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.