by Ian Slater
Ko’s contingent fought bravely, and it wasn’t until the first light of dawn after the C charges had blown, injuring two SAS/D men with shrapnel, that the full extent of the carnage could be gauged, the snow pocked red with the dead, the wounded, and the dying. The victory for the SAS/D was somewhat hollow, however, when it was discovered that as well as four SAS/D men killed, all of the Pave Low’s crewmen had died, despite the best efforts of the SAS/D men to protect them.
“Damn!” David Brentwood said with an uncharacteristic vehemence. “I should have told them to wait with the chopper.”
“Ah, rats!” Aussie said. “None of us knew whether the Chinese would find the chopper and—”
Commandos were now setting charges in the railway control boxes and on other lines. With radios unable to get through the jamming of Freeman’s Wild Weasels, the SAS lit orange and purple flares for pickup. The wall of Genghis Khan had clearly been breached by the SAS/D team, but to make it official two SAS/D men — Salvini and Aussie — were dispatched to light the wolf dung fire by the base of one of the watchtowers atop the old wall.
“What the fuck’s all this about?” Salvini asked Aussie.
“Don’t ask me, sport. Davey’s the only one that knows, and he’s apparently under orders to keep it mum till we’re out of here.”
The arrival of the Pave Lows was interrupted for a minute or so by a Chinese sniper hiding out in the woods, but he was taken out by a scope-mounted M-16 and the helos came down and took aboard the living and the dead.
“So?” Aussie yelled as the Pave Low rose with the dawn, heading away from the tall but distinctly gray-white trail of wolf dung smoke. “What’s all this business with me wolf shit?”
“Wait till we get a few hundred feet,” Brentwood said, his face still grim after the loss of the crew from the Pave Low, which they had blown to pieces with a C charge before takeoff, denying any of the helo’s weapons or electronics to the ChiComs.
“Why?” Aussie began, and then he and all the other commandos saw it: All along the front for as far as they could see, spirals of the same grayish smoke could be seen rising straight, high into the dawning sky.
“What’s the idea?” Salvini asked.
“It’s the traditional Chinese signal,” Brentwood explained. “For some reason the chemical composition of wolf dung makes it burn thick and go straight up — straighter than any other kind of smoke.”
“Yeah, but signal for what?” Salvini pressed.
“The wall — China’s defenses being breached.”
“I get it,” Aussie said. “Cheng and his buddies can’t get squat info from his radios, so with the smoke signal they’ll think we’ve broken through all along the line.”
“We have,” Brentwood said. “But what they don’t know is for how long. Hopefully Cheng’ll be rushing fresh troops — all his reserves — up north instead of westward.”
“While Freeman’s armored spearhead heads south,” Salvini said. “Brilliant. Meanwhile, we go back to base. I love it.”
“That crafty bastard!” Aussie said, and everyone knew he meant Freeman. The wolf dung smoke trails could be seen along the entire length of the Black Dragon River by the Chinese reserve battalions miles back from the front but already moving northward to counter what they saw as the enemy’s penetration of the Black Dragon line.
* * *
Cheng was not completely sold on the reports — slow in coming because of the radio jamming — that the wall had been breached everywhere. He guessed there must be some copycat panic down the line. But what sold him was the intelligence reports further south of the front amid the villages and towns along the few roads that snaked through the Manchurian vastness.
While all ChiCom military targets — at least those not camouflaged well enough — had been hit, not one single town or village on the sparse roadways through Manchuria had been destroyed. This was not, Cheng believed, because of any humanitarian gesture on Freeman’s part not to bomb civilians, but because bombed-out villages and towns in such mountainous terrain caused so much rubble on the narrow roads that it would be a major impediment to any armored columns snaking through the steep valleys, and indeed would bunch up armor, making it much more vulnerable to attack by small guerrilla bands.
Ironically, while the high columns of wolf dung smoke had alarmed other commanders along the line, it was the care that Freeman had taken not to create such rubble rather than the wolf dung that convinced Cheng it was an all-out deep attack by Freeman’s army against China’s northern defenses.
