Julia felt herself manhandled off the yak and carried from the whiteness of the hailstorm into the blackness of a cave in the rock ridge.
What she didn’t realize was that the old man had been carrying her on a circuitous path on the rocky ridge so that any pursuers following the snow tracks would come to a dead end on that part of the bare ridge in the lee of the wind where only hail and not snow had become wedged in the fractures.
When the old man put her down by the cold remains of a fire she ached in anticipation, but there wasn’t to be the slightest sign of smoke — worse still, the faintest whiff of it and the Chinese would be on them. Her headache was bad, utterly untouched by aspirin. She toyed with the idea of a morphine shot in her small first-aid kit but didn’t like the idea of it doping her out so that, along with the pain, she’d be of little use to the old man should the Chinese come upon them.
The old man left her yogurt, butter, cheese, and tsamba, the roasted barley flour that she could eat dry or with the butter. He motioned to her not to light a fire. She found it difficult to follow his meaning, her headache so pervasive that only part of his message managed to penetrate. By way of an answer, or rather a question, Julia took out the long-lasting Nuwick heat-and-light survival candle and, her sheer will fighting the pressure in her head, explained that it did not give off smoke or any odor.
“I go,” the old man said as he tapped his watch. “Come back.” She nodded that she understood he would return. Before he left, he bent down behind her, and she could feel the rough skin of his herder’s hands biting deep into the back of her skull. Stiffly resistant at first, she now relaxed, surrendering to the old man’s deep massage. From the small first-aid book that came with her pack, Julia knew that the nomads had much more hemoglobin in their blood than others, which protected them from altitude sickness, so that she doubted whether the massage would do any good. Surprisingly, however, though it didn’t take the pain away, it reduced it to a more bearable level, and she could think straight enough to be concerned that his long fingers were now reaching the top of her breasts. Was this part of the drobka—ritual — of caring or was this a straight-out grope? Whether he sensed her unease the further down he reached or whether some other imperative moved him, he stopped abruptly and walked back to the entrance to the cave, which was at the end of a rough, S-shaped corridor at times no more than five feet in diameter. Though she lost sight of him once he passed the S bend, she could hear his fading footsteps.
Five minutes had passed when she heard footsteps again, faintly at first but then growing, making a crunchy sound on the pebbles that had accumulated in the cave. Whoever it was was not yet around the S and so remained hidden. She drew out the .45 and moved to a kneeling position, her hands shaking not only from fear but from the mountain sickness. She released the safety.
Running the half mile west along Changan Avenue — the Avenue of Eternal Peace — for the Zhongnanhai, Aussie and his reconnaissance patrol caused no interference but only drop-jawed stares of the early-rising citizens of Beijing as they bicycled down the avenue, there being fewer than usual about at this time of the morning because of the rain that had followed the monsoon’s tail and that was still falling.
Then from up ahead there came two short cracks and more. Immediately Aussie signaled the reccy patrol to split — five on the southern side of the meridian, his group of four on the right-hand side, both groups moving toward the Zhongnanhai Gate from where the shots had come and where the two guards were lying down for better aim in front of the high, varnished red gates.
Aussie called to the others across the street to take them out with the SAW — squad automatic weapon. The SAS/D trooper stopped, the sling belt of the SAW over his right shoulder, the twenty-two-pound machine gun pumping out a burst of 5.56mm that silenced the two guards.
People were fleeing in all directions, but in a strangely almost habitual way as if this had been a weekly occurrence. The other part of Aussie’s patrol crossed the road and joined his foursome.
Someone was clapping and several others joined in. An old man, a red armband to show he was one of the elder brigadesmen — or rather, local snoops — called out angrily, waving his fists, telling those who were clapping that these were “foreign devils,” to which the first clapper told him to go to the night cart in his hutong and eat shit.
At the gate one SAS/D man braced himself against the wall, and Aussie Lewis took a run up and in one jump, using the man’s cupped hands as a stirrup, he put his other foot on the broken glass top a fraction of a second before he jumped down on the other side. He landed on the edge of a pebbled path leading in from the gate, but at the guardhouse inside, which was deserted, he couldn’t understand any of the Chinese signs. Not wanting to waste time calling over for the Chinese interpreter, he pressed every button he could. A siren sounded and died, but by then he’d pressed another button and the Zhongnanhai Gate opened.
The moment it was open the remaining nine members of the reconnaissance patrol came in, fanning left and right, two men designated by Aussie Lewis to take the left footpath and check out the little pavilion in the center of the round southern lake, the rest of the patrol running northalong the cobblestone pathways to the apartments and bungalows of the elite.
Even from the pathways it was difficult to see the extent of the buildings, as they were carefully hidden by meticulously attended shrubbery, trees, and gardens that followed the contours of the elite’s houses. There was no sign of the downed Comanche in the south lake. As they went into one door after another, the signs of a hasty retreat were everywhere, from unfinished tea to meals half-eaten, and in another building, the heat still on.
It wasn’t until the ninth or tenth apartment that they saw the stepladder that had been used by the State Council to climb over the wall and vacate the Zhongnanhai via row-boats over to the Forbidden City across a moat a hundred and seventy feet wide, a moat that flowed around the Forbidden City.
Aussie reached the top of the wall on the aluminum step-ladder, and all he could see was the dark green moat, then the sandstone-colored wall on its far side, and behind the wall the rusty red of the walls of the Forbidden City.
“How’d they get over the moat?” the SAW operator asked.
“That bridge down there has been blown,” another SAS/D pointed out.
“Probably had boats lined up ready,” another began, poking his head up over the wall. “See, down by—”
He didn’t finish, his body knocked from the ladder as if struck by a lance from a horse, the crack of the rifle shot that hit him reverberating against the moat and throughout the great squares of the Forbidden City. The radio “receiving” light came on, and the recon radio patrol operator snatched up the hand-piece. “Recon leader to—” and all he could hear was firing and static on the line. “Say again!”
