Ian Slater: Warshot

“Bullshit!” they told Emory. Thomis had the 7.62mm slug that had penetrated his foot. It was Siberian, all right.

“Shit!” countered Emory. “There was enough bullets on the ground for you to start a collection. Son of a bitch couldn’t walk, so he tried usin’ me as his goddamned crutch. I got to be the nigger again, man!”

It made no difference — the La Roche tabloids were making Thomis a hero. The photograph on page one showed him in Alaska, Dutch Harbor — the first stop on his repatriation home — smiling broadly, his leg in an impressive cast, which seemed to reach out to you from the picture, and with an enormous cigar given him by a smiling Douglas Freeman, before Thomis had left Siberia. It was the only smile the general had given anyone that day.

Freeman was so angry, Norton thought he would self-destruct. There were only ten hours till the official cease-fire went into effect.

“By God, those bastards in Washington are doing it to me again! I swear to God, Norton, if you were getting laid and hear climax, those sons of bitches would tell you to stop. My God, don’t they understand?” His right fist slammed into the map of Manchuria, badly denting the area around Manzhouli and causing a red rain of ChiCom unit position pins to fall to the floor. “Those rice-sucking jokers in Beijing have no intention of withdrawing.” Not caring that a group of reporters who had suddenly materialized like rabbits from the warren upon word of the cease-fire were entering the HQ hut, Freeman whipped off his reading glasses, jabbing them at the line mat marked the Siberian-Chinese border. “Can’t they read a goddamn map in Washington? These Chinks have no intention of relinquishing the territory they’ve taken from Second Army.”

“Isn’t it, uh, Siberian soil, General?” asked a correspondent from The London Times.

“No, by God. It’s ours! We paid for it — at Skovorodino and Baikal. Or have you forgotten? We, the Americans, kept the Siberian-Chinese border intact. Why, hadn’t been for us, there’d be no border. Chinese’d have moved in ages ago.”

“But General,” interrupted the Paris Match correspondent, “wasn’t the A-7 incident started by the Siberians who were there? How do you make it out to be American?”

It was a trap, but Freeman saw it immediately, the reporter trying to get him to say it was Americans who had started the fighting, given that he said the area had been won and paid for by Americans.

“It’s American because we lost good men on that damn mountain. Special Forces. That’s why. Good men.”

“Sir?” It was the stunning redhead from CBS. “General, does this mean you have no intention of ceding A-7 and the surrounding areas to the Chinese?”

“One more question,” interjected Norton, quickly giving his warning glance to the general, giving Freeman a second or two to think about his career as well as the political implications of a no answer — which would in effect be going directly against the president.

“I,” began Freeman, “am going to obey my orders, as General Schwarzkopf did.”

Norton felt the tension draining out of him. It was a brilliant answer under pressure, at once making it clear that he would obey the president, yet it was politically obscure enough, Schwarzkopf having had to withhold his impulse to pursue the withdrawing Iraqi army because of the presidential order, and in so doing, allowing Saddam Insane to begin rebuilding his entire army both during and after the ceasefire. Which was precisely what Freeman was afraid the Chinese would do — rebuild the bridge and start shunting divisions, massing them all along the Manchurian-Siberian border from A-7 eastward.

What wasn’t so brilliant of Freeman, what Norton hadn’t been able to run interference for, was when Freeman, going full bore, had used the word “Chinks” instead of “Chinese.”

Jay La Roche loved it. On his private jet en route to Dutch Harbor to see Lana — who was “playing at nurse,” as he derisively put it to Francine — he shook his head with undisguised glee at the headline his tabloids had seized:

CHINKS LIARS! CHARGES FREEMAN

CEASE-FIRE OFF TO ROCKY START

The fact that when the tabloids hit the streets in the U.S. there were still eight hours, till midnight precisely, until the cease-fire would actually begin and the special mandate of the Emergency Powers Act would be rescinded, was lost amid the outcry of every minority group in America. They charged that Freeman, protected by the Emergency Powers Act, had shown his true colors, indulging in racism and bigotry.

With the naïveté that often coinhabits genius, Freeman frequently underrated the wiliness of the press. He had no such prejudice against the Chinese and had meant no harm — said he meant no harm. He recanted, indeed he told the press how highly he respected the Chinese as a civilization. “A great people. By God, first ones to invent gunpowder!” Norton nearly had a stroke the moment Freeman said it, and had to corral the female correspondent from the L.A. Times who had heard the remark to tell her that if she used the “gunpowder” quote, she’d never again receive press accreditation anywhere in the Far East theater. “Will I need it again?” she challenged shrewdly.

“Well, miss,” Norton had replied, completely unashamed of his outright act of censorship, “what do you think the Chinese will do during the cease-fire? Go home to Beijing?”

“Are you saying this is a Yugoslavian cease-fire?” she asked, smiling.

Norton gave a noncommittal shrug. “Your phrase — not mine. Look at the map,” he said casually. “What would you do if you were the Chi—”

“Norton!”

“General?”

“Pardon me for interrupting, miss, but you can hear this, too. We’ve reports coming in from Baikal that some Siberian fighter aircraft haven’t got the message. About the cease-fire. There’s been reports of strafing. I have to go and talk with this — this Chinese joker at A-7. Goddamn colonel. I won’t go till they have a three-star commander there. The bastards!” He looked at the reporter. “And that’s off-the-record.”

“Which part, General? The strafing or the three-star bit?”

He forced a grin. “The three-star bit. Don’t want people back home to think I’m… proud. What I am proud of is my boys.”

A lie and a truth in one sentence, thought the correspondent. He was proud of his boys, but as vain as any Manchu that had sat on the Peacock Throne. “I’ll just report that enemy elements are still—”

“Elements —hell! They’re MiG-29s and they’re shooting at my boys.”

“Are the reports reliable, General?”

“Hell, yes. We’ve got SAT pics of them rising from forward fields around Irkutsk.”

It was another half-truth, though the general didn’t realize it. The Siberians were still fighting, but they weren’t strafing. What they were doing was trying to shoot all the Marsden-matting forward air strips being laid down at a frantic rate by Seabees flown in, under Freeman’s orders, from Khabarovsk. The general was doing a little last-minute reinforcing himself.

Indeed, while he was talking to the correspondent, in response to an AWAC report that four of Yesov’s MiG-29 Fulcrums were flying in diamond formation over Baikal, a nine-plane mission of B-52s from Nayoro under his orders with midair-refueled F-16 Strikers were flying high, 35,000 feet above the AA missile envelope, toward Lake Baikal.

“Sleduyte menya.” Follow me, intoned Sergei Marchenko in the usual calm, devil-may-care voice that had become as legendary as his Fulcrum’s “Yankee Killer” motif. Suddenly caught in a series of buffeting air pockets, his left wing dipped, and just as quickly his tetka — “auntie,” as he called his rechevaya instruktsiya, or voice guidance system — came on, telling him to correct the yaw.