by Ian Slater
“But—”
“In harness!” David shouted.
Aussie took a firm stand to snap on his harness and fell down, his injured foot having given way.
“We can wait a—” began Dennison.
David shouted into his throat mike. “Let’s go! C’mon, Aussie!”
There was a delay of another ten seconds before Aussie was in harness, but with that done the Pave climbed — as slowly as possible, but in a steep, almost hovering angle. The jerk would be abrupt when it came, and even as the men braced for it, they knew the spring STABO links wouldn’t cushion them from possible injury if they didn’t do it right. Without an order, they stood close to one another, linked arms, each man’s fingers interlocked in front of him as if in solemn prayer, and bowed their heads — pulling firmly on one another’s elbows, waiting to be literally lifted off their feet once the slack on the STABO lines had been taken up.
There was a grunting, slopping noise behind them. Dennison felt something gripping his ankle, trying to pull him back, and he kicked hard with the other foot and heard a crunch of bone. Suddenly the STABO lines lurched forward with a gut-wrenching sensation. The cold wind hit them, and then they collectively felt the steady tug of the five wires that, attached to the brace of harnesses being hauled up, were making a singing noise in the wind as their linked bodies swept forward into the void. There wasn’t a shot fired in their direction, or if so, they couldn’t hear it, the chaos on and about the bridge so panic-ridden and smoke-filled that they were away and being pulled one by one inside the Pave by Choir Williams and Salvini, most of whose effort was taken up hauling the last man in — who was not in harness, but hanging on to Dennison’s legs like a very heavy rag doll.
Within five minutes, well below the radar screen, they were on their way back to Salt Lake City. No one spoke, everyone utterly exhausted save for the crew of the Pave, who now gave the craft full throttle, their side gunners still alert should they be unlucky enough to give off a radar echo or two. And it wasn’t until they were low, north of the Yangtze’s wide estuary, that anyone, least of all Dennison, realized Robert Brentwood was aboard but unable to declare himself, his jaw and nose broken by Dennison’s vicious back kick. Thereafter, Dennison would be forever known as “Stomper Dennison.”
* * *
“Temperature’s minus sixty, General,” reported a weary Harvey Simmet.
The change in Freeman was to be remembered by Norton and Simmet and indeed everyone in their HQ for a long time, and was to become part of the Freeman legend. “We’ve got the sons of bitches!” declared Freeman. “By God, Norton, full attack! Hit ‘em!”
No one understood it for a minute or two, several of the officers in the buzzing HQ signals hut quite frankly thinking Freeman had flipped his lid. But later even Norton conceded that he should have known that Freeman’s attention to detail, which bordered on the compulsive-obsessive, was about to deal a crushing defeat against the Siberian tanks.
“Well,” pressed one bemused captain, “what’s it all about?”
“The temperature, I guess,” said Harvey Simmet.
“So what the hell is it?” asked the captain.
“Minus sixty,” answered Simmet.
“No — Christ, I mean what’s — what happens at minus sixty? The old man grows horns? Becomes invincible or what? What the shit’s going on?”
“Captain!” In the babble of the communications hut the captain hadn’t been aware that Freeman had overheard him. “Yes, sir. Sorry, General, I—”
“You get my goddamn Humvee around here. And fast. You’re about to get an education, son!”
“Yes, General.”
“You coming, Dick?” asked Freeman, looking remarkably reassured, confident now that his tank commanders would do the rest.
“Do I have any choice, General?”
“No. You coming along, Harvey?”
“I think I’ll sit it out back here, General. It’s gonna get a lot colder.”
“Hotter, Harv. Hotter!”
As they took off in the Humvee, armored cars fore and aft, a TOW missile launcher atop the Humvee’s cabin, Norton couldn’t believe the intensity of the cold. With the heater’s full blast there was only a four-inch-diameter half-moon clearing in the windscreen through which they could see — the rest a sheet of ice. Already he felt his toes were going into frostbite, though he knew as long as he could at least feel them there was no immediate danger of that.
