“Then how do you propose to get her?”
Nie poured himself a glass of mineral water. His chiefs of staff were good at what they did, but sometimes he wondered if they knew anything else than what they were trained for.
“It’s already been arranged,” Nie said.
“In New York?” the general asked.
Nie did not answer.
Beneath the gold and blue dome of the Temple of Heaven, Cheng, commander in chief of the PLA, experienced what his Christian mother would have called a vision but what Cheng could only accept as a fortuitous thought spawned by a schooling in Communist theory — more specifically from his memory of Mao’s rules of engagement When the enemy advances, retreat; when the enemy retreats, attack. But break all these rules if the element of surprise presents itself to you in another form. The Temple of Heaven was now invaded by long, searching fingers of fog whose chill invigorated General Cheng. He had a plan inspired by the news from the coastal weather stations at Tianjin and Qinhuangdao on the gulf where it was muggy but strangely still, and where a spiral pattern was discerned by all the weather radars. Prediction, a
Cheng walked quickly down from the Temple of Heaven along the raised walk, trying not to show his excitement, beads of perspiration forming on his forehead despite the spring chill. Once in the Red Flag limousine he ordered,
There was a delicious symmetry to it for Cheng, something that appealed to his deep sense of the yin and the yang, of opposites and of balance. As Freeman, before the truce, had rolled south toward Orgon Tal with Manchuria on his left flank, his tanks drove through the protection of a desert storm coming out of the west from the Gobi, and now he, Cheng, would head northwest from Beijing toward Orgon Tal then northeast along the snaking Manchurian trace, his troops all the while under the protection of a typhoon. American infrared beams and laser beams, degraded by the bad weather, would be unusable in the screaming, rain-laden typhoon, the sky darkly leaden, rivers swollen, roads a quagmire where infantry could move but not tanks.
The PLA infantry divisions would swarm over the trace and, like a million insects upon a buffalo’s hide, would kill it, rout the Americans. Cheng’s divisions would men keep moving north, their arms reaching out like scythes in a pincer movement on Freeman’s overextended supply line. Freeman would be cut off, an American island in the desert ready for annihilation.
If Rosemary Brentwood had thought the PX at the Bangor base was stocked full of anything you might need, her visit, with Andrea Rolston, to the Silverdale Mall revealed an even richer cornucopia of goods, and whether or not it was partially her pregnancy to blame, she felt quite overwhelmed. She had thought that the shops back in Oxshott in Surrey had enough variety to give you headaches of indecision, but in Silverdale there were even more choices to make. It made her uncomfortable — the noise, the lights, the Muzak, and the belting rock from a shoe store quickly put her nerves on edge, and she told Andrea to go ahead while she waited at the Bon Marche.
Andrea had been gone for about ten minutes when Rosemary, with the sixth sense developed as a teacher who, while facing a blackboard, generally knew exactly who was acting up and who was paying attention, glanced about. She couldn’t see anyone looking at her but nevertheless felt it in her bones. Or was it the anxiety of pregnancy? Whatever the cause, it manifested itself in a definite suspicion that she was being watched. She felt a tap on the shoulder, jumped, and turned.
It was Andrea. “You okay, Rose?”
“What — er, yes. I just got a little start — that’s all.”
“You’re right. I feel like a brontosaurus.”
“Well come on back to the house and we’ll put our feet, up. What you need is a Manhattan with lots of ice.”
“Sorry,” Rosemary said. “No alcohol — the baby.”
“Rosemary, you sure are the worrier.”
“I know,” Rosemary conceded. “I wasn’t like this at home.”
“This here’s your home now, honey.”
The shock of that revelation — that Andrea Rolston was right, that home would now be where the submariners lived — immediately made Rosemary despondent. She had known this was true ever since she’d married Robert, but the actuality of their move from Holy Loch in Scotland to Bangor in Washington State was now hitting her full force, and although she wanted to preserve the British stiff upper lip, she already missed Robert as if he had been gone a month, and despite Andrea’s best efforts, felt terribly alone.
Still, Andrea’s bonhomie was so persistent that it couldn’t help but mitigate Rosemary’s mood. And soon, Andrea told her as they drove home, it would be time to send the sub its “familygrams.” These were messages of no more than thirty-six words in which a man’s family had to condense all the important information on the home front. Rosemary tried composing one in her mind as Andrea talked on, but though she had taught the art of precis to a generation of English schoolboys, she now experienced difficulty in summarizing her thoughts — in large part because she felt so uncharacteristically lonely. But Robert wasn’t to know this, and so she struggled with the familygram. “How about this for a familygram?” she asked Andrea. “ ‘All’s well with Brentwood Junior. Made friends with Andrea Rolston. Feeling fine. Miss you. Rosemary.’ “
“Hell, honey,” Andrea said. “That’s only — let’s see, about — fifteen words.”
“Well there’s nothing much else to say,” she said rather lamely, and felt Andrea’s hand on her shoulder, grateful for once for the spontaneity of affection that came so naturally to Americans and that to the English was so often off-putting to one brought up on a staid diet of English preserves and reserve. Then as spontaneously as Andrea had been with her — almost as in the spirit of quid pro quo— Rosemary asked if there was anything Andrea wanted to say to her husband. Rosemary could use the remaining number of her words on her familygram.
“Aren’t you the sweetie?” Andrea said, and added to Rosemary’s familygram, “ ‘Andrea’s ready for meat. Can you bring home the bacon?’ “
At first Rosemary thought Andrea was talking about some dietary problem, but when Andrea winked Rosemary’s face turned beet red. “Andrea! Surely you can’t send that!”
“Honey,” Andrea said, bipping a passing motorist for coming too close on passing, “you should see some of the stuff those boys get. You know they pin the spiciest familygram up on the notice board.”
“Oh—” Rosemary said.
“No, no,” Andrea hastened to reassure her. “The guy who gets the familygrams pins them up with names clipped out after everyone’s read theirs. That way you never know who sent what. Course,” Andrea added with a gleam in her eye, “you can always guess.”
Rosemary was appalled by the idea, by Andrea’s infectious lighthearted view of life, and at the same time attracted to it. The executive officer’s wife certainly wasn’t going to die of ulcers. However, Rosemary, despite all of Andrea’s gregarious banter, couldn’t shake the feeling that she was being watched. But in the constant ebb and flow of traffic it was impossible to tell. She even watched those cars that passed them to see if they’d merely done it as a ruse only to drop back behind Andrea’s car a few minutes later. Robert had done the same thing in Scotland earlier in the war when he suspected that enemy Special Forces troops from what was now the CIS had been following them from one bed-and-breakfast place to another. It gave her no comfort to realize that the CIS were no longer at odds with the West, for she knew through Robert that after the Sino-Soviet split had been mended by Gorbachev and others that Chinese methods were often extensions of lessons they’d been taught by the Soviets in the bad old days, just as the British Special Air Services and U.S. Delta Force had trained their allies. Besides, it was a more confusing world now with ever-shifting alliances and old scores to settle — and a much more dangerous one.
