Asian Front

Five miles behind, the Spets praporshnik was hurrying his men from their position and cursing his luck. Now the SAS/D team would know that someone would come to investigate the explosion and so they would be doubly vigilant. But then he slowed his pace, the small avalanche of rocks he was starting slowing to a trickle as another realization swept over him — namely that perhaps part or all of their equipment had accidentally exploded and wiped out the SAS/D troop, ending whatever mission they had been on. Nevertheless, he resumed his steady gait, the seven Spets hurrying down beneath the ridge line of one of the foothills. Whatever the situation, he had to make sure. And in any case there was still no reason for the enemy commandos to expect anyone so close on their heels. If anything the SAS/D team would probably expect a Mongolian-forces helicopter to investigate the explosion, and for a moment he was tempted to call the Hind now returning from setting the mine trap at the enemy’s insertion point and have it sent south. But then he decided against it. The absence of a helo would give the Americans a false sense of security — just what he needed to catch up to them.

“Speshi! — Hurry up! We want to be close to them by dark — before they get into Ulan Bator.”

* * *

Lin Meiling loved the storms in England. Some of her fellow Guo An Bu agents who, like her, also used the jobs at the Taiwanese consulate as the perfect cover for their PRC activities, complained unendingly about the weather, about the ever-changing skies, governed so much by the English Channel. And why the English Channel? they asked. Why not the French, the Dutch, or European Channel? But Lin Meiling cherished the eccentricity and the vicissitudes of England, though in the larger sense she detested its political system.

The party had given Lin Meiling everything, including her university education in Marxism-Leninism and her unshakable belief in communism despite the vicious attacks from the running-dog lackeys in the Commonwealth of Independent States. Once these had been a brotherly Union of Socialist Soviet Republics, now long betrayed by Gorbachev and Yeltsin and the others, delivered up to the altar of western capitalism.

Oh, they—the West — had tried to topple the party, too, through the agents provocateurs in the Tiananmen Square incident of 1989 when the goddess of Democracy was paraded by the degenerate counterrevolutionaries down Changan Avenue. Well, the party had flexed its muscle and shown who ran China after all. It was flexing its muscle now against the criminal Freeman and his gang. And the party would flex it against any lackeys in England who dared to undo the work begun by the great helmsman, Chairman Mao.

One could see the chaos created in England by the capitalists. The problem was too much freedom — the English and American disease that so affected the young. It even affected Trevor Brenson, who called himself a leftist. The British Labour party was about as leftist as a Tibetan monk. They had no fiber, no toughness to clamp down on the religionist disease, on the free-thought disease of degenerate democracy. Self-indulgence was what they wanted. Trevor Brenson, the Labour party’s much-touted shadow “defence minister,” still claimed he was “socialist,” said he greatly respected Mao, and yet in the bedroom his religion too was self-indulgence.

The party had warned Lin Meiling of what might be required of her to extract information from such a man as Brenson who, despite his Labour party protestations of brotherhood with the workers, was at heart a capitalist lackey. A woman to a capitalist was merely another thing, a plaything, and Trevor Brenson liked to play disgusting games, games that Lin Meiling was sure the great leaders of the party in Beijing would never indulge in. To have sex with Brenson it was necessary to remind herself that she was doing it for the party and greater socialism. If she could find out from Brenson what the Americans were up to in this war, then she could do the party a great service, and no matter her personal sacrifice.

He was late this evening and had rung to say he would not be back at the flat till ten. Liar! He pretended he was hard at work in the shadow cabinet when he was no doubt seeing his wife — the other thing he used from time to time.

Meiling undid the box he had sent her from Harrods — the great socialist store, no doubt. She brushed aside the soft, rustling tissue wrapping, as thin as rice paper, and saw a scarlet bustier and matching scarlet lace panties. He had signed the card, “To M, love T,” careful, as usual, not to use his full name and to write in a hand distinctly unlike that which he usually used — in the event that she might accidentally leave the card around the flat. No doubt the people’s store had thought he was buying the lingerie for his wife, and he would have been sure to pay in cash — no credit card traceable should he be under surveillance by the Tories or MI5. She shrugged off her status as one of his two women— or did he have more? — as easily as she crushed the tissue paper into a tight ball, pushing it into the recycling bag. He was very big on recycling. Well, Lin Meiling determined that when she got what she wanted she would recycle him. It was ten after nine.

* * *

When he walked in at ten he smelled roses and saw her sitting, legs drawn up seductively on the sofa beneath a low, soft lamp that turned the scarlet bustier and panties blood red, her long black hair combed forward, draped over the bustier like a tantalizing curtain. Beside her she had a tall drink, her fingers trailing up and down the frosted glass, her lips parting for a moment over the cherry, sucking it, caressing it with her tongue.

He dropped the briefcase and all but tore off his rain-splattered mackintosh, walking toward her, unzipping himself as he approached.

“No,” she said, and turned away.

“Please!” he urged.

She shook her head like a petulant child, rolling the cherry between her lips, her hair a black sheen whipping back and forth over her breasts.

“I’ll go crazy,” he said.

She shook her head again. “You’re too cold.”

“What-”

“You’re too—” Her hand closed over his erection and squeezed. “You’re too cold.”

“Christ — I’ll — I’ll warm up. I’ll take a shower. All right?”

She smiled.

When she heard the torrential downpour and saw steam emerging from beneath the bathroom door, she got up from the sofa and, kneeling on the carpet, one eye on the bathroom, she went quickly through his briefcase.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The first visible signs of Ulan Bator were its six high smoke stacks. Unlike the ghers, the round, canvas-skinned huts of the Mongolians that were kept warm by burning camel dung, the capital was heated by more modern methods, including coal and a nuclear power plant. The four SAS/D troops and Jenghiz paused to hide their packs, only Salvini allowed to take the small but powerful radio under his del along with his Browning 9mm.

They had a short rest and checked their flat-folding PVSs, or night-vision goggles, before beginning what they hoped would be the final ten-mile leg of their hike to Ulan Bator and to the capital’s Gandan Monastery.

Since perestroika and glasnost, part of the Mongolians’ determination to make their country their own was their determination to allow more religious freedom, though even in this, Mongolia aped Soviet example. The Communists, like those in Beijing, still hated religion for two reasons: Not only did religion pose an alternative to the only way, the party way, but in Mongolia it had encouraged males to take holy orders in the lama monasteries — over seventy of them — and because the monks were required to be celibate this had led to a drastic fall in population.

The Mongolian hordes, who under Genghis Khan had ruled all China and whose kingdom had included much of Europe, were now reduced to no more than 2.9 million in the entire country — a country twice as big as Texas. Freeman believed that this fact alone would play a decisive part in the secret request the SAS/D troop was entrusted with.

Though thoroughly atheistic, the Mongolian president, since glasnost, had made a practice each evening of going from the Great Hural, the People’s National Assembly, to the Gandan Monastery to pray by either prostrating himself before the Buddha or spinning a prayer wheel on the Gandan Wall. It was unlikely, Freeman believed, that the president, with such a small population, would refuse to let the American Second Army