“By God, Norton,” said Freeman, “Harvey looks like hell. You watch him when we get back. Make sure he gets more sleep — valuable man, Harvey.”
As Norton spoke beneath his balaclava, he swore his breath was turning to ice particles before his words were out.
* * *
It wasn’t simply a victory for Freeman — it was the slaughter of the entire Siberian armored division, and within forty minutes Norton had seen why. The T-72s and the “little surprise” Colonel Soong had known about — over seventy T-80s with up-gunned 130mm cannon, also with laser sighting — were stilled, sitting ducks while the M1A1s broke cover, bursting forth like wild animals from snow-laden lairs, careening and wheeling and wheeling back again at over fifty miles an hour, and with unerring precision belched flame and shot, most of it APDS — armor-piercing discarding sabot — the projectiles hitting the Siberian tanks at over six thousand feet per second, often puncturing a hole only a few centimeters across. But through that hole came a molten jet of white-hot metal that, spraying inside the tank, created injuries and explosions unimaginable to any but the American gunners and tank crews who saw the T-80s and T-72s buck, snow flying off them like white flour, then engulfed in red, black-streaked flames. Many of the tanks, still a moment before, were suddenly jolted by the heat, moving — some forward, some backward — spewing sparks and lavalike flows as their ammunition stores exploded, the human and matériel detritus bubbling forth from the moving carcasses of what were once five hundred of the Siberians’ crack main battle tanks. The reason: long ago, Americans whose names were not known, who had attended to the dull, analytical side of war and who were driven by the demons of perfection and Department of Defense specifications — specifications in this case insisted upon by none other than Freeman himself — had produced lubricants for the M1A1 that would not freeze. Or, more accurately, lubricants in which the waxes would not separate out and, like cholesterol in the blood, clog the vital hydraulic arteries of the world’s best main battle tank. It was a tank that, thanks to American know-how, would keep running to temperatures below minus sixty degrees, at which point the Siberian tanks, good enough in themselves, simply shuddered and stopped, the petroleum waxes, because of more crudely refined oil, thick in their blood, with only the implosions of the American 120mm shells which killed them capable of heating them up enough to move.
Harvey Simmet forgave Freeman for disturbing his peace on the can, for when the temperature had fallen below fifty and showed no sign of easing up, Freeman knew all he’d had to do was wait. It was the kind of American can-do know-how that allowed Johnny Ferrago and the other “sandhogs” to dig the third tunnel under Manhattan.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
With the Nanking Bridge knocked out, the effect was not felt in the north for another three days, during which the southern arm of Freeman’s Second Army readied themselves for counterattack in the vicinity of A-7. But if it took three days for Colonel Soong to see the stream of ammunition and food slow to a trickle, the effect of the Americans having taken out the vital crossing across the Yangtze was felt within hours in Harbin.
If the American commandos could strike that deep in China from their carriers in the East China Sea, then, Chen argued to his Harbin cell of the June Fourth Democracy Movement, it should not be too long before the Americans would drive south from the Siberian-Chinese border — so that now would be the opportune moment for the Harbin underground to strike. It would be a signal and example to all the underground movements in China to rise, for, as he pointed
out, something the American commandos could not have known was the enormous symbolic power of the Nanking Bridge.
Quite apart from the vital strategic importance that the bridge had held for the Chinese Communists, its spans across the mighty Yangtze, joining north and south after the revolution, had been touted by the Communists as the joining of old enemies, of two Chinas, into one — a Communist China ever after. Now the link between the two Chinas, the northerners and the southerners, had been broken.
“What do you propose?” Chen’s comrades asked him.
“The jail!” he said.
“To get the Siberian out?” asked another, not particularly enthusiastic about risking his neck for any long nose.
“To get our friend out,” responded Chen.
“It will be dangerous.”
