by Ian Slater
Beatty realized his mistake, but too late, for by then the two Chinese pincers of the breaststroke had closed on the southern bank — three Guard companies, 520 men in all, having the express task of mortar bombing the fog-shrouded ice and pontoons, hence not only destroying any natural bridge for an American retreat but smashing their supply line.
Meanwhile Chinese T-59s, up-gunned T-55s, were now moving up the road from the deserted barracks to Xunhe village and toward the bridge — the American First Battalion taking the brunt of the armored attack while Second Battalion quickly made an abatis, sappers from Second Battalion blowing trees at a height of five to six feet from their base, felling them at approximately a forty-five-degree angle, creating a formidable obstacle course of fallen but not completely severed trees along the road, delaying the tanks for two hours. This saved some Americans from death, if not capture, but the bulk of the American force remained cut off from retreat.
The Chinese were so close to them that even if Beatty called in TACAIR strikes, the fog would deny the pilots any reliable identification of friend or foe. The final blood-boiling humiliation for the Americans was the glimpse of a lone, low-flying Phantom fighter, which might have at least made an attempt to rake the old ChiCom barracks with its 20mm cannon, but which made only one low pass in a gap in the fog and then turned eastward, presumably hightailing it for the coast.
* * *
Within minutes of the Phantom slamming down on the deck at 150 miles per hour, its tail grabbing the three-wire arrestor cable, its video shown aboard Salt Lake City revealed sullen-looking hills in a stark monochrome, covered for the most part with fog, and hills further south devoid of fog but covered with what seemed like thousands of insects, zoom shots showing, however, that they were Chinese regulars advancing along an estimated fifty-mile front against the Poyarkovo section of the U.N.-Manchurian line.
One of the more brazen acts of lying, even by Communist standards, occurred the following day in the U.N., when General Cheng’s emissaries tried to explain away the Xunhe “incident” by claiming that the presence of PLA troops was in response to concerns over banditry in the area. Bandits, it was said, had been responsible for launching the hit-and-run attack on the Japanese Defense Force — the PLA presence merely a reaction to the Americans violating the integrity of China’s borders.
“Oh no,” President Mayne said, “not this time. Those bastards can’t have their cake and eat it, too. They started this. We’ll finish it.”
“What can we do?” press secretary and adviser Trainor asked. “Beatty made a complete hash of—”
“Reinstate Freeman!”
“But Mr. President…” the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff began.
“Unleash him!” Mayne ordered.
“Yes, sir.”
“But Trainor—” the president added.
“Yes, Mr. President?”
“Tell him to end it as soon as he contains it. This isn’t a fishing expedition.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You think that’ll do it, Mr. President?” inquired Schuman, the national security advisor.
“We’ll see,” Mayne answered.
The president’s advisers were not sure what he meant by it. What would they see? The end of the fighting, or how difficult it was to contain Douglas Freeman once he was unleashed?
CHAPTER TEN
Khabarovsk
“That son of a bitch tried to kill me.” They were the first words Freeman uttered upon touching down at Khabarovsk.
“You mean Cheng?” Norton inquired.
“I mean Cheng. Monkey wants to make it personal. Well, Dick, I won’t fall for that piece of Sun Tzu about getting angry and then losing the battle because you lose your head. I’m not angry, Norton.”
“No, sir.”
“I’m mad as hell!” Freeman pulled on his learner gloves. “Weather’s supposed to be warming up.”
“It is, sir.”
“Course, Dick,” Freeman said, striding toward his staff car like an old athlete resurrected, “trick is not to stay mad. Be cool. Rational.”
“Yes, sir.”
“What’s his disposition of forces?”
“We figure it at ten divisions minimum on the Manchurian border. More coming.”
“They got that damn Nanking Bridge fixed over the Yangtze?” It was the bridge that the captured Smythe and the other SEALs had attacked and severed earlier in the war.
“Figure they must have, General,” Norton said. “Either that or they’ve put a pontoon across — though that would take some making. It’s at least three miles across there.”
Freeman grunted, pulled up his collar, and buttoned it at the throat. “Should be warmer than this. We heard anything from that SAS/D troop?”
“No, sir.”
“That’s good news then.” The commandos were on radio silence.
“We hope, sir.”
“How far would they be from Ulan Bator?”
“They ‘re flying in on a Pave Low now.”
“What’s the drill?” Freeman asked. “A burst radio message approximately forty-eight hours from now when they’ve completed their mission?”
“Yes, sir — if they do.”
“Pray to God we get that message through, Dick.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Anything else?” He sensed there was — Norton had that look about him.
“Yes, sir.”
“Spit it out!”
Norton slipped a folder from his flip-top briefcase as they entered the Quonset hut. “Bad news I’m afraid. Photos,” he said, taking a steaming cup of coffee from the general. “All from Ofek-10.” It was the Israeli high-resolution electro-optical camera satellite, one of those launched by IAI–Israeli Aviation Industries — using a Shavit, or “comet” rocket, known to Freeman’s G-2 staff as a “Shove it!”
