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 ever be sure of what Freeman will do. He’s entirely unpredictable. If he hadn’t tricked us before with his feints here and there and his main attack elsewhere he wouldn’t be only two hundred and eighty miles from the capital.”
“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 matériel 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.”
“Then how do you propose to get her?”
Nie poured himself a glass of mineral water. His chiefs of staff were good at what they did, but sometimes he wondered if they knew anything else than what they were trained for.
“It’s already been arranged,” Nie said.
“In New York?” the general asked.
Nie did not answer.
Beneath the gold and blue dome of the Temple of Heaven, Cheng, commander in chief of the PLA, experienced what his Christian mother would have called a vision but what Cheng could only accept as a fortuitous thought spawned by a schooling in Communist theory — more specifically from his memory of Mao’s rules of engagement When the enemy advances, retreat; when the enemy retreats, attack. But break all these rules if the element of surprise presents itself to you in another form. The Temple of Heaven was now invaded by long, searching fingers of fog whose chill invigorated General Cheng. He had a plan inspired by the news from the coastal weather stations at Tianjin and Qinhuangdao on the gulf where it was muggy but strangely still, and where a spiral pattern was discerned by all the weather radars. Prediction, a taifeng—typhoon. Cheng knew that even in good weather over 70 percent of all the bombs dropped on Iraq by the U.S. Allied planes missed their target, and that was in good weather — the other bombs you saw on CNN having been carefully selected for the press.
Cheng walked quickly down from the Temple of Heaven along the raised walk, trying not to show his excitement, beads of perspiration forming on his forehead despite the spring chill. Once in the Red Flag limousine he ordered, “Zhongnanhai,” then lifted the cellular phone and just as quickly put it down. One of the “cultural attaches” at the foreign embassies could be using a scanner. He looked at his watch. It was 1600 hours. He would schedule the attack for 0500 in the predawn darkness so that by first light they would be on the American positions as the typhoon, having engulfed the coast, would then be in full fury over Orgon Tal.
There was a delicious symmetry to it for Cheng, something that appealed to his deep sense of the yin and the yang, of opposites and of balance. As Freeman, before the truce, had rolled south toward Orgon Tal with Manchuria on his left flank, his tanks drove through the protection of a desert storm coming out of the west from the Gobi, and now he, Cheng, would head northwest from Beijing toward Orgon Tal then northeast along the snaking Manchurian trace, his troops all the while under the protection of a typhoon. American infrared beams and laser beams, degraded by the bad weather, would be unusable in the screaming, rain-laden typhoon, the sky darkly leaden, rivers swollen, roads a quagmire where infantry could move but not tanks.
The PLA infantry divisions would swarm over the trace and, like a million insects upon a buffalo’s hide, would kill it, rout the Americans. Cheng’s divisions would men keep moving north, their arms reaching out like scythes in a pincer movement on Freeman’s overextended supply line. Freeman would be cut off, an American island in the desert ready for annihilation.
If Rosemary Brentwood had thought the PX at the Bangor base was stocked full of anything you might need, her visit, with Andrea Rolston, to the Silverdale Mall revealed an even richer cornucopia of goods, and whether or not it was partially her pregnancy to blame, she felt quite overwhelmed. She had thought that the shops back in Oxshott in Surrey had enough variety to give you headaches of indecision, but in Silverdale there were even more choices to make. It made her uncomfortable — the noise, the lights, the Muzak, and the belting rock from a shoe store quickly put her nerves on edge, and she told Andrea to go ahead while she waited at the Bon Marché.
Andrea had been gone for about ten minutes when Rosemary, with the sixth sense developed as a teacher who, while facing a blackboard, generally knew exactly who was acting up and who was paying attention, glanced about. She couldn’t see anyone looking at her but nevertheless felt it in her bones. Or was it the anxiety of pregnancy? Whatever the cause, it manifested itself in a definite suspicion that she was being watched. She felt a tap on the shoulder, jumped, and turned.