China
Beijing
It would be understandable to visit Beijing and not pass the Central Military Committee's central command in the commute. By effort it was tucked outside of view. Easily considered outside of Beijing proper in the rugged hills north-west of Beijing. Here on the forested bluffs, with the odd farm field distantly visible in the faint blue haze beyond competing ridges, visible only from the top-most floors an unremarkable brutal building stood as a haunting axis by which many of the nation's military concerns turned.
Shaped like a bone, the offices occupied a long central paved space inter-spaced with islands of grass and trees as further on the rim barracks and outer service structures hid within dense cedar stands, erect and tall like spears driven into the earth. Even more distantly the sounds of military drilling was muted by soft bird song as rifle fire popped in the still forest air.
Within his office, Lou Shan Yuang turned with a steely look out the window in time to catch the gleam of a black sedan passing through the trees, the spring-time sun glinting off the black gloss. He stood with his arms crossed behind his back, and took a deep breath. He was uncompassionately cold, as he was towards many political affairs. To have to speak directly to a foreign agent he believed below his time, and he wished that he could easily pass it off on his Political Affairs sub-commander and be done with it. The conduct and decision making towards war, as it applied to convincing congress was his job, not Shan Yuang's. But with a weighty grumble at the back of his throat the car pulling up there had much to do with the confirmation to his circumstance.
He stepped away from the window and scanned his office. Three other officers were present with him, obliged to acting relaxed in the presence of their superior. As he turned to look over them they felt his gaze and looked up questioningly for their orders to come. “Do we have the materials for note-taking?” the commander asked.
“I can only guess so, comrade.” the shorter of the officers said, “Seeing as how the Lieutenant hasn't raced back to say he can't find anything I would say it's all in order.”
“You think so, Huan Yu?” Shan Yuang asked.
“I am confident.” the officer replied with a bow.
“Double checking: what was Politburo's orders over this affair?”
An older officer, a man who would have been a powerful section commander in the revolution but whose physical decline and attachment to the service prevented him from retiring from him responded in a dry wandering voice, “Comrade Tsai Tang wishes that this takes its course.” the order made Shan Yuang's gut tremble bitterly, “Politburo wants to know as much as Zhang Shu will be left to know, if not more.”
“I don't believe I heard that condition.” the commander remarked.
“It's Shu Wang's, if it means anything.”
“I suppose we're allowed to edit the official report?”
“No, that's not his style. He wants what we would feed Congress as irrelevant. Behavioral information, from our Russian or any he might let slip about any other personalities.”
“Understood.” the commander acknowledged, turning now from the men to a large ring table at the far-side. Here was the table normal command conferences were had. Regularly it would be cluttered with the paraphernalia of the military's branch commanders and Committee sub-commanders, left behind according to their own tastes. Normally, a wall divided it from Shan Yuang's normal office, but as he had sent for a large map of Russia; if the center had one at all, he had moved the wall, it was now strapped against the interior wall strapped open by velvet rope. This he hoped would give them all a large enough, unencumbered view of whatever size chart they had for Dymtro Radek to brief them on what he knew. Preliminary dossier information from The Bureau indicated he knew much but had never been pressed before, since the political climate didn't dub it urgent.
As an after thought Shan Yuang turned to the third unaddressed officer in the room. Unlike the others he wore a long black coat the trailed down to just above his ankles. He was clean all over, his face bearing no sign of stubble or scar, the long black coat pressed and ironed to the point the seams were sharp. For someone ostensibly ranks below the older officers in the room he carried himself almost as an equal. And once more, his hair was combed so tight back across his head it seemed to lift his face, giving him an eerie skeleton expression. “Out of curiosity, does Dymytro Radek like anything?” Shan Yuang asked.
“Ahh-” the black-coated officer started, turning his eyes up at the ceiling, “Tea, cakes, vodka.”
“Right, I'll make an order to bring some up. We could be in for a while.”
