The first sign was a hazing over of the sun so that only a dull, purplish corona of it showed through the mounting turbulence. It was one of the great Gobi storms without rain, one of the terrible gritty and blinding storms borne westward in the desert, this time of year, April, being the worst month, and added to by the sand-pregnant winds out of the Tien Shan Mountains in China’s westernmost province of Sinkiang, where the line of the mustard sky could be seen eating up the blue before the banshee howling and the pebble-hailing assault enveloped all.
Cheng was pleased. He had prepared without the hope of a storm though he knew it was the time of the year for them, but now he could see the massive storm gathering he welcomed it; it would make his trap so much more terrible for the Americans. Oh, the Americans had done well in the desert in Iraq, Cheng told his subordinates, and the incompetent Hussein helped them by being such a fool of a tactician. Besides, Cheng reminded his commanders, the PLA had had time — months, years — to prepare for any invasion from the north down the corridor between the great sandy desert to the west and the harder semidesert to the east — the corridor Freeman was heading for about ten miles in width and twenty-three in depth.
“You must understand, comrades,” Cheng reassured his HQ staff, “that the Vietnamese defeated the Americans because they realized the falseness of an American adage — that the jungle was neutral, that it was equally difficult for the Americans and North Vietnamese alike. This, of course, was an incorrect assumption because the Vietnamese used the jungle as their friend. As we will use the desert. Remember we are on home soil and have had more time to prepare than Iraq.” He paused. “Is everyone in position?” His commanders assured him that they were.
“If anyone breaks camouflage he is to be shot immediately. Understood?”
They did, each platoon officer having been supplied with a noise suppressor on his revolver so that such a shot would not be heard.
Driving south, Freeman planned to take the path of least resistance between the great sand dunes around Qagan Nur or Qagan Lake and the salt lakes south of it, the corridor extending from the dunes on his left or eastern flank to the railhead of Erenhot on the Chinese-Mongolian border. Freeman’s objective was the capture of the rail spur line that stuck twenty-three miles out northward from the east-west main line and which stopped at the small settlement of Qagan Lake, even though me town was actually ninety-five miles south of the lake it was named after.
Cheng’s strategy owed something not only to the Vietnamese, whom the Chinese detested, but also to the Egyptians’ highly successful foxhole strategy against the Israeli tanks in the Yom Kippur War. And he had elaborated upon it, not with a tactic from Sun Tzu but from the Turks of World War I.
There had been no way to gain satellite reconnaissance during the dust storms that Cheng had used as cover during the weeks of the cease-fire. No way for U.S., or any other satellites for that matter, to discover that beneath this corridor, the most obvious funnel to the south, he, General Cheng, had used only a fraction of his three-million-strong army to dig a vast interlocking system of reinforced tunnels.
Unlike the Viet Cong tunnels, they were not elaborately built insofar as they were not elbow- or S-shaped, nor did they have the misleading cul-de-sacs or sudden angular changes in elevation that in the darkness might trip any enemy brave or foolish enough to descend into them. Rather it was a honeycomb of tunnels that led to hundreds of foxholes easily concealed and manned by an elite infantry division from Shenyang’s military district Group Army 40 and some elements of the infamous Beijing military district’s Thirty-eighth Army — of Tiananmen Massacre fame. After firing an antitank missile from one foxhole, a PLA team could quickly remove itself to another, and in most cases the angle of depression of the M-1 or M-60 tank’s big gun would be useless against them at any close range — only the tank’s machine guns could effectively come into play.
“Son of a bitch!” commented the pilot of one of Freeman’s Kiowa scout choppers, which had come low behind the protection of boulders the size of bungalows. “Can’t see a friggin’ thing.” The chopper’s copilot pushed the button that raised the periscopelike “two-eyed” mast-mounted sight still higher above the rock.
Still nothing.
They were in the fog of war wherein even the best commanders become confused by a lack of information or too much conflicting information. The chopper went higher, but they still couldn’t see through the dust, the chopper’s intake filters in danger of clogging, when they began getting radar blips, which were duly reported to Freeman but which could not be identified. Freeman ordered the Kiowas forward, and already mine-detector equipment and antimine blades and flails on mine-clearing tanks were called up from the columns as he ordered them to go into single file formation.
No mines were reported, but one Kiowa came in with a report of dozens of what its crew believed, but could not be sure, were Red Arrow 8 antitank-missile-tracked vehicles. A small screen in Freeman’s command tank selected the Red Arrow from the computer’s threat library, telling him that the vehicle had an effective range of three thousand meters, a rate of fire of two to three missiles per minute — warhead diameter 120mm. Hit probability greater than 90 percent. But they were still a good six thousand meters off.
Then there came SITREPs — situation reports — from another Kiowa of what they thought were T-69II main battle tanks equipped with laser range finder, though the dust should render the laser useless in the storm.
Freeman realized that the Chinese probably could not see him either, but the noise of the Kiowa scouts alone must certainly have alerted the Chinese to his presence. No doubt Cheng, like the Americans, wasn’t going to fight blind — it would be a matter of who would be seen first by whom, and Freeman’s tanks could outreach the T-59s by three thousand yards and the T-72s by two hundred yards as they had in the Iraqi desert, standing back beyond the range of the enemy’s T-59 105mm and T-72 125mm cannon while using their own 120mm to deadly effect.
But in the midst of the blinding storm that was still not anywhere near its zenith, Freeman was haunted again by what had befallen his tanks along the Never-Skovorodino road earlier in the war when Second Army had fallen into a trap baited in the taiga by dummy tanks, inflatables that looked like the real thing from only a hundred yards away, and with cheap oil lanterns in each to give off enough heat for an infrared signature; when he’d sent in the Apaches, the Siberians had unleashed their VAMs — vertical area mines— whose sensors were triggered by the sound of the approaching rotors and lifted off, spewing up submunitions that cost him a third of his Apaches and their crews.
“Slow to ten miles per hour,” he told the driver.
“Slow to ten.”
Sitting there in the turret, the gunner seated just below him, the loader to his left and the driver well forward beyond the turret wall, down under the 120mm gun and coaxial 12.6mm machine gun, Freeman wanted to send Apaches forward, but the dust storm was so thick it was unlikely they’d get a clear shot at anything.
Besides, if they were so close to the Chinese, only a matter of a mile or so, there was always the danger of a blue on blue when you could easily mistake the outline of one of your own tanks for one of theirs. Any visible insignia, in this case a black arrow stenciled on the M1A1’s cupola sides, front and back, would be almost impossible to see in the sandstorm. He could not afford to go ahead blind and so ordered several Apaches in to try to find and blast a hole through the Chinese armor, which was still nowhere in sight.
The air, however, was now thick with smoke as well as dust, the smoke additive just one of the items purchased through La Roche Chemicals and something Cheng had paid particular attention to after remembering Schwarzkopf’s boasting about how the Americans could see through the dust much better than the T-59s.
“But we saw through this crap in Iraq,” Freeman said.
“Not the same crap, General,” the gunner replied. “They’ve somehow made it so thick that we just can’t pick up anything — infrared or laser. We’re running blind.”
“Well so are they,” Freeman said, but he was right only up to a point. The flail tanks had as yet reported no mines. There was a string of profanity followed by “Back up! Back up!”
“What the fuck—”
Over his radio network Freeman could hear the gas turbine of a flail tank roaring.
“We struck some kind of berm or—”
The next minute Freeman’s ears were ringing. He couldn’t hear anything for the explosion transmitted by the radio of the flail tank before it went dead. In an instant Freeman made his decision, ordering the entire armored column, which prudence had just made him form a single file, to withdraw. “Don’t deviate a millimeter from your incoming tracks!” he ordered.
Of course this was impossible, as most of the tank tracks were blown over or already half filled with sand, but each tank commander and driver knew what he meant: turn your tank on its own radius and get the hell out of here.
The full realization of what might have happened had all his tanks been aligned for a frontal attack now hit him — that every one, or certainly most, would have suffered the fate of the flail tank that had crashed through what appeared to be some kind of tank trap, the chains from the flail tank digging up the sand deep enough before it crashed through in what Freeman now realized might be a tunnel-strewn corridor, each one of them allowing two-man RPG 40mm type-69 antitank grenade launcher teams to take on his tanks.
He was wrong — the tunnel had in fact been dug so as to bear the weight of the M1, not to collapse as had happened in this case, and to allow access warrens for RPG teams.
