Asian Front

A man in his late fifties, though he looked much older, and Alexsandra Malof indicated they could.

“Very well,” he said to Alexsandra. “You take half the group — the old man the other six. Take their statements including your own.”

“I have no pen or paper,” the old man said.

“Neither have I,” Alexsandra said.

The major ordered one of the guards to go to the nearest HQ tent along the rail line and get pen and paper.

“Major,” Alexsandra asked, forcing a smile despite the grim circumstances, “may I confer with the old man as to how we might—”

“No.” The major looked at her, the hostility in his eyes so intense that she fully expected him to slap her. “You think that I am an idiot?”

“No,” she said, feigning surprise.

“You are awarded the Medal of Freedom by the Americans and you think this will protect you?” he asked bitterly.

“No — I just thought it might be helpful if—”

“You thought,” the major said, “that you could influence the old man and the others.”

“No, I—”

“Be quiet!” The major strode out of the room quickly, looking for the guard he’d sent. Alexsandra coughed and tried to say something to the next prisoner, but her beauty, her dark, silken hair, dark eyes, and a figure whose curves not even a Mao suit could hide intimidated the prisoner, another young male student.

All four of the guards were staring, gawking, at her. “Nimen hui shuo Yingwen ma? You speak English?” she asked them pleasantly. They shook their heads. Still looking at them, she made a writing motion against her hand, but she was talking to the prisoners either side of her. “This is the only American attack. They won’t attack along the Amur,” she said, still looking and smiling at the guards. “This is the real attack here. If anyone in the line speaks English pass the message down. The Americans aren’t going to attack from the Amur. This is the real attack.”

One guard started to wave at her, shaking his head censoriously side to side. Another, getting the same idea, jabbed ineffectually at the air in front of him with his bayonet. Their message was clear and they could see the major coming back, but by then the prisoners had been whispering among themselves, barely audible in the wind, the guards moving toward them threateningly, yelling at them, “An jing yi xia! Be quiet!”

The major and the guard accompanying him had two sheets of paper and pencils and immediately gave them to Alexsandra and the old man. The old man thanked the major but said in broken but very clear English, “I do not think we know so much, Comrade.”

“Talk in Chinese,” the major yelled at him, “and get on with it.”

* * *

Backfiring, the FAV leapt into the air at an acute angle, and for a moment Aussie, Brentwood, and the TOW operator thought they’d been hit.

“Did you fart?” Aussie yelled over at Brentwood, who ignored him, David’s eyes looking hard through the goggles for any enemy movement up ahead. He saw another mine, directed Aussie to it, where they dumped a grenade and took off again, followed by the unusual hollow sound audible even above the wind, which betrayed the existence of a tunnel exit near the detonated mine. Aussie made a quick U-turn, saw a “manhole” half exposed, like a trapdoor spider’s web, and braked the FAV as David gave the manhole several bursts of machine gun fire until it was perforated like the top of an old beer barrel given to the ax. They dropped two flash grenades and, following their boomp! tossed in their “skip” antipersonnel mines. These steel-spring-legged, spidery-looking mines were preset to go off when approached, filling the air with enough shrapnel to kill anyone up to ninety feet away. In the tunnel it would be even more devastating.

“No more diversions!” Brentwood ordered Aussie. “Let the guys in the tanks deal with the manholes. Besides, they can follow our tracks. Freeman wants us up front, fast.”

“I know,” Aussie said, his lips stung by the sand. “Just didn’t want any bastards popping up behind us.”

“I’ll keep watch!” the TOW operator shouted.

“You watch your front!” Brentwood corrected him. “You’ve got the extra height. I want you to see the guns before they see us.”

“Bloody charge of the Light Brigade!” Aussie called out, recalling the famous and doomed charge of the British cavalry against the Russian guns at Balaclava.

“FAV’s better than a horse!” Brentwood retorted. “And we have—”

“Sagger!” the TOW operator yelled. “Eleven o’clock low!”

It was coming at them like a curdling, spinning glob of gray spit through the mustard-colored air, and Aussie began his evasive driving, willing his nerves to hold till the last possible moment before going into a turn that hopefully would be too acute for the Sagger. But Brentwood got lucky— a bullet or two from the long burst of his.50 machine gun hit the Sagger. There was an explosion like molten egg yolk, a stream of blackish white smoke, and the whistling of shrapnel, one piece hitting the FAV’s front bumper. Aussie felt his left thigh was wet and feared one of the jerricans of gas had been hit. But the cans were all right.

“Oh Christ!” It was Brentwood. “Stop!” David downshifted and braked, and an even denser cloud of dust enveloped them from behind as the vehicle shuddered and slewed to a halt. Brentwood was looking back. The TOW operator still clung to the shoulder-height roll bar, but his head was gone, the shrapnel having decapitated him, his torso a fountain of warm, spurting blood.

They only had time to unbuckle him — his dog tags were gone — and lay him on the sand. Aussie got back into the driver’s seat while Brentwood used two standard-issue condoms to tie down the Browning.50 for the rough ride ahead and then mounted the wet bloody seat of the TOW operator and buckled up. Without a word Aussie set off again down the corridor — four miles to go and only God knew what lay ahead. He was struck again by the sheer bloody confusion of war. At this moment neither he nor, he suspected, any of the other FAVs, Bradleys, or M1s, knew whether they were winning or not. Now the scream of Cheng’s salvos passed overhead to create havoc amid Freeman’s columns.

* * *

“Well, Major?” Cheng asked. “What have you found out?”

The major handed him the sheaf of interrogation papers. “It’s a jumble of patriotic assurances,” the major said, “but several of them said that this attack of the Americans around Orgon Tal here is the major attack. This means the Americans’ actions along the Black Dragon are only diversions to keep our troops up there — that they will not attack any further along the Amur.”

Cheng looked at the four reports that made more or less the same point. “Where are the prisoners now?”

“In their cells,” the major responded. What he meant was that they were in four-foot-square, four-foot-deep holes in the desert earth covered with spiked bamboo grates weighed down by rail ties so that the prisoner, not allowed to sit, could not stand properly either. The guards watched three or four cells each and could do so at one glance. Already there was the smell of human excrement coming from some of the holes as Cheng waited for the major to play the small, cigarette-size cassette tape recorder that had been given to one of the guards. He turned the volume up, but the sound of the storm was too powerful, like a frying-fish noise covering the conversation — or whatever the Jewess had said to the guards. The major pushed “rewind” and slid the little volume stick back to the mid position. Now they could hear her — not well but enough to make out that it was she telling the others to say that this attack against Orgon Tal was the full AirLand attack.

The major saw Cheng smile at the information. Even a neophyte in Intelligence listening to the tape could tell what she was up to. She knew that everyone would give up sooner or later under torture and most would give up much sooner man that. She was a veteran. And so she’d concocted the idea that this assault against Orgon Tal was the only attack in the hopes of persuading him, Cheng, to move his northern armies south away from the river. She had asked the guards whether they had spoken English — which none of them did— then she’d proceeded to tell the others what to confess, but not all of them — just enough — four — hopefully to convince Cheng that this was the real attack.