Ian Slater - Asian Front

Francine saw a TV starlet take off her high heels, now gyrating, shoving pussy at La Roche atop the piano like she was trying to break down a door with it. It made Francine jealous, mad, and smug all at the same time. Jealous because she knew she wasn’t the only one he could give security to, and smug because she knew something the others didn’t— that Jay La Roche, when he gave you the strap to beat him before he did his thing with you, before he used you like a piece of toilet paper — kept calling out “Lana,” the name of his estranged wife. He’d had something beautiful in her and had lost it. The starlet — even if the bitch got to lick him all way round — would be strictly a one-night stand. So long as Lana La Roche, nee Brentwood, stayed in that outhouse of a burg, Dutch Harbor up in Alaska, Francine would be first filly in the stable.

Colonel Soong’s soldiers weren’t taking any chances. It was bad weather all over northern Manchuria — excellent cover from enemy photo reconnaissance, but any unnecessary sound, such as the mules’ braying, could travel across the mist-shrouded, snow-patched valleys, and so Soong’s men were thrusting their arms down the mules’ throats, severing their vocal chords as they continued moving men and equipment and many heavy one-hundred-pound, 81mm mortars up along the east-west ridge lines that ran like an extension eastward of the Genghis Khan wall, much of it, like the Great Wall, still intact.

General Cheng, deciding that whatever happened, the Americans would not use gas, had made a decision that, though small enough in itself, allowed each man to carry extra rounds and rice in place of the cumbersome biological and chemical warfare protective suits.

“How can you be so sure?” Chairman Nie had pressed him. “That the Americans won’t use gas?”

“Because the Americans have bourgeois notions of war, comrade,” Cheng answered. “No matter that they have tons of VX and Sarin — they’ve never used the nerve gases. They proved that earlier in Korea, even when the NKA almost pushed them into the sea. They didn’t use it in Vietnam or Iraq. They won’t use it here.”

“But,” the commander of the Shenyang armies cut in, “what if they do, General?”

General Cheng’s reply was as even as that of a schoolmaster who had been asked a simple mathematical problem. He had thought he had made this clear earlier in the war. “We run away, comrade.”

Cheng knew that gas attacks depended much on local conditions, and rather than lose precious time climbing into a suit so heavy that many more pounds of supplies could be carried in its stead — and never mind the cost of the suit — it was better to have the men simply flee the field. Oh, certainly you’d lose some, but the ratio of the PLA to the U.S. Second Army was fifteen-to-one. The PLA could afford to take the risk.

Also orders whether or not to suit up for chemical attack were so dependent on local conditions that a chaos of countermanding orders could affect an entire offensive anywhere along the Black Dragon River. That a major war was in the offing there was no doubt, for as in the great Russian empire of the czar in 1914, once general mobilization was ordered in China, the scale of the call-up was so vast that it became an unstoppable bureaucratic juggernaut that, under its own momentum, all but demanded a clash of armies.

The man who emerged from the first gher reminded David Brentwood of Eskimos he’d seen — the same broad-boned, tanned face, clear, almond-shaped eyes, and a smile of teeth white as ice. The man’s thick sheepskin del reinforced the impression, for the sun was still not fully up and the deep, creeping-up cold of the semidesert had yet to be driven off, nor had the wind whistling down from the Hentiyn Nuruu abated, the air gritty with the dust and infused with the pungent odor of burning camel dung, its smoke escaping from the gher’s roof vent, causing Salvini’s eyes to water uncontrollably so that he appeared to be weeping.

According to the ancient custom, the Mongolian opened the wooden door of the gher and welcomed them into the round canvas-and-felt house. As they’d been briefed at headquarters, the four men were careful not to walk on the door’s low board frame but to step over it so as not to bring the gher bad luck.

Inside the gher it was an island of sheepskin and other hide rugs on the floor, the walls of canvas and felt supported by wooden poles no more than five feet six inches high, spars of wood leading from these to the center where the stove pipe from the stone-based oven met the vent. Again as was customary the four guests were bidden to sit on the westward side, their backs to Nalayh, their faces to the east, the door directly to the right of them, their feet pointing to the stove where camel and cow dung kept smoldering, providing heat not only against the cold but to warm the arkhi, an alcoholic drink of fermented mare’s milk.

The head man of the gher, careful to sit opposite the four SAS/D troopers, waited until all had partaken of the light orange cheese his wife had passed around. This was the best insurance the troopers could have, for by custom once the cheese had been shared there could be no conflict between host and guest. But as Aussie braced himself for another sip of the arkhi — a small streak of melted yak butter giving it a taste like sour milk — he was ready to reach for the nine millimeter if anything went wrong.

A wide-eyed child watched him from atop one of the two metal-spring beds, a dark red and Persian blue carpet of silk and wool draped behind the beds on the gher’s wall. Adhering to custom once more, David Brentwood, consulting his phrase book, knew he should avoid “disputatious” subjects — politics especially — and wondered how he might confine himself to generalities about the weather and such. At first this had struck him as being as peculiar to the Mongolians until he realized how during his own childhood he, his two brothers — Robert, the oldest, an SSN commander, and Ray — and his sister, Lana, had been told by their father never to talk about politics or religion. It was no different with the Mongolians’ headman, he decided, except he knew that perestroika and glasnost had worked some magic here, too, and that the party was finding it tougher these days to control the herdsmen or what they spoke about.

But whatever the customs Brentwood also knew he didn’t have time to pussyfoot around, and so started with the weather, using it to come at the main point from an oblique angle. What he wanted to know was whether they could seek shelter here from the sun till nightfall.

Whether it was the heat from the vodka-spiced arkhi or from the stove itself, the cold was being driven off, and he felt sweaty about the neck as he finished his question, trusting he had used the correct Mongolian phrase. The headman smiled and, pointing to himself, said, “Little English, me.”

“Struth!” Aussie said. “That’s good news, mate.”

“ ‘Struth’!” The headman didn’t understand, but he knew what David Brentwood meant about “bad weather.”

“Not to be moving—” the old man said, “in bad weather.”

“Right, mate!” Aussie put in, relieved. “No bloody good at all.”

“Shut up, Aussie!” David said in an intentionally stern tone. “We’re not out of the woods yet.”

“No friggin’ woods here, mate,” Aussie said, then saw the child. “Sorry.”

The painfully slow conversation between David and the headman was really not necessary, however, for the Mongolian had understood the moment he had seen them come in from the plain that they were on the run from authority. It was all he had needed.