During Freeman’s hasty retreat, several more tanks were lost to teams who, realizing the American column had failed to take the bait at the last minute, had come out of their holes prematurely, most of them being killed at such close range by the M1s’.50 Brownings. Nevertheless two of Freeman’s tanks were lost to RPG teams, the tanks’ four-man crews cut to pieces by the Chinese as they tried to exit the burning vehicles. At the very least the Chinese had mauled Freeman’s column and caused him to give the uncharacteristic order to pull back. Cheng was furious that Freeman had not come on in a frontal battle charge, but the storm had brought caution to the Americans’ tactics and confusion to both sides.
“Very well,” Cheng said. “Now he retreats, where does he go? He must either come through the corridor or—”
“Go eastward to the dunes that border the corridor,” his aide suggested. Cheng uttered an ancient oath. With the corridor mined as well as honeycombed by tunnels, there was only one place Freeman could go: toward the dunes. But it was impossible to tunnel the dunes. Sand had the insistent habit of falling in on you the moment you tried to dig a foxhole in it.
Very well, Cheng thought, returning to Sun Tzu’s axiom: “The military has no constant form, just as water has no constant shape — adapt as you face the enemy.” It must adapt. Freeman had, and so would he.
“Colonel,” Cheng ordered, “get me Shenyang air army HQ immediately.” The drop he had in mind would be a little haphazard and it would have to be done in execrable conditions, but it was the only way to stop the Americans. Besides, it gave Cheng a sense of perverse satisfaction to know that the very weapons he’d be using against Freeman had been provided by an American, La Roche, out of Warsaw Pact surplus. Cheng recalled how hard he had to fight the Central Committee for the allocation funds to buy the weapons. Now he would be vindicated.
If there was one thing Freeman hated it was retreat, and already a CBN reporter well in the rear of me logistical tail of the armored column, hearing that Freeman’s armored spearhead was withdrawing, was in immediate contact with his Tokyo affiliate via his “four wire” satellite dish phone.
Within the hour the La Roche tabloids around me world were spewing forth FREEMAN ON THE RUN. Freeman was flipping over the leaves of his satchel-size operational map pad, assuring himself that you either went through the corridor between the dunes to the east and the Mongolian border to the west where SATRECON in one photo out of fifty had peeked through a brief clearing in the storm and spotted hundreds of heavy ChiCom field batteries — or you could try a fast end run across the dunes on his extreme left, then wheel about southwest in the sand. But if he knew this he knew that Cheng must know it, too, so if you were Cheng you’d try to stop the Americans at the dunes or better still try to take them out before they reached the dunes.
Freeman knew his M1A1s had a distinct advantage over the Chinese T-72s and T-59s in that the M1 was much faster. Then he got the bad news that the most forward of his tanks, which were now withdrawing from the antitank tunnel corridor and swinging east toward the dunes, were already reported as being under attack by swarms of ChiCom motorcycle and sidecar battalions, many equipped with Sagger optically controlled antitank missiles. It was difficult enough to deal with antitank ordnance normally, which is why Freeman had ordered the withdrawal from the tunnel-honeycombed corridor. But mobile Sagger antitank teams were a much more dangerous threat, even though Freeman knew it would probably be as difficult for the ChiCom sidecar units to spot his tanks in the blinding dust storm as it was for the tanks to see them.
Despite the blinding sandstorm, however, the quick turning ability of the motorcycle sidecar units was a distinct advantage for the ChiComs. There was the muffled crump of yet another tank as the explosion of fifty rounds of its ammo went up, and for a minute.50mm tracers from its machine gun ammunition could be seen flying madly in all directions as faint orange streaks in the dust-choked battlefield. It was at that point that Freeman realized from the reports of two drivers from the knocked-out tanks that it wasn’t mines that were planted in the corridor but the much more dangerous mobile antitank RPG units that had stopped them. The general immediately ordered a battalion of his tanks to race at maximum speed for the sands, and the bulk of 205 tanks to re-form for an echelon attack, five tanks to an echelon, forty-one echelons in all heading forward again toward the tunneled corridor, but not until he ordered his three squadrons of SAS/D men—210 men — to race ahead of the tanks in their seventy three-man FAVs, or fast attack vehicles—”dune buggies” built for war.
The battalion of American tanks racing for the dunes on Freeman’s left flank were told not to enter the dunes the moment Freeman had received a report from the forward-most tank that aircraft could be heard there above the dust storm.
“You sure they’re not our Apaches trying to get a look see?”
“Positive — definitely fixed-wing aircraft, General.”
“Right,” Freeman acknowledged, “then we must assume the ChiComs are dropping mines — thousands of them — onto the dunes.”
It left him with no choice. He would either have to retreat fully or hope his FAVs as outriders could somehow navigate a safe passage through the corridor.
As he re-formed the tanks for another attempt on the corridor, the first FAVs appeared, the lead vehicle being manned by Aussie Lewis as driver, David Brentwood as codriver and machine gunner, with another SAS/D trooper on the back raised seat behind the TOW missile tube. Brentwood ordered the seventy FAVs to spread across the ten-mile-wide, twenty-three-mile-deep corridor. This meant that there were approximately seven FAVs to a mile of front, but while they tried their best to keep no more man a 200-yard spacing between them it was impossible to be sure because of the visibility being no more than twenty feet.
“What the hell’s he doing now?” a CBN reporter demanded of Norton.
“Attacking,” Norton replied tersely, uncharacteristically adding, “What the hell’s it look like?”
“Well, we’re too far back to see.”
“Exactly,” Norton commented. “Didn’t report that to your paper, did you — that Freeman was in a lead tank?”
But right now the CBN reporter was more alarmed than insulted. “But Jesus, he’s trying to drive through the corridor before the chinks turn their big guns from the Mongolia border on him. Shouldn’t take them long to tow them into position.”
“No,” Norton said. “It’s a race all right. He’s running for gold and they’re coming in from the flank.”
“Jesus Christ! It’ll be nip and tuck, won’t it?”
Norton waved over a FAV.
“Yes, sir?”
“You fellas got room for an observer?”
“Sure, in the back,” said Salvini, who was driving with another SAS/D man on the machine gun in the codriver’s position and Choir Williams in back, manning the TOW. “Next to Choir — you can get a grip on the roll bar.”
“Ah — listen,” the reporter said. “If you guys are pushed for space—”
Norton had his sand goggles up and winked at Salvini, who waved encouragingly at the La Roche reporter. “Hell, no trouble, man. Always glad to help the press.”
The reporter hesitated.
“Don’t want me to tell the New York office you’re chicken, do you?” Norton pressed, only half-joking.
The CBN reporter smiled weakly. “No—”
“Right, off you go then.” And within thirty seconds they were gone, Choir Williams advising the reporter against the sound of the wind and the whine of the ninety-four-horsepower engine, “You hang on, boyo. When we get to those holes it’ll be bloody murder!”
“What holes?”
“Them bloody manholes that Cheng has popped here and there atop his nest of runnels. Throw you clear off if you’re not careful. You just get a grip on the roll bar here like Mr. Salvini says. Okay?”
The fear in the reporter’s eyes was hidden by the goggles.
“We’ll be testing for mines,” Choir informed him, having to shout over the FAV’s engine.
“Testing?”
“Aye. Freeman doesn’t know if the chinks ‘ave mined the corridor as well as tunneled it. We doubt it — but the ChiComs sure as hell are having mines dropped on the dunes now that Cheng thinks we’re taking the dune route on our left.”
“Until he sees us,” the reporter said, “coming back to the corridor.”
“Aye,” Choir said. “But he’ll be getting reports of our tanks over by the dunes and he’ll have to decide where he wants to concentrate his strength.”
“Why can’t the tanks test the mines?”
“Don’t be daft, laddie. M-1 costs four million dollars. Fast attack vehicle comes in around twenty-five thousand.”
“Thanks,” the reporter shouted. “That makes me feel better.”
“Oh it’s a fine dune buggy is the FAV. Your readers might be interested,” Choir said. “Thirteen and a half feet long, five foot high, six foot wide — tubular steel frame, can negotiate almost any terrain, and faster than a bloody tank. Seventy mile an hour attack speed, boyo.”
“Is there someplace I can get off?” the reporter asked.
Choir smacked the newsman good-naturedly on the shoulder. “Ah — you’re a cool one, boyo. Stand-up comic we have here, lads!” But Salvini and his machine gunner couldn’t hear him in the wild banshee sound of the storm.
The next minute they were airborne at fifty miles an hour, the reporter’s legs off the steel floor, his knuckles bone white on the roll bar. Choir pulled him down. Salvini saw a blur on the enormous blur of the mustard-colored dust storm. The blur seemed to be turning, or rather spinning, and looked about the size of a baseball.
