“General, they could lose a million men and still have twice as many men at arms as we do.”
“A tough shell, I’ll agree to that, Dick. Damn tough. But Dick, with a little ingenuity and determination we can do anything.”
Any excitement in Norton had waned, and now all he felt was a dull headache.
“A little ingenuity, General? Your southern strategy seems sound enough, but how about all these Chinese armies massing on the Manchurian border along the Amur? What if they suddenly come west against your flank attack?”
“Then my flank attack wouldn’t work, Dick.”
“Well, sir, we can hardly ignore them. There’re over five armies along that river.” He meant the Amur hump.
“We’ve got to keep them occupied,” Freeman answered, with what seemed calculated ingenuousness.
“Yes, General, but how? Our CAS can only do so much, and given the bad weather—”
“Dick — you have that wolf dung I told you to get?”
“Lots of it, General. You know what they’re calling us here in Khabarovsk?”
“What?”
“The shitheads.”
Freeman let forth a belly laugh that could be heard in his communications room. “Shit stirrers, Dick! That’s what they’re going to call us. Stirrers!”
“Yes, sir. But what if the Ulan Bator mission doesn’t go smoothly?”
“Why shouldn’t it?” Freeman demanded. “No one knows they’re there except us. Boys are well trained for exactly this kind of mission. Thrive on it. Their instructors were with Special Forces in Iraq. They’ll be okay.”
“I hope you’re right, General. And then there are those missiles we have to worry about.”
“Ah — I don’t think we’ll have any trouble with that either,” Freeman responded confidently. “You’re a good officer, Dick, but you have to guard against being too pessimistic. Stop seeing the glass as half empty. Start seeing it half full.”
Sometimes the general’s optimism frightened Norton more than the Chinese did. The worst thing about it was that if something went truly wrong the general could be prone to a depression so dark that few realized how perilously close his pride rode to the abyss — his depressions as intense in their way as his highs. Well, at least the general was right about the SAS/D mission. No one else knew about it but the four SAS/D troopers involved.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The Republic of China, or Taiwan, was a country worth cultivating if and when the Labour party came to power. The Taiwanese would have to do business with the government, and Trevor Brenson, M.P., thought it might as well be with him. Besides, there was no more excitement in living with his wife. He’d grown tired of her — she spent all her time at women’s rights rallies, so much so that Brenson wondered whether she was married to the feminist movement instead of him. And when they did get to be together in bed she began telling him what to do—”this way, not that way”— “you’re too rough”—”harder”—”slower.” After a while it felt as if he were learning to drive and she was the instructor. More and more he just wanted to swerve off the bloody road.
Lin Meiling, however, was different, and she offered him a way out. Like his wife she was outspoken, too, but she had the Oriental sense of place — which in bed was to do what the man wanted, anything to please. Besides, at their rendezvous in a Hampstead flat, she never rushed it or talked politics, and when she’d finished with him he felt so deliciously drained, so completely relaxed, that he’d already missed one shadow cabinet meeting because Lin Meiling had literally squeezed then sucked him dry, and as he told her later, he must have slept right through his alarm. In fact Lin Meiling had turned off the alarm, giving her ample time to go through his briefcase after they made love.
So far she’d found nothing of note, only some dry skulduggery against a conservative M.P. for having had personal use of government aircraft — taking his family on a hop across to France. They all did it, of course, and Brenson had absolutely no doubt that he’d be doing it when he got into power, but he wouldn’t be as damned silly as the Tory.
And when he got to power he wouldn’t tell Lin Meiling any more than he did now, which was naught. She could be a spy for either the ROC or the PRC. Whatever — she could detect his mood the moment he walked into the flat, and all she had to do was let him talk about the idiots and various assholes who were trying to run the government, and how he could do it so much better.
Here and there he’d unconsciously drop a hint about what was going on, but she never seemed interested. The trick, as Lin Meiling knew, was patience and knowing that it was better sometimes to know someone in the shadow cabinet man the real cabinet itself, for in order for the shadow cabinet to operate they had to know exactly what the government was up to. There was some brouhaha at the moment— something about the Americans — exactly what she didn’t know. But she remained patient, knowing that in two or three days Brenson would be so horny again that he’d want her desperately. It would give her another opportunity to flick through his files and/or listen to his self-pitying frustrations about what a thankless job it was being a member of the queen’s loyal opposition.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Aussie Lewis, like Salvini, Brentwood, and Choir Williams, had been well briefed in what to expect in the mountains northeast around Ulan Bator. Indeed, he’d been so well instructed that he was by now thoroughly disabused of the false notion, held by most foreigners, that Mongolia was nothing but desert. He knew that in its far west mountainous region there were lakes and streams and vegetation that reminded one of Switzerland, and that parts of the Gobi Desert that ran from southwestern Mongolia east, swinging up into Manchuria, weren’t all desert. Much of it was semidesert pastureland capable of sustaining great herds of sheep, camels, and wild horses that roamed about, outnumbering the human population by fourteen to one — the population density of the whole country being no more than three people per square mile.
Because of his briefing on the flora and fauna of the once-mighty kingdom of Genghis Khan, Aussie Lewis was not surprised to see ermine, sable, and squirrels in the mountains, but because the briefing officer had not mentioned it, he wasn’t at all prepared for the two roe deer that Jenghiz pointed out to him, one of which, in Lewis’s inelegant phrase, “upset the bloody applecart.” He glimpsed the deer only a moment before it descended between a smaller spill of the rocky outcrop, and stood stock still, its nose twitching in the hot spring sun, before it bounded across the open area beyond the blind side of a large boulder that protected then-southern exposure against a sudden sneak attack.
“No!” It was Jenghiz’s panic-stricken voice from the other side of the huge boulder, behind which he had suddenly flung himself. In that split second Aussie visualized the whole thing: The deer must have hit the trip wire, releasing the spring-loaded firing pin — the Claymore mine set up on its legs in dry grass so as to go off at chest height and so avoid any accidental trip by small animals. He could hear its back-blast hitting the protective boulders about their camp.