in, relieved. “No bloody good at all.”

  “Shut up, Aussie!” David said in an intentionally stern tone. “We’re not out of the woods yet.”

  “No friggin’ woods here, mate,” Aussie said, then saw the child. “Sorry.”

  The painfully slow conversation between David and the headman was really not necessary, however, for the Mongolian had understood the moment he had seen them come in from the plain that they were on the run from authority. It was all he had needed.

  “You rest,” he told them.

  “We’ll move tonight,” David Brentwood promised.

  The old man nodded, his hand pointing to the sheepskin rugs on the bed as he talked to his wife.

  “Just till tonight,” David promised again. David took a chance and gestured back toward Nalayh. “Communists.” He knew enough already to know that the herdsmen didn’t like the Communists — they told the herdsmen where to go and when, striking at the very heart of the nomad’s life: his freedom to move when and where he wanted.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  In New York, Alex Miro, a tall, thin man, pulled up the fur-lined collar of his brown suede topcoat as he made his way past the Plaza Hotel toward the Columbus Circle entrance on Central Park’s southwest corner. He liked the park — it had brought him luck, and he was as convinced of his purpose as he had been on the very first day those years before when, as a bearded young man, his future before him, he had arrived as one of the thousands of Russian minorities allowed to emigrate to America in the heady days following Gorbachev’s and then Yeltsin’s perestroika.

  The reception committee in those days consisted mostly of older émigrés who had managed to flee the Soviet Union before Gorbachev, and Alex could still recall the day when, as one of about thirty new arrivals, he had been taken on a tour of the city by one of these older émigrés. The group had paused for a moment across from the Plaza near the horse-drawn cabriolets.

  The wealth of the people entering and leaving the famous hotel overwhelmed the new arrivals almost as much as their first sight of a supermarket. One babushka, from the Ukraine, had kept clicking her tongue and shaking her head beneath the black head scarf at the sight of such opulence. After going north on Fifth Avenue, seeing the stately stone townhouses on the East Side and being told by the guide that only one family lived in each house, Alex had seen the woman’s disbelief, her tongue clicking again as she gazed at the stately buildings, her husband, however, skeptically informing several of the group that the guide was as bad as the old Pravda— “lozh”—”all lies.” It was probably just a Potemkin “village,” he said — made exclusively to impress visitors just as the fake Potemkin village had been for the czarina — why, any fool could see there was enough room for six families in any one of the townhouses.

  One of the émigrés asked the guide to take them to Harlem—insisted they see Harlem, the place of the gigantskie basketbolisty. Alex’s beard was so full in those days it had hidden the tight-lipped grimace of satisfaction he’d allowed himself on seeing that what the party had said was true — here was the grinding poverty, the rampant disorder, the half-naked black children, the awful, discordant noise of democracy, the look of hatred and despair in the eyes of me blacks who stared resentfully at the bus of tourists like caged animals, the putrid smell of garbage overpowering.

  It was still so vivid in his mind, particularly the loss of dignity he had seen in these faces — a poverty that was horrible to Nikolai Ryzhkov, Ryzhkov being his Russian name before he had taken the oath of allegiance to his newly adopted country and changed Ryzhkov to Miro. It was the lack of dignity in the blacks’ eyes that struck him as being more crushing than any he had known in his youth in Russia. For there, though people had been poorer in material things than their American counterparts, there hadn’t been the burning rage and spiritual deprivation that he saw in
these faces.

  The memory of this, his first experience of the vast disparity in wealth between rich and poor in America, not only stayed with him but all his life had acted as a spur to his single-minded goal, the memory of Harlem as troubling and as clearly etched on his mind as was that of the immigrants’ first visit to Central Park. There, in the green, ordered world that accepted everybody, it had been completely different, surely what the great Abraham Lincoln had in his mind — a place that did not depend on whom you knew, on special party shops accessible only to the powerful, but was a refuge for the common people. He hated the zoo, though — hating anything being put in a cage — anything that was hemmed in.