“Sagger!” he yelled, yanking the wheel hard left while his codriver, manning a.50 machine gun, fired in the general direction of the Sagger. He couldn’t see the man firing it but knew that the operator had to remain in line of sight of his target in order to guide the Russian-made antitank weapon to its target. And the U.S. soldiers had learned from POWs taken before the cease-fire that machine gun fire coming in your direction had a way of unsettling your concentration on the Sagger control toggle. The Sagger kept coming toward them, and Salvini turned hard right. The Sagger couldn’t make the acute turn and passed them by.
A quarter mile on, Brentwood saw another Sagger’s back-flash. “Two o’clock!” he yelled at Aussie. “A hundred yards.” The FAV was doing fifty-five, and Aussie pressed his boot to the floor. The two-man Sagger team, though they needed only one man to guide the missile, was scrambling back into the manhole. The first one made it. Aussie braked hard to prevent engine damage and hit the second man full on, rolling him under the car, fast like a big, soft log. Aussie backed up to make sure and David fired a long burst into the manhole cover, its sandy wooden top flying apart like cardboard, then he dropped in two grenades, and they were off again. “No mines so far!” Aussie told Brentwood.
“No,” Brentwood said, “but we’re only five miles into the corridor — another bumpy seven straight ahead.” The next two miles were not the hard-baked semidesert terrain that they’d been bouncing through so far but a mile-wide spill of sand, and in this the FAV was superb, up one side of a dune and down the other in its natural element. Aussie’s FAV was still in the lead when he slowed and pointed off to his left. “TMD.”
“Shit!” the response came from the usually moderate Brentwood.
“What is it?” the SAS/D man behind them on the TOW asked.
“Wooden-cased mine — bloody worst.”
“So metal detectors wouldn’t pick it up,” the man on the TOW said.
“Right,” Aussie answered, “and we’re only running on seventy pounds overpressure. Which is why we mightn’t have set off any — if we ran over them. They could be the TMD-B4 type. Only go off under a main battle tank — won’t waste them as antipersonnel. Need something really heavy to detonate them. A buggy probably wouldn’t do it.”
“How can we be sure?” David said.
“Everybody out,” Aussie said.
“I’m in command here, Aussie. I’ll do it,” Brentwood said.
“Fuck off!”
“This is an order,” Brentwood said. “Get unbuckled. I’ll drive.”
“I’m the fucking driver. I’m not moving till you’re out.”
David looked up at the man on the TOW. “How about you, Stansfield?”
“I can’t get out,” he lied. “Something’s wrong with my buckle.”
“You stupid bastards,” Aussie said. “All right, hang on!” With that, Aussie drove through the howling, spitting wind directly at the 28cm wooden-cased mine. As he saw it looming up he shifted uneasily in his seat and, driving over it, cupped his left hand under his genitals and closed his eyes. Nothing happened. He put the FAV quickly in reverse and ran over it again. Then he pulled the pin on a five-second grenade, dropped it by the mine, and put his boot to the accelerator. A hundred feet from it the explosion sent out a shock wave through the sand that was like a ripple through water.
“Well,” Aussie said, “we know they’re not dummies. Bastards are genuine enough. But they won’t be set off by a FAV’s overpressure. That’s something anyway.”
Brentwood grabbed the radio phone to tell Freeman he could again have to slow his advance to single file or as many files as he had flail tanks that could go ahead, whipping the ground with their heavy chains to detonate the mines. He asked Freeman what they should do next, though he and Aussie and everyone on the FAV radio network guessed it already.
“Boys,” Freeman said to tank crew and FAV alike, “we’re slowing down and our tanks’ll have to get behind as many flails as we can. Cheng’s going to have time to move his guns across from the right flank, maybe directly in front of us. There’s a ridge at the end of the corridor where it narrows. They’ll use this high ground for their artillery. M1’s range is damn good at three thousand meters but it can’t overtake their thirteen-mile-range artillery. You boys in the FAVs are going to go in ahead of us.”
“Holy cow!” a FAV driver said. “If an M1 tank can’t outshoot Cheng’s artillery, how the hell are we going to?”
Freeman knew well enough they were in a tight spot, made worse by the lack of attention paid to detail by his new logistics whiz, Whitely. Up in Chita Whitely had been through every detail, from the size of every bolt to water decontamination pills, but he’d assumed that the rail gauge of the Trans-Siberian, which the Americans had to use when supplies were unloaded at the port of Rudnaya Pristan, would be the same as that of China. It wasn’t. And to change troops and their equipment from one train to another was infinitely more complex than the average person realized or could ever imagine. To move tanks, especially those fitted with flails and so vitally needed down south, was a logistical nightmare. Whitely had no contingency plan for how to get U.S. cargo moved quickly from Trans-Siberian gauge to Chinese gauge. Freeman had fired him as soon as he’d found out, but that didn’t change the situation.
What would change it was Freeman’s knowledge of the minutiae of war that yet again would contribute to the Freeman legend. It was nothing mysterious, and quite simple once explained to any soldier, or civilian for that matter, and it had to do with angles of fire.
“Now listen up,” Freeman said to the FAVs. “Quickly now! We don’t know exactly where Cheng’s guns are at the moment.”
Freeman had no way of knowing it in the blinding hell of the Gobi storm, but Cheng was about to let him know with the biggest artillery salvo since the Sino-Soviet wars of the sixties. It would be the opening barrage — over two hundred guns — of what was to become known as the battle for Orgon Tal, or “Big Dick” as it was known to Freeman’s Second Army, the tiny settlement of Orgon Tal being near the railhead Freeman hoped to capture midcorridor and so sever Cheng’s supply line from the east.
Cheng, nonplussed by reports of sightings of Freeman’s forces attacking both at the dunes to the east and regrouping in the tunneled area, had to decide now whether to rush down more troops from the northern armies on the Manchurian front. This attack of Freeman’s might well be a feint like that used against Hussein in ‘91, with the main body of the U.S.’s Second Army’s AirLand battle strategy yet to strike all across the Manchurian border as Freeman had done before shifting his attack south.
It was then that Cheng decided he needed more up-to-date intelligence, and the truth was General Cheng believed that no one could deduce more from interrogation than he could; this Malof woman, for example, the Russian Jewess who had led the underground resistance in the Jewish autonomous region on the Manchurian border and who had just been recaptured north of Harbin after several months of freedom following the cease-fire. She had been a great help to the Americans with her band of Jewish bandits harassing China border traffic all along the Black Dragon.
Whether or not this harassment was itself part of a larger set piece in the Americans’ overall battle plan would tell Cheng a great deal about Freeman’s strategy. Cheng knew that they also had, in Beijing Jail, an American SAS/D trooper, Smythe, who might be of use as well, knowing how the SAS/D worked as auxiliaries to main attacking forces. Accordingly, he ordered them both rushed to the Orgon Tal railhead with any other prisoners who had been captured within the last week or two. By four p.m. he should have at least sixteen POWs — mostly Chinese June 4 or Democracy Movement members — and saboteurs caught around Harbin, including the Russian Jewess.
Meanwhile he assumed Freeman was attacking on two fronts locally: upon the dunes to the east of Orgon Tal and through the sandstorm-blasted corridor, and accordingly gave the order that his heavy guns, especially the towed M 1955 203mm with its eleven-mile-range, 2,200-pound shells, his three-mile-range Attila Mk11 multiple rocket launchers and his D4 122mm seventeen-mile gun with its rate of fire of six to seven rounds per minute, be moved as fast as possible into the middle of the southern end of the corridor. Cheng’s troops positioned the guns on an east-west axis atop a hundred-foot tongue of clay that ran east to west for several thousand yards a few miles north of Orgon Tal railhead, so that the artillery and the railhead line formed a rough T, the artillery in effect protecting the railhead.
Cheng envisaged his trap now as a dragon’s mouth. The teeth would be the mine fields atop the network of tunnels that the American tanks would have to negotiate first, while at the back of the dragon’s mouth came the flame of the artillery, the latter’s mobile dish radars sitting like clumps of high ears atop the ridge not visible beyond thirty feet in the dust storm.
Cheng entered the Orgon Tal railway station’s waiting room, as bare of human comfort as anyone could imagine, looking more like a barrack that had been opened to the searing breath of the Gobi. But at least it afforded some shelter from the storm. The sixteen prisoners were told to stand. They ranged from a small, wiry student, shaking so much Cheng could actually hear his teeth chattering, to an old man in his seventies, his face creased like leather.
“It’s hot in here!” Cheng told the student contemptuously. “Why are you shaking?”
