“Who complained?” Freeman demanded without taking his eyes off the huge wall map of the three provinces of Hopei, Shantung, and Honan.
“I don’t have her name yet, General,” answered Colonel Norton, Freeman’s longtime aide, and he was glad he didn’t. If Freeman found out who the female was who had complained directly to the Pentagon, he’d go ballistic.
“If I’ve said it once,” Freeman roared, “I’ve told those Washington fairies a thousand times, a tank is no place for a woman. Period! It’s cramped, it’s crowded — goddamn it, Dick!” he said, turning away from the map momentarily. “Why am I plagued by these skirts that are so hell-bent on getting their tits ripped off during the reload? Don’t they understand? There are no seat belts inside, no restraints. Shell ejection can break an arm just like that!”
“All I know,” Norton said quietly, “is that it’s a perennial complaint against Second Army. And General, you are obliged by Congress to—”
“To hell with Congress. See any of those jokers in a tank? By God, remember Dukakis? And now they want me to put those delicate creatures inside an M1A1?” He suddenly sounded terribly old-fashioned. He was an anachronism in many ways — still stood up for a woman when she entered a room, opened doors for them, and was even known to give up his seat on the military buses on the way to postmaneuver conferences at Fort Irwin, for he made a point of traveling with his troops.
No wonder the callow young Turks thought of him as an early twentieth-century man.
“General,” Norton advised him cautiously, “no matter what your personal feelings, the Pentagon has approved women for combat in all—”
Freeman turned angrily on his aide, then suddenly stopped his tirade, exhaling heavily, whacking a stripped stick of birch against his boot. The birch stick-cum-pointer-cum-swagger stick had traveled down with him from the northwestern part of Manchuria, where the deciduous oak forests, linden, and white pine ran right out to the edge of the northeasterly margin of the Gobi. “Well, Dick — you’re right of course.” Whack! “Appreciate your candor.” Whack! “You’re not here to pump sunshine up my ass but to tell me how it is.” Whack! “So I suppose we’re going to have to let some tail in to keep Washington off my tail.”
“I think that’s sensible, General.”
“Yes, by God, I bet you do. You’re with Congress on this, aren’t you?”
“Well, sir, the navy already—”
“Yes, yes, I know. And you think I’m a stick in the mud.”
“On strategy — no way, sir. But in this matter I think we’re dragging our feet.”
“Are we?” Freeman asked, looking at Dick Norton, who didn’t blink.
“Yes, sir, we are.”
“All right — all right — but not in my HQ company.”
“I’m not suicidal, General.”
“Huh,” Freeman grunted affably, “guess not. Give them to Hersh — he’s a ladies’ man. He can tuck ‘em in tight, but remember what I’ve said before. When nature calls and we’re in the middle of a battle, they’re going to have to pee and the rest of it in their helmets — same as everybody else. Period or no period — understand?”
“I’m sure they already know that, General.”
“Knowing and experiencing, Dick, are two different things.”
“They’ll manage, sir.”
“None of those damn sanitary pads, mind,” Freeman said. “Take up too much space. Tampax or they don’t go!”
“Yes, sir.”
For a moment Freeman was silent, thinking of his wife— killed on his leave a few months before by a prowler who, as it turned out later, had been a Spetsnaz — a Special Forces — hit man when Siberia had been fighting Second Army. And now it was the Chinese he was up against. He turned his mind back to the pressing matter of tank transporters. Were there enough for the new up-gunned Abrams 12mm main battle tanks?
“All we need is ten days, General,” Norton informed him, as if reading Freeman’s mind. “By then our replacement armor’ll all be down here at Orgon Tal and spread out east of us. SAS and Delta teams’ll be rested by then, too.”
“Well, the truce should last that long. What have we had in the way of border incidents-apart from this explosion the SAS team is investigating?”
“Intelligence reports it’s tense — odd shot fired here and there. Maybe Chinese killing takin.” He meant the species of goat antelope that wandered the Manchurian slopes to the north. “But I still think the truce will hold for another few days.”
There was another reason for what the boys had done near Tomortei. They wanted to disrupt Cheng’s supply line all right, but they also wanted to send a clear signal to all dissident groups that the June Fourth Democracy Movement was alive, if not always well, and was ready to lead the way.
