Ian Slater - Force of Arms

“Then why, Comrade General,” the captain asked, “does Washington not recall him for insubordination?”

“Because,” Cheng answered wryly, “he is the best fighting general they have — but I do not think he’ll be ready for an attack at the head of the typhoon. Remember the rain will bog him down. The mud will harden within hours of the typhoon exhausting itself over Inner Mongolia, but for those few hours, comrades, it will be a quagmire, a sea of mud and rushing streams for a hundred miles to the south and north of us. Are you ready?”

There was a cheer of a team confident of victory.

“The Americans’ eyes will pop out,” one of the volunteers said. “Freeman will see his own strategy turned upon him with a new twist. It will astonish him.”

“Where did Freeman first use the technique?” another driver asked.

“Up on the Inland Sea,” he answered, by which he meant up on Lake Baikal.

“Yes,” another put in. “He sent several hovercraft across the ice with commandos to blow up the midget sub base from which the Siberians had been launching missiles then hiding out in the lake’s deeps.”

“Did he get them?”

“The subs? Yes, and he wrecked the base.”

“Well, now it’s his turn to suffer.”

“You’re right,” another commented. “You see, the old saying is incorrect — you can teach an old dog new tricks.”

This elicited raucous laughter and even produced a smile on Cheng’s lips. His men were in high spirits — they understood the mission, they understood what they’d volunteered for, and they understood the rewards for the mission.

“For now,” Cheng told his troops, “relax as much as you can — as many cigarettes as you want.” Then in the thick, smoky air they heard the typhoon approaching, a rattling sound outside the doors of their tents.

The battle-stations alarm was on, and like the diving alarm not loud enough to cause a noise short — that is, noise that could be picked up from outside the sub — but penetrating enough to send every man moving as fast as he could to battle stations, one man heading toward the reactor room in his socks, all the quicker to put on the regulation yellow slippers that he would wear while in the reactor room lest he pick up even the minutest radiation and which he would take off when he left the reactor room.

An unknown ship—”possible hostile”—had been picked up by Reagan’s passive sonar array, its engines’ pulse and movement through the water now registering on the five-window sonar screen, the purplish blue light around the sonar like an island in the redded-out control center.

“Threat library?” Robert Brentwood asked.

“Nothing yet, sir. Possible merchantman — new registration.”

“Or hostile running with baffles.”

“Don’t think so, sir. Cavitation of screw not baffle.” Brentwood knew he could get an exact fix on it if he used his active pinging sonar, but then the unknown ship could pick the Reagan up, and the Reagan’s mission was to keep hidden from all hostiles, regardless of their size, to be ready for a FLAS — flank assist — to Freeman’s land force if needed. Everything on the ship was rigged for quiet — all washers and driers off, drawers secured, stoves off, the next meal, frozen sandwiches, already set to be zapped by the microwave if it turned out to be a long engagement that took them beyond dinner.

At the Bangor base in Bremerton, Washington State, it was 8:00 p.m. and Andrea had organized an officers’ wives’ “ball-out,” a bowling competition. “Course you don’t want to play,” she told Rosemary. “But come along and watch. Keep score if you want.”

“No thanks. My specialty is English literature, not mathematics. I’m afraid I’d make an awful mess.”

“Oh rats,” Andrea riposted. “So just sit and cheer. Don’t even have to cheer. B’sides, if you go into premature labor you’ll have a travelin’ moms brigade with you. You could have a choice — hospital or number one lane.”

“You’re impossible,” Rosemary said, awkwardly shifting herself out of the love seat in her base bungalow. “Maybe it would do me good to get out. And to be quite honest—”

“What is it?” Andrea cut in, adopting Rosemary’s semi-conspiratorial tone.

“Chips — what you call fries. I have a craving.”

Andrea clapped her hands in victory. ‘There you go. We’ll pig out on fries, popcorn, and pop.”

“And we’ll pop in the morning,” Rosemary said.

“No, we’ll do twenty minutes with Jane Fonda’s workout — pregnant ladies excused I guess.”

“You don’t have a Jane Fonda tape?” Rosemary asked in a tone of disbelief.

“Yeah. I know all the guys hate her for that North Vietnam thing, but hell, that’s over, right?”

“Then your husband does object?”

“Object? Honey, he’d lose all his hair if he knew. I’ve got it hidden — video label says ‘Home Cooking.’ He’ll never know. ‘Sides, if he does twig to it I’ll tell him it’s either the tape or me.”

Rosemary looked nonplussed. “You would leave—?”

“Oh hell no. But I’d cut him off for a week or two.”

“Oh I see,” Rosemary said. “After a long patrol. Isn’t that a little drastic?”

“Honey, I cut off one guy for a month!”

Rosemary was appalled, Andrea collapsing with laughter. “You — you really thought — oh Rosie, you’re a kick!”

Rosemary wasn’t sure what a kick was, but it had been said good-naturedly.

“C’mon, let’s go bowlin’,” Andrea said, looking for the key to the dead bolt. There’d been a rash of B and E around the base, and it was expected that sooner or later someone, probably local teenagers, would try to sneak over the wire into the base.

By the time Andrea and Rosemary arrived at the bowling alley the USS Reagan had let the unknown vessel pass over it, and the sub’s passive microphone array had registered its noise signature and entered it into the threat library under “possible hostile,” as they were too close to the China coast for it to be anything else. They would follow her and get a nighttime infrared periscope view, as this might confirm exactly what kind of ship it was.

Some of the men, the ship’s noise signature having been put over the PA system, were betting it was a Taiwanese destroyer making a fast run down the one-hundred-mile strait, half of this being ROK water and not PRC — a fine distinction neither side was paying much attention to these days.

“Sonar?” Rolston asked, starting his watch as officer of the deck. “What’s your guess?”

“Gunboat, sir. Hydrofoil with vanes down.”

“Vanes might give us a baffled noise?”

“Yes, sir.”

“How far away is he now?”

“Three thousand yards.”

“Periscope depth at two thousand yards.”

“Periscope depth at two thousand yards, aye,” the confirmation came. The men were still at battle stations.

“When will the rain hit us, Harvey?” Freeman shouted against the wind.

“In about a half hour, General.”

“Sure as hell making a goddamn noise out there.” The pebbles were hitting the Quonset hut like marbles, and several windows were already broken and were being boarded up.

In Beijing there was no wind — none. In the eye of the storm there never is, and people walked across Tiananmen with a brisk urgency that seemed to belie the uncanny stillness that pervaded the city. Soon the storm’s center would pass over and it would be possible to breathe again, and for many the terror of the typhoon upon them would be preferable to this unnatural quiet wherein even the noise of the bicycle bells had fallen off as people, faced by the typhoon, were more interested in putting their bikes in the nearest parking lot, grabbing their ticket from the granny, and heading inside, many going to the military museum on Changan Avenue, its massive concrete structure and high ceilings making it one of the safest in the city.