Freeman was pleased his forces had been able to rally significantly from the massive Chinese ground attack and to regain some lost ground, but the victories he’d expected from the close air support against Cheng’s main battle tanks were not forthcoming. The Chinese had made excellent use of smoke cover after the typhoon had passed, and, combined with the dust, the smoke not only obscured large areas of the battlefield and cut the Americans’ bombing and sighting laser rays and thermal sights, but made IFF — identification friend or foe — a near impossibility. Several M1s, mistaken for enemy tanks, had been taken out just south of the railway at Orgon Tal.
“At least the missile problem’s licked,” Norton said.
“For the time being,” Freeman answered. “Oh, it’ll take them quite a while to set up shop again, but we have to do something in the meantime, Dick — something so spectacular that it’ll short circuit the whole war.”
“Anything in mind, General?”
Freeman seemed not to notice Dick Norton’s voice. “I wonder whether young Brentwood shot those goddamned scientists.”
Norton was genuinely shocked. “You don’t mean that, General?” he said, but it was more a question than a statement of fact.
The general glanced at him and sighed. He was bone weary from lack of sleep. “No, Dick, I probably don’t, but have you ever thought of how we gain air superiority?”
“By more of us shooting down more of them I presume.”
“Planes or pilots?” Freeman asked.
It made Norton pause.
“Australian air ace,” Freeman continued. “Man called Caldwell used to shoot the German pilots in their parachutes in WW II. Said if he didn’t, the bastards’d be up the next day shooting down more of his buddies.” With that, Freeman looked up at the map and smacked Tibet. “Chinese scientists are same as the pilots. Long as we have them running loose they can build more missiles.”
“General,” Dick Norton said, “you once told me that no war is black and white — all have a gray area — but you said the degree of grayness is what separates us from them — an American from a totalitarian.”
“Did I?” Freeman said.
“Yes, sir, you did.”
“Well, Dick, don’t worry — just wishful thinking. I didn’t order the scientists shot. We’ll find out when Brentwood gets back. A few taken prisoner wouldn’t hurt.”
“Won’t know till he’s here, sir.” Dick Norton looked at his watch. “The three evac choppers should be reaching that Lake Nam pretty soon.”
“What are our casualties?”
“No word yet. Brentwood just used enough air time to send in the call for pickup.”
“What are we using?”
“Pave Lows.”
Freeman nodded approvingly. The MH-53J Pave Lows were superb NOE — nap of the earth — fliers. Just the kind of machine they needed in the bad weather swirling down from the twenty-thousand-foot mountain range.
“Air cover?” Freeman asked.
“F-15 Eagles on their way now — drop tanks and tankers.”
“Good.”
“We shouldn’t have any trouble with ChiCom fighters,” Norton added. “Eagles’ll eat a Shenyang alive.”
“Thank God for that. Listen, Dick, I’ve got to get some sleep.” He slapped his aide on the shoulder. “Otherwise I’ll get so goddamned tired my judgment will start to go. End up shooting scientists.” He winked.
Norton smiled. Sometimes even Norton couldn’t tell whether Freeman was kidding or not The general did have a point: The way you got air supremacy was to shoot down pilots, not just planes. The missile site near Lake Nam had been taken out, but how long would it stay that way? How long would the Chinese take to get it going again? Freeman was right; Second Army had to do something spectacular in order to shorten the war before missiles started raining down again.
Before he fell asleep, his Winchester 1200 riot shotgun by his bed, the Sig Sauer 9mm beneath his pillow, Freeman read again those sections he’d underlined from Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. The master had said surprise was a good tactic. Well, hell, it didn’t need a Chinese sage to tell you that. He made a note in his diary to the effect that one of the reasons Second Army had not collapsed along the Orgon Tal-Honggor line stemmed, he believed, from the simple fact that the U.S. soldier normally fires about 4.7 times as much live ammunition in practice as his Chinese counterpart. With all the modern weapons of war, it gave him a sense of pride that, like the long rifles of the American Revolution, American marksmanship was probably the best in the world. Even so, he was outnumbered, and he knew the U.S. front couldn’t hold forever without urgent resupply along lines that were stretched, straining to the limit, all the way from Khabarovsk to Orgon Tal.
