And now Freeman’s Second Army HQ at Orgon Tal had the location given them by MOSSAD. For Aussie Lewis it could not have come at a worse time, but from Brentwood’s point of view it was a godsend. It was at least something — a danger to the entire Second Army — that might overshadow Aussie’s personal loss of Alexsandra Malof. The revelation of the ICBM sites set alarm bells off all through Freeman’s HQ at Orgon Tal and as far away as Khabarovsk, all within striking distance of the latest Chinese DF5 ICBM.
But for Aussie the news that Second Army’s big B-52 raid earlier in the war on the ICBM complex at Turpan in western China’s desert had not completely taken out China’s long-range rocket capacity could not begin to upset him as much as the kidnapping of Alexsandra. The ICBMs were Freeman’s problem. Alexsandra was his. In his totally unexpected and absolute love for her the message of the ICBMs paled into nothingness, but for Freeman and the more than three hundred thousand men in Second Army, it was everything, should the truce fail. For the hitherto blasé Australian, the loss of the woman he loved was infinitely more pressing and unbearable. For the first time in his life Aussie Lewis wanted more than sex from a woman. He wanted to possess her not only sexually but in every other way. He needed her.
There was a rumble as the officers, NCOs, and some enlisted men rose in the Quonset headquarters hut at Orgon Tal as Freeman entered.
Salvini turned to Aussie Lewis, hoping to cheer him up.
“He’s got that look, Aussie.”
“What?” Aussie asked, his mind far away on the banks of the Amur River with Alexsandra.
“The George C. Scott look,” Salvini said. “Somebody’s gonna get shit.”
“Fucking MPs should be reamed out.” It took Salvini a moment or two to realize Aussie was talking about the MPs who had let the Humvee carrying Alexsandra pass through the gates at the refugee camp.
“At ease,” Freeman said, his voice booming off the metallic roof. After the coughing and usual scrabbling of feet had died down, during which Freeman looked out upon them with his remarkable facility for making every single man think it was he whom the general was talking to, Freeman slapped his birch switch against the huge wall map of China, Tibet, and the Himalayas.
“Problem — our entire army is under the threat of ICBM attack. With this activity going on, the truce can only be interpreted as temporary at best — the Chinese waiting for the most propitious moment to move and/or build new silos in and around the mountains surrounding Lake Nam. This is the roof of the world, gentlemen. We’re talking fourteen thousand feet plus. Now we’re going to put more SATRECON over that lake and adjacent mountain area and once we find their mobile launch trucks and/or shelters we are going to send in our Stealths and blow the hell out of them.”
There was a hand up — a brigadier general.
“Yes, Tommy?”
“Sir, there was an incident this morning — a kidnapping of one of our refugees which I interpret as an act of war. Am I correct?”
Aussie suddenly sat up, fairly bursting at the general’s remark. “That’s the way, General,” he said, looking toward the brigadier. “Give the fuckers—”
“I concur,” Freeman agreed, “but unfortunately—” And here he paused, the birch switch smacking his leg impatiently. “—Washington has strictly forbidden any attempt by us to cross the river despite the fact that the leader of the JAO guerrillas has been taken.”
There were murmurs of surprise running through the hall by those who hadn’t heard of the kidnapping already.
“But,” Freeman said, “I propose a reconnaissance party along the Orgon Tal trace this evening to demonstrate our displeasure. A hundred tanks,” Freeman added.
Norton leaned forward from the table and whispered, “General, how are you going to explain a reconnaissance of one hundred tanks?”
Freeman was still looking out at the sea of faces, determined to at least maintain, if he could not lift, his men’s morale, and he answered Norton without turning his face toward his aide. “It’ll be a ‘reconnaissance in force.’ “
Norton sat back. “Washington’ll have a baby if they find out, General.”
“Dick, we have to show these bozos that violation of the truce won’t be tolerated. Washington won’t let me go across the damn river, then it’s incumbent upon me to do a bit of saber rattling. We’re not here to dance. They’re damn lucky it wasn’t an American citizen, otherwise I’d be at war with the sons of bitches right now.”
“Remember, General,” Norton pressed, trying not to be too conspicuous up on the dais, “our reserves of M1A3s up north won’t be down here for another five days.”
“Agreed. That’s why it’s important to show up with a hundred tanks. Otherwise Cheng’ll think we’re frightened — that they can come across the trace and get away with it.”
Norton sat back. He’d done his best. And he had to admit the general had a point. Any sign of backing down, of losing face in front of Asian commanders, could be interpreted as weakness. Anyway, Norton guessed, push probably wouldn’t come to shove, as the Chinese would probably not see the American tanks in the rain-slashed skies of the typhoon that was about to strike. Already he, like all those in the Quonset, could hear the drumming of the rain on the roof.
Cheng saw the tanks very well, for he’d posted forward observation points with infrared binoculars along the trace near Orgon Tal where the western end of the front came to a sharp V like the end of a check mark, the right hand or tail of the check mark representing the continuation of the front northeastward up into Manchuria. He knew the American was bluffing — making out he had more tanks than he did. Well, the commander of the People’s Liberation Army had no intention whatsoever of waiting till Freeman’s M1A3 reinforcements reached him from the north. And now the Public Security Bureau had advised him from Lhasa that the Americans must now know about the ICBMs from the Dutchman’s message. Cheng could not afford to wait any longer — to do so would be militarily imprudent as well as politically inexcusable. He told Nie, and the chairman agreed. Cheng gave the order to attack — a preemptive strike.
