Ian Slater: Force of Arms

As Harvey Simmet stabbed his fork unenthusiastically at the chicken a la king and viewed the Tootsie Roll and crackers and gobs of mixed fruit and peanut butter, he cursed his luck. He had no way of knowing that in Beijing’s Number Two jail there was an American, Smythe, a SEAL who had been captured during the raid on the Yangtze Bridge earlier in the war, who would have thought he’d died and gone to heaven, given the luxury of an MRE instead of the fetid rice and vermin he had to crunch up and use as protein in his cell. Who was it that said comparison is the source of all unhappiness? Smythe dreamed of MREs.

They had strung Smythe up by his thumbs so often that by now they were useless, forcing him to use his first and second fingers to shovel in the meager rice and cockroaches from the wooden bowl. Nie’s interrogators for the Public Security Bureau wanted to know the location of all SEAL units. Smythe had told them he didn’t know, which was true. But by now daily torture had become routine, his screams mixed with those of many others — nearly all of them classified as either dissidents or “hooligans” against the state, hooliganism being a meeting of three or more people.

“Where have you been?” the PSB asked the three boys from Huade who were all in their late teens and had seen their hopes of a new China disappear, blown away like the sand in the Gobi.

“Fighting the oppression of the state!” one dramatically said, causing an expulsion of breath from his mother, whose shame was as keen as her surprise.

“And you two?” the PSB asked the others.

“Fighting the oppression of the state!” they answered in unison, sounding rather silly, albeit serious.

“Parrots!” the PSB inspector declared. “Parroting your bourgeois bosses.” Gun in hand, he demanded they tell him whom they took their orders from.

“From our heart,” the oldest of them said.

“Your heart,” the PSB sneered. “That’s an unreliable authority, boy.”

“From the goddess of democracy,” the third boy said, adding, “Malof xiapjie”—Miss Malof. In fact she had given them no such order to sabotage — they had never even seen her — but mentioning her name he hoped would take the sneer off the PSB’s face. It did. The inspector pistol-whipped the boy’s face, instantly drawing blood, and he told the squad of eight soldiers inside the house to take them in hand.

The inspector was sure the three had never met or laid eyes on the criminal Malof woman, but he was just as certain, especially when he had sniffed a rotten-egg odor of sulfuric acid on one of the boys’ sleeves, that they had blown up the track near Tomortei.

“You could have killed many soldiers,” he told the boys. “Your brothers.”

“They’re not our brothers,” the eldest of the three said. By now two truckloads of PLA had arrived, and the parents were beside themselves as the soldiers piled out of the trucks, beams of flashlights roiling with dust, and shouted commands coming through the darkness, which soon had the soldiers in a huge circle around the three boys and the PSB inspector. The inspector now held a bullhorn — the battery wasn’t working, but he used it anyhow to bellow out to the soldiers. “Remember what the democracy hooligans of Tiananmen did to your comrades in arms!”

It was a powerful appeal, immediately visible in the way the circle of troops seemed to constrict in a solid ring and grow smaller yet more menacing, as every soldier took a step forward against the saboteurs whose earlier defiance now paled in the spotlight formed by several beams. In Tiananmen, or rather throughout Beijing, the demonstrators once attacked by the soldiers had in turn attacked many of the soldiers, the most infamous incident being when one of the soldiers had been castrated and hung from a wire noose, his body nothing more than black cinder after it had burned in a torch of gasoline.

Now there were screams coming from the houses down the dark hutongs, punctuated by declarations of “It serves them right!” from the Granny Brigade, and on the inspector’s orders the soldiers turned and fixed bayonets against any possible interference from the crowd.

It took at least twelve soldiers to hold down the three boys who were now screaming as each was castrated, the bloody lumps of testicles thrown into the dust like pieces of meat. Then they were left, hands tied behind them, all out of their minds with pain, bleeding profusely into the dust, the rough placards hung about their necks reading, “Long live the people, death to the fifth columnists!” The circle of bayonets remained until the last of the boys had made his final plea for forgiveness, screaming like a wild animal, and then died. One PSB inspector ordered the bodies thrown in the truck and taken to the sabotage site near Tomortei, where their mutilated bodies were to be tied to stakes.

When Chairman Nie was told, he promised himself that he personally would shoot the Malof woman after she had been publicly humiliated in Tiananmen. He had no doubt that they would catch her eventually, and as everyone knew, Nie had a patience that was impressive, even by Chinese standards. He had waited a long time to be chairman, and he could certainly wait a little longer to have the PSB hunt down the Malof woman. The best way of course would be to bait a trap she couldn’t resist.

News of the capture of the three saboteurs and their fate traveled like wildfire down both sides of the DMZ and then on national Beijing radio, which also announced that China would insist upon maintaining her territorial integrity and would petition the United Nations to have the imperialist forces of the United States return the Jewish autonomous region to China where it belonged. It had been such border disputes that first caused the U.N. to send Freeman’s Second Army and some British SAS troops to settle.

Nie’s ambassador at the U.N. brazenly stated that regardless of the truce, the JAO was a separate issue and it must be ceded forthwith to Chinese control. It was an elaborate plan by Nie, for in fact he didn’t care about the JAO — he even suspected that the Jews had proper claim, but if anything would flush the JAO goddess of the democracy movement out into the open where the PSB could get her, and at one stroke immobilize a leaderless Democracy Movement, this U.N. move might.

The truth was that Nie’s plan — his baiting of the trap with the demand for Chinese sovereignty over the JAO— worked better than he’d had any right to expect, for PSB informants in the JAO reported that Alexsandra Malof was surfacing to go personally to the U.N. to plead the JAO case, envisioning the JAO area as a separate democratic state between Siberia and China. Nie ordered his PSB informants to watch all refugee camps from Orgon Tal to Khabarovsk.

That evening Aussie and Alexsandra were saying their good-byes before he headed south for Orgon Tal. Second Army had a plane ready for Alexsandra, believing that in the U.N. the beautiful and articulate Alexsandra arguing her case would win over many delegates.

“I’ll not be too long away,” she told Aussie.

“You be careful, luv,” Aussie advised her. “Don’t go strolling off by yourself.”

She leaned over and straightened the collar of his SAS battlefield smock and kissed him. “I’ll have U.N. bodyguards,” she said.

Aussie for once had nothing to say. Gently he pulled her toward him, and in their embrace he could feel the beating of her heart.

“No,” Nie said, “not in the air. Our Shenyangs wouldn’t get near them. The U.S. still has air supremacy, or had you forgotten that minor fact, Comrade?”

“No, sir,” the chief of the PLA’s air arm replied. “I haven’t forgotten, but we wouldn’t be using Shenyangs. We would send up our squadron of Soviet Fulcrums. They’d stand a good chance of getting through the American air cover.”