If Freeman’s victories were an open book, he had a few secrets he shared with no one. One of them was that, fit as he was, he detested having to keep it up. Jogging and physical exercise made you too damn hot and sweaty— unless, of course, you were in combat. Then you were so busy, so fearful, at times — usually after — so exhilarated you didn’t notice. But he had to force himself to run at least four miles a day to stay in shape, and go easy on the buttered popcorn. Monterey’s beach was perfect, the sand making it more exhausting, making him feel doubly heroic, and at the end he could walk into the ocean. That, as Marjorie said every time, would “cool you off right enough.”
For the past three days, Freeman hadn’t seen the figure on the dunes, and this morning the general was particularly relaxed, going over the old battles in his mind as he jogged along the water-firmed beach.
He remembered the armored battle in the Yakutsk region of Siberia where it had plunged to minus sixty degrees, at which temperature metal became brittle and the waxes in the hydraulic lines of the Siberian tanks, but not the American Abrams M1A1, separated out, the oil’s constituent waxes then clogging the tanks’ arteries in the same way as lumps of cholesterol clog the bloodstream. The T-72s and some T-80s had suddenly become sitting ducks, whereas the American tanks burst through the snow berms at forty miles per hour like exploding icing sugar, picking the Siberians off. It was one of the most beautiful things Freeman had ever seen, and he was thinking of it now as suddenly he saw the lone figure on the dunes once again.
Freeman’s world was a Hobbesian one: one in which only the sword, or the threat of it by the sovereign — whether the sovereign was one or many — guaranteed peace and tranquility, and so it was the most natural thing in the world for him to pat the bulge beneath the waistband of his jogging trousers to make sure that the Sig Sauer was snug and ready. His wife had been fatally wounded by a Siberian Spetsnaz — a special-forces sleeper who, along with so many others, had been inserted during the heyday of the love-in between Gorby and the New York Times and who, when activated to take out Freeman earlier in the war, had surprised his wife in the house instead, Freeman having been delayed on the flight from Washington. The intruder fatally wounded her, and she died a few hours later in the Monterey Peninsula Hospital.
Freeman could tell by the way the man — Chinese, in a jogging suit — was standing on the dune, staring out to sea, not bothering to turn in the general’s direction, that he was waiting for him again. Or was he one of California’s legion of ecofreaks — kill all the people but save the whales! And was the stranger the same man as a few days ago?
“Morning,” Freeman said, not altering his pace, merely nodding as he passed. The man nodded back.
Son of a bitch looks suspicious, Freeman thought, and immediately thought after that maybe he wasn’t. He looked lithe, wiry, and unusually tall. But somehow, maybe because of the smart matching jogging outfit and the Nike pumps — very modern — in some indefinable way Freeman didn’t place him as a party member. But then they’d hardly send someone in a baggy Mao suit with “party” written all over him.
Two hundred yards further on Freeman stopped and began some leg stretches. Love a duck — the Chinese jogger was doing T’ai chi, moving with that graceful deliberation that for once made westerners stare at the Chinese rather than the other way around.
Now ahead, a hundred yards further on up the beach, he saw another figure, and off to his left another appeared atop the dunes.
“Bad news, Dick!” Freeman was speaking as if Colonel Dick Norton were by his side. “One in front of me, one behind, and one on the left flank.” The sea was to his right. Boxed in.
“All right, you bastards,” Freeman muttered beneath the crash of the sea. “You’re going to have to come and get me.” Up on the highway he could hear the hum of tires and saw a Winnebago go by — then a bus and a motorbike, but they might as well have been on Mars.
“Well, Dick, I told you to build up the U.N. line — get things ready in case of a punch-up — and over here I’ve fouled up, my friend.” He was doing a few push-ups, during which he could see all of them at one glance. He stopped the pushups. Foolish to get his heartbeat up too much — could make his aim a little shaky. Still, he wasn’t fool enough to think he could get three of them. Two, maybe, but not three. He looked up and saw that T’ai Chi was now moving toward him, hands in his pockets. “Well, Dick, last time I saw a jogger with his hands in his pockets, son of a bitch was playing with himself. Don’t like it. You hear that, Sig? Time I played a little pocket billiards myself.” He knelt down, as if going into another exercise routine, which immediately reduced his target size. He felt under the jogging suit for the grip — had it, and turned the gun barrel out, still under the cloth, pushing off the safety. He figured T’ai Chi would be within good range in about sixty, seventy seconds, and began the count.