Ian Slater: Asian Front

“ Big Olga!” Choir added.

Aussie slipped an elastic band around two 9mm mags. “Don’t be so fucking rude!”

“Don’t take any pictures of her,” David said easily, smiling to break the tension now his point had been made. “Remember, no personal effects.”

“All right if I bring my dick along?” Aussie countered.

David Brentwood, essentially a shy individual, shook his head at the Australian’s unrelenting vulgarity.

“Just keep it in your trousers, boyo,” Choir Williams advised. “It might get shot off otherwise.”

Salvini thought this was very funny.

“Oh you’re a riot,” Aussie told them. “A regular fucking riot. If anybody’s going to be missing their member it’s the first Mongolian who pokes his nose—” Aussie stopped and winked at Jenghiz, the interpreter-guide. “No offense, Ghiz.”

“No off fence,” Jenghiz said, his good-humored smile of pearl-white teeth framed by a drooping black mustache. It made him look somewhat sinister despite the fine, bright teeth, and Aussie suspected that he grew it more to bug the Han Chinese who for the most part couldn’t grow one and who in general regarded facial hair as the sign of barbarians — except when one was old.

“Listen up!” Aussie said. “Ten-to-one I’ll be the first to spot a Mongolian. Choir? Sal? What do you say?”

Choir Williams, who’d lost and made money from the Australian’s obsession with gambling before, was careful to set the ground rules. “How will we know for sure?”

“Well,” Aussie said, “it’s not very difficult. If the fucker starts shooting—”

Choir and Salvini bet ten-to-one they’d spot the first Mongolian after the drop — after they started making their way down from the mountains toward Ulan Bator, where they hoped they would be able to make contact with the pro-Siberian but anti-Chinese government. Since Gorbachev’s perestroika and glasnost the Mongolians, though only with a population of just over two million, had started to go their own way and, despite the presence of Siberian garrisons, were determined to make their country their own as fer as they could. There were bound to be Russian patrols, but Brentwood’s team was to avoid all combat if at all possible and make its way to Ulan Bator with a message that Freeman had once jocularly called, “Let’s make a deal.”

“By the way,” Aussie said, “anyone hear about that poor bastard Smythe?” He was referring to one of the SEAL members who’d been captured by the Chinese, General Cheng refusing to give the American back in a prisoner exchange because the Chinese were maintaining that as Smythe was out of uniform when captured and therefore a “spy,” he was not to be accredited normal POW treatment.

The fact that Smythe was hardly a spy, decked out as he’d been in SEAL rebreather and wet suit, was of no account to the Chinese, and the fact that Smythe — a man in his early thirties with a wife and two young children back in Maine — hadn’t been shot was not due to any compassion on the Chinese part but because Cheng wanted to “question” him in greater detail about the SEALs. In short, they wanted to torture him.

“Last I heard,” David Brentwood told Aussie, “was that intelligence reports from the Democracy Movement underground said that they’d moved him from Nanking to Beijing. More interrogation probably.”

“Poor bugger,” Aussie said. “And that Jewish sheila— the one who was — you know — the one who was smuggled out of Harbin north to us.”

“What sheila?” Salvini pressed.

“The Jewish bird who told our side Cheng was moving masses of troops across the Nanking Bridge — on their way north.”

“Oh,” Sal said. “Her. Yeah, I remember. Someone told me she got back to the JAO.” He meant the Jewish Autonomous Region or Oblast wedged between Manchuria and Siberia, of which it had ostensibly been a part.

“Or what used to be the JAO before we got here,” Sal added. “She’s still around. Why?”

“Heard she’s some looker,” Aussie said. “Enormous—”

“Yes, okay,” David said, “we know. Enormous eyes.” They all laughed, even Jenghiz, who didn’t always understand their English. They said in the SAS/Delta Force that if Aussie wasn’t in a firefight he was in bed.

Two minutes later they were told the Pave Low was ready, its big noise-suppressed rotors impatiently chopping the air.

“Still bloody loud,” Aussie commented.

“Like your ties!” Salvini joshed.

With that, they were all aboard, and once the rear ramp closed, swallowing them up, the Pave Low’s big bulbous nose — the chopper’s fuselage flanked by two scallop-shaped fuel tanks — lifted, the rear rotor higher, the chopper’s down-push kicking up hard crystalline snow that chafed the faces of its ground crew, who did not know whether they’d see the Pave Low again.

The man who’d been assiduously practicing his t’ai chi was now no more than twenty feet away. “General Freeman?”

“Yes,” Freeman answered, now squatting on his haunches, arms akimbo, doing breathing exercises. “Who are you?”

“Colonel Wei. Republic of China.” His English was impeccable. “I am with the consulate in New York. Admiral Lin Kuang was sorry you were unable to discuss ideas with him and has sent—”

“Identification!” Freeman demanded, standing up, now indicating the Chinese behind him near the water and the other one on his flank up on the dunes. “Those your people?” Freeman added, his tone curtly businesslike.

“No,” the man calling himself Wei said. “We might have a problem in that regard, which is why I—”

“Why did you wait?” Freeman said, accepting the consulate identification card and driver’s license with residency address and the home address in Taiwan. “Why didn’t you approach me back there?” He indicated the dunes further behind him up the beach.

“I did not know — I still do not know, General, who these other two men are. I thought they might try to stop me.”

“Or me,” Freeman said, handing him back the identification. “What do you want to see me about?” The general’s eyes were still on the other two men, one a hundred yards to his right down the beach and the other about the same distance up from him atop the dunes, the brownish green dune grass stubble blowing stiffly in the wind.

“The admiral wanted you to know that if he can be of any assistance he will gladly give it.”

Freeman grunted, his tone somewhere between gratitude and frustration. He appreciated the admiral’s gesture, but it was just that, a gesture. Too vague a promise. Besides, Freeman was no longer C in C Second Army, and he told Colonel Wei this. He had effectively been relieved of his command. Didn’t Taipei read the papers? The La Roche tabloids had been screaming FREEMAN FIRED! for a week. Besides, ID was so easily forged in an age where they were using Xerox color copiers to pass on forged banknotes. “Why the hell didn’t you call me at the house?” Freeman demanded, still suspicious. “Instead of this cloak and—”

“Your house is being watched, General. Your phone lines are tapped.”

“By whom?”

“We do not know.”

“We?”

“At the consulate,” the man said, hesitating. “I can give you other contacts to verify my credentials if you—”

“It’s all right,” Freeman said. “What’s Admiral Kuang say — specifically?”

“Only that if you should need his assistance he will do whatever he can.”

“You don’t seem to understand. I’ve lost command of Second Army. Furthermore, I’m merely an instrument of national policy. I can’t do what the United States government doesn’t want me to do.”