“… everyone will proceed to the lounge bar.”
“Roger,” the recon operator said, knowing that this message was most likely being listened to by the Chinese. “Lounge bar” was the designated code name for the Forbidden City. Not that anyone had thought they would be using it. And “everyone will proceed” meant that the recon patrol, like everyone else, was expected to attack the Forbidden City from wherever they were — most of them being with Freeman, clustered about the Statue of Heroes of the Revolution in the square, and about to advance, original plans having gone awry with the State Council’s quitting the Zhongnanhai.
The recon operator was about to report one man down— when he saw Lewis thrown back, rolling over, facedown on the cobbled path. Then two of the other seven men lifted him up to his feet. He waved them off with a nod of thanks. The front of his antiterrorist uniform had what looked like a burn mark through it; the Kevlar vest underneath had hardly a scratch on it.
“Thank Christ,” someone said.
“Thank Dupont,” Aussie said as he got back his wind and was figuring out the best way to deploy the reccy patrol. “Tell Freeman we’ll move up from along the Zhongnanhai wall and try to sniper out a few if we can. We have a Haskins.”
The reconnaissance patrol response was appreciated by Freeman, who had already sent another patrol down the right-hand, or eastern, side of the Working People’s Cultural Palace, which came before the Tiananmen Gate, but where they too found the Donghua Men, another bridge, had been blown. In fact all the crossings over the moat had been blown, and the commandos were hearing from another Comanche pilot that tons of rubble now lay where the rear entrance to the Forbidden City — the Gate of Divine Military Genius — used to be. The only way through was via the Tiananmen Gate, and it was toward this that Freeman and the bulk of the commandos were headed.
There was no doubt in Freeman’s mind that he had caught them off guard in making his monsoon attack, but the prudence of unit 8431’s commander in having moved everybody to a new location had equally surprised Freeman. Indeed it alarmed him, for if they couldn’t get the State Council quickly rounded up and back to the square before Second Army broke through at Badaling, the whole mission would be a failure, and with every passing minute Cheng would have a chance to increase the odds against the 125 or so commandos achieving their mission.
What in Freeman’s mind was meant to be a hard, quick, if not clean, snatch and grab of the Communist leadership was now promising to be a much longer, drawn out affair.
Freeman and his commandos rushed toward the Gate of Eternal Peace, or Tiananmen, ready any moment to have machine-gun fire rain down upon them from the ramparts where Mao had made so many of his momentous speeches. Once through Tiananmen, they had to pass through the second gate. Still there was no firing, no opposition.
“I don’t fuckin’ like this,” Salvini said, he and the three survivors of his forty-man troop now grouping with Choir’s troop of forty.
“Well,” Choir said, keeping up the pace, their Vibram boots silent, ideally suited for the run on the ancient flagstones, “if we don’t get any fire from the Meridian Gate”—the actual entrance to the Forbidden City, now three hundred yards in front of them—”I’m a China—”
Suddenly there was the tearing tarpaper sound of multiple ChiCom type 56-1 machine guns opening up behind them, and ten of the SAS/D men went down in a hail of 7.62mm bullets coming from atop the gate they’d just passed through.
“Keep going!” Freeman yelled, leading the way to the Meridian Gate. “SAWs cover!”
Ten squad automatic weapons raked the Chinese high up on the gate’s battlement, that is, toward the second gate between Tiananmen and the Meridian that Freeman and the rest of the commandos were making their way toward.
By now ninety-seven SAS/D commandos had reached the base of the Meridian Gate, the entrance to the Forbidden City proper, and were firing at the railings-cum-battlements above.
Two commandos — Harrison and Bernstein — from Choir Williams’s troop were ordered by Freeman to use their weapons. It was something Freeman hated to do, but the future sightseers of Beijing would just have to forgive him. Right now he had barely ninety men left, a little more than half of what he’d started out with.
“Go!” he told them, and the two men stood so that the barrels of their weapons were pointing almost straight up, and an instant later two yellow streaks of liquid fire went into the eyes of the brooding Meridian Gate. Within seconds the lacquered red top of the gate was ablaze, and Freeman’s sappers — two of David Brentwood’s men — were placing satchel charges of pentolite and TNT with a thirty-second fuse up against the huge, closed door of the Meridian Gate. The explosion blew open the heavy doors, not by much, but enough for the SAS/D commandos to pass through with withering machine gun fire preceding them.
“Up the stairs!” Brentwood yelled. “Clean ‘em out!”
But Chinese regulars were already coming down, coughing from the acrid smoke of the fires that had been started and easy targets for the SAS/D who cut them down with three-round bursts from their HK MP5s and fire from; M-16s.
“Masks on!” someone yelled, and within seconds the SAS/D men who were going up into the smoke had donned masks and continued the slaughter as the Chinese, blinded by the smoke, practically ran into them.
They had been running so hard and so fast that the architectural beauty of the Forbidden City was the last thing any of the SAS/D troopers thought or cared about. For them the overwhelming aspect of the Forbidden City was its sheer size: 720 acres, eight hundred buildings, and nine thousand rooms.
Beyond the Wumen, or Meridian, Gate they came to the five marble bridges over the Golden River, the moat below shaped like a Tartar bow. Here they came under more heavy fire from the towers of the Gate of Supreme Harmony ahead of them.
The SAS/D was giving as much as it was taking, but Freeman knew they needed high ground fast and so ran forward across the central marble bridge and onto the great flagstone square where one group directed heavy fire at the Taihe — the Hall of Supreme Harmony — providing cover for the commandos running to take cover in the Hongi and Tairen pavilions. And once the Hongi and Tairen towers were reached, with six men lost in the process, the men in and around these two pavilions fed long bursts of fire into ±e Hall of Supreme Harmony.