The FAV — fast-attack vehicle or “dune buggy”—with Aussie Lewis driving, David Brentwood on the.50 machine gun to his right, and Choir Williams mounting the TOW antitank launcher behind them on the elevated seat, had reported that the sabotage seemed to be nothing more than a single line break. It would take Cheng’s forces a matter of hours to fix it, but then it would be open for rail traffic again. Freeman made calls up and down the line wanting SITREP, but except for the explosion on the Orgon Tal line, everything seemed quiet, the tension notwithstanding.
“Thank God for that,” Freeman said, thwacking his right leg again with the birch stick before using it as a pointer on the map. “Because, Norton, if that fox Cheng hits us anytime before the ten days are up, we are up the proverbial creek without a paddle.”
“Well, sir,” Norton said hopefully, “the weather’s closing in.”
Freeman turned about. “Who told you that? Harvey Simmet?”
“No, CNN.”
“Hmm — I ever tell you about that survey they did in England of all those weather wrap-ups on TV?”
“No, sir.”
“Well they found out hardly anyone who listens to weather forecasts can remember anything that was said five minutes later. All those damn isobars, arrows, convection currents, jet streams flying about complicate it to hell. Best weather report came from a TV channel that had no graphics, ho gimmicky electronics, just someone telling the audience that tomorrow it will be wet and windy.”
“I guess you’re right, General. I’m usually too busy watching the presenter.”
“So am I,” Freeman confided. Thwack! “Good-looking wenches on those newscasts.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Still,” Freeman responded, his tone more businesslike now, “I’d like an accurate reading on the weather within the last half hour. Get Harvey up here right away, will you?” The general turned back to the map of the three provinces, one of which lay directly ahead of him, the other two on his flanks.
Norton glanced at his watch. Seventeen hundred hours. Well, it was just starting to get dark at mealtime. He didn’t know how it happened, but usually whenever the general called for Harvey Simmet, the chief met officer of Second Army HQ was either about to eat or was asleep. Sleepy eyed, Simmet would trudge to the HQ tent usually wrapped up like an Indian during the winter of 1806.
Simmet wasn’t in his tent, however, and had to be paged. He was just sitting down to his favorite meal, ham and mashed potatoes with raisin sauce, and he had his fork loaded.
“Old man wants to see you, Harvey.”
Everyone in the officers’ mess started laughing.
“Gotcha again, Harv!.. Atta boy, Harvey… Duty calls.”
Harvey Simmet looked at the fork piled high with the succulent ham and potato dripping in the raisin sauce….
“No,” he said emphatically, “I’m not going to rush it. Damn it — Cookie, can you keep this under the lamp?”
“Better than that, sir. Give you a fresh lot when you come back.”
“You’re a gentleman and a scholar, Cookie.”
Norton slapped Harvey amicably on the shoulder. “I don’t think the general’ll keep you long.” They left the mess tent.
“He’s put a hex on me,” Harvey said as they made their way up toward the headquarters hut. “Last time he sent someone for me I was on the can. You believe that?”
“Harvey, I believe you anytime. He wants to know if the weather’s closing in.”
“It is.”
“Yeah, but you know!”
“Yes, I know, he wants it up to date every friggin’ five minutes.”
“Maybe, Harv, but remember Yakutsk.”
“Yeah,” Harvey said, glancing skyward at the velvet darkness of the Inner Mongolian sky. “I remember Yakutsk.”
It was a town in the Yakutsk oblast, or region, northeast of Lake Baikal. The Siberians were chopping up Second Army’s Ten Corps as they tried to withdraw across the frozen lake. Outnumbered and outgunned by more than three to one in main battle tanks, Freeman had given what to his men was the almost incredible order to withdraw, all the time asking Harvey Simmet by his side what the temperature was in the Yakutsk area — the coldest place in the Soviet Union, where the temperature often plummeted to more than minus seventy degrees centigrade. Simmet told him it was minus sixty and still dropping.
American tanks were ensconced in revetment areas, some dug in so deep in defilade position that only the edge of their cupolas and muzzle of their main gun showed as they waited for a point-blank exchange. Then they got another order from Freeman to retreat still further. A few tank commanders thought aloud that the old man’s nerve had cracked. But when the temperature dropped to minus sixty-nine degrees, the general thanked Harvey and suddenly told the American tanks to charge. It would go down in military history as one of the most brilliant tactical moves ever made. From the mastery of the minutiae of war to the mastery of grand strategy, Freeman knew that Siberian T-72s and T-55s would now grind to a standstill. The inferior refined Siberian oil would begin settling out in the vicious cold, the waxes in the oil solidifying like chunks of cholesterol stuck in the bloodstream — hydraulics would overheat and the tanks would become immobile.