  As a boy he had loved the Moscow Circus, which he had seen illegally, sneaking beneath the tent flaps of the traveling troupe when it had visited his town. But when they had brought on the bears, the huge, muzzled beasts reduced to playing big babies for the amusement of rude peasants like his father, Alex had felt immeasurably sad — not only for the bears but for those like his father whose sensitivities had been so brutalized by poverty in old Russia, in Siberia to be exact, that they could find the sight of the leashed bears only amusing.

  As Alex had grown older, he learned that to liberate such people from such brutality no effective appeal could be made to sensibilities deadened by the constant crush of circumstance. Throughout history, he was convinced, there had been only one way. One had to fight indifference and prejudice, as Lenin had said, not submit to it. But Gorbachev had warned that you would get no thanks for trying to improve the lot of the people — those in chains did not always thank those who set them free. Look at what had happened to Gorbachev himself, and how vividly Alex remembered the Muscovites demonstrating in Red Square, telling the American announcer Mike Wallace, who was doing his open-mouthed “surprise” act, that they’d had enough of perestroika, of glasnost—of how they pined for the order, the comfort of predictability that Stalin’s postwar years had given them.

  “I’d like to take the muzzle off that bear,” young Alex had confessed to his father at the circus. “Osvobodit—set him free.”

  “Ha!” his fattier had laughed, “you are the first he’d kill — bite your head off.” But if that’s what his father had said, Lenin had told every younger generation, “Bud’smel. Bud’terpeliv”—Be brave. Be patient — yes, the party had made serious mistakes, but at heart the party was still right.

  Lenin was gone now, reviled by some as some atheists reviled Christ, but Alex had not deserted the party, nor had the other members of his “sleeper” cell, as firm as ever in their conviction that capitalism was at heart evil — that its enemies were their friends.

  This wintry afternoon, Alex’s returning again to the park seemed propitious. Presently he was joined by a short, stout man, Mike Ricardo. Parks had always been a favorite meeting place for the Soviets, and still were in what was now the Commonwealth of Independent States, or CIS. Last time they met they had set Operation Kirov’s Ballet in action, knocking out Con Ed’s Indian Point plant, poisoning the city’s water supply at Hillsview Reservoir with one Thermos of PCBs, and taking out the cesium clock in Hillsboro, Wisconsin, the pacemaker clock for all the computers in the country, including the Pentagon’s.

  “What d’you think?” Mike asked, walking up, helping himself to a chestnut from the packet Alex was holding, tossing the nut from hand to hand, blowing on it, his breath short, coming in sharp puffs of mist in the chilly air. “You think the Chinese’ll cross?”

  “They always have.”

  “Yeah, I know, but I mean all along the line?”

  “Who knows?” Alex replied. “I can’t even figure out how they do embroidery.”

  “Embroidery?”

  “Double-sided stuff. They’ll do a picture on a silk screen. You swing it around — same picture on the other side but no knots, stitch marks, or loose thread. Beats me where they hide the ends. Must go blind.”

  “Time,” Mike explained, peeling the chestnut, its steaming wisp in the air joining that of his own breath. “Chinks are in no hurry, Alex. They’re building up their strength.”

  “Chinese can’t wait forever or Freeman might cross the line.”

  Mike rolled up the Post he’d been carrying and stuck it under his arm, hands thrust deep in his topcoat pockets. “What’s in it for us?”

  “Novosibirsk wants us to give Beijing as much help as we can. Beijing can’t start sending their operatives into New York. ‘Frisco maybe but not here. So we do our job and turn this thing around we’ll be on top. Chinks’ll make a deal with us on the disputed border areas along the Amur.”

  “The Black Dragon,” Mike said.

  “The Amur,” Alex said. “Anyway, this way Novosibirsk stays out of it — ostensibly — but if we do our job, shut things down here, hit Con Ed again, slow up the sea lift resupply, sow panic in the population, we’ll have Beijing’s IOU.”

  Mike took one of the chestnuts from the bag, noticed it was too sooty, pulled out another, and saw a squirrel keeping pace with them in short, quick dashes by the snow-dusted path leading down past the puppet house toward the dairy.

  “Son of a bitch is with the CIA.” He threw the husk at the squirrel. “You sure we’ll pull it off?”