“I’m cold,” said the boy, about fourteen years old.
“You’re guilty!” Cheng said, his arm and hand rigid, fully extended, tapping the boy’s shoulder with such single-minded and increasing force that the boy looked as if he would collapse. The boy had already wet himself in fear.
“You are all guilty!” Cheng said, looking about like an angry schoolmaster. In his experience it was the best possible way to break down a prisoner’s resistance. Criminal or not, everybody was guilty of something, all the way from murder, to petty theft as a child, to sexual fantasies they could not possibly confess to those they loved, to resentment of the party. Yes, they were all guilty.
“You!” Cheng said to a man in his mid-forties, a worker in a fading blue Mao suit. “What instructions do you get from the Americans?”
“None, Comrade General.”
Cheng looked at him and believed him, but it didn’t matter. Often they knew more than they realized. Cheng was still unsure if this corridor attack was merely a feint to hide the fact of a massive U.S. attack south from the Amur to grab all Manchuria. He walked behind the prisoners.
“Look to your front!” a major bellowed. There was a shot — a worker’s face exploding like a melon, parts of his grayish brain scattered on the sandy wooden floor.
One prisoner, the boy, gave a moan and collapsed. Cheng pushed him gently with his boot. “Wake up. Get up!”
The major kicked the boy. “Get—”
“No!” Cheng told the major. “Don’t hurt him. Help him to his feet.”
The boy tried to get up but dry-retched and stayed on his knees, looking strangely like a wet cat. There was another shot, and the boy’s torso crumpled and seemed to melt into his arms before he fell sideways with a bump into a pool of his blood.
It was imperative to Cheng to be unpredictable in such circumstances. This held more fear than most people could bear. “I will return in a half hour. I want to know what your orders were from the Americans. Tell the major — word for word. If you tell the truth you will receive reduced prison sentences. Whatever you say will be carefully checked, and if it is found that the information you have given is incorrect, you will die — more slowly than these two.” He indicated the worker and the student.
As Cheng walked out he told the major, “I want those reports in half an hour.”
“Yes, Comrade General.”
The major had only four guards and so asked who of the prisoners could read or write.
A man in his late fifties, though he looked much older, and Alexsandra Malof indicated they could.
“Very well,” he said to Alexsandra. “You take half the group — the old man the other six. Take their statements including your own.”
“I have no pen or paper,” the old man said.
“Neither have I,” Alexsandra said.
The major ordered one of the guards to go to the nearest HQ tent along the rail line and get pen and paper.
“Major,” Alexsandra asked, forcing a smile despite the grim circumstances, “may I confer with the old man as to how we might—”
“No.” The major looked at her, the hostility in his eyes so intense that she fully expected him to slap her. “You think that I am an idiot?”
“No,” she said, feigning surprise.
“You are awarded the Medal of Freedom by the Americans and you think this will protect you?” he asked bitterly.
“No — I just thought it might be helpful if—”
“You thought,” the major said, “that you could influence the old man and the others.”
“No, I—”
“Be quiet!” The major strode out of the room quickly, looking for the guard he’d sent. Alexsandra coughed and tried to say something to the next prisoner, but her beauty, her dark, silken hair, dark eyes, and a figure whose curves not even a Mao suit could hide intimidated the prisoner, another young male student.
All four of the guards were staring, gawking, at her. “Nimen hui shuo Yingwen ma? You speak English?” she asked them pleasantly. They shook their heads. Still looking at them, she made a writing motion against her hand, but she was talking to the prisoners either side of her. “This is the only American attack. They won’t attack along the Amur,” she said, still looking and smiling at the guards. “This is the real attack here. If anyone in the line speaks English pass the message down. The Americans aren’t going to attack from the Amur. This is the real attack.”
One guard started to wave at her, shaking his head censoriously side to side. Another, getting the same idea, jabbed ineffectually at the air in front of him with his bayonet. Their message was clear and they could see the major coming back, but by then the prisoners had been whispering among themselves, barely audible in the wind, the guards moving toward them threateningly, yelling at them, “An jing yi xia! Be quiet!”
The major and the guard accompanying him had two sheets of paper and pencils and immediately gave them to Alexsandra and the old man. The old man thanked the major but said in broken but very clear English, “I do not think we know so much, Comrade.”
“Talk in Chinese,” the major yelled at him, “and get on with it.”
Backfiring, the FAV leapt into the air at an acute angle, and for a moment Aussie, Brentwood, and the TOW operator thought they’d been hit.
“Did you fart?” Aussie yelled over at Brentwood, who ignored him, David’s eyes looking hard through the goggles for any enemy movement up ahead. He saw another mine, directed Aussie to it, where they dumped a grenade and took off again, followed by the unusual hollow sound audible even above the wind, which betrayed the existence of a tunnel exit near the detonated mine. Aussie made a quick U-turn, saw a “manhole” half exposed, like a trapdoor spider’s web, and braked the FAV as David gave the manhole several bursts of machine gun fire until it was perforated like the top of an old beer barrel given to the ax. They dropped two flash grenades and, following their boomp! tossed in their “skip” antipersonnel mines. These steel-spring-legged, spidery-looking mines were preset to go off when approached, filling the air with enough shrapnel to kill anyone up to ninety feet away. In the tunnel it would be even more devastating.
“No more diversions!” Brentwood ordered Aussie. “Let the guys in the tanks deal with the manholes. Besides, they can follow our tracks. Freeman wants us up front, fast.”
“I know,” Aussie said, his lips stung by the sand. “Just didn’t want any bastards popping up behind us.”
“I’ll keep watch!” the TOW operator shouted.
“You watch your front!” Brentwood corrected him. “You’ve got the extra height. I want you to see the guns before they see us.”
“Bloody charge of the Light Brigade!” Aussie called out, recalling the famous and doomed charge of the British cavalry against the Russian guns at Balaclava.
“FAV’s better than a horse!” Brentwood retorted. “And we have—”
“Sagger!” the TOW operator yelled. “Eleven o’clock low!”
It was coming at them like a curdling, spinning glob of gray spit through the mustard-colored air, and Aussie began his evasive driving, willing his nerves to hold till the last possible moment before going into a turn that hopefully would be too acute for the Sagger. But Brentwood got lucky— a bullet or two from the long burst of his.50 machine gun hit the Sagger. There was an explosion like molten egg yolk, a stream of blackish white smoke, and the whistling of shrapnel, one piece hitting the FAV’s front bumper. Aussie felt his left thigh was wet and feared one of the jerricans of gas had been hit. But the cans were all right.
“Oh Christ!” It was Brentwood. “Stop!” David downshifted and braked, and an even denser cloud of dust enveloped them from behind as the vehicle shuddered and slewed to a halt. Brentwood was looking back. The TOW operator still clung to the shoulder-height roll bar, but his head was gone, the shrapnel having decapitated him, his torso a fountain of warm, spurting blood.
They only had time to unbuckle him — his dog tags were gone — and lay him on the sand. Aussie got back into the driver’s seat while Brentwood used two standard-issue condoms to tie down the Browning.50 for the rough ride ahead and then mounted the wet bloody seat of the TOW operator and buckled up. Without a word Aussie set off again down the corridor — four miles to go and only God knew what lay ahead. He was struck again by the sheer bloody confusion of war. At this moment neither he nor, he suspected, any of the other FAVs, Bradleys, or M1s, knew whether they were winning or not. Now the scream of Cheng’s salvos passed overhead to create havoc amid Freeman’s columns.
“Well, Major?” Cheng asked. “What have you found out?”
The major handed him the sheaf of interrogation papers. “It’s a jumble of patriotic assurances,” the major said, “but several of them said that this attack of the Americans around Orgon Tal here is the major attack. This means the Americans’ actions along the Black Dragon are only diversions to keep our troops up there — that they will not attack any further along the Amur.”
Cheng looked at the four reports that made more or less the same point. “Where are the prisoners now?”
“In their cells,” the major responded. What he meant was that they were in four-foot-square, four-foot-deep holes in the desert earth covered with spiked bamboo grates weighed down by rail ties so that the prisoner, not allowed to sit, could not stand properly either. The guards watched three or four cells each and could do so at one glance. Already there was the smell of human excrement coming from some of the holes as Cheng waited for the major to play the small, cigarette-size cassette tape recorder that had been given to one of the guards. He turned the volume up, but the sound of the storm was too powerful, like a frying-fish noise covering the conversation — or whatever the Jewess had said to the guards. The major pushed “rewind” and slid the little volume stick back to the mid position. Now they could hear her — not well but enough to make out that it was she telling the others to say that this attack against Orgon Tal was the full AirLand attack.
