“An attack on the Chinese front?” Norton said. “General, I thought you said—”
“Never mind what I said, Dick. Get my corps commanders here for a meeting at oh nine hundred hours.” The general listened intently to what David Brentwood had to say — namely that it seemed quite clear from everything they’d seen that the Mongolians were in no mood to die on Marshal Yesov’s behalf, that the Mongolians, in short, had taken perestroika and glasnost as seriously as the Eastern Europeans. The Mongolians wouldn’t be a problem, but from what they’d seen of the Spets behavior, Yesov couldn’t be trusted.
“Never did trust that son of a bitch. How about this Lewis?”
Brentwood said they just didn’t know. He was as resourceful in the desert as any other clime that the SAS had been trained for. And they had dropped him a Kawasaki.
“A what?”
“Kawasaki.”
“Jesus Christ!” Freeman said. “You mean we couldn’t even get him an all-American bike?”
No one knew quite what to say.
“I’ll tell you something, Brentwood,” the general said, his eyes glowering. “Someone back in Detroit needs their ass kicked for letting Japan take over like that. Goddamn disgraceful!”
“Yes, General.”
“Course,” Freeman said, “it was Doug MacArthur’s fault. Got to thinking he was goddamn king of Japan. Gave women the vote then helped Japan build up new factories to out-industrialize us. I tell you, Brentwood, that’s what happens when a man gets too far from the good old U.S. of A. and he starts going native and NATO on you. Eisenhower was the same, damn it — kept holding Georgie Patton back on a leash. Patton could’ve stopped the cold war before it began.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Yes, well long as the son-of-a-bitch motorbike gets him here. He got a rescue beeper, purple flare?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well I want every chopper outfit west of Manzhouli to keep on alert so that we can go in and pick him up soon as he’s close enough. If he gets close enough.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Now, if he gets back he’ll be part of ‘Operation Front Door,’ the door, gentlemen, being the Amur or, as the ChiComs call it, the Black Dragon. Brentwood!”
“Sir?”
“I want you to take a squadron of your men in here…”
As Norton listened to the plan unfold, a smile began to replace his earlier apprehension. It was brilliant. Vintage Freeman. Daring all right, but still there was always the question, Would it work? After the general left the Quonset hut to relieve himself someone remarked, “I’m glad our helos are American made.”
“Right,” another said. “But the friggin’ beeper isn’t, and half the electronics aboard the chopper are Japa—”
“Quiet, here he comes.”
As Freeman began to go into more detail, Salvini, Brentwood, and Choir found it hard to concentrate. They were thinking of Aussie Lewis, alone in the Mongolian expanse. Special Operations had already lost one man earlier in the war in a commando raid near Nanking — Smythe — and he was now rotting away in Beijing Jail Number One. A Chinese jail, they said, was unimaginable. The Jewish woman, Alexsandra Malof, had been in the Harbin jail. To stay alive she had to lick the walls for moisture and pick out tiny pieces of undigested food from her feces. When she escaped, they said she was thin as a rake.