Ian Slater - Warshot

The charges were that she and Ling, as “running dog jackals” of the “fascist pro-democracy movement,” were guilty of treasonous “antirevolutionary” activity.

“I could smell her!” pronounced the diminutive granny victoriously. “I could smell her!”

Mr. Ling looked at the old woman with quiet contempt. “You smell nothing but your own fear.”

Within minutes the Public Security man arrived and Alexsandra and Ling were shackled, hands behind their backs, the chain passing around the front of the waist between their legs and back up to a metal collar. She was taken out to the PSB car, a battered blue Fiat, Ling to a police motorcycle and sidecar nearby. “Someone has betrayed us!” he yelled back at the hutong.

The PSB rider slapped him across the ear with a rough suede driving glove. “ Zhu kou!” Shut up!

The moment Alexsandra felt herself pushed into the small blue Fiat, its upholstery a dusty faded-gray velour, she experienced a strange sense of relief — the warmth of the car’s heater was luxurious. It was the warmest she’d been for days, and in her relief came the sudden smothering fear that if she was so weak as to have already surrendered to this slight creature comfort, what would she tell the PSB interrogators once faced with another bone-aching cold cell? Even the Yakuts of her native Siberia, who lived in the region where the temperature often dropped below minus sixty, grudgingly admired the legendary ability of the northern Chinese to endure the cold. Her fear of dying cold was, she knew, as irrational as having hoped she would ever be free. Her rape by the Siberians at Baikal had never left her.

And what was it all worth — her silence? She didn’t even know whether the message about the Nanking Bridge had gotten through. Yet all this now paled next to her simple but overwhelming desire to be warm again, her craving for even the smallest candle subduing all reason, all prior resolve. For now she knew it would almost certainly end with a bullet in the neck, the traditional party execution for counterrevolutionaries. Most likely it would be a public affair, as public and as exaggerated as her arrest, a warning to all those who might have sympathy with the pro-democracy movement. And if she was cold, she would shiver as she knelt and they would think it was fear. If only to deny them that, she longed to be warm.

As Freeman finalized preparations for his attack on Nizhneangarsk, Major Truet’s Charlie Company, cut off from the main body of III Corps, waited anxiously at the southern end of the lake, still dug in, facing westward, the rail tracks and concrete tunnels atop the cliff overlooking the lake a hundred yards behind them. In the night the moonlit fringe of the boreal forest stood like an impenetrable curtain barely a hundred yards in front of them, the snowdrifts so high they’d climbed halfway up the trunks of the trees whose branches were now stiff to breaking point from the weight of snow.

Despite Thomis’s incurable pessimism, the rest of second platoon remained confident that Freeman would eventually get evacuation choppers across the lake from the east. But for now all they could do was wait, all available choppers busy ferrying what men they could find in the hell that lay beneath the cloud covering the lake. The sound of Yesov’s juggernaut was still rolling and thundering, the Siberians now getting behind as well as in front of III Corps to finish off what was left of the American retreat. Though knowing this, Thomis remained bitterly disappointed at the choppers’ failure, so far, to rescue him, and he continued to argue forcefully that they should move back to the cover of the tunnels.

When it came, the weak, creaking sound of the Siberian reserve armor no more than half a mile away sounded like unoiled rail cars, the occasional clankiness of more tanks moving through the forest belying the awesome power of the main battle tanks. Each T-72 weighed 49,000 pounds and was outfitted with a 125mm smoothbore, one of the largest tank cannons in the world. They moved at no more than fifteen miles per hour, until General Minsky gave the order for a thirty-five-mile-per-hour burst of speed as they approached the edge of the treeline beyond which lay C Company. Cold was seeping down from the forest’s edge, pouring into the foxholes and trenches around Thomis and his buddies like dry ice, at times obscuring the slit openings between the log-raft cover of some of Charlie Company’s trenches.

What Thomis, Valdez, Emory — the Georgian — and others couldn’t figure out was how, with the treeline so thick at the forest edge, the tanks could hope to exit directly in front of the trenches — unless the Siberians intended bringing bulldozers forward. But this would give Charlie Company time to triangulate mortar attacks which, while they mightn’t harm the tanks, would give C Company’s antitank crews more time and pin down the Siberian infantry. But then, Siberian tactics weren’t known for showing particular concern for numbers of troops lost, so long as the objective was obtained. And anyway, Thomis hissed, it didn’t matter “what the fuck their strategy is, man — where in hell we gonna go, with a sheer hundred-fifty-foot drop behind us?”

“Jump into the lake!” opined Valdez nervously.

Thomis was stamping his feet to keep warm. “Very fucking amusing, Valdez.”

A reconnaissance patrol from C Company was almost shot as it scurried back from the treeline, their report succinct: “Fuckers are everywhere. Headin’ straight for us.”

“How far?” asked Major Truet.

“Half a mile — maybe less…”

“We could try rappeling down the cliff,” said Emory.

Thomis sneered. “Oh, terrific,” he said, cupping his hands about the M-16’s breech to stop it freezing up, “and while we’re going down, what the fuck you think the Siberians’ll be doing? Having tea? Anyway, where the hell would we go on the ice — taking a fucking stroll while they pick us off from the cliffs?”

No one answered. Thomis was a pain, but on this one his pessimism was justified. Valdez said the tanks were probably farther in the woods than anyone thought, that maybe they’d turn — run parallel to the tracks — and would go past Charlie Company, not toward them. Maybe they were going along some logging road, north toward Port Baikal to reinforce Yesov’s attack on the retreating III Corps.

“Jesus!” said Thomis, looking behind him, down out over the moon-bathed white cloud that obscured the lake.

“What?” asked Valdez, but then he saw, as Thomis had, what looked like a canal, or rather, a long, jagged slit in the ice; in fact, it was through a narrow break in the cloud cover that he and the rest in the squad glimpsed the flashes of the guns. They’d been at it all day and now, through his Starlight binoculars, Valdez for one could see clearly, in the surreal-looking green world of the night vision glasses, the slaughter of the remnants of III Corps caught out on the ice. “They’re being massa—” began Valdez.

“Shut up!” hissed Thomis. “Listen!”

The creak of the tanks had stopped. To the right of second platoon’s heavy machine gun trench and scattered foxholes, a branch collapsed, the snow pouring down from the tree like sugar. Valdez slid his M-16 forward on the frozen ice rest he’d sculptured in front of him.

“Hold it!” cautioned Emory softly. “Maybe it just fell.”

“ ‘Course it fucking fell!” hissed Thomis. “You idiot!”

Emory took no offense. He knew it was Thomis’s fear talking, the same kind of fear that had suddenly made his own mouth dry as sandpaper.

“No firing!” said the lieutenant softly, yet urgently, his voice on the walkie-talkie distinct, without a trace of static, as he turned the volume as low as he possibly could. He was listening so intently that he seemed to feel everything at once, the wind moaning through the trees, snow plopping down here and there, a crack of a branch, the distant crackle of small arms fire on the lake below, and in the distance the scream of more Siberian rocket salvos, their fiery tails a fizzing white in the night goggles, his concentration and the weight of the goggles giving him a cluster headache that started to radiate down his right arm.