Warshot

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

Flying side by side, the better to communicate while they observed radio silence, the two Siberian choppers, bulbous-eyed Hind A’s, taking the coordinates of Freeman’s position from General Malik in Nizhneangarsk south to Port Baikal and Irkutsk, beyond the blizzard, were halfway down the 390-mile lake. The overcast was still thick, metallic-looking and low, but visibility was at five kilometers when they spotted what looked like a SPETS chopper coming toward them. It appeared to be a Hind D but, given the near whiteout conditions, when depth perception suffered, it was possible that it could be a bogey, an American Sea Stallion — one of the enemy choppers that, coming in low over the frozen lake, were attempting to pick up remnants of the retreating and decimated American III Corps, whose tiny fleeing figures looked like white ants amid the black and burning detritus of their rout.

The Hind A pilot wasn’t about to take any chances, and had his copilot use the flashlamp to signal his comrade in the other Hind A — a hundred meters on his right side, nearer the western shore of the lake and Port Baikal — that he was going to warn off the oncoming chopper, even if it was a SPETS. The pilot in the other Hind gave a thumbs-up acknowledgment of the message and put his Hind in a tight right bank toward Port Baikal. The remaining Hind headed straight for the oncoming bogey, now only two miles away, but still indistinct in the blur of snow, and began a hard left-right, right-left swaying motion, signaling the other chopper to land. The chopper kept coming, and so now, Malik’s order in mind, the Hind’s pilot hesitated no longer and began to “jiggle” and “jinx” in response to his weapons officer’s commands coming up from the nose bubble below him. Switching on his “flowerpot” infrared suppressor, he fired two Aphid air-to-air missiles. The other chopper turned sharply, rose, then dropped like a brick, both missiles missing him, their white contrails now clearly visible to the fleeing Americans of III Corps beneath. But the chopper’s evasive action was to no avail, its cockpit disintegrating, the attacker’s undernose 12.7mm gun, slaved to the pilot’s sighting system, already pouring a deadly fire into the bogey, bits of rear rotor flying off. Now the attackers could see it was a U.S. Marine Sea Stallion as it fell hard to the right, hitting the ice with a whoomp, sending spidery fissures racing along the ice, its main rotors striking the frozen lake, wheeling the chopper around in ever-increasing circles until the rotor blades snapped. Six-foot-long segments of rotor flew into a fleeing American sapper company like errant boomerangs, making a heavy “chunka-chunka” sound, beheading and disemboweling clumps of U.S. troops trying desperately to cross the lake, their blood and entrails smearing the ice.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Alexsandra Malofs tongue was raw from licking the rough, wet stone wall of her jail cell. Chained to the wall, she had lost twenty pounds in ten days in the Harbin Number One Jail. On Ilya Latov’s express orders, her jailers hadn’t given her any food or water for the last three days. They were further instructed not to give her any until she told them who helped her in her escape from Baikal to Harbin and what information she’d given to the underground Chinese Democracy Movement which had aided her before she was captured.

Though she hadn’t been fed, her licking the condensation off the cell’s cold stone walls prevented her from becoming fatally dehydrated. But the stones were so rough, her tongue had become badly lacerated and swollen, and now her mouth was filled with the metallic taste of blood, her nostrils filled with the stench of her own waste emanating from the small wooden bucket by her side. But only once — during the moment of her arrest in the hutong — had she weakened, considered telling them anything. And even then she had been determined not to tell them about sending the message about the Nanking Bridge to Khabarovsk via Ling’s underground cell.

She had been afraid her determination would weaken with her body, but her refusal to talk had become the one thing that had kept her going — the one thing to which she could tether her sanity. Even so, Alexsandra knew that all the will in the world to resist couldn’t prevent her dying. Soon she must eat. But what? She had no strength left to try to catch the rats and roaches that scrabbled over her at night when she tried to sleep. And even if she could think of a way of killing them, the thought of eating them raw revolted her. She had managed to squash several of the cockroaches, but could not bring herself to devour them, the thought of their hard shell crackling beneath her teeth enough to make her almost vomit. Yet she knew she must eat if she was to survive.

One of the Chinese guards, whom she knew only as Wong, a middle-aged man — in his late forties, perhaps— took particular pleasure in her plight. In any other country Wong could have looked merely well-fed, but here in Harbin he looked positively rotund compared to the other guards. Wong smiled a lot at Alexsandra, and on the third day of her imprisonment — when he had come in to take out her toilet bucket — he had stood over her, holding a fresh stick of youtiao, the long sweet bread, undoing his fly with the other hand and pursing his lips, his gesture with the youtiao telling her what she had to do to get the bread. Contemptuous, she turned away from him. He laughed and left, making a snorting noise as he ate the bread, telling her that soon she would submit, that he had seen it all before. At the door he turned and declared that a prisoner would do anything for a scrap of bread, let alone sweet stick. It was a basic instinct. She refused to look at him, keeping her head facing the cell wall, but she’d been badly frightened, afraid he was right.

If he offered her the bread again tomorrow… She could feel her resolve slipping. Remembering the time she had spent in the hands of the Siberian secret police, and now this squalor and degradation, she began to cry. Half choking, she ordered herself to stop, knowing that her very tears were robbing her of vital moisture. She thought of the Russians starving, of her great-grandfather in Leningrad during the Great Patriotic War of 1941-45 and of how they had begun eating the wallpaper paste and…

Even with her fear of how she might be tempted to satisfy him, it still took all the courage she had left, but slowly she did it. Dragging the toilet bucket over, she removed the lid tentatively, the flies so insolent they didn’t even bother to move. Steeling herself, remembering how her forebears had survived, she stared at the putrid stools — at the tiny imbedded scraps of undigested rice and chicken innards. Here and there a speck of corn. If her forebears had found the will to do it — to survive — she could. She would not give in.

One of the guards who’d heard Wong laughingly tell everyone in the station house that the white jinu— “whore”—in number 12 “is eating her own shit,” had told his brother-in-law Chen, who’d laughed, too, and who was a blood member of the June Fourth Movement — Harbin’s offshoot of the Democracy Movement. Chen knew it meant that Alexsandra Malof hadn’t broken — hadn’t told her captors about the bridge message. But all evening Chen was grumpy, shouting at his only child, calling him a “little emperor.” “That’s the trouble with the government’s one-child policy,” he told his wife. “It turns them into spoiled brats. When I was young…”

Later that evening, his wife mentioned that Wong had asked another guard and his wife and them over for dinner. Wong could afford it, she told Chen. “While everyone else is on war rations, Wong gets extra food from the prison.” Her unspoken question was, Why can’t you scrounge more food?

“Wong ba,” muttered Chen disgustedly, his wife gaping. It meant “turtle”—the very worst kind of insult. She knew that night they would not be making love.

* * *

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

Personally overseeing the first prisoners brought in, Freeman noticed that their greatcoats were surprisingly devoid of snow, which was coming down in tiny balls so hard that it bounced off the coats, collecting at the collar folds.

The moment he saw that the surrendering Siberians were wearing civilian clothing underneath, Freeman got on the Humvee’s radio and ordered the entire Airborne to ignore prisoners giving themselves up unless they opened fire, in which case they were to be cut down. Apart from that, prisoners were to be simply disarmed and left to find their own way to the rear. “I’m not about to fall for that old ploy,” he informed Norton, “letting columns of refugees cloy your advance.”

General Malik’s planned attacks against Freeman’s flanks by his two motorized regiments were foiled by the U-shaped area of chopper-dropped mines, the two 155mm howitzers meanwhile laying deadly fire on