He knelt by his bed and prayed for all his men and that he might be given a chance for victory.
On the shores of Lake Nam the SAS/D detachment was met by the four paratroopers who had not made the rendezvous. With them they had brought six Chinese prisoners, four of them scientists whom they’d picked up on their way down to the lake after they’d heard the enormous explosion and figured correctly that the missile site had been blown and that the best they could do was to make the rendezvous for pickup at the lake.
“Well stone the crows!” Aussie said upon seeing the four SAS/D men. “About time, fellas. Where you been? Wanking yourself off by the lake? Lovely!”
“We damn near drowned in the lake,” a corporal said. “Damn lucky we made it to shore.”
“Where’d you find this lot?” Aussie asked, swinging his Haskins in the direction of the six forlorn-looking Chinese, their padded Mao suits the worse for their escape from the inferno.
“Here,” the SAS/D corporal said. “They were here by the lake. When they spotted one of our guys with an AK-47 they thought it was Christmas — till they saw our mugs.”
“They don’t look too fuckin’ happy, do they?” Aussie observed. The laughter started to build, and in the relief following the enormous tension of the mission, Aussie’s wry comment took on the aspect of one hell of a joke, then one man slipped and fell, butt first, on a pile of bird droppings that were all around the edge of the lake, it being a bird sanctuary. “Oh, shit!”
“That’s right,” Salvini said, and some of the commandos were laughing so hard, tears were streaming down their faces.
“Okay, settle down,” Brentwood said. “Remember Pave Lows will have their hover coupler on to bring ‘em to this exact GPS spot through all the cloud and mist. But if the weather closes in, the choppers won’t risk landing when they can’t see the ground — it’ll be standard hover coupler procedure. Means they’ll be about forty or fifty feet above us. They drop the rope ladders and we go up to them. Divide yourselves up into three groups of around twenty each.”
By now three ski platoons from the PLA’s Damquka camp on the other northeastern side of the twenty-thousand-foot mountain range had been dispatched via six Shenyang-made M1-4 fourteen-seat helicopters over the pass and on down toward the direction of the lake, but they were still airborne a good two miles from its nearest shoreline.
“Why don’t the bastards come right on down?” someone asked. Aussie Lewis had his Haskins and eight incendiary bullets ready. If a chopper got much closer he’d have a target that would fill the scope. Another commando readied one of the two Stinger ground-to-air missiles.
“Come on, you pricks…” Aussie said, “come closer.” But that was as far as the Chinese would come, and it puzzled Brentwood.
“Hey Aussie,” Salvini called out, “they must have heard about your sharpshooting with the jolly Hask.”
“They don’t want my Stinger,” one of the two antimissile missile commandos called out.
“Kawowski,” Aussie quipped, “nobody’d want your ricking Stinger! Dunno where it’s been.”
The six Chinese helicopters disappeared from view in mist that suddenly swept down through the pass and hid everything, including a good part of the lake.
“I don’t like it,” Brentwood commented. “Not coming closer like that.”
“Neither do I,” Aussie concurred. “Bit bloody queer isn’t it? I mean, it’ll take them a good half hour to get here by foot. By that time we should be outta here.”
“Maybe,” Choir Williams said, “they’re worried about our fighters jumping them and they want to stay close up there by the mountain range. Harder turning for a fighter.”
“Maybe,” Brentwood said, unconvinced. “Anyway, we’ve got to get to work on the defensive perimeter before they get here and—”
The trooper next to him was lifted off the ground and flung back with the force of the AK-47’s burst, and the next second another SAS/D man was dead.
“Down!” Aussie yelled, and in the scramble for cover behind the nearest boulder he dove into the snow, which racked the end of the Haskins’ barrel with ice. He put the muzzle brake at the end of the fluted barrel into his mouth, inhaling then exhaling into it, like giving a drowning victim the kiss of life.
