Freeman walked into the psychological warfare section of Second Army, a unit that the general usually had little time for. He said they ought to have reduced Noriega’s sentence for putting up with all that “damn rock ‘n’ roll” the psych unit played at him through the loudspeakers in Panama. “Let’s see the pamphlets we’re going to drop,” he said.
Dick Norton had already picked one up from the table and handed it to Freeman. The general took an immediate liking to the cartoon of the detested old men in Beijing kicking peasants and workers. “Good. I want something the people can understand — won’t have to be highly educated to get the drift. All the minorities will understand the Chinese symbols, but wasn’t it the Chinese who said that a picture is worth a thousand words?” He looked up at the psych officer, asking, “Have you made a cartoon for each minority — you know, different national dress, et cetera?”
The CO of the psychological warfare unit shifted uncomfortably. “Ah, well, we thought that Han Chinese being the most…”
“There you go again!” Freeman cut in. “If I’ve said it once I’ve said it a thousand times — you keep thinking of China as one cohesive bloc. It isn’t! Never was! Why do you think the Great Wall was built? To keep those who wanted in, out! The minorities are our natural allies— millions of them — as tired of the Beijing empire as the Gauls were of the Romans — as the republics were of the Soviet Union. You don’t see the minorities or hear them in the mass of the Han, but they’re there — waiting to be free.”
“Yes, sir,” the psych major said.
“Right, now make a note, Major. The text is good, telling them we’ve come to free them from Beijing’s yoke. They’ll all understand the Chinese script even if they pronounce it differently, but as well we must have the cartoons drawn so as to appeal to every different minority.”
A captain from the psych unit who was affronted at Freeman’s assumption that he knew more about the minorities than the psych unit asked, “Exactly which minorities did you have in mind, sir?”
“Everyone,” Freeman said, and then he gave it to them, from memory and with both barrels. “The Hui, Manchu, Daur, Oroqen, Ewenki, Tujia, She, Li, Miao, Bai, Zhuang Dai Yao, Yi, Tibetan, Uygur, and Xibe. All right?”
The captain, indeed the entire psych unit, was silenced, and Dick Norton couldn’t help a smile — he knew that news of the general’s performance would spread through Second Army like wildfire, and within hours there’d be another notch in me Freeman legend of a man who, as usual, knew and had studied his enemy in meticulous detail.
“Norton.”
“Yes, General?”
“Get Harvey Simmet up here. Fast Tell him I want another update on the next five days’ weather.”
Harvey was relaxing, or rather in the process of relaxing, on his bunk when after some initial static on the tape he settled down, hands crossed in a funereal position, to hear the first few bars of Sinatra’s “My Way” when the PA crackled to life. “Would Major Harvey Simmet report to…”
The latest from frontline SITREPs — situation reports— told Freeman that his forces were holding their own against the massed T-59s and T-62s south of Orgon Tal, with only two of every one hundred U.S. tanks “tits up”—down— because of some mechanical failure. But up around Honggor, the other terminus of the front, the situation was grim. The PLA’s salvos of mobile-type 54-1 122mm howitzers thudded away at the dug-in American positions of Five Corps as screams from the swarms of T-70 130mm rockets rent the air as the rockets crashed down in deadly unison.
In defilade hull and turret positions the Americans’ M1A1s held their own, but on this, the northeastern end of the trace, the battle took on a strange and unexpected aspect of trench warfare from the days of World War 1 and the Korean War — both sides in a rough equality, Cheng’s armies having more men and more guns, the Americans fewer men and guns but much more accurate in their fire.
There was an attempt by Cheng’s army to ford a swollen irrigation ditch in the desertlike terrain here with fifty-one of his fifteen-ton type-77 AAVs — amphibious armored vehicles — but the American M1A1s, able briefly to see through the windblown dust and debris, wreaked a terrible vengeance on Cheng’s amphibians, with only seven making the shore, and of these, two simply conked out, their armor pierced by the molten jet from an APFSDS — armor piercing fin-stabilized discarding sabot — shot and leaking all over.
Bravely the Chinese commanders opened hatches and manned the 12.7mm AA gun, and fourteen of the sixteen men from each amphibious vehicle poured out only to be caught in a cross fire between the American tanks’ coaxial 7.6mm machine gun and other 7.6mm atop each tank’s turret, not one of the Chinese infantrymen making it.