* * *
By now Freeman’s armor was well underway west and south of Manzhouli, his M1A1 tanks leading, his Bradley infantry vehicles following, at times on the flank. Reports kept coming in to Freeman that Chinese troops were still taking the bait and on the move northward in Manchuria from Shenyang toward the Amur or Black Dragon River.
“By God, Dick!” Freeman told Norton exuberantly. “We’ve done it. Wolf dung. Norton, how about that for high tech? By God, we’ve done it!”
And so they had — until, as the position became clearer to the northernmost Chinese commanders, a very low tech carrier pigeon arrived at Shenyang HQ informing the PLA’s Northern Command that the ferocity of the American attacks that had been assumed to be a major offensive now appeared to be no more than well-coordinated probing actions. Cheng was about to order the northern bound troops westward, but this would take time, especially with rail links like that of Manzhouli now broken. Instead he ordered the reserves to reverse direction and head south back down out of Manchuria as fast as possible and then westward into Inner Mongolia and the Gobi. So, Cheng thought, the great American general believed he had outwitted the PLA!
* * *
Suddenly the EWO in Ebony One saw an amber blip on his screen. “AC,” he said, notifying the air commander. “Unidentified aircraft. Two o’clock high. Fifty miles.”
The captain acknowledged. “Stay with them, Murphy — must be one of our Harrier escorts.”
“Got him in the cone, skipper.”
“Countermeasures ready?” the captain asked as a precaution.
“Ready, sir,” the EWO confirmed. Four seconds had elapsed since the first radar contact.
“Range?” the captain asked.
“Forty-nine miles. Speed, Mach one point eight,” which meant that whatever it was was traveling in excess of nine hundred miles per hour. Most probably a fighter, all right, but not a Harrier.
The captain banked left, beginning evasive action, hoping that Purple’s and Gold’s EWOs would have seen either the contact on their screens or his “radio silence” evasive maneuver. Hopefully they had seen both. Beneath them the great peaks of the Hindu Kush rose majestically in a sea of moonlit white peaks. “Range?”
“Forty-eight miles. Closing. Mach one point three. Three others joining him.”
* * *
The first four-thousand-mile East Wind 4, which western experts thought had been discarded in favor of the longer eight-thousand-mile-range CSX-4, landed on the right flank of Freeman’s armored column racing south of Manzhouli. It did no more damage than blow up enormous blocks of ice from the twenty-mile-wide Lake Hulun, which still, mostly frozen, was providing Freeman’s armored columns with a shortcut south. The second and third missiles, however, hit the ice in the middle of the column, and an M-60 tank and Bradley fighting vehicle rolled at speed and disappeared.
Immediately Freeman in the lead tank saw other columns slow. “Full bore!” he yelled into the radio. “Keep moving, damn it! And everyone stay buttoned up.” The clang of cupolas and hatches shutting could be heard echoing along the ice as the tracked vehicles continued to throw up a curtain of fine white ice particles that glinted beautifully in the early dawn.
“Where the hell are those B-52s?” Freeman mused, while looking through his commander’s periscope for sign of any enemy activity in the Manchurian foothills far off to his left, his tank’s remarkably quiet gas turbine blowing the snow aft of him
like castor sugar.
* * *
Over the Hindu Kush it was not yet dawn as the nine B-52s adjusted their course northeastward for Turpan. The mountains’ snowy peaks, like the B-52s themselves, were still moonlit, with some clouds bunching up, shifting in from the west as the four ChiCom fighters, Shenyang J-6Cs, wings swept back, nose intake reminiscent of older MiGs, were swooping down at Mach 1.3 from thirty-six thousand feet toward the B-52s, two of the fighters armed with four air-to-air missiles, the other two with eight 8.35-inch rockets, together with their deadly NR-30mm cannon.
The electronics warfare officer in Ebony One and those in the other eight bombers that made up Ebony, Gold, and Purple were watching their own radars, each plane’s quad 12.7-millimeter machine guns in the rear barbettes shifting with the bogeys’ approach, but the ChiCom fighters were still too far away, beyond the effective one-kilometer range of the guns.