It had been called the Yakutsk turkey shoot, and Siberian tanks that one minute were a threat now were stuck, unable to move as the M1s, with the higher-quality American-refined oil, raced ahead through the deep snow, slewed and turned and took out the Siberian armor on the move. The snowy explosions, their bases black fountains of undersoil, rose high in the air as red-hot metal from the M1A1s tore into the T-72s and more than evened the score.
“Good of you to come, Harv,” the general said, as if Harvey Simmet had any choice in the matter. “Harv, they tell me this weather’s ‘closing in,’ moving in on our left flank from the Bo Hai Gulf. Now what specifically does that mean for Orgon Tal?”
It had been an hour since Harvey had monitored the incoming SATREP — satellite reports — and in two hours a lot had happened: the wind picking up at the three-thousand-foot level, cold air from the northeast hitting the hot Gobi air, producing fog in northern Manchuria, and minor dust storms from Ulan Bator in Mongolia down as far as Orgon Tal 280 miles northwest of Beijing. Harvey made a call to the met tent and got the latest isobar readouts and cloud pattern through on the fax. It was not showing at the moment, but in his mind’s eye the data told him that soon the air pattern would go into an ominous circular spiral path, heading in fast from the coast. But he saw it as good news for Freeman. “Looks like a typhoon’s forming, General— over Bo Hai Gulf. Winds will increase from forty to sixty-five — maybe seventy — miles per hour, and the cloud density promises heavy rain that will probably peter out at the edge of the Gobi here at Orgon Tal, most of the rain falling on me mountain range northwest of Beijing.”
“Bog his armor down, General,” Norton said.
“And ours,” Freeman commented.
“Yes, sir, but I mean—”
“Yes—” Freeman finished the sentence for him. “Lousy weather for him to move in — to attack.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Thank you, Harv.”
When Simmet got back to the mess there’d been a snafu. Cookie had gone off for a few minutes to check the coffee and someone had grabbed the last plate of ham and raisin sauce.
“Ham’s finished,” Simmet was informed by a new server.
“Jesus!” Harvey said. “I tell you he’s got a hex on me.”
“Sir, we’ve got an MRE.” He meant one of the “meals ready to eat” in a foil-wrapped dinner tray that could be warmed by body heat and were unaffectionately known by the troops as “meals refused by everybody.”
As Harvey Simmet stabbed his fork unenthusiastically at the chicken a la king and viewed the Tootsie Roll and crackers and gobs of mixed fruit and peanut butter, he cursed his luck. He had no way of knowing that in Beijing’s Number Two jail there was an American, Smythe, a SEAL who had been captured during the raid on the Yangtze Bridge earlier in the war, who would have thought he’d died and gone to heaven, given the luxury of an MRE instead of the fetid rice and vermin he had to crunch up and use as protein in his cell. Who was it that said comparison is the source of all unhappiness? Smythe dreamed of MREs.
They had strung Smythe up by his thumbs so often that by now they were useless, forcing him to use his first and second fingers to shovel in the meager rice and cockroaches from the wooden bowl. Nie’s interrogators for the Public Security Bureau wanted to know the location of all SEAL units. Smythe had told them he didn’t know, which was true. But by now daily torture had become routine, his screams mixed with those of many others — nearly all of them classified as either dissidents or “hooligans” against the state, hooliganism being a meeting of three or more people.
“Where have you been?” the PSB asked the three boys from Huade who were all in their late teens and had seen their hopes of a new China disappear, blown away like the sand in the Gobi.
“Fighting the oppression of the state!” one dramatically said, causing an expulsion of breath from his mother, whose shame was as keen as her surprise.
“And you two?” the PSB asked the others.
“Fighting the oppression of the state!” they answered in unison, sounding rather silly, albeit serious.
“Parrots!” the PSB inspector declared. “Parroting your bourgeois bosses.” Gun in hand, he demanded they tell him whom they took their orders from.
“From our heart,” the oldest of them said.
“Your heart,” the PSB sneered. “That’s an unreliable authority, boy.”
“From the goddess of democracy,” the third boy said, adding, “Malof xiapjie”—Miss Malof. In fact she had given them no such order to sabotage — they had never even seen her — but mentioning her name he hoped would take the sneer off the PSB’s face. It did. The inspector pistol-whipped the boy’s face, instantly drawing blood, and he told the squad of eight soldiers inside the house to take them in hand.