The major saw Cheng smile at the information. Even a neophyte in Intelligence listening to the tape could tell what she was up to. She knew that everyone would give up sooner or later under torture and most would give up much sooner man that. She was a veteran. And so she’d concocted the idea that this assault against Orgon Tal was the only attack in the hopes of persuading him, Cheng, to move his northern armies south away from the river. She had asked the guards whether they had spoken English — which none of them did— then she’d proceeded to tell the others what to confess, but not all of them — just enough — four — hopefully to convince Cheng that this was the real attack.
“She’s been too clever by half,” Cheng said, with a smile of deep satisfaction. “The Americans obviously have a plan to attack from the north. The incidents along the Black River and Amur and around A-7 have not been diversionary. She’s told us precisely what Freeman is up to, Major. The Americans are going to do exactly the opposite of what she told them to tell us. There will be an attack from the north, and so we must reroute some of our southern divisions northward.”
There was a tone of urgency when Cheng asked the major, “Is our towed artillery in place?” He meant had there been time to move the artillery that had been sent to the dunes east of them back to Orgon Tal?
“They should be ready within—”
The heavy thumps of ChiCom “Pepperpots,” the long, muzzle-braked 203mm howitzers, gave him the answer, with their seventeen-mile-range, two-hundred-pound shells tearing through the sandstorm above the U.S. tanks. Because there was no reliable radar guidance for me Pepperpots due to the storm clutter it was strictly harassment fire, but soon Cheng’s underground tunnel troops could hear the M1A1 Abrams approaching and could give the approximate quadrant as the fifty-ton tanks proceeded slowly overhead behind the terrible din of chain flails setting off the mines. But soon, Cheng knew, when all of the tanks became visible to manhole positions, quadrant vectors would be much more precise, and his artillery would cut the Americans to pieces. It was all a race against time, but the ChiComs could afford to wait for me M1A1s to come forward, the M1s’ effective range being three thousand meters, the Americans’ 105mm howitzers’ seven-mile range hopelessly outreached by the six giant seventeen-mile-range Pepperpots.
To be on the safe side Cheng had kept his armor well back behind the rail line spur at Orgon Tal, to be deployed only should any of Freeman’s armor break through the artillery-pounded corridor. To further bolster his confidence there was the fact that his T-59 and T-72 main battle tanks outnumbered the Americans four to one and, as he’d told his superiors, were manned by China’s best, not by demoralized Iraqis.
“What about the prisoners?” the major asked Cheng. “Shoot them?”
Cheng shrugged. “Now or later. But I’d prefer the Americans to do it.”
The major was puzzled.
“Keep them in the cages for now,” Cheng instructed.
“Yes, General.”
Cheng, they said, had a use for everything. In a winter campaign against the Siberians many years ago he had used the frozen corpses of his own dead strapped together to make up sleds so as to pull more ammunition and supplies across the frozen lakes and through the snow.
Reports were coming in that some of the light American fast-attack vehicles were in advance of the tanks. Saggers had hit three or four, but they were still coming. Cheng was perplexed. It was so un-American — why on earth was Freeman sacrificing relatively lightly armed vehicles, compared to the M1 tanks he had, at the front? Another one of Freeman’s feints perhaps?
“But if these ‘buggies’ get through to the guns,” the major suggested worriedly, “they could cause havoc with our gun crews.”
Cheng looked at the major as if he were mad. “Our Pepperpots would blow them to kingdom come before they got anywhere near us, Major.”
“If we could see them,” the major began, “and if—”
“All right,” Cheng said, “we’ll surprise them.” With that he gave the order for all tunnel troops to exit — to forget about the tanks, which could be dealt with by the big guns. To exit and make their priority targets the American “dune buggies.”
Then, one of the American FAV drivers said, it was as if God had suddenly intervened — on the Chinese side. The storm suddenly began to abate, making the ChiCom infantry and the American FAVs more visible and allowing the dish antennae of the ChiComs’ radar to start picking up some of the FAVs.
“Take them out!” Brentwood yelled above the storm into the FAV radio net. “Fast!”
With needles quivering on their 4,400 rpm dials, the Chenowth Fast Attack Vehicles, souped up to hit seventy-five miles per hour in battle conditions, hadn’t been seen before by the Chinese troops.
The FAVs had extraordinary firepower, with an M-60 machine gun fore and aft and assault rifle for each of the three men strapped into the vehicle, a 40mm grenade launcher, laser target designator, and an antitank missile launcher with steel-webbed side compartments for casualty litters if necessary or for extra ammo and boxes of explosive. They were moving much fester than the tanks. The air-cooled FAV engine was well muffled and rear mounted, its cooling fins low down so that its infrared signature would be low to the enemy ahead.
The Chinese poured out of the tunnels, and for the first time in the newspaper reports the phrase “swarms of attacking Chinese” was appropriate. There was no doubt that the ChiComs, with their Red Arrow antitank missiles and machine guns, would take out at least a third of the 70 FAVs, others already starting to be attacked by saturation mortar bombardments. The buggies were often picked up off the ground by the concussion only to disappear in explosions marked by oily orange smudges in a rain of dust. It was not known whether the Chinese would have time to stop all of them.
One FAV came up over a rise at forty miles an hour, and ran down five ChiComs just as they were emerging from their tunnel exit. Another FAV — its engine hit, stalled in the sand — became a magnet to a platoon of ChiCom infantry, like ants encircling a piece of meat. The three Americans were cut to pieces, but there was no longer a Chinese platoon of thirty men — only half of them remained to claim a passing victory, and several of these were fatally wounded.
Back further, an M1 Abrams stopped, its front right track spinning off under the blow of shrapnel from a Pepperpot high-explosive shell hitting the earth only yards away. Then coming from the south through the gaps in their artillery at the Chinese end of the corridor came several companies of ChiCom motorcycle- and machine-gun-mounted sidecars, every fifth motorcycle and sidecar unit carrying a Sagger.
“One o’clock in the dip!” Aussie yelled to Brentwood, his face creasing momentarily from the sickly sweet stench of burning bodies. But even as he spoke he felt the hot rush of superheated air from the TOW’s backblast. The pinion occupants of the motorcycle and sidecar unit were firing frantically and in the sidecar another ChiCom was working the toggle on his Sagger when the motorcyclist, still on his bike, was lifted skyward, and, in a somersault, was aflame, the sidecar no more than a hunk of burning metal sixty yards away from where the burning motorcyclist landed and broke in half, his body shriveled black, pieces of him peeling off in the high wind like sheets of burned newspaper.
Driving with his left hand, his right firing his assault rifle, which he had braced against the passenger’s side M-60, Aussie was heading for another motorbike and sidecar coming straight at him, the sidecar machine gunner having only a ninety degree front-to-left arc in which to fire, otherwise there was danger of him shooting his driver. Aussie pulled the FAV hard left, giving the machine gunner on the sidecar even less of an angle as Brentwood popped off four 40mm grenades from their launcher. None actually hit the motorcycle and sidecar unit, but the shrapnel cut into the motorcyclist, who looked down, saw blood, and for a second lost concentration. The front wheel of the bike jackknifed, and they were over, the sidecar man crawling out, drawing his sidearm.
“Keep going!” Brentwood shouted, conscious that it was still a race to the Chinese guns before the storm cleared enough for the ChiCom radars to be effective against the M1A1s. There was the zing of small-arms fire off the “cage” of the FAV’s roll bar frame.
“Cheeky bastard!” Aussie yelled. “I oughta go back and run ‘im over.”
“Keep going!” Brentwood shouted.
“Yes, sir! Righto, sir!” Already everything was mustard looking, visibility twenty feet maximum. “Jesus, we’re doing sixty!”
“Faster!”
The sand-blasted desert was now taking on the aspect of a moonscape caused by everything from the explosions of the big PLA 160mm, 100mm, and the 82mm mortars to the huge Pepperpots, their HE shells screaming overhead louder than normal because of sand blown onto hot metal, the sense of a hot moonscape added to by the explosions of SAS/D TOW missiles, though Brentwood could be heard yelling above the sandstorm on the FAV radio network that they should conserve TOW rounds for heavier targets. He meant PLA armored personnel carriers type 82 and multiple rocket launchers mounted atop type-85 APCs, as well as the Hongjian 8 missiles carried by the type-531 APCs.
