by Ian Slater
“Hawkeye radar report, sir. Unidentified vessel. Bearing two seven zero. Range seven zero miles. Proceeding south.”
“Any others?” Admiral Kuang asked the officer of the watch.
“Nothing yet, sir.”
“When we rendezvous with our landing craft off Hsilo River we will know. Meanwhile, tell me if the unidentified turns.”
“Possible hostile,” the operator said, receiving the Hawk-eye feed. “… Hostile confirmed.”
“Type?” Kuang asked.
“Huangfen. Missile attack boat — two hundred tons. Speed, twenty knots. Four HY2 surface-to-surface. Two twin 30mms — one forward, one aft.”
“Radar capability?” Kuang asked. “It cannot be more than twenty miles.”
“Less than six, sir, and there’s a haze. He won’t have us on passive sonar either. Unless he stops. His three diesels are twelve thousand horsepower each. That would wash out any of our sound.”
The admiral nodded. “Quite so.”
If all went well, he knew they would be off the mainland peninsula an hour before dawn. Then it would be no longer possible to conceal themselves — unless the goddess Matsu was still with them and kept the curtain of mist wrapped about them. Kuang prayed fervently. He held fast to his vision — his private vision — of him personally on behalf of the ROC accepting the Red Chinese surrender at the war’s end. He would go to the beautiful city of Hangchow, the home of his ancestors, his dream to be consummated the moment his limousine drove through the garden-surrounded gates of Mao’s villa on the West Lake, whereupon he would alight in triumph to personally remove the stain of Mao’s house from the earth.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
The first sign was a hazing over of the sun so that only a dull, purplish corona of it showed through the mounting turbulence. It was one of the great Gobi storms without rain, one of the terrible gritty and blinding storms borne westward in the desert, this time of year, April, being the worst month, and added to by the sand-pregnant winds out of the Tien Shan Mountains in China’s westernmost province of Sinkiang, where the line of the mustard sky could be seen eating up the blue before the banshee howling and the pebble-hailing assault enveloped all.
Cheng was pleased. He had prepared without the hope of a storm though he knew it was the time of the year for them, but now he could see the massive storm gathering he welcomed it; it would make his trap so much more terrible for the Americans. Oh, the Americans had done well in the desert in Iraq, Cheng told his subordinates, and the incompetent Hussein helped them by being such a fool of a tactician. Besides, Cheng reminded his commanders, the PLA had had time — months, years — to prepare for any invasion from the north down the corridor between the great sandy desert to the west and the harder semidesert to the east — the corridor Freeman was heading for about ten miles in width and twenty-three in depth.
“You must understand, comrades,” Cheng reassured his HQ staff, “that the Vietnamese defeated the Americans because they realized the falseness of an American adage — that the jungle was neutral, that it was equally difficult for the Americans and North Vietnamese alike. This, of course, was an incorrect assumption because the Vietnamese used the jungle as their friend. As we will use the desert. Remember we are on home soil and have had more time to prepare than Iraq.” He paused. “Is everyone in position?” His commanders assured him that they were.
“If anyone breaks camouflage he is to be shot immediately. Understood?”
They did, each platoon officer having been supplied with a noise suppressor on his revolver so that such a shot would not be heard.
* * *
Driving south, Freeman planned to take the path of least resistance between the great sand dunes around Qagan Nur or Qagan Lake and the salt lakes south of it, the corridor extending from the dunes on his left or eastern flank to the railhead of Erenhot on the Chinese-Mongolian border. Freeman’s objective was the capture of the rail spur line that stuck twenty-three miles out northward from the east-west main line and which stopped at the small settlement of Qagan Lake, even though me town was actually ninety-five miles south of the lake it was named after.
Cheng’s strategy owed something not only to the Vietnamese, whom the Chinese detested, but also to the Egyptians’ highly successful foxhole strategy against the Israeli tanks in the Yom Kippur War. And he had elaborated upon it, not with a tactic from Sun Tzu but from the Turks of World War I.