The inspector was sure the three had never met or laid eyes on the criminal Malof woman, but he was just as certain, especially when he had sniffed a rotten-egg odor of sulfuric acid on one of the boys’ sleeves, that they had blown up the track near Tomortei.
“You could have killed many soldiers,” he told the boys. “Your brothers.”
“They’re not our brothers,” the eldest of the three said. By now two truckloads of PLA had arrived, and the parents were beside themselves as the soldiers piled out of the trucks, beams of flashlights roiling with dust, and shouted commands coming through the darkness, which soon had the soldiers in a huge circle around the three boys and the PSB inspector. The inspector now held a bullhorn — the battery wasn’t working, but he used it anyhow to bellow out to the soldiers. “Remember what the democracy hooligans of Tiananmen did to your comrades in arms!”
It was a powerful appeal, immediately visible in the way the circle of troops seemed to constrict in a solid ring and grow smaller yet more menacing, as every soldier took a step forward against the saboteurs whose earlier defiance now paled in the spotlight formed by several beams. In Tiananmen, or rather throughout Beijing, the demonstrators once attacked by the soldiers had in turn attacked many of the soldiers, the most infamous incident being when one of the soldiers had been castrated and hung from a wire noose, his body nothing more than black cinder after it had burned in a torch of gasoline.
Now there were screams coming from the houses down the dark hutongs, punctuated by declarations of “It serves them right!” from the Granny Brigade, and on the inspector’s orders the soldiers turned and fixed bayonets against any possible interference from the crowd.
It took at least twelve soldiers to hold down the three boys who were now screaming as each was castrated, the bloody lumps of testicles thrown into the dust like pieces of meat. Then they were left, hands tied behind them, all out of their minds with pain, bleeding profusely into the dust, the rough placards hung about their necks reading, “Long live the people, death to the fifth columnists!” The circle of bayonets remained until the last of the boys had made his final plea for forgiveness, screaming like a wild animal, and then died. One PSB inspector ordered the bodies thrown in the truck and taken to the sabotage site near Tomortei, where their mutilated bodies were to be tied to stakes.
When Chairman Nie was told, he promised himself that he personally would shoot the Malof woman after she had been publicly humiliated in Tiananmen. He had no doubt that they would catch her eventually, and as everyone knew, Nie had a patience that was impressive, even by Chinese standards. He had waited a long time to be chairman, and he could certainly wait a little longer to have the PSB hunt down the Malof woman. The best way of course would be to bait a trap she couldn’t resist.
News of the capture of the three saboteurs and their fate traveled like wildfire down both sides of the DMZ and then on national Beijing radio, which also announced that China would insist upon maintaining her territorial integrity and would petition the United Nations to have the imperialist forces of the United States return the Jewish autonomous region to China where it belonged. It had been such border disputes that first caused the U.N. to send Freeman’s Second Army and some British SAS troops to settle.
Nie’s ambassador at the U.N. brazenly stated that regardless of the truce, the JAO was a separate issue and it must be ceded forthwith to Chinese control. It was an elaborate plan by Nie, for in fact he didn’t care about the JAO — he even suspected that the Jews had proper claim, but if anything would flush the JAO goddess of the democracy movement out into the open where the PSB could get her, and at one stroke immobilize a leaderless Democracy Movement, this U.N. move might.
The truth was that Nie’s plan — his baiting of the trap with the demand for Chinese sovereignty over the JAO— worked better than he’d had any right to expect, for PSB informants in the JAO reported that Alexsandra Malof was surfacing to go personally to the U.N. to plead the JAO case, envisioning the JAO area as a separate democratic state between Siberia and China. Nie ordered his PSB informants to watch all refugee camps from Orgon Tal to Khabarovsk.
That evening Aussie and Alexsandra were saying their good-byes before he headed south for Orgon Tal. Second Army had a plane ready for Alexsandra, believing that in the U.N. the beautiful and articulate Alexsandra arguing her case would win over many delegates.
“I’ll not be too long away,” she told Aussie.
“You be careful, luv,” Aussie advised her. “Don’t go strolling off by yourself.”
She leaned over and straightened the collar of his SAS battlefield smock and kissed him. “I’ll have U.N. bodyguards,” she said.
