Force of arms wi 7, p.18
Force of Arms wi-7, page 18
part #7 of WW III Series
“That’s no good,” Harvey Simmet whispered to the duty officer. “Eat a few and you’re hungry again.”
“Is that clear?” Freeman bellowed. “I want this team to think attack. Defeat starts in the mind and I won’t allow it!”
Harvey Simmet took another sip of coffee. He wasn’t in the mood for Freeman’s Follies. Damn generals were all the same — except that George C. Scott here did have one quality that always earned him a lot of forgiveness. He was prepared to be out on the point with his men when it counted, and he had proved it from Korea to Ratmanov Island to the Never-Skovorodino road.
Freeman put everyone in the tent on a need-to-know status. He didn’t want anything to get out, otherwise the entire operation would be jeopardized. He decided to do the mock-up himself. Computing three-dimensional stereoscopic printouts was fine, but to see it actually built in front of you — something you could touch, move things around a bit — was the best. Besides, the truth was, Freeman wasn’t all that good on a computer — strictly a two-finger basher. “Slow as a wet week,” as someone had said. With Play-Doh he was adept and fast.
* * *
When they played taps for the five-man crew of the Pave Low and the seventeen SAS/D men aboard it who had gone down over Lake Nam, as well as the pilot of the F-15C — no chute had been seen — Freeman’s eyes flooded with tears, for he was as moved by the death of those who served under him as he was proud of them in battle, and it wasn’t until ten minutes later, when he had time to compose himself, that he had the remaining thirty SAS/D men into his headquarters hut.
Thirty out of eighty. A unit with that kind of loss was usually taken off the board, but Freeman had work for them to do. He expected no complaint and received none. Aussie Lewis, slightly wounded in the butt from the ChiCom grenade, Salvini, Choir Williams, and Brentwood told him they were ready. Aussie was still thinking about the fact that had he not had the Haskins sniper rifle and waited till last to climb aboard, he would have been in the first chopper — the one that went down. He knew it was illogical, but this knowledge made him feel that he owed something special to the unit, to the men who had gone down.
“Gentlemen,” Freeman told the thirty SAS/D men, “you’re going to be up to full strength again and then some. Eight squadrons in all, a hundred and sixty of you. You lot have done a magnificent job at Lake Nam, but we have to capitalize on that victory now. We can’t assume that your action will stop the missiles for more than two weeks or so before they rebuild.”
He stopped and decided to illustrate his point with a true story of how the Chinese in the Sino-Japanese War sabotaged a train track. “Now we use explosives,” Freeman said. “But back then the Chinese didn’t have enough and so they brought out a whole town. Thousands of them. Every man, woman, and child stood in a long line, and then at one command they all upended the track by its sleepers so that it just buckled and pushed right over. We don’t even think like that because we’ve never had that kind of population. But they can — they’ve got the manpower — so we can’t assume that now we’ve given them a black eye at Nam they won’t be ready to go again with more missiles in a few more weeks. Which is why it’s imperative that we act within the next ninety-six hours. That should give you time to re-equip and learn your part till you think and breathe it. Harvey Simmet guarantees a break in the winds on the fourth day. We’ll move out at twenty-three hundred hours the night of the third. We’ll chute in at plus or minus zero one hundred hours. In the first place they won’t expect us, and even if they did, they would figure dawn, not pitch darkness, as the time of attack.”
When he pulled the cloth off from the Play-Doh model everyone knew what it was immediately. Freeman was either bonkers or brilliant.
“We’re going for the brain, gentlemen — we’re going to paralyze their central nervous system. Without that, the body politic will have no center and we’ll see not one China but many who will join us to throw out Nie and the whole State Council.”
The SAS/D team gazed down at the model. Freeman had even found a small newspaper photo of Mao and had put this at the entrance to the Forbidden City, looking out from on high over the vastness of Tiananmen Square, the largest square in the world.
A few blocks further west along Changan Avenue, well to the left of Mao’s picture, Freeman had sculpted out the Zhongnanhai compound where the State Council members, and, most importantly, the entire military commission, were housed and guarded.
