Asian Front

quiet moment with a friend, that he apologized for not seeing enough of her lately, for coming to her flat burdened with files and cares of the day. What he said next surprised her, because she had thought that when it happened it would be in the quiet exhaustion of having made love, the most unguarded moment of all.

“We’ve got the Conservatives where we want them,” he explained. “They’re sucking up to the Americans as usual.”

“Oh?” She was careful not to ask why, and looked out to sea, affecting disinterest, listening more out of politeness, her focus fixed on the vista of sea, land, and sky.

“Yes,” he continued. “Yanks want to overfly Europe-bomb China. I don’t know why London didn’t tell Washington to go take a—”

“Is that a petrel?” she asked suddenly, in what she considered a flash of brilliance, even more to convey a profound indifference that only encouraged him.

“What?” he asked. “Oh, yes, I think it’s a petrel. Stormy petrel.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I interrupted. What were you saying?”

“Americans want to send bombers to China.”

“Which China? Not Taiwan, I hope,” she said flippantly.

“No. Of course not. In the far west apparently.”

The west — the “far west.” She felt her heart racing — it had to be the missile site at Turpan. It was the only target of any real military significance. She took his hand. “It’s all right,” she said of his apology for not seeing her enough. “You’re with me now.”

“Yes,” he said, and stopped, looking down at her.

“What is it?” she asked.

“I love you,” he said.

“I love you,” she lied, and kissed him. She would have to keep seeing him after she’d passed the message to the Chinese embassy via the dead drop near Hampton Court. Besides, it occurred to her that if she complained about him not seeing her enough over the next week, she might get the actual target, though she believed she probably knew enough already.

On their way back to London they stopped for tea at Penzance, and when she went to the ladies’ room she had the urge to phone but had enough control to stem her excitement, her trade craft quickly reining in her emotional high, reminding her that in a world of beam-fed directional microphones that could pick up a conversation through glass across a street, you were never to use the phone to contact the te wu—the resident or head of station. Instead, that night she worked off her nervous energy by letting him try a half-dozen positions before he finally settled on one — rear entry, mounting her like a dog.

“God, I love you,” he gasped.

“You too.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Having sped eighty miles east across the plain with dawn only two hours away, David Brentwood, Aussie Lewis, Salvini, and Choir Williams knew they would soon have to abandon the truck, for come first light the Spets would be looking for them.

In fact the Spets, whose chopper had been gutted — all but vaporized in one of the F-16’s napalm runs — had had to walk back to Nalayh before calling in helicopter gunships, among them a Hokum, and this gave David Brentwood’s SAS/D troop more time. But they were still three hundred miles from the northeastern Mongolian- Siberian border, and to be in the truck come daylight would be asking for certain death. The trouble was that, because of the distance from the nearest American chopper base, a helo pickup in time was out of the question, even given the possibility of in-air refueling. The most they could hope for was a drop of heavier weapons and supplies.

In the early hours of dawn, before the pale gray was transformed into cerulean blue, the four SAS/D troopers approached a group of ghers, the round felt-and-canvas dwellings of the Mongolian nomad herders a welcome sight. They had deliberately chosen a group of six or seven ghers south of where they had abandoned the out-of-gas Zil, assuming that any search party would naturally fan out north of the abandoned truck, which had been heading northeast toward the Mongolian-Siberian border and not south. It was a calculated risk to buy time, for if the Siberians and/or Mongolians who were looking for them came to the ghers before any U.S. aircraft could reach them for a drop, it would all be over for the four men.

Apart from the chance of a resupply drop to aid a possible escape, the SAS/D’s only confidence lay in what they’d been told about Mongolian herdsmen at Second Army’s HQ briefing. For the Mongolian, long used to the vast emptiness and often rocky harshness of the steppe, to refuse a stranger hospitality was to be regarded as a cur — not fit for the company of humans. The problem, as Aussie Lewis reminded the others, was that in every group there was the possibility of a cur, or, as he more colloquially put it, the danger that some “son of a bitch” who’d had a “bad day on the range” might take his frustration out on the strangers rather than on the expensive camel or mare who’d kicked him. Or, if any one of the herdsmen was a good party man, he might saddle up and bring down the wrath of the authorities on the small group of long-noses.

The four men were now half a mile from the gher, walking down a ridge, careful to avoid its summit lest they silhouette themselves against the brightening dawn. A gust of wind quickly gathered itself into a spiraling eddy like a miniature tornado and David Brentwood hoped it wasn’t an omen, like the first trickle of a grain of earth that starts a smothering avalanche.

He tried to dismiss his fear as unworthy of the SAS/D team, but he remained distinctly uneasy, and as if to confirm his suspicions, spiraling clouds of dust could be seen weaving their way through the knee-high spring grass with surprising speed, lifting the topsoil with them, at times hiding the ghers from view. Brentwood hoped he hadn’t made a mistake, that soon they would be safe and he could have Salvini send a transmit requesting a drop.

* * *

If Brentwood hadn’t made a mistake, Freeman had. Assuming that Cheng’s orders for the air conditioners indicated a summer, not a spring, offensive, Freeman had allowed a battalion of lighter, tougher Block 3 M1 tanks with their new gun and modular armor to be given a lower priority on his Sea-Lift resupply convoys, so that the newest and latest tanks were only now leaving the U.S. west coast for the Siberian and Manchurian theaters.

Meanwhile, Freeman knew Cheng would be building up his echelons of tanks, Freeman’s G-2 estimating the Chinese T-59 to American M1 ratio at four-to-one. There was no doubt that the M1 was the superior weapons platform, with its see-through smoke and laser range finders, but no matter how good a range finder was against a T-59 and no matter how much better me M1’s 120mm cannon was against the T-59’s 105mm, the best tank commander in the U.S. Army knew that if you had to kill four tanks against the enemy killing just one of yours just to stay even, you were in deep trouble.

But first the M1s had to come up to strength, which meant the convoys had to get through unmolested. This was considered a cinch — after all, while the Chinese had seventy-five submarines, only two were nuclear. Besides which the U.S. SOSUS — sound surveillance system — underwater microphone network along the U.S. coasts could, it was said, pick up a whale’s fart and classify the whale by species, which was a gross exaggeration, but was a measure of the confidence the Pentagon had in the SOSUS. It could certainly classify any ship from a threat library of known prop cavitation sounds in the same way a mechanic could tell the make of a car by its engine sound printout.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Manhattan’s lights spread out below his penthouse like spangled jewels, Jay La Roche was celebrating his court victory — already drunk on champagne and ordering one of his covey of lawyers to go get some “chicken,” by