He had made an understandable but disastrously wrong estimate.
The ChiComs from Damquka camp on the other side of the range weren’t regular mountain troops — they were ski troops. In a mogul-jumping advance that would have pleased any professional skier, they had cut the normal hiking time between where they had landed and the lake’s shore by more than a half. What would have been a twenty-minute or half-hour journey for an average hiker in good condition was slashed to five minutes via the speed of collapsible skis, telescoping poles, and Silvretta step-in bindings — and, where they needed them, light, tough magnesium snowshoes, their camouflage overwhites as effective as those of the SAS/D contingent. In another four minutes the fresh eighty-four ChiCom ski troops were all around the little more than sixty SAS/D troops.
Brentwood prayed that the three Pave Lows wouldn’t show up for a while, as an attempted evacuation by helicopters now would prove suicidal. Brentwood had no sooner clipped a new magazine into his HK MP5K submachine gun than he heard two fighters overhead.
“Our Eagles,” one man in Salvini’s group proffered.
“Don’t know,” Brentwood said. Then they could hear the steady chopping of the air that marked the approach of helos in the mist.
“Everybody,” Brentwood ordered, “defensive positions.” Within seconds the SAS/D had all but disappeared between the rocks along the foreshore, or in their white overlays were lying inert against the snow.
“It’s all right!” Brentwood shouted. “Must be the Paves.” There were three rope ladders dangling from the mist. Aussie and the other SAS/D men materialized from their hiding places to go up the rope ladders, the mist and fog rolling down the mountainsides and mixing in a bone-chilling whiteness that completely obscured the sight of the helicopters that were hovering in the pea soup, presumably no more than forty feet above them.
But the ChiComs from Damquka could be heard — a kind of eerie shuffling noise — obviously hoping to kill the Americans before they could get anywhere near the rope ladders and disappear into the churning mist and fog, the deadly stutter of Chinese T-85 submachine guns complimented by a lot of shouting. The sound of a Chinese bugle and the chatter of older but effective Soviet-made PPSh-41 submachine guns that filled the air was coming closer with dramatic suddenness. The initial wave of fifteen or more Chinese was cut down by the defensive circle of SAS/D troopers, but at the cost of four men from Salvini’s group.
The second wave, taking advantage of the first wave’s shock, took protective positions amid the many rock spills and boulders that lay covered in snow. Brentwood grabbed the radio and warned off the Pave Lows and the fighters, even as he was struck by the irony of having the world’s best strikers above him while he was unable to call them in as TACAIR, given the close proximity of SAS/D and ChiCom troops. And he knew that the longer he waited to call in the helos the more fuel they’d burn up, to a point where they would have to turn back as their fuel was consumed in the waiting.
Meanwhile, the Chinese were lobbing stick grenades all over the place. A few SAS men tossed the grenades back, but in all it was mainly a game of bluff on both sides— neither knowing exactly where the others were. Now the fog and mist became thicker, and Brentwood didn’t hesitate. “Withdraw to purple!” he called, and fired the flare, guessing the distance at about a hundred yards — nearer the edge of the lake. Reverse overarch — that is, retreating in stages of overarching protective fire — was something the SAS/D troops had rehearsed and performed elsewhere many times. The fog made it more difficult and dangerous, but still they could do it, and in squads of four they began the withdrawal to the purple smoke — a purple halo in the falling snow, the sound of the choppers near but out of the purple corona and glow that would have given them away to the Chinese.
Seven more SAS/D men were lost during the pull-back, but those that made the purple were next to two SAS/D from Salvini’s troop — or rather, what was left of it — and were pointed in the direction of the hanging rope ladders just beyond the penumbra of light cast by the flare. In another five minutes most of the remaining fifty-three SAS/D troops had made it to safety beyond the surreal purplish world of swirling snow, whiteout, and the deafening sound of rotors, approximately seventeen men allotted to each of the three Pave Lows. In another ten minutes they should be safe.
“After the swelling goes down,” the makeup artist told Chairman Nie, “I’ll need four — perhaps six — hours.”
