“Aussie!” Brentwood whispered hoarsely. “You got the bag?”
“Got it!” Aussie answered, referring to the plastic bag of wolf dung.
“He’s full of it,” Salvini joked. Brentwood ignored him. “Choir, you there?”
“I’m here.”
“Salvini?”
“Here.”
It was in that order that if Aussie was hit, the wolf dung would be passed. It was not to be lit before dawn — about a half an hour away — and in Freeman’s words, “God help the son of a bitch who doesn’t keep it dry!”
The advantage of the ChiComs having seen the Pave Lows come down was offset now by the fact that as the PLA company spewed out across the rail line and briskly made its way toward the areas where it thought the three choppers had landed, the SAS/D teams were invisible in their black uniforms against the dark forest. And the ChiComs were making the mistake of bunching up, a natural tendency of men facing danger, and their harder, cruder boots made more noise on the ties.
David Brentwood, his ear to the rail, having picked up the first movement of men coming toward him, quickly had the SAS/D team fan out left and right of the tracks. The natural move for him was to have his commandos melt into the woods either side of the track; but he resisted the temptation because it would mean the danger of them crossfiring into their own men, and so they went to ground instead and stayed there, those closest to the rails packing C charges against the rails wherever they could, waiting. Then everything went wrong. They heard the whoosh. Night became day, the line of SAS/D men exposed in flare light showing up like slugs against the patches of snow. Immediately the rattle of AK-47s filled the air, snow flicking up like a swarm of white insects.
“The trees!” Brentwood shouted, and as he did so crushed the acid timer ampoule for the nearest C-4 plastique charge. The bravery of neither the ChiComs nor the SAS/D troops was in question, but Captain Ko’s decision with an advantage of six to one that offense was in this case the best form of defense overlooked a vital component: that once in the trees the SAS/D commandos became the defenders and Ko’s men were exposed. In order for Ko’s men to uproot the commandos, who, as well as having the natural defense of the woods, were still making their way through the woods either side of the railway up to the rail yard and control hut, Ko’s men would have to go in after them.
“Scopes only!” Brentwood yelled, and a burst of AK-47 fire erupted in his direction, shredding some pine bark. It was an order that referred only to those SAS/D troops who had longer rather than shorter range submachine guns, the longer range weapons having been allocated infrared night-vision scopes. With only scopes firing, “blue on blue,” or, in other words, being shot by your own men in the dark, could be avoided. It was a classic case of the Americans adapting to new circumstances quickly, and in the process suddenly turning a dangerous situation to their advantage.
“Right,” Salvini muttered, “here we go!” And with that he rested his AIS rifle against a low pine. The accuracy of the international supermagnum sniper rifle came from its Kigre KN 200 F night-vision image intensifier. Through the scope he could see a PLA cap and torso crouching. He squeezed the trigger and the torso was lost amid an explosion of green flecks as the depleted-uranium bullet tore right through him and kicked up the snow back of him. Within seven seconds Salvini had felled three more ChiComs in the green circle of his night scope, and he could hear the single whacks of the Heckler & Koch MP5K submachine gun and an occasional quick rip of it set on three-round bursts, which meant that some of the ChiComs were reaching the edge of the wood and could still be seen in the fading flare light so as to be easily targeted without night-vision optics. The last thing Ko wanted was another flare light now he’d seen his strategy backfire on him, but Brentwood yelled, “Choir! Flare!”
Choir lifted his M-203 grenade launcher that was attached to his M-16 so that its skyward flare shot would not come back at him from overhanging branches, screaming aloft instead, well clear of the timber. There was a quick sound like the belch of a sinkhole emptying, and moonlight went to daylight again as the magnesium sun floated slowly down.
Ko ordered his men into the woods, and the Chinese, about fifty yards on either side of the snow clearing, charged into the woods to fight it out man to man. There was a roar of fire, AK-47s, AK-74s, 7.62 bayonet-equipped type-56 Chinese carbines, rype-43 and -50 7.62mm ChiCom submachine guns, and from the woods either side the eruption of the SAS/D’s Heckler & Koch 9mm Parabellums streaming out at over eight hundred rounds a minute, the crash of grenades, and the terrible whistling of fléchettes. These steel darts, fired by the SAS/D Winchester 1200 shotgun, twenty darts for each shot, drove through ChiCom helmets at a hundred yards as if they were butter, those without helmets falling, their heads exploding, spraying blood everywhere.
