When the three got to the rocky outcrop and saw the blood marks on the rock, traced them back to the cave and found Li, they didn’t need to be told that Li had been attacked by an animal — a snow leopard, the old man said— and one of the two soldiers was suddenly sick to his stomach and they went out.
The old man, in an awkward pantomime of hands and grunts, asked them if they wanted to look for the major, too. They both stared at him as if he were mad and quickly followed their own footprints back to the camp. The others, on hearing the story, needed no enticement to head back to base immediately.
Julia Reid was shaking. She could hear more footsteps, but these were heavy, more distinct, as if they wanted to be heard.
“America!” a voice said. She was sure it was the old nomad, but the headache was distorting her senses.
“Chin-eze dead!”
The relief that passed through her was like a warm shower on a bitterly cold day. Her headache instantly became less intense, and when she saw the old man, his large frame bending over Mah’s body, stripping it of the Makarov, ammunition pouches, and Chinese money, she could have kissed him.
Her hands still shaking, she relit the candle. She heard a rustle behind her and turned. In the soft flickering light she saw an extraordinary sight the old man, apparently not so old, was standing, his pants down, his erection casting a huge shadow on the wall as he smiled down at her.
“My God!” she heard herself say. “No!”
The old man looked crestfallen. “No?” He shook his head, his scarf down about his throat, his smile toothless. “No?” he repeated.
“No
He shrugged nonchalantly and, with some difficulty, put it away. He offered her his hand instead. She hesitated for a moment, then took it, and he led her out of the cave, helped her on the yak, and began the trek back to the encampment. He pointed to a cave. “Chin-eze dead!”
She couldn’t have cared less. For two days she’d felt as if she’d been on another planet. All she wanted was for the headache to subside — which it did as they went lower toward the encampment. On the way back she was astonished to see the old man putting in the earpiece of what must have been a Walkman in his pack. At one point he turned about with a huge grin. “Chin-eze dead! Many Chin-eze!” Though she didn’t realize it then, he was listening to the BBC Tibetan-language world service reporting the end of the war, and she didn’t know that within the week she would be taken to Lhasa by truck and would be free.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
In Tiananmen square it was early morning, the sun rising above the marble-sculpted Heroes of the Revolution.
It was eerily silent, students and workers kept back by barricades along the Avenue of Eternal Peace. For once not even bicycle bells could be heard, and the silence transcended all, the hush broken only by the sound of General Cheng’s footsteps as he emerged, as instructed by Freeman, from the Forbidden City, the very monarchist refuge that the Party had always so decried. Passing through the archway across the algae-polluted moat under the shrapnel-slashed portrait of Chairman Mao on Tiananmen Gate, he continued to walk across the vast square, alone, toward Freeman.
In a propaganda stroke worthy of Mao, though he detested the policies of Mao, Freeman had arranged, via the captured all-China TV and radio headquarters, for all of China to see him now: General Douglas Freeman personally raising the flag, not that of the U.N. or the United States but of the goddess of democracy, above Tiananmen.
Tens of millions of Chinese were watching the scene, glued to their TVs, and they understood immediately. To underscore the point, Freeman then did what he would later refer to as a “Doug MacArthur.” When the two men saluted, Cheng bowed, all of it recorded meticulously by international linkup TV with CNN, Cheng presenting his sword to Freeman. Freeman, not using an interpreter, asked simply, if a little awkwardly, in Chinese, ‘Win
Cheng was stunned. At this point he had expected to be shot, or at least humiliated. There was a long silence — all over China and the world. “Upon your honor?” Freeman added in Chinese. All over China, chopsticks froze above rice bowls, the tension palpable, as millions awaited Cheng’s answer.
Cheng nodded. “I will serve the people.”
Freeman returned the sword to the general.
The silence was broken then by a sound like soft rain that soon became like that of a rushing train. It was the people, over a million of them, students and workers and children flooding out upon the enormous square, unstoppable in their joy. And those who had waited so long for the goddess of democracy to be resurrected from the flames of the Tiananmen massacre of 1989 knew no end to their joy. It was deafeningly noisy, awe-inspiring, and frightening.
Cheng and Freeman ascended the steps in front of the Forbidden City to stand on the podium above Mao’s portrait, and they looked south over the square that was now a seething sea of people. Years before, in those few moments on the night of June 3–4, 1989, when the students and workers thought they had won against the tyranny of the Communist party, when the People’s Liberation Army had become the army of the party instead of of the people, Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” had burst forth from the loudspeakers only to be silenced moments later by the machine guns of the Thirty-eighth Army. But now “Ode to Joy” boomed once more, together with the thunderous roaring of the crowd. It was Freeman’s finest hour.
Freeman’s stunningly chivalrous treatment of Cheng made it clear that the United States had no territorial aspiration in China, and this raised America’s prestige enormously overnight. All those Chinese spiritually and financially imprisoned by the stop-again, start-again inflexibility of dogmatic Chinese Communist ideology were swarming to the new leaders of China, who included Admiral Lin Kuang, who had also been surrounded by rapturous crowds on his triumphal march from Xiamen to Hangzhou, where he fulfilled his pledge and burned Mao’s villa to the ground.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Exhausted, Freeman was returning home in triumph, but en route he received an urgent message in which the president of the United States, offering him his congratulations, asked the general to forego the usual celebratory victory march down Fifth Avenue and the Avenue of the Americas and to cancel any homecoming leave for Second Army. Instead he was to go to the White House — to the president—
Along with the many inconveniences for others that the president’s leave cancellation caused, it meant that it would be awhile before Robert Brentwood would see his Rosemary and his son, whom Rosemary adored. Despite his premature arrival, Robert Brentwood, Jr., was now out of danger and thriving. The leave cancellation also meant that Aussie Lewis and Alexsandra Malof’s honeymoon would have to be cut short. Aussie was most depressed, however, by the fact that he had lost all bets taken at the beginning of the campaign. Not a single SAS/D trooper had fallen into the Zhongnanhai lakes or into the moat about the Forbidden City.
