Inside Beijing and the other big Chinese cities from Harbin to Shanghai, the sirens of military convoys were constant, many of them two to three truckloads of soldiers going to yet another public execution of “hooligans” and those suspected of being “fifth columnists.”
In the Beijing prison yard, where the first blooms of spring had popped up along the wall, the killing posts were chipped and scarred by the seemingly endless procession of Nie’s firing squads.
From her drab hospital bed in a ward that in any other country in the world would have been condemned under the Health Act, Alexsandra could see those being executed — mostly men but women, too. A day or so after Alexsandra had arrived they had done away with any ceremony, not even bothering to blindfold them — just made them kneel, their hands tied behind their backs, and one shot through the base of the skull.
Alexsandra tried to pull the blinds closed. The blinds were removed, and her bed and side table wheeled closer to the window in such a way that she could not help seeing the daily executions down in the courtyard. Nie was determined that she should daily observe what happened to those who did not cooperate with the Party. After her beating, Nie had said her sentence could be commuted to life if she confessed.
Two Chinese group armies — a total of one hundred thousand reinforcements — were on their way to Orgon Tal-Honggor from the Beijing military district as well as a tank division, two artillery divisions, and four engineering regiments, the latter called up because of serious flooding of the rivers following the typhoon. Also, the Chinese had a problem with their bridges once they got outside the greater general metropolitan area. Here many old bridges simply could not take anything bigger than a fifty-ton load, and the engineers were there to ply emergency spans across swollen streams and irrigation channels that had become rivers in the spring storm.
Alexsandra knew that the further north you went the worse the bridges became. As she was thinking about the bridges as a metaphor for her own journey, how she had crossed the Black River so many times from the Jewish autonomous region in the north into Manchuria, she wondered if she had come to the last bridge of her life. A confession would allow her to pass from certain death to life and hope — if the Americans won. But she knew she would not cross the bridge if the toll for it was a confession against her comrades. She sat forlornly watching another “conspirator” die. When first she’d entered the jail a few days before, they had only tied the condemned prisoners’ hands. Now they had gags on as well.
“Why are they gagging them?” she asked the young nurse on duty. The nurse was busy writing reports, and she did not look up. “They call your name!”
For Alexsandra, those few words were like being struck again by the guard who’d brutalized her. But the sorrow she felt, the humility, the realization that people were dying with her name on their lips, undid her, and she wept, the tears starting down her cheek and stinging the ugly purple-red bruises on her cheekbone. The nurse, a short, pert woman — a no-nonsense air about her — told her to be quiet or she would have to sedate her. If she didn’t keep quiet it would set off an unruly protest by the other patients. Alexsandra didn’t care now what they did; the bravery of men and women dying for her cause and theirs had stripped her pride utterly.
“Very well,” the nurse said, and came bossily behind the screen with the hypodermic of ten millimeters of Diazepam. She also placed a kidney basin on the small bedside table and in it a white strip of paper. She pointed to the paper as she brushed Alexsandra’s arm with a swab of cold cotton wool smelling of alcohol. Alexsandra turned over the paper. It said simply, “1:00 a.m. Be ready.”
With that the nurse injected Alexsandra, put the hypodermic in the kidney basin, and walked curtly away. The Diazepam wouldn’t knock her out but would calm her enough so that she might get an hour or two’s sleep. She buzzed the nurse and asked her assistance to go to the toilet. Despite the Diazepam coursing through her veins, she was still alert and said simply but very quietly, “You must tell our friends to blow all the bridges.”
She knew it would make little difference to Freeman’s army, for its replacement tanks were already too heavy to use most of the China bridges and would have to be either airlifted over or put across on bridges of their own, but the bridges were still strong enough for the lighter Chinese tanks, and if they were blown, it would cost the Chinese divisions crucial time in trying to stop any American counterattack.