Ian Slater: Force of Arms

“Four hundred feet, aye.”

“Why can’t we stay here, Aussie?” Alexsandra sighed, reclining on the picnic blanket, looking over a long stretch of the Amur river, closing her brown eyes and stretching— albeit unknowingly — sensuously in the weak morning sun. “Why can’t we stay here and make love forever?”

Aussie Lewis’s eyes lingered on her white blouse. Just watching her breathing was a treat. “Because,” he said, in the flat down-under tone of his, “you’re a soft touch— always trying to do more than your share. If this truce doesn’t last, you’ll be at it again. Right?” Aussie propped himself up on his elbow, his blue eyes looking down at her. “Stone the crows, Sandy, you’ve done your bit — knocking out Chinese troop trains and all that. Washington’s already given you a gong for duty beyond and above — you’ve done more than your bit.”

“No,” she said quietly, still not opening her eyes, “not as long as the Chinese threaten the JAO.” The region lay in the disputed territory along the Siberian-Chinese border, the border being the Amur river to the Siberians and the Black Dragon to the Chinese. “If we don’t fight,” Alexsandra said, “we’ll end up just like Tibet — another Chinese province. Anyway”—she turned on the picnic blanket, shutting her eyes—”who are you to talk? You and your SAS/Delta troopers.” She was referring to the SAS/D troop — the British Special Air Service and American Delta force commandos that Freeman called on to plug any sudden gap in the line or to carry out deep missions behind the enemy lines — to fight if there was no truce, to collect intelligence if there was.

“Yeah, I’d go,” conceded Aussie, who had rescued Alexsandra as one of many civilian hostages the Chinese had tied to the guns at the battle of Orgon Tal. To the astonishment of his colleagues in the SAS/Delta teams, Aussie Lewis had fallen head over heels for Alexsandra Malof — even to the point of having stopped swearing. His buddies — David Brentwood, officer in charge of his SAS/D troop; Salvini from Brooklyn; and Choir Williams, a Welshman — had wagered that the Australian couldn’t last an entire week without a profanity. They still had two days to go.

“But — what I do,” Aussie tried to explain to Alexsandra, “is what I do. I mean, it’s my job. Special Ops is my line of country. We’re trained for it.”

She smiled at him as she turned side-on to the weak sun that hung above the thick taiga, a great blanket of green that hugged the river and swept right down to its banks except for the little beach they had found.

“You can’t tell me you do it for money. Because you’re—” she began.

“Well — no,” Aussie had to admit. “But what I mean is— well—” Uncharacteristically for him, he seemed at a loss for words.

“What you’re saying,” Alexsandra said softly, “is that I shouldn’t go if there’s trouble again — that you love me.”

This was pretty rough talk for the Australian. Oh sure, he’d fallen in love, but he balked at her simple declaration. It wasn’t macho to get all weepy and confessional.

“Yeah — I like you, Sandy.”

“Only like me?” she retorted, holding back a smile, still looking at him warmly and mischievously, enjoying his discomfort.

“Yeah — well,” he began, “you’re a good bird.”

“Am I?” An extraordinary thing was happening — the Australian was blushing.

Alexsandra threw her head back, smiling. She looked like the bird in Casablanca, Aussie thought. What was her name? Ingrid — Ingrid Bergman, that was it. “Yeah, well, I’m pretty keen on you, Sandy.”

“Oh dear,” she said. “This is very serious then, Aussie.”

“Stone the crows!” he began. “What I meant to say was—” He stood up abruptly and started throwing rocks into the river. “I’m a bit keen on you,” he said quickly, and immediately looked about in the forest, as if someone might have heard him. “That’s what I mean about you and this sabotage business.”

She got up and reached for his arm, and as he turned around to look at her she seemed to him even more beautiful than before, her dark hair lustrous in the spring sun. But he knew that along with her beauty was an iron determination that he wouldn’t be able to stop her doing what she felt she had to do: fight the Chinese if they broke the truce. It would be an obligation for everyone in the JAO, and she knew that Aussie knew. They embraced, and Aussie whispered hoarsely, “God, I hope this truce holds.”

“It will,” she said, sounding utterly unconvincing. Already there were reports of “strain” all along the DMZ. The feeling was like watching a rope between two tug-of-war teams: The rope was still, but the force pulling it either way had not abated — the tension was in the very air you breathed.

At this point Aussie Lewis didn’t quite realize the extent of Alexsandra’s fame, for while she might still be domiciled in the U.S.-run Khabarovsk refugee camp, her deeds had spread throughout the dissident ranks of Gansu Province’s Social Democrats and beyond Beijing to the Liberal Democratic party, the Free Labor Union, and the Chinese Progressive Alliance — all unofficially gathering under the banner of the goddess of democracy.

But she and Aussie Lewis were only two people among thousands, and no matter what her fame, events were swirling about them that would sweep them into different dangers whether they liked it or not. With over three million men in the People’s Liberation Army and only 360,000 Allies, mostly American, the scope of the battles would be huge and confused if war broke out. Five thousand T-59 and T-72 tanks alone were already being marshaled by General Cheng on the basis of Lenin’s military adage that “quantity has a quality all its own.” The Americans had better tanks, and Cheng’s strategy was simply to roll over the Americans with his four-to-one advantage. No matter how good an M1A1 tank might be, it had to kill three of his tanks out of every four just to stay even. The irony, however, was that it wouldn’t be the sight of thousands of T-59s and T-72s being moved northward that would ignite the powder keg along the trace.

The two Gong An Bu — Public Security Bureau — men looked so much alike — short, stocky, and in poorly cut Western-style suits — that their prey — anyone suspected of being a member of the underground June Fourth Democracy Movement — called the men the “turtle twins.” Being called a turtle was a great insult in China. One of the turtles told the boy to stand up against the cell wall, a dirty slab of cement defaced by dozens of pleas to, or denunciations of, the Party. The boy was seventeen years old and shivering, as much from his fear as from the cold.

“Hands behind your back!” the other security man commanded. The boy did as he was told and was shown the color photograph once more. It was a police photo of a dark-haired Caucasian woman in her thirties. Even the baggy prisoners’ Mao suit couldn’t hide a striking figure, and her brown eyes stared defiantly from the photograph.

“Well?” one of the twins said. “Where is she?”

The boy couldn’t speak, his mouth dry with fear, and so he simply shook his head. The other man kicked him in the groin. The boy doubled up, collapsing in a heap on the slimy flagstone floor, cupping his genitals, writhing in agony and so nauseated he couldn’t even utter a protest.

“Now,” the other turtle said. “Where is she?”

The boy shook his head again. He had never seen Alexsandra Malof before this photo. All he knew about her was that after the successful U.S. Second Army attack against elements of General Cheng’s long-range artillery during the great battle for Orgon Tal, the Malof woman had been rescued along with other hostages who had been tied to the wheels of the big guns. The boy knew that this Jewish guerrilla leader had played havoc with railway sabotage in the Manchurian vastness before her capture and subsequent rescue by the Americans. And the fact that she had been decorated by the Americans earlier in the war before the truce was making her a heroine throughout the democratic underground all across China, particularly among the minorities in Tibet, Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia and in most of the non-Han regions. If the beating told the boy nothing else it told him that if they were so worried about where she was, the truce might not last long — that a new PLA attack was imminent. He was only half right.