“Damn it! He’s done it again,” Freeman said, his general’s stars catching the light as he pointed the TV’s remote control and zapped CBN.
“Done what again, Douglas?” Marjorie Duchene, his sister-in-law, asked from the kitchen.
“That CBN clown calling APCs tanks.”
“What’s an APC?” Marjorie asked.
“Please don’t bait me, Dory — Marjorie.” He’d used his deceased wife’s name, for, though he’d loved her, she’d had the same habit of teasing him.
“I’m not baiting you, Douglas dear. I’ve no idea what an APC is — some truck or other I suppose.”
“Armored personnel carrier,” Freeman grumped. “Goddamn education in this country’s going to hell in a handbasket.”
“Please don’t swear, Douglas. I know it’s rough and ready in the army, but now you’re home.”
“You mean put out to pasture. Those congressional sons of — those ‘gentlemen’ in Washington recalled me from Siberia for ‘consultation.’ Haven’t called me in for a week, but I know when I go there they’re going to give me a ‘special’ assignment. What they mean is they don’t want me in command of Second Army.”
“Well, the war is over, Douglas.”
“War’s never over, Marjorie — just interrupted now and then by peace. Good God, in over five thousand years of history we haven’t had three hundred years of peace. You realize that?”
“You should go for a walk,” Marjorie said. “The tide’s out. Rock pools’ll be beautiful.”
“You know what happens in rock pools,” Freeman said, invoking an image that had never ceased to arrest him. “One creature’s fighting the other for food and space. To the death.”
“Oh, Douglas, that’s a forlorn way of looking at the world.”
“It can be a forlorn world, Marjorie,” Freeman responded. “Second Army lost the best part of four thousand men to Yesov’s hordes on Lake Baikal. And that’s not counting the casualties inflicted by the Chinese when they attacked us from the south. So what happens when I counterattack, make up some lost territory, and start taking prisoners? Beijing and Novosibirsk sing in unison for a cease-fire, and those — those ‘fairies’ back in Washington gave it to them.”
“We want peace, Douglas,” Marjorie said.
“Hell — we all want peace. Problem is, how to secure it. You don’t think those ‘comrades’ in Beijing would roll up their blankets do you? This is a breathing space for them. Time to build up their forces again for another northward push. And what if they attack again? We’ve got a supply line stretched over four thousand miles of ocean between here and Siberia. Manchuria’s their backyard. They’re going to want to grab as much territory along the Amur River valleys as they can. Siberians and Chinese have been fighting over it for more than a hundred years. Only reason they formed an alliance against us was to try and push our Allied force into the sea. Then without any U.N. overwatch they could carve one another up.”
“Then why didn’t we just let them do it?” Marjorie said ingenuously.
“Because if we let them at it, once they’d exhausted their conventional forces we’d be in an ICBM war, and pretty soon everyone else around them, from Kazakhstan to Southeast Asia, would have to choose sides. We’d have a world war that you couldn’t put out, Marjorie. Hell — that’s why the U.N. sent us over there. To keep the peace. But I’m telling you, this cease-fire isn’t keeping the peace — it’s just time out for Cheng and Yesov to rearm, resupply. Meanwhile their ‘diplomats’ are yakking away with our diplomats. Well, you know what Will Rogers said about diplomacy.”
“No, I don’t,” Marjorie said.
“Diplomacy’s saying ‘Nice doggie’ till you can find a rock. That’s what they’re doing, Marjorie — getting the rocks ready for their slingshots.”
“Oh, I’m sure Washington knows what it’s doing.”
“Marjorie, the last time Washington knew what it was doing was when it declared war on Saddam Insane.”
“Go for a walk, Douglas. It’ll do you good.”
He did, and it didn’t. All he could think of was Norton’s call that morning about the air-conditioning units.
In Hong Kong, La Roche Industries had received a fax— an order from General Cheng in Beijing, C in C of the People’s Liberation Army, two and a half million strong. The order was for everything from American-made Gore-Tex sleeping bags to five thousand air-conditioning units of the kind used by heavy-haul refrigerator trucks. Though Hong Kong was now firmly in PLA hands, it was still used by Beijing, as in the days when the colony had been British, as a capitalist outpost for trade with the West. Chinese-born agents loyal to Britain were still at large in the former British colony, and along with everything else they heard they passed the information about the La Roche order to the American Second Army’s headquarters at Khabarovsk via the Harbin-Manchurian underground Democracy Movement. From Khabarovsk, Colonel Dick Norton had called Freeman, careful to bill it as a personal and not an official call.
“These air-conditioning units,” Freeman asked. “They portable?”
“Didn’t say, General.”
“Find out, Dick. Call me back. Ten-to-one they’re portable.”
“Yes, sir.”
As Freeman had sat impatiently reading the lives of Sherman and Grant, Norton rang back. “You’re right. They’re portable, sir. How did you—”
“Thank you, Dick.” When he put down the receiver, Freeman began to pace back and forth in the lounge room, talking to himself.
“What’s that, Douglas?” Marjorie called from the kitchen.
Suddenly Freeman had stopped. Now in late March, the spring thaw was in full swing along the Siberian-Chinese-Manchurian border. “Why on earth — summer! That little turd is going to launch a summer offensive!”
“Where?” Marjorie said, rushing in. “What? You saw a little tern? Where?”
“What-ah, no. I—”
“Oh dear. They’re such beautiful birds.”
Striding along the beach, Freeman was buffeted by a chilly wind, and unusually wracked by doubt. Was he overreacting? No, that damn Cheng was up to something. It aggravated Freeman so much he felt his skin itch here and there and had to shift the 9mm Sig Sauer Parabellum he always carried further along his waistband so that he could scratch the offending part.
The sea crashed in wildly along the ribbon of sand that was Monterey’s beach. He couldn’t help but hear the sounds of Second Army’s III Corps floundering in the crashing waters of Lake Baikal, Yesov’s heavy artillery chopping up the ice, cutting off III Corps’s retreat, and the Siberians’ Spets and OMON commandos butchering die retreating Americans, the ice floes smeared with Americans’ blood. For a while he thought he was alone on the beach, mistaking the lone figure further up for a piece of rock. He or she seemed to be waiting for him. But as he went past the man who was too far up on the dunes for his features to be clear, the man turned and walked away. As the general headed back to the house, his general’s thoughts were back along the Amur.
Now he was convinced more than ever that it was a summer offensive. Cheng doesn’t want to make the same mistake the Arabs did against the Israelis, he thought. Half the Arab tank crews were prostrate with heat exhaustion. Got to over a hundred and twenty degrees inside those T-72s. Hell, it was so bad Sadat thought the Israeli’s MOSSAD had issued the Israeli pilots some new kind of debilitating gas bombs. Wasn’t gas, it was the goddamn heat. It would be easy to mount the air-conditioning units on me rear of the T-59s and T-72s, right near the extra gas drum. He’d equally want his lead tanks cool for a long-reaching preemptive strike. July or August! There could only be one place: the Gobi Desert, bypassing the Manchurian mountain chain on his, Cheng’s, right flank, driving into the heart of the American-controlled DMZ along the Amur.
Next question — the big question — was, would the Mongolian Communists come in on the Chinese side? To find out, he began formulating what he would call “preventive medicine,” and he did not mean his advice to his soldiers to practice safe sex.