She shook her head like a petulant child, rolling the cherry between her lips, her hair a black sheen whipping back and forth over her breasts.
“I’ll go crazy,” he said.
She shook her head again. “You’re too cold.”
“What-”
“You’re too—” Her hand closed over his erection and squeezed. “You’re too cold.”
“Christ — I’ll — I’ll warm up. I’ll take a shower. All right?”
She smiled.
When she heard the torrential downpour and saw steam emerging from beneath the bathroom door, she got up from the sofa and, kneeling on the carpet, one eye on the bathroom, she went quickly through his briefcase.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The first visible signs of Ulan Bator were its six high smoke stacks. Unlike the ghers, the round, canvas-skinned huts of the Mongolians that were kept warm by burning camel dung, the capital was heated by more modern methods, including coal and a nuclear power plant. The four SAS/D troops and Jenghiz paused to hide their packs, only Salvini allowed to take the small but powerful radio under his del along with his Browning 9mm.
They had a short rest and checked their flat-folding PVSs, or night-vision goggles, before beginning what they hoped would be the final ten-mile leg of their hike to Ulan Bator and to the capital’s Gandan Monastery.
Since perestroika and glasnost, part of the Mongolians’ determination to make their country their own was their determination to allow more religious freedom, though even in this, Mongolia aped Soviet example. The Communists, like those in Beijing, still hated religion for two reasons: Not only did religion pose an alternative to the only way, the party way, but in Mongolia it had encouraged males to take holy orders in the lama monasteries — over seventy of them — and because the monks were required to be celibate this had led to a drastic fall in population.
The Mongolian hordes, who under Genghis Khan had ruled all China and whose kingdom had included much of Europe, were now reduced to no more than 2.9 million in the entire country — a country twice as big as Texas. Freeman believed that this fact alone would play a decisive part in the secret request the SAS/D troop was entrusted with.
Though thoroughly atheistic, the Mongolian president, since glasnost, had made a practice each evening of going from the Great Hural, the People’s National Assembly, to the Gandan Monastery to pray by either prostrating himself before the Buddha or spinning a prayer wheel on the Gandan Wall. It was unlikely, Freeman believed, that the president, with such a small population, would refuse to let the American Second Army have free transit across its territory into China. But Freeman held it as an article of his faith that the difference between doing it and asking to do it first marked a profound difference between totalitarianism and democracy, and for this he’d been willing to dispatch the four SAS/D men to see the president. There was always the danger, of course, that the Mongolians could inform the Siberians of the American intention, but it was a chance Freeman was prepared to take in the belief that the Mongolian president would be loath to put himself in a squeeze between Freeman’s Second Army and Marshal Yesov’s army, which so far at least was abiding by the cease-fire.
The absence of any helos in the sky was taken by David Brentwood’s troop as a good sign, and as Jenghiz led them through the silken dust on the outskirts of the flat Ulan Bator, the pale green foothills of the Hentiyn Nuruu took on a peaceful deeper mauvish hue beneath a darkening royal-blue sky that reminded David of the grasslands of the big sky country in Montana.
It was so peaceful that he was now viewing the accident with the trip wire as a blessing in disguise, for it had forced them to take the risk of a daylight hike out in the open, over the protruding fingers of the foothills down to the plain, a journey they would not have otherwise attempted till nightfall. It meant that they were now well ahead of schedule, and Brentwood thought of Freeman’s quoting the ancient Chinese warrior Sun Tzu, that an army is like water, that it must adapt itself to the terrain and circumstance. It was exactly what the SAS/D team was doing, using the explosion of the Claymore not as an impediment that had set plans awry but as a new opportunity.
Brentwood fought the temptation to be pleased with himself, but Freeman’s directive to approach the Mongolian president at the monastery in the evening fit in perfectly. If nothing happened to stop them they should reach it within a few hours, with Jenghiz leading the way across the vast Sukhbaatar Square in the center of the city toward the Gadan.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Chinese divisions continued to mass across the Amur, and with the weather clearing, though for how long no one knew, it seemed that only the threat of close air attack by the U.S. Air Force, particularly the presence of AC-130 Spectre gunships firing their deadly, seven-barreled Vulcan machine guns and 105mm howitzers, had stemmed crossings by the Chinese troops. But while the awesome power of the gunships was part of the reason for a pause in the Chinese advance, there was a much more pressing cause.
Chinese officers were reporting deficiencies in the small arms supplied to the northern armies — dozens of men having been seriously wounded, some having lost limbs and/or been killed when grenades exploded as soon as the pin was pulled, others having weapons exploding in their faces. Under such conditions of substandard equipment, an advance was deemed unadvisable by General Cheng and an investigation promptly launched. At first it was suspected that La Roche Industries had wilfully furnished defective munitions — that is, until several grenade fragments were collected and sent to Harbin for closer forensic inspection.
Cheng doubted that La Roche, already in trouble in the U.S., suspected of supplying arms to certain countries against congressional edict, would be likely to jeopardize his lucrative multibillion under-the-table arms business by shipping poor-quality arms and ammunition to his prime customer. Confirmation that Cheng was right came when scientists, rushed up from Turpan’s First Artillery Regiment — the name the PLA gave to its missile contingent — determined that while serial numbers made it clear that the defective grenades had indeed been American made, they were not from any of the La Roche batches.
Further investigation along the Amur revealed that the arms in question had been among those stolen from American soldiers in brothels along the river towns of the DMZ. Cheng immediately ordered all such arms and ammunition destroyed, but by now they were mixed up with standard issue and the testing was a hazardous, painstaking, and extremely time-consuming business, as in order to find a single round that had been tampered with, every round had to be examined carefully.
The incident told Cheng and Freeman something important about each other. Cheng learned that the American general’s much-touted attention to detail was as great as it was reputed to be, while Freeman’s intelligence services, fed the information by underground Democracy Movement agents like the Jewish woman, Alexsandra Malof, learned that Cheng was not as cavalier as, say, Lin Biao had been in the Korean War about sacrificing the lives of his men if he could avoid it. In fact Cheng would rather pause, even though it gave Second Army time to reinforce the crossing points, and make sure everything was in order before he would strike. Of course it also gave Cheng more time to reinforce his side of the river.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
It was 1:00 p.m. Jay La Roche and his guards were met by a barrage of cameras and microphones as he made his way up the steps of New York’s central criminal court building, his head held high, looking sneeringly at the blind statue of Justice as though confident that nothing could touch him.