There was much more firing now from outside the northern moat of the Forbidden City, where students were massing in the thousands while other students and workers massed at the southern end on Changan and the other avenues. It brought traffic to a standstill, and now there was a sea of people in which it was clear that the people did not love the PLA and the PLA did not love the people. It was a slaughter, hundreds of students either run over by the tanks or flailed by the army’s machine guns. But then the Molotov cocktails had appeared, and four T-69s were burning, their crews either shot or battered to death as they tried to escape from the hatches.
At the northern end of the Forbidden City, a crossing leading over the moat had long been blocked by the students, and now, with more buses and tanks, it became even more congested with the arrival of thousands of students around the Dasanyuan Restaurant and Jingshan Park, many of them armed with AK-47s and large improvised Molotov slingshots that kept harrowing the tank line with small-arms fire and a steady rain of the gasoline bombs.
Warthogs appeared overhead, despite the smoke and the bad weather that was following the monsoon, but the crowds had become so enormous all round the Forbidden City, spilling out on Tiananmen Square, that the A-10s couldn’t fire at the tanks because of the certainty that if they did the tanks exploding would kill more students than PLA. But then students, seeing the A-10 Thunderbolts diving then having to pull away, thwarted in their attack, began screaming at everyone to get away from the moat in front of which the Chinese tanks were parked.
At first a margin of fifty yards separated the tanks from the still-firing students, some of the tanks belching smoke, having used their cannon to shoot point-blank into the students. Given the margin of fifty yards or so, the few A-10s managed to sweep down and, as if in some fantastic dance macabre, five tanks seemed to be soaking up the golden rain that the A-10s poured down. Suddenly the tanks exploded in a spectacular scene that made the CNN cameraman atop the Statue of Heroes of the Revolution momentarily ecstatic. But the Chinese tank commander was no fool, and within a few minutes he had ordered the remaining tanks to advance more quickly in line into the receding crowd, for in killing the crowd lay his protection.
The tens of thousands of students, many workers joining them, surged from the northern end of the Forbidden City southward to Changan Avenue and Tiananmen Square, some of the thousands already in the square escaping a similar tank charge by retreating behind Mao’s mausoleum at the southern end of the square, around Beijing’s Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet — two-piece dinner with fries and hot Mao bun, three yuan.
The surveillance cameras on the posts along Changan were smashed in the event that the Americans didn’t win and the Public Security Bureau used the videotape to round up suspects as they had done after the massacre of June 4, 1989, when for a time the students, thinking they had won, had heard Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” booming through the loudspeakers in the square.
By now Freeman’s remaining radio operator — one dead, one wounded fatally, the SAS/D team down to seventy men — received a transmit that about the same number of civilians and two PLA officers had been seen reentering FC7, the Hall of Preserving Harmony.
“Bastards have doubled back on us!” Aussie said. To ask how was pointless, as despite the neat, methodically laid out plan of the Forbidden City, its myriad hallways and secret doors were in fact a labyrinth.
Turning back, the SAS/D contingent led by Freeman, Aussie, Williams, and Salvini first had to retake FC7, the Hall of Preserving Harmony, and it was here that unit 8431 had collected its strength. Then Brentwood and Salvini, Salvini bleeding from a flesh wound in his upper left arm, saw what looked like a thousand mushrooms coming down over Tiananmen and the Forbidden City. ChiCom paratroopers on a short, five-hundred-foot drop. In Tiananmen it was no trouble. The students swarmed back, placing the paratroopers between themselves and the advancing line of tanks that were moving southward away from the moat on the southern end of the Forbidden City. If many students died, there would be no doubt that most of the paratroopers would also perish, precisely the fate that the paratroopers coming down in the Forbidden City planned for the Americans.
On what was now the Juyong Pass-Honggor front, Freeman’s strategy was approaching the top of the curve. It was true that the power of the Soviet-made T-72s that Cheng had used around Honggor under a Colonel Soong were a serious threat to the Abrams M1A1. For a start the Soviet-made gun was bigger, 125mm versus the American 120. It was a smooth bore weapon and could fire a forty-six-pound APFSDS — armor-piercing fin-stabilized discarding-sabot round — at eighteen hundred meters per second as opposed to me M1A1 Abrams’s 1650 meters per second.
