Ian Slater - Force of Arms

“He’s not on the toilet,” the first technician said suddenly, surprised by his own revisionist thought.

“Ah!” Mah said. “Now we are thinking. Maybe he’s doing something else?”

“He’s — he’s in the bedroom,” the oldest of the technicians said, visibly excited by his deduction.

“Doing what, comrade?” Mah pressed.

“He’s recording over the music tape. He’s talking very close to it…. The toilet is to cover his voice. He must have spoken very softly.”

Mah nodded, then picked up the phone, pressing the number for the front desk. “And of course he might have a thing about flushing toilets and the music could mean he likes Tibetan music.”

The front desk answered.

“Major Mah here. Last night a foreigner, Mr. Hartog, he gave you a tape to mail.”

“Yes, sir, and a fax.”

“Has the fax gone?”

“Yes, Major. Almost immediately. It was another of his messages about Tibetan remedies.”

“Has the cassette tape been posted?”

“No — it’s due to go in another few—”

“Send it to me immediately. And your copy of the fax.”

Scanning the copy of the fax — it was in telegraphic style, no doubt to save money — Mah saw that Hartog had instructed the recipients to classify his Tibetan remedies discovered so far under the following letters of the English alphabet: ISNLNCIEAABTAKMMEREM. It was signed “Willi.”

Man now turned his attention to the cassette tape. They all sat silently as Mah had the technician run the tape fast forward. There was a gabble of music — the same as picked up by the room mike if Mah wasn’t mistaken — but no voice. They tried the other side and played it fast forward. Fast music gibberish again — no sustained pauses — no European voice. Nothing. Maybe the tape was no more than noise cover with no message at all?

The silence in the room was more intense because of the terrible snarling and nipping and yapping of one of the packs of wild dogs who, because the Buddhist monks would not harm any living creature, strayed wild around Lhasa and the other Tibetan villages. Some of the dogs had been shot for sneaking into PLA camps looking for food. Some had rabies. Mah was trying to concentrate, and told one of the men to have the desk get someone out to disperse the mongrels. Had his mother tongue been English it is just possible that Mah might have disassembled the fax’s message right away. He looked at it again. ISNLNCIEAABTAKMMEREM and the last word, “Willi.”

What struck Mah as odd was that several of the English characters, or rather letters, were repeated, such as M and the two As. If a medicine — if anything — was to be classified, why mention the same letters (M and A) twice? And why Willi instead of William? Was he just using a nickname — or was the Dutchman being economical again by not signing his full name? But if he’d been economical he’d hardly use the same letters twice.

In Tibet it was 8:00 a.m., in Amsterdam one in the morning, but in the small shop on the Osterdok near the railway station out of which Hartog worked when in Amsterdam that fax had already been decoded by his MOSSAD assistant and cleared for Tel Aviv as “most secret” and for “immediate” transmission to UNCOMFARE — U.N. Commander Far East, General Douglas Freeman.

“Willi” had five letters, thus the message broke down into a five-line message, so that “ISNLN” became

I

S

N

L

N

and the message read

ICBM

SITE

NEAR

LAKE

NAM.

Lake Nam, at the foot of the Nyaiqen Mountains, was twenty-five miles long, the largest salt lake in Tibet.

And now Freeman’s Second Army HQ at Orgon Tal had the location given them by MOSSAD. For Aussie Lewis it could not have come at a worse time, but from Brentwood’s point of view it was a godsend. It was at least something — a danger to the entire Second Army — that might overshadow Aussie’s personal loss of Alexsandra Malof. The revelation of the ICBM sites set alarm bells off all through Freeman’s HQ at Orgon Tal and as far away as Khabarovsk, all within striking distance of the latest Chinese DF5 ICBM.

But for Aussie the news that Second Army’s big B-52 raid earlier in the war on the ICBM complex at Turpan in western China’s desert had not completely taken out China’s long-range rocket capacity could not begin to upset him as much as the kidnapping of Alexsandra. The ICBMs were Freeman’s problem. Alexsandra was his. In his totally unexpected and absolute love for her the message of the ICBMs paled into nothingness, but for Freeman and the more than three hundred thousand men in Second Army, it was everything, should the truce fail. For the hitherto blasé Australian, the loss of the woman he loved was infinitely more pressing and unbearable. For the first time in his life Aussie Lewis wanted more than sex from a woman. He wanted to possess her not only sexually but in every other way. He needed her.

There was a rumble as the officers, NCOs, and some enlisted men rose in the Quonset headquarters hut at Orgon Tal as Freeman entered.

Salvini turned to Aussie Lewis, hoping to cheer him up.

“He’s got that look, Aussie.”

“What?” Aussie asked, his mind far away on the banks of the Amur River with Alexsandra.

“The George C. Scott look,” Salvini said. “Somebody’s gonna get shit.”

“Fucking MPs should be reamed out.” It took Salvini a moment or two to realize Aussie was talking about the MPs who had let the Humvee carrying Alexsandra pass through the gates at the refugee camp.

“At ease,” Freeman said, his voice booming off the metallic roof. After the coughing and usual scrabbling of feet had died down, during which Freeman looked out upon them with his remarkable facility for making every single man think it was he whom the general was talking to, Freeman slapped his birch switch against the huge wall map of China, Tibet, and the Himalayas.

“Problem — our entire army is under the threat of ICBM attack. With this activity going on, the truce can only be interpreted as temporary at best — the Chinese waiting for the most propitious moment to move and/or build new silos in and around the mountains surrounding Lake Nam. This is the roof of the world, gentlemen. We’re talking fourteen thousand feet plus. Now we’re going to put more SATRECON over that lake and adjacent mountain area and once we find their mobile launch trucks and/or shelters we are going to send in our Stealths and blow the hell out of them.”

There was a hand up — a brigadier general.

“Yes, Tommy?”

“Sir, there was an incident this morning — a kidnapping of one of our refugees which I interpret as an act of war. Am I correct?”

Aussie suddenly sat up, fairly bursting at the general’s remark. “That’s the way, General,” he said, looking toward the brigadier. “Give the fuckers—”

“I concur,” Freeman agreed, “but unfortunately—” And here he paused, the birch switch smacking his leg impatiently. “—Washington has strictly forbidden any attempt by us to cross the river despite the fact that the leader of the JAO guerrillas has been taken.”

There were murmurs of surprise running through the hall by those who hadn’t heard of the kidnapping already.

“But,” Freeman said, “I propose a reconnaissance party along the Orgon Tal trace this evening to demonstrate our displeasure. A hundred tanks,” Freeman added.

Norton leaned forward from the table and whispered, “General, how are you going to explain a reconnaissance of one hundred tanks?”