have free transit across its territory into China. But Freeman held it as an article of his faith that the difference between doing it and asking to do it first marked a profound difference between totalitarianism and democracy, and for this he’d been willing to dispatch the four SAS/D men to see the president. There was always the danger, of course, that the Mongolians could inform the Siberians of the American intention, but it was a chance Freeman was prepared to take in the belief that the Mongolian president would be loath to put himself in a squeeze between Freeman’s Second Army and Marshal Yesov’s army, which so far at least was abiding by the cease-fire.
The absence of any helos in the sky was taken by David Brentwood’s troop as a good sign, and as Jenghiz led them through the silken dust on the outskirts of the flat Ulan Bator, the pale green foothills of the Hentiyn Nuruu took on a peaceful deeper mauvish hue beneath a darkening royal-blue sky that reminded David of the grasslands of the big sky country in Montana.
It was so peaceful that he was now viewing the accident with the trip wire as a blessing in disguise, for it had forced them to take the risk of a daylight hike out in the open, over the protruding fingers of the foothills down to the plain, a journey they would not have otherwise attempted till nightfall. It meant that they were now well ahead of schedule, and Brentwood thought of Freeman’s quoting the ancient Chinese warrior Sun Tzu, that an army is like water, that it must adapt itself to the terrain and circumstance. It was exactly what the SAS/D team was doing, using the explosion of the Claymore not as an impediment that had set plans awry but as a new opportunity.
Brentwood fought the temptation to be pleased with himself, but Freeman’s directive to approach the Mongolian president at the monastery in the evening fit in perfectly. If nothing happened to stop them they should reach it within a few hours, with Jenghiz leading the way across the vast Sukhbaatar Square in the center of the city toward the Gadan.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Chinese divisions continued to mass across the Amur, and with the weather clearing, though for how long no one knew, it seemed that only the threat of close air attack by the U.S. Air Force, particularly the presence of AC- 130 Spectre gunships firing their deadly, seven-barreled Vulcan machine guns and 105mm howitzers, had stemmed crossings by the Chinese troops. But while the awesome power of the gunships was part of the reason for a pause in the Chinese advance, there was a much more pressing cause.
Chinese officers were reporting deficiencies in the small arms supplied to the northern armies — dozens of men having been seriously wounded, some having lost limbs and/or been killed when grenades exploded as soon as the pin was pulled, others having weapons exploding in their faces. Under such conditions of substandard equipment, an advance was deemed unadvisable by General Cheng and an investigation promptly launched. At first it was suspected that La Roche Industries had wilfully furnished defective munitions — that is, until several grenade fragments were collected and sent to Harbin for closer forensic inspection.
Cheng doubted that La Roche, already in trouble in the U.S., suspected of supplying arms to certain countries against congressional edict, would be likely to jeopardize his lucrative multibillion under-the-table arms business by shipping poor-quality arms and ammunition to his prime customer. Confirmation that Cheng was right came when scientists, rushed up from Turpan’s First Artillery Regiment — the name the PLA gave to its missile contingent — determined that while serial numbers made it clear that the defective grenades had indeed been American made, they were not from any of the La Roche batches.
Further investigation along the Amur revealed that the arms in question had been among those stolen from American soldiers in brothels along the river towns of the DMZ. Cheng immediately ordered all such arms and ammunition destroyed, but by now they were mixed up with standard issue and the testing was a hazardous, painstaking, and extremely time-consuming business, as in order to find a single round that had been tampered with, every round had to be examined carefully.
The incident told Cheng and Freeman something important about each other. Cheng learned that the American general’s much-touted attention to detail was as great as it was reputed to be, while Freeman’s intelligence services, fed the information by underground Democracy Movement agents like the Jewish woman, Alexsandra Malof, learned that Cheng was not as cavalier as, say, Lin Biao had been in the Korean War about sacrificing the lives of his men if he could avoid it. In fact Cheng would rather pause, even though it gave Second Army time to reinforce the crossing points, and make sure everything was in order before he would strike. Of course it also gave Cheng more time to reinforce his side of the river.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
It was 1:00 p.m. Jay La Roche and his guards were met by a barrage of cameras and microphones as he made his way up the steps of New York’s central criminal court building, his head held high, looking sneeringly at the blind statue of Justice as though confident that nothing could touch him.
It took only minutes for the charges to be read and less time for La Roche’s lawyer to get him off scot-free — the reason stunningly simple. Jay La Roche had been arrested under the Emergency Powers Act, which ended at midnight, Washington time, on the day of his arrest, and under which a suspect could be arrested without being Mirandized. But having been arrested at 11:40 p.m. Alaskan time meant that he had in fact been arrested at 3:40 a.m. Washington time, that is, three hours and forty minutes
It was pandemonium in the courtroom, and even more flashbulbs and TV crews crowding the corridors than had been on the steps when La Roche had entered the building. As he exited a free man, he walked down the steps of the courthouse unhurriedly, pausing halfway so that his picture in his own tabloid would show him released beneath blindfolded Justice, who had shown impartiality under the law. He made a grave face about how he was of course innocent of the charges of trading with the enemy and he would have “much preferred” to have been cleared on other evidence but that in the “present political climate” during wartime he doubted that he could have received a fair trial.
Lana, still in shock, called Frank Shirer and as it was 1:30 p.m. in Dutch Harbor when she made the call, she woke him up at 10:30 at Lakenheath — all air crews having already turned in while waiting for a decision to come down as to whether or not they would be going on the China mission.
“Set
“Yes, absolutely—”
“I don’t believe it,” Frank said, and then made a remark about lawyers that all but turned Lana’s face red with embarrassment.
“I know,” she agreed. “I can’t believe it either.” She sighed. It was part pain, part resignation. “I suppose we were all naive in thinking they’d get him. The rich get richer and the poor—”
“The bastard!” Shirer cut in, his tone one of bitter resentment. It meant more than La Roche was free again. It meant that the divorce Lana had longed for — a divorce that would have been much easier to get if he’d been convicted— was now as far off as ever.
“I–I don’t know what to say, Frank. I—” He could tell she was crying. In the Dutch Harbor Hospital she’d seen some of the worst injuries of the war: melted skin where once there’d been a man’s face, a mangled stump of splintered bone and flesh that had once been a limb, and the smells— the vinegary stink of fear, the eye-watering stench of pus-filled gangrene. With all this she could cope, but the trapped feeling of being sealed in a marriage gone sour with no release in sight was too much.
“Hang on, honey,” Frank told her lamely. “We’ll beat it — Lana?”
“Yes,” she replied, but it was so desolate a response that he felt it in his gut and was left too with that desolate feeling that only a telephone can give in its awful illusion of nearness shattered by the reality of being so