The driver in Colonel Soong’s lead tank had switched over to the gyro drive of his TPD-K1 sight. Three minutes later he uncaged the gyro, the red light coming on followed by the green light mat told him he could begin traversing. Next the laser range-finder was activated, and he slewed the turret as Colonel Soong, in the same tank but in his independent cupola, was able to traverse. Soong saw the first M1A1 crossing the line and got ready to fire. However, even though the T-72 has an automatic loader and all one has to do is select the type of round from one of the twenty-two ammunition cassettes, the automatic breech must be opened by hand for the first round.
It was only a second lost, but by then the M1A1 had fired, and its laser-locked APDS wouldn’t be denied as it hit Soong’s tanks just as the Chinese APDS left the T-72. The T-72’s shot, however, was not as accurate, for there was no crosswind error corrective in the tank’s fire control, and given the other vicissitudes of barrel droop and the peculiarities of each tank versus any other tank even of the same make, the shot missed the Americans. In short, given equal fitness and determination on the part of each tank crew, American and Chinese, it was American technology, which, for example, quickly corrected for windage, that won the day.
But beyond the tank battle that ebbed and flowed at first because of the four-to-one Chinese advantage and their proximity to the crowds limiting what the A-10 Thunderbolts could do, it was the Bradley armed vehicle that sealed the Chinese fate. At twenty-two-and-a-half tons, its speed sixty-six kilometers per hour, with a 25mm gun and TOW antitank missiles and carrying seven men, the Bradley was simply the best armored personnel carrier in the field. But this wasn’t because of a lack of enemy APCs that could keep up with it. The British-Chinese coproduced NVH1 also had a speed of over sixty kilometers per hour and weighed four and a half tons less than the Bradley. It too had a 25mm automatic cannon with electrical 360-degree traverse and a secondary coaxial 7.62mm chain gun, and it carried six men in addition to the crew of three.
And there was the type YW309 infantry combat vehicle, which had a crew of three plus eight Chinese infantry and which, while not as fast on land at fifty kilometers per hour, did have a speed in water of six kilometers per hour, its main armament, a 73mm smooth bore, much more powerful than the Bradley.
But it was the Bradley’s suspension, with its quarter-inch hard steel sides and 30mm of appliqué armor on the front as well, that still held the day. The suspension, like that of the M1A1, had to be seen to be believed. While going up and down over the sandy wastes south of Honggor, the Bradley’s 25mm seemed to be sitting still while the underchassis did everything but flip.
The Chinese, as usual, were indisputably brave and on more than one occasion simply rammed their vehicle into an American as the only way of stopping it. But once the worst of the monsoon had passed, the Comanches came down and, hovering where the A-10 could not, became the scourge of the battlefield, their retractable claws carrying eight Hellfire antitank missiles and two Stingers, and their cannon having five hundred rounds of 20mm ammunition, the helos having a fuel capacity of nearly two hours on or about me target.
Standing off, guided by their digital map display and high-speed fiberoptic data and sensor-distribution systems, Vulcan II 20mm Gatling guns in their chin mountings, the Comanches killed as many Chinese tanks as did the American M1A1s, the latter being inhibited in areas where mines had been laid, mines that were triggered to be set off by the weight of main battle tanks but not lighter vehicles so that the Chinese might use their armored personnel carriers. It was a fatal mistake on the part of the Chinese, given the ability of the Bradley. And so it was no one weapon system that could take credit for the Americans simply overpowering the Chinese south of Honggor, but rather a concert of high-tech weapons, many already battle tested in Iraq, that carried the day.
When unit 8431 in the Forbidden City learned that the American tanks had reached the Juyong Pass and that the American Comanches were swarming over the Ming Tombs area seven miles east of the pass, scattering infantry companies left, right, and center amid the huge carved stone animals, unit 8431 knew that they might well be protecting a doomed government, and never mind the fact that it seemed as if the beachheads established by the American marine force at Beidaihe and by Admiral Kuang were growing as ton after ton of matériel and more Nationalist Chinese and U.S. marines swept ashore. But this knowledge only hardened the unit’s resolve that the Americans in the Forbidden City at least must be wiped out to the last man.
With helo resupply of ammunition and water, the SAS/D troops were ready for what would clearly be a fight to the, finish inside the nine-thousand-room Forbidden City.
The old nomad was entering the camp with only one yak. The five Chinese left there and still waiting for the patrol under Major Mah to return immediately asked him where he had been, and had he seen either the remains of an American fighter or its pilot? He either did not understand Chinese or refused to speak it if he did. He acted dumb, his age in the sixties probably but looking much older. His skin deeply creased by the elements and his imbecile stare satisfied the Chinese that the old fool had not seen anything, which wasn’t surprising in the storm. The Chinese huddled back into several tents, cold to the bone.
