“How badly?”
“I do not know. Reports are sketchy, but it doesn’t sound good.”
“What sort of attack was it?”
“An air attack, origin unknown. As I said, reports are very sketchy at this time. Twenty-ninth seems very disorganized at the moment,” Ge reported.
“Very well. You will continue the attack. Forty-third Army is behind Twenty-ninth and will support you. Watch your left flank—”
“I know of the reports of Russian units to my west,” Ge said. “I will orient a mechanized division to deal with that, but. . .”
“But what?” Luo asked.
“But, Comrade Marshal, we have no reconnaissance information on what lies before us. I need such information in order to advance safely.”
“You will find your safety in advancing rapidly into enemy territory and destroying whatever formations you find,” Luo told him forcefully. “Continue your advance!”
“By your command, Comrade Minister.” There wasn’t much else he could say to that.
“Report back to me as necessary.”
“I will do that,” Ge promised.
“Very well. Out.” Static replaced the voice.
“You heard him,” Ge said to Colonel Wa Cheng-gong, whom he’d just inherited as army operations officer. “Now what, Colonel?”
“We continue the advance, Comrade General.”
Ge nodded to the logic of the situation. “Give the order.”
It took hold four minutes later, when the radio commands filtered down to battalion level and the units started moving.
They didn’t need reconnaissance information now, Colonel Wa reasoned. They knew that there had to be some light Russian units just beyond the ridgeline where Peng had met his foolish death. Didn’t I warn him? Wa raged to himself. Didn’t Ge warn him? For a general to die in battle was not unexpected. But to die from a single bullet fired by some lone rifleman was worse than foolish. Thirty years of training and experience wasted, lost to a single rifleman!
“There they go again,” Major Tucker said, seeing the plume of diesel exhaust followed by the lurching of numerous armored vehicles. “About six kilometers from your first line of tanks.”
“A pity we can’t get one of these terminals to Sinyavskiy,” Bondarenko said.
“Not that many of them, sir,” Tucker told him. “Sun Micro Systems is still building them for us.”
“That was General Ge Li,” Luo told the Politburo. “We’ve had some bad luck. General Peng is dead, killed by a sniper bullet, I just learned.”
“How did that happen?” Premier Xu asked.
“Peng had gone forward, as a good general should, and there was a lucky Russian out there with a rifle,” the Defense Minister explained. Then one of his aides appeared and walked to the marshal’s seat, handing him a slip of paper. He scanned it. “This is confirmed?”
“Yes, Comrade Marshal. I requested and got confirmation myself. The ships are in sight of land even now.”
“What ships? What land?” Xu asked. It was unusual for him to take an active part in these meetings. Usually he let the others talk, listened passively, and then announced the consensus conclusions reached by the others.
“Comrade,” Luo answered. “It seems some American warships are bombarding our coast near Guangszhou.”
“Bombarding?” Xu asked. “You mean with guns?”
“That’s what the report says, yes.”
“Why would they do that?” the Premier asked, somewhat nonplussed by this bit of information.
“To destroy shore emplacements, and—”
“Isn’t that what one docs prior to invading, a preparation to putting troops on the beach?” Foreign Minister Shen asked.
“Well, yes, it could be that, I suppose,” Luo replied, “but—”
“Invasion?” Xu asked. “A direct attack on our own soil?”
“Such a thing is most unlikely,” Luo told them. “They lack the ability to put troops ashore in sufficiently large numbers, America simply doesn’t have the troops to do such a—”
“What if they get assistance from Taiwan? How many troops do the BANDITs have?” Tong Jie asked.
“Well, they have some land forces,” Luo allowed. “But we have ample ability to—”
“You told us a week ago that we had all the forces required to defeat the Russians, even if they got some aid from America,” Qian observed, becoming agitated. “What fiction do you have for us now, Luo?”
“Fiction!” the marshal’s voice boomed. “I tell you the facts, but now you accuse me of that?”
