Warshot wi-5

by Ian Slater

  On the memo pad by his bed he also scribbled an order to Colonel Dick Norton for immediate attention to Supply: “No fairy Bibles will be permitted in Second Army. King James version only. I don’t want my men fighting and dying — should it come to that — with some namby-pamby ‘God is my pal’ version of some liberal New York hippy diocese. I expect your cooperation. Signed, General Douglas Freeman.”

  * * *

  On the south bank, the Chinese side, of the Argun River, which formed the western side of the Amur, or Black Dragon, hump, the first round to rupture the cease-fire was audible to the Chinese seconds before it hit them. Its staccato shuffling sounded like some giant steam locomotive moving rapidly in the blackness above them, the heat envelope of the 155mm HE head having concertinaed the frigid air. It landed a hundred yards behind them, its explosion lighting up what looked like glass-covered brambles as the hoarfrost melted from uprooted bushes that a moment before had been under a mantle of virgin snow and were now flying through the air in an eruption of black dirt and snow, shrapnel singing like bees, slashing into the advance battery of the Shenyang Military Region’s Sixteenth Army, its 130mm field guns dug in under snow-camouflage netting high above the river.

  Their forward observation posts, using the Soviet-made combination infrared laser range-finder, caught the flash of the second round two to three miles across the river, and the officer commanding the battery was on the radio to group army headquarters at Manzhouli, reporting that the direct fire was coming from high ground in the direction of Srednearaunsk in the hills on the American-held side. Within two minutes four other HE rounds had bracketed the Chinese position, killing one loader and exploding a Long March ammunition truck, and the Chinese battery had returned fire with six rounds of HE from their 130mm, thirteen-mile-range guns. Soon, in this, the southwestern sector of the Amur-Argun hump, firing erupted all along the line, especially along the west to east dip formed by the still extant wall of Genghis Khan forty-three miles east of Manzhouli. Quickly other American and Chinese batteries opened up on one another. American MLRSs — multiple launch rocket systems — lit up the night sky with what the MLRS troops called “white lasers,” streaking salvos of thirteen-foot-long, nine-inch-diameter, 667-pound rockets — each rocket with a range of eighteen miles — twelve rockets fired at once from each of a dozen MLRS units spread along the length of the Khan wall. At times there were salvos of 120 rockets in one minute, 120 white parallel lines in the night sky, the rockets not designed to take out pinpoint targets, but to saturate a wide area and to sow chaos among the enemy troops. This they did, especially among the forward units of the Shenyang Sixteenth Army as the “coffee cups,” or polyurethane foam containers, from 667-pound MLRS rockets, each carrying over six hundred antipersonnel/antimatériel submunitions, rained down. After each warhead’s time had set off its “blowout” black powder charge, thousands of tiny submunition chutes were scattered over an oval-shaped area of several miles in which the M-77 submunitions exploded on contact, ripping through flesh and/or light armor. In the Chinese battery that had been first hit, there were twenty-six dead and over two hundred wounded in the first ten minutes of combat.

  Within two hours three group armies — the Shenyang Military Region’s Sixteenth, Sixty-fourth, and Thirty-ninth — were on the move, the spearhead of an attack on a seventy-five-mile front formed by the Twenty-seventh Army group, whose reputation had been made when they had swarmed down Changan Avenue and shot children as well as the young protesters of the Democracy Movement on the night of June 3–4, 1989, when above Tiananmen the voice of Big Brother in the loudspeakers had declared, “Your movement is bound to fail. It is foreign. This is China, not America.”

  “The Twenty-seventh,” promised General Cheng, who had particularly ordered that the imperialist battery that had fired the first shot of the war be taken alive for all the world to see, “will know what to do with them after.”

  * * *

  In General Freeman’s Khabarovsk headquarters hundreds of miles to the north, the noise level of radio traffic was near deafening, the situation board, a computer screen blowup, showing fighting had broken out all along the border in the southwest sector of the hump. ChiCom divisions were already moving north en masse, fanning out toward Kulusutay to the east and Dauriya seventy miles to the west, and in the foothills of the four-thousand-foot-high Argunskiy mountain range the infamous Twenty-seventh had already crossed the border, men and equipment making good time across the frozen marshes just south of Genghis Khan’s wall.

