making a preemptive strike, of course.”
“Perhaps,” Cheng answered with deliberate equivocation. In fact he had the area already determined through which his divisions would pour in a lightning pincer movement he had designed in order to trap the arrowhead of Freeman’s forces. But to tell Nie the exact location could jeopardize the entire plan, for Nie would no doubt send his agents pouring in first to “cleanse” the area of fifth columnists and other politically unreliable elements. This would merely alert the Americans and their underground spies that that was the area most likely to be attacked. No, Cheng was determined not to reveal the location to anyone until he had informed his divisional commanders, and that would be only hours before the attack. He wanted absolute surprise.
Cheng would achieve his surprise, but not in the way he wanted. Nor would Freeman meet the attack in the way the U.S. general had planned — primarily with his armor, the will and determination of even the best generals often being thwarted by factors completely beyond their control.
General Cheng’s chauffeur was standing idly by the black, shiny, Red Flag limousine, bobbing his head to a belting rendition of pop singer Cui Jian’s song about the world changing too quickly. But the song’s real message, like so many in modern China, was about China not changing fast enough. This way the song got past the grinning, blockheaded censors but carried its cry for more freedom to those of the younger generation. But if the censor had been slow at perceiving the satire, General Cheng, C in C of the PLA, was not.
“Turn that rubbish off!” he ordered as he approached the open rear door of the Red Flag limousine. The chauffeur quickly obeyed — he hadn’t expected the Politburo’s meeting to end so quickly. But Cheng had had little to say apart from his criticism of Nie, and putting forth his, Cheng’s, prediction that the present truce between the People’s Liberation Army and the U.N. force — in reality, Freeman’s Second Army — would not hold. Sui, the Beijing garrison commander, had been visibly relieved, reiterating that the Politburo simply could not tolerate the fact that Freeman’s army was only 280 miles northwest of Beijing. Sui had also wanted to know whether Cheng would launch a preemptive strike against Freeman’s supply line— stretching all the way down from the Amur River to Orgon Tal — before the Americans made any move on the mountainous barrier of the Great Wall.
“Perhaps,” Sui had proffered, “the Americans will launch a preemptive strike first?”
“No,” Cheng had told him quite definitely. “It is the weakness of the democratic state. It can only
“And while they wait, we grow stronger,” the Beijing commander had said hopefully.
“Yes,” Cheng had agreed. “Our supply line is much shorter.”
Out on the street, the people of Beijing were going about their work as if a war were the furthest thing from their minds, yet Cheng knew this was merely appearance and not the full reality, their true emotions hidden beneath impassive stares. One had to look for other signs, such as the song by Cui Jian and other ballads about a northern hero or heroine — ostensibly about a Chinese woman who had made a heroic stand against the invasions of Genghis Khan. Cheng knew very well that the song was really being sung about the Siberian, Alexsandra Malof, who had rallied Siberian and Chinese dissidents to harass the PLA’s flanks in battles past. Still, Cheng was not as pessimistic as Nie, who thought that every youngster would automatically be turned against the older men in the Great Hall of the People. When it came to the fight, he was confident that nationalism would prove a much stronger magnet than the Communist party and what would carry the day in the Damaqun Shan — the wall-spined mountains to the north.
When General Cheng’s black Red Flag limousine turned off from Beijing’s Avenue of Eternal Peace toward Xinhuamen Gate, the two PLA soldiers on guard snapped to attention, their white gloves, dark green coats, fur hats, and glistening bayonets catching the pale spring light. A duty officer emerged from the guardhouse to check the credentials of General Cheng. Of course they knew it was him but in a country of over one billion people, many of them minorities, and dissastisfied minorities at that, and of students often flush with decadent liberal bourgeois attitudes, even in the Communist holy of holies, the Zhongnanhai, the compound housing the living quarters and many of the offices of the elite, nothing could be left to chance.
