Five thousand miles away it had been a slow morning along the U.N. line. Everything was quiet, and only the four-man SAS/Delta troop of David Brentwood, Salvini, Choir Williams, and Aussie Lewis were unhurriedly busy, checking all their equipment from the transparent mags for the Belgian P-90 to the pencil flares and hand-held, cigarette-pack-size GPSs — geosynchronous positioning systems — they all carried. Jenghiz, the Mongolian interpreter-guide they had assigned them, was fluent not only in the Khalkha Mongol dialect that was used by three-quarters of the population but also the dialects of the Durbet Mongols who lived in and about the mountainous region north of the tableland between Siberia and China that the rest of the world called Mongolia. Jenghiz also spoke the tongue of the Darigangra inhabitants of eastern Mongolia, and that of the Kazakhs, Turvins, and Khotans that made up less than 10 percent of the sparsely populated country the size of Texas.
With Jenghiz they would be going in over the wall, not the Great Wall of China but the big rampart of Genghis Khan in northeast Mongolia, near the Mongolian-Chinese border, and over the two-mile-high Hentiyn Nuruu Mountains south of the Siberian-Mongolian border and eighty miles northeast of the Mongolian capital of Ulan Bator. It was a high country that, unlike the steppes and the Gobi Desert south and east of it, was one of fast-running rivers, deep gorges, and wild, windswept mountains, outcrops of larch and spruce hanging grimly onto rock faces, battered by the winds that alternately came out of Siberia to the north and Chinese Inner Mongolia to the south.
If they were caught, Jenghiz was to destroy Freeman’s sealed message. The cover story given them by Colonel Dick Norton would be that while patrolling the U.N. DMZ, the Pave Low M-53J chopper had lost its NOE — nap of the earth — radar, and in one of the many dust storms that plagued Mongolia they had lost their way, straying into Mongolian airspace, the Mongolian interpreter as lost for recognizable landmarks as they were. It had happened before, both in the almost featureless expanse of the Gobi Desert to the southeast and to those pilots trying to negotiate their way around the Hentiyn Nuruu.
But Aussie Lewis reckoned the Mongolians wouldn’t buy it. They certainly didn’t buy any incursions on their territory by the Chinese from Inner Mongolia, whom they hated.
“This is different,” David Brentwood assured Aussie. “We’ll be wearing U.N. identification — armbands, et cetera.”
“Yeah, until we reach the insertion point,” Salvini said. “But what if they come across us while we’re changing into our Mongolian garb? You know what they do to spies.” He paused. “You know what we do to spies.”
“We’re not at war with them, boyo,” Choir Williams said. “It’d be mighty embarrassing, that’s all.”
Aussie chimed in, “Maybe, Choir, but Sal’s got a point. We could be embarrassed for twenty-five years’ hard fucking yakka in some friggin’ coal mine!”
“Hey!” David Brentwood said, checking over the clothes they’d slip into in order to travel down through the mountains to Ulan Bator on Dick Norton’s, that is, Freeman’s, “preventive medicine” mission. David’s tone was older than his twenty-five years. He was cutting short the worry talk. “No one twisted your arms, you know. You guys volunteered. Norton told me that was the general’s first directive for this mission. You know the conditions. We get caught, we get caught. Uncle Sam can’t do anything. You want to Cry about it, don’t go!”
It was about the worst insult you could deliver to the elite commandos of Special Air Service or Delta Force. These were men who had gone deep into enemy country from the coast only a few weeks before the cease-fire to help a stranded SEAL detachment near Nanking. These men had been together on Ratmanov Island — had gone down into the labyrinth of tunnels to “sweep” out the Spetsnaz.
“We’re not complaining,” Aussie said. “Just looking at it square in the face, Davey. I think Freeman’s doin’ the right thing. It’s just—”
“Aw, why don’t you admit it, Aussie?” Salvini said, his Brooklyn accent at its height. “You don’ wanna leave little Olga!”
“Big Olga!” Choir added.
Aussie slipped an elastic band around two 9mm mags. “Don’t be so fucking rude!”
“Don’t take any pictures of her,” David said easily, smiling to break the tension now his point had been made. “Remember, no personal effects.”
