Ian Slater - Choke Point

Anyway, sweetie, these are some of the reasons I’ll be glad to get out of the place, which brings me to the big news: I’m coming home! High time, eh? Got some shrapnel in the right arm. It’s slowed me down a bit so they’re shipping me to Fort— for some R and R. You know, some physio — hot tub, that sort of stuff. Before you know it I’ll be good as new — back in the unit.

He ached, needed to tell her how badly he felt about losing his men, but he knew she’d worry about him worrying — and what could she do? “You can tell me anything, David,” she’d told him. “I don’t want you carrying the load all by yourself, honey. No matter what it is. Okay?”

“Okay,” he’d agreed, but how could he explain it to any civilian? And she was alone. All he could do was write the six KIAs’ next-of-kin, and knowing that they’d all write back to him, thanking him for his thoughtfulness in writing them, made him ill. And they’d trust him all the more because he was a hero, a Medal of Honor winner, which made him inwardly cringe.

He signed off with “Lots of love to everyone,” kisses and hugs, aware that he hadn’t told her how long his R&R at Fort Lewis in Washington State, and therefore their reunion, would be.

At USO Headquarters at Tora Bora, where he could use a secure land line, the general called the Beijing embassy, asking for the military attaché. He was transferred to Riser instead, and introduced himself, adding, “Sorry about your girl, son.”

“Thank you, General. You wanted to speak to the MA. He’s out at the moment. Friendship Store.”

Freeman knew the place — overstaffed by semicomatose Chinese salesgirls who were about as enthusiastic about selling merchandise to “Big Noses” for urgently needed U.S. dollars and euros as they were about joining the PLA’s reserves, which had begun to decline as the younger cell phone — Internet generation of Chinese became less enamored with the PLA’s slogan of “Unite against the running dog lackeys of the right” and more interested in getting the latest burned American CDs.

“General, he’s just come back,” said Riser, handing the phone to Bill Heinz, who respectfully heard the general’s concern about the Muslims in a bar, the same point General Chang had brought up with Riser and thus indirectly with Heinz.

“Good point, General. I see you’re sharp as ever. I still remember your tip-off about the Patriot missile. But it’s not unusual for Muslim terrorists to go to bars.” The MA was calling up his computer file on all suspects thought to be involved in the planning as well as the execution of the 9/11 attack. Among them were three men who were at a skin palace, The Pink Pony, a Daytona Beach strip club featuring “totally nude XXX naked dancers,” the night before the attacks on the WTC and Pentagon.

“Huh,” responded Freeman. “Those fundamentalists sure get around town.”

“Sure do, General. ’Course, those three suspects might not have been drinking, unlike Li Kuan’s boys in Suzhou.”

“Guess not,” said Freeman wryly. “Too busy slobbering over pussy at the Pink Horse.”

“Pony.”

“Whatever, drinking or perving, seems as if they’re using bars and strip joints to fit in. No doubt their religious sensitivities are offended. They’re just whoring and boozing out of a sense of duty.”

“Probably,” laughed Heinz. “Maybe getting a taste of the seventy-two virgins they’ll get when they hit us again.”

“So the info from Suzhou isn’t suspect just because the Muslims were hitting the sauce?”

“Not as far as I’m concerned.”

“Thanks for your time.”

“My pleasure, General.”

When Bill Heinz replaced the phone, Charlie Riser asked him about his reference to the general and the Patriot missile.

“Freeman,” Heinz explained, “cottoned on to a bizarre fact — that in a certain range the Patriot missile could be accidentally launched by a baby’s scream. Freeman warned them. They did tests. He was right.”

“They fix it?” asked Riser.

“Oh, yeah. Real quick.”

Charlie Riser was impressed. “Anything he doesn’t know?”

“Yeah,” answered the military attaché. “How to get on with politicians and their staff. Too blunt.”

Indeed, it was the general’s prickly relationship with the present administration which was responsible for Eleanor Prenty’s delay in returning Freeman’s call to her. Besides, SATPIX taken over the darkness of the far western Pacific were coming in fast and furious, showing cluster “blossoms,” explosions of light, near the line of the South China coast, specifically in Shantou and other bases in Fukien Province. Both the NSA and CIA had alerted Eleanor, but she’d decided not to wake the President until she realized that the lat/long coordinates of these “blossoms” were actually on the Chinese coast. The explosions caught by the satellite’s zoom eye were revealed to be in Shantou, Dongshan, Xiamen, and Pingtan — all major PLA navy bases directly across the strait from Taiwan. “Sea scratches,” long white lines, could also be seen through the intermittent cloud cover offshore, the wakes indicating that the vessels were approaching the Chinese coast.

Then the red “Red” phone from Beijing rang. Zhou Zhang, the premier of the most populous country on earth, urgently needed to speak to the President of the most powerful nation on earth. Eleanor buzzed the interpreter and the President himself, and noted that it would now be early dawn in China.

“Hello, Mr. President,” was the first and last English phrase the Chinese premier used, because he knew there was no room for error, or the slightest misunderstanding. His message, a courtesy to the President, was the same message his ministers for defense and the interior were now conveying to their counterparts in Europe and Russia: The Chinese mainland was under attack by the forces of renegade Taiwan, which was obviously taking advantage of China’s preoccupation with its northwestern terrorist problem to launch a sneak attack against China’s eastern seaboard.

The President had no sooner thanked the Chinese premier for advising him of Beijing’s point of view than Eleanor handed him a decoded “Eyes Only” transmission. Both the NSA and CIA were reporting that the Nationalist government in Taipei was emphatically denying that it had ordered any attack against the Communist Chinese mainland.

“All right,” the President told Eleanor. “But how about the offshore Chinese islands? The Nationalist-held islands are within spitting distance of the mainland. What’s going on there? Every day the Communists shell the Nationalist island of Kinmen with propaganda pamphlets, and the Nationalists are bunkered in a complex you wouldn’t believe.” He took off his reading glasses, dropping them tiredly on the Oval Office desk. “Ever since 1949 they’ve been at loggerheads.”

A typhoon alert had been issued at 3:50 A.M., the typhoon expected to make landfall at Shihmen at the northernmost tip of the 240-mile-long, leaf-shaped island of Taiwan, which varies in width from its tapered five-mile-wide southern extremity up through its eighty-five-mile-wide waist, to the northern end of the leaf, where the distance from west to east coasts is about thirty-two miles.

In the small village four miles east of Shihmen, the wife of fifty-one-year-old Moh Pan awoke in the predawn darkness, foisting off her husband’s groping hands from beneath their bedroll. “No,” she said firmly. “It’s time.” It was already five o’clock.

“A few minutes?” he pleaded.

“No. After.”

“After?” Moh snorted. “ After , I’ll be dead!”