“What have you not told us, Luo?” Qian asked harshly. “We are not peasants here to be told what to believe.”
“The Russians are making a stand. They have fought back. I told you that, and I told you this sort of thing is to be expected—and it is. We fight a war with the Russians. It’s not a burglary in an unoccupied house. This is an armed contest between two major powers—and we will win because we have more and better troops. They do not fight well. We swept aside their border defenses, and we’ve pursued their army north, and they didn’t have the manhood to stand and fight for their own land! We will smash them. Yes, they will fight back. We must expect that, but it won’t matter. We will smash them, I tell you!” he insisted.
“Is there any information which you have not told us to this point?” Interior Minister Tong asked, in a voice more reasonable than the question itself.
“I have appointed Major General Ge to assume command of the Thirty-fourth Shock Army. He reported to me that Twenty-ninth Army sustained a serious air attack earlier today. The effects of this attack are not clear, probably they managed to damage communications—and an air attack cannot seriously hurt a large mechanized land force. The tools of war do not permit such a thing.”
“Now what?” Premier Xu asked.
“I propose that we adjourn the meeting and allow Minister Luo to return to his task of managing our armed forces,” Zhang Han Sen proposed. “And that we reconvene, say, at sixteen hours.”
There were nods around the table. Everyone wanted the time to consider the things that they’d heard this morning—and perhaps to give the Defense Minister the chance to make good his words. Xu did a head count and stood.
“Very well. We adjourn until this afternoon.” The meeting broke up in an unusually subdued manner, without the usual pairing off and pleasantries between old comrades. Outside the conference room, Qian buttonholed Fang again.
“Something is going badly wrong. I can feel it.”
“How sure are you of that?”
“Fang, I don’t know what the Americans have done to my railroad bridges, but I assure you that to destroy them as I was informed earlier this morning is no small thing. Moreover, the destruction inflicted was deliberately systematic. The Americans—it must have been the Americans—deliberately crippled our ability to supply our field armies. You only do such a thing in preparation to smashing them. And now the commanding general of our advancing armies is suddenly killed—stray bullet, my ass! That tset ha tset ha Luo LEADs us to disaster, Fang.”
“We’ll know more this afternoon,” Fang suggested, leaving his colleague and going to his office. Arriving there, he dictated another segment for his daily journal. For the first time, he wondered if it might turn out to be his testament.
For her part, Ming was disturbed by her minister’s demeanor. An elderly man, he’d always nonetheless been a calm and optimistic one for the most part. His mannerisms were those of a grandfatherly gentleman even when taking her or one of the other office girls to his bed. It was an endearing quality, one of the reasons the office staff didn’t resist his advances more vigorously—and besides, he did take care of those who took care of his needs. This time she took her dictation quietly, while he leaned back in his chair, his eyes closed, and his voice a monotone. It took half an hour, and she went out to her desk to do the transcription. It was time for the midday meal by the time she was done, and she went out to lunch with her co-worker, Chai.
“What is the matter with him?” she asked Ming.
“The meeting this morning did not go well. Fang is concerned with the war.”
“But isn’t it going well? Isn’t that what they say on TV?”
“It seems there have been some setbacks. This morning they argued about how serious they were. Qian was especially exercised about it, because the American attacked our rail bridges in Harbin and Bei’an.”
“Ah.” Chai shoveled some rice into her mouth with her chopsticks. “How is Fang taking it?”
“He seems very tense. Perhaps he will need some comfort this evening.”
“Oh? Well, I can take care of him. I need a new office chair anyway,” she added with a giggle.
Lunch dragged on longer than usual. Clearly their minister didn’t need any of them for the moment, and Ming took the time to walk about on the street to gauge the mood of the people there. The feeling was strangely neutral. She was out just long enough to trigger her computer’s downtime activation, and though the screen was blank, in the auto-sleep mode, the hard drive started turning, and silently activated the onboard modem.