As he repeated the order, a “pic” stick or stick grenade bounced off the spare tire and exploded ten feet behind the FAV. Another Chinese twenty yards ahead of them pulled a cord fuse of another “pic” grenade, but it blew up instantly, taking his hand off. David Brentwood didn’t know why but the ChiComs had a fixation about picric acid. It had cost them quite a few hands, the acid-packed grenade becoming dangerously unstable if any moisture was allowed to accumulate in the grenade boxes. But then picric acid was cheap, and the PLA had three million men to arm. Cheng probably figured the odd hand was worth it; the cast-iron shrapnel from the stick grenade when it worked had been the cause of many American casualties in Southeast Asia, American medevac choppers being called in to carry out the wounded.
Whenever the Americans were hit they had the habit of stopping until their wounded were taken care of. To wound an American seriously, in Cheng’s view, was better than killing him — for it tied up at least a dozen men, from first-aid types to chopper crews who could have been more useful carrying the battle forward. Indeed Freeman was already ordering troop-carrying Hueys, “Blackhawks,” up forward, not in an evac role but to see whether it was yet feasible to use them in an offensive role in the storm. But nap-of-the-earth flying was well-nigh impossible because of the ground clutter caused by the bouncing of millions of pieces of silica, the sand reflecting radar rays in a dancing static.
Besides, banks of PLA type-77 and W-85 12.7mm AA machine guns were radar linked, and once the helos rose above twenty or thirty feet some of them were coming under fire, for at this height they were out of the radar clutter that prevented them from flying nap-of-the-earth but it took them high enough to be picked up on the most powerful of the ChiComs’ radar. Freeman ordered them to land and wait till the high winds and sandstorm abated enough to reduce the “bounce-back” clutter on their own radars. It was a mistake.
Chinese infantry streaming out of the holes had taken out four of Freeman’s helos with “corncobs,” the name given by the Americans to the conical shape of the 40mm type-69 antitank grenade round. Freeman quickly ordered the helos to get airborne, at least those that were not shot up too much, to return to their hover positions behind the tanks four miles back.
Freeman cursed himself for such a dumb move, which the La Roche tabloids would have called “brilliant and daring” if it had worked out and opened a hole in the ChiCom defenses but which even now was being described by one of CBN’s “four-wire” phone-in rear observers as “Freeman Reeling before PLA!”
The only bit of good news Freeman got that day was that Admiral Kuang — true to his word — was apparently en route to the Chinese mainland off Fukien province and so, Freeman hoped, was effectively bottling up the PLA’s Army Group One and Group Twelve in the Nanjing military district that served Fukien province.
Freeman had already lost fourteen M1A1s — and most of their crews — to the Pepperpot harassment fire. It was to be expected under such odds, and he was confident that once out of the corridor bounded by high dunes right and left of him he’d have room to move, and then he’d show Cheng what the M1s, free of a mine field, could do. But against this he had a morale problem, his troops’ earlier enthusiasm already hemorrhaging with the loss of fourteen tanks and their crews. And he knew that if they broke through to the end of the corridor they would still be facing four to five tanks for each of the M1s and that those odds would go higher every time Freeman lost another M1 while being forced to proceed in column behind the flail and other antimine grader tanks. Yet to retreat would be to suffer the same kind of attrition among his tanks, as the Pepperpots would not let up.
“Problem is,” he told Dick Norton, who was now aboard a Bradley APC running close alongside him in the lee of one of the grader tanks, “our guys got a bit spoiled with Saddam Insane. For all our smart bombs duly reported by a tightly controlled press — you know 75 percent of all bombs dropped failed completely to hit their targets?”
Norton nodded. Actually the general was wrong. It was even worse: Over 77 percent of all bombs had missed their targets in Iraq, but the army had controlled the press in a way it had never been able to in Vietnam, and the few spectacular successes with the smart bombs made the whole Iraqi campaign seem a walkover that Freeman and others should be able to duplicate.
“And they’re wondering why I’m not sending in the air force,” Freeman thundered. “Christ, there’s already been four choppers taken out in this pea soup. This isn’t Iraq — it’s a damn sight tougher.” The general closed his eyes, took off his goggles, wiped them clean, and put them on again, announcing to Norton, “Well, if Huang gets to Fukien he’ll keep them bottled up in the south.”
“Yes, sir. Met boys say the storm will pretty much die down in an hour or so.”
“That’s what they told me an hour ago. By God, where’s Harvey Simmet? He’s the only weatherman who knows anything. Get him up here.”
“Yes, sir.”
Harvey Simmet, the meteorological officer for Freeman’s HQ, was a man whose patience and dedication had been sorely tried by Freeman in earlier Arctic battles, Freeman calling on him half-hourly, sometimes every five minutes in the heat of the battle. Everyone thought Freeman had been acting strangely, but he knew that once the temperature hit minus sixty the waxes in the poor-quality Siberian lubrication oils would settle out and clog the hydraulics, stopping the Siberian tanks in their tracks. Then he could counterattack. And he did.
“Where the hell’s Simmet?” Freeman demanded.
“We’re having him brought up the line soon as we can, sir.”
Freeman grunted. “This damn storm has been sent to try us, Norton. It’s hell-sent.”
“Yes, sir.” Norton wasn’t about to contradict the general who had very specific ideas about hell and often viewed the vicissitudes of nature as heaven-sent omens. In this the general was as superstitious as the Chinese.
“Fellas!”
Neither Salvini nor Choir could hear the CBN reporter as Choir was busy blazing away at a motorcycle and sidecar unit with his M-60, Salvini using his M-16 on anything that moved in the dark day of the sand.
“Fellas!” the reporter repeated. “Let’s head back—”
There was no answer.
“Look,” the reporter said. “A thousand bucks — okay? You’ve been very good. I’ve seen enough…”
“No, no, boyo!” Choir yelled without turning his head, starting a new belt for the M-60. “You haven’t seen the big stuff, laddie. ‘E ‘as to see that now hasn’t he, Sal?”
“Oh, definitely,” Salvini agreed.
“What’s that?” the reporter asked, ashen faced in his goggles, the goggles giving him a mad look.
“Pepperpots,” Choir explained. “Biggest fucking gun in the world, boyo!”
It wasn’t, but it was big, and Choir knew that with its sheer size it would be an awesome sight — if they reached the guns alive.
Sal shifted down as they went up a small hill, changing up as soon as he felt the two rear Wrangler tires grip. The reporter was holding a fistful of notes. “You keep your money, chief,” Sal said. “When you see those Pepperpots you might need some toilet paper.”
“You’re both mad!” the reporter yelled. “SAS is fucking insane!”
“Hang on!” Salvini yelled, then hit a series of deep potholes, the FAV sounding like a junk shop amid an earthquake.
Out of the original seventy FAVs only thirty now remained, and not one had failed mechanically. Then Salvini saw another go up in flame, hit by a Sagger. “Twenty-nine now,” said Salvini.
Cutting in on the FAV network, Freeman informed Brentwood and the remaining FAVs that a Kiowa helo’s mast radar had picked up a high, stationary blob on his screen before returning to hover position over the M1A1s. His explanation: a high radar tower that once the storm died could give the exact positions of the M1s.
“That’s your second job,” Freeman ordered the FAVs through Brentwood.
The reporter, with Salvini and Choir, sallow with fear, asked what the first job was.
“To follow Aussie — under the guns,” Salvini said. “Haven’t you ever heard of that, under the gun?”
“I thought it meant, you know, having a gun on you,” the reporter said nervously.
Salvini shook his head. “Not here, chief. Freeman got us all together back there and told us the Pepperpots have an elevation of plus fifty-five and a down angle from the horizontal of minus two. You see he knows they can’t lower their barrels beyond minus two. So once we get into their no-shoot zones — under the guns, like the cavalry used to, that is, beneath me lowest angle of their dangle — they can’t use the artillery on us anymore.”
“So what will you do?”
“Are you serious?” Salvini yelled, shifting down again. “Shoot the fuckers. The gun crews. Think we’re out here for a picnic?”
There was a loud bang — the right front tire. The FAV skewed in the clay, or rather in what seemed to be hard soil much like clay. Salvini was out and unstrapping a spare-Choir covering him with the M-60 before the La Roche reporter knew what was going on. In the distance, a half mile to their left, there was a terrific salvo hitting and shaking the earth, and four more FAVs were gone. Only twenty-five remained.
By now some FAVs had taken more than twenty prisoners and returned them to the head of Freeman’s column, where me general himself directed the interrogation.
“Ask them who are party members.”
There was no response, though clearly several of the prisoners were frightened.
“Is it a shame to be a party member?” Freeman pressed through the interpreter. “Is there no honor?”
