Ian Slater - Force of Arms

When the ship’s writer let it be known the familygram burst messages had arrived, the atmosphere aboard the Reagan immediately seemed infused with a festive air as crew members eagerly, yet trying not to seem overly excited, waited for news of home. All they needed to hear was that the family, wife, or sweetheart was fine. “Everything’s fine” was all their psyches needed. Anything else — a newborn having put on weight, a student getting honors, a football team in good spirits, victorious or not— was what the officers and men of USS Reagan considered the icing on the cake. “Puss in boots is waiting” almost ousted Andrea Rolston’s anonymous “I need meat. Can you bring home the bacon?” as raunchiest ‘gram of the month.

When Rolston saw a duplicate of it, unsigned, pinned up on the notice board as ‘gram of the month, he shook his head, tut-tutting, “Geez, what some gals will write. Disgusting.”

“Oh no, sir,” a torpedo man first class said. “That’s beautiful.”

“You’re sick, Mulvaney,” Rolston joshed.

“Well, I’d sure like to meet whoever the gal is.”

It was too bad it wasn’t summer, the young man explained to Alexsandra. “In summer you can go to Kiessling’s.” It was a delicatessen where you could get pastries and scallops.

“Have you ever been to prison?” she asked him, her taut body tired and swaying rhythmically in what was for the young man a seductive way in tune with the clickety-clack of the rails crossing the sleepers.

“Once,” he replied.

“For how long?”

“Ten days. It’s all they could hold me on if they had no charges that would stick.”

“What were the charges?”

“Hooliganism,” he said proudly. “I was accused of writing some of the dazibao at Beijing University, but there were dozens of such notices and proclamations of our solidarity and support for the goddess of democracy and they couldn’t prove which one was mine.”

“Did it matter?” she asked him, her voice fatigued.

“I don’t understand,” he said. “Did what matter?”

“Whether they could prove it or not. If they wanted to keep you they would have — proof or no proof.”

“Ah, but not this time,” the student said. “Some of the dazibao said ‘Arrest without proof is fascism!’ This shamed them.”

The prospect of Nie’s followers being ashamed of anything struck her as being peculiarly unlikely. It made her nervous in fact, and for the first time since being trundled out with the dirty linen she was alert to a possible danger— that the boy was a plant, a collaborator who had exchanged a long prison term for being an informant. To talk to her — to have her confess to him anything she had done against the PLA — and then they would have a star witness.

He was not a worker’s son but one of the middle class that wasn’t supposed to exist. They cracked much more quickly than most, she knew. Put a middle-class kid in a cell overnight, take away his shoelaces, belt, anything with which he might hang himself, leave the light on all night, stale rice and water, a bucket for a toilet, and you never saw morale collapse so quickly in all your life. It was as if they were on another planet. It was the way the Public Security Bureau and indeed so many other police forces throughout the world got so many confessions. Everyone felt guilty about something they’d done in their life, and it was this free-floating anxiety that interrogators gave shapes and names to.

He saw the concern in her eyes and immediately divined her alarm. “You can trust me,” he said. She nodded. Another hour and they would be near Beidaihe.

What else could he say, she thought, if she’d shown she suspected him?

“I would do anything for you,” he said, and she knew that what he meant was that, apart from anything else, he would like to have sex with her. Puppy love. She smiled gracefully but beyond that did not answer, thinking of Aussie Lewis, of how she longed to be with him and under his protection. She was so weary of being the champion of the minority, the June Fourth Movement, and the Goddess of Democracy Movement. She wanted her own champion to take away her fears, her constant anxiety from being hunted.

“Come here,” she told the boy, and the next moment he was sitting stiffly, flushed, by her side. She put her arm about him and drew him to her, his eyes closing as his head rested on her bosom. They sat like this, rocked to and fro by the mesmerizing action of the train. She was looking out the window at green rice fields and beyond toward the sea. “Have you betrayed me?” she asked softly. “Hmm?” she said, pulling him even closer to her. “Have you?”

For a moment he couldn’t speak, the tears rolling down his face. He nodded. “They told me my family…”

He couldn’t go on.

“Shhhh,” she told him. “I know. They want to discover who my Manchurian friends are.” She paused. “And the nurse?”

He said he didn’t know about her. She seemed genuine, he said, but no one could be sure of anyone, he said, excusing his own weakness. Alexsandra ignored the plea for pity, though she did pity him. “Then we must leave the train before Beidaihe,” she said.

“Will you come with me?” she asked him. “It may mean punishment for your family if we are caught. You don’t have to.”

“I must,” he said, his face creased with worry. “What could I tell them if I don’t come with you? What could I tell the Public Security Bureau — that I let you escape?”

He was sitting up, wringing his hands and snuffling. The train began to slow in the predawn sky, some of the stars above the gulf so bright one could almost touch them, the wind having shifted, coming from the east now, blowing some of the Gobi dust back to where it belonged.

Alexsandra rose and pulled the padded Mao suit around her and did up all the buttons except the very top one. “Are you coming?” she asked.

“No. Yes. Yes,” he said, and made to hop up from the seat.

“Have you any money?” she asked.

He gave her three yuan, his eyes avoiding hers.

“If you don’t come with me,” she said, “you will be punished. This way if we’re caught you can say I did all the planning.”

“When do we jump?” he asked.

“Don’t be silly,” she said, her tone schoolmarmish, but she was so tired, so utterly tired of betrayal, that it had given an edge to her voice when she meant none. She longed to have Aussie with her. At least he was someone you could trust “We’ll get off at the station before Beidaihe.”

“But — but,” the boy stammered, “we’ll still have to go through Beidaihe if you are to go north.”

“Yes, but don’t you understand they’ll be looking, waiting, for us at the train station. We won’t go near it.”

MAGTAFs — Marine air-ground task forces — come in different sizes, but the one General Freeman ordered in from Korea was a MEF — marine expeditionary force — a total of fifty-one thousand men, forty-eight thousand of these marines, fifty amphibious ships, and armed with everything from sixty Av-8 short-takeoff and — landing Harrier jets, forty-eight F/A18 fighters, twenty A-6E all-weather night-attack aircraft, twelve KC-130 refuelers, sixty Chinook 46 medium-lift and assault choppers, twenty-four attack helicopters, Hawk surface-to-air missiles, and at least eighty Stinger surface-to-air missile teams.

The MEF also contained seventy MBTs, over sixty-five heavy mortars, 150 TOW antitank missiles, plus 216 assault amphibious vehicles, over one hundred 155mm howitzers, and other medium mortars. Such a force could not easily be hidden, yet without the element of surprise it would take at least a four-to-one marine advantage to be able to secure the beach. Air support of course would be telling in their favor, but two or three ChiCom divisions drawn south from the Orgon Tal-Honggor line could soon engage this force of Freeman’s at the beach. And what Cheng lacked in air cover for his own troops would be made up for in having at his disposal the largest coastal navy in the world, its northern fleet headquartered at Qingdao. But surely the Chinese would pick the MEF up at sea on radar.