by Ian Slater
* * *
In Freeman’s AirLand battle opening up all along the Amur front, first the medium-range bombers and fighters went in, shooting up everything in sight, including superbly camouflaged oil-lamp-heated dugouts, which their infrared targeted as tanks in defilade position. Even so, the Chinese were struck by the ferocity of the American offensive.
Colonel Soong, north of Manzhouli, had his troops well dug in atop A-7 but was paid a return visit by a C-130 Spectre gunship whose crew’s infrared night-vision capacity enabled it to pour down a deadly rain of fire. But whereas during an attack on A-7 earlier in the war a C-130 had finally fallen prey to a surface-to-air missile, this time the SAM sites had been raked by F-15 Eagles.
Each Eagle dropped sixteen thousand pounds of smart ordnance from its underfuselage and underwing hard points, so that the C-130 was left unthreatened save for small-arms fire. As it continued in its devastating counterclockwise spiral, spewing out its deadly fire, if any of the Chinese troops lifted a rifle or RPG, or any other weapon in a desperate attempt to down it, they were immediately sighted on the infrared screens and targeted.
From Fuyuan in the east near Khabarovsk to Manzhouli in the west, the night was rent by fire. In Fuyuan the Americans received unexpected help from the Jewish underground in the nearby Jewish Autonomous Oblast and actually succeeded in pushing the Chinese four miles back across a frozen section of the river.
The advance, General C. Clay reported, was getting out of hand. One of the most aggressive groups was a Jewish contingent led by Alexsandra Malof, the woman who had been tortured by Siberian and Chinese alike and who was determined to help the Americans. It was she who, with other Jewish women, had been forced to fraternize, who had been the poprosili — the requested ones — for the pleasure of the Siberian fliers in Khabarovsk before the Americans came. Aleksandra had been a favorite of the ace, Sergei Marchenko. But she was only one, and so many had scores to settle against both Sibirs, as they called them, and the Chinese that General Clay had to order a slowdown in order for his logistical tail to catch up with his forward troops in the rugged ravines of the Manchurian fastness.
Up around Never and Skovorodino, sites of one of Freeman’s fiercest-fought battles earlier in the war, the Chinese gave as good as they got. The ChiCom regulars wouldn’t yield even to the marines’ M-60s, whose 105mm guns, atop the tortoiselike appearance of the tanks caused by blocks of reactive armor all over them, blasted PLA infantry positions across the river. Salvos of expensive, at least for the Chinese, RPGs were fired at the M-60s, but the reactive armor blowing up as it was struck neutralized the Chinese attack in the main and the M-60s kept up a deafening fire that resounded like thunder through the still-snow-dusted hills and along the flats of the river at the foot of cleft-hewn mountains.
Cheng could tolerate the situation so far, but what he was asking his aides for was any reports coming in from around Manzhouli to the west on his left flank, where Chinese positions stretched along the wall of Genghis Khan, and beyond to the south, where the country became flatter — and would be much more suitable for the American Abrams forty-five-mile-per-hour main battle tank.
“Nothing, General.”
“What do you mean, nothing?” Cheng asked, though his voice was subdued and surprisingly calm.
“Only static, General! The American Wild Weasels’ electronic interceptors are jamming all radio communications.”
“We don’t know what’s going on anywhere,” another said. “They’re attacking on so many points we don’t know where their main concentration lies.”
“Freeman’s no fool,” Cheng said. “He knows better than to spread his forces that thinly from Manzhouli to Khabarovsk — over a 1,200-mile front. No army in the world can attack equally along such a lengthy front. If our radios are jammed we’ll have to rely on our motorcycle couriers.”
“But General, it would take them hours — in some cases, days — before they could reach—”
“Not to us here in Beijing, you fool. I mean between regimental commands. We have good men up there. They will use their initiative.”
Indeed they were, one motorbike signal company already moving couriers out along the narrow roads through the mountainous cold. They might as well have been carrying a neon sign, however, saying, “Here we are,” for the F-16s and F-15s, while they didn’t kill all of them in the narrow defiles, did get most of them.
