La Roche wanted Francine and fast. He rang down to the D Trovatore bar. “Get up to the penthouse,” he told her.
“I’m wanted upstairs, Jimmy,” she informed the barman.
“Be a good girl,” he said. What he meant was, do as you’re told if you don’t want trouble.
When she arrived the air was cloying with the perfume of roses, as if a bucket of it had been spilled, and he was already in his robe, flashy gold silk with dragons rampant.
Wordlessly, roughly, he walked up to her, pulled off the tight black blouse and, taking the knife from his private bar, he cut the bra off her. The first time he’d done it she’d frozen in panic, but now she knew it was part of the ritual. “You bitch!” he told her, pulling the bra off and throwing it to the floor. “You’re all the same, right? You all want it. Go on!”
It was her cue, and wordlessly she slapped her hands beneath the folds of his robe, grabbing it firmly, pulling him gently toward her, her tongue wetting her lips.
“That’s enough!” he commanded, and told her to get into the bedroom where she could see the strap and photograph of his estranged wife, Lana Brentwood, on the side table. Francine hated this part, but she feared La Roche more. She doubled the strap over and almost lethargically smacked his buttocks. She would have to wait until he told her to do it harder.
“More,” he commanded, lying facedown on the Chinese brocade bedspread, his hands clenching and unclenching as her whipping aroused him. “Come on!” he called urgently. “Come on!” Quickly she dropped the strap and felt under him. “Now!” he told her, and she brushed her hair quickly aside as he rolled over on his back and she went down on him, her tongue flicking back and forth then sucking and flicking back and forth again and all the time him gasping, “Lana…Lana…”until his back arched and fell, arched again and again in spasm, his whole body shaking until he was satiated. He lay there, exhausted, arms out, staring at the ceiling.
“Get me a beer!” he ordered. “Then clean me up!”
As he held the beer, Francine, in order to complete the routine, had to take off her panties and lick him dry.
“A new deal?” she ventured. She’d been with him long enough to know that the routine, his fantasy of being back with Lana Brentwood, was always triggered by some financial orgasm he’d had, but she’d never asked him anything until after — otherwise he wouldn’t pay her the five hundred on top of her weekly take at the bar.
“A new deal!” he said. “No, sweetie, it’s an old order that was renewed three hours ago. We’re rushing it in from Hong Kong to my benefactor, Mr. Cheng. Jesus, three million — just like that!”
“For what?” she asked idly.
“For what? Hey, Francine, what are you — fucking cub reporter?”
“No, I was just wondering—”
“Well don’t. It’ll hurt that pretty little head of yours.” He took another long pull at the beer, then arched his back again in the ecstasy of her tongue between his legs darting in and out like a snake. It wasn’t just the money she did it for— Francine liked the sense of power, however transitory, it gave her.
“Cheng’s gonna have a big surprise for that fucking Freeman, I can tell you that.”
She didn’t press for details. Besides, she’d learn about whatever it was when the time was right; the La Roche tabloid chain would spread the word from coast to coast and overseas of any great American defeat.
She had asked him one time, when she was a little drunk, whether it bothered him that what he did was against the law.
“Fuck the law. That’s why I’ve got lawyers.”
“No,” she’d said, “I mean against — you know — against our boys. Against our country.”
“Fuck the country. What’s it done for me? When are you gonna learn, Francine, that you have to look after number one?” He’d paused, a slatternly look on his face, as he’d raised himself on his elbows from the bed. “In your case that means looking after me — right?” She had nodded obediently.
Now he ordered, “Give me the donut. Nice and slippery.”
She rounded her lips into the shape of an O and worked it back and forth on him, careful that her teeth didn’t touch.
“Oh Christ, that’s good. You’re a good kid, Francine.” He reached down and tousled her hair.
By midmorning Freeman’s advance column, his logistical tail following, was seventy miles south of Lake Nur, having now crossed the blunt arrowhead of Manchuria that sticks out into Mongolia, taking the vital sixty-to-seventy-mile shortcut across the Mongolian territory, swinging to his right, southwest toward the desert regions of the Gobi rather than due south, which would have led the columns into the swamps of Huolin Gol on their left flank.
The only report Freeman received that morning apart from Washington’s insistence, which he ignored, that he not be at the head of his troops but back at headquarters where he belonged, was an intelligence report that the Jewish underground, led by the woman Alexsandra Malof in the Jewish Autonomous Oblast near Khabarovsk, had been waging a pitched battle with ChiCom regulars. They were trying to sabotage their own flatcars near Khabarovsk so as to deny Freeman transfer of the hundreds of lighter, automatic-loader 3 block M1A2 tanks en route from the United States but held up because of the SS Southern Star’s delaying tactics of having mined the seas off the West Coast’s bases.
“How’s this Malof lady doing?” Freeman asked Norton, who had come up alongside in a Bradley IFV. Sometimes Freeman’s phrases—”this Malof lady”—conjured up an old world charm that seemed strangely arcane coming from a general of high tech ordnance. Norton liked it.
“Pretty well, General. You remember she’s one tough lady.”
“Remember?” Freeman asked, nonplussed, his face now a mustard color from the fine dust.
“Yes, sir, she was the woman the Siberians arrested in Khabarovsk early in the war and shipped out to Baikal. When we hit Baikal before the cease-fire she escaped. Wound up in Harbin for a while where she got the message through to us about Cheng moving everything over the Nanking Bridge.”
“Ah!” Freeman said in happy admiration. “I remember. We decorated her!”
“Yes,” Norton confirmed, “but I ‘d have thought that after what they did to her at Baikal then at Harbin she would have had enough.”
“Woman after my own heart,” Freeman said, his goggles now completely coated by dust so that he had to take them off, the dirt caked about his mouth and eyebrows. Only his gentian blue eyes seemed visible. “Onward and upward! Right, Norton?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, tell our boys to give her underground lot what support we can, and tell that new logistics wizard, Whitely, at Chita that no matter how many tanks get through to Chita I want them shipped down via Borzna and Manzhouli ASAP!”
“Yes, General.”
“Norton,” Freeman added, “keep close liaison with all those logistic boys. I’ll need up-to-the-minute estimates of just how far back our tail is. I don’t want it too stretched out and have to do what the damn Siberians do — follow their supplies. We don’t go to our supplies — they come to us. Understood? I want our ammo to be near my tanks wherever the tanks are.”
“Yes, sir,” Norton yelled out from the cupola of the Bradley. “I’ll tell them.”
“Make sure that Whitely knows he mightn’t get enough flatbeds coming from Khabarovsk if the Jewish underground can’t stop the Chinese sabotaging those flatbeds. He’s to use his initiative.”
“Will do, sir.”
“How about those light fast attack vehicles?” Freeman asked.
“The FAVs are three miles back, General, with the SAS/D teams if we need them.”