The trace east of Orgon Tal was a hundred-foot, mile-long ridge running southeast to northeast where the trace arced up from the V of the check mark-shaped truce line, the Americans on the northern side, the PLA to the south. It was hard, stony gravel that further north a few miles, to where the bulk of the Americans were, turned from stony ground to sand dunes. To the south of the trace the stony ground led back up for two hundred miles into the bush-covered mountains that, along with the dragon-humped Great Wall, formed a protective fastness around Beijing.
The typhoon’s tai feng, or great wind, at over one hundred miles per hour, was not yet upon the area around Orgon Tal, though already gusts of up to forty and fifty miles per hour were heralding what was in store unless the typhoon lost and exhausted much of its power after hitting land coming from the east out of Bo Hai.
Freeman’s tanks went ahead in echelons of five in spear-tip formation, the two tanks furthest back acting as wing-men would in a fighter formation, paying particular attention to the flanks while the three tanks up ahead concentrated more, though not exclusively, on the trace now coming up and on the lead tanks’ right-hand side. Inside the lead tank, its commander, Lieutenant R. T. Roper from Philadelphia, wondered if this would be it. The first sign, or rather glimpse, of the enemy trenches way over on the other side of the trace was indicated by coils of razor wire, obscuring any view of the troops, though the Chinese, probably the forward artillery observers, clearly had binoculars on the first tank of Freeman’s “reconnaissance in force.”
Here and there the Americans, primarily the loader and the tank commander, could spot the muzzle of a machine gun where there was a gap in the wire, and sandbagged outposts beyond that were probably heavy 81mm mortar nests. The men in the tanks were confident and with good reason. They were in one of the best, if not the best, main battle tanks in the world. The M1A1 main gun was an M256 120mm smooth bore with one coaxially mounted 7.62mm machine gun, the other 7.62 atop the loader’s position in the turret with a Browning.50 machine gun atop the commander’s position forward and right of the loader. Left of both the commander and the gunner on the right side of the turret sat the loader, the driver outside the turret steering the behemoth in a reclined position by way of short hand bars. Yet above all the firepower there was the sheer grace of something that was on another level so brutish. Its gas turbine motor was probably the quietest of any, capable of charging ahead at forty-five miles per hour despite a larger heat signature than most, its suspension so superior that its turret remained in the same plane, despite the tracks constantly undulating like pythons as the M1s raced across the uneven ground.
“Remember,” Roper said, in Freeman’s lead tank, “we take one shot, one friggin’ rattle of a spent Chinese bullet on our beast, and we vaporize the mothers.” Everyone understood, everyone was tense, but they all agreed that Freeman was right to bring the tanks right up to the trace, otherwise the next thing the Chinese would try would be to send over a patrol and take an American prisoner or two as they had done often enough in Korea. The wind was quickening between forty and sixty-five miles per hour, blowing up small whirlwinds of gritty sand that hailed against the sloped armor.
“So how we gonna know if it’s a Chink bullet hitting us or not?” the gunner asked, referring to the noise of the coarse sand and stones being blasted at them by the typhoon’s early fury.
“You know what I mean,” Roper answered. “Something substantial.”
“Yeah, well, if it’s that substantial,” the gunner said, “maybe it’ll just shoot a jet right through us.” He meant the molten jet of metal that was formed by the HEAT — high-explosive antitank — rounds that could penetrate the M1’s body with a molten streak of metal, creating havoc inside the turret, exploding the tank as it ignited the M1A1’s own fifty or more antitank shells.
The commander got on the radio and passed the message along — the haillike sound of pebbles striking the tanks could send off a premature shot from the Americans from some nervous commander further up from the line of M1A1s. Lieutenant Roper from Philadelphia didn’t care that he was speaking in plain language and not code, wanting to be overheard by the Chinese. That was in effect the power of Freeman’s show of force. He merely wanted the Chinese, with their outdated T-59s and more up-to-date laser-equipped, range-finding T-72 tanks, to know they were there, that if push came to shove along the trace, then Cheng would have to deal with Freeman’s one hundred tanks preceded by flail, grader, and demagnetizing-pan tanks that would lead them across the mine field between the two sides, and there the Americans would deal out some heavy high-velocity punishment for any truce violation. Each man in the one hundred tanks had been in the Far East long enough to know that for Freeman not to have responded to the kidnapping of Alexsandra Malof with such a show of force would have immediately signaled weakness to the PLA, and if Washington wouldn’t understand it, Beijing would.
Cheng spoke to the fifty men from the Sixty-five and Sixty-six armies based near Beijing who had volunteered to spearhead his attack. He had held up a book — or rather a thick monograph, its hundreds of computer pages on a ring binder. It was an account of all of Freeman’s battles, from grand strategy to local tactics, including his background, right down to the fact that in matters of food he did not like sushi, was partial to Tsing Tao beer because it had no preservatives in it that would give you a headache, and that he intensely disliked the American actress Jane Fonda and enjoyed westerns. Cheng told them he had studied it all: the man and his tactics. He had studied how Freeman had studied his heroes, from General Sherman to Guderian and Rommel, particularly the Germans’ tactics, both in the desert wastes of North Africa and in the heavily timbered mountains of Yugoslavia. As a result, Cheng could tell them that the only thing about Freeman that was absolutely predictable was that he was always unpredictable — witness his present “reconnaissance in force” in response to the Malof woman’s extradition despite Washington’s ban on any military action.
“Then why, Comrade General,” the captain asked, “does Washington not recall him for insubordination?”
“Because,” Cheng answered wryly, “he is the best fighting general they have — but I do not think he’ll be ready for an attack at the head of the typhoon. Remember the rain will bog him down. The mud will harden within hours of the typhoon exhausting itself over Inner Mongolia, but for those few hours, comrades, it will be a quagmire, a sea of mud and rushing streams for a hundred miles to the south and north of us. Are you ready?”