Meanwhile the patrol was having increasing difficulty following the hoofprints of the two laden yaks, as even their pathfinder — the man with the infrared scope — was hard pressed to see much difference in temperature between the fading hoofprints and the surrounding snow and hail. By the time they reached the ridge and snow gave way to windblown rock, the pathfinder was convinced they’d now lost the trail, but by spreading out, he told Mah, they might pick up the yaks’ hoofprints as the animals’ hooves would have shucked accumulated snow on the hard rock so that by the time the animals had crossed the rock their hooves would sink deeper in the snow. As they began to cross the rock, Mah noticed that there were several caves on the ridge, some little more than depressions and a few others that went deeper beneath rocky overhangs. Mah heard his pathfinder calling out excitedly that his prediction had been correct. He had picked up the yak’s hoofprints again in the snow. Mah asked him whether this meant the yaks might have rested on the ridge before stepping off to reenter the snow.
“It’s possible,” the pathfinder conceded. A rest on the ridge, inside one of the caves perhaps, would certainly explain the freshness of the new hoofprints. Mah looked about at the caves. What would he do if he’d found the pilot and wanted to hide him? The caves. But the longer they stayed to investigate the dozen or so caves, the less likely they would be able to find the hoofprints again, as it was still snowing. Mah decided to cover both possibilities: the caves and the new hoofprints they’d found. He told the patrol to move on, following the tracks, and kept one man to stay with him to have a quick look in the caves. The two of them would then follow the tracks of the patrol after they’d finished.
As the twelve men continued following the yaks’ hoofprints, unknowingly heading back to the camp, Mah, taking out his Shanghai black, a .38 revolver, pointed to one of the deeper-looking caves. “You take that one,” he ordered the soldier. “I’ll go over here. I’ll meet you back here in five minutes. It shouldn’t take us long.”
The soldier, unslinging his AK-47, didn’t look too happy about his assignment. He had a distinct aversion about going into dark places — and no flashlight, of course. Mah had one, but then majors in the People’s Liberation Army did have a lot more than those who served under them. To hell with the major, thought the private. He’d go into the cave a few yards or so, and if he didn’t see or hear anything then he’d come straight out.
Mah went into a cave whose entrance was no more than five feet wide. He heard the slow drip of melting snow, shone his flashlight inside, and looked along the beam of light before he advanced any further. The cave took several twists and turns and then ended abruptly, its walls seeping with moisture.
When he reemerged into the outside light he saw the soldier waiting. “Anything in there?” Mah asked him.
“Nothing, Comrade Major,” the soldier replied. “It’s hard to see without a flashlight.”
Mah grunted. “Your eyes get used to it. Wait a few minutes when you enter, then go on.”
“Yes, Major.”
“All right, comrade, you take that one — it looks fairly shallow. I’ll take the one over there. Looks deeper.”
“Yes, Major.”
As Aussie Lewis, David Brentwood, and thirty other SAS/D men prepared for the second and final rush on the north side of the Hall of Preserving Harmony situated atop a flight of long marble stairways, Choir Williams, Salvini, and Freeman, leading thirty-five commandos in all, ran around the front to the south side and began their attack from the marble stairs that flanked the long, stepping-stone motif of dragons among clouds. Immediately twelve members of unit 8431 opened fire, some of them taking cover behind the balustrade and long flight of steps that bracketed the carved dragons.
A ricochet hit Freeman’s Kevlar vest and fell down the marble steps like a pebble as he crouched and steadied himself and used a slugging shell in the Winchester 1200, its impact such that it blew the door to the Hall of Preserving Harmony wide open, the unhinged door flying back and knocking over a Chinese commander.
The next four cartridges Freeman fired were fléchettes, all eighty of them, and they could be heard like a hum of bees. At this short range they penetrated the steel helmets of the Chinese defenders, and Freeman could hear them screaming, a dart embedded in one man’s eye. The Chinese soldiers lost all control for a moment as Aussie Lewis, Salvini, and Choir Williams came in with three-round bursts from their Heckler & Koch submachine guns. Again, as in the field, it was the combination of guts and good gunnery that won the day for Freeman’s SAS/D force.
Suddenly it was over, and Freeman could see the civilians — seven, or was it eight? — CS smoke still thick in the air — staggering around, hands up, and two members of the PLA.
