by Ian Slater
“No,” Norton said. “It’s a race all right. He’s running for gold and they’re coming in from the flank.”
“Jesus Christ! It’ll be nip and tuck, won’t it?”
Norton waved over a FAV.
“Yes, sir?”
“You fellas got room for an observer?”
“Sure, in the back,” said Salvini, who was driving with another SAS/D man on the machine gun in the codriver’s position and Choir Williams in back, manning the TOW. “Next to Choir — you can get a grip on the roll bar.”
“Ah — listen,” the reporter said. “If you guys are pushed for space—”
Norton had his sand goggles up and winked at Salvini, who waved encouragingly at the La Roche reporter. “Hell, no trouble, man. Always glad to help the press.”
The reporter hesitated.
“Don’t want me to tell the New York office you’re chicken, do you?” Norton pressed, only half-joking.
The CBN reporter smiled weakly. “No—”
“Right, off you go then.” And within thirty seconds they were gone, Choir Williams advising the reporter against the sound of the wind and the whine of the ninety-four-horsepower engine, “You hang on, boyo. When we get to those holes it’ll be bloody murder!”
“What holes?”
“Them bloody manholes that Cheng has popped here and there atop his nest of runnels. Throw you clear off if you’re not careful. You just get a grip on the roll bar here like Mr. Salvini says. Okay?”
The fear in the reporter’s eyes was hidden by the goggles.
“We’ll be testing for mines,” Choir informed him, having to shout over the FAV’s engine.
“Testing?”
“Aye. Freeman doesn’t know if the chinks ‘ave mined the corridor as well as tunneled it. We doubt it — but the ChiComs sure as hell are having mines dropped on the dunes now that Cheng thinks we’re taking the dune route on our left.”
“Until he sees us,” the reporter said, “coming back to the corridor.”
“Aye,” Choir said. “But he’ll be getting reports of our tanks over by the dunes and he’ll have to decide where he wants to concentrate his strength.”
“Why can’t the tanks test the mines?”
“Don’t be daft, laddie. M-1 costs four million dollars. Fast attack vehicle comes in around twenty-five thousand.”
“Thanks,” the reporter shouted. “That makes me feel better.”
“Oh it’s a fine dune buggy is the FAV. Your readers might be interested,” Choir said. “Thirteen and a half feet long, five foot high, six foot wide — tubular steel frame, can negotiate almost any terrain, and faster than a bloody tank. Seventy mile an hour attack speed, boyo.”
“Is there someplace I can get off?” the reporter asked.
Choir smacked the newsman good-naturedly on the shoulder. “Ah — you’re a cool one, boyo. Stand-up comic we have here, lads!” But Salvini and his machine gunner couldn’t hear him in the wild banshee sound of the storm.
The next minute they were airborne at fifty miles an hour, the reporter’s legs off the steel floor, his knuckles bone white on the roll bar. Choir pulled him down. Salvini saw a blur on the enormous blur of the mustard-colored dust storm. The blur seemed to be turning, or rather spinning, and looked about the size of a baseball.
“Sagger!” he yelled, yanking the wheel hard left while his codriver, manning a.50 machine gun, fired in the general direction of the Sagger. He couldn’t see the man firing it but knew that the operator had to remain in line of sight of his target in order to guide the Russian-made antitank weapon to its target. And the U.S. soldiers had learned from POWs taken before the cease-fire that machine gun fire coming in your direction had a way of unsettling your concentration on the Sagger control toggle. The Sagger kept coming toward them, and Salvini turned hard right. The Sagger couldn’t make the acute turn and passed them by.
A quarter mile on, Brentwood saw another Sagger’s back-flash. “Two o’clock!” he yelled at Aussie. “A hundred yards.” The FAV was doing fifty-five, and Aussie pressed his boot to the floor. The two-man Sagger team, though they needed only one man to guide the missile, was scrambling back into the manhole. The first one made it. Aussie braked hard to prevent engine damage and hit the second man full on, rolling him under the car, fast like a big, soft log. Aussie backed up to make sure and David fired a long burst into the manhole cover, its sandy wooden top flying apart like cardboard, then he dropped in two grenades, and they were off again. “No mines so far!” Aussie told Brentwood.
