“Why can’t we stay here, Aussie?” Alexsandra sighed, reclining on the picnic blanket, looking over a long stretch of the Amur river, closing her brown eyes and stretching— albeit unknowingly — sensuously in the weak morning sun. “Why can’t we stay here and make love forever?”
Aussie Lewis’s eyes lingered on her white blouse. Just watching her breathing was a treat. “Because,” he said, in the flat down-under tone of his, “you’re a soft touch— always trying to do more than your share. If this truce doesn’t last, you’ll be at it again. Right?” Aussie propped himself up on his elbow, his blue eyes looking down at her. “Stone the crows, Sandy, you’ve done your bit — knocking out Chinese troop trains and all that. Washington’s already given you a gong for duty beyond and above — you’ve done more than your bit.”
“No,” she said quietly, still not opening her eyes, “not as long as the Chinese threaten the JAO.” The region lay in the disputed territory along the Siberian-Chinese border, the border being the Amur river to the Siberians and the Black Dragon to the Chinese. “If we don’t fight,” Alexsandra said, “we’ll end up just like Tibet — another Chinese province. Anyway”—she turned on the picnic blanket, shutting her eyes—”who are you to talk? You and your SAS/Delta troopers.” She was referring to the SAS/D troop — the British Special Air Service and American Delta force commandos that Freeman called on to plug any sudden gap in the line or to carry out deep missions behind the enemy lines — to fight if there was no truce, to collect intelligence if there was.
“Yeah, I’d go,” conceded Aussie, who had rescued Alexsandra as one of many civilian hostages the Chinese had tied to the guns at the battle of Orgon Tal. To the astonishment of his colleagues in the SAS/Delta teams, Aussie Lewis had fallen head over heels for Alexsandra Malof — even to the point of having stopped swearing. His buddies — David Brentwood, officer in charge of his SAS/D troop; Salvini from Brooklyn; and Choir Williams, a Welshman — had wagered that the Australian couldn’t last an entire week without a profanity. They still had two days to go.
“But — what I do,” Aussie tried to explain to Alexsandra, “is what I do. I mean, it’s my job. Special Ops is my line of country. We’re trained for it.”
She smiled at him as she turned side-on to the weak sun that hung above the thick taiga, a great blanket of green that hugged the river and swept right down to its banks except for the little beach they had found.
“You can’t tell me you do it for money. Because you’re—” she began.
“Well — no,” Aussie had to admit. “But what I mean is— well—” Uncharacteristically for him, he seemed at a loss for words.
“What you’re saying,” Alexsandra said softly, “is that I shouldn’t go if there’s trouble again — that you love me.”
This was pretty rough talk for the Australian. Oh sure, he’d fallen in love, but he balked at her simple declaration. It wasn’t macho to get all weepy and confessional.
“Yeah — I like you, Sandy.”
“Only like me?” she retorted, holding back a smile, still looking at him warmly and mischievously, enjoying his discomfort.
“Yeah — well,” he began, “you’re a good bird.”
“Am I?” An extraordinary thing was happening — the Australian was blushing.
Alexsandra threw her head back, smiling. She looked like the bird in Casablanca, Aussie thought. What was her name? Ingrid — Ingrid Bergman, that was it. “Yeah, well, I’m pretty keen on you, Sandy.”
“Oh dear,” she said. “This is very serious then, Aussie.”
“Stone the crows!” he began. “What I meant to say was—” He stood up abruptly and started throwing rocks into the river. “I’m a bit keen on you,” he said quickly, and immediately looked about in the forest, as if someone might have heard him. “That’s what I mean about you and this sabotage business.”
She got up and reached for his arm, and as he turned around to look at her she seemed to him even more beautiful than before, her dark hair lustrous in the spring sun. But he knew that along with her beauty was an iron determination that he wouldn’t be able to stop her doing what she felt she had to do: fight the Chinese if they broke the truce. It would be an obligation for everyone in the JAO, and she knew that Aussie knew. They embraced, and Aussie whispered hoarsely, “God, I hope this truce holds.”
“It will,” she said, sounding utterly unconvincing. Already there were reports of “strain” all along the DMZ. The feeling was like watching a rope between two tug-of-war teams: The rope was still, but the force pulling it either way had not abated — the tension was in the very air you breathed.
