Ian Slater: Warshot

“It was nice,” and with that he walked over and opened the door. The two Black Berets, their faces covered by the usual black balaclavas, walked in unhurriedly but moved purposefully, one standing to the side of the open door, the other coming over, handing Alexsandra her coat and shawl.

“And this time,” said Ilya, as he was zipping up outside the door, looking back at them, “don’t let her escape. Find out who her contacts are in the city — what other Jewish bastards are in the area — before you get rid of her. Understand?”

This angered the Black Beret closest to her. “Hell,” he told his comrade when Latov was gone. “We weren’t the bastards who blew the jail apart!”

The other Black Beret, still looking down at her, wasn’t listening. Alexsandra stared at the balaclavas, the mark of their obsession with anonymity. Then, as if reading her thoughts, the one nearest — she could smell him — pulled up his mask and grinned. They knew it didn’t matter whether she could identify them or not — it would do her no good now. She was finished. An interrogation session, maybe with help from their Chinese hosts — after all, she would be in a Chinese jail — and then execution as a spy. In China that meant a bullet into the neck, or would they insist on the OMON way and garrote her?

“Too bad the Americans won’t know,” one of them said to her. She was speechless with fright, shivering so violently she could hear her teeth chattering. “… about the Nanking Bridge,” he continued. He glanced back at the other OMON by the door. “You think the Americans are in for a surprise, comrade?”

“I think so, comrade,” the other answered. “I think so,” and they both laughed. “I’ll have a bit of that,” the unmasked one said, watching her breasts rising and falling quickly in her panic.

“Left tit for me,” said the other man.

“Picky bastard,” joked his companion with mock severity. “You’ll take what’s left, comrade.”

The unmasked one walked toward her. He had the crude, gold-capped teeth that had given Soviet dentistry a bad name, and when he smiled, it made him look even more malevolent.

“Marshal Yesov,” he told her, bending down on his haunches so close she could smell a strong, cheesy odor pervading the dark room. “Marshal Yesov, my lovely, wants some information from you. All right?” He was unbuttoning his fly. “We want to know all about your yid underground. Its contacts with the Americans, understand?” She wasn’t looking at him, but could smell him. Slowly he wound her hair about his wrists, forcing her to look up at him, her lips parted in pain. “You have contacts with Freeman’s HQ, eh?” He now pushed her head down between his legs. “Tell Niki what you know.”

Already a legend in his time, for his part in America’s sweeping, outflanking armored movements of the Iraqi War and in the battles since, General Douglas Freeman, a tall, silver-gray-haired officer whose clear blue eyes belied the weather-beaten exterior of middle age, was, for all his toughness, an optimistic man — a smile more his armor in Second Army than a frown. But when he scowled, as he was this late afternoon, striding as briskly as deep snow would allow and pulling his gloves on tightly against the bitter Siberian cold, his troops said he was a dead ringer for George C. Scott as Patton.

There was a swish of snow nearby.

“ ‘Scuse me, General?”

Freeman and his aide, Colonel Dick Norton, saw it was a reporter. Some of the press corps, particularly the Europeans, imitating Second Army’s first-battalion alpine troops out of the winter training center high in the Sierra Nevadas, were finding it easier to get about on skis. The newsman’s ID clip signified he was from one of the general’s least liked papers, the National Investigator, one of the American La Roche tabloid chain. “Only thing they investigate,” Freeman had once told Norton, “is tit and ass. That’s it and that’s all of it!”

“ ‘Scuse me, General?”

“Yes?” He knew the reporter was probably sniffing around for info about one of the men near the Baikal DMZ hundreds of miles to the east, who the night before had come in after four hours of guard duty and shot himself.

“You think Private Bronowski would have committed suicide, General, if he’d been back in the States when he got the news from his wife?”

Freeman kept walking, the squeak of his boots against the dry packed powder not letting up.

“No one likes being over here,” said Freeman, not bothering to break his stride for the reporter or to look at him. “But we were sent here by the U.N. to do a job — to maintain the peace and to ensure that Siberia’s annexation of Outer Mongolia doesn’t spread any farther.”

“Farther where?”

“Inner Mongolia,” said Freeman, almost adding, you fool, his breath stabbing the air in short bursts of warmth. “Men are bound to get homesick. ‘Course, I don’t expect your story of his wife being screwed by a Pentagon pen pusher while he’s stuck over here keeping the cease-fire helped any.”

“We just report the news, General.”

At that Freeman stopped and wheeled on the reporter, Dick Norton alarmed, the general looking as if he was within a couple of seconds of punching out the muckraker. The National Investigator reporter stood his ground. “General, you said no one likes being over here. Are you saying the president should recall—”

Freeman turned away and kept walking, Dick Norton informing the reporter, “We’re here to keep the cease-fire. Period. If you’d like to ask any more questions, you should put them at the scheduled press conference — Khabarovsk HQ. Sixteen hundred hours.”

The reporter moved off on his skis, still scribbling.

“By God!” muttered Freeman, pulling one glove so tight that the Gore-Tex looked grafted to his hand. “Can’t stand that vermin.”

“The blonde’s a bit better-looking, I must admit,” said Norton, trying to laugh it off.

“Rats!” said Freeman. “All of those La Roche reporters are rats.” He looked across at Norton. “You see that boy’s body? God damn, I’ve seen some horrible wounds in my time, but sticking a barrel in your mouth like that. Still, I haven’t got much time for anyone who shoots himself over beaver. But you can understand, I suppose.” His right fist hit the palm of his left. “Damn! Washington should have let me press Yesov’s army when we had ‘em on the run, Dick. Now they’re safe as church mice west of Baikal. All those damned politicians back home. That’s what it is.” They were approaching the general’s Quonset hut, the pillowed snow following the roofs half-moon bluish contour in the late afternoon light, the general pausing, watching the long trails of steam from the Quonset’s vents snaking high up into the pristine air. “But, no,” added Freeman bitterly. “Washington in its wisdom stopped us — just as they did Schwarzkopf. ‘Course,” Freeman conceded, “if Norman had gone farther west to run the Republican Guard to ground, our armor over there would’ve bogged down in the wet plains round Basra. But here, Dick, here we could’ve finished Yesov’s bastards off before they got halfway across that — that damned ice rink.” The rink Freeman was referring to was the four-hundred-mile-long Lake Baikal, now frozen solid. Norton spotted a covey of reporters approaching them, hungry on the scent of the suicide and bent, he warned Freeman, on making an issue of poor morale throughout Second Army.

They’d given Freeman good headlines for fighting Yesov’s Siberians to a standstill then pushing them back across Baikal, but now, with the suicide of one soldier, there was blood in the air, and the less scrupulous among the press corps had left their hosannas back in the bars of Khabarovsk. It was hooting time.