More fifteen-ton T-77 AAVs were sent across the muddy swirl of about a hundred yards wide. Again the M1A1s came up from the hatch-down defilade position and the amphibians were slaughtered. But Cheng knew what he was doing, having ordered the amphibians across, confident that, sending them en masse, a dozen or so would make it and be free to race toward the Americans’ dug-in positions. And so long as there were targets for them, the tanks of the U.S. Five Corps had no option but to use their fifty rounds apiece. Meanwhile swarms of Cheng’s fast motorbike interdiction teams, armed with 85mm, 18.8-pound, rocket-propelled grenades, raced through the dust and over narrow footbridges to sever Freeman’s overextended supply line.
Freeman’s engineers worked the wonders that they are all too often forgotten for, but they couldn’t perform miracles. The supply line they’d laid for the gasoline was a long, plastic hose plowed under a few inches of ground to bring gasoline to the front, but once a fissure in it had been made by a Chinese 81mm barrage it burst skyward in a long, thin finger of fire that served as a marker for all ensuing 81mm attacks in the sector.
Soon the line containing two blivets — the big plastic underground tanks — was like a giant water bed suddenly pierced with multiple needles, and the fuel set afire by backflash from the first mortar-created fire burned fiercely in the desert, as demoralizing to the Americans in the trenches as it was to those inside the tanks where ammunition was running low.
It was then that Cheng unleashed his regimental T-69s. The relatively light thirty-seven-ton, 580-horsepower tanks raced at fifty kilometers per hour, sweeping forward in arrowhead-shaped echelons, their laser range finders, which had been cut by the dust, of no concern because the fuel fires now illuminated the American M1A1s in turret defilade positions.
It was now that quantity — over one thousand T-69s against the two hundred M1A1s — had a quality all its own, as M1A1s that had run out of ammunition, having stopped many of the 69s dead in their tracks, were now themselves destroyed, many out of fuel as well as ammunition as they were finally overwhelmed by Cheng’s tanks.
Dragon missile antitank teams managed to make some of the Chinese main battle tanks pay for the victory, but there were still 838 Chinese MBTs left to advance on the dug-in Americans.
“Send in the A-10s!” Freeman ordered. “Use our fuel fires as flares. And undo those T-69s that are crossing or near the severed fuel line.” The A-10s, taking their cue from Freeman’s order, used the fuel fires now as identification friend-or-foe flares and killed over a hundred more of the Chinese tanks.
The Warthogs’ pilots were ecstatic, one of them reporting joyously, “We got the mothers — a hundred of ‘em,” to which Freeman’s wry reply was, “Good — that only leaves seven hundred and thirty-eight.”
The American infantry, at first dug in and now withdrawing from the positions south of Honggor without sufficient armor cover, were slaughtered by the ChiComs’ 12.7 machine guns both on the tanks and those of the YW531H-type armored personnel carriers of Cheng’s — many of the Americans simply ran down and killed by the treads of Cheng’s vehicles. In some instances, the Chinese rested their machine guns, many of them having got too hot because of the rapid fire, and used cannon to clear a trench, which left nothing but a bloody conduit of mashed bone and flesh that only further greased the treads of the Chinese tanks and gave off the peculiar copperlike odor of blood, adding to the smells of involuntary defecation, cordite, and dust.
“Dick,” Freeman announced, “we have to hit them with a second front.”
“What about Admiral Kuang?”
“He hasn’t moved yet and I can’t afford to wait.”
“What do you have in mind — something on the coast?”
“Good man,” Freeman said. “Great minds think alike. Yes, let’s have a marine air-ground task force. And call in a carrier from South Korea to provide close air support.”
Norton wondered where the MAGTAF would be used. “Where on the coast?”
“Beidaihe!”
“Ambitious,” Norton commented, in what was one of the understatements of the war so far. Beidaihe had been chosen by Freeman because not only was it 150 miles east of Beijing but it was the summer fun place for all the high-ranking cadres and their lackeys. Deng’s fortresslike villa was at Beidaihe. It was where all the top Party members and “worker heroes” of the People’s Republic and selected military personnel went to escape, and those workers suffering from lung disease and nervous disorders went to Beidaihe’s sanatorium for the peace and the salt air. Now in spring the fishing village was quiet, but it had three good beaches and had a good road as well as a railroad to Beijing. It was also the cadres’ favorite resort. It used to be said that he who owned Beidaihe — not Beijing — had the mandate of heaven. Since Mao’s victory in 1949, they simply said, “He who owns Beidaihe owns China.”