“I can keep the cameras far enough away,” the “All China News” producer added. “No closeups of course.”
“But when,” asked Nie, “will the swelling go down?”
The makeup artist shrugged. “I’m no doctor, but I’d say four — six — days. Good food — fresh air.”
“All right,” Nie said, decidedly unhappy about the turn of events but seeing that he couldn’t do very much about it at the moment. The trouble was, the Politburo was becoming impatient. There had been widespread reports of “hooliganism” in Harbin and to the south in Fuchow province just across the straits from Taiwan.
“Hooliganism” was now even a wider net, meaning anything from reading a capitalist newspaper from Hong Kong to actual insurrection. It could also get you shot.
Nie needed a confession coming from her own lips. That was the propaganda he wanted. Instead of her starvation diet they would feed her well, fatten her up a little, get her looking healthy. In Harbin they had captured four undercover conspirators, and in Beijing jail they still had the American SEAL, Smythe. If she did not confess he would have the four conspirators and Smythe all shot in front of her, not at once but as the questioning proceeded.
That evening one of the night nurses on her rounds came to the prisoner’s bed and could not see her. The nurse panicked and had almost sounded the alarm when she thought to check the lavatory, and found the Malof woman there. All her bandages were off, and she had a gruesome black eye that she did not have before.
It was self-abuse, they told Nie, to get more time in hospital, the action of a coward.
No, Nie said, it certainly wasn’t the action of a coward but of a “brave enemy agent.” Yes, she no doubt had given herself a black eye and unbandaged herself to delay her recovery, to delay her questioning, and that told him that she was afraid of something happening, that finally her will would break under the pain.
Aussie and the two men with the Stingers waited till last before they began their climb up into the mist, voices lost to the wind under the roaring of rotor blades. As he began his climb, Aussie heard a sound like firecrackers in the distance and then mortar fire, not toward him but out on the lake. Beneath a long tongue of mist he could see water spouts as mortar rounds hit the lake, and then a strange mist — or was it fog? — seemed to rise up from the enormous lake to join the mist above.
Salvini, Choir Williams, and Aussie Lewis were the last three to approach the last Pave Low, ten men having gone before them, one badly wounded and bleeding profusely. The trooper beside him gave him a shot of morphine from his helmet pack then proceeded to make a tourniquet out of his belt.
“Last three!” Salvini yelled up at the two chopper crewmen at the door. One of the crewmen, despite the strain, the expectation that any second a wild burst of ChiCom machine gun fire from the pickup zone might riddle him and the chopper, still found time to laugh, calling out to the other crewman, “These guys might be tough ‘uns, but they sure as hell can’t count!”
“Whaddya mean?” the other man shouted back, barely audible over the noise of the rotor slap. The other crewman pointed down. “There are four of ‘em, not three.”
The other trooper shrugged — what did it matter? long as they didn’t leave anybody, and they could only wait another five minutes before the fuel gauge would dictate they head out.
Aussie was carrying the Haskins sniper rifle, weighing twenty-three pounds, and in the swirling vortex of wind caused by the prop wash he was trying to make sure that the last trooper, below him, wasn’t bothered by the muzzle brake and the end of the barrel, which had a tendency to swing a bit like a pendulum in the high wind, despite its weight.
“You okay, mate?” he yelled down.
There was no answer. “Hey buddy, you okay?” Aussie yelled, letting the barrel tap the man’s helmet. “You in trouble?” Suddenly he saw a black blob pass him into the open door. He heard a shout from above and saw the grenade come out again, bursting open about ten feet below him, and felt a hot sting in his right buttock. By now realizing the man below him was a ChiCom, he let the barrel of the Haskins swing in close directly above the man’s white overlay hood. The ChiCom’s right hand came up to push the rifle away, his left hand holding another grenade.
“You—” Aussie began, and pulled the trigger on the Haskins, sending a.50 depleted uranium slug right through the ChiCom helmet, exiting from the man’s chest in a crimson cloud of pink snow, the man, or rather his corpse, falling quickly to the ground, already lost to view in the snow.