It was when he reached the hall that Freeman realized what had happened, and his anger at himself stung him with humiliation. The legendary Freeman of Second Army, of Ratmanov Island, the Dortmund-Bielefeld Pocket, the Freeman of the victory in the snows of Siberia and the hero of the brilliant attack on Orgon Tal before the truce, and of the celebrated night raid on Pyongyang earlier in the war, realized that the hunted, by retreating from the Zhongnanhai to the Forbidden Palace, had become the hunters, having lured the Americans inside the moat-bordered palace of 250 acres. As neat a trap as you could have planned for.
In the fog of war, confusion an ever-present player, Freeman had concentrated on going for a quick surgical strike to take out the State Council. But the quarry had been moved into what turned out to be the maze of the Forbidden City, and with them so had the elite members of unit 8431, their snipers buying time for army units to be recalled from the Orgon Tal-Honggor front back to Beijing and the Forbidden City, where the American general would be captured and, with his remaining eighty or so troops, be humiliated before the State Council in the great square of Tiananmen — a world telecast of the Americans in chains. Already Beijing radio was broadcasting reports, picked up and reported by CNN, of the imminent victory over the American “warmongers,” who were “vandalizing one of China’s great cultural landmarks.”
“Vandalizing!” Freeman roared. “Goddamn it, they’re the ones who are using the place as an ambuscade. Like some gunman running into a church then pleading piety to his enemy. Well, hell, I don’t want to violate their national treasures any more than anyone else, but damned if they’re going to stop me.” He remembered all the men who had been lost trying to take Monte Cassino in WW II — not allowing the Italian monastery to be bombed — until too many men had died. He wasn’t going to let the same thing happen here. Freeman looked around the graceful and ancient rooms in the Hall of Supreme Harmony. “Radio!”
Two men held up their hands.
“Over here, son,” Freeman said to one. “Now this is what I want you to encode.” Next he looked at his grid map of Beijing and gave the operator the coordinates.
Her vision blurring again from the mountain sickness, the .45 trembling in her hand, Julia had nevertheless made the figure out to be that of the old man. He had brought her scoops of hail and snow in a salt bag and made rubbing motions across her forehead. “Headache,” he said, gave her another salt bag of ice, and left.
When he returned to where the two yaks were tethered he sniffed at the hailstorm and looked down at the earlier footprints back further in the sea of snow that surrounded the ridge. There had been enough snow and hail by now to obliterate the latest tracks. He walked the two yaks for two hundred yards or so, crossing the wind-blasted summit, and then started down with the two animals, making fresh prints away from the ridge.
In the Bo Hai Gulf the Sea Wolf II-class USS Reagan, though submerged two hundred miles off the China coast, was trailing her long VLF — very low frequency — aerial and was receiving Freeman’s message via the Khabarovsk relay.
Within seconds of the decode, Robert Brentwood, from the raised podium of the control room’s attack center, ordered, “Man battle stations missile!” and the alarm mounded, water immediately shut off from all showers so that men in them could hear the call. The sudden absence of water meant that at least one man — a steward — had to quickly vacate the shower, his head and shoulders covered in sticky shampoo.
Robert Brentwood’s hands gripped the brass railing that guarded the bigger search and smaller attack periscope housings. “Set condition one SQ.”
This was the highest alert.
“Set condition one SQ,” confirmed Rolston, the officer of the deck. No sooner had the OOD said it than the various departments throughout the sub were punching in “ready” status.
“Condition one SQ all set,” Rolston confirmed.
“Very well,” Brentwood answered. “Mutual trim.”
“Mutual trim now, sir.”
“Very well. Prepare to spin. Stand by to flood forward tubes one and two, aft tubes five and six.” There was a faint sound of rushing water as the tubes were flooded. Tubes one and two forward and five and six aft were already housing 3,500-pound, 28-mile-range Mark 48 torpedoes with contact fuses.
It was a precautionary measure should the sound of the USS Reagan firing off Tomahawk cruise missiles be picked up by an enemy Hunter-Killer who might in turn launch an immediate attack against the Reagan.
“Missile status report?” Brentwood asked.
“Spin-up complete, sir.”
“Very well. Prepare for ripple fire.”
“Yes, sir. Prepare for ripple fire.”
Throughout the Reagan crewmen moved quickly but without panic to their firing positions. The ripple or staggered firing sequence meant that as one cruise missile was being fired on the starboard side, the water rushing into its silo would be balanced by the water pouring into the next silo of the next missile fired, which would be on the port side, thus minimizing the yaw created by the inrush of water on the starboard side and vice versa.
The weapons officer waited. His assistant, with wire trailing from headphones, moved, head bent in priestly concentration, up and down “Blood Alley,” the rigged-for-red corridor made up of banks of computers, as he constantly monitored the missiles’, in this case the cruise missiles’, status.
“Missiles ready,” the weapons officer reported after having checked each one’s housing to make sure it was ready to pass through its prelaunch modes.
“Flood Tomahawk tubes.”
“Flood Tomahawk tubes.”
“Tubes flooding, sir.” There was a few seconds’ delay as the water poured into the vertical housing, filling the space between the elastomeric shock-absorber liners and the Tomahawk missiles themselves. Brentwood inserted his key to complete the firing circuitry, giving his independent authority to launch.
“Stand by for ripple fire,” Brentwood said.
“Stand by for ripple fire,” the weapons officer repeated.
“Fire one,” Brentwood ordered.
“Fire one.”
“Fire two.”
“Fire two.”
“Fire three.”
“Fire three.”
“Fire four.”
“Fire four. All fired.”
The Tomahawks rose from their housings, breaking the water-missile interface protective membrane, and within seconds were through the water into the air, their fiery tails first giving off smoke and looking as if they were skidding sideways for a time, then rising higher and higher before leveling out and going into their TERCOM — terrain contouring mode — in which each missile would sweep in over die Chinese coast, its television eye recording the topography, matching it with that of the target fed into the computer before launch. The missile would not come down until the exact configuration seen by its TV eye matched the preprogrammed picture of the target — like a hand moving toward its mirror image. Having made the matchup it would “down turn” to complete its homing lock-on.