After a few seconds one of the Chinese POWs raised his hand. “Wo shi dang yuan, wo wei ci er gan daojiao ao”— I am a party member and proud of it.
Another man, then another, raised their hands, signifying that they too were party members. It was a surprise to the Humvee driver who’d driven Freeman back from his M1 to the mobile APC interrogation unit. Like so many American soldiers, he didn’t understand that the actual membership in the party in China, as in the CIS, was no more than 10 to 15 percent of the entire population. Most of the population in China merely obeyed because to do otherwise was to risk prison, torture, or death — beheading now reintroduced by Cheng and the Central Committee as a much cheaper alternative than wasting expensive bullets.
Freeman had the Communist party members removed from the APC. One of them glowered back threateningly at the others. Freeman’s calf-gloved hand shot out, his forefinger jammed hard against the man’s forehead. “Now don’t worry about it, Jack — it’s none of your business.”
Outside the APC a grunt was puzzled, asking another, “How come Freeman called the prisoner ‘Jack’?”
“Always does when he’s mad at you,” the older veteran replied.
“Where we got to take them?” the first grunt asked.
“Take them down the line and give them an MRE.” He meant one of the prepacked “meals ready to eat.”
“Constitution says we can’t do that,” the other grunt complained.
“Why the hell not?”
“It’s cruel and unusual punishment. One taste of that crap and—” They all flattened beneath the scream of incoming, the explosion of a Pepperpot’s shell seventy yards off creating a crater and a rain of sand.
Back in the APC, Freeman took his gloves and helmet off, the close atmosphere thick with the smell of oil, sweat, and cordite. Everyone was perspiring in the cramped quarters, including the general, but he looked fresher and suddenly became more informal, which helped ease the tension between him, the interpreter, Norton, and the POWs. Looking directly at the remaining prisoners, he nevertheless spoke quickly to the interpreter, the echo of his voice fairly booming inside the APC. “Tell them I admire the Chinese people. Magnificent fighters for thousands of years.”
Some men showed no emotion, looking impassively at him. Others had their faces down. One, unable to wipe his nose properly because of the plastic strip that cuffed his hands behind him, was wiping his nose on the shoulder of his loose-fitting, olive green “pajamas.” Freeman ordered Norton to cut the plastic cuffs off them.
“I like the Chinese,” Freeman repeated. “But I hate the party. The party exploits the people. A man needs more than an iron rice bowl.” Nearly all of the prisoners now looked up at him because he knew of Mao’s promise of the iron rice bowl — a promise of a strong agricultural revolution that would feed all China.
“A rice bowl is good,” Freeman went on, his hands resting in front of him in a relaxed, yet authoritative manner. “But is this all a man and his kin desire? Why can you not get into the foreigners’ hotels? The luxurious friendship stores — serving foreigners while you must work to make goods you cannot buy even if you had the yuan, which you don’t. Why is this?” No one answered, but he had their undivided attention.
“It is,” Freeman told them, “because the party keeps everything for itself. While you slave they sit in their baths at the Zhongnanhai and dine on succulent delicacies, and their chauffeurs drive them in Red Flags while you ride a bicycle.” The general paused. He knew they knew he spoke the truth.
“There must be another revolution against the party,” he added. “If you are to be free. But now you are like the cormorants who fish on the Yangtze with the rings about their necks so they can catch fish but are not allowed to swallow them. Do you wish to have the ring about your throat all your life?”
The interpreter finished, but there was no answer.
With that, Freeman took a large manila envelope from Norton, tore it open, and tipped it upside down — bundles of hundred-dollar bills spilling out on the bottom of the APC. “We suspect,” Freeman said, “that the party has a large radar tower and complex immediately to the south of us. We need to know its position because the storm hides it from us.” He put a thousand-dollar bundle in front of each man. He did not expect anyone to take it but merely wished to whet their appetites. But as he was putting his helmet and gloves back on, a hand dashed out and took a thousand, the man’s expression defiant. He spit and yelled.
“What did he say?” Freeman asked.
“It’s a little indelicate, General.”
“What’d he say, God damn it!”
“He said, ‘Fuck the party!’ “
“By God!” Freeman said, sitting fully up and grinning, looking like George C. Scott. “I like that. By God I do!” He extended his hand in friendship and the PLA soldier took it.
“Take the particulars from him, Norton. Once you’ve got the grid references—” Another man took a thousand, then another, and another. Soon only one bundle was left, and the last man — the others all looking at him — shrugged, then took the bundle before him.
“When you have the references, Norton,” Freeman repeated, “give them to the FAV leader. I want those towers and whatever buildings are around them taken out, and fast— before this storm stops!”
“If the FAVs get through the guns, sir.”
“If they don’t,” Freeman said, lowering his head to get out from the APC’s rear door, “I’ll kick ass from here to Kentucky. And Norton?”
“Yes, sir?”
Once outside, Freeman indicated the two of them should keep walking. Freeman pulled his gloves on tightly, then squinting while adjusting his sand goggles, told Norton, “Tell those dirty little rats in there that if the information they give you doesn’t jibe — if we don’t find a goddamn tower where they tell us there’s one — I’ll shoot every one of the sons of bitches — personally!”
“General, may I say something off the record?”
“Go.”
“Sir, what you’ve already done contravenes the Geneva Convention. Paying taxpayers’ money to—”
“And what about shooting them?” Norton couldn’t tell whether Freeman was bluffing — couldn’t see his eyes clearly enough through the goggles — but the general was just unpredictable enough…
“That’d be murder, General.”
Freeman leaned over, his voice barely audible above the storm. “Yes, but they don’t know that.” There was a trace of a grin, but then it was gone, the general saying, “Soldiers ratting like that on their own men deserve shooting.”
“I thought you didn’t like the party either.”
“I don’t. But to risk their own men’s lives by telling us. I don’t go for that. That’s despicable.”
“But,” Norton said as the general mounted his M1 and stepped into the cupola, “you’re glad they did.”
As Freeman stood, his head out of the cupola, binoculars raised in the hope of seeing something in this forlorn wasteland, he rapped on the tank for the M1 to start off. There was a subdued growl from the gas turbine engine. “I’m a general, Norton. Not a fool. You get those coordinates to Brentwood, or if his FAV’s gone give them to the next in command, but it has to be done or we’ll have us a massacre out here once it clears and their radar starts working.”
“By last report we only have twenty-four FAVs left, General.”
“Get it done, Dick!” Freeman yelled back.
Norton was incorrect, for as they spoke there were only eighteen FAVs left out of the original seventy.
Harvey Simmet arrived and told Freeman that the met forecast was actually wrong. Freeman was delighted, thinking that the storm would last until he could get past the Chinese guns.
“No,” Harvey Simmet said. “The storm is about to abate.”
It meant the FAVs had less time to take the guns and to do anything about the radar complex.
“Damn it, Harvey, what kind of forecast is that?”
“I can’t change the weather, General. I’m not God.”
Freeman suddenly remembered Patton’s relief of Bastogne when bad weather had delayed him until he ordered a prayer for good weather and got it. Freeman sent for the padre and told him to get rid of “this appalling bitch of a sandstorm!” Harvey Simmet and Norton exchanged glances but said nothing.
“By God!” Freeman thundered. “We have to start killing Chinese — soon as we can.”
Aussie watched the needle on the 4,400 rpm dial quivering, his right foot jammed so hard down on the accelerator he thought he’d push it right through the floor as the Wrangler’s tires gripped and kicked up sand on a thirty-degree slope, hauling the two-thousand-pound vehicle and exerting 165 pounds per square inch as its ninety-four-horsepower engine gave all it had.
It mounted the summit of a dune, and was immediately taking fire from no more than thirty yards away. Brentwood responded with a long burst of tracer from his front-mounted 50mm machine gun. There was an explosion — a burst of lemon-colored light in the dust storm. Only now did he see he had committed a “blue on blue”—fired on a friendly FAV, the latter rearing up like some wounded metallic monster, its cage engulfed in flame, its TOW controller already afire, the driver still strapped into his seat as it came down with a thump, the right-seated gunner, Brentwood’s opposite number, having released his seatbelt and been thrown clear. There was no time to mourn — everyone knew “blue on blue” was a high danger in the dust storm and was the very reason Freeman could not yet commit AIRTAC to the battle.
Aussie drove toward the burning vehicle, the flame giving the afflicted FAV the appearance more of a skeletal, tubular frame than the fighting vehicle it had been seconds before.