“Cheeky bastard!” Aussie yelled as he was helped aboard the Pave Low, saw the rope ladder coming up after him, and felt immediate relief. Then as the Pave Low started off along with the other two southwest across the lake and began climbing, he sensed a sudden tension inside the chopper. He heard a bump, then another, and could feel the Pave Low yawing hard to the right, and he could hear the pilot’s voice. “Go for height, damn it! Height!” His voice shouted with urgency, and Lewis could hear another pilot’s voice but was unable to make out what he was saying over the sizzling noise of static. Then he heard, quite clearly, “I’m going down.” Seconds later there was a muffled explosion.
“She’s gone!” Brentwood said. There were several more bumps hitting the fuselage. “Gone where?” Aussie asked. There was no answer, and Aussie made his way through the tightly packed troops to the pilot and copilot’s cabin. Beyond the windscreen was nothing but an impenetrable whiteness. It was a complete whiteout, but the radar was speckled as if a pepper shaker had been passed over it and all the speckles alight.
“Birds,” the copilot yelled, seeing his puzzled expression. “Fucking thousands of ‘em. Lake’s a fucking bird sanctuary.”
“Jesus,” Aussie said, “is that what’s hitting us?”
“You’ve got it.” He’d no sooner spoken than another impact hit the chopper, and a spray of blood and feathers was smearing over the perspex window. The wipers began to whine. They threw out anything and everything they could to lessen the weight and gain more altitude, including the Haskins, minus its bolt action, and eventually they were high enough that the iridescent dots on the radar became less and less but were still a threat. They heard the F-15 Eagles streak past high over them and then a Mayday from one of the pilots, then a gut-wrenching explosion.
“Christ, his intakes must be jammed with ‘em,” the pilot said. “And at that speed, man—”
Lieutenant Reid had seen the “telephone post,” the Soviet-made SAM streaking up toward the F-15C Eagle, and had dropped down to get below the SAM. When the Eagle was below it, Reid pulled up harder, the SAM following but unable to make the acute upturn in time, going harmlessly past the Eagle. Then suddenly, triple A had exploded halfway between the plane’s right-side 20mm Vulcan cannon and the speed brake actuator, tearing the plane apart. Reid had ejected immediately, the Douglas ACES 11 seat suddenly in the sky, full of rushing wind and dirty black puffs of triple A fire exploding all around, and the chute opened, drifting down silently amid the mist and fog, Reid doing everything possible to steer the chute away from the lake but realizing it was mainly up to fate. The black puffs of AA smoke seemed to decrease, and Reid was pretty sure that the chute was being blown over the mountain range toward Damquka.
For several seconds Aussie could see parts of the F-15 Eagle sliding down the Pave’s radar screen. Both remaining Pave Low pilots wanted to go down and try to rescue some of the men from the downed chopper and, if possible, the pilot of the F-15 if the pilot had had time to eject, which was highly unlikely. But they both knew the rules. If they went back down into the mass of birds, which the Chinese had deliberately panicked and set to flight above the lake, then they too risked crashing — then everybody would be gone.
Lieutenant Reid landed northeast across the mountains down toward the Damquka-Naggu road. She knew her chance of being rescued by the choppers on the mission was nil, but momentarily at least she was pleased that if she had to be shot down it was triple A and not the result of making the wrong cut in a dogfight. There was no way she or the best pilot in the world could evade triple A by maneuvering — it was simply a matter of bad luck. But that satisfaction — that she was as good as any man — a conviction perhaps essential to the first woman combat pilot in any theater of operations — was short-lived.
In what was a whiteout, Julia took out her compass and headed north to where her military fold-out map of Tibet had “numerous nomad encampments” marked. It was a calculated risk, to go north, further toward China rather than south toward Lhasa, but with Tibet overrun by the Chinese she decided that keeping away from Lhasa, where there were thousands more Chinese than native Tibetans, would be the preferable risk.