There was a cheer of a team confident of victory.
“The Americans’ eyes will pop out,” one of the volunteers said. “Freeman will see his own strategy turned upon him with a new twist. It will astonish him.”
“Where did Freeman first use the technique?” another driver asked.
“Up on the Inland Sea,” he answered, by which he meant up on Lake Baikal.
“Yes,” another put in. “He sent several hovercraft across the ice with commandos to blow up the midget sub base from which the Siberians had been launching missiles then hiding out in the lake’s deeps.”
“Did he get them?”
“The subs? Yes, and he wrecked the base.”
“Well, now it’s his turn to suffer.”
“You’re right,” another commented. “You see, the old saying is incorrect — you can teach an old dog new tricks.”
This elicited raucous laughter and even produced a smile on Cheng’s lips. His men were in high spirits — they understood the mission, they understood what they’d volunteered for, and they understood the rewards for the mission.
“For now,” Cheng told his troops, “relax as much as you can — as many cigarettes as you want.” Then in the thick, smoky air they heard the typhoon approaching, a rattling sound outside the doors of their tents.
The battle-stations alarm was on, and like the diving alarm not loud enough to cause a noise short — that is, noise that could be picked up from outside the sub — but penetrating enough to send every man moving as fast as he could to battle stations, one man heading toward the reactor room in his socks, all the quicker to put on the regulation yellow slippers that he would wear while in the reactor room lest he pick up even the minutest radiation and which he would take off when he left the reactor room.
An unknown ship—”possible hostile”—had been picked up by Reagan’s passive sonar array, its engines’ pulse and movement through the water now registering on the five-window sonar screen, the purplish blue light around the sonar like an island in the redded-out control center.
“Threat library?” Robert Brentwood asked.
“Nothing yet, sir. Possible merchantman — new registration.”
“Or hostile running with baffles.”
“Don’t think so, sir. Cavitation of screw not baffle.” Brentwood knew he could get an exact fix on it if he used his active pinging sonar, but then the unknown ship could pick the Reagan up, and the Reagan’s mission was to keep hidden from all hostiles, regardless of their size, to be ready for a FLAS — flank assist — to Freeman’s land force if needed. Everything on the ship was rigged for quiet — all washers and driers off, drawers secured, stoves off, the next meal, frozen sandwiches, already set to be zapped by the microwave if it turned out to be a long engagement that took them beyond dinner.
At the Bangor base in Bremerton, Washington State, it was 8:00 p.m. and Andrea had organized an officers’ wives’ “ball-out,” a bowling competition. “Course you don’t want to play,” she told Rosemary. “But come along and watch. Keep score if you want.”
“No thanks. My specialty is English literature, not mathematics. I’m afraid I’d make an awful mess.”
“Oh rats,” Andrea riposted. “So just sit and cheer. Don’t even have to cheer. B’sides, if you go into premature labor you’ll have a travelin’ moms brigade with you. You could have a choice — hospital or number one lane.”
“You’re impossible,” Rosemary said, awkwardly shifting herself out of the love seat in her base bungalow. “Maybe it would do me good to get out. And to be quite honest—”
“What is it?” Andrea cut in, adopting Rosemary’s semi-conspiratorial tone.
“Chips — what you call fries. I have a craving.”
Andrea clapped her hands in victory. ‘There you go. We’ll pig out on fries, popcorn, and pop.”
“And we’ll pop in the morning,” Rosemary said.
“No, we’ll do twenty minutes with Jane Fonda’s workout — pregnant ladies excused I guess.”
“You don’t have a Jane Fonda tape?” Rosemary asked in a tone of disbelief.
“Yeah. I know all the guys hate her for that North Vietnam thing, but hell, that’s over, right?”
“Then your husband does object?”
“Object? Honey, he’d lose all his hair if he knew. I’ve got it hidden — video label says ‘Home Cooking.’ He’ll never know. ‘Sides, if he does twig to it I’ll tell him it’s either the tape or me.”
Rosemary looked nonplussed. “You would leave—?”
“Oh hell no. But I’d cut him off for a week or two.”
“Oh I see,” Rosemary said. “After a long patrol. Isn’t that a little drastic?”
“Honey, I cut off one guy for a month!”
Rosemary was appalled, Andrea collapsing with laughter. “You — you really thought — oh Rosie, you’re a kick!”
Rosemary wasn’t sure what a kick was, but it had been said good-naturedly.
“C’mon, let’s go bowlin’,” Andrea said, looking for the key to the dead bolt. There’d been a rash of B and E around the base, and it was expected that sooner or later someone, probably local teenagers, would try to sneak over the wire into the base.
By the time Andrea and Rosemary arrived at the bowling alley the USS Reagan had let the unknown vessel pass over it, and the sub’s passive microphone array had registered its noise signature and entered it into the threat library under “possible hostile,” as they were too close to the China coast for it to be anything else. They would follow her and get a nighttime infrared periscope view, as this might confirm exactly what kind of ship it was.
Some of the men, the ship’s noise signature having been put over the PA system, were betting it was a Taiwanese destroyer making a fast run down the one-hundred-mile strait, half of this being ROK water and not PRC — a fine distinction neither side was paying much attention to these days.
“Sonar?” Rolston asked, starting his watch as officer of the deck. “What’s your guess?”
“Gunboat, sir. Hydrofoil with vanes down.”
“Vanes might give us a baffled noise?”
“Yes, sir.”
“How far away is he now?”
“Three thousand yards.”
“Periscope depth at two thousand yards.”
“Periscope depth at two thousand yards, aye,” the confirmation came. The men were still at battle stations.