“No,” Brentwood said, “but we’re only five miles into the corridor — another bumpy seven straight ahead.” The next two miles were not the hard-baked semidesert terrain that they’d been bouncing through so far but a mile-wide spill of sand, and in this the FAV was superb, up one side of a dune and down the other in its natural element. Aussie’s FAV was still in the lead when he slowed and pointed off to his left. “TMD.”
“Shit!” the response came from the usually moderate Brentwood.
“What is it?” the SAS/D man behind them on the TOW asked.
“Wooden-cased mine — bloody worst.”
“So metal detectors wouldn’t pick it up,” the man on the TOW said.
“Right,” Aussie answered, “and we’re only running on seventy pounds overpressure. Which is why we mightn’t have set off any — if we ran over them. They could be the TMD-B4 type. Only go off under a main battle tank — won’t waste them as antipersonnel. Need something really heavy to detonate them. A buggy probably wouldn’t do it.”
“How can we be sure?” David said.
“Everybody out,” Aussie said.
“I’m in command here, Aussie. I’ll do it,” Brentwood said.
“Fuck off!”
“This is an order,” Brentwood said. “Get unbuckled. I’ll drive.”
“I’m the fucking driver. I’m not moving till you’re out.”
David looked up at the man on the TOW. “How about you, Stansfield?”
“I can’t get out,” he lied. “Something’s wrong with my buckle.”
“You stupid bastards,” Aussie said. “All right, hang on!” With that, Aussie drove through the howling, spitting wind directly at the 28cm wooden-cased mine. As he saw it looming up he shifted uneasily in his seat and, driving over it, cupped his left hand under his genitals and closed his eyes. Nothing happened. He put the FAV quickly in reverse and ran over it again. Then he pulled the pin on a five-second grenade, dropped it by the mine, and put his boot to the accelerator. A hundred feet from it the explosion sent out a shock wave through the sand that was like a ripple through water.
“Well,” Aussie said, “we know they’re not dummies. Bastards are genuine enough. But they won’t be set off by a FAV’s overpressure. That’s something anyway.”
Brentwood grabbed the radio phone to tell Freeman he could again have to slow his advance to single file or as many files as he had flail tanks that could go ahead, whipping the ground with their heavy chains to detonate the mines. He asked Freeman what they should do next, though he and Aussie and everyone on the FAV radio network guessed it already.
“Boys,” Freeman said to tank crew and FAV alike, “we’re slowing down and our tanks’ll have to get behind as many flails as we can. Cheng’s going to have time to move his guns across from the right flank, maybe directly in front of us. There’s a ridge at the end of the corridor where it narrows. They’ll use this high ground for their artillery. M1’s range is damn good at three thousand meters but it can’t overtake their thirteen-mile-range artillery. You boys in the FAVs are going to go in ahead of us.”
“Holy cow!” a FAV driver said. “If an M1 tank can’t outshoot Cheng’s artillery, how the hell are we going to?”
Freeman knew well enough they were in a tight spot, made worse by the lack of attention paid to detail by his new logistics whiz, Whitely. Up in Chita Whitely had been through every detail, from the size of every bolt to water decontamination
pills, but he’d assumed that the rail gauge of the Trans-Siberian, which the Americans had to use when supplies were unloaded at the port of Rudnaya Pristan, would be the same as that of China. It wasn’t. And to change troops and their equipment from one train to another was infinitely more complex than the average person realized or could ever imagine. To move tanks, especially those fitted with flails and so vitally needed down south, was a logistical nightmare. Whitely had no contingency plan for how to get U.S. cargo moved quickly from Trans-Siberian gauge to Chinese gauge. Freeman had fired him as soon as he’d found out, but that didn’t change the situation.
What would change it was Freeman’s knowledge of the minutiae of war that yet again would contribute to the Freeman legend. It was nothing mysterious, and quite simple once explained to any soldier, or civilian for that matter, and it had to do with angles of fire.