In addition to her emergency rations and kit, which included a Nuwick forty-four-hour heat/light candle, she had what pilots called the “tit,” a small, arctic-type pup tent just big enough to lie in and zip up and have room for the candle. She could try a purple flare, but it was only a low probability that any of the aircraft, including choppers, were anywhere in the area — anyway their flight plan had called for them to fly south toward the Indian border, not north. And in that case the purple flare would only be an invitation to the Chinese. She felt, too, an added pressure — as the first female combat pilot. If she could tough it out in this godforsaken clime and somehow escape, then her fortitude would be another victory against the prejudices of those who didn’t want women in combat. History had also taught her that if she was captured by enemy troops, rape was a high probability. Far down on the white, icy north road she could see a black dot — a roadside shack, or something moving? A vehicle? She couldn’t tell. She would have to get closer. Just then she experienced a whiteout and felt a surge of fear — told herself to settle right down and took out her compass. If she walked north-northeast she should meet the road.
For Aussie Lewis and the other returning SAS/D troopers it was a somber helo trip back via the Indian border, and it remained so all the way to Khabarovsk.
Freeman’s dreams the night after the SAS/D returned were seamless, each running naturally into the other, despite the fact that in one dream he was at Trafalgar, where, after the broadside of just one naval engagement, all the men on the gun deck, as often happened, were permanently deafened. And he dreamed of the Russians, who had pioneered paratroop drops but without chutes when in winter they had to crawl out on the wing and drop off into the snow. Many were injured or killed, of course, but many were not and were quickly in action against the Wermacht. He dreamed of Hannibal crossing the Alps — of Napoleon’s retreat, how the Russian fastness soaked up the French like blotting paper soaked up ink — and he dreamed of the first land defeat suffered by the Japanese in 1942 at Milne Bay and of MacArthur’s triumphant return.
Suddenly he was awake and, hearing a noise outside, immediately reached for his shotgun. It was a mournful, keening wind fresh out of the great Gobi, and in its wolfish howling there seemed to be a warning that if he did not do something soon, the sheer weight of Cheng’s numbers would determine the outcome: China would absorb him as Russia had the French. It was in that moment that he realized what had to be done. Of course it was a gamble, but if it worked it would be a decisive blow — no, the decisive blow. He got up, ordered in coffee, and told the duty officer that as soon as the SAS/D team got back he wanted to see the four troop leaders.
“They’ll be pretty tired, General, after—”
“Tired! Don’t give me tired, son. Just get ‘em here. They’ve had fourteen hours sleep on the flight back from India through Japan,” Freeman said. “Besides, these are SAS/D, Major. They’re the best we’ve got. So don’t give me tired.”
“No, sir.”
Studying the SATPICs of Beijing, Freeman could see what looked like headless bodies along the east-west Changan Avenue and also in the square. Higher magnification showed the people’s heads were covered by a kind of muslin bag. Others, street sweepers, were busy with long straw brooms and wearing surgical masks against the dust Freeman pointed to the stretch of dirt that had no doubt once been a grassy meridian. Or at least that he knew had once been a grassy meridian.
“In the fifties,” he explained to Norton, “the Chinese government, with faultless Marxist logic, decided to do something to get rid of the millions of birds feeding off the city and defacing statues of the Heroes of the Revolution, and so the authorities encouraged the people to kill all the birds. Only problem was, with all the birds gone, there came a plague of insects that most of the birds had fed on. The insects destroyed the plants, and then the winds blew away the soil with no plants to anchor it. So now in addition to the west wind bringing all the dirt out of the Gobi, we’ve got the dirt from the city mixed in with it.” It was a yellowish pollution — a mixture of dust and grit from the deserts.
“Dick,” Freeman ordered, “get Harvey Simmet up here.” Norton glanced at his watch. It was three a.m., the time when most people die.
“Yes, I know,” Freeman said. “He’s probably having his beauty sleep, but get him all the same.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And get the aerial photo wiz.”
“It is late, General. Can it wait—”
“No! I don’t give a goddamn what time it is. You think Cheng shuts down past midnight? At night, Major, he moves entire divisions — thirteen thousand men at a time. The Chinese are a sea around us, and we’d better do something mighty quick before we drown.”
