with only seventy yards to go, desperately working the rudder hard to port lest he be sucked into the fast-flowing midbend channel. But the length of the raft took care of that, for it couldn’t make a sharp turn and its front end was already crashing and splintering into the packed ice of the bend.
In a flash, Aussie was racing through the ice jam with the painter of hide and anchoring the hide rope to a stake he was driving hard into the ground. Then without pausing for breath he hauled for all his might, the ice jam now helping him slide the raft, albeit bumpily, a few feet forward, acting like glider wheels beneath the raft, but then one of two pieces obstructed him. Suddenly he could pull it no further. He felt the impact of several more lumps of ice hitting the stern of the raft but paid no attention, going back and starting the Kawasaki on its side, holding it in neutral then lifting it up and in one movement pushing it hard forward and accelerating in gear. He was off the raft in a second and up the side of the riverbank, heading north of the river through the tract-less Dornod depression, not toward the Great Wall, which was hundreds of miles to the south, but instead toward the still- existent wall of Genghis Khan. He estimated it would be about 150 miles to the border — three to four hours if he made good time, barring any other impediments. Certainly the Spets would think he was still on the southern side of the Herlen River, heading east toward Choybalsan, rather than north.
Now and then he had to slow down on the rock-strewn stretches, but at others the firm grassland, still hard despite the thaw from its winter hardness, gave him a surprisingly fast and relatively comfortable ride. “No problems,” he assured the Kawasaki. “Not to worry.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
“An attack on the Chinese front?” Norton said. “General, I thought you said—”
“Never mind what I said, Dick. Get my corps commanders here for a meeting at oh nine hundred hours.” The general listened intently to what David Brentwood had to say — namely that it seemed quite clear from everything they’d seen that the Mongolians were in no mood to die on Marshal Yesov’s behalf, that the Mongolians, in short, had taken
“Never did trust that son of a bitch. How about this Lewis?”
Brentwood said they just didn’t know. He was as resourceful in the desert as any other clime that the SAS had been trained for. And they had dropped him a Kawasaki.
“A what?”
“Kawasaki.”
“Jesus Christ!” Freeman said. “You mean we couldn’t even get him an all-American bike?”
No one knew quite what to say.
“I’ll tell you something, Brentwood,” the general said, his eyes glowering. “Someone back in Detroit needs their ass kicked for letting Japan take over like that. Goddamn disgraceful!”
“Yes, General.”
“Course,” Freeman said, “it was Doug MacArthur’s fault. Got to thinking he was goddamn king of Japan. Gave women the vote then helped Japan build up new factories to out-industrialize us. I tell you, Brentwood, that’s what happens when a man gets too far from the good old U.S. of A. and he starts going native and NATO on you. Eisenhower was the same, damn it — kept holding Georgie Patton back on a leash. Patton could’ve stopped the cold war before it began.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Yes, well long as the son-of-a-bitch motorbike gets him here. He got a rescue beeper, purple flare?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well I want every chopper outfit west of Manzhouli to keep on alert so that we can go in and pick him up soon as he’s close enough. If he gets close enough.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Now, if he gets back he’ll be part of ‘Operation Front Door,’ the door, gentlemen, being the Amur or, as the ChiComs call it, the Black Dragon. Brentwood!”
“Sir?”
“I want you to take a squadron of your men in here…”
As Norton listened to the plan unfold, a smile began to replace his earlier apprehension. It was brilliant. Vintage Freeman. Daring all right, but still there was always the question, Would it work? After the general left the Quonset hut to relieve himself someone remarked, “I’m glad our helos are American made.”
“Right,” another said. “But the friggin’ beeper isn’t, and half the electronics aboard the chopper are Japa —”
“Quiet, here he comes.”
As Freeman began to go into more detail, Salvini, Brentwood, and Choir found it hard to concentrate. They were thinking of Aussie Lewis, alone in the Mongolian expanse. Special Operations had already lost one man earlier in the war in a commando raid near Nanking — Smythe — and he was now rotting away in Beijing Jail Number One. A Chinese jail, they said, was unimaginable. The Jewish woman, Alexsandra Malof, had been in the Harbin jail. To stay alive she had to lick the walls for moisture and pick out tiny pieces of undigested food from her feces. When she escaped, they said she was thin as a rake.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
In Beijing, General Cheng was about to switch off his reading light above the antimacassar-topped lounge chair that was the only luxury he allowed himself. He was reading transcripts of General Schwarzkopf’s press conferences during the Iraqi War. Most of it was routine stuff — silly questions by silly reporters who had no idea of the complexity of war, but one answer of Schwarzkopf’s was burned into Cheng’s memory, and he had it marked for the red box — the documents that would be taken to the military Central Committee. Schwarzkopf had said,
There’s black smoke and haze in the air. It’s an infantryman’s weather. God loves the infantryman, and that’s just the kind of weather the infantryman likes to fight in. But I would also tell you that our sights have worked fantastically well in their ability to acquire, through that kind of dust and haze, the enemy targets. And the enemy sights have not worked that well. As a matter of fact, we’ve had several anecdotal reports today of enemy who were saying to us that they couldn’t see anything through their sights, and all of a sudden their tank exploded when their tank was hit by our sights.
Cheng had made an immediate rush order via La Roche’s front companies in Hong Kong for the infrared night vision, particularly the thermal-imaging sights that could cut through smoke and dust, plus additional supplies of smoke thickener that had caused Freeman’s tanks so much trouble when Yesov had used it up around Lake Baikal before the cease-fire. The other thing Cheng was banking on was that delivery of the newer Abrams M1A2 tank, which had two gun sights — one for the gunner and one for the tank commander, to track two targets simultaneously, unlike the M1, in which both commander and gunner had to share the same sight. The delivery had been delayed by the widespread sabotage carried out in the United States from dockside to communications.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
The two U.S. destroyers, 430-foot-long Knox-class warships of 3,900 tons each and manned by 280 seamen, along with a Canadian Tribal-class destroyer, whose previous twin, angled stacks were now one in order to reduce her line-of-sight infrared signature, moved at flank speed on patrol, slicing through long Pacific swells. They were heading toward the last-reported SOS position of the disabled factory ship, the MV
