by Ian Slater
“Did you fart?” Aussie yelled over at Brentwood, who ignored him, David’s eyes looking hard through the goggles for any enemy movement up ahead. He saw another mine, directed Aussie to it, where they dumped a grenade and took off again, followed by the unusual hollow sound audible even above the wind, which betrayed the existence of a tunnel exit near the detonated mine. Aussie made a quick U-turn, saw a “manhole” half exposed, like a trapdoor spider’s web, and braked the FAV as David gave the manhole several bursts of machine gun fire until it was perforated like the top of an old beer barrel given to the ax. They dropped two flash grenades and, following their boomp! tossed in their “skip” antipersonnel mines. These steel-spring-legged, spidery-looking mines were preset to go off when approached, filling the air with enough shrapnel to kill anyone up to ninety feet away. In the tunnel it would be even more devastating.
“No more diversions!” Brentwood ordered Aussie. “Let the guys in the tanks deal with the manholes. Besides, they can follow our tracks. Freeman wants us up front, fast.”
“I know,” Aussie said, his lips stung by the sand. “Just didn’t want any bastards popping up behind us.”
“I’ll keep watch!” the TOW operator shouted.
“You watch your front!” Brentwood corrected him. “You’ve got the extra height. I want you to see the guns before they see us.”
“Bloody charge of the Light Brigade!” Aussie called out, recalling the famous and doomed charge of the British cavalry against the Russian guns at Balaclava.
“FAV’s better than a horse!” Brentwood retorted. “And we have—”
“Sagger!” the TOW operator yelled. “Eleven o’clock low!”
It was coming at them like a curdling, spinning glob of gray spit through the mustard-colored air, and Aussie began his evasive driving, willing his nerves to hold till the last possible moment before going into a turn that hopefully would be too acute for the Sagger. But Brentwood got lucky— a bullet or two from the long burst of his.50 machine gun hit the Sagger. There was an explosion like molten egg yolk, a stream of blackish white smoke, and the whistling of shrapnel, one piece hitting the FAV’s front bumper. Aussie felt his left thigh was wet and feared one of the jerricans of gas had been hit. But the cans were all right.
“Oh Christ!” It was Brentwood. “Stop!” David downshifted and braked, and an even denser cloud of dust enveloped them from behind as the vehicle shuddered and slewed to a halt. Brentwood was looking back. The TOW operator still clung to the shoulder-height roll bar, but his head was gone, the shrapnel having decapitated him, his torso a fountain of warm, spurting blood.
They only had time to unbuckle him — his dog tags were gone — and lay him on the sand. Aussie got back into the driver’s seat while Brentwood used two standard-issue condoms to tie down the Browning.50 for the rough ride ahead and then mounted the wet bloody seat of the TOW operator and buckled up. Without a word Aussie set off again down the corridor — four miles to go and only God knew what lay ahead. He was struck again by the sheer bloody confusion of war. At this moment neither he nor, he suspected, any of the other FAVs, Bradleys, or M1s, knew whether they were winning or not. Now the scream of Cheng’s salvos passed overhead to create havoc amid Freeman’s columns.
* * *
“Well, Major?” Cheng asked. “What have you found out?”
The major handed him the sheaf of interrogation papers. “It’s a jumble of patriotic assurances,” the major said, “but several of them said that this attack of the Americans around Orgon Tal here is the major attack. This means the Americans’ actions along the Black Dragon are only diversions to keep our troops up there — that they will not attack any further along the Amur.”
Cheng looked at the four reports that made more or less the same point. “Where are the prisoners now?”
“In their cells,” the major responded. What he meant was that they were in four-foot-square, four-foot-deep holes in the desert earth covered with spiked bamboo grates weighed down by rail ties so that the prisoner, not allowed to sit, could not stand properly either. The guards watched three or four cells each and could do so at one glance. Already there was the smell of human excrement coming from some of the holes as Cheng waited for the major to play the small, cigarette-size cassette tape recorder that had been given to one of the guards. He turned the volume up, but the sound of the storm was too powerful, like a frying-fish noise covering the conversation — or whatever the Jewess had said to the guards. The major pushed “rewind” and slid the little volume stick back to the mid position. Now they could hear her — not well but enough to make out that it was she telling the others to say that this attack against Orgon Tal was the full AirLand attack.