“Where the hell they going?” an electrician’s mate, Holmes, asked.
“China, man.”
“Yeah but whereabouts?”
“Dunno, man. Skipper got the orders to press the button. He pressed it. Wherever they’re gonna land it’s hasta la vista, baby.”
“And now,” Holmes said, “every mother within a hundred miles of us knows where we are.”
“Hey, man, that’s why we’re half missile launcher and half HUK.” He meant Hunter-Killer. “They want to come for us we can play. Why you think the old man loaded those four Mark 48s in the tubes? He’s ready.”
“Hope so,” Holmes said.
“Know so,” the mate said.
The Chinese sub Perch heard the launch on its passive sonar but could not fix range unless it used its active sonar, and to use that would be to let the Americans know precisely where it was. It preferred to risk surfacing for a quick high-burst radio message to the naval base at Qingdao, which in turn alerted its flotillas of fast, standard, and hydrofoil gunboats, most particularly the Soviet-built Osa 1 guided-missiles boats with a speed of thirty-six knots, a range of five hundred nautical miles, and armed with four surface-to-surface Styx missiles and one surface-to-air N-5 launcher.
But the gunboat flotilla wasn’t at all interested. It had already been dispersed up and down the coast, concentrating particularly along the 120-mile strip between Xiamen and Putan opposite Taiwan, from where Admiral Kuang’s invasion had established a beachhead near Xiamen.
With no interest shown by the Brown Wave Navy, the Chinese sub skipper decided to resume his patrol in the direction of the American Sea Wolf alone. If it missed the Sea Wolf and could no longer hear its water pump, then there was still a chance to take a bite out of the big U.S. carrier group itself. The Perch could go to the bottom, cut its engines, and wait, silent, ready to attack on battery power alone.
At Honggor, things were falling apart. The Americans were not overwhelmed by the far more numerous Chinese but were caught in a draw, and a draw wasn’t good enough, for ultimately the Chinese sea of armor and the troop and matériel reinforcements being rushed by rail from Shenyang’s northern armies in Manchuria must turn the tide against the U.S. forces.
This day the second in command to Freeman, General Leigh, commander to the Orgon Tal-Honggor front, decided that the only thing to do, especially given the snags that Freeman’s SAS/D troop were running up against, was to call in the Marine Expeditionary Force. It was time to turn the feint into a reality at Beidaihe’s Middle Beach. He was on the radio asking Freeman for permission to call in the marines. “Request Golf Force.”
“Permission granted,” Freeman said. “Disembarkation at fourteen hundred hours. Repeat, fourteen hundred hours.” At the time, no one thought to question why Freeman was so emphatic about 1400 hours. In any case, on hearing “permission granted,” the 48,000-strong Marine Expeditionary Force was instructed to execute “Golf Force,” to hit the Chinese east flank at Beidaihe. And Robert Brentwood knew he would have to blow the hidden beach obstacles.
As the USS Reagan detached itself from the main force and raced ahead at forty knots submerged, the ChiCom sub Perch remained on silent station. It came to periscope depth and glimpsed one of the DDG-51 — class Flight III guided-missile destroyers only five miles away. The control room was charged with excitement as the Perch’s captain, known to his crew as Xingyuner — Lucky — decided to wait no longer for the appearance of an American sub. On the basis of one in the hand being better than two in the bush, he aligned his tubes, running silent on battery power alone, in the direction of the coming destroyer. As he snappily took the bearing, a Sea King helo from the American state-of-the-art destroyer rose from the ship’s after deck and began a routine ASW search over a predetermined grid pattern by hovering in the middle of each grid, letting down its dipping sonar, which, sending out an active pulse, could wait to see if there was any sound. It received an echo in 1.2 seconds and, allowing for the local salinity, told the two pilots and two sonar operators aboard the Sea King that there was a sub in the immediate area.
The captain of the helo already had a computer list spewing out, telling him the type and location of all Allied subs and surface vessels in the area. The only one in general proximity was the USS Reagan, and it was on a heading thirty-one miles away and only five miles from the China coast. The Sea King notified its destroyer that it was attacking, and dropped a 9.5-foot-by-12.75-inch 805-pound Mark 50 ASW torpedo. When it hit the water it went into active acoustic homing mode, streaking toward the Perch at 42.7 knots.
Aboard the Perch they heard it coming, and the captain ordered hard to starboard, battle speed. As soon as it turned, the Sea King had its bearing via the dipping sonar mike and dropped the second Mark 50. The first torpedo missed but exploded near the sub; the second’s hundred-pound warhead hit the Chinese sub midships but did not explode. Assorted debris popped up from the site of the first explosion, followed by a large bleed of oil.
The USS Reagan heard the explosion but kept on toward Beidaihe.
“May just be a fake,” the pilot of the Sea King reported. “The oil and debris.” But the fleet had no time or torpedoes to waste, for it was critical that the Marine Expeditionary Force make an on-time coordinated attack, and so the Sea King returned to scouting ahead for the frigate, the encounter with the sub logged as a possible sinking of a Chinese diesel sub.
In the Hall of Supreme Harmony there was a bloody and air-shattering firefight between David Brentwood’s troop of twenty-seven men, all that remained out of the original forty — and six of the twenty-seven were wounded — and elements of Special Security Unit 8431, who, now that the Americans had been boxed in in the hall, were letting rip from the top of the Gate of Supreme Harmony two hundred yards away with AK-7.62mm and light type 81-1T-74 7.62mm machine guns, their drum magazines interchangeable.
