Ian Slater: Warshot

Cheng’s concerns ranged from the grand strategic implications of Siberia’s annexation of Mongolia to the myriad details that had to be attended to in running the world’s largest army, which, though not as modernized as the Siberians’ or the Americans’, was nevertheless four million strong. Many of the reservist cadres were battle hardened and wise after unofficially fighting to help defeat the Americans in the Vietnam War, older cadres having fought the Americans to a standstill in Korea in the 1950s.

But always it had been difficult for the PLA to keep within budget. In 1989, the time of Tiananmen, it had cost only thirteen U.S. cents a bullet to shoot Goddess of Democracy protesters; but now, with rampant inflation, the cost of ammunition had skyrocketed to twenty-five cents. Cheng knew this might not be a serious consideration for smaller armies, but for an army of four million, it was a headache. But Cheng was as resourceful as he was known to be cautious, and his connection with the American industrialist and newspaper magnate Jay La Roche was used to good effect, enabling him to buy U.S. supplies in the illegal arms trade through Brussels.

Cheng knew from his intelligence sources that La Roche was what even the Americans would call a degenerate — his bizarre sexual behavior had driven away his wife, who was now serving as a Wave, an American naval nurse, at Dutch Harbor in the American Aleutian island chain. But registered on the Shanghai, as well as the Tokyo, London, and Wall Street, exchange, La Roche, who Cheng plainly admitted to his colleagues would “sell his mother for a fen,” was valuable to Beijing. La Roche had assured Cheng, and thus the People’s Liberation Army, of access to anything they required, from bullets to nerve gas, which could be used against either Siberians or Americans— whoever violated Chinese territorial integrity.

Though La Roche always insisted on hard currency, Cheng had conserved brilliantly. While the Americans and Siberians were spending more and more on self-propelled artillery, for example, the PLA relied largely on the older-fashioned towing system. It meant that the crews weren’t as well-protected as they would be in armor-plated, self-propelled howitzers, but Cheng knew that once a self-propelled vehicle broke down — an overheated bearing, a wiring malfunction, whatever — it stayed where it was and became the delight of enemy artillery gunners: a stationary target. With towed weapons, on the other hand, if something happened to the lead vehicle, the gun could be quickly uncoupled, broken down into its component parts, and if necessary moved by sheer muscle power — as had been done over the mountains and through the swamps of the thousand-mile Ho Chi Minh Trail. Cheng much preferred fighting to penny-pinching, the constant battle of refusing requests for more money making him increasingly unpopular among military commanders, and he yearned to show his mettle in combat.

As he signed a memo denying yet another exorbitant request for extra uniforms, General Cheng’s foreign affairs phone began its insistent ring. It was the Foreign Ministry, informing him that the Siberian chargé d’affaires in Harbin, Ilya Latov, had conveyed the wish of General Yesov, commander in chief of the new Siberian forces, to meet tomorrow with his “esteemed” Chinese colleague in the border town of Erhlien. Cheng recognized instantly that there was significance in the Siberians having selected the Chinese town on the border and not Dzamïn Üüd, the town on Siberia’s Mongolian side, where the Trans-Siberian spurline coming down through Ulan Bator reached the Chinese frontier. It was a gesture of respect, that Yesov would be coming to him, not vice versa. Still, Cheng was as suspicious of Yesov as Yesov and Freeman were of each other. What was the Siberian bear up to?

So as to maintain face and not show any sign of haste that might evidence the anxiety he felt, Cheng replied he would be pleased to meet the comrade from Siberia but not till the following evening. This, he knew, would necessitate Yesov taking the Trans-Mongolian express, unless the Siberian commander wanted to come by air and risk the Americans interpreting an overborder flight as a back door violation of the cease-fire. It would be a long journey for Yesov through the mountains south of Lake Baikal, down through the Selenga River valley into Mongolia, all the time enjoying the ceaseless loudspeaker rattle from the train’s PA system.