Ko was not to know that the enemy was the SAS/D elite, otherwise he might have elected to withdraw, but close-encounter warfare was what the SAS/D called a “specialty of the house.” For the SAS this meant the CQB — close quarter battle — practiced at the house in Hereford, England, and what the Delta men referred to as the “shooting house” at Fort Bragg, both houses training the commandos for everything there was to know about CQB. Adding to this, the Varo flip-up/flip-down night-vision goggles supplied to the SAS/D men helped reduce what had been a six-to-one ChiCom advantage to a three-to-one advantage during the firefight. And now, the fight being closer in, SAS/D cold steel found bone, ripping the ChiComs to pieces.
Ko’s contingent fought bravely, and it wasn’t until the first light of dawn after the C charges had blown, injuring two SAS/D men with shrapnel, that the full extent of the carnage could be gauged, the snow pocked red with the dead, the wounded, and the dying. The victory for the SAS/D was somewhat hollow, however, when it was discovered that as well as four SAS/D men killed, all of the Pave Low’s crewmen had died, despite the best efforts of the SAS/D men to protect them.
“Damn!” David Brentwood said with an uncharacteristic vehemence. “I should have told them to wait with the chopper.”
“Ah, rats!” Aussie said. “None of us knew whether the Chinese would find the chopper and—”
Commandos were now setting charges in the railway control boxes and on other lines. With radios unable to get through the jamming of Freeman’s Wild Weasels, the SAS lit orange and purple flares for pickup. The wall of Genghis Khan had clearly been breached by the SAS/D team, but to make it official two SAS/D men — Salvini and Aussie — were dispatched to light the wolf dung fire by the base of one of the watchtowers atop the old wall.
“What the fuck’s all this about?” Salvini asked Aussie.
“Don’t ask me, sport. Davey’s the only one that knows, and he’s apparently under orders to keep it mum till we’re out of here.”
The arrival of the Pave Lows was interrupted for a minute or so by a Chinese sniper hiding out in the woods, but he was taken out by a scope-mounted M-16 and the helos came down and took aboard the living and the dead.
“So?” Aussie yelled as the Pave Low rose with the dawn, heading away from the tall but distinctly gray-white trail of wolf dung smoke. “What’s all this business with me wolf shit?”
“Wait till we get a few hundred feet,” Brentwood said, his face still grim after the loss of the crew from the Pave Low, which they had blown to pieces with a C charge before takeoff, denying any of the helo’s weapons or electronics to the ChiComs.
“Why?” Aussie began, and then he and all the other commandos saw it: All along the front for as far as they could see, spirals of the same grayish smoke could be seen rising straight, high into the dawning sky.
“What’s the idea?” Salvini asked.
“It’s the traditional Chinese signal,” Brentwood explained. “For some reason the chemical composition of wolf dung makes it burn thick and go straight up — straighter than any other kind of smoke.”
“Yeah, but signal for what?” Salvini pressed.
“The wall — China’s defenses being breached.”
“I get it,” Aussie said. “Cheng and his buddies can’t get squat info from his radios, so with the smoke signal they’ll think we’ve broken through all along the line.”
“We have,” Brentwood said. “But what they don’t know is for how long. Hopefully Cheng’ll be rushing fresh troops — all his reserves — up north instead of westward.”
“While Freeman’s armored spearhead heads south,” Salvini said. “Brilliant. Meanwhile, we go back to base. I love it.”
“That crafty bastard!” Aussie said, and everyone knew he meant Freeman. The wolf dung smoke trails could be seen along the entire length of the Black Dragon River by the Chinese reserve battalions miles back from the front but already moving northward to counter what they saw as the enemy’s penetration of the Black Dragon line.
Cheng was not completely sold on the reports — slow in coming because of the radio jamming — that the wall had been breached everywhere. He guessed there must be some copycat panic down the line. But what sold him was the intelligence reports further south of the front amid the villages and towns along the few roads that snaked through the Manchurian vastness.
