each brick house. You will be pleased to build your accommodation quickly and well. Guards will direct you.”
“I’ll bet,” one of the prisoners said.
“You will behave well,” Major Chen said. He pointed northward. “After, you will assist in enlarging Ningming airfield. Anyone, man or woman, who refuses to work will be shot” He waited some seconds for the last bit to sink in. “Questions?”
Murphy had his hand up. The major pointed to him. “Speak!”
“We’re not soldiers, we’re civilians. We shouldn’t even be prisoners.”
Danny Mellin added to Murphy’s comment. “Even if you do consider us prisoners of war, under the Geneva Convention you’re not entitled—”
“Quiet!” Major Chen shouted. “I want nothing about Geneva. You are in China. The Geneva Convention is bourgeois propaganda.”
“When will we be fed?” an Englishman asked. “We haven’t eaten.”
“Rice,” Chen replied, thinking the Englishman had asked him
“Medical care?” another shouted.
“The same as our soldiers,” Chen said.
“That means sweet fuck-all,” the Aussie said. Someone told him to shut up. “Up yours,” came his response.
The major said, “Troublemakers will be shot!”
None of the POWs, including Murphy, said anything. A few of them moved uneasily.
“Build well!” the major urged. “Remember the three little piggies.” Despite the tension, a prisoner, unable to contain himself, burst out laughing.
The next instant the major was walking back toward the truck, his flunky trotting after him.
“What about the three fucking piggies?” Murphy asked no one in particular.
“Do you think,” Shirley Fortescue said angrily, “that it’s possible for you to utter one sentence without using the F word?”
Murphy screwed up his face. “Not fucking likely.”
“No speaking!” one of the guards shouted, making his way toward Mellin.
“It wasn’t him,” Murphy said. “It was me.”
“No speaking!” The guard lifted the butt of his Kalashnikov threateningly. No one moved. The guard, though still glaring at Murphy, lowered the rifle. Finally he turned to Mellin. “You boss number one squad — yes.” It was half command, half question.
“All right,” Danny agreed, not seeing any alternative. Then the guard, seemingly ignorant in all other respects, made a decision that, even though he couldn’t have known, was as brilliant as any that King Solomon made. He designated Mike Murphy as “boss number two squad — yes.”
“No,” Murphy said. “I’ve got no bloody intention of helping you—”
The guard didn’t understand all the words, but he knew refusal when he heard it in any language, and he kicked Murphy in the shin, then slammed the rifle into his chest, knocking the Australian down. “Boss number two — yes.”
“Yes,” Mellin said. “He’ll do—”
“He say!” the guard shouted, lifting his rifle menacingly again.
“Yeah, all right,” Murphy gasped, pushing himself up. “Boss number two.”
The guard gave a curt nod and grunt of approval before moving on and designating eighteen more squad bosses.
“Look,” someone said, nodding toward two trucks stopping at the edge of the marshy ground, steam rising from the covered rear of each truck. The first two trucks contained boiled rice for the guards, with a helping of fish paste. The prisoners received only a bowl of rice each from the last truck, and worn-looking red plastic cups of green tea.
“And about fucking time,” Murphy quipped out of the guard’s earshot.
Mellin moved over to Shirley Fortescue as they were lining up for the meager rice ration. “Shirley, look, I know Murphy rubs you the wrong way, but try to ignore his bad language.”
“Hmm,” she answered coldly, and stopped as Upshut appeared on the scene from one of the truck cabins with a twenty-six-ounce bottle of Tsing Tao beer. He was taking the top off with his teeth, and Shirley told Mellin, “It’s like trying to ignore a bad smell.”
“C’mon,” Mellin said. “He’s okay underneath. He was the only one with guts enough to help me when I was first cap—”
Upshut was now by the tailgate of the truck, arrogantly drinking his beer. It started to rain. Upshut went back to the truck’s cabin and through the windscreen watched Ningming airfield turn to a watery blur.
As Murphy’s turn came to receive his dollop of rice and mug of green tea, he said, “Thank you,” out of habit, and returned to where the other forlorn-looking POWs were huddled in the rain.
“You’re right,” a fellow prisoner said to Mellin, checking that none of the guards was looking in his direction. “Sooner we lay those bricks, sooner we get out of this damned rain.”
There was a low murmur of approval, except for Murphy, who commented, “Fuck the bricks. Where the hell are we? This Ning-bloody-ming — how far’s it from the Chinese-Viet border?”
“ ‘Bout fourteen miles,” another Australian said, “as the crow flies.”
“Yeah,” Murphy responded. “Well, I’m a fucking crow. Anybody else? Danny?”
No one answered. More guards were headed their way, shouting at them to get up and start working. “Quickly! Quickly!”
CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE
To an outsider, the incoming flight of Hercules helos, containing Freeman’s USVUN interdiction force — made up of volunteers from the U.S. Army’s Delta Force, British Special Air Services commandos, and Gurkhas — would have seemed uneventful. For some of the older men in the IFOR, however, the flight to Da Nang was a return to the old days of ‘Nam, that part of their youth that was among the most hellish and intensely felt experiences of their lives. A few among the helicopter pilots who would fly them to the Laotian-Vietnamese border would be using routes they’d used before, when Nixon had authorized secret strikes into enemy sanctuaries in Cambodia and Laos during ‘Nam.
Colonel A. Berry, chosen by Freeman to command IFOR, had distinguished himself behind enemy lines in the Gulf War against Iraq when Saddam Insane had invaded Kuwait. Berry was extraordinarily confident and well trained, like the men he led. He also had a prodigious memory. It was the memory of his great-grandfather schooling him in things military that came to him now, and despite the roar of the engines and the thump of the undercarriage, he could still hear the old man telling him of the French forces at Dien Bien Phu near the northern Laotian-Vietnamese border, 160 miles west of Hanoi.
The French, tired of the hit-and-run tactics of the Communist Viet Minh forces, had wanted a pitched set- piece battle, and they got it in one of the bravest and ultimately one of the most humiliating defeats in military history. The French were thrashed. Lesson one: Berry’s grandfather had told him to never ever underestimate the enemy.
The planned sabotage of the thirty-five-mile Ningming-Pingxiang-Dong Dang section of the southern rail line was called off on the express order of C in C, USVUN forces, General Jorgensen. He consulted Freeman, who in an unprecedented decision, considering his military career, agreed with the C in C that not even Delta Force or SAS, the two elite Special Forces of the United States and Great Britain respectively, should be used. No one could be used. Freeman had viewed the latest KH-14 spy satellite photos, which revealed evidence of the massive manpower of the China’s People’s Liberation Army.
What Beijing couldn’t do because it lacked the U.S. state-of-the-art technology, it did through what any economist or military strategist would call a labor-intensive operation. General Wei, drawing on reserves of the