“Everything,” Freeman said, “depends on our speed and ferocity. Simultaneously we will be launching the biggest counterattack yet along the Orgon Tal-Honggor front. But it’s here — in the heart of Beijing — where we must succeed. If we seem to be winning there, we’ll have others follow— the Malof guerrillas up north, the Democracy Movement in the south, and, if we’re lucky, Admiral Kuang in Taiwan will move across the straits. If that happens the ChiComs’ll have a two-front war into the bargain.”
Most of them were still watching the mock-up of downtown Beijing — the sheer audacity of Freeman’s plan only now sinking in.
“We go right into the square. Fan out from there from the Statue of Heroes of the Revolution. We’ll keep ferrying in more troops as we can, but our one hundred and sixty will be the point.”
“Our?” Aussie Lewis said. “Are you coming, General?”
“Unless,” Freeman replied, “anyone has any objections.”
The effect on the men’s mood was instantaneous.
“Lewis.”
“Yes, sir?”
“Your troop with me. We’ll hit the Zhongnanhai compound. Capture who we can, shoot who we can’t. Williams and Salvini.”
“Sir?”
“Great Hall of the People. Brentwood.”
“Sir.”
“Underground railway — including the secret escape line they don’t think we know about that runs from the Zhongnanhai compound to Xishan military base.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Right. You’ll form the core, and with the replacements we’ll gather strength. Choir, I want you to take charge of the radio tower, or rather what’s left of it.” Choir was about to interject, but Freeman stopped him. “Not now. I’ll go into more detail in the final briefing later on. Meanwhile I’ll leave choice of weapons up to the individual, but remember, it’ll be short-range for most of it but I’ll need twenty snipers to spread about. Take some Haskins.” For Freeman it would be the Winchester 1200 with fléchette-packed cartridges. The enormous implications of Freeman’s plan excited Aussie Lewis. He turned to Brentwood. “Say what you like, the old man’s got balls.”
“Lewis!”
“Sir.”
“Over here.”
“Sir.”
“Lewis, I don’t want to hit this one too hard, but intelligence reports tell us that Miss Malof is in the same Beijing jail as Smythe. Soon as we take the square, you take a squad to liberate it.”
“Bloody right,” Lewis said.
“General?” Salvini asked. “How about the Chinese garrison? Beijing has the Thirty-first Army ready.”
“Not in the middle of the city — on the outside perimeter. They’re expecting an armored thrust through the Great Wall. We’ll feint there of course, but our main force’ll leapfrog the son of a bitch.”
His confidence was infectious, but even so, Norton, Harvey Simmet, and others knew that it would be touch and go. If he lost, they’d drum him out of the army. If he won, well — they’d have to wait and see.
CHAPTER NINTEEN
Inside Beijing and the other big Chinese cities from Harbin to Shanghai, the sirens of military convoys were constant, many of them two to three truckloads of soldiers going to yet another public execution of “hooligans” and those suspected of being “fifth columnists.”
In the Beijing prison yard, where the first blooms of spring had popped up along the wall, the killing posts were chipped and scarred by the seemingly endless procession of Nie’s firing squads.
From her drab hospital bed in a ward that in any other country in the world would have been condemned under the Health Act, Alexsandra could see those being executed — mostly men but women, too. A day or so after Alexsandra had arrived they had done away with any ceremony, not even bothering to blindfold them — just made them kneel, their hands tied behind their backs, and one shot through the base of the skull.
Alexsandra tried to pull the blinds closed. The blinds were removed, and her bed and side table wheeled closer to the window in such a way that she could not help seeing the daily executions down in the courtyard. Nie was determined that she should daily observe what happened to those who did not cooperate with the Party. After her beating, Nie had said her sentence could be commuted to life if she confessed.
