“Perhaps. But your Gong An Bu agents are making a meal of this, Comrade Chairman.”
“General,” Nie said, leaning uncharacteristically forward, so close that Cheng could smell the fish he’d had for lunch. “If we do not defeat the Americans, Beijing will fall, and if Beijing falls, you and I fall. This is not the time to waste indulging ourselves with bourgeois views of the young. They are like the young anywhere. They need to know the limits, and it’s time to walk loudly with a big stick! Leave the internal security to me. You have enough on your plate with Freeman, so I hear.”
“Don’t worry yourself over that. I will take care of Freeman.”
“Let us hope so, Comrade,” Nie said, sitting back, looking around at the other members of the Politburo. “Or all our efforts will have been in vain.”
After the meeting, as General Cheng rose to go, doing up his coat — while it was warm in the Great Hall of the People, he knew it would still be chilly outside — Nie sat back like a headmaster and asked him, “You will be making a preemptive strike, of course.”
“Perhaps,” Cheng answered with deliberate equivocation. In fact he had the area already determined through which his divisions would pour in a lightning pincer movement he had designed in order to trap the arrowhead of Freeman’s forces. But to tell Nie the exact location could jeopardize the entire plan, for Nie would no doubt send his agents pouring in first to “cleanse” the area of fifth columnists and other politically unreliable elements. This would merely alert the Americans and their underground spies that that was the area most likely to be attacked. No, Cheng was determined not to reveal the location to anyone until he had informed his divisional commanders, and that would be only hours before the attack. He wanted absolute surprise.
Cheng would achieve his surprise, but not in the way he wanted. Nor would Freeman meet the attack in the way the U.S. general had planned — primarily with his armor, the will and determination of even the best generals often being thwarted by factors completely beyond their control.
General Cheng’s chauffeur was standing idly by the black, shiny, Red Flag limousine, bobbing his head to a belting rendition of pop singer Cui Jian’s song about the world changing too quickly. But the song’s real message, like so many in modern China, was about China not changing fast enough. This way the song got past the grinning, blockheaded censors but carried its cry for more freedom to those of the younger generation. But if the censor had been slow at perceiving the satire, General Cheng, C in C of the PLA, was not.
“Turn that rubbish off!” he ordered as he approached the open rear door of the Red Flag limousine. The chauffeur quickly obeyed — he hadn’t expected the Politburo’s meeting to end so quickly. But Cheng had had little to say apart from his criticism of Nie, and putting forth his, Cheng’s, prediction that the present truce between the People’s Liberation Army and the U.N. force — in reality, Freeman’s Second Army — would not hold. Sui, the Beijing garrison commander, had been visibly relieved, reiterating that the Politburo simply could not tolerate the fact that Freeman’s army was only 280 miles northwest of Beijing. Sui had also wanted to know whether Cheng would launch a preemptive strike against Freeman’s supply line— stretching all the way down from the Amur River to Orgon Tal — before the Americans made any move on the mountainous barrier of the Great Wall.
“Perhaps,” Sui had proffered, “the Americans will launch a preemptive strike first?”
“No,” Cheng had told him quite definitely. “It is the weakness of the democratic state. It can only react to an attack. They have this worn-out, bourgeois belief that you must not start a war, that there is some moral imperative against it.”
“And while they wait, we grow stronger,” the Beijing commander had said hopefully.
“Yes,” Cheng had agreed. “Our supply line is much shorter.”
Out on the street, the people of Beijing were going about their work as if a war were the furthest thing from their minds, yet Cheng knew this was merely appearance and not the full reality, their true emotions hidden beneath impassive stares. One had to look for other signs, such as the song by Cui Jian and other ballads about a northern hero or heroine — ostensibly about a Chinese woman who had made a heroic stand against the invasions of Genghis Khan. Cheng knew very well that the song was really being sung about the Siberian, Alexsandra Malof, who had rallied Siberian and Chinese dissidents to harass the PLA’s flanks in battles past. Still, Cheng was not as pessimistic as Nie, who thought that every youngster would automatically be turned against the older men in the Great Hall of the People. When it came to the fight, he was confident that nationalism would prove a much stronger magnet than the Communist party and what would carry the day in the Damaqun Shan — the wall-spined mountains to the north.
When General Cheng’s black Red Flag limousine turned off from Beijing’s Avenue of Eternal Peace toward Xinhuamen Gate, the two PLA soldiers on guard snapped to attention, their white gloves, dark green coats, fur hats, and glistening bayonets catching the pale spring light. A duty officer emerged from the guardhouse to check the credentials of General Cheng. Of course they knew it was him but in a country of over one billion people, many of them minorities, and dissastisfied minorities at that, and of students often flush with decadent liberal bourgeois attitudes, even in the Communist holy of holies, the Zhongnanhai, the compound housing the living quarters and many of the offices of the elite, nothing could be left to chance.
Often as he returned from important meetings, Cheng would deliberately pause once inside the compound to admire its tranquility and beauty, for here was another China. Dating back to the Qing Dynasty, it was here that the emperor would plow the first symbolic furrow of spring, where imperial banquets and the examinations for the highest credentials in martial arts were held.
Separated from the endless river of bicycle bells and civilians by high, thick walls, the gardens within the Zhongnanhai compound evoked calm after one’s immersion in the daily struggle to govern a land whose people were as numerous as the sands of the Gobi Desert and who, though few foreigners ever realized it, were not nearly as cohesive and obedient to the precepts of Marxism and Leninism and the thoughts of Mao as they appeared. It took all of the party’s strength and wisdom to hold them together.
But this day Cheng did not linger to sit by the Zhongnanhai’s two lakes. He must ready the People’s Liberation Army for what might well be the biggest war since Korea. Yet typically, not unlike Freeman in this respect, his attention to the minutiae of his profession — as in the way he studied the Americans for years, particularly their strategy — led him to pay attention to a request on his desk from the Thirty-first Army Group, headquartered in Xiamen.
The Thirty-first wanted to purchase fake aircraft silhouettes to fool U.S. satellite surveillance. Cheng scribbled a note that though such fakes could easily be purchased via the Hong Kong-based La Roche Industries, and were, he admitted, only a fraction of the cost of a real aircraft, cents compared with millions of dollars, it was nevertheless a waste of valuable resources. Instead he suggested requisitioning leftover blacktop paint from the Beijing main roads department and having students from the nearest technical institute, through “voluntary labor for the people,” paint Shenyang F-12 and Soviet-made Fulcrum silhouettes on the tarmac in squadron formation. This fooled even the most sophisticated satellite cameras, and if the Xiamen commander was concerned about the infrared sensors on the American satellites, then Cheng advised placing thermos flasks at the tail ends of the silhouettes. This would give off enough heat for satellite infrared sensors to interpret the aircraft as “hot” rather than “cold”—conveying the impression to the Americans that all the aircraft were fully operational and, just as importantly, that fuel was apparently no problem for the PLA fighter aircraft — which it was. Then, after quickly denying the Thirty-first’s request, he went, as was his habit during those times in his life when his responsibility weighed most heavily upon him, out of the southern entrance of the Zhongnanhai compound onto Changan Avenue.