Ian Slater: Asian Front

“We understand, General, but you may yet be returned to command.”

“Huh — that’d be a miracle,” Freeman commented, looking again at the two other men. Then he knew who they must be. “Goddamn it! They’re bodyguards,” he said, smiling at Wei. “For once the fairies’ve done something right.”

Still, Freeman wondered, would bodyguards be assigned after you were no longer a threat to the enemy? Well, hell, ex-presidents had bodyguards for life. Was it too much conceit that after his victories he would have earned the wrath of vindictive losers — that they might send someone after him?

“We feel,” Wei continued, choosing his words as carefully as a chef selecting his tomatoes for the day, working around it. “We feel that things are in a state of flux in the disputed area between Siberia and Manchuria and that—”

“The world’s in a state of flux, Colonel,” Freeman interrupted. “It’s her natural condition.”

“Perhaps, but the signs are more propitious than I think you realize, General. For yourself.”

“Even if you’re correct — again, what can I do?”

“Should the occasion arise, you would send the word ‘mercury’ to our consulate. This would activate certain procedures with Admiral Kuang.”

“Don’t dance with me, Colonel. Does ‘mercury’ mean you’d intervene militarily?”

“This is possible.”

Colonel Wei flew into Freeman, knocking him to the harder sand by the water’s edge, blood and bone from his shattered cheek spurting over the general’s chest, turning the white foamy sea pink.

“Jesus—” Freeman began. Wei’s eyes were frozen in shock, the shot having killed him the instant the depleted uranium bullet had exploded in his brain, creating a hole the size of a fist in the back of his head. Another bullet thudded into him, and Freeman felt a warm sensation flooding over his stomach. Now the general had the Sig Sauer out and, pushing Wei off him, but snuggling in close to the body, took careful aim. The Sig Sauer bucked twice, and the man by the water seemed to hesitate, trembling, looking as if he were shot, but he kept coming.

The man from the dunes had disappeared only to reappear moments later, his head barely visible through the windshield of a four-wheel-drive Jeep Renegade coming straight at Freeman, who fired again to his left. The man by the water crumpled at the sea’s edge, the waves issuing over his body, their forward motion rolling cumbersomely toward die beach, the undertow sucking at him, and wet sand pouring over his legs back into the sea.

The four-wheel-drive was now hurtling down from the dunes a hundred feet away when Freeman fired one, two, three, four, five at the windshield. One of the shots found the target, the four-wheel-drive flipping onto its side, careening for a bit on the beach, making the drier sand squeak like the sound of piglets, its wheels still spinning at the sky. Freeman knew he had only a few shots left and ran toward the vehicle from the off side. The man was dead, and Freeman couldn’t see where he’d been hit until he realized he hadn’t been hit at all. The windshield was a milky spider’s web; little glass had flown out. Instead, what must have happened was that as soon as the windshield had been hit, turning opaque, the man had instantly stuck his head out far left to see where to steer when the vehicle flipped, digging deep into the dry sand, his head taking the impact full on and now lolling like a rag doll’s.

No one had heard any shots against the noise of the surf, but someone passing up on the highway had seen the overturned Renegade and the body at the surf’s edge. When the police arrived they couldn’t find any ID on the two men.

“You have any idea who they were, General?” asked a blonde whose figure couldn’t be disguised despite the state trooper uniform.

“No,” the general answered. “I’d only be speculating.”

“Go ahead, General,” she encouraged him.

“Guo An Bu — Chinese Intelligence Service — External Affairs.”

“Why would they be after you, General?”

“Don’t know,” Freeman said, “unless they think I’m another Subutai.” The general was staring out at the sea, not in the near distance but as if somehow he could see all the way to China. “Subutai,” he explained, “served Genghis Khan. Marched all the way from China to the Hungarian plain. At one stage his armies covered four hundred miles, took several cities, and fought two great battles, conquering Poland and all of Silesia — in less than thirty days.” He paused, oblivious to me policewoman’s stare. “Before that, he’d taken Russia. And before that, Genghis Khan had taken all China. By God, what an army!”

“General-”

“What — oh. Sorry, officer. No, what I mean was there’s a good chance it was politically motivated, but I don’t want that to get into the press.”

“Politically motivated, sir?”

“Yes, that’s what I think. Chinese don’t want me in the picture, which makes me believe that Wei — that joker over there — was right. Maybe the cease-fire over there isn’t worth the paper it’s written on.”

“You mean the Chinese were trying to assassinate you, General?”

“Either that,” Freeman said, “or”—flashing a smile—“someone in Washington!”

Everyone laughed. It happened now and then at a homicide — the tension had to snap. But as the ROC colonel was carried away, Freeman’s jaw clenched. No matter what army — when a soldier went down like that, having risked all, knowing the odds, it never failed to move him. At that moment he felt as if Wei were a son in a way that transcended time and borders. Hearing the roll of the sea, he felt that he had been with Subutai, that destiny had thrown Wei upon him to protect him — that God had used the ROC colonel as a shield and that therefore Freeman’s time had not come. Yet.

Sergeant first class Minoru Sato was fifty-two years of age, one year away from mandatory retirement in the Japanese Defense Force. The company to which he was attached was part of the Second Asahikawa Division, one of the JDF’s northern army’s four divisions. Under the constitution, the JDF did not get to take either the type-61 or -74 tank or the FH 70. Also denied them were the 155mm howitzer and the self-propelled 106mm recoilless rifle. By stretching the definition of what constituted “small arms,” the two-thousand-man JDF unit was permitted to take LAW antitank launchers and antipersonnel mines, as these came under the heading of self-defense. But for the JDF’s purposes the restrictions were not seen as any impediment to what was thought would be basically a U.N.-sanctioned observer team on a ten-by-five-mile strip of the U.N. ‘s DMZ. In any event U.S. armor and artillery were in effect “on call” should they be needed in some unforeseen circumstance. And at least the two battalions that made up the JDF force were equipped with top-of-the-line type-89 5.56mm rifles.

With a thoroughness for which the Japanese were known in their industrial policy, the JDF battalion organized itself promptly into a classic perimeter defense, with the JDF commander true to his U.N. mission playing no favorites — both the western and eastern sectors of the perimeter that fronted American garrisons no less manned than the southern side of the five-by-ten-mile sector where JDF troops looked across the Amur River into Manchuria.

The Japanese were determined to look and to be as professional as possible — after all, this was only the second time Japanese troops had been abroad since World War II over sixty years ago, and the nation would be watching, expecting them to meet the highest standards. Japanese pride was not about to be embarrassed by any attack — even by Chinese bandits who in this sparsely populated region of Manchuria could come down from the high country across the river and conceivably launch a raid across the river on the Siberian villages. In fact Beijing had warned the U.N. central command before the Japanese Defense Force had even been despatched that it, Beijing, could not be responsible for the actions of Chinese border brigands. The admission constituted something of a loss of face for Beijing, apparently conceding that part of the People’s Republic was not completely under Communist control. But Beijing’s caution about brigands was seen by Washington as a genuine effort to forestall any possible misunderstanding should a local warlord and his followers forge over the river and cause the PLA to be blamed for violating the cease-fire.