‘What are our casualties?’
‘We’ve lost about two thousand dead in the counteroffensive, and about nine thousand wounded. Half those KIAs are in the Tangyuan Valley. Overall, we’re just over ten thousand dead and thirty thousand wounded for the war.’
Gordon held Dekker’s gaze. ‘How long till we hook up with those troops in the valley, General?’
Dekker frowned. ‘It’s difficult to say, Mr President. We’re on our time line right now. That would put us there in five days.’ Gordon nodded and turned to the head of the Special Operations Command. ‘So how goes the rearming of the Russian military?’
‘She’s been ferrying them out by medevacs,’ Colonel Reed said. Clark sat in front of the monitor watching video of parachutes blooming behind fat green aircraft. Guns popped and smoke rose from the battlefields beneath the high ridge. It was Clark’s first view of the desperate battle.
And the voice was clearly Kate Dunn’s. ‘Flying low through the valley, transports drop massive loads of supplies, which are consumed at a prodigious rate. Soldiers are engaged in nearconstant battle against wave after wave of Chinese infantry. Although the numbers of troops landed deep in China is classified, this is a major operation aimed straight into the heartland. And the People’s Liberation Army is pulling out all the stops to throw the foreign invaders from their soil.’ There were pictures of men running with stretchers toward aid tents. ‘The twenty-year-olds weathering that storm have no great desire to be here. But they’re among the best soldiers in the world. They’ve been hardened by months of winter war.’ There were close-ups of sunken, glassy eyes. ‘They know that the course of the war and of history may turn on the outcome of this one battle. But more importantly they know that they’re fighting for their lives and for the lives of their best friends.’ Two soldiers were crammed tightly into a hole — sound asleep. ‘And the force of the bonds forged on this anvil of war are so great they can only be broken by death.’
The final shot was of a vinyl tarpaulin covering all but the upturned boots of a dead soldier.
‘This is Kate Dunn, NBC News, northern China.’
Clark looked up at Reed and shook his head. ‘No way. Confiscate every tape she sends out.’ Reed nodded. ‘I would like to take a look at them, though,’ Clark added. Reed nodded again. ‘Now let’s go.’
Nate Clark’s Blackhawk hovered far upstream from the heli-bridge. Huge U.S. Marine Corps helicopters ferried heavy loads from one bank to the other. But the more impressive sight was what flowed down the river. Jagged patches of ice — sometimes piled high — meandering toward the sea.
‘Beautiful, don’t you think?’ General Cuvier said. Clark looked up at the area’s French commander. They sat knee-to-knee beside the large square window. ‘Before I came here it was impossible to conceive of the scale.’ He stared down at the scene. ‘Of the distances. Of the wilderness. How few roads and villages and people. At least on the Russian side of the border.’
Clark still looked out the window. But his mind wandered. They were entering a new country. A new and more populous theater. ‘I won’t miss it,’ Clark said without realizing. He looked up into the stare of his escort.
The man was alert and leaning forward. The helicopter’s engine was loud. It allowed for the fiction that the six aides couldn’t overhear their private conversation. ‘You seem to be afraid of losing,’ the general said. His voice was low and his accent thick. ‘If I can speak to you about this.’ Clark invited him to continue with a spread of his hands. ‘What I am saying about you is very good for a commanding officer. There was talk, you know. Talk from Paris, which we were told came from Washington.’ Clark just listened. ‘That you would resign your command,’ he explained as if Clark would immediately understand. ‘But that never seemed to me to be the man that I saw — the soldier — and I told them this. They just said,’ he made a face and waved his hand dismissively, ‘a-ah, you just do your job. Fight your battles. We will tell you about such things.’
He rocked back with a scowl on his face and locked himself stiff-armed with his hands on his knees.
Clark’s gaze drifted off. ‘At least they didn’t leave a pistol on my desk.’
There was laughter from everyone in the helicopter. Nate turned to see a half-dozen smiles. The captains and colonels in their entourage lightened up. An ease settled over the group that had not been there before.
The ear protectors they all wore looked like large headphones. Up and down the riverside heliport giant CH-53Es dropped their loads on mesh pads. Their huge engines were revved to full power. The noise was quite literally deafening.
Clark strained to listen to his guide. The Marine colonel and his French commander walked him onto the bulldozed and matted landing areas. Men on the ground unhooked the cargo. The loads dangled a hundred feet beneath the U.S. military’s most powerful helicopter. ‘We got a dozen Echos on loan from the Navy!’ the colonel yelled.
The ferries didn’t have very far to travel. From one side of the river to the other, they shuttled vehicles, nets and fuel tanks. The traffic was exclusively one-way. They picked up on the Russian side, and dropped off in Communist China. As he watched the operation, he experienced a sudden and unexplainable rush. Thoughts and feelings flooded his mind. It was as if he’d awakened to find himself sleepwalking. He looked at the bustling helipad. The crowded truck park. The tent city. The mounds of crates and boxes. The road that hadn’t been there two days before. It had been built solely for this crossing. In a month, it would be a sea of mud. But for the next two weeks it would be an artery through which would flow the life’s blood of his army.
And it was all in the People’s Republic of China.
General Cuvier was pointing out the short turnaround time. How the helicopters never touched the ground. But Clark’s mind roamed down the road into Manchuria. Dust rose high into the air behind two-ton trucks. The same dust also filled the air on the Russian bank. In Clark’s mind he visualized the huge pipeline. From factories and ports in America and Japan to the troops on the main line of resistance, the entire supply chain ran across the earth’s surface. Until it readied the Amur River, that is, and its gravity-defying heli-bridge.
The parade of ice down the waterway was a testament to nature’s power. Clark found himself increasingly drawn to the riverbank. He saw there with his own eyes what had previously been dry engineering theory. Comparisons of the maximum force that a span would withstand with the energy unleashed by millions of tons of moving ice. The thick slabs were broken in places and piled atop one another sometimes several layers thick. They were white monuments to crushing force. The phenomenal energy of the river’s movement. And even over the constant roar of the helicopters he could occasionally hear the groan of the grinding ice.
‘We’ll have pontoon bridges in ten days!’ the Marine transportation officer said from Clark’s side. ‘Not here, but about ten miles downriver!’ He raised a gloved hand to point. ‘Had to cross up here with the helicopters because there wasn’t flat land downstream for two LZs — one on each bank!’
Clark caught himself thinking it seemed too easy. The Chinese defenses built up to counter the Soviets had seemed insurmountable on paper months before. Clark knew intellectually all the answers. That those defenses had eroded. That they’d been abandoned by the troops who invaded Siberia. But he knew also that there was nothing easy about it. That men fought and died for every meter of that dirt road. It was a depressing measure of how detached he’d grown from the killing and the dying in the field. How effectively he had shut from his mind all the horror he’d experienced in his youth.