It took only minutes for the charges to be read and less time for La Roche’s lawyer to get him off scot-free — the reason stunningly simple. Jay La Roche had been arrested under the Emergency Powers Act, which ended at midnight, Washington time, on the day of his arrest, and under which a suspect could be arrested without being Mirandized. But having been arrested at 11:40 p.m. Alaskan time meant that he had in fact been arrested at 3:40 a.m. Washington time, that is, three hours and forty minutes after the Washington deadline, thus rendering his arrest “technically” invalid, as he had not been Mirandized. That is, Jay La Roche had been arrested and not advised of his rights under a law that no longer was in force.
It was pandemonium in the courtroom, and even more flashbulbs and TV crews crowding the corridors than had been on the steps when La Roche had entered the building. As he exited a free man, he walked down the steps of the courthouse unhurriedly, pausing halfway so that his picture in his own tabloid would show him released beneath blindfolded Justice, who had shown impartiality under the law. He made a grave face about how he was of course innocent of the charges of trading with the enemy and he would have “much preferred” to have been cleared on other evidence but that in the “present political climate” during wartime he doubted that he could have received a fair trial.
Lana, still in shock, called Frank Shirer and as it was 1:30 p.m. in Dutch Harbor when she made the call, she woke him up at 10:30 at Lakenheath — all air crews having already turned in while waiting for a decision to come down as to whether or not they would be going on the China mission.
“Set free?” he asked Lana.
“Yes, absolutely—”
“I don’t believe it,” Frank said, and then made a remark about lawyers that all but turned Lana’s face red with embarrassment.
“I know,” she agreed. “I can’t believe it either.” She sighed. It was part pain, part resignation. “I suppose we were all naive in thinking they’d get him. The rich get richer and the poor—”
“The bastard!” Shirer cut in, his tone one of bitter resentment. It meant more than La Roche was free again. It meant that the divorce Lana had longed for — a divorce that would have been much easier to get if he’d been convicted— was now as far off as ever.
“I–I don’t know what to say, Frank. I—” He could tell she was crying. In the Dutch Harbor Hospital she’d seen some of the worst injuries of the war: melted skin where once there’d been a man’s face, a mangled stump of splintered bone and flesh that had once been a limb, and the smells— the vinegary stink of fear, the eye-watering stench of pus-filled gangrene. With all this she could cope, but the trapped feeling of being sealed in a marriage gone sour with no release in sight was too much.
“Hang on, honey,” Frank told her lamely. “We’ll beat it — Lana?”
“Yes,” she replied, but it was so desolate a response that he felt it in his gut and was left too with that desolate feeling that only a telephone can give in its awful illusion of nearness shattered by the reality of being so far apart, the feeling that teased you into thinking you could do something against the cold reality of knowing you could do nothing. In his pain he selfishly wished that she hadn’t called.
When he went back to his bunk he couldn’t sleep. The thought of her thousands of miles away in the wind-blown loneliness of Dutch Harbor, a speck in the vast darkness of the world, brought tears to his eyes, and with them the animal urge to be with her, to feel her warmth, to give her his, to be in her, to possess her so that he tossed and turned, nothing but the low moan of a channel storm blowing about the eaves of the Quonset hut for company and the gray dawn creeping.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Aussie Lewis didn’t think the day would ever come when he’d be happy to see a Siberian, but now in the gathering purple dusk the presence of other Caucasian faces, no doubt Siberian advisers and the like, afforded Brentwood’s group added protection as they lost themselves in the crowds milling about the temple. Long shafts of golden moonlight shone through the pillars, the beams getting thinner and thinner as the moon passed in a golden wafer through cloud.
At the entrance to the temple several pilgrims were prostrate, while in the temple itself others moved so silently that all that could be heard was the wind sweeping down from the Hentiyn Nuruu, the shuffle of feet, and the soft whir of prayer wheels whose spokes, containing the little paper messages that the Buddhists believed would find their way to Heaven, spun about like small merry-go-rounds. The notorious Mongolian cold was already seeping up from the ground like dry ice, the change dramatic and particularly uncomfortable for Salvini, who had worked up a sweat during the long hike dressed in his del. The only firearm he, like the others, carried into the city was his 9mm Browning, and it was irritating his skin beneath the silk-lined tunic.
Soon the official presidential party arrived, the president’s entrance to the holy place as low-key as they’d been briefed it would be. Now everything depended on Jenghiz handing the president Freeman’s sealed note, the same size as those that were inserted in the prayer wheels, requesting free passage for the American troops in the hostilities against China. If anything went awry, David Brentwood knew that even with the 9mms hidden under their dels it would be “dicey,” as Aussie was wont to say.
As Jenghiz, in a silent, respectful attitude of prayer, made his way closer to the president, the latter, acting as yet another pilgrim with no special prestige within the temple, bowed his head to the Buddha in respect. One of the bodyguards cast an eye over the crowd in the darkened temple, its candlelight casting huge, flickering shadows on the monastery’s temple walls. The four SAS men moved into the throng of worshippers, trying to form a rough protective semicircle around Jenghiz as he faced the Buddha. Aussie Lewis said a prayer of his own — that there would be no fighting in the holy place. The Buddhists subscribed to the theory of nonviolence, but he knew the presidential guard wouldn’t.
It was then, however, that Aussie felt strangely uncomfortable. Was it that, the Claymore explosion aside, everything had gone so smoothly — too smoothly, almost — that there was an air of unreality about it all, as if they were somehow going through the well-rehearsed motions of a play written by someone else? Perhaps, he thought, it was the relative silence of the monastery itself and the almost ethereal sight of the saffron-robed monks, some with small scarlet skullcaps on their heads, the whole atmosphere added to by the thick aroma of incense in the air. It had been only seconds since Jenghiz had pressed the piece of prayer paper into the president’s hand, but now Jenghiz, having said his prayer, was talking to one of the bodyguards.
At the same moment David Brentwood saw a white face near a candle’s flame, then caught a glimpse of Spets military fatigues beneath it, and yelled, “Abort!” into the darkness. In that instant Aussie saw Jenghiz’s hand shoot out toward him, and Aussie fired through his del, an explosion of orange silk, dark in the dim light, filling the air, Jenghiz hit twice, falling dead, and the crowd into which the SAS men turned now surging in panic, all trying to head for the exits.
There were shouts from the Siberians, a burst of jagged red fire over the crowd’s heads, but to no avail, the crowd moving even more frantically now, surging through the temple’s entrance, passing around the Spets commandos in a dark river of dels and fur caps, a roar coming from the street as the panic spread like an instant contagion. Each of the four SAS/D team members was now on his own, separated from each other by the mob and being carried along by it, past the incongruous sight of animals that one moment had been wandering in, grazing peacefully around the square, now in stampede, each SAS/D man knowing that Jenghiz had betrayed them. Each of them had to assume that their insertion point and therefore extraction point was known, realizing they would now have to revert to the emergency extraction plan. The latter called for them to rendezvous sixteen miles southwest of Ulan Bator, just north of Nalayh, the actual EEP, or emergency extraction point, at longitude 107 degrees 16 minutes east, latitude 47 degrees 52 minutes north, in a valley between two mountains, one to the north, seven thousand feet high, the other to the south, five thousand feet.