“Yes, sir.”
What in hell, Dick Norton wondered, was the general up to now? Had a little snippet of Chinese history — another point of the minutiae he knew about China — changed his mind about the strategy of the attack?
In fact, General Freeman was thinking about the night of June 3, 1989, when the PLA’s Twenty-seventh Army used a lot of tear gas at the Muxidi Bridge in Beijing.
Julia started out and anticipated feeling nauseated from altitude sickness until she got used to the relative lack of oxygen at fourteen thousand feet But whether it was her training in the centrifuge, the tight compression at high Gs, or the fact that she was in superb physical condition, she experienced little of the shortness of breath that they’d been briefed about before the mission.
She still couldn’t tell what the black dot was, only that it must be moving away from her at the same rate she was following it.
For minutes at a time the dot was completely lost in the sudden windstorms of snow and even hail that beat down, then just as quickly disappeared to reveal the denuded landscape of Tibet’s Chang Tang, a land of sky-blue lakes and vast green treeless grassland, pierced here and there by precipitous treeless mountains of somber, mustard-hued beauty.
The black dot seemed to break into several parts, and she could see it was two or three animals, stopped now, and another figure — a man — possibly walking with them. Should she wave or not? Would they be Chinese or Tibetans?
Most Tibetans, Julia knew, hated the Chinese since the PLA’s takeover in 1950 and the fleeing of the Dalai Lama nine years later. After the Red Guards’ mad “Cultural Revolution” was over, after they’d murdered monks, forced them into labor camps, and destroyed over fifteen hundred Buddhist monasteries, there was a legacy of oppression that ran deep. Julia knew if it was a group of Tibetan nomads or drokba who lived from one campsite to another on the seventeen-thousand-foot-high plateau that was the Chang Tang, or north plateau, then she might be lucky. The drokba had suffered as much as any of the Tibetans in Lhasa and the towns. Often they’d fared worse, the Chinese insisting that Tibet was theirs, forcing many of the nomads into communes and confiscating the yaks, goats, sheep, and pasture grounds upon which the drokba had traditionally depended for their livelihood.
As she got closer to the yaks she saw smaller animals, sheep probably, and some goats milling about — now about half a mile away down the road. It had not been a heavy snowstorm, and the black coats of the yaks had only a dusting of snow, as if someone had thrown talcum powder over them, and they were mostly still, nuzzling through the light spring snow, eating the rich grass below.
Whether it was her anxiety about just what kind of reception she’d get — some of the poorer nomads had collaborated with the Chinese and become richer — the shoulder holster holding her service .45 was rubbing against her bra and she had to loosen the shoulder strap. She prayed she wouldn’t need the gun but that if she did, she wouldn’t hesitate, she would fire it the way she flew — with total concentration, the kind of concentration that had made her the first American woman fighter pilot to down two of the enemy: a Chinese Shenyang and a MiG Fulcrum.
None of the male pilots in Khabarovsk had taken any notice of her downing a Shenyang, common opinion being that if you couldn’t down a Shenyang with one eye closed you were a piss-poor pilot. The Fulcrum — well that had made the boys sit up and take notice. Not many had downed the brilliant Chinese-bought CIS fighter.
She had heard, “Bogey five o’clock!” and made the first cut hard left, she dropping speed, he increasing, till for a second they were all but parallel. Then she was climbing and started a barrel roll right, going for the Fulcrum. Next minute she couldn’t see him in front, the next they were in rolling scissors. She had him in her sights for less than a second and had the tone from the Sidewinder. It was all she needed — releasing the missile, the latter streaking forward with its nose locked onto the Fulcrum’s exhaust.
The Fulcrum tried to drop fast and outturn the Sidewinder, but the missile disappeared up his exhaust, blowing the Fulcrum apart in a yellow sheet of flame — no chute.