* * *
As the Pave Low banked, Aussie felt his Bergen pack shift despite its tight rigging, and now they were coming into the darkness of Manzhouli, the rail lines ribbons of steely light beneath the moon running east of the wall, which was now being breached by the Pave Lows.
“Bloody great orb!” Aussie said, cursing the break in the clouds. “Might as well send up a flare.” The Pave Low took a whack and seemed to skid in midair, but it was shrapnel from AA fire hitting the second chopper and perhaps the third.
“Second chopper’s going down!” someone said.
The red light went to green and they felt the icy rush of air.
“Go!”
And one by one they went down the rope, the big Pave in a clearing not a quarter mile north of the railway station. The choppers would return in forty-five minutes.
Aussie felt the heat through his black gloves as he descended on the rope and fell back into gritty snow. Within a minute he had the 9mm Heckler & Koch MP5K in one hand, shucking the chute with the other, then joined the other nineteen men from the three Paves. The chopper that had been hit had landed, albeit bumpily, and discharged its six SAS/D men but was now unable to take off, the other two choppers already up and away.
“Right!” David Brentwood called out to the crew of the damaged chopper. “You’re with us. Keep in the center.” There was a chance — just a chance — that the Pave Lows, some of the best nap-of-the-earth fliers in me world, had come in so low via their ground-sensing radar that despite the AA fire that could well have been directed at the helos’ sound, none of the ChiCom guards atop the wall several hundred yards in front of them, or at the railway complex a quarter mile ahead of them, had actually seen the choppers. Then again if the ChiComs had been trying to make regular radio calls to units up along the Genghis Khan Wall they would have quickly realized that the static jamming their lines was so intense as to be more than merely atmospheric in origin.
In fact, the whole garrison of 12 °Chinese troops at Manzhouli was alerted, having seen one of the Pave Lows pass like a bulky chariot across me moon, and the garrison’s commander, an unafraid twenty-three-year-old Captain Ko, made the eminently sensible decision to go out straight away to meet his attackers head on rather than do half the job for them by staying bottled up in the railway station. Surprise was to be met by surprise. To begin with, the small town of Manzhouli had been evacuated by all its citizens, and only the military remained.
CHAPTER FORTY
The navigator in Ebony One informed Air Commander Thompson, the pilot of Ebony One, “We’re coming up on Büyuk Agridome. Otherwise known to you peasants as Mount Ararat.”
“Which one?” the radar navigator asked, crammed in next to him. “There are two peaks.”
“The big one, dummy,” the navigator replied. “The ‘dome’ is a sixteen-thousand-foot massif, the twelve-thousand-foot twin is four miles to the southeast. Four point two to be exact. Iraq and Iran to your right.”
“How far to target?” Ebony’s captain asked as he glanced out to try to pick up the two arrowhead formations of Purple and Gold, assuming they were carrying out precisely the same computations, but not absolutely sure as all cells were on interplane radio silence, the only conversations allowed being those within each aircraft.
“Damn!” Thompson said.
“What’s up?” his copilot asked.
The captain was looking out the port side. They were out of cloud, though mountainous cumulonimbus was all around them, the captain indicating the long contrails that in the moonlight had taken on a sheen that could
be seen for miles as the three cells progressed in perfect formation. “Should be cloud pretty soon,” the copilot said reassuringly. He’d barely finished speaking when the entire wave was swallowed up by more cumulonimbus as they approached the mountains of northern Iraq and Iran. “What’d I tell you, Cap?”
“Yep. God’s on our side, Captain,” cut in Murphy, at the rear gun controls.
“Never mind that, Murphy,” Thompson responded. “Keep your eyes peeled. Radar nav — anything on the scope?”
“Just our eight compadres, Captain. A milk run.”