There had been no way to gain satellite reconnaissance during the dust storms that Cheng had used as cover during the weeks of the cease-fire. No way for U.S., or any other satellites for that matter, to discover that beneath this corridor, the most obvious funnel to the south, he, General Cheng, had used only a fraction of his three-million-strong army to dig a vast interlocking system of reinforced tunnels.
Unlike the Viet Cong tunnels, they were not elaborately built insofar as they were not elbow- or S-shaped, nor did they have the misleading cul-de-sacs or sudden angular changes in elevation that in the darkness might trip any enemy brave or foolish enough to descend into them. Rather it was a honeycomb of tunnels that led to hundreds of foxholes easily concealed and manned by an elite infantry division from Shenyang’s military district Group Army 40 and some elements of the infamous Beijing military district’s Thirty-eighth Army — of Tiananmen Massacre fame. After firing an antitank missile from one foxhole, a PLA team could quickly remove itself to another, and in most cases the angle of depression of the M-1 or M-60 tank’s big gun would be useless against them at any close range — only the tank’s machine guns could effectively come into play.
* * *
“Son of a bitch!” commented the pilot of one of Freeman’s Kiowa scout choppers, which had come low behind the protection of boulders the size of bungalows. “Can’t see a friggin’ thing.” The chopper’s copilot pushed the button that raised the periscopelike “two-eyed” mast-mounted sight still higher above the rock.
Still nothing.
They were in the fog of war wherein even the best commanders become confused by a lack of information or too much conflicting information. The chopper went higher, but they still couldn’t see through the dust, the chopper’s intake filters in danger of clogging, when they began getting radar blips, which were duly reported to Freeman but which could not be identified. Freeman ordered the Kiowas forward, and already mine-detector equipment and antimine blades and flails on mine-clearing tanks were called up from the columns as he ordered them to go into single file formation.
No mines were reported, but one Kiowa came in with a report of dozens of what its crew believed, but could not be sure, were Red Arrow 8 antitank-missile-tracked vehicles. A small screen in Freeman’s command tank selected the Red Arrow from the computer’s threat library, telling him that the vehicle had an effective range of three thousand meters, a rate of fire of two to three missiles per minute — warhead diameter 120mm. Hit probability greater than 90 percent. But they were still a good six thousand meters off.
Then there came SITREPs — situation reports — from another Kiowa of what they thought were T-69II main battle tanks equipped with laser range finder, though the dust should render the laser useless in the storm.
Freeman realized that the Chinese probably could not see him either, but the noise of the Kiowa scouts alone must certainly have alerted the Chinese to his presence. No doubt Cheng, like the Americans, wasn’t going to fight blind — it would be a matter of who would be seen first by whom, and Freeman’s tanks could outreach the T-59s by three thousand yards and the T-72s by two hundred yards as they had in the Iraqi desert, standing back beyond the range of the enemy’s T-59 105mm and T-72 125mm cannon while using their own 120mm to deadly effect.
But in the midst of the blinding storm that was still not anywhere near its zenith, Freeman was haunted again by what had befallen his tanks along the Never-Skovorodino road earlier in the war when Second Army had fallen into a trap baited in the taiga by dummy tanks, inflatables that looked like the rea
l thing from only a hundred yards away, and with cheap oil lanterns in each to give off enough heat for an infrared signature; when he’d sent in the Apaches, the Siberians had unleashed their VAMs — vertical area mines— whose sensors were triggered by the sound of the approaching rotors and lifted off, spewing up submunitions that cost him a third of his Apaches and their crews.
“Slow to ten miles per hour,” he told the driver.
“Slow to ten.”
Sitting there in the turret, the gunner seated just below him, the loader to his left and the driver well forward beyond the turret wall, down under the 120mm gun and coaxial 12.6mm machine gun, Freeman wanted to send Apaches forward, but the dust storm was so thick it was unlikely they’d get a clear shot at anything.
