South China Sea wi-8

by Ian Slater

  It began to rain then, but not before the quiet, confident tone of the forward air controller came on. “Armored column heading south approx two miles — I say again two miles — from Pingxiang.”

  “How many tanks?”

  “Can’t say. Saw five before mist closed in.”

  “Type?”

  “T-72s.”

  That meant Soviet main battle tanks — top of the line — sold to the PLA after the breakup of the Soviet Union.

  Freeman ordered in strikes from the carrier Enterprise. “This,” he said, “is where we show them what American technology can do. Right, Bob?”

  “Yes, sir;” Cline said unenthusiastically. “If you say so.”

  Freeman turned on him. “What the hell’s the matter with you? Can’t take the heat?”

  There was silence between the two men, despite the usual mind-numbing noise of artillery screaming overhead and the ceaseless babble, some of it frantic, from the remaining men trapped on Disney.

  “If I hadn’t called in arty,” Freeman thundered, “the Chinese would be here now. We would’ve been pushed so far back from that hill we’d be in retreat all the way to Hanoi.”

  Bob Cline nodded.

  “Damn it, Major — if you’re not up to it, get out of the kitchen!”

  It was Freeman’s unapologetic tone that shocked Cline out of his uncertainty. “Yes, sir — I’ll be fine.”

  “You bet your ass you’ll be fine — a hell of a lot finer than those boys on the hill.”

  “Boys?” It was Marte Price, the press pool’s designated hitter for the day. “Aren’t there some women combat pilots, General, aboard the helos and the carriers—”

  “See the front door of that tent?” Freeman snapped.

  “Yes.”

  “Well, that gender shit stops there. I haven’t time for it. You understand?”

  “Yes, General.” She’d never seen him so angry before, and he almost never swore in front of women.

  “If you want a story,” he shouted over the noise, “look at these.” In his hands were tiny shards of steel that Cline had brought him earlier.

  “What are they?”

  “Fragments from what’s called an APBR — armor-piercing Black Rhino round — made in Alabama out of carbon-based plastic. Has what they call a polymer tip. Explodes into splinters inside the body. Wounds are huge — six inches in diameter. If it hits a bulletproof vest, goes right through. Wounds are even bigger. It’s banned in the States.”

  “Then where do the PLA get them?”

  “Hong Kong probably. That’s the usual source, so the CIA tell us. Who, exactly, we don’t know, but we’re sure as hell trying to find out.”

  “Is it that serious?” Marte asked naively.

  “Serious? Hell, PLA using that ammunition is equivalent to them having an extra regiment to throw at us. And never mind the effect on morale. It’s like a wildfire among the troops. Makes everyone hold back, and on top of this withdrawal—” Freeman stopped. “Withdrawal” and “retreat” weren’t part of his normal vocabulary. They stuck in his throat. In that moment Marte Price discovered something about Freeman that reminded her of what she’d heard about Patton. Here was a general, a warrior whose ferocity and élan in battle were legendary, whose code of honor drew a line against this advance in technology, the use of the armor-piercing Black Rhino bullets.

  “In a wound caused by a Black Rhino round,” he added, “it’s almost impossible to staunch the bleeding. It’s horrendous.”

  “You’re an anachronism, General,” Marte said admiringly. “I thought all soldiers would use anything—”

  “No,” he interrupted. “Otherwise we’d be using nerve gas, another monstrosity. Besides, the need for extra blood on hand is doubled once they start using Black Rhino — tears flesh to pieces. Each fragment is like a razor, a separate wound.”

  “General,” Marte responded. “I have pretty good contacts in Hong Kong. If you like—”

  “I thought,” Freeman cut in, “that you’re to report on the military, not help us.”

  “It’d be a good story,” she said.

  “One good turn deserves another,” Freeman responded, and they both realized they had compromised their professional integrity and that neither felt guilty.

  “General.” It was Major Cline, and he clearly had more than the impact of Second Army’s retreat on his mind. “Could I have a word in private, sir?”

  Blushing, Marte Price quickly left the HQ tent.

  “What’s up, Major?” Freeman asked him.

  “Sir, word’s got out about our Special Forces group near Dien Bien Phu, and there’s hell to pay in Washington — and the rest of the country. Larry King’s asked the head of the Joint Chiefs to appear on his show.”