“Living is dangerous, comrades. She is our friend.” Chen said it to save face. Even so, he was lying. They were all lying. A long nose was a long nose, and in their view would not stand up to torture as well as Chinese. Friendship was not enough to move them. The truth, he knew, was that if the Public Security Bureau broke her — if she talked — die Harbin chapter of the Democratic Movement, and their own escape line through Manchuria should they need it, would be finished.
Chen gave them another reason that they should act. “We should begin to sabotage. Start the fire here, comrades — in Harbin! The Americans will now push south. Harbin is the first major city in their path of liberation.”
“And what if the Americans don’t attack?” asked a comrade. “If this Freeman doesn’t come through?”
“He will,” answered Chen. “The bridge is gone, and now we hear the Siberians have suffered a major defeat in the north around Baikal, which will leave the Americans free to turn all their forces south against our border and push the PLA back.”
There was a show of hands. Chen won the vote.
His plan was simple. They would pretend drunkenness and call on Chen’s brother-in-law Wong.
“Wong’s a turtle!” said someone. Against this grievous insult, there was no defense from Chen. Wong was, indisputably a turtle. But he could help, Chen told them.
“How?”
“We will ask him to show us this crazy foreigner who eats her own shit.”
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
In Harbin they would call it the night of the west wind. For the PLA guards on duty at Harbin Number One Jail, however, it would be the night of the hornets, for the Democracy Movement guerrillas swarmed all about them like a wild sea and seemed to be everywhere at once.
Within minutes of Wong having self-importantly opened the door to show off his power and to show his brother-in-law the foreign devil who ate her own excrement, the guerrillas were upon them in a kind of fearful ferocity, and the already grimy, yellow-bricked walls of the police station were streaked in blood.
Harbin was shaken to its core, and within an hour of the attack the PLA had rallied sufficiently to be scouring the streets in an outburst of officially sanctioned panic and revenge, the death knell of several guerrillas being the fact that to distinguish one another in the melee they had used cheaply dyed neck kerchiefs whose blue dye ran easily under the heat of their perspiration, so that even though they had taken the kerchiefs off, a stain mark was left on their necks. Less than half of the 150 arrested as Democracy Movement terrorists and “enemies of the people” actually belonged to the Democracy Movement, the others having been people, both men and women, unable or unwilling to account for their whereabouts to local granny committees or to the investigating police. Several were beheaded in public executions for no other reason than a cheaply dyed shirt had left a blue stain on their skin.
Ling and his wife were immediately taken out and shot in the tiny exercise yard, the bullets deliberately not aimed at their spinal cords, so as to have them bleed to death over a number of hours. Their small boy was sent the next day for adoption to Shanghai, but with it being known that he was the offspring of enemies of the state, no one would have him. He was then sent to the Fourteenth Reform School for thought correction.
* * *
But if Chen had predicted success in the raid on the jail, then his prediction that Freeman would immediately drive south couldn’t have been more wrong. Freeman, his Second Army now casting all its attention southward, was on the verge of just such a massive counterattack on A-7 and beyond when Beijing, seeing the writing on the wall, sued for a cease-fire in the U.N. on the grounds that, as they told the people, “the enemy imperialist aggressors on A-7 have been repelled at the border and we are satisfied. The freedom-loving peoples of China are not warmongers, and now that a lesson has been taught to the aggressors, the Chinese people wish to normalize relations.”
Without Chinese support on their eastern flank, and with the massive defeat of their armor out of Yakutsk, Novosibirsk quickly joined Communist China in asking for “peace talks.” Washington readily agreed to a cease-fire at midnight.
* * *
In the southernmost part of the lake around Kultuk, General Minsky’s troops, only hours before exultant over having helped rout the American III Corps, were defiant to the end. Their feeling of having been denied a victory because of Yesov’s failure to hold in the north was further inflamed by the news of the severing of the Nanking Bridge. Minsky was hard put, and indeed did little, to discipline his troops.
