Chen argued to his Harbin cell of the June Fourth Democracy Movement, it should not be too long before the Americans would drive south from the Siberian-Chinese border — so that now would be the opportune moment for the Harbin underground to strike. It would be a signal and example to all the underground movements in China to rise, for, as he pointed out, something the American commandos could not have known was the enormous symbolic power of the Nanking Bridge.
Quite apart from the vital strategic importance that the bridge had held for the Chinese Communists, its spans across the mighty Yangtze, joining north and south after the revolution, had been touted by the Communists as the joining of old enemies, of two Chinas, into one — a Communist China ever after. Now the link between the two Chinas, the northerners and the southerners, had been broken.
“What do you propose?” Chen’s comrades asked him.
“The jail!” he said.
“To get the Siberian out?” asked another, not particularly enthusiastic about risking his neck for any long nose.
“To get our
“It will be dangerous.”
“Living is dangerous, comrades. She is our friend.” Chen said it to save face. Even so, he was lying. They were all lying. A long nose was a long nose, and in their view would not stand up to torture as well as Chinese. Friendship was not enough to move them. The truth, he knew, was that if the Public Security Bureau broke her — if she talked — die Harbin chapter of the Democratic Movement, and their own escape line through Manchuria should they need it, would be finished.
Chen gave them another reason that they should act. “We should begin to sabotage. Start the fire here, comrades — in
“And what if the Americans don’t attack?” asked a comrade. “If this Freeman doesn’t come through?”
“He will,” answered Chen. “The bridge is gone, and now we hear the Siberians have suffered a major defeat in the north around Baikal, which will leave the Americans free to turn all their forces south against our border and push the PLA back.”
There was a show of hands. Chen won the vote.
His plan was simple. They would pretend drunkenness and call on Chen’s brother-in-law Wong.
“Wong’s a turtle!” said someone. Against this grievous insult, there was no defense from Chen. Wong was, indisputably a turtle. But he could help, Chen told them.
“How?”
“We will ask him to show us this crazy foreigner who eats her own shit.”
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
In Harbin they would call it the night of the west wind. For the PLA guards on duty at Harbin Number One Jail, however, it would be the night of the hornets, for the Democracy Movement guerrillas swarmed all about them like a wild sea and seemed to be everywhere at once.
Within minutes of Wong having self-importantly opened the door to show off his power and to show his brother-in-law the foreign devil who ate her own excrement, the guerrillas were upon them in a kind of fearful ferocity, and the already grimy, yellow-bricked walls of the police station were streaked in blood.
Harbin was shaken to its core, and within an hour of the attack the PLA had rallied sufficiently to be scouring the streets in an outburst of officially sanctioned panic and revenge, the death knell of several guerrillas being the fact that to distinguish one another in the melee they had used cheaply dyed neck kerchiefs whose blue dye ran easily under the heat of their perspiration, so that even though they had taken the kerchiefs off, a stain mark was left on their necks. Less than half of the 150 arrested as Democracy Movement terrorists and “enemies of the people” actually belonged to the Democracy Movement, the others having been people, both men and women, unable or unwilling to account for their whereabouts to local granny committees or to the investigating police. Several were beheaded in public executions for no other reason than a cheaply dyed shirt had left a blue stain on their skin.
Ling and his wife were immediately taken out and shot in the tiny exercise yard, the bullets deliberately not aimed at their spinal cords, so as to have them bleed to death over a number of hours. Their small boy was sent the next day for adoption to Shanghai, but with it being known that he was the offspring of enemies of the state, no one would have him. He was then sent to the Fourteenth Reform School for thought correction.
But if Chen had predicted success in the raid on the jail, then his prediction that Freeman would immediately drive south couldn’t have been more wrong. Freeman, his Second Army now casting all its attention southward, was on the verge of just such a massive counterattack on A-7 and beyond when Beijing, seeing the writing on the wall, sued for a cease-fire in the U.N. on the grounds that, as they told the people, “the enemy imperialist aggressors on A-7 have been repelled at the border and we are satisfied. The freedom-loving peoples of China are not warmongers, and now that a lesson has been taught to the aggressors, the Chinese people wish to normalize relations.”
Without Chinese support on their eastern flank, and with the massive defeat of their armor out of Yakutsk, Novosibirsk quickly joined Communist China in asking for “peace talks.” Washington readily agreed to a cease-fire at midnight.
In the southernmost part of the lake around Kultuk, General Minsky’s troops, only hours before exultant over having helped rout the American III Corps, were defiant to the end. Their feeling of having been denied a victory because of Yesov’s failure to hold in the north was further inflamed by the news of the severing of the Nanking Bridge. Minsky was hard put, and indeed did little, to discipline his troops.
After having looted the American dead, they were now withdrawing back through the taiga like a plague. A company of them occupying their southernmost flank position sought to vent their anger and frustrations on anything and everything in their path. One such target was the small house in the woods near Kultuk that Minsky had used as a fire-control point. They burned it to the ground and then moved to the next target, Major Truet’s Charlie Company, where Private Thomis was dug in with the others, waiting for a helo evac that had been hampered by the midair collision of two Black Hawk choppers, one of which would have taken out Thomis, who now stood in the blood-soaked ice of his foxhole.
Though injected with morphine for the pain, and fully conscious, Thomis was unable to move his right leg because of his self-inflicted wound, which the medic and Truet and the others around him had quite reasonably believed had come from an enemy bullet during the earlier Siberian helo attack.
After the first attack wave of Minsky’s company against Charlie Company’s foxholes and trenches near the tunnels, the Siberians were beaten back. But Charlie Company was left with no more than fifty-two men out of what had originally been a hundred — several abdominal cases having priority over Thomis and others in the pre-cease- fire evacuation now under way. Now it was Thomis’s turn, but the taiga a hundred yards in front began trembling, snow sliding down the thickly laden branches from the reverberations of the Siberians’ machine guns. Amid all this, smoke flares were being fired for cover by the Siberians even as evac helos arrived in an effort to take out the last of Charlie Company. Thomis had to help himself out of the foxhole, Brooklyn and the man from Georgia both dead in foxholes nearby, Thomis using his M-16 as a staff to haul himself out with his left foot, but exhausted at the top, lying panting like a whipped dog in the snow, trying to catch his breath long enough to hobble his way to the nearest helo.
As the Siberian company broke cover under flare light and closed for the kill, a section of eight or nine of them, though white figures in the white smoke, nevertheless cast long, dark shadows spearing toward the nearest loading helo. Thomis knew that one good bullet in the right place and the helo would be out of operation, and from the darkness beyond the flare light he opened up at twenty yards, downing two of the Siberians, the others diving for cover behind the wreckage of one of the earlier disabled choppers. There was a sharp crack by his ear, but Thomis had already tossed two grenades at the downed helo’s carcass, the first going wide, blowing up snow and
