surprised his wife in the house instead, Freeman having been delayed on the flight from Washington. The intruder fatally wounded her, and she died a few hours later in the Monterey Peninsula Hospital.
Freeman could tell by the way the man — Chinese, in a jogging suit — was standing on the dune, staring out to sea, not bothering to turn in the general’s direction, that he was waiting for him again. Or was he one of California’s legion of ecofreaks — kill all the people but save the whales! And was the stranger the same man as a few days ago?
“Morning,” Freeman said, not altering his pace, merely nodding as he passed. The man nodded back.
Son of a bitch looks suspicious, Freeman thought, and immediately thought after that maybe he wasn’t. He looked lithe, wiry, and unusually tall. But somehow, maybe because of the smart matching jogging outfit and the Nike pumps — very modern — in some indefinable way Freeman didn’t place him as a party member. But then they’d hardly send someone in a baggy Mao suit with “party” written all over him.
Two hundred yards further on Freeman stopped and began some leg stretches. Love a duck — the Chinese jogger was doing T’ai chi, moving with that graceful deliberation that for once made westerners stare at the Chinese rather than the other way around.
Now ahead, a hundred yards further on up the beach, he saw another figure, and off to his left another appeared atop the dunes.
“Bad news, Dick!” Freeman was speaking as if Colonel Dick Norton were by his side. “One in front of me, one behind, and one on the left flank.” The sea was to his right. Boxed in.
“All right, you bastards,” Freeman muttered beneath the crash of the sea. “You’re going to have to come and get me.” Up on the highway he could hear the hum of tires and saw a Winnebago go by — then a bus and a motorbike, but they might as well have been on Mars.
“Well, Dick, I told you to build up the U.N. line — get things ready in case of a punch-up — and over here I’ve fouled up, my friend.” He was doing a few push-ups, during which he could see all of them at one glance. He stopped the pushups. Foolish to get his heartbeat up too much — could make his aim a little shaky. Still, he wasn’t fool enough to think he could get three of them. Two, maybe, but not three. He looked up and saw that T’ai Chi was now moving toward him, hands in his pockets. “Well, Dick, last time I saw a jogger with his hands in his pockets, son of a bitch was playing with himself. Don’t like it. You hear that, Sig? Time I played a little pocket billiards myself.” He knelt down, as if going into another exercise routine, which immediately reduced his target size. He felt under the jogging suit for the grip — had it, and turned the gun barrel out, still under the cloth, pushing off the safety. He figured T’ai Chi would be within good range in about sixty, seventy seconds, and began the count.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Five thousand miles away it had been a slow morning along the U.N. line. Everything was quiet, and only the four-man SAS/Delta troop of David Brentwood, Salvini, Choir Williams, and Aussie Lewis were unhurriedly busy, checking all their equipment from the transparent mags for the Belgian P-90 to the pencil flares and hand-held, cigarette-pack-size GPSs — geosynchronous positioning systems — they all carried. Jenghiz, the Mongolian interpreter-guide they had assigned them, was fluent not only in the Khalkha Mongol dialect that was used by three-quarters of the population but also the dialects of the Durbet Mongols who lived in and about the mountainous region north of the tableland between Siberia and China that the rest of the world called Mongolia. Jenghiz also spoke the tongue of the Darigangra inhabitants of eastern Mongolia, and that of the Kazakhs, Turvins, and Khotans that made up less than 10 percent of the sparsely populated country the size of Texas.
With Jenghiz they would be going in over the wall, not the Great Wall of China but the big rampart of Genghis Khan in northeast Mongolia, near the Mongolian-Chinese border, and over the two-mile-high Hentiyn Nuruu Mountains south of the Siberian-Mongolian border and eighty miles northeast of the Mongolian capital of Ulan Bator. It was a high country that, unlike the steppes and the Gobi Desert south and east of it, was one of fast-running rivers, deep gorges, and wild, windswept mountains, outcrops of larch and spruce hanging grimly onto rock faces, battered by the winds that alternately came out of Siberia to the north and Chinese Inner Mongolia to the south.