Unable to stop or even control the PA system, Yesov would be subjected to the relentless, mind-numbing blare all the way down over the endless, brown, icy, treeless expanse. The great marshal of the United Siberian Republic would have to feast on the finest Mongolian cuisine of rancid blood sausage and slimy bowls of floating goats’ ears and yellow mutton. Cheng calculated that by the time Yesov reached Erhlien on the Chinese side, a neat town compared to the Mongolian slum of Dzamïn Üüd, and was given proper food, he would be in a much more conducive mood to listen to the Chinese point of view to whatever proposal he might have. Cheng certainly wasn’t going to cross the border to meet him. Apart from the filth of the Mongolian side, the mobile missile sites around Dzamïn Üüd, as part of the Gobi Desert defense, were all pointed at China. To meet there rather than in Erhlien would be an implicit acceptance of Siberia’s annexation of the Mongolian frontier. It would be noon by the time the Trans-Mongolian reached the border, and over the vast, endless snow that covered the dormant grassland of the southern Gobi, vultures would be high in the hard, cloudless, blue sky, circling, waiting for the slightest mistake of any wayward traveler. Already many refugees from the north were said to have perished.

Before leaving for Erhlien, General Cheng, unsettled by the new Siberian republic flexing its muscle in Mongolia, decided it would be prudent to have the frontier units in Beijing, Lanzhou, and Shenyang military regions in the far north of China, bordering on Siberia and Mongolia, on first-stage alert. The haunting fear of a sudden Mongol invasion sweeping down from the north across the plains of Inner Mongolia to Beijing was always a constant in the psyche of the Chinese, and foremost in the mind of whoever was head of the PLA. Indeed, the fear had been the reason for the construction of the Great Wall, the only man-made construct visible from outer space. Cheng, ever vigilant, would sometimes walk through the vast underground network of tunnels beneath Beijing, which had been constructed in the 1960s when the ferocity of the Chinese-Soviet battles over the disputed northern border areas around the Amur River had convinced the Chinese that a Soviet invasion was imminent.

As a final precaution prior to leaving the Beijing railway station for Erhlien, Cheng suddenly ordered carriages in his train to be switched. You could never be too careful. It would take only one Democracy Movement fanatic to kill you. He also ordered a fax be readied for one of La Roche’s Shanghai companies, requesting replacement parts for civilian air transport. Indeed, Cheng, though he could never admit it officially, avoided air travel in China if at all possible. He had lost more people on the People’s airline in the last year than he had on military maneuvers. In fact, the fax, which might or might not be sent, depending on his meeting with Yesov, had nothing to do with aircraft parts. But its invoice number code would tell La Roche’s company that what the PLA needed was a delivery of ten thousand 203mm, 102-kilogram HE — high explosive— heavy artillery rounds with variable bag charges. The 203mm had a range of plus or minus eighteen miles and could do tremendous damage in either a creeping barrage or direct target fire. Cheng also ordered that, pending the meeting with Yesov, a requisition be made and held for four thousand AIF, or anti-infrared smoke rounds. These latter were normal smoke rounds infused with denser particles which prevented enemy infrared scopes from picking up body and engine heat signature, which they could do through normal smoke. These AIF rounds, Cheng knew, might be a little more difficult for La Roche to procure. He knew that La Roche might not be able to get them directly from Belgian or French factories because of the ridiculous U.S. human-rights-prompted embargo on such sales to China. But then, La Roche would do what he had done so often in the past — have the AIF shells stolen from his own country’s army, either from the convoys resupplying Freeman’s Vladivostok base out of Japan, or from the stockpiles in Vladivostok itself. He would then send them down on junks through the Tsushima Strait between South Korea and Japan into the Yellow Sea, where the junks, ostensibly bound for Taiwan, could be officially intercepted by the PLA navy’s fast-attack coastal defense boats and unloaded on the China coast.