“When will the rain hit us, Harvey?” Freeman shouted against the wind.
“In about a half hour, General.”
“Sure as hell making a goddamn noise out there.” The pebbles were hitting the Quonset hut like marbles, and several windows were already broken and were being boarded up.
In Beijing there was no wind — none. In the eye of the storm there never is, and people walked across Tiananmen with a brisk urgency that seemed to belie the uncanny stillness that pervaded the city. Soon the storm’s center would pass over and it would be possible to breathe again, and for many the terror of the typhoon upon them would be preferable to this unnatural quiet wherein even the noise of the bicycle bells had fallen off as people, faced by the typhoon, were more interested in putting their bikes in the nearest parking lot, grabbing their ticket from the granny, and heading inside, many going to the military museum on Changan Avenue, its massive concrete structure and high ceilings making it one of the safest in the city.
In revetment areas all along the trace, Cheng ordered his tanks to stay dug in, in hull-down defilade position wherever they were, and to ready themselves to lay down an artillery barrage before the first wave of troops began to cross the truce line.
“I believe,” Freeman said, his knuckles now supporting his weight over the table map of Beijing and environs, “that Cheng is going to attack.”
“In a typhoon?” an incredulous Norton asked.
“In a typhoon,” Freeman responded, a note of urgency in his voice. “Norton, I want you to encode for the tanks— withdraw a hundred yards from the trace and dig in.”
The general saw Harvey Simmet looking at him worriedly. “Well,” Freeman said by way of explanation, “you’re telling me, Harvey, that it’s going to rain buckets for a while, aren’t you?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then I don’t want my tanks bogged down and vulnerable. This way only their main guns will show.”
And the main guns of the hunkered down M1A1s were just visible, but ample reference points for Cheng’s fifty East Wind one-man hovercrafts. Actually they were three-man hovercrafts of the same arrowhead shape that Freeman had used on Lake Baikal, the sharp, streamlined, fifteen-foot-long, six-foot-waisted wooden hulls, with an eight-inch skirting below, driven by a ten-horsepower, four-cycle vertical shaft mower engine that moved the hovercrafts across sand, mud, or water between forty-seven and fifty-five miles per hour. It was based very much on the early UP design series of hovercraft in the United States.
The early winds of the typhoon were now gusting at fifty miles per hour, giving the East Winds an additional fifteen miles per hour so that some of the hovercrafts actually had to brake hard, by deceleration and tail flap, in order to maintain stability at around fifty to sixty miles per hour. The space in the cockpit behind the perspex windshield usually occupied by two passengers either side of the driver was now packed with two hundred pounds of TNT and jelled high octane, a napalmlike explosive mix that if it hit the M1 tanks would kill them by incinerating the tank crew.
In the slashing rain and wind-driven squalls of rock and sand on this, me outermost fringes of the Gobi, the laser range finders of the M1A1’s became segmented by airborne debris. As a result, the rounds fired by the Americans at the small, fast hovercrafts fell long or short or even wide of their targets.
The constantly fast weaving and jinxing of the sharp-bowed hovercrafts, looking no bigger than wedges of cake at two hundred yards if you could see them, made direct hits against them by the M1A1s virtually impossible, and within four minutes of the swarm of fifty hovercraft shooting across, indeed skimming across, the mine field, only one lost power at this critical juncture. Nose-diving hard into the typhoon-whipped earth, its nose detonator exploding instantly, the heat and enormous concussion of the huge, two-hundred-foot-wide napalm fireball took out another three hovercrafts that had been running more or less together across the mine field — the sudden overpressure exploding several more mines.
“Jesus!” Lieutenant Roper said. “Fire into—” Instead of finishing his order he used the gunner’s override and pressed the button himself, blowing up some mines, but by now most of the hovercrafts were across the DMZ, racing toward the tanks. The tanks’ main gun depression at ten degrees was better than that of most main battle tanks, but Roper and every other tank crewman knew at some point they could depress the gun no lower.
“Machine guns!” Roper yelled over the radio. “And break out for maneuver. Now!”
In the swirling maelstrom of the withdrawal and now the deluge of rain, tracks spun and slewed but still gripped hard enough to back out of their stationary hunkered down position atop the ridge as tank commanders and gunners flipped open the cupolas, the Browning.50 and 7.62mm machine guns respectively in the Israeli position, that is, the commanders’ heads were visible above the cupola and would have made perfect targets for the hovercrafts had the latter been fitted out with machine guns themselves. But they were not, the hovercrafts’ only defense, though a considerable one, their bobbing and weaving motion with only two hundred yards to go. Only Roper and a few other echelon commanders had guessed the truth — that the mini Chinese hovercrafts were kamikazes.
In the fury of the storm, the acrid stench of cordite filled the air with wet dust, and four other hovercraft disintegrated, vaporized by their own napalm hit by a.50mm Browning on whose belt every fifth shell was a tracer. Then without the wind increasing, its wild banshee sound was punctuated by the staccato sound of machine guns, but the forty-two remaining hovercraft were on the tanks, slamming into them at fifty miles per hour plus, the Americans screaming as each fireball engulfed their tank, the tank exploding in mustard-colored eruptions of earth and two hundred pounds of TNT and jelled gasoline.
Out of forty-two suicide hovercrafts that hit, only two failed to explode, but that left forty tanks—160 Americans, the latter no more than charred corpses, their ID tags melted in the furious heat of the fireballs, the burned and sweetish stench of their bodies blown westward by the typhoon’s ferocious wind.
