Freeman nodded. He was looking due east as if he could see through the terrible fighting now in progress near Honggor, where one of Freeman’s Bradley fighting-vehicle battalions had made a stunning counterattack using TOW missiles and their rapidly firing, armor-piercing 30mm cannon. He was looking as if he could see through the dust wall and mountain fastness of Manchuria all the way to the sea. “Dick, have you ever been seasick? I mean truly seasick, when even the very thought, the merest suggestion, of food made you want to throw up? Where the seas were so mountainous, so full of piss and fury that you could imagine death as the only release?”
“Can’t say I have, General — not that sick.”
“You know that’s how many of our boys felt on D day, after that June storm.” He turned to Norton. “You realize that Doug MacArthur threw up his guts the night before Inchon?”
“No, sir, I didn’t.”
“Well I do,” Freeman said, and put his hand on his subordinate’s shoulder. “Dick, let me tell you something. When you feel like that, the thing you pray for, desire most in the world, isn’t a good woman or a good cigar or a good plug of Southern Comfort Dick, all you care for is land, to set foot on dry land, muddy land, it doesn’t matter. You crave land. You make deals with the heavenly bodies — Buddha, Allah, God, Muhammad, your ancestors — anything. ‘Please get me to land where I can stand — and end this agony.’ By Christ, Norton, three days in that monsoon and those boys’ll turn into razors if I deliver them up to terra firma.”
“And if not?” Norton proffered.
“Then they’ll have to be sick.”
One such individual was PFC Walton, who was at that very moment on his knees at the stern of the eighteen-thousand-ton Iwo Jima-class amphibious assault ship. The smell of gasoline from the tied-down CH-46 Sea Knight and 11 CH-53 Sea Stallion choppers mixed with the smoke belching from the stack had caused him to vomit one more time, but there seemed to be nothing left to discharge. Every morsel of food, every dribble of liquid, had been heaved out of him, and he was the shade of stewed celery. Already on his knees, he promised God that if He spared PFC Walton he would fight the godless Communists that kept this vast land in subjection. At this point his eyes had no real focus but seemed to be rolling with the ship. Certainly he was only dimly aware that his buddy, Sergeant Hamish of the thirty-man rifle squad, stood next to him, his left foot looking smaller than his right as he fought the pitch and yaw of the ship.
“Hey, you look ill, man!”
Walton made an indecipherable kind of moaning sound that ended in “go away,” accompanied by his right hand waving his comrade back. Instead of helping his friend, Hamish ignored PFC Walton’s request to be alone. “Look, man, you’ve got nothing left in your gut. No wonder you’re sick.” He had to repeat this as the wind at the stern stole his first sentence of advice. “Listen, man, this is nothing — old man says we’re in for a monsoon proper in the next forty-eight hours. A real mother of a storm.”
PFC Walton emitted a great gorillalike groan that ended in a heartfelt “No!”
“Fucking yes!” Sergeant Hamish said. “Come on down below and—”
Walton shook his head in abject defeat, wiping his mouth on his arm. “I’ll be… I’ll be…” But whatever it was, he couldn’t finish.
“Okay, okay,” Hamish said. “Stay up here if you like, but I’m bringing you some chow. What do you want— coupla eggs? Milk?”
Walton gave a great heave and vomited bile, and his head rested or rather lolled across his wrists from left to right and back again with the roll of the ship. His whole body was a definition of defeat. “Fuckin’ monsoon!” he bellowed into the wind.
“Freakin’ right,” Hamish answered. “A monsoon
If PFC Walton could have, he would have killed Sergeant Hamish right there on the deck, but there was no strength in him.
As the task force sailed into the frenzied wake of the typhoon, thousands of miles eastward Rosemary Brentwood, in premature labor brought on by the shock of the intruder, was having her baby by cesarean section because it was in the breach position. On top of the trauma of having shot the intruder dead, it was a nightmarish experience for her as she had a bad reaction to the local anaesthetic Marcaine used for the epidural, which produced hallucinations of such terrifying proportions that Andrea Rolston, out in the waiting room, could hear her friend’s primeval scream.
Twenty minutes later, a hospital-gowned nurse, her mask still on, came quickly through the door, taking the premature baby, a boy, into the intensive pediatric care ward. “The baby all right?” Andrea asked.
“Don’t know,” the nurse said abruptly as she rushed by, heading toward the IC unit in which Andrea then saw the nurse hooking up the baby to various tubes, assisted by two other nurses. Andrea immediately thought about the familygram Rosemary had sent her husband — before the, break-in, the shooting, and now this. “Everything fine,” had been her last two words.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
As dawn broke, Major Mah and twenty-one privates aboard a Zil-151 truck arrived at the nomads’ campsite and began screaming at people. But if the Tibetans, already up attending to their animals, understood Chinese, none admitted to it, and they stood silently, some open-mouthed, gaping Chinese provincial style at the soldiers.
One of the children was rolling a snowball, rounding and tapping it so expertly it looked like a huge, white, round stone in his hand. He threw it at the truck, and Major Mah started screaming again — signaling impatiently for the interpreter, who then proceeded to tell them all that if they’d been found to be hiding American criminals —”pirates of the air” being the literal translation — then he would shoot one person from every tent, then burn down the huts.
All Tibetans by now, Mah said, should understand that the PLA loves the people and the people love the PLA. The child who had thrown the snowball was making another when his mother — despite her offspring’s resistance — took it from him and crumbled it. The child began to cry, and a pet goat from the nearest tent suddenly ran out, causing Mah to step back, drawing his pistol before he realized what it was. This evoked great laughter from all the Tibetans and a few of the troops. Enraged, Mah fired into the air.
“What’s he doing?” a little girl asked her father.
“Shooting at air pirates!” the father said.
By now Mah’s men had been through all the tents, causing no small confusion and panic among the pets who scattered every which way as bayonets were thrust into piles of blankets.
“If we find you have been hiding anyone we will take all your salt!” Mah warned them, upping the ante. This caused a rumble of resentment and fright among the nomads, for their salt packs filled from the salt pans of the salt lakes were precious, not only for their personal culinary use but as tender for bartering. One of the Chinese soldiers left the main body and, walking about the camp, looked through the scope of his rifle. It was infrared capable, able to pick up the temperature differentials even where snow had fallen but where a footprint had recently been. He called out excitedly to Major Mah — he had found tracks, two yaks probably heading away from the camp — not very old tracks, perhaps a half hour at most.
Mah left five men with the truck — which could climb no higher — to stay in the encampment should anyone return to the tents. He placed himself with the remaining fourteen soldiers and began to follow the man with the infrared scope.
The sonar operator aboard the Chinese sub
The periscope revealed nothing but a scud of dirty cloud to the east, and indeed when the