“Right,” Thompson said, encouraged by the esprit de corps after his concern about the contrails. As air commander as well as captain, he shouldn’t have said anything about the vapor trails that might have induced anxiety in his crew, but this was his third combat tour and sometimes he just felt jumpier than others. Besides, like the other fifty-three men in the wave, he had an abiding hatred and fear of the religious fanatics who inhabited so many of the Islamic countries over or near which they would be flying.
One of the most vivid memories of his childhood was the nightly broadcasts of the Iranian-held American hostages, and even though he was too young then to fully understand what was going on he well understood the humiliation of the blindfolded and tortured Americans as they were daily taunted and paraded before the world. His great-grandfather had told him the Iranian fanatics reminded him of Hitler’s SS — they weren’t simply fanatical but were fierce fighters, and their hatred of America knew no bounds.
So intense were the crews’ feelings about falling into the hands of Muslim fundamentalists that everyone aboard Ebony One had opted to carry “the pill” in his first-aid kit just in case.
“Hey,” Murphy said from the rear barbette control above and aft of the swivel-mounted cannon. “Ara— Whatsit?.”
“Ararat,” the navigator told him.
“I’ve heard that somewhere before,” Murphy said.
The electronics warfare officer leaned forward over his plot, shifting his canvas-holstered service revolver further around on his belt to keep it from digging into his pelvis.
“Yeah,” Murphy said eagerly. “Ararat — isn’t that where they had some winter Olympics?”
The navigator drew a line on his plastic overlay from Ararat to the Hindu Kush and from there to the Turpan depression, a red circle the size of a dime on Ararat. “Olympics?” the gunner responded. “Not unless Noah was a hotdogger!”
“Noah?” Gunner Murphy said. “Noah who?”
“For Chrissake—” the copilot chuckled.
“You know, Murph,” the radio nav cut in. “Noah — Raiders of the Lost Ark.”
“I saw that,” Murphy triumphantly said. “I don’t remember any Noah.”
“You jerkin’ us off, Murphy?” the copilot asked.
“What? No,” Murphy said. “Why?”
“He’s jerking us off,” the EWO said. “Right, Murph?”
* * *
Freeman waited for word that Cheng had fallen for the bait and was now moving the Shenyang army and other northern reserves up to the Amur front. Once this happened, if it happened, Freeman could launch his armored attacks south across the Chinese nose that poked into Mongolia, then across the eighteen miles that comprised the Mongolian toe of land that likewise stuck into Manchuria, and then onto me semidesert plains of the Gobi and China’s Inner Mongolia.
With the B-52s having taken off from Lakenheath and traveling around six hundred miles per hour, depending on the altitude, it would take them seven and a half hours before they hit Turpan, and Freeman knew that if he was to take advantage of faking out Cheng by his Amur front deception he might have to order his armor south before the missiles at Turpan were taken out. What was it the British had said to him during the battle of Ratmanov Island between Alaska and Siberia? That “it might be a near run thing!” But before it could be anything, Cheng had to take the bait.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
“Aussie!” Brentwood whispered hoarsely. “You got the bag?”
“Got it!” Aussie answered, referring to the plastic bag of wolf dung.
“He’s full of it,” Salvini joked. Brentwood ignored him. “Choir, you there?”
“I’m here.”
“Salvini?”
“Here.”
It was in that order that if Aussie was hit, the wolf dung would be passed. It was not to be lit before dawn — about a half an hour away — and in Freeman’s words, “God help the son of a bitch who doesn’t keep it dry!”
* * *
The advantage of the ChiComs having seen the Pave Lows come down was offset now by the fact that as the PLA company spewed out across the rail line and briskly made its way toward the areas where it thought the three choppers had landed, the SAS/D teams were invisible in their black uniforms against the dark forest. And the ChiComs were making the mistake of bunching up, a natural tendency of men facing danger, and their harder, cruder boots made more noise on the ties.