Now Cheng ordered three armies, the Sixty-third, Twenty-seventh, and Sixty-ninth, originally from the Beijing area, to swarm across the trace. Chinese T-59s amassed during the storm provided covering fire, first to clear a path through the minefields and then firing to create a creeping barrage under which the three armies — over ninety thousand men — advanced on the American lines, overwhelming the American defenders who of necessity had been spread too thinly out along the trace, the sudden Chinese attack creating a huge bulge in the right side of the check mark-shaped front. And into the bulge Cheng poured as much armor as he could possibly expend, most of this being the light, eighteen-ton amphibious type-60 tank, its main gun an 85mm. Weighing three and a half times less than the 63-ton M1A1, it presented a mobility in the water that the M1A1 did not have. But here, a hundred miles northeast of Orgon Tal, the bulge met no American armor, most of it being collected around Orgon Tal for what had been Freeman’s grand plan of a dash south to the city.
Behind the T-60s, in reality in large Soviet PT-76s that had been used to good account earlier in the war against Freeman, thousands of PLA regular frontline troops moved like so many ants through the downpour of the typhoon, which did not inhibit the amphibious T-60s but hindered the retreating Americans who, devoid of tanks to protect them in this sector, relied on the lightly protected Bradley fighting vehicle. However, the Bradley’s superb mobility and speed of forty-one miles per hour was reduced by the typhoon’s headwinds, and once again targeting via laser became obscured by airborne debris.
Worst of all for the Americans was the fact that their TACAIR was grounded, the only aircraft venturing forth being a squadron of A-10 Thunderbolt IIs, or “tank busters,” as they were affectionately known after their brilliant performance in the Iraqi desert. But despite the bravery of the pilots in flying down into the typhoon, they could not shoot at what neither they nor their infrared goggles could see properly. In any case by now the ground troops of the two sides were engaged in hand-to-hand fighting, and no satisfactory ID of friend or foe could be made from the air.
“For God’s sake!” Freeman thundered. “When is this weather going to lift, Harvey?”
Because of the general’s tone, Harvey felt personally responsible for the typhoon.
“Another eight to twelve hours, General.” Freeman looked along the trace of the map. It was simply too long a trace to cover in any depth. If you rushed through here and there, another bulge would quickly appear to your rear. Freeman was in no panic, but he knew he was getting clobbered. He had earlier believed his M1A3s would be down south before the Chinese — presumably waiting for better weather — would attack. But he did not realize by how much he was being beaten, until exactly one hour after Cheng had ordered his surprise kamikazes, killing Lieutenant Roper of Philadelphia and the crews of the thirty-nine other M1A1s. Suddenly there was an advancing rush of air, like the chuff-chuffing, of a huge locomotive only speeded up, as Chinese DF5s fired from Lake Nam by the PLA’s Second Artillery or ICBM arm began landing, albeit with conventional warheads, on Second Army positions around Orgon Tal and northward, cutting into Freeman’s supply line.
At first the peripheral concussion of just one of the DF5s — designated CSS-4s by the Americans — was so powerful it killed more than fifty-three men outright, the core explosion of the missile killing another seventy-three, the latter members of a marine detachment at Orgon Tal.
The red marker pins of Chinese positions advanced relentlessly across the trace. In some places Chinese infantry had simply swarmed across the DMZ, mines killing scores of them, their bodies, or rather the parts of them, forming a bridge of dead men as stepping stones of flesh for the others behind them.
The blue marker pins of the Second Army were pulling back, not only in the northeast and at Orgon Tal but in the mountains of Manchuria as well — all along the trace.
“If we can just hold,” Freeman said, “long enough for the weather to clear — well, hell, we’ll hit ‘em with everything that can fly. Harvey?”
“General?”
“Your best guesstimate is another eight hours of this nonsense until the typhoon blows itself out?”
“At least eight, General — maybe twelve.”
“Damn it, I’ll have to give ground.”
“I agree,” Norton said, “but I don’t see any other alternative.”
“But damn it, Dick, we can’t let them go on like this. This isn’t a withdrawal — it’s a goddamn rout. In forty-eight hours I won’t have any cohesiveness left on the trace. Tell everyone to dig in where they are. We’ll resupply.”
“Resupply?” Norton ventured. “How?”
“By chopper — at least we can drop supplies through all this muck.” But Freeman knew he had to do more than dig in and resupply. The Chinese had the bit between their teeth — damn it! He knew what he needed. So did Norton and Simmet: to take out the ICBM sites at Lake Nam in Tibet. If the missiles kept coming, he didn’t stand a chance. Immediately he contacted his Khabarovsk airfield. Surely the Stealths, with the Dutchman’s general target designation of Lake Nam, could find out the exact positions of the Tibetan ICBM site via infrared and SEV — starlight enhanced visuals. And when they did — well, they could start using their SMART bombs.
After sending in the request and getting a confirmation that Stealths were already on their way with in-flight refueling over the South China Sea before the inland leg of their mission, Freeman felt a bit better, but not much. He was fighting a two-front war — that son of a bitch Cheng sending across division after division of expendable infantry, while he, Freeman, was being kicked in the butt by the ICBM launchers out of Tibet. The babble of voices, the screaming of the wind, the high screech of radio, and the constant chatter of intercepts were buzzing all around him.
“Quiet!” he bellowed. Everyone stopped talking and turned toward the general. Was the old man cracking up after all? Had he met his Waterloo in Cheng?
“While the Stealths are getting ready, what we need is a diversionary tactic to draw some of Cheng’s troops out of the bulge he’s made in our line.”
“You got anything in mind, General?”