Aussie for once had nothing to say. Gently he pulled her toward him, and in their embrace he could feel the beating of her heart.
“No,” Nie said, “not in the air. Our Shenyangs wouldn’t get near them. The U.S. still has air supremacy, or had you forgotten that minor fact, Comrade?”
“No, sir,” the chief of the PLA’s air arm replied. “I haven’t forgotten, but we wouldn’t be using Shenyangs. We would send up our squadron of Soviet Fulcrums. They’d stand a good chance of getting through the American air cover.”
“And,” Nie said, “at what cost?” The air force chief began to say something, but Nie held up his hand, silencing him.
“I know what you’re going to tell me. The Fulcrum is a match for the F-16 or whatever, but the squadron of Fulcrums in the Beijing grid are the only ones we have and none of them can be risked. Besides, the shooting down of an Air America plane would tear the truce apart. Particularly with a woman aboard it.”
“The truce is very thin already,” the air force general said. “These three hooligans you found sabotaged the Orgon Tal line. They were obviously sent by the Americans to provoke us.”
Nie stared at the air force general as an irate headmaster might upbraid one of his staff. “You can’t seriously believe that, Comrade? That Freeman would precipitate an action before his armor is ready — before it comes down to him at Orgon Tal and points east along our Manchurian front.”
But the air force general, though chagrined, retorted, “Perhaps not, Comrade Chairman, but what I am sure of is that no one could ever be sure of what Freeman will do. He’s entirely unpredictable. If he hadn’t tricked us before with his feints here and there and his main attack elsewhere he wouldn’t be only two hundred and eighty miles from the capital.”
“Oh, he’s a fox,” Nie said. “A fox, yes. I grant you that, Comrade, but he’s not a fool. The Americans like all their matériel ready, tested, and accounted for, before they make a move. He won’t move before his replacement tanks are here.”
The air force general agreed but shrewdly riposted, “But if he has not got his tanks ready, we needn’t worry about his moving against us.”
Nie’s face took on a splotchy effect, his temper infused by a recognition that the air force general had a point.
“I did not mean he will do nothing, Comrade, before the tanks are here. If you down one of his planes, however, he could very well unleash air strikes anywhere along the DMZ. Even over Beijing.”
The air force general knew he was rapidly losing ground but fired one more salvo in the battle of egos.
“But Comrade Chairman, the weather system over the central northern provinces is thickening by the minute. Even with their SMART bombs and Stealth aircraft they could not operate during a typhoon. Their aim would—”
“Yes, yes,” Nie concluded, as if he had already thought of it. “I know all that. But you still can’t intercept her plane. You don’t understand the political side of this, Comrade. Apart from you losing several Fulcrums in the attempt — planes which we can ill afford to lose — the mass media reporting a shooting down of Malof would enrage the Americans and British and worse, it would make her a martyr. I do not want martyrs. Martyrs are drawing power for any fool that’s anywhere near the Democracy Movement. Her death in such a manner could galvanize the various undergrounds into a coherent force at precisely the wrong moment. I want her captured alive — humiliated— completely discredited by her providing us with a list of names of Democracy Movement members.”
“Names which I venture you already have,” the air force general proffered.
“Precisely. Then she will be seen as a traitor who broke.”
“Then how do you propose to get her?”
Nie poured himself a glass of mineral water. His chiefs of staff were good at what they did, but sometimes he wondered if they knew anything else than what they were trained for.
“It’s already been arranged,” Nie said.
“In New York?” the general asked.
Nie did not answer.
Beneath the gold and blue dome of the Temple of Heaven, Cheng, commander in chief of the PLA, experienced what his Christian mother would have called a vision but what Cheng could only accept as a fortuitous thought spawned by a schooling in Communist theory — more specifically from his memory of Mao’s rules of engagement When the enemy advances, retreat; when the enemy retreats, attack. But break all these rules if the element of surprise presents itself to you in another form. The Temple of Heaven was now invaded by long, searching fingers of fog whose chill invigorated General Cheng. He had a plan inspired by the news from the coastal weather stations at Tianjin and Qinhuangdao on the gulf where it was muggy but strangely still, and where a spiral pattern was discerned by all the weather radars. Prediction, a taifeng—typhoon. Cheng knew that even in good weather over 70 percent of all the bombs dropped on Iraq by the U.S. Allied planes missed their target, and that was in good weather — the other bombs you saw on CNN having been carefully selected for the press.
