didn’t know how it happened, but usually whenever the general called for Harvey Simmet, the chief met officer of Second Army HQ was either about to eat or was asleep. Sleepy eyed, Simmet would trudge to the HQ tent usually wrapped up like an Indian during the winter of 1806.
Simmet wasn’t in his tent, however, and had to be paged. He was just sitting down to his favorite meal, ham and mashed potatoes with raisin sauce, and he had his fork loaded.
“Old man wants to see you, Harvey.”
Everyone in the officers’ mess started laughing.
“Gotcha again, Harv!.. Atta boy, Harvey… Duty calls.”
Harvey Simmet looked at the fork piled high with the succulent ham and potato dripping in the raisin sauce….
“Better than that, sir. Give you a fresh lot when you come back.”
“You’re a gentleman and a scholar, Cookie.”
Norton slapped Harvey amicably on the shoulder. “I don’t think the general’ll keep you long.” They left the mess tent.
“He’s put a hex on me,” Harvey said as they made their way up toward the headquarters hut. “Last time he sent someone for me I was on the can. You believe that?”
“Harvey, I believe you anytime. He wants to know if the weather’s closing in.”
“It is.”
“Yeah, but you know!”
“Yes, I know, he wants it up to date every friggin’ five minutes.”
“Maybe, Harv, but remember Yakutsk.”
“Yeah,” Harvey said, glancing skyward at the velvet darkness of the Inner Mongolian sky. “I remember Yakutsk.”
It was a town in the Yakutsk oblast, or region, northeast of Lake Baikal. The Siberians were chopping up Second Army’s Ten Corps as they tried to withdraw across the frozen lake. Outnumbered and outgunned by more than three to one in main battle tanks, Freeman had given what to his men was the almost incredible order to withdraw, all the time asking Harvey Simmet by his side what the temperature was in the Yakutsk area — the coldest place in the Soviet Union, where the temperature often plummeted to more than minus seventy degrees centigrade. Simmet told him it was minus sixty and still dropping.
American tanks were ensconced in revetment areas, some dug in so deep in defilade position that only the edge of their cupolas and muzzle of their main gun showed as they waited for a point-blank exchange. Then they got another order from Freeman to retreat still further. A few tank commanders thought aloud that the old man’s nerve had cracked. But when the temperature dropped to minus sixty-nine degrees, the general thanked Harvey and suddenly told the American tanks to charge. It would go down in military history as one of the most brilliant tactical moves ever made. From the mastery of the minutiae of war to the mastery of grand strategy, Freeman knew that Siberian T-72s and T-55s would now grind to a standstill. The inferior refined Siberian oil would begin settling out in the vicious cold, the waxes in the oil solidifying like chunks of cholesterol stuck in the bloodstream — hydraulics would overheat and the tanks would become immobile.
It had been called the Yakutsk turkey shoot, and Siberian tanks that one minute were a threat now were stuck, unable to move as the M1s, with the higher-quality American-refined oil, raced ahead through the deep snow, slewed and turned and took out the Siberian armor on the move. The snowy explosions, their bases black fountains of undersoil, rose high in the air as red-hot metal from the M1A1s tore into the T-72s and more than evened the score.
“Good of you to come, Harv,” the general said, as if Harvey Simmet had any choice in the matter. “Harv, they tell me this weather’s ‘closing in,’ moving in on our left flank from the Bo Hai Gulf. Now what specifically does that mean for Orgon Tal?”
It had been an hour since Harvey had monitored the incoming SATREP — satellite reports — and in two hours a lot had happened: the wind picking up at the three-thousand-foot level, cold air from the northeast hitting the hot Gobi air, producing fog in northern Manchuria, and minor dust storms from Ulan Bator in Mongolia down as far as Orgon Tal 280 miles northwest of Beijing. Harvey made a call to the met tent and got the latest isobar readouts and cloud pattern through on the fax. It was not showing at the moment, but in his mind’s eye the data told him that soon the air pattern would go into an ominous circular spiral path, heading in fast from the coast. But he saw it as good news for Freeman. “Looks like a typhoon’s forming, General— over Bo Hai Gulf. Winds will increase from forty to sixty-five — maybe seventy — miles per hour, and the cloud density promises heavy rain that will probably peter out at the edge of the Gobi here at Orgon Tal, most of the rain falling on me mountain range northwest of Beijing.”
“Bog his armor down, General,” Norton said.
“And ours,” Freeman commented.
“Yes, sir, but I mean—”
“Yes—” Freeman finished the sentence for him. “Lousy weather for him to move in — to attack.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Thank you, Harv.”
When Simmet got back to the mess there’d been a snafu. Cookie had gone off for a few minutes to check the coffee and someone had grabbed the last plate of ham and raisin sauce.
“Ham’s finished,” Simmet was informed by a new server.
“Jesus!” Harvey said. “I tell you he’s got a hex on me.”
“Sir, we’ve got an MRE.” He meant one of the “meals ready to eat” in a foil-wrapped dinner tray that could be warmed by body heat and were unaffectionately known by the troops as “meals refused by everybody.”
As Harvey Simmet stabbed his fork unenthusiastically at the chicken a la king and viewed the Tootsie Roll and crackers and gobs of mixed fruit and peanut butter, he cursed his luck. He had no way of knowing that in Beijing’s Number Two jail there was an American, Smythe, a SEAL who had been captured during the raid on the Yangtze Bridge earlier in the war, who would have thought he’d died and gone to heaven, given the luxury of an MRE instead of the fetid rice and vermin he had to crunch up and use as protein in his cell. Who was it that said comparison is the source of all unhappiness? Smythe dreamed of MREs.
They had strung Smythe up by his thumbs so often that by now they were useless, forcing him to use his first and second fingers to shovel in the meager rice and cockroaches from the wooden bowl. Nie’s interrogators for the Public Security Bureau wanted to know the location of all SEAL units. Smythe had told them he didn’t know, which was true. But by now daily torture had become routine, his screams mixed with those of many others — nearly all of them classified as either dissidents or “hooligans” against the state, hooliganism being a meeting of three or more people.
“Where have you been?” the PSB asked the three boys from Huade who were all in their late teens and had seen their hopes of a new China disappear, blown away like the sand in the Gobi.
“Fighting the oppression of the state!” one dramatically said, causing an expulsion of breath from his mother, whose shame was as keen as her surprise.
“And you two?” the PSB asked the others.
“Fighting the oppression of the state!” they answered in unison, sounding rather silly, albeit serious.
“Parrots!” the PSB inspector declared. “Parroting your bourgeois bosses.” Gun in hand, he demanded they tell him whom they took their orders from.
“From our heart,” the oldest of them said.
“Your heart,” the PSB sneered. “That’s an unreliable authority, boy.”
“From the goddess of democracy,” the third boy said, adding, “Malof xiapjie”—Miss Malof. In fact she had given them no such order to sabotage — they had never even seen her — but mentioning her name he hoped would take the sneer off the PSB’s face. It did. The inspector pistol-whipped the boy’s face, instantly drawing blood, and he told the squad of eight soldiers inside the house to take them in hand.
The inspector was sure the three had never met or laid eyes on the criminal Malof woman, but he was just as