“They get wind of it before we’re ready, General, and those beaches could become an abattoir for Second Army.”
“Well, Dick, it’ll be our lot’s job to make damn sure they don’t know. We’ll make a feint of hitting the coast up north first. Meanwhile at Beidaihe we’ll send in SEALs by submarine. That skipper — young David Brentwood’s older brother — Robert Brentwood. He’s proved his mettle. We’ll send a SEAL team in with his sub to scout the approaches. They can wrap underwater demolition charges around any obstacles to a landing and we can blow them in unison later by remote control.”
“If Kuang doesn’t come in and we need to send in the MAGTAF,” Norton said.
“You’ve got it. At the very least it’ll frighten the pants off of Cheng, having a beachhead attack to worry about. He’ll have to divert at least two divisions — more — from the Beijing Military Region. If the marines get pinned down we can always pull them out, and us attacking Beidaihe might light a cracker under Kuang’s ass and get him moving. Then China could have four fronts to contend with — the Orgon Tal-Honggor front, the trace north of Beijing, Beidaihe to the east, and Kuang to the south. That’s when I’d expect all the Chinese minorities to take the cue. Hell, even if they don’t, we have to take the pressure off our boys around Honggor. They’re getting clobbered. We’ll have to move in a carrier force from South Korea to Bo Hai — bomb the crap out of the Beidaihe beaches before and while our MAGTAF is going in.”
Norton saw the weak link in a flash, and he was about to say something when Freeman conceded the Achilles’ heel of the operation. “Yes, I know, PLA’s navy is a brown navy. Haven’t got a pot to piss in when it comes to deep water, but here we’re talking about coastal defenses and they have scores of hydrofoil and fast-attack surface-to-surface missile boats for coastal defense. Well our carrier’s screen’ll have to deal with them.”
“Washington isn’t going to like the expansion of this ‘reconnaissance in force.’”
“Well, Dick, I have a choice — see our boys chopped to pieces around Honggor, or take the pressure off with a MAGTAF. Hell, that’s what a MAGTAF is all about — self-contained emergency force ready to move anywhere. If this isn’t an emergency I don’t know what in hell is.” He paused. “Did I call it that—a ‘reconnaissance in force’?”
“You did.”
“Hum — needs a new title, Dick — with something U.N.-ish about it—’police action!’ By God, that’s it! For Khabarovsk press releases.”
“Yes, sir. You do know the press are crying foul about you prohibiting them from the front.”
“For their own safety,” Freeman said.
“They’d take that risk, General.”
“Yes, by God, I’m sure they would. And some son of a bitch’d take a faceup snapshot of one of our dead, and next thing you know we’d have every damned liberal from here to Waco telling us how we should have done it. No, Dick. No press — not now.”
“Yes, General.”
Within a half hour the MAGTAF was notified, and Captain Robert Brentwood, skipper of the Sea Wolf II class combination Hunter-Killer-ICBM sub USS Reagan, was ordered to take a SEAL team fully qualified from Coronado and San Clemente, the latter an open-water school at San Diego, and the airborne school at Fort Benning, Georgia, and have them carry out a BLS — beach landing site— survey of the central beach off Beidaihe.
As Alexsandra was pushed out of the prison exit into the darkness in a large bamboo hopper, she almost threw up from the noxious odors of the hospital’s filthy linen, but it was her way to freedom, and within a half hour she had been transferred from the hospital truck to a hutong not far from the railway station. From there, after a change of clothing and bowl of meat-laced rice, she found herself aboard the six-and-a-half-hour train to Shanhaiguan, the university student accompanying her telling her that it would take only five hours to Beidaihe. If everything went all right, they would arrive close to dawn.
It was still several hours before dawn as Julia Reid was awakened by the baaing of sheep, the wind howling about the tent still sweeping down upon the Chang Tang unabated. Despite the soft sheepskin rugs she had been sleeping on, her body ached all over, and what had been a small bump on her left cheekbone, caused during her eject, was now a dark bruise. The smell of the dung fire, surprisingly pleasant, mixed with that of sour yogurt and cheese in the tent, gave a cloying quality to the air.