Besides, if they were so close to the Chinese, only a matter of a mile or so, there was always the danger of a blue on blue when you could easily mistake the outline of one of your own tanks for one of theirs. Any visible insignia, in this case a black arrow stenciled on the M1A1’s cupola sides, front and back, would be almost impossible to see in the sandstorm. He could not afford to go ahead blind and so ordered several Apaches in to try to find and blast a hole through the Chinese armor, which was still nowhere in sight.
The air, however, was now thick with smoke as well as dust, the smoke additive just one of the items purchased through La Roche Chemicals and something Cheng had paid particular attention to after remembering Schwarzkopf’s boasting about how the Americans could see through the dust much better than the T-59s.
* * *
“But we saw through this crap in Iraq,” Freeman said.
“Not the same crap, General,” the gunner replied. “They’ve somehow made it so thick that we just can’t pick up anything — infrared or laser. We’re running blind.”
“Well so are they,” Freeman said, but he was right only up to a point. The flail tanks had as yet reported no mines. There was a string of profanity followed by “Back up! Back up!”
“What the fuck—”
Over his radio network Freeman could hear the gas turbine of a flail tank roaring.
“We struck some kind of berm or—”
The next minute Freeman’s ears were ringing. He couldn’t hear anything for the explosion transmitted by the radio of the flail tank before it went dead. In an instant Freeman made his decision, ordering the entire armored column, which prudence had just made him form a single file, to withdraw. “Don’t deviate a millimeter from your incoming tracks!” he ordered.
Of course this was impossible, as most of the tank tracks were blown over or already half filled with sand, but each tank commander and driver knew what he meant: turn your tank on its own radius and get the hell out of here.
The full realization of what might have happened had all his tanks been aligned for a frontal attack now hit him — that every one, or certainly most, would have suffered the fate of the flail tank that had crashed through what appeared to be some kind of tank trap, the chains from the flail tank digging up the sand deep enough before it crashed through in what Freeman now realized might be a tunnel-strewn corridor, each one of them allowing two-man RPG 40mm type-69 antitank grenade launcher teams to take on his tanks.
He was wrong — the tunnel had in fact been dug so as to bear the weight of the M1, not to collapse as had happened in this case, and to allow access warrens for RPG teams.
During Freeman’s hasty retreat, several more tanks were lost to teams who, realizing the American column had failed to take the bait at the last minute, had come out of their holes prematurely, most of them being killed at such close range by the M1s’.50 Brownings. Nevertheless two of Freeman’s tanks were lost to RPG teams, the tanks’ four-man crews cut to pieces by the Chinese as they tried to exit the burning vehicles. At the very least the Chinese had mauled Freeman’s column and caused him to give the uncharacteristic order to pull back. Cheng was furious that Freeman had not come on in a frontal battle charge, but the storm had brought caution to the Americans’ tactics and confusion to both sides.
“Very well,” Cheng said. “Now he retreats, where does he go? He must either come through the corridor or—”
“Go eastward to the dunes that border the corridor,” his aide suggested. Cheng uttered an ancient oath. With the corridor mined as well as honeycombed by tunnels, there was only one place Freeman could go: toward the dunes. But it was impossible to tunnel the dunes. Sand had the insistent habit of falling in on you the moment you tried to dig a foxhole in it.
Very well, Cheng thought, returning to Sun Tzu’s axiom: “The military has no constant form, just as water has no constant shape — adapt as you face the enemy.” It must adapt. Freeman had, and so would he.
“Colonel,” Cheng ordered, “get me Shenyang air army HQ immediately.” The drop he had in mind would be a little haphazard and it would have to be done in execrable conditions, but it was the only way to stop the Americans. Besides, it gave Cheng a sense of perverse satisfaction to know that the very weapons he’d be using against Freeman had been provided by an American, La Roche, out of Warsaw Pact surplus. Cheng recalled how hard he had to fight the Central Committee for the allocation funds to buy the weapons. Now he would be vindicated.
* * *
If there was one thing Freeman hated it was retreat, and already a CBN reporter well in the rear of me logistical tail of the armored column, hearing that Freeman’s armored spearhead was withdrawing, was in immediate contact with his Tokyo affiliate via his “four wire” satellite dish phone.