“Understood.”
“I haven't had lunch, I hope you wouldn't mind if the lieutenant brought up dumplings from the commissary for a light meal.” the older officer requested with the voice of a soft wind.
“Huan Yu, you want anything if we're calling up a round of dim sum?”
“Chicken's feet would be OK by me.” Yu replied matter of factually, “Some black tea as well.”
“And you?” Shan Yuang asked, turning to the Bureau agent.
“I'll just have some plain water. I ate before coming in.”
Shan Yuang nodded, and sighing apathetically motioned for everyone to claim a seat, “He'll be here any moment now. Let's not look like Congress now.”
One by one they picked out their seats, minutes later the office doors were opened and in stepped the Russian Radek, in all his priestly manner and his two closest men. One was a broad shouldered man, who surprised the military policeman escorting them when he broke rank and walked ahead to meet Huang Shan Yuang directly with an outstretched hand. The commander looked at the opened hand baffled, and realizing one of his mistakes the poor soul shook his head and withdrew it, bowing low instead. “Is sorry, I forget.”
“He normally watches these things.” Dymtro Radek explained politely, while his Chinese was far better than his obstinate companion's, it was thick with an accent.
“I understand.” Huang Shan Yuang said, recalling his initially experience with foreign brigade commanders, “It's been a long while since I have had to shake hands.” he held out a hand though to gesture at the open seats along the round table. “We have plenty of space, do take a seat. And introduce your companions.”
Dimytro Radek smiled, and directed himself and his two companions to the table. “I have with me Nestor Yanikovich” pointing to a smaller man with a wild waxed mustache to his left, “And Nikolov Nitski.” he directed their attention to the bear. “They are my closest confidants and loyalist of followers. You might say they're the Politburo of the organization.” he said with a political smile.
“To confirm for the records, if I understand this right we are meeting here today to discuss potential future operations in the Russian Far-East, as one congressman Zhang Shu is putting together.” he paused briefly to turn to Huan Yu who was already busily scribbling down a transcript of the proceedings here and taking minutes.
“That is my understanding.” Radek confirmed, “That at the least and moving ahead that the two of us would have achieved a strategic consensus in Russia, and hopefully find our first goals.”
“First goals, so I take it you already know this will carry on?”
“I did not fight and loose as a liberator for my people just to come out of it more retard than I was headed into it.” Radek explained dismissively, “I may not be a military scholar, but Russia is a rack that can stretch out the most well equipped enemy. You and I will agree we will need to approach our enemies carefully, I understand?”
“Much understood.” said Shan Yuang. “But one of the first things I want to know is if before beginning operations there are any localized assets that might be of use to us. Surely, not all of you are in China.”
“You would be correct in saying so.” Radek confirmed, “Only the core of my movement managed to escape. We do maintain clandestine communications with various underground or rural cells we are sure are safe and who are willing to pick up arms once again if we finally get the strong hammer we need to smite our enemy.”
“Where are they located, can you say? Do you have a list?” Shan Yuang probbed.
“Yes, we do. Do any of you at this table here speak any Russian?”
“I speak a little.” the elderly officer said, “I served in Manchuria in the revolution. Almost personally I had to coordinate with Russian units and men. I will not say I am perfect, but I can communicate.”
Radek's expression lifted and he smiled, “Nikolai can speak with you in that case then.” he directed, before turning to speaking in Russian to the large hulk of a man. He nodded, and rose from his seat and walked gracefully to the older man's side and pulled out a dossier from inside his coat and went over it with him.
“What does he do?” Shan Yuang asked, pointing to Nikolai.
“He's like a secretary of sorts.” Radek explained, “He can cut fire wood like a machine and keep the correspondences clean and presentable. I leave him in charge of that kind of work. I do not imagine he'd ever fail in keeping track of the where abouts of one of the committee presidents still in Russia.”
Shan Yuang nodded – acknowledging - and moved on, “As a general statement then where are most of them?”
