For the past three days, Freeman hadn’t seen the figure on the dunes, and this morning the general was particularly relaxed, going over the old battles in his mind as he jogged along the water-firmed beach.
He remembered the armored battle in the Yakutsk region of Siberia where it had plunged to minus sixty degrees, at which temperature metal became brittle and the waxes in the hydraulic lines of the Siberian tanks, but not the American Abrams M1A1, separated out, the oil’s constituent waxes then clogging the tanks’ arteries in the same way as lumps of cholesterol clog the bloodstream. The T-72s and some T-80s had suddenly become sitting ducks, whereas the American tanks burst through the snow berms at forty miles per hour like exploding icing sugar, picking the Siberians off. It was one of the most beautiful things Freeman had ever seen, and he was thinking of it now as suddenly he saw the lone figure on the dunes once again.
Freeman’s world was a Hobbesian one: one in which only the sword, or the threat of it by the sovereign — whether the sovereign was one or many — guaranteed peace and tranquility, and so it was the most natural thing in the world for him to pat the bulge beneath the waistband of his jogging trousers to make sure that the Sig Sauer was snug and ready. His wife had been fatally wounded by a Siberian Spetsnaz — a special-forces sleeper who, along with so many others, had been inserted during the heyday of the love-in between Gorby and the New York Times and who, when activated to take out Freeman earlier in the war, had surprised his wife in the house instead, Freeman having been delayed on the flight from Washington. The intruder fatally wounded her, and she died a few hours later in the Monterey Peninsula Hospital.
Freeman could tell by the way the man — Chinese, in a jogging suit — was standing on the dune, staring out to sea, not bothering to turn in the general’s direction, that he was waiting for him again. Or was he one of California’s legion of ecofreaks — kill all the people but save the whales! And was the stranger the same man as a few days ago?
“Morning,” Freeman said, not altering his pace, merely nodding as he passed. The man nodded back.
Son of a bitch looks suspicious, Freeman thought, and immediately thought after that maybe he wasn’t. He looked lithe, wiry, and unusually tall. But somehow, maybe because of the smart matching jogging outfit and the Nike pumps — very modern — in some indefinable way Freeman didn’t place him as a party member. But then they’d hardly send someone in a baggy Mao suit with “party” written all over him.
Two hundred yards further on Freeman stopped and began some leg stretches. Love a duck — the Chinese jogger was doing T’ai chi, moving with that graceful deliberation that for once made westerners stare at the Chinese rather than the other way around.
Now ahead, a hundred yards further on up the beach, he saw another figure, and off to his left another appeared atop the dunes.
“Bad news, Dick!” Freeman was speaking as if Colonel Dick Norton were by his side. “One in front of me, one behind, and one on the left flank.” The sea was to his right. Boxed in.
“All right, you bastards,” Freeman muttered beneath the crash of the sea. “You’re going to have to come and get me.” Up on the highway he could hear the hum of tires and saw a Winnebago go by — then a bus and a motorbike, but they might as well have been on Mars.
“Well, Dick, I told you to build up the U.N. line — get things ready in case of a punch-up — and over here I’ve fouled up, my friend.” He was doing a few push-ups, during which he could see all of them at one glance. He stopped the pushups. Foolish to get his heartbeat up too much — could make his aim a little shaky. Still, he wasn’t fool enough to think he could get three of them. Two, maybe, but not three. He looked up and saw that T’ai Chi was now moving toward him, hands in his pockets. “Well, Dick, last time I saw a jogger with his hands in his pockets, son of a bitch was playing with himself. Don’t like it. You hear that, Sig? Time I played a little pocket billiards myself.” He knelt down, as if going into another exercise routine, which immediately reduced his target size. He felt under the jogging suit for the grip — had it, and turned the gun barrel out, still under the cloth, pushing off the safety. He figured T’ai Chi would be within good range in about sixty, seventy seconds, and began the count.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Five thousand miles away it had been a slow morning along the U.N. line. Everything was quiet, and only the four-man SAS/Delta troop of David Brentwood, Salvini, Choir Williams, and Aussie Lewis were unhurriedly busy, checking all their equipment from the transparent mags for the Belgian P-90 to the pencil flares and hand-held, cigarette-pack-size GPSs — geosynchronous positioning systems — they all carried. Jenghiz, the Mongolian interpreter-guide they had assigned them, was fluent not only in the Khalkha Mongol dialect that was used by three-quarters of the population but also the dialects of the Durbet Mongols who lived in and about the mountainous region north of the tableland between Siberia and China that the rest of the world called Mongolia. Jenghiz also spoke the tongue of the Darigangra inhabitants of eastern Mongolia, and that of the Kazakhs, Turvins, and Khotans that made up less than 10 percent of the sparsely populated country the size of Texas.
With Jenghiz they would be going in over the wall, not the Great Wall of China but the big rampart of Genghis Khan in northeast Mongolia, near the Mongolian-Chinese border, and over the two-mile-high Hentiyn Nuruu Mountains south of the Siberian-Mongolian border and eighty miles northeast of the Mongolian capital of Ulan Bator. It was a high country that, unlike the steppes and the Gobi Desert south and east of it, was one of fast-running rivers, deep gorges, and wild, windswept mountains, outcrops of larch and spruce hanging grimly onto rock faces, battered by the winds that alternately came out of Siberia to the north and Chinese Inner Mongolia to the south.
If they were caught, Jenghiz was to destroy Freeman’s sealed message. The cover story given them by Colonel Dick Norton would be that while patrolling the U.N. DMZ, the Pave Low M-53J chopper had lost its NOE — nap of the earth — radar, and in one of the many dust storms that plagued Mongolia they had lost their way, straying into Mongolian airspace, the Mongolian interpreter as lost for recognizable landmarks as they were. It had happened before, both in the almost featureless expanse of the Gobi Desert to the southeast and to those pilots trying to negotiate their way around the Hentiyn Nuruu.
But Aussie Lewis reckoned the Mongolians wouldn’t buy it. They certainly didn’t buy any incursions on their territory by the Chinese from Inner Mongolia, whom they hated.
“This is different,” David Brentwood assured Aussie. “We’ll be wearing U.N. identification — armbands, et cetera.”
“Yeah, until we reach the insertion point,” Salvini said. “But what if they come across us while we’re changing into our Mongolian garb? You know what they do to spies.” He paused. “You know what we do to spies.”
“We’re not at war with them, boyo,” Choir Williams said. “It’d be mighty embarrassing, that’s all.”
Aussie chimed in, “Maybe, Choir, but Sal’s got a point. We could be embarrassed for twenty-five years’ hard fucking yakka in some friggin’ coal mine!”