Within the hour the La Roche tabloids around me world were spewing forth FREEMAN ON THE RUN. Freeman was flipping over the leaves of his satchel-size operational map pad, assuring himself that you either went through the corridor between the dunes to the east and the Mongolian border to the west where SATRECON in one photo out of fifty had peeked through a brief clearing in the storm and spotted hundreds of heavy ChiCom field batteries — or you could try a fast end run across the dunes on his extreme left, then wheel about southwest in the sand. But if he knew this he knew that Cheng must know it, too, so if you were Cheng you’d try to stop the Americans at the dunes or better still try to take them out before they reached the dunes.
Freeman knew his M1A1s had a distinct advantage over the Chinese T-72s and T-59s in that the M1 was much faster. Then he got the bad news that the most forward of his tanks, which were now withdrawing from the antitank tunnel corridor and swinging east toward the dunes, were already reported as being under attack by swarms of ChiCom motorcycle and sidecar battalions, many equipped with Sagger optically controlled antitank missiles. It was difficult enough to deal with antitank ordnance normally, which is why Freeman had ordered the withdrawal from the tunnel-honeycombed corridor. But mobile Sagger antitank teams were a much more dangerous threat, even though Freeman knew it would probably be as difficult for the ChiCom sidecar units to spot his tanks in the blinding dust storm as it was for the tanks to see them.
Despite the blinding sandstorm, however, the quick turning ability of the motorcycle sidecar units was a distinct advantage for the ChiComs. There was the muffled crump of yet another tank as the explosion of fifty rounds of its ammo went up, and for a minute.50mm tracers from its machine gun ammunition could be seen flying madly in all directions as faint orange streaks in the dust-choked battlefield. It was at that point that Freeman realized from the reports of two drivers from the knocked-out tanks that it wasn’t mines that were planted in the corridor but the much more dangerous mobile antitank RPG units that had stopped them. The general immediately ordered a battalion of his tanks to race at maximum speed for the sands, and the bulk of 205 tanks to re-form for an echelon attack, five tanks to an echelon, forty-one echelons in all heading forward again toward the tunneled corridor, but not until he ordered his three squadrons of SAS/D men—210 men — to race ahead of the tanks in their seventy three-man FAVs, or fast attack vehicles—”dune buggies” built for war.
The battalion of American tanks rac
ing for the dunes on Freeman’s left flank were told not to enter the dunes the moment Freeman had received a report from the forward-most tank that aircraft could be heard there above the dust storm.
“You sure they’re not our Apaches trying to get a look see?”
“Positive — definitely fixed-wing aircraft, General.”
“Right,” Freeman acknowledged, “then we must assume the ChiComs are dropping mines — thousands of them — onto the dunes.”
It left him with no choice. He would either have to retreat fully or hope his FAVs as outriders could somehow navigate a safe passage through the corridor.
As he re-formed the tanks for another attempt on the corridor, the first FAVs appeared, the lead vehicle being manned by Aussie Lewis as driver, David Brentwood as codriver and machine gunner, with another SAS/D trooper on the back raised seat behind the TOW missile tube. Brentwood ordered the seventy FAVs to spread across the ten-mile-wide, twenty-three-mile-deep corridor. This meant that there were approximately seven FAVs to a mile of front, but while they tried their best to keep no more man a 200-yard spacing between them it was impossible to be sure because of the visibility being no more than twenty feet.
* * *
“What the hell’s he doing now?” a CBN reporter demanded of Norton.
“Attacking,” Norton replied tersely, uncharacteristically adding, “What the hell’s it look like?”
“Well, we’re too far back to see.”
“Exactly,” Norton commented. “Didn’t report that to your paper, did you — that Freeman was in a lead tank?”
But right now the CBN reporter was more alarmed than insulted. “But Jesus, he’s trying to drive through the corridor before the chinks turn their big guns from the Mongolia border on him. Shouldn’t take them long to tow them into position.”