While all ChiCom military targets — at least those not camouflaged well enough — had been hit, not one single town or village on the sparse roadways through Manchuria had been destroyed. This was not, Cheng believed, because of any humanitarian gesture on Freeman’s part not to bomb civilians, but because bombed-out villages and towns in such mountainous terrain caused so much rubble on the narrow roads that it would be a major impediment to any armored columns snaking through the steep valleys, and indeed would bunch up armor, making it much more vulnerable to attack by small guerrilla bands.
Ironically, while the high columns of wolf dung smoke had alarmed other commanders along the line, it was the care that Freeman had taken not to create such rubble rather than the wolf dung that convinced Cheng it was an all-out deep attack by Freeman’s army against China’s northern defenses.
By now Freeman’s armor was well underway west and south of Manzhouli, his M1A1 tanks leading, his Bradley infantry vehicles following, at times on the flank. Reports kept coming in to Freeman that Chinese troops were still taking the bait and on the move northward in Manchuria from Shenyang toward the Amur or Black Dragon River.
“By God, Dick!” Freeman told Norton exuberantly. “We’ve done it. Wolf dung. Norton, how about that for high tech? By God, we’ve done it!”
And so they had — until, as the position became clearer to the northernmost Chinese commanders, a very low tech carrier pigeon arrived at Shenyang HQ informing the PLA’s Northern Command that the ferocity of the American attacks that had been assumed to be a major offensive now appeared to be no more than well-coordinated probing actions. Cheng was about to order the northern bound troops westward, but this would take time, especially with rail links like that of Manzhouli now broken. Instead he ordered the reserves to reverse direction and head south back down out of Manchuria as fast as possible and then westward into Inner Mongolia and the Gobi. So, Cheng thought, the great American general believed he had outwitted the PLA!
Suddenly the EWO in Ebony One saw an amber blip on his screen. “AC,” he said, notifying the air commander. “Unidentified aircraft. Two o’clock high. Fifty miles.”
The captain acknowledged. “Stay with them, Murphy — must be one of our Harrier escorts.”
“Got him in the cone, skipper.”
“Countermeasures ready?” the captain asked as a precaution.
“Ready, sir,” the EWO confirmed. Four seconds had elapsed since the first radar contact.
“Range?” the captain asked.
“Forty-nine miles. Speed, Mach one point eight,” which meant that whatever it was was traveling in excess of nine hundred miles per hour. Most probably a fighter, all right, but not a Harrier.
The captain banked left, beginning evasive action, hoping that Purple’s and Gold’s EWOs would have seen either the contact on their screens or his “radio silence” evasive maneuver. Hopefully they had seen both. Beneath them the great peaks of the Hindu Kush rose majestically in a sea of moonlit white peaks. “Range?”
“Forty-eight miles. Closing. Mach one point three. Three others joining him.”
The first four-thousand-mile East Wind 4, which western experts thought had been discarded in favor of the longer eight-thousand-mile-range CSX-4, landed on the right flank of Freeman’s armored column racing south of Manzhouli. It did no more damage than blow up enormous blocks of ice from the twenty-mile-wide Lake Hulun, which still, mostly frozen, was providing Freeman’s armored columns with a shortcut south. The second and third missiles, however, hit the ice in the middle of the column, and an M-60 tank and Bradley fighting vehicle rolled at speed and disappeared.
Immediately Freeman in the lead tank saw other columns slow. “Full bore!” he yelled into the radio. “Keep moving, damn it! And everyone stay buttoned up.” The clang of cupolas and hatches shutting could be heard echoing along the ice as the tracked vehicles continued to throw up a curtain of fine white ice particles that glinted beautifully in the early dawn.
“Where the hell are those B-52s?” Freeman mused, while looking through his commander’s periscope for sign of any enemy activity in the Manchurian foothills far off to his left, his tank’s remarkably quiet gas turbine blowing the snow aft of him like castor sugar.