  “Shit!”

  “That’s only half of it, sir. The New York Times is on to it. They’re going to run an editorial on it tomorrow. They’re comparing you to Nixon when he ordered the secret bombing of Cambodia and Laos during ‘Nam.”

  “Well, they’ve got that right,” Freeman said, unabashed. “I mightn’t have agreed with everything he did, but by God he was right to hit those Commie staging areas. Bastards would slip across into ‘Nam, shoot up our boys, then run back over the border.”

  “Trouble is, General, in Washington the Democrats and some Republicans are charging that seeing there’s no big enemy troop movements out of Cambodia or Laos so far in this war—”

  “That I shouldn’t have sent in any Special Forces — until we were attacked. Right?”

  “That’s more or less it, sir. They’re saying that democratic nations have an obligation not to indulge in preemptive strikes.”

  “Tell Israel that,” Freeman said. “Goddamn it. If the Israelis had waited to be attacked en masse before they took action, there wouldn’t be an Israel by now.”

  “We’re going to have to respond, General.”

  “Goddamn it. It’s bad enough I’ve had to pull Melbaine’s boys back to the damn paddy fields. Now I have to fight our own press.”

  Cline knew all about that, but his job wasn’t to agree with the general, it was to hit him “in the teeth,” as Freeman had once put it, “with the bad news as well as the good.” “We’re going to have to respond, General,” he repeated, his tone as demanding as his rank would allow.

  “I know,” Freeman said thoughtfully, if hastily, looking at the huge map. His steel-blue eyes followed the winding course of the Laotian-Vietnamese border around the splotch of green that marked the eleven-mile-long valley running north and south of Dien Bien Phu and Ban Cong Deng.

  “Call a press conference in an hour. We won’t restrict it — let in every son of a bitch in Hanoi who wants to come. I’ll straighten it out.”

  Cline shook his head. “It’s going to be tough, General. We’ve got every longhaired weirdo yapping on this one. We’ve even got the environmentalists’ lobby charging that you’re going to use some chemical like Agent Orange to defoliate the border areas ‘round Dien Bien Phu and Ban Cong Deng. They’re afraid of hurting the trees.”

  Freeman gave him a crooked grin. “Maybe I should let Marte Price take a photo of me hugging a goddamn bush!”

  “She’d be the last one I’d give anything to.”

  Freeman looked puzzled. “Why not?”

  “Well, we can’t prove it, but our G-2 section suspects her of leaking our Laos Special Forces op. Not directly, but via that French shit, LaSalle. Scratching one another’s back. Rumor mill has it that he’s screwing her.”

  Freeman’s facial muscles knotted. “Damn it, I gave her info about the Rhino rounds. She could roast us on an open spit with that one.”

  “How?” Cline asked.

  “I told her it affected morale. She could say—”

  “Our boys are backing off,” Cline cut in.

  “Exactly. Damn—”

  “Sir?” It was a call from the operations table. Melbaine’s men, those that were off, were now all in the rice
paddy, coming under mortar fire. The field was turning into a churning sea of muddy water as the PLA’s 82mm mortar rounds exploded, throwing up geysers of rust-colored water, green rice stalks, and shrapnel from the mortar shells. Meanwhile, various small-arms fire, mostly AK-47s, peppered the turbulent paddy. Several bodies, two Americans and a Vietnamese, were floating bumpily in the wash.

  Freeman called for arty to straddle the narrow margin of ground between the rice paddy and Disney’s apron of high ground, now swarming with more PLA reinforcements coming from the tunnels. The general’s request was answered in less than forty seconds with a creeping barrage of H.E. that soon covered Disney’s southern slope in a dust storm of dirt and pebbles that, swept southward by the wind, fell like hail on the embattled USVUN forces on the edge of the paddy.

  Anticipating the “blind pause” this would create for both sides, unless they wanted to waste ammunition by firing at nothing in particular, Freeman ordered in a brigade, three thousand men of the Third Airborne Cavalry Division, which had landed in Hanoi only a few hours before.

  It was a sight that impressed even the old battle-hardened vets of both sides in ‘Nam, 157 slicks dotting the gray metallic sky in an aerial armada carrying the three battalions.