The major saw Cheng smile at the information. Even a neophyte in Intelligence listening to the tape could tell what she was up to. She knew that everyone would give up sooner or later under torture and most would give up much sooner man that. She was a veteran. And so she’d concocted the idea that this assault against Orgon Tal was the only attack in the hopes of persuading him, Cheng, to move his northern armies south away from the river. She had asked the guards whether they had spoken English — which none of them did— then she’d proceeded to tell the others what to confess, but not all of them — just enough — four — hopefully to convince Cheng that this was the real attack.
“She’s been too clever by half,” Cheng said, with a smile of deep satisfaction. “The Americans obviously have a plan to attack from the north. The incidents along the Black River and Amur and around A-7 have not been diversionary. She’s told us precisely what Freeman is up to, Major. The Americans are going to do exactly the opposite of what she told them to tell us. There will be an attack from the north, and so we must reroute some of our southern divisions northward.”
There was a tone of urgency when Cheng asked the major, “Is our towed artillery in place?” He meant had there been time to move the artillery that had been sent to the dunes east of them back to Orgon Tal?
“They should be ready within—”
The heavy thumps of ChiCom “Pepperpots,” the long, muzzle-braked 203mm howitzers, gave him the answer, with their seventeen-mile-range, two-hundred-pound shells tearing through the sandstorm above the U.S. tanks. Because there was no reliable radar guidance for me Pepperpots due to the storm clutter it was strictly harassment fire, but soon Cheng’s underground tunnel troops could hear the M1A1 Abrams approaching and could give the approximate quadrant as the fifty-ton tanks proceeded slowly overhead behind the terrible din of chain flails setting off the mines. But soon, Cheng knew, when all of the tanks became visible to manhole positions, quadrant vectors would be much more precise, and his artillery would cut the Americans to pieces. It was all a race against time, but the ChiComs could afford to wait for me M1A1s to come forward, the M1s’ effective range being three thousand meters, the Americans’ 105mm howitzers’ seven-mile range hopelessly outreached by the six giant seventeen-mile-range Pepperpots.
To be on the safe side Cheng had kept his armor well back behind the rail line spur at Orgon Tal, to be deployed only should any of Freeman’s armor break through the artillery-pounded corridor. To further bolster his confidence there was the fact that his T-59 and T-72 main battle tanks outnumbered the Americans four to one and, as he’d told his superiors, were manned by China’s best, not by demoralized Iraqis.
“What about the prisoners?” the major asked Cheng. “Shoot them?”
Cheng shrugged. “Now or later. But I’d prefer the Americans to do it.”
The major was puzzled.
“Keep them in the cages for now,” Cheng instructed.
“Yes, General.”
Cheng, they said, had a use for everything. In a winter campaign against the Siberians many years ago he had used the frozen corpses of his own dead strapped together to make up sleds so as to pull more ammunition and supplies across the frozen lakes and through the snow.
* * *
Reports were c
oming in that some of the light American fast-attack vehicles were in advance of the tanks. Saggers had hit three or four, but they were still coming. Cheng was perplexed. It was so un-American — why on earth was Freeman sacrificing relatively lightly armed vehicles, compared to the M1 tanks he had, at the front? Another one of Freeman’s feints perhaps?
“But if these ‘buggies’ get through to the guns,” the major suggested worriedly, “they could cause havoc with our gun crews.”
Cheng looked at the major as if he were mad. “Our Pepperpots would blow them to kingdom come before they got anywhere near us, Major.”
“If we could see them,” the major began, “and if—”
“All right,” Cheng said, “we’ll surprise them.” With that he gave the order for all tunnel troops to exit — to forget about the tanks, which could be dealt with by the big guns. To exit and make their priority targets the American “dune buggies.”
* * *
Then, one of the American FAV drivers said, it was as if God had suddenly intervened — on the Chinese side. The storm suddenly began to abate, making the ChiCom infantry and the American FAVs more visible and allowing the dish antennae of the ChiComs’ radar to start picking up some of the FAVs.
“Take them out!” Brentwood yelled above the storm into the FAV radio net. “Fast!”