The general lowered his head, walking thoughtfully toward the huge wall map of China, his shadow dwarfed by its size. “Norton, ask Khabarovsk how long our boys’ll take to organize in-air refueling and how long to knock out that ICBM site up at Nam — if and when they find it.” Some of the officers wished he’d used the full name “Lake Nam” or “Nam Co”—”Nam” alone was an impediment to the American psyche. It reminded every man there how a war in Asia could start, look as if you were winning it, then eat you up. Like now!
“Wish to hell it was called Lake Iraq,” someone said.
“Don’t worry about it,” Freeman said, breaking out in a morale-raising smile. “Our boys’ll go in there with a surgical strike. Those goddamn Chinks in Tibet won’t know what hit them. These Stealths’ll know what to do.”
Somebody mumbled something about the lack of enough Stealths being part of “Clinton’s cock-up.”
The four Stealth, or “Wobbly Goblin,” pilots were Iraqi veterans and, providing the weather was clear enough over the mountains towering around Lake Nam, they knew very well what to do with their pitch black, twelve-and-a-half-foot-high F-17A Nighthawks. They knew, for example, that the best Chinese radar would be unable to track them or even glimpse them as they came in.
As pilots mounted the long stepladder into the cockpit behind the five flat one-way glass canopy windows, they knew their ATO — air tasking order — called for an ICBM site to be hit at Lake Nam, each of the four Stealths carrying two two-thousand-pound bombs equipped with nose-mounted Pave Track laser guidance kits that would steer the fourteen-foot-long bombs via laser-guided movable vanes, allowing the bomb to slide down the laser beam for a bull’s-eye hit. There would be no fighter escorts for the Wobbly Goblins as Chinese radar would be unable to get any fix on them because of the 117’s flat, angular shape reflecting any incoming radar upward rather than back at the radar. And the two General Electric turbofan engines were set deep within the wing roots to rescue their infrared signature, while the exhaust was cooled and baffled so as to deny any heat or infrared signature to the enemy.
With a maximum speed of only Mach.9, the Stealth was by no means the fastest plane in the American arsenal, but in having to fly over other countries’ air space en route to the mountains of Tibet, it was deemed highly desirable to send in the Stealth if the mission was to be kept a secret and U.S. diplomats spared notes of outrage from half a dozen governments, which would have been the case if other American airplanes that could be seen on radar were used.
The only thing holding the mission back was lack of good SATRECON — satellite-reconnaissance — photos of the area, and to reprogram the K14 satellite to take a flight path high over Tibet was extraordinarily expensive and time-consuming. And in any case, once the Chinese got a hint of the spy satellite’s new orbit they would not fire any missiles from the site while the K14 was in geosynchronous orbit overhead. But of course the four Stealth pilots would be able to see burn marks produced by the ICBM backflash at the launch site. And so it was finally a matter of waiting for the weather to clear over the roof of the world.
“Send Harvey up here, damn it!”
“Yes, sir,” Norton answered. Simmet apparently was going to be held responsible for the locked-in cloud cover over Lake Nam and the surrounding mountains. What particularly annoyed Douglas Freeman was the fact that, knowing he was in the right, he had said a prayer for good weather, but cumulus cloud remained glued to the mountaintops despite his incantations.
“Maybe the Chinese are praying, too, General,” Simmet suggested.
Freeman swung about from the map. “Chinese are goddamned atheists.”
“The leadership perhaps,” Simmet answered, “but not—”
“Don’t contradict me, Harvey. I know the leadership are and that’s who I’m talking about, not the people. Why do you think I’ve given express orders to everyone in Second Army that I won’t tolerate any vandalism or ‘collecting memorabilia’ from temples, et cetera. When we win I want the Chinese to be a help in the reconst—”
There was a sound above the drumming of the rain like that of a roaring train, and instantly the three men hit the deck of the Orgon Tal headquarters hut. The earth shook, the noise the most terrifying and sustained roar Norton had ever heard, so much so that his knees were shaking as he got up, half stunned, Harvey Simmet almost falling over because of the concussion-produced imbalance in his inner ear.
Behind them, further down “Radio Alley,” dust was still falling, but the babble, momentarily silenced, was now back at full volume, a tone of new urgency, even excitement, detectable, and for those who had felt the close wings of death about them, this moment was exhilaratingly alive.
It wasn’t the same, however, for Three Armored Corps’s fifty-five tanks fighting a desperate action to stem the tide of Chinese following on from the suicide hovercraft attacks and the creeping barrage of the T-59s. Three Corps HQ would undoubtedly have been overrun had it not been for the M1 overreach. Its 105mm cannon had a range of four thousand yards, two thousand yards better than the Chinese T-72s and three thousand yards better than their T-55s. It was this overreach and only this overreach that prevented the Chinese from pummeling Three Corps HQ at Orgon Tal, an HQ that was caught up in the frantic business of readying for withdrawal. But it was far from a one-way fight, as the Chinese-like amphibious T-60s were now paying the price for their lack of armor. With the rain still routing down, the M1s could see the Chinese even if the rain cut the laser beams, and it was fire at will. Within twenty-three minutes, seventy-five of Cheng’s tanks were tin cans, blown apart bodies, or rather body parts, scattered across the wet, stony ground, one tank, driverless, still rolling forward until another APDS — armor-piercing discarding sabot — round hit it and blew up its ammunition supply in a spectacular explosion of bluish white and red.
But if the Chinese had been stopped around Orgon Tal, Three Corps supporting forces, from gas tanker trucks to signals, were smoking ruins with over two hundred men killed and 312 wounded by just one warhead from a DF5 missile. Freeman immediately gave orders to retreat northwest some thirty miles back to higher ground toward the Mongolian border. Even so, now that Freeman’s Second Army on the whole had recovered from the initial surprise in the typhoon, the Chinese were meeting with more sustained and coordinated resistance from MLRs — multiple-launch rocket systems — which found their targets via forward artillery spotters who could now call in U.S. howitzer fire without fear of “blue on blue”—or friendly fire— hitting the retreating Americans. With twelve MLR units firing simultaneously, 144 rockets were sent screaming into the screaming typhoon, raining down twelve miles away on the Chinese positions, and, while not hitting any ChiCom tanks, were filling the air with white-hot shrapnel.
