twice, and the man by the water seemed to hesitate, trembling, looking as if he were shot, but he kept coming.
The man from the dunes had disappeared only to reappear moments later, his head barely visible through the windshield of a four-wheel-drive Jeep Renegade coming straight at Freeman, who fired again to his left. The man by the water crumpled at the sea’s edge, the waves issuing over his body, their forward motion rolling cumbersomely toward die beach, the undertow sucking at him, and wet sand pouring over his legs back into the sea.
The four-wheel-drive was now hurtling down from the dunes a hundred feet away when Freeman fired one, two, three, four, five at the windshield. One of the shots found the target, the four-wheel-drive flipping onto its side, careening for a bit on the beach, making the drier sand squeak like the sound of piglets, its wheels still spinning at the sky. Freeman knew he had only a few shots left and ran toward the vehicle from the off side. The man was dead, and Freeman couldn’t see where he’d been hit until he realized he hadn’t been hit at all. The windshield was a milky spider’s web; little glass had flown out. Instead, what must have happened was that as soon as the windshield had been hit, turning opaque, the man had instantly stuck his head out far left to see where to steer when the vehicle flipped, digging deep into the dry sand, his head taking the impact full on and now lolling like a rag doll’s.
No one had heard any shots against the noise of the surf, but someone passing up on the highway had seen the overturned Renegade and the body at the surf’s edge. When the police arrived they couldn’t find any ID on the two men.
“You have any idea who they were, General?” asked a blonde whose figure couldn’t be disguised despite the state trooper uniform.
“No,” the general answered. “I’d only be speculating.”
“Go ahead, General,” she encouraged him.
“Guo An Bu — Chinese Intelligence Service — External Affairs.”
“Why would they be after you, General?”
“Don’t know,” Freeman said, “unless they think I’m another Subutai.” The general was staring out at the sea, not in the near distance but as if somehow he could see all the way to China. “Subutai,” he explained, “served Genghis Khan. Marched all the way from China to the Hungarian plain. At one stage his armies covered four hundred miles, took several cities, and fought two great battles, conquering Poland and all of Silesia — in less than thirty days.” He paused, oblivious to me policewoman’s stare. “Before that, he’d taken Russia. And before that, Genghis Khan had taken all China. By God, what an army!”
“General-”
“What — oh. Sorry, officer. No, what I mean was there’s a good chance it was politically motivated, but I don’t want that to get into the press.”
“Politically motivated, sir?”
“Yes, that’s what I think. Chinese don’t want me in the picture, which makes me believe that Wei — that joker over there — was right. Maybe the cease-fire over there isn’t worth the paper it’s written on.”
“You mean the Chinese were trying to assassinate you, General?”
“Either that,” Freeman said, “or”—flashing a smile—“someone in Washington!”
Everyone laughed. It happened now and then at a homicide — the tension had to snap. But as the ROC colonel was carried away, Freeman’s jaw clenched. No matter what army — when a soldier went down like that, having risked all, knowing the odds, it never failed to move him. At that moment he felt as if Wei were a son in a way that transcended time and borders. Hearing the roll of the sea, he felt that he had been with Subutai, that destiny had thrown Wei upon him to protect him — that God had used the ROC colonel as a shield and that therefore Freeman’s time had not come. Yet.
CHAPTER NINE
Sergeant first class Minoru Sato was fifty-two years of age, one year away from mandatory retirement in the Japanese Defense Force. The company to which he was attached was part of the Second Asahikawa Division, one of the JDF’s northern army’s four divisions. Under the constitution, the JDF did not get to take either the type-61 or -74 tank or the FH 70. Also denied them were the 155mm howitzer and the self-propelled 106mm recoilless rifle. By stretching the definition of what constituted “small arms,” the two-thousand-man JDF unit was permitted to take LAW antitank launchers and antipersonnel mines, as these came under the heading of self-defense. But for the JDF’s purposes the restrictions were not seen as any impediment to what was thought would be basically a U.N.- sanctioned observer team on a ten-by-five-mile strip of the U.N. ‘s DMZ. In any event U.S. armor and artillery were in effect “on call” should they be needed in some unforeseen circumstance. And at least the two battalions that made up the JDF force were equipped with top-of-the-line type-89 5.56mm rifles.
With a thoroughness for which the Japanese were known in their industrial policy, the JDF battalion organized itself promptly into a classic perimeter defense, with the JDF commander true to his U.N. mission playing no favorites — both the western and eastern sectors of the perimeter that fronted American garrisons no less manned than the southern side of the five-by-ten-mile sector where JDF troops looked across the Amur River into Manchuria.
The Japanese were determined to look and to be as professional as possible — after all, this was only the second time Japanese troops had been abroad since World War II over sixty years ago, and the nation would be watching, expecting them to meet the highest standards. Japanese pride was not about to be embarrassed by any attack — even by Chinese bandits who in this sparsely populated region of Manchuria could come down from the high country across the river and conceivably launch a raid across the river on the Siberian villages. In fact Beijing had warned the U.N. central command before the Japanese Defense Force had even been despatched that it, Beijing, could not be responsible for the actions of Chinese border brigands. The admission constituted something of a loss of face for Beijing, apparently conceding that part of the People’s Republic was not completely under Communist control. But Beijing’s caution about brigands was seen by Washington as a genuine effort to forestall any possible misunderstanding should a local warlord and his followers forge over the river and cause the PLA to be blamed for violating the cease-fire.
Freeman, on the other hand, dismissed Cheng’s plea as “Beijing bullshit!” claiming that it was a “goddamned facade, a ready-made excuse for the PLA to hit and run wherever they like and then blame it on some bandit.”
“Why would they bother?” he was asked by Washington.
“Because it’s a hidden message to us that says, ‘You boys want a U.N. line, fine — but be prepared to lose men in “border raids” over the next twenty years.’ Same as Korea. There are still people in the U.S. who don’t know we lose men every year in ‘incidents’ on that damn Thirty-eighth parallel. This ‘bandit’ cover is Beijing’s way of reminding us that we’re stuck here to garrison the U.N. line
“Douglas,” they said in Washington, “is just looking for a fight. Get him out of here. Fast.”
And now he was sitting with Marjorie on the eve of April the twenty-fourth, watching the JDF set up camp on the U.N. line. At one point he could do nothing more than shake his head in disgust and disbelief. CBN was already interviewing members of the Japanese contingent.
“Beautiful,” Freeman said, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “Look at the background for this interview — you could plot their sections, strong points, and battle positions to the nearest yard. CBN’s giving us an aerial shot now — Jesus! Why don’t they just send the plans to Beijing and be done with it?”
“Well,” Marjorie said — she’d long given up on Douglas’s blasphemy—”I’m sure it will all work out for the best, Douglas.” She was an “all-for-the-best” lady — she could have turned the battle for Hue into an “all-for-the- best” event. She was getting on his nerves, and he was trying to think of a way of telling her that from now on he had decided to stay up at Fort Ord. He figured his duty to his dead wife, to give Marjorie a chance to “look after you,” had long been fulfilled. Though he was watching an earlier taped newscast of the JDF near Poyarkovo, it was already dawn there and a phone call from a sympathetic colleague at the Pentagon informed him that Poyarkovo was as of this moment under heavy attack — U.S. fire-support teams being rushed from both the western and eastern sectors of the rectangle to try to help the JDF hold. The forward slope nearest the Amur, or Black Dragon, as the Chinese called it, was already under heavy 81mm mortar assault.