“Largely around Irtusk, Krasnoyarsk. Much of the population of this part of the country lives along the Trans-Siberian rail road. We had contact with with the groups in Vladivostok and Khabarovsk, but since the Japanese invasion of the eastern coast and occupation communications with them has been difficult to establish and maintain. Eventually the runners stopped coming and we can only fear for the worst. From time to time we hear stories about slavery of our people, and if they are not all dead then they certainly toil over whatever it might be the Japanese put them too.”
“That is not unfamiliar.” Shan Yuang remarked. At that moment the door opened and a young lieutenant along with a female junior cadet pushed into the room a large map of the entirety of Russia on a large board. They panted heavily as they moved it into the middle of the room and looked at the men, straightening up immediately.
“Strike this conversation from the notes.” Shan Yuang advised as he rose, “Did we have trouble?” he asked the two.
They nodded quickly, “We had to carry it before reaching the elevator. It was in the basement.”
“Fine, if you cold bring it forward. We need to see it.”
The two carried out the request, and wheeled it towards them. As it stopped they went to attention and Shan Yuang presented them with an order for food. Out of respect he consulted with Radek for what he wanted. He answered he wanted tea and bread and his two partners said they'd have the same. The junior officers left the room.
“Tzu Ju-Long, are you finished going over that list?” Shan Yuang asked, speaking to the older commander.
“I believe so.” he said.
“I have a box of thumb tacks.” Shan Yuang said, leaning back to rummage in a narrow drawer. He found a small paper box and breathed a sigh of relief to see it was full, “Could you mark them on the map for us?”
“Certainly.” Tzu said, bowing as he rose. He walked around the table, picking the box up as he made his way to the map.
“If you could use the blue ones, please.” Huang Shan Yuang urged.
“Excuse me?”
“The blue.”
“Oh, yes. Thank you.” the old officer said, opening the box and methodically placing pins across the map, starting from the Amur and slowly working his way west, taking sparing glances down at the register in his hands. The pace was slow, having to hunt and find the small printed names on the old paper atlas map. As he went, Ju-Long prattled off the names of the communities, “Blagoveshchensk, Tynda, Irkutsk...”
He rambled on the names for some time, speaking as slow as he could fish out a tack, find the location on the map, and pin it. But over the corresponding five minutes a clear pattern, a zone was emerging spanning east to west along a vague path, from Japanese-held Russia to almost the Urals, sprinkled along the southern side of Siberia. There had to be no less than eighty, no more than hundred-twenty marked towns and villages.
“They call them... er, Soviets.” Ju-Long said, finishing. “How did you describe them, Nikolai?”
Nikolai looked shocked he'd be directly asked a question at the meeting and appeared to be immediately trying to find the right vocabulary in his limited Chinese to explain. But Radek saved him by a hair, “Worker's councils, districts. Congregations of the followers of people's liberation in Russia, and even outside of Russia, in China with me. The worker's soviet in Russia goes back to 1905 and would have been the driving force behind the post-revolutionary government had the Bolsheviks and other revolutionary forces had not fallen, and had the czar not achieved a shock moment of wisdom by withdrawing his men to deal with the bubbling discontent in the country. Though while the soviet was smashed then and in the years following and prior only to tomorrow its council tradition has been maintained peace-meal and independent through the Russian workers and peasantry, in dusty basements, barns, and country churches and yards. These soviets are my congregation.”
“I see, do they have any fighting men?”
“There might be.” There was a dour tone in Radek's answer, “Many of them are angry, they want to organize. But they are afraid. They don't have the material or means to organize with if they could. Small rifles and small-game shotguns are not tools you want to take to battle against the Amur Cossack.”
“The Amur Cossack? I take it he's the one that rules Siberia then?”