  Freeman, for all his warnings about a breakdown of the cease-fire, was in shock, stunned now that it had actually happened. Staring at himself in the mirror, he slipped the nine-millimeter Parabellum into his waistband and was buttoning up his tunic as if in a state of hypnosis as Dick Norton knocked, waited, knocked again, then, alarmed at not receiving an answer, opened the door to the general’s room. He took the general’s silence for extreme calm under pressure, not realizing what a devastating blow it had been to Freeman.

  Now that it had actually happened, it made no sense to Freeman. The American Second Army—his army — was suddenly in a war with China, a country of over a billion people. He didn’t have to imagine what effect it would have on the American public — on the White House — the almost certain attempt of his enemies in and outside the Pentagon, if not on the president’s staff itself, to hold him personally responsible for having broken the cease-fire. He was stunned by the supreme irony — that of all his warnings about the cease-fire being broken, the possibility that it would be broken by China had never, deep down, been seriously entertained by him. He had taken their border movements to be merely precautionary. But he knew that those against him back home, looking for a scapegoat, would recall his warnings about a possible cease-fire rupture, together with his wanting to pursue the Siberians before the cease-fire, and in it they would see him guilty of having made a preemptive strike.

  The shock was wearing off now. He had always been contemptuous of Stalin’s state of mind upon being informed that the Wehrmacht legions were upon him after he had signed the Hitler-Stalin Pact. Now, as much as he’d detested the Communist leader, Freeman knew what it must have felt like, but for Freeman the very recognition he was in shock was the signal he was on his way out of it.

  “General!” It was Norton following him out into a river of khaki, some officers, still with white snow overlays on, passing about Freeman and Norton like rapids in a stream.

  “What is it, Dick?”

  “Sir — the Chinese are claiming we started it.”

  “Bullshit!”

  Norton handed him a SATRECON photograph. It had been taken with an infrared sensor, a white spot like a pinpoint of overexposed film circled on the photo. Freeman felt his heart pounding.

  “You can’t see it with the naked eye,” commented Norton, “but on computer enhancement they say you can actually see the black side blasts coming out of the muzzle brake. It’s definitely a U.S. 155mm howitzer — towed, not self-propelled.”

  “So?”

  Normally Norton would have lowered his voice for what he was about to tell the general, but in the near-frantic hubbub of the HQ it was unnecessary. “This was fired at oh five hundred hours, General. Ten minutes before the first report from our side of Chinese fire.”

  Freeman grunted, not wanting to acknowledge the frightening implication of Norton’s words. “Probably took ten minutes for our reports to get passed down the line. You know how it is. Fog of war, Dick. The fog of—”

  “We had the report within a minute, sir. It looks like we fired first.” Norton continued, anticipating the general’s next question, “We’re trying to pinpoint the unit. Seems to be one of Five Corps’ batteries near Kulusutay. They shouldn’t be where they are, but maybe they saw ChiCom infantry on the move and changed positions for a better traverse. Anyway, we can’t raise them — either their radio’s out or—”

  “Doesn’t make any difference,” said Freeman, a
nd Norton knew the general was right. Whatever the cause, battle was joined.

  The White House, however, demanded that responsibility for the first shot be “ascertained immediately. Repeat— immediately.” The decoded Most Secret message from the White House added that “all hell” had broken out in the U.N. — the suspicion that Freeman had precipitated a war trumpeted to near certainty by the media, especially the La Roche chain of newspapers in the U.S. and abroad. Already The New York Times had obtained from an “anonymous” source another print of the photograph from the Pentagon showing the “first shot” SATRECON snap, which the Times said was “confirmed by independent analysis” to be genuine, the time on the photograph being automatically registered on such satellite overflights on the bottom right-hand corner of the photograph.

  With three Chinese group armies, in excess of 121,000 men, coming at Second Army’s left, or southern, flank— 64,000 men — Freeman was in no mood to bother with the White House request, but knew if he didn’t, he might be out of a job. He might be out of one anyway.