At this point Aussie Lewis didn’t quite realize the extent of Alexsandra’s fame, for while she might still be domiciled in the U.S.-run Khabarovsk refugee camp, her deeds had spread throughout the dissident ranks of Gansu Province’s Social Democrats and beyond Beijing to the Liberal Democratic party, the Free Labor Union, and the Chinese Progressive Alliance — all unofficially gathering under the banner of the goddess of democracy.
But she and Aussie Lewis were only two people among thousands, and no matter what her fame, events were swirling about them that would sweep them into different dangers whether they liked it or not. With over three million men in the People’s Liberation Army and only 360,000 Allies, mostly American, the scope of the battles would be huge and confused if war broke out. Five thousand T-59 and T-72 tanks alone were already being marshaled by General Cheng on the basis of Lenin’s military adage that “quantity has a quality all its own.” The Americans had better tanks, and Cheng’s strategy was simply to roll over the Americans with his four-to-one advantage. No matter how good an M1A1 tank might be, it had to kill three of his tanks out of every four just to stay even. The irony, however, was that it wouldn’t be the sight of thousands of T-59s and T-72s being moved northward that would ignite the powder keg along the trace.
The two Gong An Bu — Public Security Bureau — men looked so much alike — short, stocky, and in poorly cut Western-style suits — that their prey — anyone suspected of being a member of the underground June Fourth Democracy Movement — called the men the “turtle twins.” Being called a turtle was a great insult in China. One of the turtles told the boy to stand up against the cell wall, a dirty slab of cement defaced by dozens of pleas to, or denunciations of, the Party. The boy was seventeen years old and shivering, as much from his fear as from the cold.
“Hands behind your back!” the other security man commanded. The boy did as he was told and was shown the color photograph once more. It was a police photo of a dark-haired Caucasian woman in her thirties. Even the baggy prisoners’ Mao suit couldn’t hide a striking figure, and her brown eyes stared defiantly from the photograph.
“Well?” one of the twins said. “Where is she?”
The boy couldn’t speak, his mouth dry with fear, and so he simply shook his head. The other man kicked him in the groin. The boy doubled up, collapsing in a heap on the slimy flagstone floor, cupping his genitals, writhing in agony and so nauseated he couldn’t even utter a protest.
“Now,” the other turtle said. “Where is she?”
The boy shook his head again. He had never seen Alexsandra Malof before this photo. All he knew about her was that after the successful U.S. Second Army attack against elements of General Cheng’s long-range artillery during the great battle for Orgon Tal, the Malof woman had been rescued along with other hostages who had been tied to the wheels of the big guns. The boy knew that this Jewish guerrilla leader had played havoc with railway sabotage in the Manchurian vastness before her capture and subsequent rescue by the Americans. And the fact that she had been decorated by the Americans earlier in the war before the truce was making her a heroine throughout the democratic underground all across China, particularly among the minorities in Tibet, Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia and in most of the non-Han regions. If the beating told the boy nothing else it told him that if they were so worried about where she was, the truce might not last long — that a new PLA attack was imminent. He was only half right.
“Where is she?”
“Everywhere,” the boy said. The Public Security man kicked him again but knew the boy was telling them an uncomfortable truth. She was everywhere — the mere mention of her name a rallying cry to any group of “hooligans” or other antisocial elements who wanted to overthrow the government. And there were reports of her being everywhere.
The boy had vomited on the floor. They forced him to eat it. “Now — where is she?”
“Everywhere.”
They took him out and bludgeoned him to death on the rough flagstone courtyard. Normally they would have simply shot him in the base of the neck, but bullets cost seventeen cents American each, and for an army of three million the cost of ammunition was an item of budgetary concern.
Chairman Nie was coldly furious at the failure of the Public Security Bureau — the counterespionage group — to find her.
“Keep looking!” he told the PSB. “I want her — alive.” He knew that to kill her would only make a martyr of her. Having her alive — in chains — would evoke the power of the state much more. She could be got rid of as soon as her capture and humiliation had served Nie’s purpose of demoralizing the underground.
