Murphy swung about, but the pistol was knocked from his hands. The Iranian, an officer of the Third Corps, was a short, thick man, like the four other soldiers now surrounding Murphy, their rifles pressed hard against his chest.
When the officer shone the flashlight directly into his eyes, Murphy instinctively put up his hands and saw his right hand was bleeding from where they’d kicked the pistol out of it. The officer gave an order and one of the men, a faded picture of what looked like an ayatollah on the butt of his Kalashnikov, bent down and retrieved the .45. The officer laughed. “You are idiot,” he told Murphy. “Safety strap is not released.” He meant the safety catch, but Murphy was in no mood to correct him.
“Where did you come from?” the officer asked, his tone sharp, bullying.
“The sky,” Murphy said ingenuously, but the officer took it as sarcasm, whipping the revolver across Murphy’s face. There was a crunch of bone, and Murphy tasted blood, like warm aluminum, running over his lips.
There was a shot — the officer pitching forward, knocking Murphy over. Another shot — a flare. There were several more — sharper rifle shots. Two of the soldiers near him dropped, the other two taking off. A submachine gun chattered, followed by a scream.
Out of the grayness beyond the fringe of flare light, one of the two soldiers who had run off was returning, or rather was being led back, hunched over, begging for mercy, the still-falling flare revealing the fiercest looking man Murphy had ever seen, dragging the soldier by the ear. He was a giant of a man in a white turban, not the kind Murphy had seen worn by East Indians but a turban like those he’d seen among Afghans. The man was wearing a rough, dark green lamb’s-wool vest over a loose-fitting khaki smock, his khaki trousers wrapped about the ankles with puttees, chest crisscrossed with bandoleers, his eyes ebony black, his beard and mustache as white as his turban.
As he pointed his Kalashnikov to the sky, his other hand, holding the prisoner’s ear, flexed, forcing the Iranian soldier to the ground. “Plane?” he asked Murphy, his gun still pointing at the sky. “American?”
Murphy knew he was supposed to give only his name, rank, and serial number, but right now he was willing to give the tall man his Instabank access number and anything else he wanted. “Yes,” Murphy said, “Americ—” His voice gave out, the effort to speak creating a searing cramp from his lower jaw up to his nose where the revolver had struck him. When he tried to “peg” his nose with his ringers to staunch the flow of blood, he felt a mulch of skin and smashed bone, the strange thing being that it was the rest of his face rather than his nose that ached indescribably. What remained of the nose felt numb.
The man in the turban flung the cowering Iranian soldier to the ground next to the dead Iranian officer and offered Murphy his Kalashnikov while spitting on the soldier. Murphy waved the rifle off, not sure he could stay on his feet if the pain didn’t ease up. The Kurd drew his dagger, the Iranian now scrambling backward like an upturned crab but unable to turn over quickly enough to get up and run. The Kurd, muttering an oath, barked out an order, and the man stood up. With one slash, the Kurd disemboweled him, then kneeling and with a few more quick strokes, the dagger flashing in the dying flare light, castrated the still-screaming Iranian, the next moment stuffing the genitals in the now-dead man’s mouth and returning Murphy’s .45 to him.
Murphy had heard now and then of Kurdish rebels, the bane of the Iraqis and Iranians alike, who, like the Afghans far to the east, had never given an inch in their fierce determination to keep the mountains as their own.
“Americans,” the Kurd said, “friends. Stingers.”
Murphy thought he must mean Stinger air-to-air missiles, which the United States had given the Afghans years ago after the Russian invasion.
“Friends!” the Kurd declared again with the same kind of ferocity with which he’d killed the Iranian. “Friends!”