* * *
Two Chinese group armies — a total of one hundred thousand reinforcements — were on their way to Orgon Tal-Honggor from the Beijing military district as well as a tank division, two artillery divisions, and four engineering regiments, the latter called up because of serious flooding of the rivers following the typhoon. Also, the Chinese had a problem with their bridges once they got outside the greater general metropolitan area. Here many old bridges simply could not take anything bigger than a fifty-ton load, and the engineers were there to ply emergency spans across swollen streams and irrigation channels that had become rivers in the spring storm.
* * *
Alexsandra knew that the further north you went the worse the bridges became. As she was thinking about the bridges as a metaphor for her own journey, how she had crossed the Black River so many times from the Jewish autonomous region in the north into Manchuria, she wondered if she had come to the last bridge of her life. A confession would allow her to pass from certain death to life and hope — if the Americans won. But she knew she would not cross the bridge if the toll for it was a confession against her comrades. She sat forlornly watching another “conspirator” die. When first she’d entered the jail a few days before, they had only tied the condemned prisoners’ hands. Now they had gags on as well.
“Why are they gagging them?” she asked the young nurse on duty. The nurse was busy writing reports, and she did not look up. “They call your name!”
For Alexsandra, those few words were like being struck again by the guard who’d brutalized her. But the sorrow she felt, the humility, the realization that people were dying with her name on their lips, undid her, and she wept, the tears starting down her cheek and stinging the ugly purple-red bruises on her cheekbone. The nurse, a short, pert woman — a no-nonsense air about her — told her to be quiet or she would have to sedate her. If she didn’t keep quiet it would set off an unruly protest by the other patients. Alexsandra didn’t care now what they did; the bravery of men and women dying for her cause and theirs had stripped her pride utterly.
“Very well,” the nurse said, and came bossily behind the screen with the hypodermic of ten millimeters of Diazepam. She also placed a kidney basin on the small bedside table and in it a white strip of paper. She pointed to the paper as she brushed Alexsandra’s arm with a swab of cold cotton wool smelling of alcohol. Alexsandra turned over the paper. It said simply, “1:00 a.m. Be ready.”
With that the nurse injected Alexsandra, put the hypodermic in the kidney basin, and walked curtly away. The Diazepam wouldn’t knock her out but would calm her enough so that she might get an hour or two’s sleep. She buzzed the nurse and asked her assistance to go to the toilet. Despite the Diazepam coursing through her veins, she was still alert and said simply but very quietly, “You must tell our friends to blow all the bridges.”
She knew it would make little difference to Freeman’s army, for its replacement tanks were already too heavy to use most of the China bridges and would have to be either airlifted over or put across on bridges of their own, but the bridges were still strong enough for the lighter Chinese tanks, and if they were blown, it would cost the Chinese divisions crucial time in trying to stop any American counterattack.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Freeman’s Second Army was as ready as it would ever be, and the speed with which his new armor had arrived on the scene within the last few days once again owed something to his legendary attention to the tactical details as well as the strategy of war. In having fired a young logistics officer for not knowing the difference between the Siberian and Chinese railway gauges, which could have caused a defeat at the rail terminals, he had served notice to the logistics officers and engineers to get busy adapting rail cars for the shorter gauge. The resulting smooth transition from ship to railhead southward proved a crucial factor in Second Army’s logistical buildup, and it was clear to the Chinese, having to move cautiously through rain-swollen creeks, rivers, and other conduits, that a major American counterattack was under way.
The shape of the attack was that of an arrowhead or triangular formation, the widest part or baseline being the line between Orgon Tal and Honggor, the intent of both ends to meet in an arrow tip of overwhelming mobile force near Badaling on the Great Wall, forty miles from Beijing and then on through the Juyong Pass, past the western hills to the city thirty-five miles to the southeast.
On the map of the city, Freeman connected the targets that would form a rough V shape. The left top of the V was Beijing University, at the bottom of the V, Tiananmen Square, the Great Hall of the People on the left, or western, side of Tiananmen, as well as the Zhongnanhai compound, which housed the “Central Authority”—the top party officials — and to the northeast, or top right-hand side of the V, Shoudu Airport.