  “Three thousand won’t be enough to stop them, General,” Melbaine shouted into his cellular field phone.

  “I agree,” Freeman growled back, “it isn’t going to stop them, it’s going to push the sons of bitches back into China where they belong. You hang on, Colonel. I’m about to give you a lesson in logistics!”

  “Arrogant son of a bitch,” Melbaine said, collapsing the phone, slipping it into his pocket. “How the hell’s he going to push ‘em back? We’re already running out of ammo, and the Airborne can only bring in enough for themselves, never mind us.”

  “He’s got Hanoi fever!” a Vietnamese major nearby suggested.

  “He’s nuts,” Melbaine’s second in command said. “Crazier’n a two-bit watch.”

  All that Freeman had meant by a “lesson in logistics” was that the three battalions, under his express orders, were also equipped with Vietnamese 82mm mortars.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE

  The Special Forces contingent that made up the interdiction force under Colonel Berry had now crossed the border into Laos, reaching the “fan stem” where two trails coming out of Laos converged. There, the IFOR contingent split up into three columns: Echo, commanded by SAS Major Leigh-Hastings; Foxtrot, U.S. Colonel Berry’s men; and Delta, led by U.S. Ranger Captain Walter Roscoe.

  The plan was for two columns, Echo and Foxtrot, to go farther in along the two trails that eventually spread out to make a fan, or smaller trails, and lie in ambush waiting for any enemy main force en route to Vietnam’s western flank.

  The remaining column of thirty men, Delta, under Roscoe, would wait back at the border in order to net any enemy survivors of an ambuscade or any smaller patrols that either Echo or Foxtrot would let pass rather than fire upon, and so betray its presence to an oncoming enemy force.

  Normally, such ambushes would consist of no more than ten men, but intelligence, both from aerial pix and ground movement sensors dropped by air, indicated company-sized enemy activity, and the point of Freeman’s three Special Forces interdiction columns was not simply to verify such activity and then call in air strikes, but to engage the enemy on the spot and wipe them out. However, as Echo’s and Foxtrot’s security teams, a pair of soldiers from each column, went uptrail and downtrail about seventy yards from the selected ambush site, the fact of their general presence in the area was already known to Salt and Pepper Two — the incursion into the fan-shaped jungle area of about thirty square miles west of the Vietnamese-Laotian border was already on page one of Paris Match, under the byline of Pierre LaSalle.

  Immediately, General Wang ordered a six-hundred-man battalion of the elite Chengdu-based paratroop commandos south from Mengzi to Dien Bien Phu. Anticipating such a response, and despite the international uproar over his having ordered the Special Forces contingent into Laos, Freeman nevertheless asked Jorgensen in Hanoi to authorize interdiction by U.S. fighters aboard Enterprise. Jorgensen refused — point-blank. Now his career was on the line as well as Douglas Freeman’s.

  Normally a placid man, Jorgensen, with visions of a court-martial foremost in his mind, was trying to control himself. “General,” he said, gripping the phone so hard his knuckles were white, “you don’t seem to grasp the seriousness of the situation.”

  “Sir,” Freeman cut in, “I understand it very well. The position of ninety of my best men has been compromised by a goddamn frog, and I want to give them air interdiction and TACAIR support.”

  “I don’t mean the military situation,” Jorgensen shot back. “I’m talking about the political fallout. Everybody in Washington and at the U.N. in New York is up in arms about you widening the war. It’s the nightmare of ‘Nam again. Kennedy, Nixon, LBJ — all widening the war in the belief they were going to end it.”

  “End it?” Freeman riposted. “By God, I’ll end it easy enough. You give me an A-bomb — which I know we have on the Enterprise—and I’ll end it in half an hour. Drop that baby on Ningming and we’ll have peace talks within twenty-four hours, guaranteed. I’ll turn Ningming into the world’s biggest fishpond.”

  The moment he said it, Freeman wished he hadn’t. But before he could retract it, his normally calm-spoken superior had blown a fuse. “You’re mad. You’re insane. I’m relieving you of command of Second Army as of now. You hear me?”

  “General—”

  “You hear me?”

  “I hear you, sir.”

  The phone line went dead.

