In Hong Kong, Breem, satiated from a smorgasbord of sex with Mi Yin and two other girls who he was sure belonged to the Chinese Secret Service, put on his royal-blue robe, wandered over to the full-length glass windows by his fax, which overlooked the harbor, and grabbed a handful of messages from all around the world. The ones that interested him most were from various hospitals requesting donor organs, and those faxes from Fukien province, a cover for Beijing transmits, requesting resupply of tractor bearings — another cover, this time “bearings” referring to bullets, “tractor” to Black Rhino, the type of bullet. Within minutes he had ordered the “tractor bearings” to be taken south to the Ningming railhead.
Breem estimated that the profit on the sale of the armor-piercing bullets alone would net him around a million U.S. dollars, and then there was the kickback from General Wei’s son-in-law, who, as part of a resurging market in China, was Wei’s procurement officer.
It wasn’t the first time that the irony of the Chinese buying American bullets from an American to maim and/or kill Americans struck Breem as funny. The whole business of international arms dealers reinforced Breem’s conviction that in this world there were only winners and losers, and that right now the Americans were the losers. Oh sure, press reports were going out on CNN telling how the Americans were making up some lost ground in the fighting around someplace called Disney Hill, but Breem was more than confident that once the U.S.-USVUN counterattack met the fresh troops and Black Rhino armor-piercing ammunition now on their way via rail to the front from Ningming, the Chinese would soon push the Americans back. Besides, if the newspaper stories were true, then a U.S.-USVUN force sent in by Freeman to secure his left flank around Dien Bien Phu was about to be wiped out by an overwhelming number of Chinese airborne troops.
Flicking through the channels, Breem picked up another news story, this one from BBC television news claiming that as well as the Chinese airborne, a full Chinese regiment of 2,817 men had been moving down the 150 miles of secondary roads from China’s Mengzi to the area around Dien Bien Phu. Whether this force had been sent by General Wang before or after Freeman’s IFOR was now purely academic. What mattered was that ignoring Laotian neutrality, as Freeman had done, the Chinese now in Vietnam were closing in on the valley between Dien Bien Phu and Ban Cong Deng. And roads meant heavy artillery; not that a lack of roads would have prevented the PLA from bringing down their heavy guns. In their last war with Vietnam, they had manhandled heavy guns down piece by piece, as the Viet Minh had done against the French.
The BBC interviewer asked a military expert who would win.
“All depends on what the troops are like on the ground.”
“Well,” the interviewer said, “Freeman’s lot around Dien Bien Phu are said to be top-drawer troops.”
“We’ll see,” the professor said dryly. “The PLA is no pushover, and their lot are also believed to be the ‘top drawer,’ as you put it — and there are many more of them.”
“One more question, Professor. If we — and by ‘we’ I mean the USVUN forces — have known about PLA intervention through Laos, why didn’t the Americans bomb them?”
“Because,” the professor said, looking bored, “the President of the United States has obviously made a decision — and in my view, a perfectly justified one — not to allow bombing on neutral territory. In this case, Laos.”
“Yet he let Freeman in with his special force.”
“Yes, but my dear chap, that was a field decision by Freeman, for which, my sources inform me, he came perilously close to losing his job.”
“But he’s a hero now.”
The professor blinked, his forehead furrowed under the studio lights. “A hero, yes, but for how long? If he loses what must surely be an outright battle at Dien Bien Phu and at Disney Hill, he’ll no longer be a hero. I can assure you of that. I might add that the eminent French reporter, Pierre LaSalle, is already predicting a humiliation for the Americans on both fronts.”