It had lasted less than a minute, but after her downing of the Fulcrum, the ribbing suddenly ceased. And if in the world of split-second, fly-by-wire warfare she could get another three enemy fighters she’d be an ace. Some of the guys she knew would celebrate her; some would be eaten away by jealousy. Tough. But before any of that could happen she had to get back, and next to the north and south poles, she was in perhaps the harshest place on earth, where you could experience the four seasons in one day, so unsettled and everchanging was the weather on the roof of the world.
Now she could see that several yak-hide tents had been put up, and already there was smoke wafting above them, the yak-dung fires giving off an unexpectedly pleasant odor. She went through her emergency pack again, looking under the wafer-thin but highly absorbent tampons to the phrase book. Unfortunately it had only Chinese — Mandarin and Cantonese — phrases. If none of the nomads spoke English it would all have to be done with sign language.
As she approached the nomads’ camp, several naki— sheep dogs — began barking, their bluish black coats in marked contrast to the light dusting of snow, and several children in filthy clothes gathered around one of them while staring at this apparition — this long, lithe Westerner that might well have come from one of the mountain gods. One of the children, looking at her fixedly, called out, presumably to someone in the tent, but Julia couldn’t tell for sure as the child’s stare had been unbroken while he ate what looked to be a kind of yogurt from a small, decorated bowl.
Then abruptly the child went inside, followed by one of the dogs, and a man dressed in trousers whose bottoms were sewn into a pair of Reebok shoes and whose torso was covered by a dirty sheepskin jacket, wiping his nose on the sleeve, came out of the yak tent, smiled, and waved her inside, saying something in Tibetan that she hoped meant “You’re welcome.”
“What the—”
‘The general wants to see you, Harvey.”
“You know what time it is?”
“I do. The general still wants to see you.”
Harvey Simmet could barely raise himself from his bunk. “What does he want?”
“Don’t ask me, sir. I’m just the gofer.”
Harvey almost left the tent without his helmet.
“Better put it on, sir,” the duty officer told him. “The general has a standing order about that — even have to wear them in…”
“… When we go to the latrines. Yes, I know. Eighty-dollar fine, right?”
“Right, sir.”
As he bent his body against the Gobi wind, Harvey was wondering what was so urgent that the general had to dig him out of a warm bed at this ungodly hour.
“Ah, there you are, Harvey. Hope I didn’t wake you up. Coffee?”
“No — yes, sir. Coffee, yes.”
“Clear the cobwebs out, Harvey,” Freeman said, handing his meteorological officer a steaming mug. “Spring has sprung and we’ve work to do, gentlemen.”
“What do you want to know, General?” Harvey asked.
“First things first, Harv. This dust storm from the Gobi. Will it be short?”
“Could last for days. Bad for our air cover.”
“And theirs, Harvey.”
“True.” Harvey was starting to come round with the coffee. “I’d guesstimate three to four days.”
“After that?” the general asked.
“It’ll settle down. You’ll have your close air support again. Warthogs can prowl at will.”
“Perhaps, but that’s no consolation if Cheng’s troops start using that goddamn smoke cover again. Impossible to make IFF.”
‘True,” Harvey said, pulling the blanket around him.
“So it’s three to four days’ dust we have.”
“Yes — maybe longer, but three to four I’d figure.”
“Now, Harvey, this is important. How strong is the wind going to be?”
“Thirty, maybe forty miles per hour. Forty at the outside.”
“It’s more than that out there now.”
“You’re right, General, but it still sounds worse than it is. In any case it’ll be down around thirty miles per hour in four days — maybe less.”
“ ‘Scuse me, sir, Major Norton.” It was the duty officer.
“Yes, Major?”
“Photo recon boys are here.”
“You have that computer model ready yet?” Freeman cut in.
“Working on it, sir.”
“What the hell does that mean? Is it ready or not?”
‘They’re working on it, sir.”
Suddenly Freeman slammed his fist against the map, knocking off several armored divisions. “Goddamn it! What’s the matter with you people? You think it’s time to sleep?” He was so loud he even drowned out the radio babble outside his room. “We haven’t got time to sleep! We’re going to counterattack! We are going on the offensive, gentlemen. And I don’t mean holding our positions. We are going to eat Chinese alive.”
“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.