Ian Slater: Force of Arms

“Where is she?”

“Everywhere,” the boy said. The Public Security man kicked him again but knew the boy was telling them an uncomfortable truth. She was everywhere — the mere mention of her name a rallying cry to any group of “hooligans” or other antisocial elements who wanted to overthrow the government. And there were reports of her being everywhere.

The boy had vomited on the floor. They forced him to eat it. “Now — where is she?”

“Everywhere.”

They took him out and bludgeoned him to death on the rough flagstone courtyard. Normally they would have simply shot him in the base of the neck, but bullets cost seventeen cents American each, and for an army of three million the cost of ammunition was an item of budgetary concern.

Chairman Nie was coldly furious at the failure of the Public Security Bureau — the counterespionage group — to find her.

“Keep looking!” he told the PSB. “I want her — alive.” He knew that to kill her would only make a martyr of her. Having her alive — in chains — would evoke the power of the state much more. She could be got rid of as soon as her capture and humiliation had served Nie’s purpose of demoralizing the underground.

After he’d spoken with Alexsandra on the beach, there was a marked change in Aussie Lewis’s mood. Known as one of the most proficient and profane fighters in the SAS/D team, he became unusually subdued. Salvini, Choir Williams, and David Brentwood, the younger brother of the USS Reagan’s skipper, all noticed that he was uncharacteristically censorious about others swearing — so much so that Brentwood, Williams, and Salvini speculated that wedding bells were in the offing.

“Come on, Aussie. You going to take the big jump — the great leap forward?”

Aussie was sitting on the floor, blindfolded, reassembling his P-90 submachine gun by feel alone, a practice all SAS/D team members had to be “time capable” of in utter darkness. He didn’t answer them at first.

“Come on, Aussie. You dipping your wick?” Salvini asked.

“Don’t be crude!” Aussie replied.

“It must be serious,” Choir Williams joshed. “He hasn’t sworn for a week.”

“Uh-uh — two days to go,” Salvini reminded them. “He won’t last the distance.”

“Ye of little faith,” Aussie said, slapping the plastic see-through mag into the P-90. “You’re about to be surprised.”

“So,” Salvini proffered, “you’ve already popped the question, eh?”

Aussie didn’t answer. He needed more time and prayed no one along the trace — Chinese or Ally — would pull the trigger before he had a chance to spend more time with Alexsandra.

PFC — Private First Class — Melton of Alpha fire squad in the second company of infantry from the Thirty-second Battalion hailed from the Midwest. Melton was a farming boy from Missouri and was raised in strict adherence to his folks’ religious philosophy. Sunday was church — maybe a game of baseball out on the old rapeseed patch, and Lord help the kid who swore! Old Mrs. Melton would have him off the field and peeling potatoes before he could get back on the diamond.

Across the trace from Melton were members of the mortar squad from Shenyang’s Fourteenth Army, also scanning the DMZ. The sun was setting and night patrols would soon begin, but no one expected anything more than a few catcalls and maybe a tracer or two if a patrol looked like it was growing too fond of any part of the DMZ — especially if someone was digging under the wire or using the light alloy minesweepers in hopes of plotting the best points for crossing. Neither side had had enough time, since the truce, to plant mines all along the trace, for it was a weaving, thousand-mile front that roughly followed the shape of a long check mark, the longer part of it going up and over the mountains beyond the north plain, the bottom of the check mark consisting of the American forces that had penetrated furthest south following the battle of Orgon Tal.

“Melton!” a call came through the chilly darkness as Alpha squad edged down past a high rocky cleft closer to the wire. It was no surprise that occasionally they found out your name — it could have been provided by a Chinese intelligence agent who’d followed the disembarkation of the unit from the States, or maybe it had simply been picked up from one of the Chinese patrols overhearing conversation or smelling aftershave from the Americans who in some places along the trace were only twenty yards away.

“Melton! You miss your wife?”

Because of the narrow defile the Alpha squad was almost against the wire.

“Your wife has boyfriend, Melton. You fight. She fuck.”

By now the Alpha squad’s point man was trying to suppress a laugh.

“What’s up?” another asked. “If it was your wife I’ll bet you—”

“Melton ain’t married,” the point man said.

So the Chinese had struck out — the Alpha squad hadn’t fallen for the bait — but Melton didn’t laugh. Melton wasn’t amused at all. You’re out on patrol, it’s black as pitch and someone calls out your name. How’d they know his name? They just pick it up from listening across the trace? And if they hadn’t, it meant Chinese intelligence had gotten hold of his name some other way. How? he asked the squad. Where? It made them all edgy.

“Just remember Freeman’s orders.” the squad leader said. “Anybody fires back for crap like that and they could start the whole fucking war again along the trace.”

“Hey Melton,” squad leader asked, “sure you didn’t get married without tellin’ us?”

“Don’t worry,” Melton said. “It ain’t gonna be me.”

“What do you mean, ‘it ain’t gonna be me’? You gonna spend your life jerkin’ off?”

“I mean I’m not firing back because of that kind of crap.” But Melton had been spooked. Now and then they could hear the unoiled, squeaking noise of tanks — T-59s and T-62s upgraded with appliqué armor that looked like big slabs of hinged concrete stuck on the tanks as they made their way along the trace, Cheng’s units taking full advantage of the truce to bolster their positions all along the line.

General Cheng was a soldier, not a sadist, and he viewed Chairman Nie’s witch hunt for anyone who was either a member of, or merely suspected of being a fellow traveler in, the underground movement as an unhealthy obsession. Nie’s constant charges of “antigovemment behavior and hooliganism” in General Cheng’s view lowered morale among the civilian population as well as in the army — especially among the young. “We must be careful not to isolate them,” he advised Nie.

“Isolate them? How?” Nie asked combatively.

“By pursuing everyone over sixteen with criminal charges. That’s how. Before you know it you will have created more underground members than you’ve arrested.”

Nie waved aside Cheng’s concern contemptuously. “You fret too much, General. The state is more important than a few democracy mongers. You and I know that. Tiananmen taught them a lesson. It’s time for another. Remember what Comrade Deng told us: ‘Some people can only be educated by a bullet.’ “

“Perhaps. But your Gong An Bu agents are making a meal of this, Comrade Chairman.”

“General,” Nie said, leaning uncharacteristically forward, so close that Cheng could smell the fish he’d had for lunch. “If we do not defeat the Americans, Beijing will fall, and if Beijing falls, you and I fall. This is not the time to waste indulging ourselves with bourgeois views of the young. They are like the young anywhere. They need to know the limits, and it’s time to walk loudly with a big stick! Leave the internal security to me. You have enough on your plate with Freeman, so I hear.”