Over the Hindu Kush it was not yet dawn as the nine B-52s adjusted their course northeastward for Turpan. The mountains’ snowy peaks, like the B-52s themselves, were still moonlit, with some clouds bunching up, shifting in from the west as the four ChiCom fighters, Shenyang J-6Cs, wings swept back, nose intake reminiscent of older MiGs, were swooping down at Mach 1.3 from thirty-six thousand feet toward the B-52s, two of the fighters armed with four air-to-air missiles, the other two with eight 8.35-inch rockets, together with their deadly NR-30mm cannon.
The electronics warfare officer in Ebony One and those in the other eight bombers that made up Ebony, Gold, and Purple were watching their own radars, each plane’s quad 12.7-millimeter machine guns in the rear barbettes shifting with the bogeys’ approach, but the ChiCom fighters were still too far away, beyond the effective one-kilometer range of the guns.
The three B-52s of Purple were now in thick stratus, their exhaust heat signal weakened by the clouds’ moisture, the Shenyangs shifting their attack to the six planes of Ebony and Gold. It told Ebony’s captain that he could expect heat-seekers, so that when he saw the pinpricks of light from the Shenyangs he yelled, “Release flares,” knowing the B-52s could not turn in time. Even if the six B-52s did manage to swing toward the ChiCom fighters, denying the B-52s’ engine heat to the rear-entry infrared-seeking missiles, the bombers’ guns, their only external antiaircraft weapons, would be facing away from the Shenyangs.
The sky was suddenly aglow with phosphorus flares, like shooting stars, the ChiComs’ four 120-pound, Soviet-type Aphid missiles streaking toward Ebony and Gold at over 2,800 meters per second, to reach the B-52s in 6.5 seconds.
Murphy, controlling the rear barbette of Ebony One, his heart thumping so loudly it was the only thing he could hear, cheered as he saw the ChiCom missiles curving off into the thickets of burning flares aft of Ebony and disintegrating. But now another four rockets were streaking toward the B-52s.
“Active! Active!” Ebony’s EWO yelled, indicating these weren’t Aphids — heat-seekers — but were emitting radar beams, using the reflections of these from the B-52s to home in on.
“Chaff!” Ebony One’s captain yelled, his order, as he was also air commander of the wing, immediately obeyed by Gold and Purple so that now the sky twinkled in the dying light of the flares, the millions of strips of aluminum, cut to various wavelengths to cover the band, “fuzzing” the ChiComs’ radar-homing missiles.
“Ha! You bastards!” Murphy called, elated by the Chinese’s failure to sucker the B-52s into thinking the second set of missiles was heat-seekers instead of radar-homing air-to-air Apexes — which, though heavier at seven hundred pounds, were one and a half times faster.
These four missiles began curving away, but unlike the heat-seekers before them, each missile’s flight path wasn’t so much a single curve but rather a series of jerky movements, crisscrossing one another’s smoky trails like hounds confused by the fox’s scent, tearing into the chaff clouds at over one thousand meters per second. “Foiled by foil, you fools!” Murphy shouted.
Then he heard a rapid thudding noise, one of the Shenyang’s NR-30mm cannon raking Ebony One’s port side. But the big plane had seen worse than this, its upgraded wet — that is, fuel-carrying — wing having a remarkable ability to soak up self-sealing punctures created by the ChiComs’ machine gun fire. The Shenyang swept past, going into a tight turn. The B-52s were in cloud, out of it, then in again. Then as quickly as they appeared, the bogeys were gone, obviously on bingo fuel or because there were SAM sites ahead that might not distinguish between friend or foe. Murphy was ecstatic, but not so Air Commander Thompson. They had yet to reach the target and get back again. And where in hell were the Harriers?
Freeman’s lead division of five hundred and forty tanks was advancing in column, broken up into three brigades of 144 M1A1 and M-60 tanks each, and the brigades in turn were broken down into three battalions of sixty tanks, companies of fifteen tanks each, and finally platoons of five tanks. The lead tank had two aerials instead of one, one for intertank communication, the other for air strikes if necessary, and was followed in column by the second tank covering an arc of fire on the right side of the column, the third tank covering the left side, and so on down the column.