“Congratulations, sir!” Brentwood said.
“Yes, sir,” Salvini and Choir Williams added — Aussie Lewis and four other men quickly getting the prisoners in a straight line up against the wall. They were all in tears from the CS gas, if not from the defeat, and for fresh air Aussie Lewis obligingly smashed out an ornate window dating back to the Ming dynasty.
“Jesus Christ!” It was Freeman, sounding like an enraged bull, his voice clearly heard in the Hall of Preserving Harmony above the footsteps of thousands now that the students had penetrated the Forbidden City and were gathering like a great blue-and-gray sea about the Forbidden City, around Freeman, the conqueror of Beijing.
It was confusion again, with some of Salvini’s men looking around at the huge crowd forming outside, and even though they were obviously friendly, with the goddess of democracy statue carried bobbing and wobbling among them, the noise of the cheering was drowning almost anything that was said in the Hall of Preserving Harmony, so that Freeman had to thunder out his discovery.
“Where’s Cheng? Nie? The State Council?”
“You mean—” Aussie began. “Bloody hell!”
“Bloody hell is right!” Freeman thundered. “The bastards were never in the Forbidden City. Son of a bitch—” He grabbed one of the civilians, one of the officials who had stood in for the State Council members, drew his 9mm Browning, and stuck it in the man’s mouth, the man almost collapsing in fright. “Where are Cheng and Nie and all the rest?’ he yelled. “Interpreter!” But there was no need for interpretation, for at least two of the eleven captured officials spoke English, and with the crowd swirling about them they didn’t see why they should be the only ones to take the heat.
“General Cheng has gone,” one trembling official said, “with our commanders. And Nie. All the State Council. The soldiers. On the train — the airport has been bombed and—”
“Where?” Freeman demanded, pulling back the hammer.
“Gone,” the official repeated. “To — to Tanggu.”
“Where the hell’s that?” Salvini cut in.
Freeman reholstered his pistol, his hands now on his hips. “Son of a bitch and his guards are on the way by train to Tanggu. Closest port to here. A fast boat trip across Bo Hai Gulf to North Korea no doubt. Goddamn it!” Freeman, his head down, began pacing up and down as the smoke was clearing, and outside the crowd was growing even larger, all cheering his name. Suddenly Freeman stopped and looked at Williams, Salvini, and Aussie. “I’m getting on the radio and we’re gonna stop that damn train. If it ever left Beijing. Yes, sir, we’re gonna stop every goddamn train out of Beijing.” He then turned to the operator, giving him the necessary orders for the A-10s and Comanches — who by now had neutralized all airports and runways in the Beijing area — to stop any train from leaving Beijing, but particularly those bound southeast of the city toward Tanggu.
“You boys,” he told Salvini, Williams, Brentwood, and Aussie Lewis, “aren’t finished yet. I want you to get aboard the first chopper we can get in here. Go to Tanggu and bring back Cheng and Nie. All the State Council if possible but definitely Cheng and Nie. Bring the bastards back in chains!”
It was simply impossible to get a Comanche, Huey, Chinook, Apache, or any other kind of helo to land in the Forbidden City. It was jam-packed with people. The same was true of Tiananmen Square, and the only way that Aussie, Brentwood, Williams, and Salvini could get out was to climb up a swinging rope ladder to a Huey hovering twenty feet above the roof of the Hall of Preserving Harmony, or what Aussie Lewis, after the battle, called “the Hall of Fucking Disharmony.”
“Christ!” Lewis yelled over the roar of the Huey’s rotors and the crowd below. “I thought we were done for the day. I’m puttin’ in for overtime, mate. No bones about it.”
The other three commandos — Salvini, Choir Williams, and Brentwood — were either too exhausted or deafened by the chopper and the mob scene below, growing bigger as the American tanks from the Marine Expeditionary Force entered the outskirts, to say anything. Besides, they all knew they needed whatever energy they had left for what they hoped would be the end of the war.
They had no way of knowing that within half an hour, when the news of the Beijing collapse got through to the southern beachhead at Xiamen, the southern armies would be recalled by the generals-cum-warlords. The north-south divisions in China were probably the oldest in history, and southern Chinese blood was not about to be spilled in defense of Communist Mandarins in the north who had already fled Beijing, the same Mandarins who had declared it was all right to burn briquettes for warmth in your home if you were north of the Yangtze, but not if you were in the south.