  “Look, we did Con Ed okay,” Alex reminded him tartly. “If we do this thing right — Christ knows we’ve been training for it long enough — Washington’ll shit its pants. Americans don’t have the stomach for it. You know that.”

  “We Americans are tougher than you think,” Mike said.

  Alex didn’t like the “we” but figured it was probably a good sign. Mike always got right into the part. Mike pointed out that some of the others, though neither he nor Alex met them very often, had gone a bit soft — not on the strategy, but they’d been waiting so long they’d started going to seed. “Donut guts!” Alex called them. They liked the blue-collar affluence they enjoyed — plumbers eighty bucks an hour! But if they’d gone soft it didn’t mean they’d gone over. Anyway, most still had at least one parent back in the CIS republics, and grandparents, even brothers and sisters — whatever Siberian Intelligence’s KGB Chief Chernko had decided he needed to keep everyone committed to the semya—family.

  One of them had gone off the rails completely — started playing around with street women, spending most of his time screwing and spending. Paid out more at the track than he made on his job as subcontractor for New York Port Authority’s HERT, the harbor emergency response team. They’d found him, a floater, in the East River off the South Street Seaport, blood alcohol count of 1.6 and his testicles sewn in his mouth.

  The Post had run a story that the man, a diver for HERT, had been humping one of the mob’s tarts. It had shaken everybody up except Alex, who, Mike thought, might have done it. The thing was, you never knew who was Chernko’s iceman in New York or anywhere else. Before the war, the rezidents in the U.N., UNICEF, or in the embassy in Washington would have handled it. Now you never knew who it was. Alex said it didn’t matter who whacked the big spender, that the Americans would do the same to any one of their people who started screwing anything in sight. You couldn’t afford the risk of who they’d blab to when they’d gone that far off the rails.

  “Oh yeah?” Mike said in an accent as flawlessly American as Alex’s. “What about Kennedy? He screwed anything in a skirt.”

  “And they whacked him,” Alex said.

  Mike got the message, though he’d never bought the idea of a conspiracy theory — some big organizational plan to get Kennedy — even though he did think for one man to get away three shots at a moving target in a few seconds was tough to do. He, Alex, and every other “apprentice” at Spets training school in Novosibirsk had tried it. Alex had been the fastest and most accurate, blowing Kennedy’s head off three times in a row. But that wasn’t why he’d been chosen as the “foreman,” nor had he been chosen because he could do a floater if needed. No — Alex’s outstanding quality was his ability to sustain the long view,
to bide his time through all the Gorbachev-Yeltsin turbulence and to hold the others to it.

  Whoever shot the floater, Alex told Mike, was unimportant. The point was, he couldn’t keep his pecker in his pants and he paid for it. “Drew too much attention to himself. Put everybody at risk.”

  They saw Stefan, a wiry man well over six feet with what the doctors had told him was poor posture — stooped “from ducking doorways,” Mike joked. Stefan was a tradesman, too, an electrician from upstate, but he always wore a jacket and tie that made him look like a small businessman. He was standing by the monkey cage watching one of the animals sitting high on the loops, the monkey ignoring them, peering down into his crotch, grooming himself. Alex could smell Stefan’s breath as he approached him and tried not to make a face. Here Stefan was, living in the most advanced industrial country on earth, the home of the brave and dental floss, and he wouldn’t take care of his teeth. But it was a subject that Alex, for all his hard-nosed Spets training, couldn’t bring himself to broach, though he did move around Mike so that he was upwind as they stood either side of Stefan.

  “Look at his red ass!” Stefan said.

  “Yeah,” Mike said. “He’s a party monkey.”

  “How big’s the park?” Alex asked flatly, and he wasn’t smiling at Mike’s little joke. Stefan, immediately sensing Alex was in his usual all-business mood, answered, “Eight hundred and forty-three acres.” Then Stefan asked his question. “How many blocks?”

  Despite being upwind, Alex had to turn away from Stefan’s bad breath before answering. “Fifty-one blocks.”

  Chernko in Novosibirsk, obsessed by the possibility of infiltration, insisted that every cell go through the formality of such a preset exchange after an American look-alike years ago had penetrated the Walker ring in Vienna on appearance alone.

  The formality over, Alex suggested the three of them walk down to the reservoir.