“Well,” Freeman said, looking down at the whitish shape made by the microdot-size pixels that looked about half the size of a cigarette filter against a background of gray, barren landscape. “Sure as hell aren’t Scuds.”
“East Winds,” Norton said. “Type four. Confirmed by the Pentagon. Conventional or three-megaton payload. Range three thousand miles. Has a circular error probability of around plus or minus two miles — so Tel Aviv says. But a CEP of plus or minus two miles doesn’t matter much if they’re after a big target like a city or—”
“An army,” Freeman said.
“Yes, sir. They’re theater-level offensive all right — not divisional. That’s why I thought you ought to see them straight away.”
Freeman sat down, patting his shirt for his bifocals, couldn’t find them, and had to go to the makeshift bedroom where he retrieved a spare pair from atop a Gideon Bible, its pages held open by a box of buckshot cartridges for the Winchester 1200 shotgun he kept by his bedside. The general found he didn’t need his glasses after all, for even without them Israeli and Pentagon intelligence reports had already concurred with Dick Norton’s assessment, classifying the missiles in large, black capitals as INF — intermediate nuclear forces — from PLA’s Second Artillery. He was shaking his head in disgust as well as alarm.
“I told them in Washington. I told them the moment those goddamned fairies signed that INF treaty with the Russians. While we were sending our Pershings to the scrap heap, and the Russians were doing the same—” He looked up at Norton, then back down at the missiles, a cluster of six of them. “Beijing, my friend, was grinning — ear-to-ear. Moment Gorby and Reagan signed the INF, China became the number one INF power in the world. You figure the fairies didn’t think of that?” Freeman was getting madder by the second. “I tell you what, Norton, when I think of all that goddamn incompetence running around loose in Washington it makes my blood—” The general stopped midsentence, directing a wary glance at Norton. “These infrared confirmed?”
“Yes, sir.” Norton knew that the general was remembering the humiliation heaped upon him by the press — the La Roche tab
loids in particular — for the casualties Second Army had suffered earlier in the Siberian campaign, when Freeman believed, as intelligence had reported, that he was about to engage a division of enemy tanks hidden in the taiga. They had also been infrared confirmed, the Siberians having simply put battery-powered heaters inside the plastic mockups of the T-80s to give off a sufficient infrared signature to fool aerial reconnaissance.
As well as leading his armor into the trap, Freeman had sent Apaches on ahead to soften the Siberian armor up, only to have over fifteen of the Hellfire missile-armed choppers blown out of the sky by VAMs, or vertical area mines. Freeman knew that he’d been lucky that he’d lost only the battle on the Never-Skovorodino road and not the war. It was a lesson he’d not soon forget. “Any other confirmation?” he pressed Norton.
Norton reached over, turning past the photographs to page three of the typed report. “Yes, sir. Indentation. We can tell from blowups of the tire tracks in the desert approximately how many tons the carrier vehicles and loads are. The indentation weight equals that of a missile. If they’re fakes, they’re sure as hell heavy ones. And you know how the ChiComs are about fuel. It’s damn near a capital offense to waste a gallon in the Chinese army. I don’t think they’d be driving heavy fakes around for fun.”
From the coordinates, Freeman could tell at a glance that it was somewhere in Sinkiang province, Lanzhou military region. “Missile sites at Lop Nor?”
“Further west than that,” Norton answered. “Past the Turpan depression — in the foothills of the Tien Shan range. Pentagon and Israeli intelligence figure the missiles were originally situated there because Moscow was well within striking distance. They still don’t trust one another. Especially now. With the breakup of the old Soviet Union, Beijing’s afraid the disease’ll spread.”
“Maybe,” Freeman replied, “but the point is, Dick, their three-thousand-mile radius means they could easily reach us.”
“That’s what the report concludes, General. Washington and Tel Aviv are agreed on that. Only need to hit us with two or three in the first salvo and that’d be it for Second Army.”
Freeman was tapping his teeth with his bifocals, a habit that annoyed Norton intensely.
“By God, Dick, what we need is a preemptive strike. Apart from anything else those missiles are so close to the border they’re a gift to Yesov if he wanted to use them against us — if he and the Chinese are in cahoots. Remember in Siberia, Novosibirsk doesn’t like Moscow any more than Beijing.” The general saw Norton’s unease about a preemptive strike.
“I know, I know.” Freeman waved his hand impatiently. “Fairies’ll have a fit. Hopefully the White House will back us this time. I think that’s why MOSSAD sent their report straight to Washington.”
“But if we move anything in there, General, we’d be in a much wider war with China. Sixty-eight divisions against our forty-four, and these’re only the divisions on the Sino-Siberian border.”