With needles quivering on their 4,400 rpm dials, the Chenowth Fast Attack Vehicles, souped up to hit seventy-five miles per hour in battle conditions, hadn’t been seen before by the Chinese troops.
The FAVs had extraordinary firepower, with an M-60 machine gun fore and aft and assault rifle for each of the three men strapped into the vehicle, a 40mm grenade launcher, laser target designator, and an antitank missile launcher with steel-webbed side compartments for casualty litters if necessary or for extra ammo and boxes of explosive. They were moving much fester than the tanks. The air-cooled FAV engine was well muffled and rear mounted, its cooling fins low down so that its infrared signature would be low to the enemy ahead.
The Chinese poured out of the tunnels, and for the first time in the newspaper reports the phrase “swarms of attacking Chinese” was appropriate. There was no doubt that the ChiComs, with their Red Arrow antitank missiles and machine guns, would take out at least a third of the 70 FAVs, others already starting to be attacked by saturation mortar bombardments. The buggies were often picked up off the ground by the concussion only to disappear in explosions marked by oily orange smudges in a rain of dust. It was not known whether the Chinese would have time to stop all of them.
One FAV came up over a rise at forty miles an hour, and ran down five ChiComs just as they were emerging from their tunnel exit. Another FAV — its engine hit, stalled in the sand — became a magnet to a platoon of ChiCom infantry, like ants encircling a piece of meat. The three Americans were cut to pieces, but there was no longer a Chinese platoon of thirty men — only half of them remained to claim a passing victory, and several of these were fatally wounded.
Back further, an M1 Abrams stopped, its front right track spinning off under the blow of shrapnel from a Pepperpot high-explosive shell hitting the earth only yards away. Then coming from the south through the gaps in their artillery at the Chinese end of the corridor came several companies of ChiCom motorcycle- and machine-gun-mounted sidecars, every fifth motorcycle and sidecar unit carrying a Sagger.
“One o’clock in the dip!” Aussie yelled to Brentwood, his face creasing momentarily from the sickly sweet stench of burning bodies. But even as he spoke he felt the hot rush of superheated air from the TOW’s backblast. The pinion occupants of the motorcycle and sidecar unit were firing frantically and in the sidecar another ChiCom was working the toggle on his Sagger when the motorcyclist, still on his bike, was lifted skyward, and, in a somersault, was aflame, the sidecar no more than a hunk of burning metal sixty yards away from where the burning motorcyclist landed and broke in half, his body shriveled black, pieces of him peeling off in the high wind like sheets of burned newspaper.
Driving with his left hand, his right firing his assault rifle, which he had braced against the passenger’s side M-60, Aussie was heading for another motorbike and sidecar coming straight at him, the sidecar machine gunner having only a ninety degree front-to-left arc in which to fire, otherwise there was danger of him shooting his driver. Aussie pulled the FAV hard left, giving the machine gunner on the sidecar even less of an angle as Brentwood popped off four 40mm grenades from their launcher. None actually hit the motorcycle and sidecar unit, but the shrapnel cut into the motorcyclist, who looked down, saw blood, and for a second lost concentration. The front wheel of the bike jackknifed, and they were over, the sidecar man crawling out, drawing his sidearm.
“Keep going!” Brentwood shouted, conscious that it was still a race to the Chinese guns before the storm cleared enough for the ChiCom radars to be effective against the M1A1s. There was the zing of small-arms fire off the “cage” of the FAV’s roll bar frame.
“Cheeky bastard!” Aussie yelled. “I oughta go back and run ‘im over.”
“Keep going!” Brentwood shouted.
“Yes, sir! Righto, sir!” Already everything was mustard looking, visibility twenty feet maximum. “Jesus, we’re doing sixty!”
“Faster!”
* * *
The sand-blasted desert was now taking on the aspect of a moonscape caused by everything from the explosions of the big PLA 160mm, 100mm, and the 82mm mortars to the huge Pepperpots, their HE shells screaming overhead louder than normal because of sand blown onto hot metal, the sense of a hot moonscape added to by the explosions of SAS/D TOW missiles, though Brentwood could be heard yelling above the sandstorm on the FAV radio network that they should conserve TOW rounds for heavier targets. He meant PLA armored personnel carriers type 82 and multiple rocket launchers mounted atop type-85 APCs, as well as the Hongjian 8 missiles carried by the type-531 APCs.