Brentwood was out of his FAV before Aussie had brought it to a complete stop and was rolling the burning TOW operator over and over in the sand, extinguishing the flames, the gunner, who had been thrown free and only slightly wounded, trying with Aussie to douse the driver with the extinguisher, but soon the foam was exhausted, the driver dead. The TOW operator had been saved, but the man was horribly burned, his face looking as if half of it had simply melted and slid away. It immediately reminded David Brentwood of the seemingly endless plastic surgery that had had to be performed on his brother Ray, who had received third degree burns aboard a Perry-class guided frigate at the beginning of the war. David turned his attention to the gunner. “How about you? Okay?”
“Yes, sir — sorry, sir, we thought you were a ChiCom motorcycle/sidecar coming over the rise and—”
“Never mind,” Brentwood said. “Stay with your buddy. I’ll radio your GPS position back to the main column for medics.”
“Yes—” He hadn’t even got the “sir” out before Brentwood was back in his seat and Aussie was driving off, Brentwood realizing he’d killed two of bis own men — his silence now infused with tension.
“They fired first, mate,” Aussie said, moving the FAV from zero to forty miles per hour, despite the poor visibility.
“I know that, damn it!”
Two other FAVs were lost in other “blue-on-blue” engagements as they passed from the big guns’ killing range into the zone where, because of the declination of the guns being only minus two degrees, and because the guns themselves were on the clay ridge, the shells could no longer bother them. The remaining fifteen FAVs, as Freeman had hoped, like those horsemen in the last great cavalry charge in history — the Australian Light Horse at Beersheba in 1917— were under the guns, the fifteen FAVs racing up toward the looming enormities that were the ChiCom’s Pepperpot batteries.
ChiCom infantry and APCs came out to meet them. But here the sheer mobility of the FAVs, with their relative lightness and stunningly accurate TOW missiles, took a deadly toll of the slower Chinese personnel carriers, and the much heavier firepower of the FAVs was creating a hosing fire that ignited one APC after another.
“Go for the gun crews!” Brentwood shouted on the FAV network. “The gun crews!” he repeated. “Then go to the flanks. Repeat, gun crews, then the flanks. Do not engage their tanks.” Conscious that “flank” might sound like “tank” in the confusion of static and explosions, David repeated, “First the gun crews, then find the radar. Repeat, first the…”
Salvini swung hard right, and there were two sudden bumps and screams as he ran down two ChiCom infantry exiting one of the manholes, his TOW operator exhilarated by having taken out three APCs and now “pissed off,” in his own words, that they had to stick to the original plan to take out the gun crews first. Choir yelled back at the La Roche reporter. “Lively enough for you, boyo?”
The reporter didn’t answer, couldn’t answer — his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth, dry as leather, his grip on the roll bar so hard that his body was rigid, despite the swaying motion of the FAV as it went over several corrugations of sand where a dune flattened out before the incline to the guns.
“What the—” Aussie began, but Brentwood had already seen it: a dozen or so civilian prisoners and captured American soldiers lashed to the wheels of the big guns. Aussie could see that one was a woman. Somebody came on the air, wondering what they should do.
“Take out the crews, for Chrissake!” Brentwood shouted, and the FAVs — now only fourteen remaining — drove resolutely toward the guns, the ChiCom infantry firing from behind them. Every time a gun went off, the prisoners ran around on their rope tethers like crazed rats in a cage, unable to get away from the crashing thunder of the guns, unable, like the gun crews, to block their ears from the earth-shattering sound.
“Smoke!” Brentwood ordered, as Aussie began a weaving pattern to throw off the Chinese small-arms fire. Soon all along the line the smoke from the 40mm canisters being fired from the FAVs rear-mounted gun was so thick that the FAV drivers had to gear down, then go quickly for the gaps created by the out-pressure of the guns still firing on Freeman’s advancing tanks two miles behind.
The FAVs wheeled around behind the guns, taking out the crew with machine gun and, in a few cases, TOW fire. Half the hostages died as a result of either American or ChiCom fire. It was a chaotic battle lasting only minutes, the FAVs’ rear gunners often literally throwing fragmentation grenades down a Pepperpot barrel or otherwise spiking the big guns so that they could no longer be used against Freeman’s main battle tanks.
There was a stomach-churning rumbling sound, like an earthquake, and the noise of the FAV ChiCom infantry battle was pierced by the high-toned squeak of metal on metal as the first echelons of Cheng’s main battle tanks now lurched forward, starting their advance toward the overrun Pepperpot artillery this side of the mines that had slowed Freeman’s echelons, which were now turning into right and left “refused” formation — three of the five tanks in an echelon having their guns aimed straight ahead, the remaining two, to one side. Cheng’s MBTs contained everything from laser-sight, up-gunned T-59s to T-72s.
Two of the FAVs were turned back by Brentwood with only a driver and gunner, the rear “cage” section with the spare wheel and the side compartments that normally carried ammo and other supplies now used to hold those few civilians who had survived the attack on the guns, one of them being Alexsandra Malof.
“Jesus Murphy!” Aussie said as the FAV carrying her and others passed him. “Would I ever like to mount—”
“All right,” Brentwood snapped. “Turn to the right flank and stay well out of range of their MBTs.”
“I can’t fucking well see the MBTs,” Aussie replied.
“You will soon enough.”
There were only ten FAVs remaining.
Freeman knew that now the big ChiCom artillery batteries had been silenced he would soon be engaging Cheng’s main battle tanks, and he knew that while the laser-ranging M1A1, with a top speed of fifty miles per hour and 120mm cannon, was considered the best MBT in the world, this was not enough to win. The American MBTs of World War II had been as inferior to the Nazis’ Tiger and Panther MBTs as the ChiCom T-59 was to the American M1A1, but the then inferior U.S. tanks had won the day through their sheer weight of numbers, ironically validating the Soviet maxim that “quantity has a quality all its own.”
It was not clear enough yet for SATRECON to see how many Chinese tanks were now aligned against Freeman following the collapse of the Pepperpot line, and the padre’s weather prayer, though stated clearly, had done no good at all. Freeman estimated Cheng would have had time to marshal at least a three-to-one MBT advantage. And if the radar station could not be found and taken out quickly enough to render the ChiComs’ triple AA defenses ineffective against the slower but deadly U.S.A. Thunderbolt and Apache tank killers, Cheng could still quickly overwhelm the Americans.
Further, once the ChiCom and American echelons mixed it up it would be near dark, and IFF — identifying friend or foe — would become increasingly difficult. The MBTs of both sides would be so close in the dust-churned night that even with friend or foe recognition not being a problem, the danger of blue-on-blue fire on the ground and from the air would become a certainty, yet only TACAIR could help redress the odds against the Americans. And so it was imperative that the ten remaining SAS/D FAVs take out the radar that would otherwise identify the incoming American planes once the weather cleared.
Freeman’s lead tank, identifiable by its two aerials rather than one, received a burst-coded message of the latest intelligence estimate out of Khabarovsk of the enemy MBT strength based upon rail movements along the southern Manchurian mainlines and from Beijing to Erenhot.
“What are the odds, sir?” the loader asked.
“I was wrong,” the general said. “It’s not a three-to-one advantage after all.”
“That’s good—”
“It’s five to one,” Freeman said.
“Visibility’s increasing to fifty yards, sir,” the driver reported. “Dust storm seems to be falling off a little.”
“Huh,” Freeman grunted. “Maybe we’ll just pass one another — eh, Lawson? Like two ships in the night.”
“Unlikely, General.”
“Damned unlikely, son. Anyway, you wouldn’t want to miss it, would you?”
“No, sir,” lied Lawson, who was now berating himself for all the times he’d been grumpy at having to put his two kids to bed at night and knowing now he’d give anything to be doing that at this moment, and if he died, would God, if there was a God, forgive him? “Visibility increasing,” he said. “Sixty yards.”
A minute later he reported that the dust had closed in again — visibility back down to forty yards.
The other bad news was that Freeman’s earlier hope that the ChiCom radar complex was a fixed installation — which once the weather cleared might be an ideal smart bomb target — was dashed by a recent burst of radar waves from the ChiCom side that came in on a different vector. This meant that the radar unit was mobile, yet another reason why an air strike would yield nothing in a sky through which the American pilots couldn’t see. A reconnaissance Kiowa had been sent out to test infrared visibility through the dust, but no radar target could be found, which puzzled Freeman’s HQ. In any event, even if the weather had cleared in time, Freeman was remembering how most ordnance dropped in the Gulf War missed its targets — what the public saw on CBN were the relatively few hits. He knew it was up to Brentwood and his FAVs to take out the ChiCom radar. If they didn’t, Freeman would lose any TACAIR advantage he might otherwise have.