There were no trains out of Beijing. There were no trains coming into Beijing. Everything had been stopped by the massive uprising of the underground Democracy Movement and workers pouring out into the city now that the top Communist leaders had fled. The only trains moving, in fact, were those that had left Beijing no later than an hour before, one of these having been the train to Qinhuangdao via Beidaihe.
By now the news of Beijing’s collapse, confirmed by CNN, was flashed worldwide and to all parts of China, where local underground movements seized the moment against local Communist administrations. And it was at Qinhuangdao, en route to Shanhaiguan, that Alexsandra Malof’s train was met by a huge crowd waving banners of revolution, her Chinese student suddenly filled with courage, and confidence and a feeling of some importance that he had been chosen by fate to be escaping with Alexsandra Malof at the very moment of the Beijing clique’s defeat. With an air of authority that surprised even Alexsandra, he bellowed and shouted, making way for her through the crowd at Qinhuangdao, a place that, with its oil refineries and heavy chemical pollution, was probably one of the ugliest and most inauspicious places for such an auspicious event to occur.
There were Chinese everywhere at Honggor as Cheng’s staff, among them Colonel Soong, continued to fight on in hopes of blunting, if not defeating, the American Marine Expeditionary Force pressing the Chinese right flank. And for several hours at least, with all communications with Beijing cut and by pouring in regiment after regiment of battle-experienced ChiCom troops from Shenyang’s Twenty-fourth Army, Cheng’s staff was not only able to blunt the MEF attack on the right flank but also managed to attack Honggor successfully on the left. It was there, on the left flank, that Cheng’s veteran regiments came upon one of the few unblooded battalions of Freeman’s Second Army, and some of Freeman’s men ran.
It wasn’t picked up by the press because Freeman had done a Schwarzkopf and kept the press well behind his forces. But it was no use, Dick Norton knew, trying to tart up the report to Freeman by saying the men who ran were overwhelmed by the number of ChiComs, which they were, or that they had failed to get proper artillery support or TACAIR — also true — for the fact of the matter was that most of Charlie company—120 men — in Third Battalion broke and ran. What Charlie company’s commander had intended to be a shooting withdrawal was in fact a rout, some men even throwing their weapons away.
And as if a malevolent fate was at work, the old saying that “trouble comes not in ones or twos but in battalions!” had come true. Military police had been sent in to help stiffen the company’s resolve, to help the company find its pride again, but what the MPs found was a thoroughly demoralized force. On walking toward two of the soldiers in a foxhole, in the hope of getting them up and out and back at the front to help stem the ChiCom breakthrough, an MP, a sergeant, heard, “I can’t do it. I can’t—”
“Sure you can,” came another deeper voice. “Just relax, babe. C’mon, Danny.”
“You’ll look after me?”
“Haven’t I always, Danny?”
“Yes, but—”
The MP then heard a low, moaning noise, and when he looked over into the foxhole he saw one of them — the shorter, Danny he supposed — down on his knees, sucking off the bigger, older man.
“All right!” the MP said. “You two faggots are under arrest. Get on outta there — and surrender your arms.”
“You’re just jealous,” the older man said, remarkably unperturbed. “Isn’t that right, Danny?” Danny couldn’t look at the MP.
“So, asshole,” said the tall, hefty one, name strip Sperling, J., zipping up. “When was the last time you got it off?”
“One more word out of you,” the MP said, “and I’ll blow your fucking head off.”
“Nasty, isn’t he, Danny? We should teach the mother some manners.”
In the near distance they could hear Chinese infantry advancing. Danny was already out of the foxhole, having surrendered his rifle. Sperling followed, sneering at the MP, who was terrified the Chinese would come over the ridge any moment. Danny still couldn’t look at the MP sergeant. Instead he just kept walking shamefacedly. Sperling mussed his hair. “Don’t you worry, sweetheart. It’s all right. Be our word against his.”
To the MP’s relief, an MP Humvee came in sight, having gathered up two or three other forlorn-looking soldiers from Charlie company.
“Is this the faggot train?” the first MP asked.
“No, these boys are runners, aren’t you, boys? Yessir, we’ve got four courts-martial already with this bunch.”
“How do you like it?” Sperling asked the driver. “Up the ass?”
“Listen, you fucking queer, get in and behave or I’ll shoot you myself.”
“So what do you boys do?” Sperling said. “Think of little wifey or Playboy and wank off?”
“Maybe,” said the MP who’d caught them in fellatio, “but we don’t do it when we’re supposed to be stopping the fucking enemy from overrunning us.”