After he’d spoken with Alexsandra on the beach, there was a marked change in Aussie Lewis’s mood. Known as one of the most proficient and profane fighters in the SAS/D team, he became unusually subdued. Salvini, Choir Williams, and David Brentwood, the younger brother of the USS Reagan’s skipper, all noticed that he was uncharacteristically censorious about others swearing — so much so that Brentwood, Williams, and Salvini speculated that wedding bells were in the offing.
“Come on, Aussie. You going to take the big jump — the great leap forward?”
Aussie was sitting on the floor, blindfolded, reassembling his P-90 submachine gun by feel alone, a practice all SAS/D team members had to be “time capable” of in utter darkness. He didn’t answer them at first.
“Come on, Aussie. You dipping your wick?” Salvini asked.
“Don’t be crude!” Aussie replied.
“It must be serious,” Choir Williams joshed. “He hasn’t sworn for a week.”
“Uh-uh — two days to go,” Salvini reminded them. “He won’t last the distance.”
“Ye of little faith,” Aussie said, slapping the plastic see-through mag into the P-90. “You’re about to be surprised.”
“So,” Salvini proffered, “you’ve already popped the question, eh?”
Aussie didn’t answer. He needed more time and prayed no one along the trace — Chinese or Ally — would pull the trigger before he had a chance to spend more time with Alexsandra.
PFC — Private First Class — Melton of Alpha fire squad in the second company of infantry from the Thirty-second Battalion hailed from the Midwest. Melton was a farming boy from Missouri and was raised in strict adherence to his folks’ religious philosophy. Sunday was church — maybe a game of baseball out on the old rapeseed patch, and Lord help the kid who swore! Old Mrs. Melton would have him off the field and peeling potatoes before he could get back on the diamond.
Across the trace from Melton were members of the mortar squad from Shenyang’s Fourteenth Army, also scanning the DMZ. The sun was setting and night patrols would soon begin, but no one expected anything more than a few catcalls and maybe a tracer or two if a patrol looked like it was growing too fond of any part of the DMZ — especially if someone was digging under the wire or using the light alloy minesweepers in hopes of plotting the best points for crossing. Neither side had had enough time, since the truce, to plant mines all along the trace, for it was a weaving, thousand-mile front that roughly followed the shape of a long check mark, the longer part of it going up and over the mountains beyond the north plain, the bottom of the check mark consisting of the American forces that had penetrated furthest south following the battle of Orgon Tal.
“Melton!” a call came through the chilly darkness as Alpha squad edged down past a high rocky cleft closer to the wire. It was no surprise that occasionally they found out your name — it could have been provided by a Chinese intelligence agent who’d followed the disembarkation of the unit from the States, or maybe it had simply been picked up from one of the Chinese patrols overhearing conversation or smelling aftershave from the Americans who in some places along the trace were only twenty yards away.
“Melton! You miss your wife?”
Because of the narrow defile the Alpha squad was almost against the wire.
“Your wife has boyfriend, Melton. You fight. She fuck.”
By now the Alpha squad’s point man was trying to suppress a laugh.
“What’s up?” another asked. “If it was your wife I’ll bet you—”
“Melton ain’t married,” the point man said.
So the Chinese had struck out — the Alpha squad hadn’t fallen for the bait — but Melton didn’t laugh. Melton wasn’t amused at all. You’re out on patrol, it’s black as pitch and someone calls out your name. How’d they know his name? They just pick it up from listening across the trace? And if they hadn’t, it meant Chinese intelligence had gotten hold of his name some other way. How? he asked the squad. Where? It made them all edgy.
“Just remember Freeman’s orders.” the squad leader said. “Anybody fires back for crap like that and they could start the whole fucking war again along the trace.”
“Hey Melton,” squad leader asked, “sure you didn’t get married without tellin’ us?”
“Don’t worry,” Melton said. “It ain’t gonna be me.”
“What do you mean, ‘it ain’t gonna be me’? You gonna spend your life jerkin’ off?”
“I mean I’m not firing back because of that kind of crap.” But Melton had been spooked. Now and then they could hear the unoiled, squeaking noise of tanks — T-59s and T-62s upgraded with appliqué armor that looked like big slabs of hinged concrete stuck on the tanks as they made their way along the trace, Cheng’s units taking full advantage of the truce to bolster their positions all along the line.