certain, especially when he had sniffed a rotten-egg odor of sulfuric acid on one of the boys’ sleeves, that they had blown up the track near Tomortei.
“You could have killed many soldiers,” he told the boys. “Your brothers.”
“They’re not our brothers,” the eldest of the three said. By now two truckloads of PLA had arrived, and the parents were beside themselves as the soldiers piled out of the trucks, beams of flashlights roiling with dust, and shouted commands coming through the darkness, which soon had the soldiers in a huge circle around the three boys and the PSB inspector. The inspector now held a bullhorn — the battery wasn’t working, but he used it anyhow to bellow out to the soldiers. “Remember what the democracy hooligans of Tiananmen did to your comrades in arms!”
It was a powerful appeal, immediately visible in the way the circle of troops seemed to constrict in a solid ring and grow smaller yet more menacing, as every soldier took a step forward against the saboteurs whose earlier defiance now paled in the spotlight formed by several beams. In Tiananmen, or rather throughout Beijing, the demonstrators once attacked by the soldiers had in turn attacked many of the soldiers, the most infamous incident being when one of the soldiers had been castrated and hung from a wire noose, his body nothing more than black cinder after it had burned in a torch of gasoline.
Now there were screams coming from the houses down the dark
It took at least twelve soldiers to hold down the three boys who were now screaming as each was castrated, the bloody lumps of testicles thrown into the dust like pieces of meat. Then they were left, hands tied behind them, all out of their minds with pain, bleeding profusely into the dust, the rough placards hung about their necks reading, “Long live the people, death to the fifth columnists!” The circle of bayonets remained until the last of the boys had made his final plea for forgiveness, screaming like a wild animal, and then died. One PSB inspector ordered the bodies thrown in the truck and taken to the sabotage site near Tomortei, where their mutilated bodies were to be tied to stakes.
When Chairman Nie was told, he promised himself that he personally would shoot the Malof woman after she had been publicly humiliated in Tiananmen. He had no doubt that they would catch her eventually, and as everyone knew, Nie had a patience that was impressive, even by Chinese standards. He had waited a long time to be chairman, and he could certainly wait a little longer to have the PSB hunt down the Malof woman. The best way of course would be to bait a trap she couldn’t resist.
News of the capture of the three saboteurs and their fate traveled like wildfire down both sides of the DMZ and then on national Beijing radio, which also announced that China would insist upon maintaining her territorial integrity and would petition the United Nations to have the imperialist forces of the United States return the Jewish autonomous region to China where it belonged. It had been such border disputes that first caused the U.N. to send Freeman’s Second Army and some British SAS troops to settle.
Nie’s ambassador at the U.N. brazenly stated that regardless of the truce, the JAO was a separate issue and it must be ceded forthwith to Chinese control. It was an elaborate plan by Nie, for in fact he didn’t care about the JAO — he even suspected that the Jews had proper claim, but if anything would flush the JAO goddess of the democracy movement out into the open where the PSB could get her, and at one stroke immobilize a leaderless Democracy Movement, this U.N. move might.
The truth was that Nie’s plan — his baiting of the trap with the demand for Chinese sovereignty over the JAO— worked better than he’d had any right to expect, for PSB informants in the JAO reported that Alexsandra Malof was surfacing to go personally to the U.N. to plead the JAO case, envisioning the JAO area as a separate democratic state between Siberia and China. Nie ordered his PSB informants to watch all refugee camps from Orgon Tal to Khabarovsk.
That evening Aussie and Alexsandra were saying their good-byes before he headed south for Orgon Tal. Second Army had a plane ready for Alexsandra, believing that in the U.N. the beautiful and articulate Alexsandra arguing her case would win over many delegates.
“I’ll not be too long away,” she told Aussie.
“You be careful, luv,” Aussie advised her. “Don’t go strolling off by yourself.”
She leaned over and straightened the collar of his SAS battlefield smock and kissed him. “I’ll have U.N. bodyguards,” she said.
Aussie for once had nothing to say. Gently he pulled her toward him, and in their embrace he could feel the beating of her heart.
“No,” Nie said, “not in the air. Our Shenyangs wouldn’t get near them. The U.S. still has air supremacy, or had you forgotten that minor fact, Comrade?”
“No, sir,” the chief of the PLA’s air arm replied. “I haven’t forgotten, but we wouldn’t be using Shenyangs. We would send up our squadron of Soviet Fulcrums. They’d stand a good chance of getting through the American air cover.”
“And,” Nie said, “at what cost?” The air force chief began to say something, but Nie held up his hand, silencing him.
“I know what you’re going to tell me. The Fulcrum is a match for the F-16 or whatever, but the squadron of Fulcrums in the Beijing grid are the only ones we have and none of them can be risked. Besides, the shooting down of an Air America plane would tear the truce apart. Particularly with a woman aboard it.”
“The truce is very thin already,” the air force general said. “These three hooligans you found sabotaged the Orgon Tal line. They were obviously sent by the Americans to provoke us.”
Nie stared at the air force general as an irate headmaster might upbraid one of his staff. “You can’t seriously believe that, Comrade? That Freeman would precipitate an action before his armor is ready — before it comes down to him at Orgon Tal and points east along our Manchurian front.”
But the air force general, though chagrined, retorted, “Perhaps not, Comrade Chairman, but what I am sure of is that no one could
“Oh, he’s a fox,” Nie said. “A fox, yes. I grant you that, Comrade, but he’s not a fool. The Americans like all their materiel ready, tested, and accounted for, before they make a move. He won’t move before his replacement tanks are here.”
The air force general agreed but shrewdly riposted, “But if he has not got his tanks ready, we needn’t worry about his moving against us.”
Nie’s face took on a splotchy effect, his temper infused by a recognition that the air force general had a point.
“I did not mean he will do nothing, Comrade, before the tanks are here. If you down one of his planes, however, he could very well unleash air strikes anywhere along the DMZ. Even over Beijing.”
The air force general knew he was rapidly losing ground but fired one more salvo in the battle of egos.
“But Comrade Chairman, the weather system over the central northern provinces is thickening by the minute. Even with their SMART bombs and Stealth aircraft they could not operate during a typhoon. Their aim would —”
“Yes, yes,” Nie concluded, as if he had already thought of it. “I know all that. But you still can’t intercept her plane. You don’t understand the political side of this, Comrade. Apart from you losing several Fulcrums in the attempt — planes which we can ill afford to lose — the mass media reporting a shooting down of Malof would enrage the Americans and British and worse, it would make her a martyr. I do not want martyrs. Martyrs are drawing power for any fool that’s anywhere near the Democracy Movement. Her death in such a manner could galvanize the various undergrounds into a coherent force at precisely the wrong moment. I want her captured alive — humiliated— completely discredited by her providing us with a list of names of Democracy Movement members.”
“Names which I venture you already have,” the air force general proffered.
“Precisely. Then she will be seen as a traitor who broke.”