Atop the Meridian Gate two SS Unit 8431 riflemen, armed with 7.62 semiautomatic sniping rifles with four-power telescopic sights, zeroed in on the Hall of Supreme Harmony. They had killed four SAS/D men before Aussie yelled amid the din and smell of cordite for the Haskins. The soldier who had been issued — or “married to,” in the SAS troop’s lexicon — the twenty-three-pound Haskins M500 came over to Aussie’s side. At relatively close ranges, even in the 250 acres of the Forbidden City, the ten-power magnification of the Haskins M500 telescopic sight meant that anything that moved completely filled the cross hairs. With this weapon eight Chinese members of Special Unit 8431 were “lifted”—blasted away — from the wall of the Meridian Gate, two falling headfirst over the balustrade to the cobblestone expanse below, their blood pooling near the five marble bridges and trickling down into the Golden River.
The armored thrust pivoting south of Orgon Tal was doing much better than those about Honggor to the east. While no gain was easy, Cheng’s troops contesting every meter, those elements of Freeman’s ground force heading for the wall at Badaling — forty-two miles northwest of Beijing — and Juyong Pass six miles further south found the going not as tough. Some would ascribe it to the monsoon being more powerful at Honggor, but the mud and wet sand that had to be negotiated were about the same either end of the trace. All other things being equal it was a mystery— the kind of mystery military analysts are well acquainted with but not at ease with, for it does not lend itself to the cold logic of logistics but belongs more to the spirit, a matter that cannot be easily defined or boxed neatly in DoD compartments.
Some argued it was explicable when one paid close attention to the disposition of forces — in this case, those pivoting about Orgon Tal had been longer under Freeman’s command and had been taught that whatever else happens on the battlefield you must keep moving. But those troops at Honggor also knew Freeman’s adage, and yet the advance had gone not nearly so well, and not only amid the infantry but amid the armored thrust. At Orgon Tal, Norton was closer to the answer than anyone when he pointed to the long distances the M1s had to be driven east to Honggor before going into action. It was one of the best-kept secrets in the American Armored Corps that the driver’s seat, built in the reclining position or what some called the TVRM — TV recliner mode — was simply so comfortable that often drivers dozed off at the wheel.
Whatever the reason for Honggor’s poor showing insofar as they were holding positions and not advancing like those from Orgon Tal, the commander of the whole trace was anxious for the marine corps’s attack on Cheng’s right flank.
“Ready to detonate SEAL packs,” Robert Brentwood ordered.
“Ready to detonate SEAL packs. Aye.”
“Detonate SEAL packs.”
“Detonate SEAL packs. SEAL packs detonated.”
“Very well. Sonar — active sweep one eight zero.”
“Active sonar sweep one eight zero degrees,” the confirmation came.
One minute later sonar reported, “Three obstacles above required CV depth.” This meant that for the CVs — surface vessels of the Marine Expeditionary Force — three “China gates” remained intact, but three obstacles was a number that Brentwood knew the marine major general in charge of the MEF could live with. Landing craft carrying the 48,000 marines ashore would simply have to go about the unseen obstacles, the latter’s positions indicated by fluorescent red marker buoys being readied for eject from the USS Reagan.
Meanwhile the four sleek, eighteen-foot-long Tomahawk cruise missiles went in over the China coast at six hundred miles an hour with a strong tail wind, hugging the beach at an altitude of twenty feet, then beginning their contoured flights over the higher ground, each only thirty seconds behind the next, each missile’s terrain contour matching computer, computer-radar-altimeter and inertial-guidance-system steering every second, going around hills rather than over them on their three-hundred-mile, half-hour journey to Beijing. As they passed by coastal defenses some triple A came their way, but they were flying so low that in most cases the triple A gun barrels couldn’t be sufficiently depressed to get their fire anywhere near them, and those AA guns that were depressed often as not hit the land forms around which the missiles were turning, causing civilian casualties.
Below the Tomahawks that were speeding at ten miles per minute, the missiles were seen by workers in the rice paddies and seemed to be going as fast as the big passenger jets of China Air. Immediately Shenyang fighters were dispatched, but if the peasants in the patchwork fields saw the Tomahawks easily in the trail of the monsoon, the fighters couldn’t. The fighters’ radar couldn’t help them, for all they were getting back from trying to pick up the missiles, which were rarely more than fifty feet above ground, was ground clutter, one pilot glimpsing them for a moment over the eastern suburbs of Beijing.
The person who got the best view was the French reporter from La Monde who, in his Beijing Hotel room, was sipping a Scotch and ice and in utter astonishment saw four missiles flash past his window, the first one making a sharp right off Changan Avenue, the Avenue of Eternal Peace, and slamming into its target, the Gate of Heavenly Peace— the Tiananmen Gate. More tremors were felt as moments later this was followed by the second one exploding in the Meridian Gate by the bow-shaped Golden River and the last two, in what was a stroke of targeting selection genius by Freeman, slamming into the Hall of Preserving Harmony, thus taking out all the SS unit’s snipers and others immediately to his front and rear.
In seconds the situation had changed dramatically, and without further ado Freeman called out, “Masks!” and ordered the firing of CS canisters toward the building of the Nine Dragon Screen in order to flush out the State Council believed to be hiding there.
Within seconds the Hall of Supreme Harmony emptied of SAS/D commandos, who made the fast run to the Nine Dragon Screen. Overhead there was the whir of rotors and the constant chattering of machine-gun fire as Russian-made Chinese Hind A choppers mixed it with the Comanches. Not one Comanche was downed out of forty, and the Chinese lost eight Hinds. One of the Comanches coming in on Freeman’s frequency reported what looked like a line of officials with a couple of PLA officers among them running from the building designated FC15, the Hall of Manifest Harmony, to FC12, the Gate of Divine Military Genius.