But Freeman knew that while he was now undoubtedly putting up a more coordinated retreat, it was still a retreat and would remain so until the weather, by which he meant the cloud cover more than wind or rain, lifted at Orgon Tal, allowing his A-10s to go in low. But even with this, as long as the ICBMs coming out of the launch site in the Lake Nam area kept coming, he would be run out of China’s northeast Liaoning province and would not be safe anywhere in what was for now Second Army’s territory.
Tactical rockets, though with nothing like the range of the DF5 being fired from the Tibetan site, were now coming out of Beijing. Their accuracy, despite their shorter range, was paradoxically not as good as the DF5s’ coming in from Tibet, and while many of them were landing among the Chinese frontline troops as well as the Americans, Freeman knew there’d be no letup in the Beijing rocket barrage because Cheng could afford thousands of his men to be killed as the cost for killing hundreds of Americans.
Shortly before dark the weather lifted briefly as the worst of the typhoon passed over and the “Warthogs,” the A-10 Thunderbolts, came in low, their GAU-8 Avenger 30mm seven-barreled rotary cannon spitting out a deadly stream of heavy depleted uranium that went through the Chinese tanks like ball bearings through glass, their white-hot fragments setting off the tanks’ ammunition and fuel tanks, creating great blowouts of orange-black flame.
The Stealths did not give any active radar signals, for this would be to obviate their whole purpose, and so they depended entirely on what they could see, either visibly or through the infrared and starlight goggles. The moon bathed the Himalayas and the mountains to the north in a beautiful, ghostly light, the summit of Everest clearly in sight but the lower parts of the mountain packed tight with snow that looked uncannily like bluish white cotton batten.
Everest was now well to the south on their left and out of sight, clouds shrouding its summit, but below they could see the steep valley formed by the mountains behind Lake Nam off to their right, the mountains furthest to the west faintly visible through scudding cloud. Suddenly there was a blossom of orange light that faded then kept on only with a lower intensity — an ICBM lift-off. Both the leader and his wingman got a fix and dived, laser beams streaking out into the night at the target: the light source. Then the light source disappeared, leaving only an infrared patch of the ICBM’s backblast, the residual heat waves washing about the base of the mountain as if it were a mirage in the desert.
“Christ!” the pilot of Nighthawk One murmured, talking to himself. “It’s a steel door. The bastards have the missile sliding out on a rail.” Only now did he break radio silence and tell the other three what he’d seen, ending up with “We go for the door,” and with that his computer, via infrared and laser information, quickly got the exact range and told him he could pickle off the bombs. One slid down the laser beam, and all four Stealth Nighthawk pilots saw the explosion as the two-thousand-pound bomb hit. The four Nighthawks made two runs each, dropping the second bomb amid a sky now pocked with triple A — antiaircraft artillery — the red traces coming so fast, probably one in four, that it seemed as if continuous red lines were shooting up through the night sky, an enormous pile of ice and rock debris about the huge door, heat coming from it like a smoking quarry.
They got out before any of the searchlights that came alive in the valley could zero in on them. Three hours and seven minutes later, Freeman’s Six Corps, up near Manchuria’s Harbin, took direct hits from three DF5 warheads and, falling back in disarray, reported over three hundred casualties. The number of dead were not yet known, human remains strewn about the trace, and the commanding officer missing, either captured in the aftermath by advancing Chinese infantry or killed, blown to pieces so that his fate might never be known for certain.
A half hour after mat, Second Army intelligence — with a noticeable lack of surprise — was reporting to Freeman that closeup computer-enhanced photos from the Stealths showed that a huge steel door had possibly been dented somewhat but that the door, obviously a superhardened entrance to a superhardened silo or the interior of the mountain, had suffered only minor damage.
Stereoscopic blowups from the Stealths’ videos revealed lines about 1,435 millimeters apart: rail tracks. The ICBMs were apparently rail mounted for firing, the launcher then shunted back quickly behind the immense armor-plated door.
“Very clever,” Norton said. “If the Stealth with laser-guided bombs can’t take them out, what can?”
“An A-bomb,” Freeman said.
Norton’s face drained of color.
“Don’t worry, Dick,” Freeman told him. “I’m not that crazy.” Norton exhaled heavily with relief, but the problem still remained.
The only answer was to get someone down inside the mountain — to blow up the launcher platform.
“Special forces?” Norton proffered.
Freeman nodded. “It’s a hell of a thing to ask them, but it’s our only chance. Have to be the most experienced men we have, Norton,” and the general’s aide knew straightaway that Freeman meant Second Army’s elite: the SAS/D British Special Air Services and American Delta combination team that had served him so well before.
“It’ll be risky, General,” Norton said. “Going into a narrow valley between twenty-thousand-foot peaks.”
“I know. But goddamn it, we have no choice. We have to take out the ICBM site or we’ll lose this war. We nave to get someone on the ground, and Brentwood and Co. have HALO and HAHO experience.” He meant the parachute troops’ high-altitude, low-opening and high-altitude, high-opening missions involving high-altitude drops into the heart of enemy territory.
“Notify Khabarovsk,” Freeman told Norton. “We’ll need KC-135 in-air refuelers. I want them here and ready within twelve hours. We’ll use fighter-protected Hercules for transport. Fly from here to Lake Nam — via Mongolia if necessary to avoid Chinese radar and triple A. Thank God we’ve got air superiority.”
