North Cape

By the mid-1970s a new trend — the first tentative edgings toward international cooperation that far surpassed that of the 1930s and completely disregarded the regional blocism of the late 1940s and early 195os-was gaining momentum. And so, rebuffed like the other two giants, Red China turned again, as historically she had done for thousands of years, to fomenting trouble on her frontiers — her Asian frontiers. And not without some small justification.

Between the Soviet Union and Red China stretches nearly two thousand miles of common border. That this borderland includes some of the most worthless land on the face of the earth made absolutely no difference to either party — just as it never had in four hundred years of struggle. In the mid-1800s the troops and diplomats of the Romanov tsars, after their rebuff at the Dardanelles by Britain and France during the Crimean War, turned their attentions toward the still mythical lands of Cathay. By the turn of the century they had managed to annex some fifty million square miles of former Chinese territory in a fashion that not even the wily Ch'ing emperors completely understood. That fifty million square miles of desolate and useless land remained a bone of contention ever since. Most of it consisted of a northeastern extension of the Himalayas called the Tien Shan Range; the Takla Makan, a cold, wind-swept, and totally barren desert ranging from three to six thousand feet in altitude; and the equally desolate and useless western reaches of the Gobi Desert. Since the late 195os, China and the Soviet Union had continually fought a series of small-scale battles up and down the border and throughout the land on either side; the Chinese side was known as Sinkiang and the Russian, the Kazakh S.S.R. So isolated was this area, so far removed from human civilization was this region, that very little word of conflict ever leaked out to the Western world. Teleman recalled that it was in this same area, along these same borders, that in 1938-39 the Soviets and the Japanese fought a small-scale war — so small in fact that in 1940 over three thousand Soviet officers were decorated for war action — and promptly shipped off as badly needed reinforcements for Soviet troops in Finland. As Soviet and Chinese relations worsened following the de-Stalinization campaign of the Khrushchev regime, the intensity and frequency of Sino-Soviet border clashes increased until finally, less than a year ago, both sides, in a carefully secreted meeting, worked out a compromise that was to have settled the entire affair. It seemed that the Chinese had already broken their side of the bargain.

Teleman's orders directed him to fly to the Sinkiang-Kazakh border where the Red Chinese were reported to have attacked in strength. It appeared to Western observers, from the sketchy reports available, that the Chinese had pulled a surprise attack and caught the Russians fiat-footed. They were steadily being pushed back all along the border and Chinese troops were reported to be firmly established on Soviet territory. Both sides were extremely quiet about the fighting, as indeed they always had been. The war was being conducted on a non-nuclear basis at the moment, rather a gentlemen's agreement, although Teleman could not think of two less likely candidates.

Teleman thoughtfully considered the implications of such au attack as he continued to enjoy a rare moment of relaxation. If the war was being fought without the use of nuclear weapons, the Chinese would be at a distinct advantage. They could mobilize one field army at a strength equal to the entire Soviet forces. The Soviets now must be feeling the same way about the Chinese that the United States had felt about the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong, and, before them, the magnificent French Army about the Viet Mirth. The Chinese troops were equipped and trained for this type of "conventional" guerrilla war, a conventional war that involved the proper use and maneuvering of small battle units in guerrilla tradition, small but in vast numbers of independently acting units. Units able to hit and run, always edging and prodding the Soviet forces into territory where the Chinese troops could overwhelm the less mobile Soviet troops by sheer weight of numbers. The Soviet generals and political leaders would be in Moscow fingering their arsenal of nuclear missiles and bombs, just as the United States generals had done in Southeast Asia, knowing that they could never use them unless the Chinese did so first, or unless a disastrous defeat endangering the entire nation appeared imminent. They would learn, thought Teleman, just the way the United States had, how best to fight such a war — by practical experience. All the reading and observing could never furnish what one year's defeats and questionable victories would provide.