The three B-52s of Purple were now in thick stratus, their exhaust heat signal weakened by the clouds’ moisture, the Shenyangs shifting their attack to the six planes of Ebony and Gold. It told Ebony’s captain that he could expect heat-seekers, so that when he saw the pinpricks of light from the Shenyangs he yelled, “Release flares,” knowing the B-52s could not turn in time. Even if the six B-52s did manage to swing toward the ChiCom fighters, denying the B-52s’ engine heat to the rear-entry infrared-seeking missiles, the bombers’ guns, their only external antiaircraft weapons, would be facing away from the Shenyangs.
The sky was suddenly aglow with phosphorus flares, like shooting stars, the ChiComs’ four 120-pound, Soviet-type Aphid missiles streaking toward Ebony and Gold at over 2,800 meters per second, to reach the B-52s in 6.5 seconds.
Murphy, controlling the rear barbette of Ebony One, his heart thumping so loudly it was the only thing he could hear, cheered as he saw the ChiCom missiles curving off into the thickets of burning flares aft of Ebony and disintegrating. But now another four rockets were streaking toward the B-52s.
“Active! Active!” Ebony’s EWO yelled, indicating these weren’t Aphids — heat-seekers — but were emitting radar beams, using the reflections of these from the B-52s to home in on.
“Chaff!” Ebony One’s captain yelled, his order, as he was also air commander of the wing, immediately obeyed by Gold and Purple so that now the sky twinkled in the dying light of the flares, the millions of strips of aluminum, cut to various wavelengths to cover the band, “fuzzing” the ChiComs’ radar-homing missiles.
“Ha! You bastards!” Murphy called, elated by the Chinese’s failure to sucker the B-52s into thinking the second set of missiles was heat-seekers instead of radar-homing air-to-air Apexes — which, though heavier at seven hundred pounds, were one and a half times faster.
These four missiles began curving away, but unlike the heat-seekers before them, each missile’s flight path wasn’t so much a single curve but rather a series of jerky movements, crisscrossing one another’s smoky trails like hounds confused by the fox’s scent, tearing into the chaff clouds at over one thousand meters per second. “Foiled by foil, you fools!” Murphy shouted.
Then he heard a rapid thudding noise, one of the Shenyang’s NR-30mm cannon raking Ebony One’s port side. But the big plane had seen worse than this, its upgraded wet — that is, fuel-carrying — wing having a remarkable ability to soak up self-sealing punctures created by the ChiComs’ machine gun fire. The Shenyang swept past, going into a tight turn. The B-52s were in cloud, out of it, then in again. Then as quickly as they appeared, the bogeys were gone, obviously on bingo fuel or because there were SAM sites ahead that might not distinguish between friend or foe. Murphy was ecstatic, but not so Air Commander Thompson. They had yet to reach the target and get back again. And where in hell were the Harriers?
* * *
Freeman’s lead division of five hundred and forty tanks was advancing in column, broken up into three brigades of 144 M1A1 and M-60 tanks each, and the brigades in turn were broken down into three battalions of sixty tanks, companies of fifteen tanks each, and finally platoons of five tanks. The lead tank had two aerials instead of one, one for intertank communication, the other for air strikes if necessary, and was followed in column by the second tank covering an arc of fire on the right side of the column, the third tank covering the left side, and so on down the column.
Once over the ice and onto land, the visibility was still good on the low, flat country but not as open as it was on the lake. Freeman moved to wedge formations, the lead tank of each platoon as the point, the others flanking it left and right a hundred yards apart to form the triangular advance.
The dust trails, it was hoped, would be dampened somewhat by the still scantily snow-covered terrain and by the early morning dew, but in the fragile ecosystem of the semidesert around the Gobi, the dust rose like mustard-colored flour, forming an enormous cloud south of Lake Hulun, and Freeman’s M1A1 leading the way, cruising at thirty-five to forty miles per hour, was followed not only by the remainder of his M1A1 and M-60 tanks but by scores of Bradley infantry fighting vehicles.
The Bradleys’ diesels were in a high whine, as opposed to the more muffled, lower-toned roar from the gas turbines of the M1A1s, the Bradleys’ turrets mounted with 25mm chain guns with a 475-round-per-minute capacity. Run by crews of three, they also carried a “deuce” of TOW — tube-launched, optically tracked, wire-guided antitank missiles. The twenty-five-ton, forty-one-miles-per-hour amphibious vehicles carried nine infantry men with port firing automatic weapons, riding it out in the armor-protected cabin.