“Yeah,” Murphy said, still holding his nose, his voice nasal. “Very glad—” He tried desperately to think of something else to say but couldn’t. Instead he sat, or rather collapsed to the ground, dimly aware of other figures, Kurds moving in toward him, as he fumbled in his emergency kit with the insane idea that he must get out his phrase book. Instead, his head weaving like that of a drunkard, he began holding the Hershey bar out to them and offered his .45 to the fierce one, who smiled, holding the .45 aloft as treasure. He said something, but to Murphy, though he knew the man was very close, the Kurd’s voice seemed far off, lost in a swirling vortex of explosions and the air commander telling him, screaming at him to bail out. Murphy thought he saw the tall warrior once more — holding up the strip of three condoms from the kit — then blacked out.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
Freeman had kept his word. With Cheng having violated the cease-fire the American general had unflinchingly struck back. Now it was Kuang’s moment. Turpan had been destroyed, and late the next day the Taiwanese admiral gave the order.
At 0100 hours, the moonless night wreathed in mist, Admiral Kuang’s ROC — Republic of China — task force, on radio silence, set out from Kuang’s home port of Kaohsiung on the far southwest coast of Taiwan. Steering a course on a northern tack into the Formosa Strait, as if the battle group of one helicopter carrier, two cruisers, two destroyers, and four frigates were following routine maneuvers up the 240-mile-long west coast of Taiwan, the task force proceeded under the electronic umbrella of two Grumman E-2Cs early-warning patrol planes.
The battle group steamed twenty-two miles north-northwest before Kuang, after being joined by one hundred invasion craft that were waiting under camouflage nets off the mouth of the River Hsilo midway up the Taiwanese coast, would steam due west past the Pescadores twenty-nine miles off the coast.
If all went well, this course would take the task force toward the mainland where the landings would take place on the peninsula north of Xiamen Dao (or Amoy Island). The invasion would be supported by other ROC regiments already dug in on Quemoy Island, which had long been part of the Republic of China, and which lay less than ten miles from the Chinese mainland and which Chiang Kai-shek had festooned with high-explosive cannon. The ROC cannon on Quemoy would lay down heavy artillery barrages on mainland China’s near shore islands less than two miles to the west of Quemoy.
For so long, Kuang mused, so many people in the world had seen Taiwan as the permanent home of the Kuomintang, after they had been pushed out by the forces of Mao Zedong in ‘49. But through the mist of the hundred-mile-wide Formosa Strait, Chiang Kai-shek had fled the mainland to Taiwan to carry on the fight. It was here that the next Asian “miracle” occurred when Taiwan joined Japan and South Korea as the three most prosperous countries in all of Asia. Admiral Lin Kuang, a one-time captain of a guided-missile frigate, did not remember this time of the economic miracle so much as the stories told by his great-grandfather — stories of how Taiwan was not to be viewed as home — never could be — but was an island garrison that, through the blessings of Matsu, the sea goddess, had been given to the Kuomintang on the condition that one day they would return, leaving the indigenous Taiwanese, who resented them so much, behind and reclaim their beloved homeland.
It was not enough, Kuang’s father, grandfather, and greatgrandfather told him, to be content with the luxuries the Kuomintang had wrought from their industry and the labor of the indigenous Taiwanese, and the wealth the millions of Chinese emigres had produced. Nor was it sufficient to dwell on the fabulous wealth of the treasures they had brought with them—”plundered,” the Red Chinese said — from Beijing’s Forbidden City. Such treasures must one day return to China, or else how could the spirits of their ancestors who had borne such travail ever rest in peace?
Lin Kuang remembered how his great-grandfather recalled the humiliation of having been driven into the sea by Mao’s forces and of everyone in the world sounding the death knell of the Kuomintang as the beleaguered refugees clambered ashore on Taiwan. Even the Americans who had given them so much aid finally did not believe they would ever see the Kuomintang on mainland China again.
But then when the North Koreans had invaded the South, the American response to the invasion resulted in Beijing suddenly having to shift its military away from Taiwan in order to meet the threat of the Americans in Korea, and quite suddenly made the old Kuomintang dream realizable. Not only were the descendants of the Kuomintang keen to act, but all those who suddenly saw the vast prize of China before them. And to carry out the promise, the superbly equipped Republic of China forces were ever ready, and now poised to attack the Communists’ eastern flank across the straits. With Freeman in the west and the ROC in the east, Cheng would find himself in a two-front