  “Dick!”

  “Sir?” It wasn’t Norton answering but the communications duty officer cutting in.

  “What is it, Major?”

  “Sir, Five Corps HQ say they’ve tried to reach the battery that supposedly fired first, but there’s no radio communication and the ChiComs are closing. Five Corps’ G-2 estimates that unless we haul them out within the next ten to twelve hours, the ChiComs will overrun the position.”

  “Well, what in hell is Five Corps Air Cavalry doing?” demanded Freeman. “Sitting on their butts? Get the goddamn helos in there!”

  “That’s part of the problem, sir. It’s still pretty cold, but the temperature’s rising — so now we have a lot of fog and we’ve run into Qing Fives.”

  “Qing Fives!” retorted Freeman angrily, contemptuous of the Chinese fighter. “God damn it, Major, a Qing Five’s just a bucket of crap with a jet engine strapped to it.”

  “Yes, sir. Our fighters’ll make mincemeat of the Qings all right when they get there, but the best they can do is keep the ChiComs away from the Five Corps battery. Getting helos in there to get our boys out is another question. ChiComs are reportedly using surface-to-air missiles even against our light reconnaissance aircraft.”

  “God damn it!” said Freeman, glaring at the situation board. “Soviet munitions. What’d I tell you, Dick? Birds of a feather.”

  “Well, sir, the Siberians haven’t moved.”

  “And thank God for that,” replied Freeman. “Dick, send in a commando team to help get those Five Corps artillery battery guys out before the damn ChiComs overrun it.” Freeman glanced up at the Special Forces availability board. “We have any SAS/Delta Force men around?”

  “David Brentwood. Guy you used on Ratmanov’s here somewhere in Khabarovsk.”

  “Where in Khabarovsk?”

  “I don’t know exact—”

  “Well, find him, Dick. Tell him to get a team together— men he’s worked with before — I don’t want any screwups. Use Army Lynx helos to fly NOE. I want that SAS/D team in and out — fast. Tell them to rescue as many of our guys as possible and bring them straight to me. Try to get me the battery commander if possible so I can shoot the son of a bitch myself.”

  Norton was already making notes and issuing orders for the best NOE — nap of the earth — Lynx chopper pilots in the division even as the “tote” board above Freeman’s HQ’s radio row was going crazy with blipping red lights, each the size of a glowing cigarette tip and representing a ChiCom regimental advance of over two thousand men, the “reds” outnumbering the stationary “blues,” the U.S. regiments, ten to one.

  “What a screwup!” opined a radio operator, giving up his seat to his replacement, indicating the unofficial but widespread assessment of the situation.

  “Shut up!” It was the duty officer reprimanding him.

  Freeman held up his hand to intervene. “You got a complaint, soldier?”

  The radio operator, who hadn’t realized the general was nearby, visibly gulped. “Complaint… no, sir.”

  “Yes you have. We’ve got most of our divisions on Baikal’s west shore to stave off a Siberian violation of the cease-fire, and instead I get hit on the southern flank by the Chinese. Well, son, you’ve got every right to be mad. So am I.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Freeman, putting his arm around the operator, steered him toward the coffee urn. “Tell you fellas something else…” Everyone was listening. “I’m gonna change that. Right about now.”

  “Yes, General.”

  With that, Freeman ordered alternate divisions — every second division on the Baikal line — pulled out to head southeast to block the Chinese advance on his southern flank, and ordered AIRTAC strikes against the ChiCom divisions to hold them off long enough “until the alternate divisions from Baikal can reach the Chinese and attack! We’re going to turn that goddamn ‘yellow peril’ into chop suey!”

  The surge in morale that the general’s words produced was palpable in the HQ hut, and Norton shook his head at the duty officer, smiling in admiration of Freeman’s ability to so quickly raise the spirits of his troops. Freeman called Norton over. The general was still grinning, but his words told a different story. “Tell Washington I want every reserve, every ounce of gas, every bullet they’ve got, and I want it over here pronto. I know we can’t do it all by airlift, but get those big C-7s started, Dick. And get ‘em moving those convoys out from Pearl and the West Coast. I smell a big fucking rat — and his name’s Yesov. If that son of a bitch violates the cease-fire at Baikal, we’ll have a two-front war on our hands.” He paused, Norton noting that he was short of breath. “Any sign of him moving, Dick?”