Freeman didn’t need the figures. He already knew that China’s full-time army alone stood at over one hundred divisions — a million and a half men — and this ignored the two million men they had in the reserves. And Freeman knew the Chinese weren’t Iraqis. It wouldn’t be simply a mass of poorly led conscripts he’d have to face if it hit the fan. To a man, the Chinese were volunteers, and long-term volunteers at that. Like the German Wehrmacht, the PLA had taken pains to make sure that the members of any unit came from not only the same province, but wherever possible from the same village. It seemed like a small enough detail, but Freeman pointed out it was enormously important in terms of morale. You might bug out in front of strangers, but it’d be a long time before you’d let your own village down. Everyone in the village knew you and your parents. The disgrace would be total. It went a long way to making up for lack of sophisticated weaponry — the United States had learned that in ‘Nam.
And, as they’d shown in Korea, the ChiCom commanders knew a few more tricks than the Iraqis, like slipping a division or two — over twenty thousand men — right under your damn nose. They’d wait for a thunderstorm to trip off all the ground-movement sensors, then move. And PLA officers, while paid more, were much closer to their men than the Iraqi officers had been to theirs. In this respect the Chinese were more like their traditional enemies, the Vietnamese. Still, Freeman was confronted by the brutal reality of the missiles. A massive attack on Second Army could take out its heart. The problem would be to get permission for a bombing mission to try to take out the missiles. It was so deep into China—2,300 miles — that if the bombers were to stand a chance of getting through to the target, the flight, given the fractures found in more Stealths, would have to consist of B-52s originating out of western Europe.
But most likely France wouldn’t allow it — just as she’d refused permission for the U.S. to overfly French soil in the raid against Qaddafi in Libya. There was nothing for it but to ask the White House to ask the Brits. Still, Maggie Thatcher was long gone, and elements of the leftist Labour party opposition were bound to oppose such a flight as they had in the case of Libya.
* * *
In Beijing, meanwhile, the extent of General Beatty’s unexpected response had made it clear that China was now de facto in a war with the United States. Both Premier Nie’s and General Cheng’s forcefully stated determination to defend China’s borders “against imperialist U.S. aggression” immediately gave way to reawakening Asian memories of the humiliating defeat inflicted upon the Americans in Vietnam.
The Chinese hated the Vietnamese, who were continually arguing over border areas and the resource-rich islands in the South China Sea, but nevertheless Nie and Cheng had no qualms about invoking the Vietnamese victory over the Americans to remind the PLA that a much smaller Asian country had defeated the mighty U.S.A. Besides, the PLA was many times the size of the North Vietnamese army, and for the PLA to be victorious over the Americans along the Black Dragon River in the north would enhance China’s reputation in all Asia, particularly given the vacuum left by the demise of the USSR.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Britain
The minister for defense, Stanley Wright-Attersley, was sitting at the long cabinet room table at 10 Downing Street, a battered-looking red box of ministerial documents in front of him on the green baize-covered table. When the P.M. entered, Wright-Attersley rose. “Prime Minister.”
“Is my information correct, Stanley — the French won’t come on side?”
“Afraid so, sir. Elysée Palace issued a secret memo earlier this morning that the French cabinet deem it ‘an inappropriate response to the misunderstanding along the Black Dragon River.’ “
“Is that what they actually said — a misunderstanding along the Black Dragon, not the Amur?”
“Yes, Prime Minister. They’re afraid that an American bombing mission would, to quote their president, ‘inflame the situation further.’ “
“Misunderstanding?” the prime minister huffed. “My God, the Chinese attacked the U.N. line. Any schoolboy could understand it.”
Wright-Attersley nodded. “Quite so, Prime Minister. But we’re dealing with the French.”
The P.M. grunted, pulled out a chair, and his aide knew it would be a pot-of-tea decision.
“Darjeeling, Prime Minister, or Earl Grey?”
“Darjeeling,” the P.M. said without turning, putting on his pince-nez to read the remainder of the French communiqué. “They’re a fractious lot, the frogs. Sometimes I think it’s against their principle to say yes to anything. They simply cannot tolerate any idea that doesn’t originate with them.”
“They no doubt feel,” Wright-Attersley said, “that French-Chinese trade would be damaged if they allowed bombers to use French airspace.”
“And do they think,” the prime minister asked rhetorically, “that our trade with China would not be affected? And never mind the retaliation that the Communists may very well wreak on British passport holders in Hong Kong now that it’s under the benevolent rule of
Beijing — those of Tiananmen Massacre fame.”
The defense minister said nothing. There was nothing more he could say about the French. In the world of self-interest theirs was the most self-interested. The French had always had a love-hate relationship with America — a love of Hollywood and a contempt for everything else.
The P.M.’s private secretary entered as tea was being poured. He had the latest poll results — the government was fifteen points behind Labour. He said nothing but merely laid the message slip alongside the secret French communiqué refusing to assist the Americans.
“Does Labour know?” the P.M. inquired. “I mean, has the U.S. request leaked?”
“No, Prime Minister,” the private secretary answered. “Though I can’t answer for the next twenty-four hours.” Wright-Attersley sipped the Darjeeling and placed the cup down without a sound. “Be that as it may,” he said, looking over at the prime minister, “I feel obliged to tell you that this kind of thing is extremely difficult to keep under wraps. Bound to get out sooner or later, Prime Minister.”