“They.” Radek corrected, “My mistake, the Amur Cossack Host, the local Cossacks. Commanded by Hetman Yuri Mykhalov. They used to rule out of Khabarovsk and Vladivostok depending on season and mood or their military need but the Japanese invasion and occupation of those territories pushed them west into the interior. Now I am afraid I do not know where Yuri commands from, but he still commands. Whenever the host feels the need to make its authority known I get letters about when it rides into a town to make a show, sometimes they pick up a man to hang for communism, anarchism, or syndicalism or some such; perhaps their charges are right or wrong I don't know. Then they leave.”
“You say ride, like on horses?”
“With horses, and cars, and bikes. They may control the oil fields in the north of Siberia but I don't think they have the capacity to refine it large-scale, so light equipment; no tanks. All the industrial refineries in the country are out west, towards Moscow and Saint Petersburg.”
“Does Yuri answer to himself?”
“No, he claims to still serve the Czar and his family. But his ability to do that, to take orders or lend support his suppressed by his distance from the Russian far-west so I suspect it is only lip service. In reality he rules as a warlord. As any Zhang Zongchang or Ma Qi.”
The office doors opened once again, the young officers now pushing ahead of them dining carts of round steaming baskets. On one a pitcher of water rattled next to small glass cups and a kettle of warm tea and tin cups. They made their way behind the men, where they quietly served from the carts.
“How are they armed, do you know if they're being supplied by anyone?”
“They're mostly using old imperial weapons. How or if they're being supplied with fresh weapons, parts, or ammunition I could not say. I know no one who has infiltrated the Cossack's ranks. They treat themselves as a closed world. They hold their own meetings, speak with their own people. They pull fresh warriors from people they know. They are at war in their own land against anyone and everyone if it deems fits.”
“Who do they feel they're occupying? Who do they think is occupying them?” Shan Yuang asked. He was starting to feel the Hetman was deeply paranoid. That he was not a man who felt he actually had the land, but had lost it already.”
“The Japanese? Who knows. Siberia on its own could be much better without him. Fundamentally the region could do well without any leader. So many of these villages and towns young and old live so far out of the extent of any civilization they've learned to live off the dessert itself.”
“Excuse me, but what does desserts have to do with Siberia?” Shan Huang inquired.
“Forgive me, but it's an old way to refer to the wilderness. Many of the populations are fairly independent and have become more so as the years went on after the czar's death. Simply put, if you leave them be they'll be happy the most.”
With the dishes of food passed around there was a pause. The young lieutenant took a seat next to Huan Yu who relinquished his note taking duties for the junior officer to do. Rolling his neck he loosened his hands before he entered into the conversation, “You are aware a military invasion of Russia would cause interference in these municipalities?” he asked, then peeling off the lid to his fried chicken feet, “How might they react to a column of soldiers passing through their streets, perhaps with a tank? How long might it be until the Hetman reacts?”
“They might grumble about inconvenience unless you stay.” Radek answered him. “But to the question about how long it might take Yuri Mykhalov to learn: I can't answer. Again, I am not adept at knowing where he is, so I also don't know the full range of his capabilities or how he communicates. I trust he might have spies in place around Siberia, it may be how they find the people the hang in anti-communism.”
“Would your men – your soviets – be receptive to trying to find that out to the best of their abilities?” he asked. Then turning to Lou Shan Yuang: “Without knowing this I am not comfortable in making any set strategic recommendations.”
“I know that, but we're on a short time table so there's not much to do about that.” the commander asserted.
“I might be able to see what can get done.” said Radek, “I won't obviously promise you men results before this is through. At best you'll be getting the information when you're ready to march in.”
“Understood, if you can get that done then go ahead. But for right now can I get the record to indicate that the strategic decision making is being done on the belief that we will have limited internal information as to the state of Siberia.”
“Yes sir.” the lieutenant said. Shan Huang sipped his tea.
“Perhaps for the purpose of being complete we can have a few best guesses on where Yuri Mykhalov might have moved to?” Tsu Ju-Long asked.
