The man who’d been assiduously practicing his t’ai chi was now no more than twenty feet away. “General Freeman?”
“Yes,” Freeman answered, now squatting on his haunches, arms akimbo, doing breathing exercises. “Who are you?”
“Colonel Wei. Republic of China.” His English was impeccable. “I am with the consulate in New York. Admiral Lin Kuang was sorry you were unable to discuss ideas with him and has sent—”
“Identification!” Freeman demanded, standing up, now indicating the Chinese behind him near the water and the other one on his flank up on the dunes. “Those your people?” Freeman added, his tone curtly businesslike.
“No,” the man calling himself Wei said. “We might have a problem in that regard, which is why I—”
“Why did you wait?” Freeman said, accepting the consulate identification card and driver’s license with residency address and the home address in Taiwan. “Why didn’t you approach me back there?” He indicated the dunes further behind him up the beach.
“I did not know — I still do not know, General, who these other two men are. I thought they might try to stop me.”
“Or me,” Freeman said, handing him back the identification. “What do you want to see me about?” The general’s eyes were still on the other two men, one a hundred yards to his right down the beach and the other about the same distance up from him atop the dunes, the brownish green dune grass stubble blowing stiffly in the wind.
“The admiral wanted you to know that if he can be of any assistance he will gladly give it.”
Freeman grunted, his tone somewhere between gratitude and frustration. He appreciated the admiral’s gesture, but it was just that, a gesture. Too vague a promise. Besides, Freeman was no longer C in C Second Army, and he told Colonel Wei this. He had effectively been relieved of his command. Didn’t Taipei read the papers? The La Roche tabloids had been screaming FREEMAN FIRED! for a week. Besides, ID was so easily forged in an age where they were using Xerox color copiers to pass on forged banknotes. “Why the hell didn’t you call me at the house?” Freeman demanded, still suspicious. “Instead of this cloak and—”
“Your house is being watched, General. Your phone lines are tapped.”
“By whom?”
“We do not know.”
“We?”
“At the consulate,” the man said, hesitating. “I can give you other contacts to verify my credentials if you—”
“It’s all right,” Freeman said. “What’s Admiral Kuang say — specifically?”
“Only that if you should need his assistance he will do whatever he can.”
“You don’t seem to understand. I’ve lost command of Second Army. Furthermore, I’m merely an instrument of national policy. I can’t do what the United States government doesn’t want me to do.”
“We understand, General, but you may yet be returned to command.”
“Huh — that’d be a miracle,” Freeman commented, looking again at the two other men. Then he knew who they must be. “Goddamn it! They’re bodyguards,” he said, smiling at Wei. “For once the fairies’ve done something right.”
Still, Freeman wondered, would bodyguards be assigned after you were no longer a threat to the enemy? Well, hell, ex-presidents had bodyguards for life. Was it too much conceit that after his victories he would have earned the wrath of vindictive losers — that they might send someone after him?
“We feel,” Wei continued, choosing his words as carefully as a chef selecting his tomatoes for the day, working around it. “We feel that things are in a state of flux in the disputed area between Siberia and Manchuria and that—”
“The world’s in a state of flux, Colonel,” Freeman interrupted. “It’s her natural condition.”
“Perhaps, but the signs are more propitious than I think you realize, General. For yourself.”
“Even if you’re correct — again, what can I do?”
“Should the occasion arise, you would send the word ‘mercury’ to our consulate. This would activate certain procedures with Admiral Kuang.”
“Don’t dance with me, Colonel. Does ‘mercury’ mean you’d intervene militarily?”
“This is possible.”
Colonel Wei flew into Freeman, knocking him to the harder sand by the water’s edge, blood and bone from his shattered cheek spurting over the general’s chest, turning the white foamy sea pink.
“Jesus—” Freeman began. Wei’s eyes were frozen in shock, the shot having killed him the instant the depleted uranium bullet had exploded in his brain, creating a hole the size of a fist in the back of his head. Another bullet thudded into him, and Freeman felt a warm sensation flooding over his stomach. Now the general had the Sig Sauer out and, pushing Wei off him, but snuggling in close to the body, took careful aim. The Sig Sauer bucked twice, and the man by the water seemed to hesitate, trembling, looking as if he were shot, but he kept coming.
The man from the dunes had disappeared only to reappear moments later, his head barely visible through the windshield of a four-wheel-drive Jeep Renegade coming straight at Freeman, who fired again to his left. The man by the water crumpled at the sea’s edge, the waves issuing over his body, their forward motion rolling cumbersomely toward die beach, the undertow sucking at him, and wet sand pouring over his legs back into the sea.
The four-wheel-drive was now hurtling down from the dunes a hundred feet away when Freeman fired one, two, three, four, five at the windshield. One of the shots found the target, the four-wheel-drive flipping onto its side, careening for a bit on the beach, making the drier sand squeak like the sound of piglets, its wheels still spinning at the sky. Freeman knew he had only a few shots left and ran toward the vehicle from the off side. The man was dead, and Freeman couldn’t see where he’d been hit until he realized he hadn’t been hit at all. The windshield was a milky spider’s web; little glass had flown out. Instead, what must have happened was that as soon as the windshield had been hit, turning opaque, the man had instantly stuck his head out far left to see where to steer when the vehicle flipped, digging deep into the dry sand, his head taking the impact full on and now lolling like a rag doll’s.
No one had heard any shots against the noise of the surf, but someone passing up on the highway had seen the overturned Renegade and the body at the surf’s edge. When the police arrived they couldn’t find any ID on the two men.
“You have any idea who they were, General?” asked a blonde whose figure couldn’t be disguised despite the state trooper uniform.
“No,” the general answered. “I’d only be speculating.”
“Go ahead, General,” she encouraged him.
“Guo An Bu — Chinese Intelligence Service — External Affairs.”
“Why would they be after you, General?”
“Don’t know,” Freeman said, “unless they think I’m another Subutai.” The general was staring out at the sea, not in the near distance but as if somehow he could see all the way to China. “Subutai,” he explained, “served Genghis Khan. Marched all the way from China to the Hungarian plain. At one stage his armies covered four hundred miles, took several cities, and fought two great battles, conquering Poland and all of Silesia — in less than thirty days.” He paused, oblivious to me policewoman’s stare. “Before that, he’d taken Russia. And before that, Genghis Khan had taken all China. By God, what an army!”
“General-”
“What — oh. Sorry, officer. No, what I mean was there’s a good chance it was politically motivated, but I don’t want that to get into the press.”
“Politically motivated, sir?”
“Yes, that’s what I think. Chinese don’t want me in the picture, which makes me believe that Wei — that joker over there — was right. Maybe the cease-fire over there isn’t worth the paper it’s written on.”
“You mean the Chinese were trying to assassinate you, General?”
“Either that,” Freeman said, “or”—flashing a smile—“someone in Washington!”
Everyone laughed. It happened now and then at a homicide — the tension had to snap. But as the ROC colonel was carried away, Freeman’s jaw clenched. No matter what army — when a soldier went down like that, having risked all, knowing the odds, it never failed to move him. At that moment he felt as if Wei were a son in a way that transcended time and borders. Hearing the roll of the sea, he felt that he had been with Subutai, that destiny had thrown Wei upon him to protect him — that God had used the ROC colonel as a shield and that therefore Freeman’s time had not come. Yet.