“Peking doesn’t seem to know it,” Eisner remarked. “We should call such actions only an exchange of mutual courtesies, mon colonel.”
“How about those garrisons at Tien-pao, mon colonel?” I asked, thinking of the thirty thousand Chinese troops.
“They have no transports,” the colonel explained. “Fifteen trucks and some derelict jeeps are all they have. The troops are armed mostly with vintage Russian rifles and for the present their ammo is restricted to about five cartridges per weapon.”
“That’s comforting,” said Karl.
“So keep quiet until you arrive at objective “A” and the garrisons won’t be able to interfere with you in force.”
He folded the map and handed it to me. “This is the only map covering the operation,” he advised me. “Prepare two copies for yourself, then bring it back. Don’t bungle this job, for if you do, you might as well remain in China and go down lighting.”
“I understand that, mon colonel.”
“You will be wearing civilian clothes, of course—”
“Of course.”
Of course, I thought. No papers, no identity tags, no army rations, only native pajamas and foodstuffs.
“What will you do about possible casualties, Wagemueller?” he asked cagily.
“The Chinese will find neither corpses nor graves, mon colonel.”
“So be it.”
He extended his hand. We avoided discussing the gory details.
Corpses were to be destroyed either by grenades or by flamethrowers: blasted to bits, burned beyond recognition, and should there be gravely wounded comrades who could not march while the enemy was pressing us, it was also our duty to turn them into corpses, so that they wouldn’t turn into evidence in Chinese hands.
“You will have a good chance to succeed,” the colonel said before dismissing us. “I have selected your guides personally. They know the area well and they are also professionals.”
We code-named the operation “Longhand” because of its far-reaching implications.
“Here we go, one hundred against half a billion,” Schulze remarked, gazing back toward the moonlit ridges of Bao Lac. Ahead of us loomed the sinister hills of China. We crossed the frontier following the remote trail which native warriors must have cut across the virgin woods decades before. It must have been maintained by smugglers, then cleared again, probably by Nationalist warring parties. After a few miles on the trail I knew that Colonel Houssong’s “blueprint for aggression” had been based on precise data, the result of exhaustive intelligence and even aerial reconnaissance. The colonel did not believe in venturing an important job on the spin of a coin. And since our lives depended on his meticulous exactitude, we indeed appreciated it.
The company advanced in a long line, the men keeping about ten paces apart: pajama-clad dark shapes, wearing coolie hats and crude rubber sandals fashioned from old automobile tires. Everything had been blacked with soot, our faces, our hands, the weapons; nothing glinted in the bright moonlight.
Although we carried only the absolute minimum, the load on each man weighed about fifteen kilos. That included a submachine gun with ten spare mags, food, burlap, a small medical kit, magnetic compass, flashlight, bush knife, mosquito net, and hand grenades. The field gear of Gruppe Drei was divided among the troops.
Gruppe Drei was our advance guard, the “trailblazers,” the unit on which our existence depended. It consisted of only thirty men but they were specially trained. Every member of the group had completed a rigorous six-month training schedule that included bomb detection and demolition, trap detection, tracking, and general woodsmanship. Their tutors were some of the foremost experts of antiguerrilla warfare, both French and foreign: an ex-British army captain who had fought the Communist insurgents for three years in Malaya and a former Japanese colonel, the one-time commander of a counterintelligence unit of the Kempe Tai (former Japanese Secret Police) during the war. Both men wore the uniform of a colonel of the Colonial army but they did not formally belong to the armed forces and received civilian wages, as per contract.
A hundred meters ahead of us marched the advance guard led by Krebitz. Still ahead of them marched four Nationalist Chinese officers, one of them a former guide to the forces of Chiang Kai-shek. They knew the area well. Some of the last Nationalist battles had been fought in the province before the vanquished party was compelled to withdraw into the jungles of northern Burma. Colonel Houssong did not inform me how and where he had gotten hold of the Nationalist Chinese. “You may trust them,” was all he said, “a well-known American general has vouched for them.”
Being well aware of the utter corruption which then dominated the Nationalist army, and which contributed greatly to the final collapse of Nationalist China, I reserved my opinion on the matter. As a rule we trusted no Chinese or Indochinese and we also had some misgivings about the judgment of American generals. The Americans had poured into China money and weapons enough to conquer the earth yet they were unable to preserve a single square kilometer of the “Heavenly Empire” that was now gradually turning into a perfect hell.
I had asked Colonel Houssong if our Chinese companions had been informed about “Longhand” in detail.
“I understand what you mean,” he had said, “but rest assured. I did not consider it necessary to reveal all. You may tell them as much as possible under the circumstances.”
My sigh of relief must have been audible for he had added reassuringly, “I am sure they will be all right.”
“They had better be indeed.”
He had laughed and” slapped me on the shoulder in a friendly manner. “I know you wouldn’t trust Chiang Kai-shek himself, Wagemueller.”
“I wouldn’t trust Jesus Christ on a mission like this, mon colonel. The slightest indiscretion and—”
“Would you prefer to go on your own?”
“Without reservation.”
“It would be much more difficult.”
“We may have to climb more hills but we won’t be jittery all the way.”
“Will you be jittery because of them?”
“By your leave, mon colonel, I shall make my own security arrangements.”
“Alors, make them, but return safely.”
So we kept our Chinese quintet under close surveillance, and I made sure that they knew as little as possible of our general plan. The Nationalist Chinese officers could study our immediate objective but nothing else. One of them who spoke good French must have noticed our polite but reserved attitude, for he spoke to me shortly after we had crossed the border.
“You are not sure about our capability to lead this expedition, are you?” he asked me with a hint of sadness in his voice.
“Major Kwang,” I replied in a firm voice, “I am going to be frank with you. We met only five days ago. We don’t know you or where you come from.”
“Colonel Houssong knows,” he ventured. “The colonel is in Hanoi, Major. We are on the way to hell—and back, let us hope. But let me ask you something. Have you known your companions for a long time?”
“I know only Major Cheng,” he replied. “We used to serve in the same battalion. The others we met in the colonel’s office.”
“You see, Major. They are aliens even to you—”
“But the colonel surely knows them.”
“The colonel is only a human being, Major Kwang. Human beings are fallible.”
“The colonel, the generals, the prime minister,” Eisner cut in. “We have been around here for a long time, Major Kwang. We have outlived the average life expectancy of Legionnaires, and I think we are still around because we took nothing for granted—never!” The major smiled politely. “Then you regard every stranger guilty until proven innocent?”
“We regard only one thing, Major—our own survival factors,” I said. “We learned that a long time ago: to think, to plan, to calculate, to evaluate and act—everything related to survival factors. Friendship, relations, rank, sentiments are all only of secondary importance. We are living on borrowed time and abiding by the law of probability, which is the only law we carefully observe. Had we done otherwise, we would now be dead heroes instead of surviving experts. For that’s what we really are, Major Kwang: neither invincible daredevils nor supermen nor heroes—only survival experts. But survival is the most important thing in any war.”
