Force of Arms

at least put the relevant yellow sheets of paper in either “incoming,” “outgoing,” or “pending.” She had made a joke with the other two members of her cell in the Democracy Movement that the Malof file should strictly be in the “out” tray that day, but she had been sensible enough to leave it in “pending.”

The fact that it had taken so many weeks to get the democracy group ready was a matter of getting false papers for a planned journey from Beijing to the seaside resort of Beidaihe, 160 miles east of the capital, where it was still too early for holiday makers to be bathing off any of the three beaches. From one of the three — East, Middle, or West — it might be possible to get her away via a U.S. sub through the Bo Hai Gulf, as any northern journey from Beijing would have to pass through Cheng’s divisions spread out northeast from Orgon Tal and China’s Inner Mongolia to Manchuria.

It had also taken weeks to set up, because many of the Democracy Movement’s underground cells of three had been penetrated by Nie’s agents posing as eager recruits. The nurse, Meiling, knew that after the disappearance of the prisoner Malof she and the other two members might also have to leave the city lest they be hunted down and killed by Nie’s men.

It was a sacrifice each of them had to make, for parents and relatives would suffer, most of all Meiling’s, because she would be the person who, arranging for Alexsandra to hide under the dirty linen in the big two-wheeled baskets, would have to bribe the janitor to look the other way when the prisoner was transferred to a waiting vehicle. The janitor could always reasonably say he had seen nothing and be believed, but Meiling, the prisoner’s bed nearby, would immediately be suspected and her family and relatives questioned — probably tortured. But it was something that Meiling had long been determined to do. No one had asked, and she’d told no one but her parents, that one of the so-called “hooligans” and “antistate bandits” who had been shot on June 3, 1989, on Changan Avenue when the Twenty-seventh Army moved in with tear gas, clubs, AK-47s, and armored personnel carriers, had been the man she had wanted to marry.

She looked up at the clock. It was 1:10 a.m. She walked over to Alexsandra Malof and, remaking the bed, whispered, “Call me to assist you to go to the toilet at one-twenty. I’ll unstrap you and walk down there with you. You understand?”

“Yes.”

Alexsandra had almost said “Thanks,” but she had had so much betrayal in her life she always harbored a suspicion that she might be betrayed again. Even when the SAS/D commandos had cut her free from the Chinese guns in the climactic battle at Orgon Tal before the truce, she had thought that the Allies might torture her.

At one-twenty she jerked the cord pinned to her pillow and it rang the bell. Meiling ignored it for a while, then answered crossly for the benefit of any other prisoners listening and unstrapped her, allowing her to use a walker to go to the toilet. Though still weak from the guard’s beating, she could have walked, but this was better, for using the walker would mean that none of the other prisoner patients would expect her back for quite a while as the toilet was way down the hall and off along a more poorly lit hallway to the right of the hospital ward.

* * *

In a small hutong where the smell of cooking wafted up not far from the hospital and where the houses were no more than holes in the wall, two men were trying to keep warm on the brick kang, its charcoal smoking below.

“We better go now — you have the tickets?”

The other man drew the tickets — two of them — return tickets to Shanhaiguan forty miles further on than Beidaihe, but one of the men — a student from Beijing University— and Alexsandra Malof would get off at Beidaihe rather than Shanhaiguan as a safety precaution, then take a later train for the remaining one and half hours to Shanhaiguan.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Freeman walked into the psychological warfare section of Second Army, a unit that the general usually had little time for. He said they ought to have reduced Noriega’s sentence for putting up with all that “damn rock ‘n’ roll” the psych unit played at him through the loudspeakers in Panama. “Let’s see the pamphlets we’re going to drop,” he said.

Dick Norton had already picked one up from the table and handed it to Freeman. The general took an immediate liking to the cartoon of the detested old men in Beijing kicking peasants and workers. “Good. I want something the people can understand — won’t have to be highly educated to get the drift. All the minorities will understand the Chinese symbols, but wasn’t it the Chinese who said that a picture is worth a thousand words?” He looked up at the psych officer, asking, “Have you made a cartoon for each minority — you know, different national dress, et cetera?”

The CO of the psychological warfare unit shifted uncomfortably. “Ah, well, we thought that Han Chinese being the most…”

“There you go again!” Freeman cut in. “If I’ve said it once I’ve said it a thousand times — you keep thinking of China as one cohesive bloc. It isn’t! Never was! Why do you think the Great Wall was built? To keep those who wanted in, out! The minorities are our natural allies— millions of them — as tired of the Beijing empire as the Gauls were of the Romans — as the republics were of the Soviet Union. You don’t see the minorities or hear them in the mass of the Han, but they’re there — waiting to be free.”

“Yes, sir,” the psych major said.

“Right, now make a note, Major. The text is good, telling them we’ve come to free them from Beijing’s yoke. They’ll all understand the Chinese script even if they pronounce it differently, but as well we must have the cartoons drawn so as to appeal to every different minority.”

A captain from the psych unit who was affronted at Freeman’s assumption that he knew more about the minorities than the psych unit asked, “Exactly which minorities did you have in mind, sir?”

“Everyone,” Freeman said, and then he gave it to them, from memory and with both barrels. “The Hui, Manchu, Daur, Oroqen, Ewenki, Tujia, She, Li, Miao, Bai, Zhuang Dai Yao, Yi, Tibetan, Uygur, and Xibe. All right?”

The captain, indeed the entire psych unit, was silenced, and Dick Norton couldn’t help a smile — he knew that news of the general’s performance would spread through Second Army like wildfire, and within hours there’d be another notch in me Freeman legend of a man who, as usual, knew and had studied his enemy in meticulous detail.

“Norton.”

“Yes, General?”

“Get Harvey Simmet up here. Fast Tell him I want another update on the next five days’ weather.”

* * *

Harvey was relaxing, or rather in the process of relaxing, on his bunk when after some initial static on the tape he settled down, hands crossed in a funereal position, to hear the first few bars of Sinatra’s “My Way” when the PA crackled to life. “Would Major Harvey Simmet report to…”

* * *

The latest from frontline SITREPs — situation reports— told Freeman that his forces were holding their own against the massed T-59s and T-62s south of Orgon Tal, with only two of every one hundred U.S. tanks “tits up”— down— because of some mechanical failure. But up around Honggor, the other terminus of the front, the situation was grim. The PLA’s salvos of mobile-type 54-1 122mm howitzers thudded away at the dug-in American positions of Five Corps as screams from the swarms of T-70 130mm rockets rent the air as the rockets crashed down in deadly unison.

In defilade hull and turret positions the Americans’ M1A1s held their own, but on this, the northeastern end of the trace, the battle took on a strange and unexpected aspect of trench warfare from the days of World War 1 and the Korean War — both sides in a rough equality, Cheng’s armies having more men and more guns, the Americans fewer men and guns but much more accurate in their fire.