In the few moments of the Tomahawk cruise missile attacks, Freeman saw that now was his chance to take the offensive, which he did by being the first of the SAS/D troopers to fire his CS gas canister toward the Dragon Screen as he made his dash to the Hall of Preserving Harmony, a step closer but still some way from the Gate of Divine Military Genius, the last building on the northern side, from which the members of unit 8431 were pouring deadly fire at students fleeing in the huge parking area below between upturned and burning buses that were being bumped and smashed aside by a T-69 and other tanks arriving from the Orgon Tal-Honggor front
They could afford to, for the battle of the Orgon Tal-Honggor front had taken a turn for the worse. In short, a disaster had taken place on the American left, or eastern, flank around Honggor.
Here the PLA had successfully constructed a formidable defense of tank traps and tunnels that both halted and confounded the American echelons. The tank traps were crude and effective large pits whose sheer walls prevented any escape by the tank once it had tumbled through the camouflage of soil- and bush-dotted netting. The M1’s coaxial machine gun was immediately rendered useless, leaving the.50 caliber atop the tank’s cupola but with the “up” angle so acute that the tank commander had to keep down in the cupola in order to fire, and he could not see all about him at the same time.
The result was that ChiComs about the rim of the trap could shoot down at will — which they did, in addition to dropping deadly Molotov cocktails, obliging the cupola’s machine gunner to withdraw and the cupola’s hatch to be closed, sealing the American’s fate. The tunnels there were of the kind Second Army had encountered earlier in the war when Freeman’s armored column and his FAVs — fast attack vehicles — had stormed the ChiCom artillery wall at Orgon Tal, but now there was, however, the added danger of the tank traps that would accommodate a FAV, or “dune buggy” as they were often called, as easily as any tank. The crews of the American FAVs had more mobility in that they could be out of their seat belts and firing M-16s and the.50 front-mounted machine gun at any angle. Still, a stick grenade or two tossed down into the trap put an end to that, and in all, over three hundred FAV drivers, machine gunners, and TOW antitank missile operators were killed in that battle alone.
Still it was Freeman’s armor that took the worst beating, with seventy-eight M1s and crews lost. The tunnels dug at night during the cease-fire were in fact in front of the tank traps so that the ChiComs could wait until the U.S. infantry, which had been following behind the protective shield of tanks, passed over them. At this point, Cheng’s troops would emerge from behind the Americans in ambuscades of withering fire.
The result of this penetration behind the moving American line was that Honggor, which was to be the pivot about which the Orgon Tal-Honggor line would sweep, was a shambles of burned-out tanks, dead tank crews, and, most demoralizing of all, on the point of collapse with the subsequent withdrawal of the American front.
No retreat is pretty to watch, but even among the veterans of Freeman’s army, men who’d been trapped on the Never-Skovorodino road and who had been with him in Korea, broke and ran to save themselves. There were not many at first, but the pace of a rout is determined by those who are first to bolt, and their speed was such that it terrified reinforcements, some of whom were yet to be blooded and so had been put on a second line of defense. And in the rout they were met by a fusillade of shots fired by the ChiComs’ tunnel battalions. In just over two hours 194 Americans were killed and more than three hundred wounded.
At least Harvey Simmet had been right in his prediction of the monsoon, and the wind from the east was strong so that Freeman and his SAS/D troops, by firing their canisters at the northeastern corner of the Forbidden City, saw the CS gas sweep across the northern sector of the compound like smoke.
Here Cheng’s budget constraints, which did not allow for updating to state-of-the-art protective gear, caused his men to be more on the defensive as their masks were of the old American pre-Iraqi style and were neither plentiful in the PLA nor used enough to offer the Chinese any real protection.
Freeman’s personal weapon for the attack was his Winchester 1200 shotgun, his ammunition cartridges of twenty fléchettes packed in each of the cartridges, each dart effective up to a thousand yards and best used in open areas such as those between the Forbidden City’s buildings. For closer in work, there were cartridges made of a hardened lead slug in a polyethylene sabot or sleeve, the slug so powerful it was used to take out anything substantial up to 450 yards away. One such slug slammed into the door of the Hall of Preserving Harmony, and the door gave way. The last cartridge was followed by CS gas bomblets bursting, the liquid becoming an aerosol on impact and making the large room uninhabitable in seconds without a mask. Now they could hear shouting in the near distance, and though it was difficult to tell exactly where it was originating from, it seemed at times to come in waves from beyond the Forbidden City, possibly behind them from the vastness of Tiananmen Square.
What was happening was that while some of the armies were racing back from Shenyang to Beijing to help what they believed was a general attack on the city, some of their commanders couldn’t have cared less whether they arrived later than sooner.
In short, let the Americans finish off the State Council, then take the Americans, and whoever was left standing at the end of the day would win China.
The widespread myth of cohesiveness between the military command was shown to be just that — a myth — as armored columns reached the city’s outskirts. Cheng’s rivals in the Eleventh, Twenty-fourth, and Twenty-eighth armies were taking their time. Others, however, were racing, namely the Shenyang Thirty-ninth, Fortieth, and Sixty-fourth armies, who were keen to get into the fight first, for not only were their commanding officers all related, but the ones who won the day would have the first claim to the booty after the Americans were defeated, and Cheng would be indebted to them for their intervention whether he liked it or not.
Each LCU — landing craft unit — coxswain and his three-man crew of bowman, stern-sheets man, and stoker mechanic were working hard to keep the LCU from smashing against the side as the marines scrambled down the nets of the mother ships into the landing crafts, which, even though they were on the leeward side, were rising and dropping through six-foot swells.
Once the thirty-man complement had been loaded, the coxswain wasted no time shoving off and joining the other circling loaded LCUs so that when they made for shore they would hopefully proceed in waves, the ideal being to have all the LCUs hitting the beach simultaneously, thus giving the Chinese so many targets at once rather than allowing any one LCU to stray too far ahead where it would draw the fire of all the, ChiComs dug into the beach’s defensive positions.