  Cline had heard enough of the conversation — Jorgensen yelling — to know it was very bad news. Freeman, who had put the phone down slowly, left his aide in no doubt. “I’ve been relieved. By God, I—” He didn’t finish the sentence.

  Cline, though shocked, had pressing business at hand. But with his boss no longer in command, it was confusing all around.

  “What is it?” Freeman asked.

  “Sir, we’ve got Arty pouring fire down on Disney’s south side. You want our boys to wait for the Airborne?”

  “Hell, no. Soon as Arty clears a sector, I want us and the other USVUN troops to occupy it. Soon as we have high ground cleared, we take it. That way the Airborne with my mortars will have LZs for the choppers. Besides, the more dirt we can stir up with Arty, the better. Tricky for the helo jockeys, I know, but it’s as good as smoke cover. Hell, our boys should be using smoke anyway.”

  “Wind’s blowing north, General. It’s taking smoke away from us. Covering the enemy.”

  “Well, hell, we can’t have everything. Anyway, maybe it’ll hide the upcoming choppers.” Freeman paused. “What time you make it, Major?”

  “Fifteen twenty hours, General.”

  “Then I suggest you record receiving my order at fifteen hundred.”

  Cline looked at him, nonplussed.

  “Before I got fired,” Freeman explained. “Might as well cover your ass.”

  “Yes, sir. But what about the press conference in Phu Lang Thuong? There must be near a hundred reporters waiting there.”

  “What about them?”

  “Well, sir, I mean are you going to tell them you’ve been relieved?”

  Freeman shrugged, thinking it over. He sighed, shaking his head. “Hell, no. I want to try to help my boys in those IFOR columns. I sent them in there, and now, with that prick LaSalle telling the whole world where they are, least I can do is try to help ‘em — shift world opinion.”

  “Beg pardon, General, but how in hell are you going to do that?”

  “Watch me,” Freeman said.

  “Yes, General, but what if Jorgensen finds out about this press conference you’re about to give?”

  “We tried to contact him for permission, didn’t we?”

  “Lines down?” Cline suggested.

  “Whatever you like, Maj
or.”

  It was amazing, Cline thought. Freeman had just been fired, and the son of a bitch was back on the attack.

  The general noticed Cline’s astonishment as the major opened the tent flap on the way to the Hummer that would take them to the press conference center in Phu Lang Thuong. As they got aboard the high-clearance Hummer, which had a bad time of it bouncing over the potholed road, the general glanced at Cline. “Bob, I want your computer boys to dig up State Department policy memos vis-à-vis ‘Hot Pursuit.’ “

  “Across borders?” Cline asked.

  “Specifically across borders,” Freeman said. “Those fairies in Washington think I’m a grunt general. Well, I am — damn proud of it too — but I do my homework, Major. By God, I do. Remember what Frederick the Great said. ‘L’audace, I’audace, toujours I’audace!” “ Audacity, audacity, always audacity!

  Freeman knew that once he mounted the press center’s improvised podium — a wooden slat tent base — he would see a phalanx of hands shoot up. One of them would belong to Marte Price, and another to Pierre La Prick Salle. Both reporters, he knew by now, were politically left. And after blowing the Special Forces contingent in Laos, La Prick Salle probably wouldn’t think he’d take any questions from him.

  * * *

  Echo and Foxtrot column’s two pairs of security teams made several listening, halts along the site chosen by Major Leigh-Hastings for a possible ambush. The job of these four soldiers was to alert the rest of their columns as to the size of any enemy force coming either way. Everyone expected any enemy columns to come from deeper in Laos, to the west, but the possibility of an enemy force returning from the east, from action in Vietnam, also had to be considered.

  The security teams for Foxtrot column were in position within another quarter hour, with the Echo security teams three miles south of Foxtrot. About twenty-five minutes later both Echo’s and Foxtrot’s leaders moved in their assault teams of twenty-five men each into their positions along each trail of the fan, setting it up for ambush. The remaining man in each of the two columns of thirty men was now free to command. It would be these two men who, staying still for the next twenty hours, like the rest of their column, would take up the best ambush position for overall command of their respective columns. It would be their order, and theirs alone, that would unleash fire should the Khmer Rouge-led columns come their way.