“If you're putting me there I would say anywhere in the area of Omsk, Tyumen, or Novosibirsk area. They're cities far from their traditional haunt, but shifts their power closer to the west and the Czarist pretenders. Yekaterinburg would put them on the very border of the concentrated western politic if not within 'foreign' territory.”
“That sounds about right.” Tsu remarked, “If that's the situation then I don't think he wants to stir up the west too much. Keeping his forces and command too close to them might flag he's willing to step into the fray. To me it sounds as though his survival has been a feigned indifference to the happenings of the west and less to do with his supposed loyalty to the czar or any likely king or emperor on the European side of the Urals. If we want to keep the conflict politically isolated from what is happening so far beyond the Urals so we don't provoke a unified alliance our best course would be to operate in such a way we don't push him further west, physically or politically. We need to keep him east-bound.”
“It's Siberia though, we're going to have a limited fighting season.” Shan Huang commented, “It's why we're doing this on such a close schedule after all, right?”
Tsu Ju-Long laughed, “I never once kept my ass glued to the chair for any longer than a week in Manchuria.” he cackled, giving a wide toothy grin, “Oh, you won't be able to do it with tanks or cars. Too cold a winter makes steel brittle, freezes fuel oil and gas just does not pop the way it should. So you stop using cars, fight on foot like men.”
“Or with horses.” the small wax mustache man said, Nestor Yanikovich.
Tsu Ju-Long laughed and smiled again, “With damn horses.”
“I've had the pleasure of watching the Mongolian regiments train in my residency here in China. I do not see the reason why we could not use them in force in the field. Where and when mechanical transportation fails us or is too limited we throw thick, woolly beast at it. Were these not the animals your people rode in conquest of all of Russia once before.”
Lou Shan Yuang leaned over the desk, “Genghis Khan was not one of our people.” he corrected, “And if you spoke Chinese, why haven't you spoken up before.”
“My mistake.” Nestor said dryly, “And forgive me, I had nothing to say before now. But my point still stands: why not use horses? Not in a main capacity, a limited one perhaps. One enough to keep the Hetman bottled up physically where we need him.”
“You know, commander,” Tsu Ju-Long began, leaning it: “He has a point about the horses. As I remember yours were only ever logistical support with the mules. But I have some experience with them as battlefield animals, I will advocate.”
“That was close to twenty years ago.” Shan Yuang corrected him, “Times have changed.”
“But not in Russia.” Tsu Ju-Long observed, “It's a broader Manchurian front. Dense forests, cold winter, sparse villages. They may be spread further around but it's not entirely unfamiliar. You southern city commanders had your show in Tibet. Politics had its in Mongolia. But let Russia be the show of the sons of the Manchurian Volunteer Brigades, foreign and domestic! I have men, old prodigies who've graduated beyond their young grasshopper days who could go in. It would mean much to these veteran rifles to expand the Revolution, and to not waste themselves away overseeing drills and parades.”
“Tsu Ju-Long, this may be getting ahead of ourselves.”
“Bullshit.” the aging officer laughed, dry and cracking. “At the rate Zhang Shu wants to move this and how he's played you into a corner of enough tacit approval to get the military commission in congress to go along with his little charade we are at a stage we have the upper hand for once in these affairs. We don't get to let them put their favorite seniors out into the field for a political career, but we can press our own sons at the head for one moment and be the star of the army, to be the star of an overlooked part of the army. The Central Column had its hour, I want now to be the Northern Column's: tomorrow the South will hopefully get Taiwan and the Revolutionary generation and its sons will have had the hurrah we need before we die.”
“Who is this man you'd like to lead?”
“I'll send you his file later today, right now I want to eat.”
Shan Yuang sighed, he knew he was right in his own way. “Very well.” he conceded, “We'll call today's conference to adjournment and eat. We'll sit back down if we have questions in the future.”
There was tacit agreement from around the table, and the junior officers were excused.
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