After having looted the American dead, they were now withdrawing back through the taiga like a plague. A company of them occupying their southernmost flank position sought to vent their anger and frustrations on anything and everything in their path. One such target was the small house in the woods near Kultuk that Minsky had used as a fire-control point. They burned it to the ground and then moved to the next target, Major Truet’s Charlie Company, where Private Thomis was dug in with the others, waiting for a helo evac that had been hampered by the midair collision of two Black Hawk choppers, one of which would have taken out Thomis, who now stood in the blood-soaked ice of his foxhole.
Though injected with morphine for the pain, and fully conscious, Thomis was unable to move his right leg because of his self-inflicted wound, which the medic and Truet and the others around him had quite reasonably believed had come from an enemy bullet during the earlier Siberian helo attack.
After the first attack wave of Minsky’s company against Charlie Company’s foxholes and trenches near the tunnels, the Siberians were beaten back. But Charlie Company was left with no more than fifty-two men out of what had originally been a hundred — several abdominal cases having priority over Thomis and others in the pre-cease-fire evacuation now under way. Now it was Thomis’s turn, but the taiga a hundred yards in front began trembling, snow sliding down the thickly laden branches from the reverberations of the Siberians’ machine guns. Amid all this, smoke flares were being fired for cover by the Siberians even as evac helos arrived in an effort to take out the last of Charlie Company. Thomis had to help himself out of the foxhole, Brooklyn and the man from Georgia both dead in foxholes nearby, Thomis using his M-16 as a staff to haul himself out with his left foot, but exhausted at the top, lying panting like a whipped dog in the snow, trying to catch his breath long enough to hobble his way to the nearest helo.
As the Siberian company broke cover under flare light and closed for the kill, a section of eight or nine of them, though white figures in the white smoke, nevertheless cast long, dark shadows spearing toward the nearest loading helo. Thomis knew that one good bullet in the right place and the helo would be out of operation, and from the darkness beyond the flare light he opened up at twenty yards, downing two of the Siberians, the others diving for cover behind the wreckage of one of the earlier disabled choppers. There was a sharp crack by his ear, but Thomis had already tossed two grenades at the downed helo’s carcass, the first going wide, blowing up snow and dirt, the second exploding in a purple crash by the helo whose wreckage suddenly spewed rivers of flame, two of the Siberians rising, afire. At fifteen yards Thomis couldn’t have miss
ed them if he’d tried, the other four or five Siberians heading back to the taiga.
“Jesus!” someone yelled at the helo now loading its litters with the last of the wounded. “Look at Thom!”
Thomis was glimpsed in the smoke for a second changing magazines. Having tried to hobble toward the chopper, he’d found he couldn’t do it. The next moment he saw Emory, the black man moaning, his dark face shiny with blood draining down his left side. “Can you walk?” yelled Thomis, firing from the hip into a new rush of Siberians from the taiga trying to get close with their wildly spraying automatic Kalashnikovs. He heard the whack of several bullets hitting the chopper and was filled with panic that if the chopper bought it, he’d be left behind. “Get up, goddamn you!” he yelled at Emory. Emory was on his knees, blood still dripping from him, dazed, unsure of what was going on. “Go on, get up, goddamn it! Move your ass!” commanded Thomis.
The black man rose, and Thomis’s right arm wrapped itself about his shoulder. Emory would be his transport. Using the butt of the M-16 as a walking stick, they limped toward the chopper, fell, got up again, and now the chopper was rising into swirling smoke, its litters full, arms and legs sticking out of it from every angle, it was so crammed with bodies. Several Siberians were charging through the smoke. Thomis fired again from the hip, saw one man literally thrown back, another go down face forward into the snow, the third literally shot to pieces by Thomis’s last clip. Suddenly another man appeared on Thomis’s left, the smoke clearing because of the downdraft of the slowly rising chopper, the Siberian’s Kalashnikov aiming up at the chopper when Thomis, with one hop, brought his M-16 around like a baseball bat, knocking the man off his feet and falling on his face, butt first. At this point the helo, dangerously overloaded, barely managed to make its turn away toward the lake, and the last thing Truet and the other evacuees on the chopper saw was Thomis yelling something up at them, fist raised defiantly.