Cheng walked quickly down from the Temple of Heaven along the raised walk, trying not to show his excitement, beads of perspiration forming on his forehead despite the spring chill. Once in the Red Flag limousine he ordered, “Zhongnanhai,” then lifted the cellular phone and just as quickly put it down. One of the “cultural attaches” at the foreign embassies could be using a scanner. He looked at his watch. It was 1600 hours. He would schedule the attack for 0500 in the predawn darkness so that by first light they would be on the American positions as the typhoon, having engulfed the coast, would then be in full fury over Orgon Tal.
There was a delicious symmetry to it for Cheng, something that appealed to his deep sense of the yin and the yang, of opposites and of balance. As Freeman, before the truce, had rolled south toward Orgon Tal with Manchuria on his left flank, his tanks drove through the protection of a desert storm coming out of the west from the Gobi, and now he, Cheng, would head northwest from Beijing toward Orgon Tal then northeast along the snaking Manchurian trace, his troops all the while under the protection of a typhoon. American infrared beams and laser beams, degraded by the bad weather, would be unusable in the screaming, rain-laden typhoon, the sky darkly leaden, rivers swollen, roads a quagmire where infantry could move but not tanks.
The PLA infantry divisions would swarm over the trace and, like a million insects upon a buffalo’s hide, would kill it, rout the Americans. Cheng’s divisions would men keep moving north, their arms reaching out like scythes in a pincer movement on Freeman’s overextended supply line. Freeman would be cut off, an American island in the desert ready for annihilation.
If Rosemary Brentwood had thought the PX at the Bangor base was stocked full of anything you might need, her visit, with Andrea Rolston, to the Silverdale Mall revealed an even richer cornucopia of goods, and whether or not it was partially her pregnancy to blame, she felt quite overwhelmed. She had thought that the shops back in Oxshott in Surrey had enough variety to give you headaches of indecision, but in Silverdale there were even more choices to make. It made her uncomfortable — the noise, the lights, the Muzak, and the belting rock from a shoe store quickly put her nerves on edge, and she told Andrea to go ahead while she waited at the Bon Marché.
Andrea had been gone for about ten minutes when Rosemary, with the sixth sense developed as a teacher who, while facing a blackboard, generally knew exactly who was acting up and who was paying attention, glanced about. She couldn’t see anyone looking at her but nevertheless felt it in her bones. Or was it the anxiety of pregnancy? Whatever the cause, it manifested itself in a definite suspicion that she was being watched. She felt a tap on the shoulder, jumped, and turned.
It was Andrea. “You okay, Rose?”
“What — er, yes. I just got a little start — that’s all.”
“Start—honey, you were taking off. Sooner you have that baby, kiddo, better off you’ll be.”
“You’re right. I feel like a brontosaurus.”
“Well come on back to the house and we’ll put our feet, up. What you need is a Manhattan with lots of ice.”
“Sorry,” Rosemary said. “No alcohol — the baby.”
“Rosemary, you sure are the worrier.”
“I know,” Rosemary conceded. “I wasn’t like this at home.”
“This here’s your home now, honey.”
The shock of that revelation — that Andrea Rolston was right, that home would now be where the submariners lived — immediately made Rosemary despondent. She had known this was true ever since she’d married Robert, but the actuality of their move from Holy Loch in Scotland to Bangor in Washington State was now hitting her full force, and although she wanted to preserve the British stiff upper lip, she already missed Robert as if he had been gone a month, and despite Andrea’s best efforts, felt terribly alone.
Still, Andrea’s bonhomie was so persistent that it couldn’t help but mitigate Rosemary’s mood. And soon, Andrea told her as they drove home, it would be time to send the sub its “familygrams.” These were messages of no more than thirty-six words in which a man’s family had to condense all the important information on the home front. Rosemary tried composing one in her mind as Andrea talked on, but though she had taught the art of précis to a generation of English schoolboys, she now experienced difficulty in summarizing her thoughts — in large part because she felt so uncharacteristically lonely. But Robert wasn’t to know this, and so she struggled with the familygram. “How about this for a familygram?” she asked Andrea. “ ‘All’s well with Brentwood Junior. Made friends with Andrea Rolston. Feeling fine. Miss you. Rosemary.’ “
“Hell, honey,” Andrea said. “That’s only — let’s see, about — fifteen words.”
