In Beijing, General Cheng was about to switch off his reading light above the antimacassar-topped lounge chair that was the only luxury he allowed himself. He was reading transcripts of General Schwarzkopf’s press conferences during the Iraqi War. Most of it was routine stuff — silly questions by silly reporters who had no idea of the complexity of war, but one answer of Schwarzkopf’s was burned into Cheng’s memory, and he had it marked for the red box — the documents that would be taken to the military Central Committee. Schwarzkopf had said,
There’s black smoke and haze in the air. It’s an infantryman’s weather. God loves the infantryman, and that’s just the kind of weather the infantryman likes to fight in. But I would also tell you that our sights have worked fantastically well in their ability to acquire, through that kind of dust and haze, the enemy targets. And the enemy sights have not worked that well. As a matter of fact, we’ve had several anecdotal reports today of enemy who were saying to us that they couldn’t see anything through their sights, and all of a sudden their tank exploded when their tank was hit by our sights.
Cheng had made an immediate rush order via La Roche’s front companies in Hong Kong for the infrared night vision, particularly the thermal-imaging sights that could cut through smoke and dust, plus additional supplies of smoke thickener that had caused Freeman’s tanks so much trouble when Yesov had used it up around Lake Baikal before the cease-fire. The other thing Cheng was banking on was that delivery of the newer Abrams M1A2 tank, which had two gun sights — one for the gunner and one for the tank commander, to track two targets simultaneously, unlike the M1, in which both commander and gunner had to share the same sight. The delivery had been delayed by the widespread sabotage carried out in the United States from dockside to communications.