Ian Slater: Asian Front

“These air-conditioning units,” Freeman asked. “They portable?”

“Didn’t say, General.”

“Find out, Dick. Call me back. Ten-to-one they’re portable.”

“Yes, sir.”

As Freeman had sat impatiently reading the lives of Sherman and Grant, Norton rang back. “You’re right. They’re portable, sir. How did you—”

“Thank you, Dick.” When he put down the receiver, Freeman began to pace back and forth in the lounge room, talking to himself.

“What’s that, Douglas?” Marjorie called from the kitchen.

Suddenly Freeman had stopped. Now in late March, the spring thaw was in full swing along the Siberian-Chinese-Manchurian border. “Why on earth — summer! That little turd is going to launch a summer offensive!”

“Where?” Marjorie said, rushing in. “What? You saw a little tern? Where?”

“What-ah, no. I—”

“Oh dear. They’re such beautiful birds.”

Striding along the beach, Freeman was buffeted by a chilly wind, and unusually wracked by doubt. Was he overreacting? No, that damn Cheng was up to something. It aggravated Freeman so much he felt his skin itch here and there and had to shift the 9mm Sig Sauer Parabellum he always carried further along his waistband so that he could scratch the offending part.

The sea crashed in wildly along the ribbon of sand that was Monterey’s beach. He couldn’t help but hear the sounds of Second Army’s III Corps floundering in the crashing waters of Lake Baikal, Yesov’s heavy artillery chopping up the ice, cutting off III Corps’s retreat, and the Siberians’ Spets and OMON commandos butchering die retreating Americans, the ice floes smeared with Americans’ blood. For a while he thought he was alone on the beach, mistaking the lone figure further up for a piece of rock. He or she seemed to be waiting for him. But as he went past the man who was too far up on the dunes for his features to be clear, the man turned and walked away. As the general headed back to the house, his general’s thoughts were back along the Amur.

Now he was convinced more than ever that it was a summer offensive. Cheng doesn’t want to make the same mistake the Arabs did against the Israelis, he thought. Half the Arab tank crews were prostrate with heat exhaustion. Got to over a hundred and twenty degrees inside those T-72s. Hell, it was so bad Sadat thought the Israeli’s MOSSAD had issued the Israeli pilots some new kind of debilitating gas bombs. Wasn’t gas, it was the goddamn heat. It would be easy to mount the air-conditioning units on me rear of the T-59s and T-72s, right near the extra gas drum. He’d equally want his lead tanks cool for a long-reaching preemptive strike. July or August! There could only be one place: the Gobi Desert, bypassing the Manchurian mountain chain on his, Cheng’s, right flank, driving into the heart of the American-controlled DMZ along the Amur.

Next question — the big question — was, would the Mongolian Communists come in on the Chinese side? To find out, he began formulating what he would call “preventive medicine,” and he did not mean his advice to his soldiers to practice safe sex.

The two PLA guards snapped to attention, the red flag fluttering stiffly in the breeze as Captain Lee, aide to General Cheng, chief of the two-and-a-half-million People’s Liberation Army, arrived at the Xinhuamen — the Gate of New China — the southern entrance to the Zhongnanhai compound off Changan Avenue. Here a short distance west of the Forbidden City, the party’s top officials resided and had offices behind a high wall and around two lakes. Lee had been raised on the discipline of the Tao, his mind resolved never to show his emotions to anyone, and certainly not to his enemy. But this morning he knew he could not contain himself. Besides, General Cheng was no enemy. Lee told the general they’d pulled it off.

“Are you sure?” Cheng inquired impassively.

“Yes, Comrade General. Almost as soon as we placed the order for the air-conditioning units one of the British spies in Hong Kong sent a message north to Khabarovsk via the Manchurian route.”

“The Harbin Democracy Movement cell?” Cheng proffered.

“Yes, General.”

Cheng’s fingers carefully squeezed the end of his Camel cigarette to a point and pushed it with a twist into the end of his Persian blue cloisonné cigarette holder. “And Freeman has received the information personally?”

“Yes, General — a phone call from his Khabarovsk headquarters.”

“Are you confident of this?”

“We’ve had two men watching his house — one equipped with a multidirectional aerial. The transmitter is inside his sister-in-law’s house. He will no doubt think we will attack in the summer.”

“Good. Freeman has no doubt alerted the Pentagon to this, and his Second Army will be so advised. And then to prevent him from second-guessing us any further, we will kill him.”

“But General,” Lee began, clearly perplexed, “you said our embassy in Washington has it that he is to be relieved of command of Second Army. Sent back to Fort Ord. He won’t be any danger to us there.”

Cheng turned to the window overlooking the two lakes, sugary-looking ice still clinging to the banks. “You’ve not fought against Freeman?”

“No, sir.”

“He is formidable. Did you know he keeps a copy of our Chinese general Sun Tzu’s The Art of War next to his Bible? He well understands Sun Tzu’s maxim that ‘all war is deception.’ “

“Yes, General, but—”

“He may discern my trap if he is given time to think about it. We will not give him that time.”

“So long as our agents are discreet,” Lee suggested. “When the Siberian Spets tried to—”

“When the Siberian women tried to kill him he was not on his home ground. He was in Khabarovsk. More alert. In California there is a large Chinese population — it would just seem like another citizen approaching him.”

“When will it be done?”

Cheng inhaled, and then seconds later smoke came out in voluminous clouds of bluish gray that rose and spilled down off the ancient roof, Cheng’s silence his answer. Cheng had risen fast through the party’s ranks to head the PLA not only because he was a brilliant strategist but also because he was able to keep secrets, never tempted to tell subordinates more than they needed to know about any operation.

In Washington, where great faith had been put in the cease-fire, the buds on the Japanese cherry trees — the trees a gift of the Japanese government long ago — were seized on by the media as symbols of promise and reconciliation between two other disputants, Japan and the U.S., after the mutually draining trade wars of the 1980s and 1990s.

It wasn’t clear whether the symbolic importance of cherry blossoms prompted the president and/or his advisers to turn their thoughts to what more Japan might give the United States to make up for the bruised relationships of the trade war and the American and Allied disgust with Japan’s checkbook participation, or rather nonparticipation, in die Gulf War with Iraq.

In any event, Harry Schuman, national security, adviser, saw how Japan might make a conciliatory move. He pointed out how, in order to bolster the idea of building up a multinational peacekeeping force along the Siberian-Manchurian border like the force they’d sent to fight Saddam Insane, the Japanese should be invited to contribute not just yen to offset the huge American contribution but men as well. It was true that under Article 99 of the Japanese constitution, the JDF— Japanese Defense Force — in order to allay old and persistent fears in Asia of a resurgent Japanese militarism — was permitted to send only a maximum of two thousand military personnel at any one time. Furthermore, the two thousand could only carry arms for self-defense. Nevertheless, it was felt in Washington that the presence of an active Japanese contingent would be a welcome addition in bolstering the multinational aspect of the peacekeeping force. In the same way as the smaller Arab nations were asked to be part of the U.S.-led Allied force in Kuwait in order to show Saddam that it wasn’t simply the U.S. desire that he vacate Kuwait, it was felt that a contingent from an Asian power, Japan— albeit a tiny contingent — would sustain the idea of a multinational force and so would help deter Novosibirsk and Beijing from any further aggression.