“Well there’s nothing much else to say,” she said rather lamely, and felt Andrea’s hand on her shoulder, grateful for once for the spontaneity of affection that came so naturally to Americans and that to the English was so often off-putting to one brought up on a staid diet of English preserves and reserve. Then as spontaneously as Andrea had been with her — almost as in the spirit of quid pro quo— Rosemary asked if there was anything Andrea wanted to say to her husband. Rosemary could use the remaining number of her words on her familygram.
“Aren’t you the sweetie?” Andrea said, and added to Rosemary’s familygram, “ ‘Andrea’s ready for meat. Can you bring home the bacon?’ “
At first Rosemary thought Andrea was talking about some dietary problem, but when Andrea winked Rosemary’s face turned beet red. “Andrea! Surely you can’t send that!”
“Honey,” Andrea said, bipping a passing motorist for coming too close on passing, “you should see some of the stuff those boys get. You know they pin the spiciest familygram up on the notice board.”
“Oh—” Rosemary said. “Oh!”
“No, no,” Andrea hastened to reassure her. “The guy who gets the familygrams pins them up with names clipped out after everyone’s read theirs. That way you never know who sent what. Course,” Andrea added with a gleam in her eye, “you can always guess.”
Rosemary was appalled by the idea, by Andrea’s infectious lighthearted view of life, and at the same time attracted to it. The executive officer’s wife certainly wasn’t going to die of ulcers. However, Rosemary, despite all of Andrea’s gregarious banter, couldn’t shake the feeling that she was being watched. But in the constant ebb and flow of traffic it was impossible to tell. She even watched those cars that passed them to see if they’d merely done it as a ruse only to drop back behind Andrea’s car a few minutes later. Robert had done the same thing in Scotland earlier in the war when he suspected that enemy Special Forces troops from what was now the CIS had been following them from one bed-and-breakfast place to another. It gave her no comfort to realize that the CIS were no longer at odds with the West, for she knew through Robert that after the Sino-Soviet split had been mended by Gorbachev and others that Chinese methods were often extensions of lessons they’d been taught by the Soviets in the bad old days, just as the British Special Air Services and U.S. Delta Force had trained their allies. Besides, it was a more confusing world now with ever-shifting alliances and old scores to settle — and a much more dangerous one.
Andrea felt Rosemary’s silence. It filled the car like a funereal dream. “Rosemary, honey, you have got to relax for your sake and the baby’s. Lighten up. You should have bought that dress I showed you — the maroon. That’d look terrific on you.”
“I’m afraid buying things — clothes — doesn’t perk me up like I assume it does most women.”
Now it was Andrea’s turn to be appalled. “Rosemary, that’s downright unhealthy. I can see I’ve got my work cut out with you.”
“Oh please don’t bother. I’m sorry I’ve been such a drag today. I just feel—”
“Blah!” Andrea said, tapping Rosemary’s knee. “I know — believe me. Everyone expects you to be mad with joy over the coming event. Lordy, I felt like — what I mean is, everyone expects you to be on cloud nine. Wasn’t with me.”
“It wasn’t?” Rosemary inquired, a sudden hope in her tone.
“No way. When I was due I was ready to go out and play in traffic. Thought I was gonna die and the young Eddie with me. And then before I knew it they had me in an ambulance, sirens blaring so’s to let everyone know I was about to drop one — Lord, I hate those sirens. Anyway, oat popped Eddie. Ugliest thing you ever saw — all bumps and angles and face all flushed and bloody like one of those drunks on skid row. I was not a happy camper. Anyway, pretty soon I started feeling more myself again and now Eddie’s my darlin’. Wouldn’t trade him for anything.”
“So you never had any postpartum blues?” Rosemary asked.
“Oh yes, ma’am. For about three months — sat in the living room in the dark.”
“What did — I mean, if it isn’t a rude question — what did your husband do?”
“Do? I think he did it by himself — a lot.”
“Did — oh, oh!” Rosemary was beet red again. “I meant now did he take it?”
“Pretty good for the first two weeks, then he told me to get off my butt and stop embarrassing the hell out of him. Said it could ruin his promotion from XO to skipper — you know, nutty wife, undue strain on the family. So—” Andrea gave a truck coming too near a blast. “Those guys think they own the road.”
“So you got over it?”
“I sure did. Course I did a lot of shopping. Got me out of the house.” She winked at Rosemary. “He didn’t like that much but what could he say?”
For the first time that morning, Rosemary visibly relaxed. She’d found a friend — rough at the edges but someone who, unlike many officers’ wives, wasn’t afraid to say she’d been afraid of having her first child. Someone she could talk to.