If they were caught, Jenghiz was to destroy Freeman’s sealed message. The cover story given them by Colonel Dick Norton would be that while patrolling the U.N. DMZ, the Pave Low M-53J chopper had lost its NOE — nap of the earth — radar, and in one of the many dust storms that plagued Mongolia they had lost their way, straying into Mongolian airspace, the Mongolian interpreter as lost for recognizable landmarks as they were. It had happened before, both in the almost featureless expanse of the Gobi Desert to the southeast and to those pilots trying to negotiate their way around the Hentiyn Nuruu.
But Aussie Lewis reckoned the Mongolians wouldn’t buy it. They certainly didn’t buy any incursions on their territory by the Chinese from Inner Mongolia, whom they hated.
“This is different,” David Brentwood assured Aussie. “We’ll be wearing U.N. identification — armbands, et cetera.”
“Yeah, until we reach the insertion point,” Salvini said. “But what if they come across us while we’re changing into our Mongolian garb? You know what they do to spies.” He paused. “You know what we do to spies.”
“We’re not at war with them, boyo,” Choir Williams said. “It’d be mighty embarrassing, that’s all.”
Aussie chimed in, “Maybe, Choir, but Sal’s got a point. We could be embarrassed for twenty-five years’ hard fucking yakka in some friggin’ coal mine!”
“Hey!” David Brentwood said, checking over the clothes they’d slip into in order to travel down through the mountains to Ulan Bator on Dick Norton’s, that is, Freeman’s, “preventive medicine” mission. David’s tone was older than his twenty-five years. He was cutting short the worry talk. “No one twisted your arms, you know. You guys volunteered. Norton told me that was the general’s first directive for this mission. You know the conditions. We get caught, we get caught. Uncle Sam can’t do anything. You want to Cry about it, don’t go!”
It was about the worst insult you could deliver to the elite commandos of Special Air Service or Delta Force. These were men who had gone deep into enemy country from the coast only a few weeks before the cease-fire to help a stranded SEAL detachment near Nanking. These men had been together on Ratmanov Island — had gone down into the labyrinth of tunnels to “sweep” out the Spetsnaz.
“We’re not complaining,” Aussie said. “Just looking at it square in the face, Davey. I think Freeman’s doin’ the right thing. It’s just—”
“Aw, why don’t you admit it, Aussie?” Salvini said, his Brooklyn accent at its height. “You don’ wanna leave little Olga!”
“
Aussie slipped an elastic band around two 9mm mags. “Don’t be so fucking rude!”
“Don’t take any pictures of her,” David said easily, smiling to break the tension now his point had been made. “Remember, no personal effects.”
“All right if I bring my dick along?” Aussie countered.
David Brentwood, essentially a shy individual, shook his head at the Australian’s unrelenting vulgarity.
“Just keep it in your trousers, boyo,” Choir Williams advised. “It might get shot off otherwise.”
Salvini thought this was very funny.
“Oh you’re a riot,” Aussie told them. “A regular fucking riot. If anybody’s going to be missing their member it’s the first Mongolian who pokes his nose—” Aussie stopped and winked at Jenghiz, the interpreter-guide. “No offense, Ghiz.”
“No off fence,” Jenghiz said, his good-humored smile of pearl-white teeth framed by a drooping black mustache. It made him look somewhat sinister despite the fine, bright teeth, and Aussie suspected that he grew it more to bug the Han Chinese who for the most part couldn’t grow one and who in general regarded facial hair as the sign of barbarians — except when one was old.
“Listen up!” Aussie said. “Ten-to-one I’ll be the first to spot a Mongolian. Choir? Sal? What do you say?”
Choir Williams, who’d lost and made money from the Australian’s obsession with gambling before, was careful to set the ground rules. “How will we know for sure?”
“Well,” Aussie said, “it’s not very difficult. If the fucker starts shooting—”
Choir and Salvini bet ten-to-one they’d spot the first Mongolian after the drop — after they started making
