dirt, the second exploding in a purple crash by the helo whose wreckage suddenly spewed rivers of flame, two of the Siberians rising, afire. At fifteen yards Thomis couldn’t have missed them if he’d tried, the other four or five Siberians heading back to the taiga.
“Jesus!” someone yelled at the helo now loading its litters with the last of the wounded. “Look at Thom!”
Thomis was glimpsed in the smoke for a second changing magazines. Having tried to hobble toward the chopper, he’d found he couldn’t do it. The next moment he saw Emory, the black man moaning, his dark face shiny with blood draining down his left side. “Can you walk?” yelled Thomis, firing from the hip into a new rush of Siberians from the taiga trying to get close with their wildly spraying automatic Kalashnikovs. He heard the whack of several bullets hitting the chopper and was filled with panic that if the chopper bought it, he’d be left behind. “Get up, goddamn you!” he yelled at Emory. Emory was on his knees, blood still dripping from him, dazed, unsure of what was going on. “Go on, get up, goddamn it! Move your ass!” commanded Thomis.
The black man rose, and Thomis’s right arm wrapped itself about his shoulder. Emory would be his transport. Using the butt of the M-16 as a walking stick, they limped toward the chopper, fell, got up again, and now the chopper was rising into swirling smoke, its litters full, arms and legs sticking out of it from every angle, it was so crammed with bodies. Several Siberians were charging through the smoke. Thomis fired again from the hip, saw one man literally thrown back, another go down face forward into the snow, the third literally shot to pieces by Thomis’s last clip. Suddenly another man appeared on Thomis’s left, the smoke clearing because of the downdraft of the slowly rising chopper, the Siberian’s Kalashnikov aiming up at the chopper when Thomis, with one hop, brought his M-16 around like a baseball bat, knocking the man off his feet and falling on his face, butt first. At this point the helo, dangerously overloaded, barely managed to make its turn away toward the lake, and the last thing Truet and the other evacuees on the chopper saw was Thomis yelling something up at them, fist raised defiantly.
The Siberians had had enough, and moved on to Irkutsk. All that later historians would note about the “small action” at a place called the Kultuk Tunnels was that Americans had come under “repeated Siberian attacks during a last-minute evacuation.” Nothing was mentioned in the historical account — because no one knew — that Thomis had shot himself in the foot in the hopes of being one of the first “wounded” taken out, but had in fact been one of the last, along with Emory.
Major Truet had been told at West Point never to exaggerate a man’s exploits when writing him up for a commendation, that battle-experienced officers could smell a “puff” job a mile away. And so he simply wrote what he saw as the truth: namely that Private First Class John D. Thomis of Charlie Company Second Battalion U.S. III Corps had, despite sustaining a leg wound from the enemy and being under repeated attacks by the enemy on C Company positions, not only held his ground, but in the best traditions of the service, had thrown himself into the breach, fighting off repeated attempts of the Siberians who were trying to destroy the helicopter evacuating his comrades. Private Thomis had kept firing until he ran out of ammunition, at which point he used his rifle itself as a weapon in close-quarter combat, securing precious seconds during which the helo, with his comrades aboard, could take off.
For his “valor at the Kultuk Tunnels,” Private First Class Thomis was awarded the Silver Star. Only Emory, his head swathed in bandages now, and some said still suffering from concussion, opined, “Shit — that son of a bitch couldn’t walk to the chopper. That’s why he was shootin’ where he was, man. Otherwise he’d have been the first son of a bitch on the Huey.”
“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
“No, by God. It’s ours! We paid for it — at Skovorodino and Baikal. Or have you forgotten?
“But General,” interrupted the
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 naivete 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