“Don’t you fret, Rosie,” Andrea said. “I’ll stick by you.”
“Oh, that is nice of you, Andrea. I confess to you I’m terrified of all the pushing and — is it, I mean is it as bad as it looks on all those documentaries?”
“Worse,” said Andrea matter-of-factly. “Now get this. Eddie — Eddie Senior — took a video of it.”
“Really?”
“Yes, really. What the hell for I’ll never know—’less he was going to send it to ‘America’s Funniest Videos.’ I was cussin’ to beat the band. Then you know what?”
Rosemary really couldn’t imagine. “What?”
“Eddie’s mom — old battle-ax — saw it and said it was too bad Andrea couldn’t keep control—’control’! She meant me cussing — old bitch.”
When they got back to the house the sun was shining brilliantly and the water had the oily sheen of a calm. Rosemary tried to adopt its pacific mood, but at the gate the guards kept them a long time verifying ID — which was ridiculous, Andrea said, because they knew her by sight. She didn’t say anything more to Rosemary, however, because she figured from the mood of the guards and their insisting that she open the trunk, something had happened while they were away. She quickly thwarted any fear Rosemary might have by commenting, “Well it’s nice to know our boys are on the ball.”
“Yes,” Rosemary agreed. “It’s reassuring.”
“Uh-huh,” Andrea said, watching the guard in the rear-view mirror. “If he doesn’t close that soon all my frozen stuff’ll turn to mush.”
They were going over it with some kind of detector.
“That sabotage near Tomortei,” Freeman asked before going to bed, standing resplendent in a patchwork silk robe of vibrant squares, each one emblazoned with the logo of an American football team. “Any reaction from the Chinese?”
“Internal, sir. Intelligence has heard murmurs of a punishment detail — three tracks near Huade — but nothing on the trace. The truce is holding, General.”
“Yes,” Freeman answered, “for the present.”
“Harvey Simmet was right, General. There’s a typhoon on the way — miles across. Ground’ll be mush. Cheng won’t be able to move his T-55s or T-72s for long.”
“All right,” Freeman answered, “but keep the trace reports coming in. We’ll be without SATREP until that typhoon has passed us. Once it starts to rain—”
“Yes, sir. We’ll keep our eye on it. Goodnight.”
“Night.”
Inside the small eight-by-four room of the headquarters Quonset hut, the general went through his nightly ritual. He kneeled, his West Point ring pressing hard against his forehead as he prayed that he might “vanquish my enemies and uphold the freedom and honor of the United States,” got up, broke open his pump-action Remington 1200 shotgun, checking the double 0-load, closed it, and leaned it up beside his bed and checked the Sig Sauer 9mm Parabellum beneath his pillow. There had already been two attempts on his life.
In bed he took up his copy of The Art of War by Sun Tzu, which he kept by his Bible that he always read before going to bed, liking best the part wherein an army was described as having to be like a river having to adapt its course as it comes across the opposition, the kind of measure that always separated out those who had initiative from those who did not. It reminded him of Douglas MacArthur’s strategy in the Pacific where MacArthur had simply bypassed several strongly held Japanese islands and attacked others, cutting off the ones he left behind from all supply. Next he put one of, the earphones from his Walkman on, letting the other one lie on the sheet so that one ear could always hear the alarm on the shelf above his bed. On the tape he heard the voice of John F. Kennedy awarding Churchill honorary citizenship of the United States, talking about how Churchill had “mobilized the English language and sent it into battle.”
“Best damn speech he ever made,” the general murmured, and turned a page of The Art of War, as he did every night, like an athlete always in training, to remind himself of that which could rob you of victory — of how the simplest lack of vigilance could have dire consequences— that one must never underestimate the opposition.
At that moment ten Chinese divisions, 150,000 men, set their sights on the desert around Orgon Tal, the division equipped with East Wind hovercrafts. Sand, mud, or water — it didn’t matter — the hovercrafts could attack at over ninety kilometers per hour.
Freeman could hear the rain drumming sonorously on the metallic roof, it making him feel warm and safe just as it did when he was a child in Missouri. But how much rain would mere be? Freeman lifted his phone.
“Duty Officer Burns, sir.”
“Burns, get Harvey Simmet up here.”
“Yes, sir.”
“On the double, Burns.”
“Yes, sir. Right away.”