Regular Second Army paratroopers would be dropped over the airport to secure it for Second Army, but if they could not take it then TACAIR would go in with the tarmac-busting air-drop mines that would both pockmark and booby-trap the runways, preventing the Chinese from using or repairing them. But the main business of the 160 men of the SAS/D force in the inner city was to take the Zhongnanhai, built around two lakes next to the moat-protected Forbidden City, the ancient imperial capital of China.
“Remember, our main job,” Freeman told his SAS/D men, “is to take the Zhongnanhai. Officially its name means ‘central and south seas’ because its residences and offices are built around two connecting lakes — Lake Zhonghai, the central lake, and Lake Nanhai, the southern lake. The two are about a mile long and vary in width from a third of a mile to the north to three-quarters of a mile wide at the southern end. Now there’s reconstruction and new building going on with new sauna baths and enlarging some of the residences here and there. We don’t know exactly what bungalows are being worked on, nor if the families of the Party bosses will be there. You’ll need to be very careful when clearing rooms. This’ll mean flash-stun grenades rather than HE to be thrown by the first pair. But quick response to anyone you see, and remember to shout a challenge in any possible IFF mix-up. The Zhongnanhai, as you can see, is to the west of you if you’re in Tiananmen Square looking north at the Gate of Heavenly Peace where Mao’s photograph is hung.
“Zhongnanhai is walled, and so once we get in, the wall can serve as a protective barrier from any PLA coming too quickly to the rescue — we hope. Anyway, our job is to take out the leadership and to hold until relieved by our main forces attacking through the wall at Juyong Pass, thirty-seven miles north.”
‘How about the PLA in the compound, General?”
“A small force — possibly two to three platoons at the most. They always have the two white-gloved sentries at the gate. Here inside the model you can see there is a series of walks and bungalows — luxurious bungalows — for the exclusive use of the Party bosses. While we’re going into the Zhongnanhai, pamphlets will be dropped into the Beijing and Qinghua universities to explain how we’ve come to liberate the city from the old Communist bosses and to return the goddess of democracy to her rightful place. That’s powerful stuff for people, especially the younger ones, who still remember the massacre by their own troops in eighty-nine in Tiananmen Square.
“Intelligence indicates we have a virtual underground army waiting for the means and help to overthrow the detested old men like Chairman Nie. But what the regular army will do we don’t know. That’s why I want the whole military commission captured as soon as possible. After that I don’t know what will happen — we could get a backlash of patriotism despite the hated Communist rule.” Freeman paused. “For that reason this is a purely voluntary mission. It’s risky — a dice throw — but if we can pull it off—”
“Sir?”
“Yes?”
“You mentioned Admiral Kuang during the first briefing. Do we know for sure that he’ll attack across the strait and tie up the southern forces which would otherwise be used against us? And how will he know that we’re attacking?”
“Hopefully he’ll attack,” Freeman answered, “and as to your follow-up question, the moment our armor hits Badaling he’ll know. So there it is in overview. Anybody want out?”
No one did. Freeman nodded knowingly. “Didn’t think so. I can promise you this, boys. If we pull this off it’ll be one hell of a coup! You’ll read about yourselves in the history books!”
“If we’re alive to read any,” one of Aussie’s group murmured.
“Well,” Salvini said, “you going to bet on this, Aussie?”
Aussie said he wouldn’t. He was a gambler, sure, but he wasn’t a fool. Freeman’s plan was brilliantly conceived, but absolutely too close to call.
* * *
In the wind-riven high country of the Chang Tang, Julia was obliged to stay with the nomads three days before she could move, or rather had to move. She had been suffering from hypothermia when she had reached the nomad’s tent and sat down to warm up by the dung fire, the smoke exiting from the smoke hole high up in the dark yak-hair tent looking like a rectangular marble column, its boundaries sharply defined by the sunlight flooding the smoke hole. But the presence of the sun did not carry any promise of warmth, for outside a blizzard had been sweeping across the snow-covered pass between the mountains whose summits had been lost to a swirling mist created by the howling winds.