Once over the ice and onto land, the visibility was still good on the low, flat country but not as open as it was on the lake. Freeman moved to wedge formations, the lead tank of each platoon as the point, the others flanking it left and right a hundred yards apart to form the triangular advance.
The dust trails, it was hoped, would be dampened somewhat by the still scantily snow-covered terrain and by the early morning dew, but in the fragile ecosystem of the semidesert around the Gobi, the dust rose like mustard-colored flour, forming an enormous cloud south of Lake Hulun, and Freeman’s M1A1 leading the way, cruising at thirty-five to forty miles per hour, was followed not only by the remainder of his M1A1 and M-60 tanks but by scores of Bradley infantry fighting vehicles.
The Bradleys’ diesels were in a high whine, as opposed to the more muffled, lower-toned roar from the gas turbines of the M1A1s, the Bradleys’ turrets mounted with 25mm chain guns with a 475-round-per-minute capacity. Run by crews of three, they also carried a “deuce” of TOW — tube-launched, optically tracked, wire-guided antitank missiles. The twenty-five-ton, forty-one-miles-per-hour amphibious vehicles carried nine infantry men with port firing automatic weapons, riding it out in the armor-protected cabin.
Out forward of the main armored force, relays of three lightly armed but fast Kiowa Warrior reconnaissance choppers were darting about like dragonflies, searching for any sign of impediment, either enemy troops or natural barriers, that might have to be dealt with, as map references could not always be relied upon. In the Gobi the shapes of dunes could change overnight following a storm from the west, and in selected sites not yet on the maps, forests had been planted and watered on the desert’s edge in a desperate attempt to stop the ever-encroaching sand.
Behind the Bell two-seater Kiowas and in support of the armor were the tank-killing Apaches ready to shoot forward and kill with either laser-guided Hellfire missiles, rockets, or their below-the-nose-mounted 30mm cannon, which could deal with any enemy tanks or other targets of opportunity pointed out to them by the Kiowa spotters.
“Incoming!” the warning came as another East Wind with conventional warhead exploded overhead, taking out three tanks and a Bradley, over twenty men and over twenty million dollars worth of equipment lost in a few seconds.
Freeman knew he couldn’t take this too much longer before his force was decimated, and standing up in the cupola he lifted his ten-power binoculars, looking for possible revetment areas in some hilly country off to his left, a continuation of semidesert and dune.
Everyone was asking where the hell the B-52s were. Some were yelling in their tanks that the old man should have waited before moving, but other voices countered by arguing Freeman’s point that to keep the initiative he had to drive south quickly if he was to outflank the Manchurian reserves.
The Manchurians reserves, in particular Shenyang’s Sixteenth Group Army of fifty-two thousand men, were moving faster than Freeman had anticipated. In part it was because they had been bored, and no matter what the danger, soldiers of any army welcome some activity after long, dull hours at the rear. Besides, in the sparse grasslands and semidesert, the PLA’s motorcycle and sidecar battalions could move at speed, each pinion seat carrying another soldier in addition to the rider and the machine gunner or antitank missile operator in the sidecar. Simultaneously, all trains and civilian traffic had been commandeered by Cheng, who was using Freeman’s deliberate policy of not bombing the villages and towns to his, Cheng’s, advantage, by using every route that led south and west to Erenhot.
Because of the absence of serviceable roads leading west out of Manchuria, Cheng knew, and he knew that Freeman must know, that no substantial PLA flank action could be mounted against Freeman’s southward-headed column until he got further south. Cheng would have to stop him further down in the Gobi’s dunes around the railhead of Erenhot, and so it was to Erenhot, the railhead on the border of China’s Inner Mongolia and Mongolia, that many of the reserves from Beijing’s Sixty-fifth Army Group were now being sent.
The Shenyang armies, including towed artillery, were able to reach the dunes faster by being able to cut directly west through Chifeng and Duolun. Meanwhile Cheng was receiving the news that Freeman’s armored division was being pounded by the missiles from Turpan. Anticipating the coming battle, Cheng allowed himself a rare smile of satisfaction. Did the American general think he was the only one who read Sun Tzu and understood how all war is deception? Did the American think that he, Cheng, was asleep?