“Now listen up,” Freeman said to the FAVs. “Quickly now! We don’t know exactly where Cheng’s guns are at the moment.”
Freeman had no way of knowing it in the blinding hell of the Gobi storm, but Cheng was about to let him know with the biggest artillery salvo since the Sino-Soviet wars of the sixties. It would be the opening barrage — over two hundred guns — of what was to become known as the battle for Orgon Tal, or “Big Dick” as it was known to Freeman’s Second Army, the tiny settlement of Orgon Tal being near the railhead Freeman hoped to capture midcorridor and so sever Cheng’s supply line from the east.
* * *
Cheng, nonplussed by reports of sightings of Freeman’s forces attacking both at the dunes to the east and regrouping in the tunneled area, had to decide now whether to rush down more troops from the northern armies on the Manchurian front. This attack of Freeman’s might well be a feint like that used against Hussein in ‘91, with the main body of the U.S.’s Second Army’s AirLand battle strategy yet to strike all across the Manchurian border as Freeman had done before shifting his attack south.
It was then that Cheng decided he needed more up-to-date intelligence, and the truth was General Cheng believed that no one could deduce more from interrogation than he could; this Malof woman, for example, the Russian Jewess who had led the underground resistance in the Jewish autonomous region on the Manchurian border and who had just been recaptured north of Harbin after several months of freedom following the cease-fire. She had been a great help to the Americans with her band of Jewish bandits harassing China border traffic all along the Black Dragon.
Whether or not this harassment was itself part of a larger set piece in the Americans’ overall battle plan would tell Cheng a great deal about Freeman’s strategy. Cheng knew that they also had, in Beijing Jail, an American SAS/D trooper, Smythe, who might be of use as well, knowing how the SAS/D worked as auxiliaries to main attacking forces. Accordingly, he ordered them both rushed to the Orgon Tal railhead with any other prisoners who had been captured within the last week or two. By four p.m. he should have at least sixteen POWs — mostly Chinese June 4 or Democracy Movement members — and saboteurs caught around Harbin, including the Russian Jewess.
Meanwhile he assumed Freeman was attacking on two fronts locally: upon the dunes to the east of Orgon Tal and through the sandstorm-blasted corridor, and accordingly gave the order that his heavy guns, especially the towed M 1955 203mm with its eleven-mile-range, 2,200-pound shells, his three-mile-range Attila Mk11 multiple rocket launchers and his D4 122mm seventeen-mile gun with its rate of fire of six to seven rounds per minute, be moved as fast as possible into the middle of the southern end of the corridor. Cheng’s troops positioned the guns on an east-west axis atop a hundred-foot tongue of clay that ran east to west for several thousand yards a few miles north of Orgon Tal railhead, so that the artillery and the railhead line formed a rough T, the artillery in effect protecting the railhead.
Cheng envisaged his trap now as a dragon’s mouth. The teeth would be the mine fields atop the network of tunnels that the American tanks would have to negotiate first, while at the back of the dragon’s mouth came the flame of the artillery, the latter’s mobile dish radars sitting like clumps of high ears atop the ridge not visible beyond thirty feet in the dust storm.
* * *
Cheng entered the Orgon Tal railway station’s waiting room, as bare of human comfort as anyone could imagine, looking more like a barrack that had been opened to the searing breath of the Gobi. But at least it afforded some shelter from the storm. The sixteen prisoners were told to stand. They ranged from a small, wiry student, shaking so much Cheng could actually hear his teeth chattering, to an old man in his seventies, his face creased like leather.
“It’s hot in here!” Cheng told the student contemptuously. “Why are you shaking?”
“I’m cold,” said the boy, about fourteen years old.
“You’re guilty!” Cheng said, his arm and hand rigid, fully extended, tapping the boy’s shoulder with such single-minded and increasing force that the boy looked as if he would collapse. The boy had already wet himself in fear.
“You are all guilty!” Cheng said, looking about like an angry schoolmaster. In his experience it was the best possible way to break down a prisoner’s resistance. Criminal or not, everybody was guilty of something, all the way from murder, to petty theft as a child, to sexual fantasies they could not possibly confess to those they loved, to resentment of the party. Yes, they were all guilty.