Often as he returned from important meetings, Cheng would deliberately pause once inside the compound to admire its tranquility and beauty, for here was another China. Dating back to the Qing Dynasty, it was here that the emperor would plow the first symbolic furrow of spring, where imperial banquets and the examinations for the highest credentials in martial arts were held.
Separated from the endless river of bicycle bells and civilians by high, thick walls, the gardens within the Zhongnanhai compound evoked calm after one’s immersion in the daily struggle to govern a land whose people were as numerous as the sands of the Gobi Desert and who, though few foreigners ever realized it, were not nearly as cohesive and obedient to the precepts of Marxism and Leninism and the thoughts of Mao as they appeared. It took all of the party’s strength and wisdom to hold them together.
But this day Cheng did not linger to sit by the Zhongnanhai’s two lakes. He must ready the People’s Liberation Army for what might well be the biggest war since Korea. Yet typically, not unlike Freeman in this respect, his attention to the minutiae of his profession — as in the way he studied the Americans for years, particularly their strategy — led him to pay attention to a request on his desk from the Thirty-first Army Group, headquartered in Xiamen.
The Thirty-first wanted to purchase fake aircraft silhouettes to fool U.S. satellite surveillance. Cheng scribbled a note that though such fakes could easily be purchased via the Hong Kong-based La Roche Industries, and were, he admitted, only a fraction of the cost of a real aircraft, cents compared with millions of dollars, it was nevertheless a waste of valuable resources. Instead he suggested requisitioning leftover blacktop paint from the Beijing main roads department and having students from the nearest technical institute, through “voluntary labor for the people,” paint Shenyang F-12 and Soviet-made Fulcrum silhouettes on the tarmac in squadron formation. This fooled even the most sophisticated satellite cameras, and if the Xiamen commander was concerned about the infrared sensors on the American satellites, then Cheng advised placing thermos flasks at the tail ends of the silhouettes. This would give off enough heat for satellite infrared sensors to interpret the aircraft as “hot” rather than “cold”—conveying the impression to the Americans that all the aircraft were fully operational and, just as importantly, that fuel was apparently no problem for the PLA fighter aircraft — which it was. Then, after quickly denying the Thirty-first’s request, he went, as was his habit during those times in his life when his responsibility weighed most heavily upon him, out of the southern entrance of the Zhongnanhai compound onto Changan Avenue.
Though not alone — the two public security men assigned to protect him only a few yards back — he made his way east, crossing Beichang Street, reaching the seven bridges that spanned the green-algae-covered moat before the Tiananmen Gate atop which Mao had proclaimed the People’s Republic of China on October 1, 1949. Seeing the five entrances to the gate closed, Cheng paused, perplexed for a moment, until he remembered it was Monday. He took the absence of tourists as a good omen, as he, and shortly after, the two public security men, slipped through one of the side gates into the Forbidden City.
He understood, as did every member of the Party, that the Forbidden City was but the remains of the most degenerate exploiters of the Chinese people, but, despite the fact that his commitment to Marxism-Leninism was as strong as ever, Cheng felt within the Forbidden City something he could not experience anywhere else. Standing silently before the five marble bridges that crossed the tartar-bow-shaped Golden Water Stream that led to the Gate of Supreme Harmony, the city’s noise muffled by the great walls, he felt a serenity that transcended all thought, all cares — the kind of feeling his great-grandmother spoke about whenever she would return from the Christian temples with all their candles and their liberal bourgeois hogwash. It was the kind of calm he needed in order to consolidate his Tai — so that all his psychic and physical energy could be used to destroy his enemies.
CHAPTER FIVE
Near Huade, 160 miles northwest of Beijing, on the road between Shangdu and Orgon Tal, the three-man Huade cell of the June Fourth Democracy Movement had made their decision. They would march the forty-three miles due west through the desert toward their truce line and blow the main line at a point twelve miles south of the Genghis Khan Wall, not the Great Wall, outside Tomortei and so wreck the line along which Cheng was rushing