At least half the men had been seasick, with the ships having been caught earlier by the monsoon. And many, despite all their training, were scared, the sound of the big ships’ guns pounding the shoreline bunkers so loud that it seemed as if there were a continuous roiling thunder. Each coxswain had his own way of trying to calm everyone as he stood in the stern, left hand on the wheel, right hand resting on the port and starboard throttles. Members of this MEF, whether they were going to be ferried in by air-cushion vehicles, LCUs, or choppers, were all aware of Freeman’s cash prize for the best joke told aboard any landing craft — only one joke per LC allowed as the official entry. Norton had once pointed out to General Freeman that there was no regulation to allow such a contest, especially not in combat. Freeman had agreed, but he said it was his money — besides which it served “one hell of a good purpose” in keeping up morale during that terrible ten-to-fifteen-minute run into the beach.
Private First Class Walton and his buddy, Hamish, were on one of the last landing crafts to go in, one of the last to enter the big circle of LCs waiting until the last LC designated for any one wave of marines had its full complement aboard and was ready to break from the circle for line-abreast attack.
Walton believed he was truly near death, his face a pasty white, his legs trembling like jelly, and the nausea reducing him to a forlorn figure who was repenting of his sins, yet believing such sickness as this couldn’t be part of a benevolent god’s world.
“Hang on, buddy,” Hamish encouraged him. “We’re almost there!”
“Where?”
“Freakin’ beach, man. Where else?”
“I don’t care.”
“All right, you guys,” the bosun bawled. “Settle down and Harry Lynch — that’s me, Coxs’n El Supremo — will get you in. Shit, I’ll be surprised if you get the feet wet.” Walton wasn’t the only one who was sick, and from the coxs’n’s platform it looked as if everyone was at prayer.
“Right!” the coxs’n called. “Let’s hear a joke.”
There was only a groan from the bellies of the beasts— one man throwing up, another trying to get away from the stench. “You dirty bastard!”
“C’mon,” joined in the lieutenant of the platoon that the coxswain was ferrying to shore. “Joke!” Suddenly there was a scream just above them. The Chinese HE was a “long” shot, causing nothing more than a high column of seawater to erupt ahead of them, some of the water sweeping over the men. The Chinese had found the range, and from his semaphore leader the coxswain, Lynch, was being told, as were all the boats in his line, to slow down, anticipating the next salvo would be “shorts.”
“Jesus Christ!” Hamish said. “That was close.”
“C’mon,” Lynch bullied. “I want to hear a fucking joke, right, Lieutenant? I’m not goin’ back to the big boat without an entry from—” He waited.
“Third platoon, ‘Charlie’ company,” the lieutenant answered.
“All right then,” Lynch boomed through his bullhorn. “Let’s hear a fucking joke!”
A hand came up from the middle of the platoon.
“Go!” Lynch yelled.
“Woman has an orgasm every time she sneezes. Goes to the doc and tells him. He’ says, ‘Well, what are you taking for it?’
“ ‘Pepper,’ she says.”
There was a collective grunt.
“I like it,” the coxswain bellowed. “Any more?”
“What’s the difference—” Another LCU took a direct hit and Third platoon Charlie company could hear a man’s scream.
“Go on,” Lynch said. Intruders were swooping over low, bombing the Chinese emplacements. The LCU would be there in about seven minutes. “Go on!”
“What’s the difference between—” No one could hear it, the noise deafening.
“Get ready, boys. Ramp goes down in four minutes.”
“Remember,” the lieutenant yelled, “weapons high and each man give your two mortar rounds to the mortar team — carefully. Just don’t plunk ‘em down.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Hamish said. “The boys know that. Right, Walton?”
“Christ,” said Walton, “I don’t think I can stand. My fuckin’ legs—”
“Ramp down — ready!”
There was the run of chains, the splash, and the first men out — up to their waist, the zinging and pinging of bullets and the inefficient but loud slaps of expended rounds. The whole grayness of the world seemed to crowd in with a depressing enormity upon the crescent of Middle Beach, and from the ruins of the broadcasting house on Middle Beach to its hotel, the Zhonghaitau, came the heaviest concentration of automatic fire that Sergeant Hamish or Walton had ever seen. “Mortar bombs!” the lieutenant shouted. “Mortar bombs! C’mon, get movin’! Get those fuckin’ bombs over here — here, Ashe — good man, Ashe. Walton, you too.”
As the lieutenant hurried to get the mortar bomb pile set up, the mortar crew already had bipod, base plate, and thirty-five-pound barrel set, one man bent over, aligning the site, and within three minutes HE rounds were whistling up and over with a sustained rate of fourteen rounds a minute.
The heavy guns of the fleet kept crashing in, and without them the thousands of ChiCom infantry crowding on and around the much larger East Beach just to the north would have swept down in a green khaki tide. The pocket the marines had secured on Middle Beach was just that, a semicircle three hundred yards in diameter, but each minute the superiority of American logistics became painfully apparent to Cheng’s warlords, for the American organization was such that the sheer weight, the density of men and matériel, kept pushing out the pocket as if it were some awful inevitability, a giant amoeba spreading over the beach where once cadres basked in the sun.
Cheng, who had taken personal command of the reinforcements rushed in by train from Shenyang, could see only one way out, and when the bugles sounded, the ghosts of the Korean War rose up in Cheng’s troops. And under the phalanx of red flags and a terrible din they charged en masse, and it was decidedly not true, as the La Roche tabloids reported, that only half of them were armed so that all would charge and if one man fell another would quickly snatch up the downed man’s weapon. The fact was, every ChiCom soldier was well armed with either AK-74s or 47s, and there seemed to be no shortage of stick grenades.
But against the bravery of the Chinese and their weapons was pitted the bravery and equally strong discipline of the American marines in their thirteen-man rifle squad configuration with a squad leader, like Sergeant Hamish, and three four-man fire teams equipped with the best weapons in the world. The marines stood firm, unfazed by the mass attack and helped by the timely arrival of a flame-throwing tank whose two-hundred-foot-long tongue was, in Freeman’s words, the “biggest goddamn dragon those jokers had ever seen. Hell, barbecued three platoons ‘fore Cheng knew what had hit him.”