“The Mongolians might have something to say about a U.S. overflight,” Norton cautioned.
“If they do,” Freeman said, already drawing in the route from Orgon Tal to the Tibetan ICBM site, “I’ll turn Ulan Bator into a parking lot.”
Norton was on the scrambler to Khabarovsk.
In his dream Aussie Lewis couldn’t hold her any longer. Her hand was reaching for his, but in the quicksand there was nothing more he could do. He felt her fingers touching his — he reached, strained to grab her, but she was gone.
“Aussie!” David Brentwood was speaking in an urgent but subdued tone, trying to bring the Australian out of the dream sleep gradually. With the commandos of the SAS/D trained for hair-trigger response, more than one orderly had ended up on the floor with an SAS/D man atop him, chest knife drawn before the commando realized where he was.
“Aussie—”
Suddenly Aussie was sitting upright on the edge of the bunk, staring at Brentwood. “Alexsandra?” he said, expecting, hoping for, some news of her.
“No,” Brentwood said. “Sorry, chief — it’s not about her. We’ve received orders from Freeman. An ICBM site is cutting our boys to pieces. We’re going in.”
“HALO,” Salvini added from the next bunk, already checking his oxygen mask.
“How many?” Aussie asked.
“A squadron of us,” Choir said, meaning eighty SAS/D troops would be involved in the drop, broken up into four troops of twenty men each.
Aussie nodded and, trying to shuck off the weight of his worry about Alexsandra, commented wryly, “Be a bit chilly. What’s the altitude?”
“We’ll go out at fourteen thousand. Night drop of course, NV goggles — the lot.”
“Weapons?” Aussie asked.
“Each to his own. Somehow we’ve got to get inside a mountain where the Chinks have their ICBMs stacked to send out on a rail launcher. Once we’re inside we blow it up.”
“Oh, that all?” Aussie said. “I thought this was going to be something difficult.”
“Nah,” Salvini said, adopting Aussie’s nonchalant mood and glad to see his comrade in arms fight his way out of his depression about the woman he loved. “If it was difficult,” Salvini continued, “we wouldn’t have asked you along. Right, Choir?”
“Right, lad,” Choir said, loading the magazine for his thirteen-inch-long Heckler & Koch MP5K submachine gun with 9mm Parabellum cartridges, the gun’s rate of fire nine hundred rounds a minute.
“Each of us will command a stick of twenty going in,” Brentwood told them. “Regroup soon as we land best as we can.”
“We got any pics on this?” Aussie asked.
“Yes,” David Brentwood said, dropping a manila envelope of high-quality “fax-fotos” onto the bed. “Sent up from Orgon Tal. Beautiful scenery.”
“Fuck the scenery,” Aussie said, pulling out the photographs. The valley between the peaks looked to be about a mile across but would appear as nothing more than a scratch at fourteen thousand feet, the mountains towering above it.
“We’ll go in the northern end of the valley, which is a mile or so wide,” Brentwood said.
“Bound to be high winds,” Aussie said.
“That’s the fun part,” Salvini said. No one laughed.
Outside, the Galaxies, Hercules, and fighters were readying for the flight to Orgon Tal HQ.
Hartog was exhausted from climbing the hundreds of stone steps of the Potala Palace to reach the thirteenth story of the 406-foot-high Red Palace its majesty highlighted by the wings of the older White Palace on either side. The Dutchman walked quietly through the seven mausoleums of the Red Palace, seeing the salt-preserved remains of the nine Dalai Lamas, their tombs lined with gold, silver, and jewels — stunning even in the monks’ poor candlelight. Respectful of tradition, he was careful to walk clockwise around the holy shrines but wondered how long it would be before China desecrated this place, too, the Chinese having already built an unsightly jumble of brutish, modern apartments at the base of the palace, the style of the apartments, if one could call it style, owing more to the Stalinist school of architecture than to Tibet.
Before he set off down toward the Dragon King Pool on the north side of the palace, he glanced across at the Iron Mountain, Chagpori. Once a prestigious medical school that was destroyed, like so much else in the “Cultural Revolution,” it was now a cavernous fortress. It had enough supplies of ammunition, frozen food — primarily meat and rice — and winter uniforms to fully supply the garrison for months of seige, which might happen, Hartog thought, if ever the two and a half million Tibetans rose against the occupying Chinese as they had in 1959 when they were viciously repressed.
As Hartog began walking down to the north exit, tired after seeing inside only twenty of the one thousand rooms and hundreds of shrines, the Chinese major at the Holiday Inn dialed 22896, the number of the Potala Palace. It was answered by a monk who was in fact a member of the Gong An Bu.
It wasn’t until he reached the seventh level that the monk, all but breathless, caught up with him and told him he was wanted in one of the lower rooms. Hartog looked down in the bright sunlight that was below him, his senses alert to the smell of alpine flowers, from which direction he couldn’t tell — or were they crushed flowers near a shrine? The only thing he was sure of was that a group of monks below him with their drab oxblood-colored shawls about their saffron robes suddenly looked strange, advancing hostilely up toward him.
More monks materialized behind him from dark corridors and dimly lit rooms. What had they been told? That he had violated one of the Dalai Lama’s chortens, stealing the gold and inlaid jewels that decorated each crypt? Surely all of them couldn’t be Public Security men. And why not? he thought. There were enough genuine monks to hide a large number of security men if the Chinese wanted to do it. He looked down over the thirteenth level, the people ant-sized below, and all about him shaven heads closed in slowly, with a deliberateness in their eyes that did not evoke salvation but rather damnation.