  “No, sir.” Norton indicated the met board. “There’re blizzard conditions around Baikal, anyway.”

  “He could still move, Dick. Visibility or not. Besides, the temperature’s rising. Doesn’t feel like it, I know — but it is. Ice is starting to break up. Besides, blizzard’s only thing that can stop our air force, laser bombs and all. Not even the Stealths can laser designate targets in that lot.”

  “I don’t think he’ll attack, General.”

  “By God, I hope you’re right, Dick. Two-front war east and south. Our backs to the sea. Be a goddamn nightmare.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Between Irkutsk, forty miles west of Lake Baikal, and the lake, in the village of Bol’shaya Rechka, a babushka wrapped her black scarf tightly around her head before she stepped out on her porch. As she stooped to grasp the two splintery pine sticks that stood up from the frozen paper cups of milk, she heard a squeaking noise that reminded her of her youth on the communes: tractors starting the harvest. Then, the giant, Popsicle-like milks at her side, she stood transfixed, staring through the thick white curtain of falling snow, the enormous shapes becoming more distinct by the second — armor — tanks and enormous field guns, their weight on bipods atop the biggest tractor tracks she’d ever seen. They were all around her, albino leviathans, crawling inexorably eastward toward Lake Baikal. After a while the old peasant woman stopped counting.

  * * *

  Each of the more than three hundred three-man-crewed Siberian T-72M main battle tanks — an APSDS, armor-piercing-fin-stabilized discarding sabot round, in its big 125mm gun — stopped seven miles from the western shore on the southern end of the four-hundred-mile-long, banana-shaped lake. The tank regiment’s overall komandir, General Minsky of the Tenth Guards “Slutsk” Division, had at last been given the task he craved: his orders to spearhead the attack and defeat the Americans. He was eager but tense, his head tank regiment, with ninety-three of the “Slutsk” guards’ division’s 328 main battle tanks, assigned to undertake zadacha dnia—a total rout in the American sector in the southwestern Baikal. And the zadacha dnia had to be completed in no less than twenty-four hours, before the Americans could recover and regroup.

  Minsky’s initial artillery/tank attack in his sector would be
followed by what Yesov had declared would be a merciless presledovatelnyi boi—a pursuit of lightning savagery — designed to finish off the retreating Americans on the ice before they reached the relative safety of the taiga twenty miles across the lake from the small town of Port Baikal. And following Minsky, ready to spread out north and south of him after his blitzkrieg, were the remainder of the four thousand tanks, advancing on a forty-eight-mile, or eighty-kilometer, front, the maximum that anyone like Yesov, trained at the Frunze Academy, felt comfortable with.

  Immediately behind Minsky’s ninety-three-tank spearhead came the regiment’s forty-six BMPs — armored personnel carriers — with higher velocity and harder-hitting thirty-millimeter guns replacing the old seventy-three millimeters, and behind them the regiment’s eighteen self-propelled 120mm, thirteen-mile-range guns, and the BM-21 multiple rocket launchers, forty tubes to each launcher.

  The Slutsk division’s artillery regiment of nine self-propelled S-3 152mm guns was kept as far back as possible, while up front Yesov had his self-propelled howitzers, their crews so razor-sharp that it would take them only seven minutes — under half the time required for the towed guns — to have the guns fully emplaced and ready for firing. These self-propelled howitzers were the new M-1974s, amphibious versions of the old M-1973, 152mm, 360-degree-rotation howitzer. Their drive sprockets, while well-protected — being located forward and beneath the sloping glacis plate — nevertheless squeaked like the unoiled rail cars of the Trans-Siberian, which, a few miles back on Minsky’s right, or southern, flank, were even now hauling the supplies toward the lake, including a full range of main battle-tank 125mm HE, APDS, and HESH — heat, squash head — ammunition.