can deal with them. Your job will be to get to that door — blow it open and make one godawful mess of that place. If you hit the large fuel tanks — also under cover inside the site because we can’t see any of them outside — you won’t have to worry about anything else. That’ll do the job.”
“And how about us, sir?” a recently graduated recruit ventured.
“You run, you silly bastard!” Aussie said.
There was raucous laughter that brought a smile to Freeman’s face. He couldn’t ask for better morale. The ability of the Australian to spring back from his low mood about his woman and to get his mind back on the task ahead was just the kind of quality he, Freeman, expected in the SAS/D, and they had never disappointed him.
“Very well, gentlemen. Godspeed and good luck.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
One hundred miles off the mainland, Admiral Lin Kuang waited with his Taiwanese fleet, not only because the last of the typhoon had yet to pass through the strait but because he knew that as long as the Tibetan ICBM site was intact, any attack by him against the mainland would result in his fleet being rained upon by the conventional warheads of the ICBMs. On one hand he felt that he was letting his allies, the Americans, down, for what they needed now was an attack on China’s southern provinces by Kuang to draw divisions away from Cheng’s offensive against the trace. And the admiral, or rather his envoys, had promised Freeman support. But it was a matter of timing. There was no point in risking the fleet now until Freeman’s forces had silenced the hidden launch site in Tibet. And if Freeman’s men failed, then what use would the fleet be?
He asked for SITREPs from his agents in Beijing and was told that despite the martial law imposed there, people seemed generally well behaved. But how much this good behavior was merely for show and not real could not be easily ascertained. The admiral knew that his mainland brothers and sisters had had long training in self- discipline and in parroting the official party line if they knew what was good for them. Many of the older ones had passed through the “Cultural Revolution,” an orgy of spite, envy, and hatred that swept the land like locusts, and attacked religious shrines and, among millions of others, had victimized and killed those who dared make the slightest protest against Mao’s line.
The other reason, the agents suspected, for the acquiescence of the population, not only in Beijing but even as far north as Harbin, was the ruthless efficiency of Chairman Nie’s Public Security Bureau. But Admiral Kuang knew if all the secret dissidents managed to come together simultaneously, and then were given some real encouragement, they would pose a considerable problem for the authorities in Beijing. But now — following the calamitous typhoon — a spirit of cooperation was alive and well as people began helping one another rebuild some of the worst-hit areas. It was for this reason Freeman had warned his air force not to bomb Beijing or any Chinese city for that matter. He knew that with high-explosive bombs ripping the earth up all around you, you do not care who is dropping the bombs, only that whoever is doing it is your enemy.
Such cooperation between workers and students, however, worried Nie, who hadn’t rested easily since Tiananmen Square on the night of June 3, 1989. What had worried him and the “old men” running the party was that for the first time in a long while workers had marched with, and not against, the students. And it was workers in the main, not students, who had killed the trapped members of the PLA. Thus a prime aim of Nie’s internal policy was to drive a wedge between the students and workers, to spread lies and set one against the other. If only he could make the Malof woman publicly confess her crimes as a foreign agent provocateur, then her role as a rallying point for the dissidents, be they workers or students, would vanish. For Nie it would be a major victory. He would feed her well and have the experts from the Beijing film studios make her up as if no pressure had been applied—
As he walked, hand behind his back, past the solitary cells, his eyes began to water from the astringent odor of urine and feces. When the guard opened number seventeen cell, the light barely penetrated from the few small holes in the brick high on the stone wall. Immediately, Nie struck a match and lit his American cigarette to try to smother the stench.
Alexsandra had never smoked — she had neither the desire nor the money when she worked as a waitress in the Jewish autonomous region — but right now she craved a cigarette — to taste something, anything other than the fetid vegetable slop she was given once a day and the polluted water from the rusted-out plumbing of the prison that officially had been slated for demolition ten years ago. Her legs were bloody, as female prisoners were issued neither tampons nor even the large sanitary napkins available to the better-behaved prisoners. They had thrown her some rags, and now in the corner she held her legs tightly against her, yet her eyes were as defiant as those of a trapped animal.
“It is your wish to live like this?” Nie said very formally, blowing out a long trail of smoke, its dark and pale blues streaming in strange currents about the cell. He heard her breathe in the smoke and savor the alternate odor.
“Would you like a cigarette?” Nie asked. “And good food, eh? This would be nice.”
She told him he was a turtle and that all his forebears had been turtles. Nie was so incensed by the insult he threw down the cigarette on the cold wet flagstone of the cell, stamped it out, and yelled, “You will not have this cigarette or another. You will not have — things to keep your wretched body clean. Or fresh water until you confess. I–I could beat you!”
“Then beat me!” This was a brave but foolish thing for Alexsandra to say, for her having challenged Nie in front of the guard meant that Nie must now follow through with his threat or lose face.
“Beat her!” he ordered the guard. “Do what you like with her.” But the guard was no fool, which is why he had been put in charge of looking after such an important political criminal. The guard understood that what Chairman Nie meant was, beat her by all means but not about the face or forearms or anywhere else where, during the trial that would follow her public confession, bruises could be seen by the cameras. That she would yield, the guard had no doubt. As the echo of Nie’s footsteps faded, Alexsandra turned her face to the wall. She wanted to cry, but tears would not come — it was beyond that.
The guard returned — a tall man for a Chinese — and he brought her a whole packet of tampons and a bucket of fresh water. “Clean yourself. You look disgusting.” She grabbed the tampons, clutching them to her.
“Ha!” he laughed. “Ha!” But her tone had had the desired effect. “I’m going now,” he said, looking down at her, and then with a most childish gesture he wiggled a finger at her. “But I’ll be back!” And with that he used his other hand to massage his groin. “Okay?”
She raised her head from the bucket, which she had leaned upon with one arm, using the other to sweep her long hair away from her face. She thanked God she still had her hair, because she knew that as long as they left her hair alone she would be alive. They daren’t have her with a shaven head in a show trial, for it would tell the gallery how far they had humiliated her before bringing her to trial.
“Is that,” she began, looking at the guard’s obscene gestures, “what Comrade Mao taught you to do to women?’
“Ha, ha!” the guard said, in a forced tone of
“His sayings also?” Alexsandra pressed gamely. “Are they dead, too?”
“Ha, ha!” he said, and was gone. If he came back to rape her, she knew he would bring others. That last “ha ha” about Chairman Mao’s sayings would need some strength through numbers to overcome any scruples he might otherwise have. The fools — did they really think raping her would make her confess? She had been raped before in the jails at Lake Baikal and in Harbin. She had almost starved to death, too, but had survived by going through her feces to extract the undigested pieces of corn. Who did they think she was? See how the bully of a guard was shamed into leaving a moment ago? In any case she knew he would not assault her while she was still bleeding. He meant later, after her period had passed.
Within an hour of Freeman’s speaking to his eighty SAS/D troops, the long-haul C-130H-30 Hercules was roaring down Orgon Tal’s marsden matting runway, the plane’s four four-and-a-half-thousand-horsepower Allison 501 turboprops nearing full throttle, its crew of four strapped in for takeoff. The eighty SAS/D troopers, forty to a