In the same way it was rumored that the Chinese didn’t like fighting in the rain, the Chinese believed that the Americans, so enamored, as Chairman Nie put it, with their high-tech toys, had no stomach for hand-to-hand combat. Trouble for Nie was that the high-tech “toys” killed faster and more accurately than those of the Chinese, and that someone had forgotten to tell him about Fort Lejeune, and when cold steel met cold steel on Middle Beach, the Chinese did a bit better because of their light packs, compared to the much more heavily weighted marines, but no discernible dent was made in the MEF’s pocket.
PFC Walton was so exhilarated being on land again he knew no one was going to push him back into the sea. On one level, like so many, he was drained of energy from the seasickness, but once ashore, the adrenaline of escape and a quickly consumed Baby Ruth bar were more than enough to carry him.
By now the massed landings of the LC craft were supplemented by over a hundred Sea Stallion helos ferrying commando units behind the Chinese, the ChiCom troops so tightly packed on and around the rear approaches to Middle Beach that the commandos were using one-shot disposable antitank LAW rocket launchers against congested areas of infantry with devastating results. Twelve helos were lost on such operations, but the success of their behind-the-lines forays was undeniable and sowed more confusion and knocked out almost as many bugles as anything else.
And it was only Cheng — certainly none of Freeman’s commanders — who divined the time of attack, 1400 hours, as most propitious for the Americans. Freeman, Cheng realized, had chosen 1400 hours for the beginning of the attack because he knew one thing the Chinese Army was fervent about was xiuxi, the two-hour spell-off period between 1:00 and 3:00 guaranteed them by Article Forty-nine of the Constitution. Two p.m. was halfway through the siesta, where most units’ efficiency was at its lowest. Pulling them out of it was like pulling a westerner out of his jet lag and telling him to fight.
The battle to breach the Great Wall at Badaling was not difficult with helo-ferried troops taken over to the southern side of the wall and getting the ChiCom defenders in a deadly cross fire. The Great Wall, as Freeman had predicted, was a great folly in modern warfare, another example of what Patton had once said — namely that “fixed fortifications are monuments to the stupidity of man,” that “anything man can build he can just as easily tear down.”
The Chinese didn’t believe in the wall any more than Freeman. Cheng hoped instead that the American graveyard would be Juyong Pass, six miles to the southeast, where there were particularly steep walled gorges that must be passed through — an ideal trap for armor. But it was there in the narrow confines of the pass, when friend and foe were clearly visible as the monsoon’s rain abated, that the A-10 Thunderbolts, or Warthogs, as they were affectionately known by those who flew and serviced them, attacked the ChiComs’ T-62s that Cheng, in his first real blunder — or so it appeared — had ordered in to spearhead the Chinese counterattack. The American pilots were left shaking their heads as they took down the planes and punctured tank after tank with the enormous A-10 Thunderbolts’ rotary-barreled GAU-8 Avengers, firing their 30mm depleted uranium-tipped bullets. Hadn’t the Chinese seen what the Warthogs had done in Iraq — on the road to Basra? As it turned out, Cheng had ordered all armored personnel, including maintenance crews, as part of their training, to go see the CNN footage, which the PLA had copied.
After what could only be described as a slaughter of Chinese armor in Juyong Pass, the Warthogs returned to base, some with photo recon aboard, and declared the winding Chinese column of sixty T-62s dead. The first one to notice something odd about the carnage was Corporal Glenda Lipcott of the photo recon intelligence unit. She reported to her commanding officer that there was something funny about the corpses.
“Oh — what?”
“Well, sir, I don’t mean there’s anything unusual with the corpses themselves, but I can’t find more than one corpse per tank.”
“What do you mean? You can’t see inside the tanks with photo recon.”
“After they’re attacked by the Warthogs you can, sir. Opens them up like a tin can — spare rounds inside the tank blow up.”
“I know that,” the colonel said liverishly, “but what I’m saying is that it looks like a butcher shop inside. So how can you tell?”
“DPBs, sir.” She meant distinct body parts — heads mainly, limbs, etc.
“All right,” the colonel said, “let’s say you’re correct. No tank has more than one corpse.”
“Ah, all except the first one,” Lipcott corrected herself.
“So?” the colonel pressed. Smart women irritated him.
“Well, sir, it looks as if the only crewman aboard each tank was the driver. First one probably had a commander in the turret to direct the driver to the exact spot Cheng wanted them stopped.”
“Stopped — what in hell for?”
“Well, sir—” The colonel glowered at her. If she said “Well, sir,” one more time—
“Sir, I think the Chinese wanted to be held up in Juyong Pass. It has narrow defiles, and if you jam one road section, particularly if you select one that’s not straight but winding, then you have to remove all those wrecks. One by one, cranes’ll have to lift…”
“Yes, of course you’re right. Give me some of those photos will you?” She passed him a folder with ten 10-by- 14-inch shots.
When Orgon Tal’s HQ — moved sixty miles southeast around Ondor-Sum — received the information they were initially angered by what the A-10s had achieved until they saw how it had been a no-win situation: whether the tanks had been stopped by the U.S. aircraft or had been sabotaged by their own troops they had effectively closed down the road and stopped the drive to Beijing, only nineteen miles to the southeast past the Ming Tombs and the capital’s fragrant Western Hills. Norton, chief aide at the Ondor-Sum HQ, enquired as to how the information of one Chinese corpse per tank had been deduced. The colonel, in a self-deprecating manner, confessed that it was the photos that first gave him the idea. Norton made a note of it. It was the kind of thing Freeman would like to hear about those serving him in Second Army. It was quite brilliant of Cheng. At the most he’d sacrificed sixty-one men to hold up the entire Orgon Tal-Ondor-Sum push at Juyong Pass.