Out forward of the main armored force, relays of three lightly armed but fast Kiowa Warrior reconnaissance choppers were darting about like dragonflies, searching for any sign of impediment, either enemy troops or natural barriers, that might have to be dealt with, as map references could not always be relied upon. In the Gobi the shapes of dunes could change overnight following a storm from the west, and in selected sites not yet on the maps, forests had been planted and watered on the desert’s edge in a desperate attempt to stop the ever-encroaching sand.
Behind the Bell two-seater Kiowas and in support of the armor were the tank-killing Apaches ready to shoot forward and kill with either laser-guided Hellfire missiles, rockets, or their below-the-nose-mounted 30mm cannon, which could deal with any enemy tanks or other targets of opportunity pointed out to them by the Kiowa spotters.
“Incoming!” the warning came as another East Wind with conventional warhead exploded overhead, taking out three tanks and a Bradley, over twenty men and over twenty million dollars worth of equipment lost in a few seconds.
Freeman knew he couldn’t take this too much longer before his force was decimated, and standing up in the cupola he lifted his ten-power binoculars, looking for possible revetment areas in some hilly country off to his left, a continuation of semidesert and dune.
Everyone was asking where the hell the B-52s were. Some were yelling in their tanks that the old man should have waited before moving, but other voices countered by arguing Freeman’s point that to keep the initiative he had to drive south quickly if he was to outflank the Manchurian reserves.
* * *
The Manchurians reserves, in particular Shenyang’s Sixteenth Group Army of fifty-two thousand men, were moving faster than Freeman had anticipated. In part it was because they had been bored, and no matter what the danger, soldiers of any army welcome some activity after long, dull hours at the rear. Besides, in the sparse grasslands and semidesert, the PLA’s motorcycle and sidecar battalions could move at speed, each pinion seat carrying another soldier in addition to the rider and the machine gunner or antitank missile operator in the sidecar. Simultaneously, all trains and civilian traffic had been commandeered by Cheng, who was using Freeman’s deliberate policy of not bombing the villages and towns to his, Cheng’s, advantage, by using every route that led south and west to Erenhot.
Because of the absence of serviceable roads leading west out of Manchuria, Cheng knew, and he knew that Fre
eman must know, that no substantial PLA flank action could be mounted against Freeman’s southward-headed column until he got further south. Cheng would have to stop him further down in the Gobi’s dunes around the railhead of Erenhot, and so it was to Erenhot, the railhead on the border of China’s Inner Mongolia and Mongolia, that many of the reserves from Beijing’s Sixty-fifth Army Group were now being sent.
The Shenyang armies, including towed artillery, were able to reach the dunes faster by being able to cut directly west through Chifeng and Duolun. Meanwhile Cheng was receiving the news that Freeman’s armored division was being pounded by the missiles from Turpan. Anticipating the coming battle, Cheng allowed himself a rare smile of satisfaction. Did the American general think he was the only one who read Sun Tzu and understood how all war is deception? Did the American think that he, Cheng, was asleep?
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
Unfazed by the nonappearance of the Harriers, keeping the big planes on course, Ebony Leader, now that his flight had been attacked, switched from in-plane to intercell radio. It was 0753 and there was a strong headwind against them. “Ebony Leader to Gold and Purple,” Air Commander Thompson called. “Will start ‘to-go’ count at one hundred twenty seconds before ERT — at oh-seven-five-six plus twenty-one seconds. I will release bombs at end of radar nav’s fifteen-second count and on his—”
“We’ve been hit!” a surprised voice came over the intercom, Thompson ignoring it, carrying on, his tone tense but controlled.
“Targeting radar’s out!” the same voice cut in.
Again the AC kept talking, refusing to be interrupted, even as he took account of what he’d just heard. “We’ll be visible bombing then,” he instructed the other two cells. “Drop on my ‘pickle’ signal. Acknowledge!”
“Bogeys… three o’clock… coming in high. Mach one point two. New bandits. Configurations MiG-29s. Repeat, MiG-29s.”