“All right if I bring my dick along?” Aussie countered.
David Brentwood, essentially a shy individual, shook his head at the Australian’s unrelenting vulgarity.
“Just keep it in your trousers, boyo,” Choir Williams advised. “It might get shot off otherwise.”
Salvini thought this was very funny.
“Oh you’re a riot,” Aussie told them. “A regular fucking riot. If anybody’s going to be missing their member it’s the first Mongolian who pokes his nose—” Aussie stopped and winked at Jenghiz, the interpreter-guide. “No offense, Ghiz.”
“No off fence,” Jenghiz said, his good-humored smile of pearl-white teeth framed by a drooping black mustache. It made him look somewhat sinister despite the fine, bright teeth, and Aussie suspected that he grew it more to bug the Han Chinese who for the most part couldn’t grow one and who in general regarded facial hair as the sign of barbarians — except when one was old.
“Listen up!” Aussie said. “Ten-to-one I’ll be the first to spot a Mongolian. Choir? Sal? What do you say?”
Choir Williams, who’d lost and made money from the Australian’s obsession with gambling before, was careful to set the ground rules. “How will we know for sure?”
“Well,” Aussie said, “it’s not very difficult. If the fucker starts shooting—”
Choir and Salvini bet ten-to-one they’d spot the first Mongolian after the drop — after they started making their way down from the mountains toward Ulan Bator, where they hoped they would be able to make contact with the pro-Siberian but anti-Chinese government. Since Gorbachev’s perestroika and glasnost the Mongolians, though only with a population of just over two million, had started to go their own way and, despite the presence of Siberian garrisons, were determined to make their country their own as fer as they could. There were bound to be Russian patrols, but Brentwood’s team was to avoid all combat if at all possible and make its way to Ulan Bator with a message that Freeman had once jocularly called, “Let’s make a deal.”
“By the way,” Aussie said, “anyone hear about that poor bastard Smythe?” He was referring to one of the SEAL members who’d been captured by the Chinese, General Cheng refusing to give the American back in a prisoner exchange because the Chinese were maintaining that as Smythe was out of uniform when captured and therefore a “spy,” he was not to be accredited normal POW treatment.
The fact that Smythe was hardly a spy, decked out as he’d been in SEAL rebreather and wet suit, was of no account to the Chinese, and the fact that Smythe — a man in his early thirties with a wife and two young children back in Maine — hadn’t been shot was not due to any compassion on the Chinese part but because Cheng wanted to “question” him in greater detail about the SEALs. In short, they wanted to torture him.
“Last I heard,” David Brentwood told Aussie, “was that intelligence reports from the Democracy Movement underground said that they’d moved him from Nanking to Beijing. More interrogation probably.”
“Poor bugger,” Aussie said. “And that Jewish sheila— the one who was — you know — the one who was smuggled out of Harbin north to us.”
“What sheila?” Salvini pressed.
“The Jewish bird who told our side Cheng was moving masses of troops across the Nanking Bridge — on their way north.”
“Oh,” Sal said. “Her. Yeah, I remember. Someone told me she got back to the JAO.” He meant the Jewish Autonomous Region or Oblast wedged between Manchuria and Siberia, of which it had ostensibly been a part.
“Or what used to be the JAO before we got here,” Sal added. “She’s still around. Why?”
“Heard she’s some looker,” Aussie said. “Enormous—”
“Yes, okay,” David said, “we know. Enormous eyes.” They all laughed, even Jenghiz, who didn’t always understand their English. They said in the SAS/Delta Force that if Aussie wasn’t in a firefight he was in bed.
Two minutes later they were told the Pave Low was ready, its big noise-suppressed rotors impatiently chopping the air.
“Still bloody loud,” Aussie commented.
“Like your ties!” Salvini joshed.
With that, they were all aboard, and once the rear ramp closed, swallowing them up, the Pave Low’s big bulbous nose — the chopper’s fuselage flanked by two scallop-shaped fuel tanks — lifted, the rear rotor higher, the chopper’s down-push kicking up hard crystalline snow that chafed the faces of its ground crew, who did not know whether they’d see the Pave Low again.