David Brentwood, his ear to the rail, having picked up the first movement of men coming toward him, quickly had the SAS/D team fan out left and right of the tracks. The natural move for him was to have his commandos melt into the woods either side of the track; but he resisted the temptation because it would mean the danger of them crossfiring into their own men, and so they went to ground instead and stayed there, those closest to the rails packing C charges against the rails wherever they could, waiting. Then everything went wrong. They heard the whoosh. Night became day, the line of SAS/D men exposed in flare light showing up like slugs against the patches of snow. Immediately the rattle of AK-47s filled the air, snow flicking up like a swarm of white insects.
“The trees!” Brentwood shouted, and as he did so crushed the acid timer ampoule for the nearest C-4 plastique charge. The bravery of neither the ChiComs nor the SAS/D troops was in question, but Captain Ko’s decision with an advantage of six to one that offense was in this case the best form of defense overlooked a vital component: that once in the trees the SAS/D commandos became the defenders and Ko’s men were exposed. In order for Ko’s men to uproot the commandos, who, as well as having the natural defense of the woods, were still making their way through the woods either side of the railway up to the rail yard and control hut, Ko’s men would have to go in after them.
“Scopes only!” Brentwood yelled, and a burst of AK-47 fire erupted in his direction, shredding some pine bark. It was an order that referred only to those SAS/D troops who had longer rather than shorter range submachine guns, the longer range weapons having been allocated infrared night-vision scopes. With only scopes firing, “blue on blue,” or, in other words, being shot by your own men in the dark, could be avoided. It was a classic case of the Americans adapting to new circumstances quickly, and in the process suddenly turning a dangerous situation to their advantage.
“Right,” Salvini muttered, “here we go!” And with that he rested his AIS rifle against a low pine. The accuracy of the international supermagnum sniper rifle came from its Kigre KN 200 F night-vision image intensifier. Through the scope he could see a PLA cap and torso crouching. He squeezed the trigger and the torso was lost amid an explosion of green flecks as the depleted-uranium bullet tore right through him and kicked up the snow back of him. Within seven seconds Salvini had felled three more ChiComs in the green circle of his night scope, and he could hear the single whacks of the Heckler & Koch MP5K submachine gun and an occasional quick rip of it set on three-round bursts, which meant that some of the ChiComs were reaching the edge of the wood and could still be seen in the fading flare light so as to be easily targeted without night-vision optics. The last thing Ko wanted was another flare light now he’d seen his strategy backfire on him, but Brentwood yelled, “Choir! Flare!”
Choir lifted his M-203 grenade launcher that was attached to his M-16 so that its skyward flare shot would not come back at him from overhanging branches, screaming aloft instead, well clear of the timber. There was a quick soun
d like the belch of a sinkhole emptying, and moonlight went to daylight again as the magnesium sun floated slowly down.
Ko ordered his men into the woods, and the Chinese, about fifty yards on either side of the snow clearing, charged into the woods to fight it out man to man. There was a roar of fire, AK-47s, AK-74s, 7.62 bayonet-equipped type-56 Chinese carbines, rype-43 and -50 7.62mm ChiCom submachine guns, and from the woods either side the eruption of the SAS/D’s Heckler & Koch 9mm Parabellums streaming out at over eight hundred rounds a minute, the crash of grenades, and the terrible whistling of fléchettes. These steel darts, fired by the SAS/D Winchester 1200 shotgun, twenty darts for each shot, drove through ChiCom helmets at a hundred yards as if they were butter, those without helmets falling, their heads exploding, spraying blood everywhere.
Ko was not to know that the enemy was the SAS/D elite, otherwise he might have elected to withdraw, but close-encounter warfare was what the SAS/D called a “specialty of the house.” For the SAS this meant the CQB — close quarter battle — practiced at the house in Hereford, England, and what the Delta men referred to as the “shooting house” at Fort Bragg, both houses training the commandos for everything there was to know about CQB. Adding to this, the Varo flip-up/flip-down night-vision goggles supplied to the SAS/D men helped reduce what had been a six-to-one ChiCom advantage to a three-to-one advantage during the firefight. And now, the fight being closer in, SAS/D cold steel found bone, ripping the ChiComs to pieces.