“You!” Cheng said to a man in his mid-forties, a worker in a fading blue Mao suit. “What instructions do you get from the Americans?”
“None, Comrade General.”
Cheng looked at him and believed him, but it didn’t matter. Often they knew more than they realized. Cheng was still unsure if this corridor attack was merely a feint to hide the fact of a massive U.S. attack south from the Amur to grab all Manchuria. He walked behind the prisoners.
“Look to your front!” a major bellowed. There was a shot — a worker’s face exploding like a melon, parts of his grayish brain scattered on the sandy wooden floor.
One prisoner, the boy, gave a moan and collapsed. Cheng pushed him gently with his boot. “Wake up. Get up!”
The major kicked the boy. “Get—”
“No!” Cheng told the major. “Don’t hurt him. Help him to his feet.”
The boy tried to get up but dry-retched and stayed on his knees, looking strangely like a wet cat. There was another shot, and the boy’s torso crumpled and seemed to melt into his arms before he fell sideways with a bump into a pool of his blood.
It was imperative to Cheng to be unpredictable in such circumstances. This held more fear than most people could bear. “I will return in a half hour. I want to know what your orders were from the Americans. Tell the major — word for word. If you tell the truth you will receive reduced prison sentences. Whatever you say will be carefully checked, and if it is found that the information you have given is incorrect, you will die — more slowly than these two.” He indicated the worker and the student.
As Cheng walked out he told the major, “I want those reports in half an hour.”
“Yes, Comrade General.”
The major had only four guards and so asked who of the prisoners could read or write.
A man in his late fifties, though he looked much older, and Alexsandra Malof indicated they could.
“Very well,” he said to Alexsandra. “You take half the group — the old man the other six. Take their statements including your own.”
“I have no pen or paper,” the old man said.
“Neither have I,” Alexsandra said.
The major ordered one of the guards to go to the nearest HQ tent along the rail line and get pen and paper.
“Major,” Alexsandra asked, forcing a smile despite the grim circumstances, “may I confer with the old man as to how we might—”
“No.” The major looked at her, the hostility in his eyes so intense that she fully expected him to slap her. “You think that I am an idiot?”
“No,” she said, feignin
g surprise.
“You are awarded the Medal of Freedom by the Americans and you think this will protect you?” he asked bitterly.
“No — I just thought it might be helpful if—”
“You thought,” the major said, “that you could influence the old man and the others.”
“No, I—”
“Be quiet!” The major strode out of the room quickly, looking for the guard he’d sent. Alexsandra coughed and tried to say something to the next prisoner, but her beauty, her dark, silken hair, dark eyes, and a figure whose curves not even a Mao suit could hide intimidated the prisoner, another young male student.
All four of the guards were staring, gawking, at her. “Nimen hui shuo Yingwen ma? You speak English?” she asked them pleasantly. They shook their heads. Still looking at them, she made a writing motion against her hand, but she was talking to the prisoners either side of her. “This is the only American attack. They won’t attack along the Amur,” she said, still looking and smiling at the guards. “This is the real attack here. If anyone in the line speaks English pass the message down. The Americans aren’t going to attack from the Amur. This is the real attack.”
One guard started to wave at her, shaking his head censoriously side to side. Another, getting the same idea, jabbed ineffectually at the air in front of him with his bayonet. Their message was clear and they could see the major coming back, but by then the prisoners had been whispering among themselves, barely audible in the wind, the guards moving toward them threateningly, yelling at them, “An jing yi xia! Be quiet!”
The major and the guard accompanying him had two sheets of paper and pencils and immediately gave them to Alexsandra and the old man. The old man thanked the major but said in broken but very clear English, “I do not think we know so much, Comrade.”
“Talk in Chinese,” the major yelled at him, “and get on with it.”
* * *
Backfiring, the FAV leapt into the air at an acute angle, and for a moment Aussie, Brentwood, and the TOW operator thought they’d been hit.