As he repeated the order, a “pic” stick or stick grenade bounced off the spare tire and exploded ten feet behind the FAV. Another Chinese twenty yards ahead of them pulled a cord fuse of another “pic” grenade, but it blew up instantly, taking his hand off. David Brentwood didn’t know why but the ChiComs had a fixation about picric acid. It had cost them quite a few hands, the acid-packed grenade becoming dangerously unstable if any moisture was allowed to accumulate in the grenade boxes. But then picric acid was cheap, and the PLA had three million men to arm. Cheng probably figured the odd hand was worth it; the cast-iron shrapnel from the stick grenade when it worked had been the cause of many American casualties in Southeast Asia, American medevac choppers being called in to carry out the wounded.
Whenever the Americans were hit they had the habit of stopping until their wounded were taken care of. To wound an American seriously, in Cheng’s view, was better than killing him — for it tied up at least a dozen men, from first-aid types to chopper crews who could have been more useful carrying the battle forward. Indeed Freeman was already ordering troop-carrying Hueys, “Blackhawks,” up forward, not in an evac role but to see whether it was yet feasible to use them in an offensive role in the storm. But nap-of-the-earth flying was well-nigh impossible because of the ground clutter caused by the bouncing of millions of pieces of silica, the sand reflecting radar rays in a dancing static.
Besides, banks of PLA type-77 and W-85 12.7mm AA machine guns were radar linked, and once the helos rose above twenty or thirty feet some of them were coming under fire, for at this height they were out of the radar clutter that prevented them from flying nap-of-the-earth but it took them high enough to be picked up on the most powerful of the ChiComs’ radar. Freeman ordered them to land and wait till the high winds and sandstorm abated enough to reduce the “bounce-back” clutter on their own radars. It was a mistake.
Chinese infantry streaming out of the holes had taken out four of Freeman’s helos with “corncobs,” the name given by the Americans to the conical shape of the 40mm type-69 antitank grenade round. Freeman quickly orde
red the helos to get airborne, at least those that were not shot up too much, to return to their hover positions behind the tanks four miles back.
Freeman cursed himself for such a dumb move, which the La Roche tabloids would have called “brilliant and daring” if it had worked out and opened a hole in the ChiCom defenses but which even now was being described by one of CBN’s “four-wire” phone-in rear observers as “Freeman Reeling before PLA!”
The only bit of good news Freeman got that day was that Admiral Kuang — true to his word — was apparently en route to the Chinese mainland off Fukien province and so, Freeman hoped, was effectively bottling up the PLA’s Army Group One and Group Twelve in the Nanjing military district that served Fukien province.
Freeman had already lost fourteen M1A1s — and most of their crews — to the Pepperpot harassment fire. It was to be expected under such odds, and he was confident that once out of the corridor bounded by high dunes right and left of him he’d have room to move, and then he’d show Cheng what the M1s, free of a mine field, could do. But against this he had a morale problem, his troops’ earlier enthusiasm already hemorrhaging with the loss of fourteen tanks and their crews. And he knew that if they broke through to the end of the corridor they would still be facing four to five tanks for each of the M1s and that those odds would go higher every time Freeman lost another M1 while being forced to proceed in column behind the flail and other antimine grader tanks. Yet to retreat would be to suffer the same kind of attrition among his tanks, as the Pepperpots would not let up.
“Problem is,” he told Dick Norton, who was now aboard a Bradley APC running close alongside him in the lee of one of the grader tanks, “our guys got a bit spoiled with Saddam Insane. For all our smart bombs duly reported by a tightly controlled press — you know 75 percent of all bombs dropped failed completely to hit their targets?”
Norton nodded. Actually the general was wrong. It was even worse: Over 77 percent of all bombs had missed their targets in Iraq, but the army had controlled the press in a way it had never been able to in Vietnam, and the few spectacular successes with the smart bombs made the whole Iraqi campaign seem a walkover that Freeman and others should be able to duplicate.