Chinese divisions continued to mass across the Amur, and with the weather clearing, though for how long no one knew, it seemed that only the threat of close air attack by the U.S. Air Force, particularly the presence of AC-130 Spectre gunships firing their deadly, seven-barreled Vulcan machine guns and 105mm howitzers, had stemmed crossings by the Chinese troops. But while the awesome power of the gunships was part of the reason for a pause in the Chinese advance, there was a much more pressing cause.
Chinese officers were reporting deficiencies in the small arms supplied to the northern armies — dozens of men having been seriously wounded, some having lost limbs and/or been killed when grenades exploded as soon as the pin was pulled, others having weapons exploding in their faces. Under such conditions of substandard equipment, an advance was deemed unadvisable by General Cheng and an investigation promptly launched. At first it was suspected that La Roche Industries had wilfully furnished defective munitions — that is, until several grenade fragments were collected and sent to Harbin for closer forensic inspection.
Cheng doubted that La Roche, already in trouble in the U.S., suspected of supplying arms to certain countries against congressional edict, would be likely to jeopardize his lucrative multibillion under-the-table arms business by shipping poor-quality arms and ammunition to his prime customer. Confirmation that Cheng was right came when scientists, rushed up from Turpan’s First Artillery Regiment — the name the PLA gave to its missile contingent — determined that while serial numbers made it clear that the defective grenades had indeed been American made, they were not from any of the La Roche batches.
Further investigation along the Amur revealed that the arms in question had been among those stolen from American soldiers in brothels along the river towns of the DMZ. Cheng immediately ordered all such arms and ammunition destroyed, but by now they were mixed up with standard issue and the testing was a hazardous, painstaking, and extremely time-consuming business, as in order to find a single round that had been tampered with, every round had to be examined carefully.
The incident told Cheng and Freeman something important about each other. Cheng learned that the American general’s much-touted attention to detail was as great as it was reputed to be, while Freeman’s intelligence services, fed the information by underground Democracy Movement agents like the Jewish woman, Alexsandra Malof, learned that Cheng was not as cavalier as, say, Lin Biao had been in the Korean War about sacrificing the lives of his men if he could avoid it. In fact Cheng would rather pause, even though it gave Second Army time to reinforce the crossing points, and make sure everything was in order before he would strike. Of course it also gave Cheng more time to reinforce his side of the river.