The strangeness of it all, the constant moaning of the wind and the pull on the tent ropes like a ship straining to be free, all reminded her of how far from home — how far from civilization — she was. She could hear the grandfather and the man who’d been watching her snoring like motor mowers, the sound so loud that at times it even subdued the wailing of the wind. Used to living in shared quarters at Fairchild Air Force Base in Washington State, she wasn’t normally bothered by the snores and other nocturnal sounds in barracks, but now they irritated her to the point of sleeplessness, and she pulled the sheepskin over her head. It was worse, her sense of isolation exacerbated. How long could she stay with the nomads?
From the little she’d been able to understand, it seemed as if they stayed only long enough for a pasture to be grazed and then moved on. Given this and the snow, she guessed they’d be on their way within a day or two. But to where? Further into the vastness of the Chang Tang plateau. Yet what else could she do? Turn around and walk to Lhasa, with Chinese troops looking for the pilot of the downed F-15? Or perhaps they couldn’t reach the wreckage, wherever it was — perhaps it wasn’t even visible, burned somewhere in the high mountain snows.
Someone in the tent broke wind, and a malodorous cloud permeated the smell of unwashed bodies, yogurt, and yak dung. Next time someone told her women weren’t fit for combat she’d tell them to go find a yak tent. Beyond the immediate noises of snoring and the wind, Julia thought she could hear snoring from the next tent, which she knew was impossible.
The more she listened, the more convinced she became that it was a motor. No sooner had she deduced this than the flap of the tent seemed to implode, and silhouetted against a flurry of snow was a man. From where she was lying he looked to be over six feet, and in his sixties, his face leathery from the harshness of the climate. He immediately began talking. Julia had no idea what it was about, but from his tone she could tell it was urgent. The snoring stopped abruptly, and in the dim light of the fire’s coals she could see the shadow of the grandfather, then his son or son-in-law.
The children woke and started crying. The man who had entered the tent so abruptly came across and tapped her on the arm. He raised his arms as if he were holding a rifle, then made driving motions, pointing beyond the tent. “Chin-eze,” he said, “Chin-eze,” and motioned her to follow him, handing her a sheepskin coat and hat. As she stumbled over the bodies in the darkness, she felt the grandfather grabbing her and thrusting something hard and warm into her hand. It was her service .45.
Out in the freezing darkness the snow was still swirling down. It was a light snow, the howling wind whipping it across her face, making it seem much denser than it really was. There were two yaks standing still as statues, and she wondered why she hadn’t heard them coming up to the tent The man indicated she should get on the nearest animal, which she thought would be easy until the yak, sensing her hesitation, moved, and it was more difficult to mount than any F-15.
“Chin-eze,” the man repeated.
“Yes,” she replied. “I know — Chinese.”
He nodded to confirm that she understood. “Chin-eze,” he said again, and headed off into the snow, the yak Julia was riding tethered to the first. Julia could still hear the motor sound she heard just before his arrival. Suddenly she was struck by a bone-chilling apprehension that he was not taking her away from the nomad encampment for her safety but to deliver her to the Chinese for what she knew must be a substantial reward for a downed American pilot. She just as quickly dismissed the idea as absurd. As far as she knew, the Tibetans hated the Chinese.
Of course there were those who didn’t, who, during the madness of the Cultural Revolution in the sixties when Mao sent out his Red Guards, had collaborated. The Chinese had forced the nomads into communes, and those who had wealth had their animals stolen, their silver earrings torn off, and other goods confiscated. The nomads were branded “class enemies” of the people and as often as not were evicted as outcasts, even from the lowest level of the communes. During this time, some of the very poor had become powerful officials of the Chinese. Then after the Cultural Revolution had faded, the old order of nomadic society had reasserted itself, to the relief of nearly all the nomads. But there were still those who, once having had the power of the Chinese behind them, wanted it again and would do anything to ingratiate themselves with the Chinese.
What bothered Julia most was having had her .45 revolver stolen — if only for a few hours. Perhaps it was a local custom to share anything new brought into the camp.
It was like instrument flying in bad weather. She could see nothing through the darkness. Having placed all her faith in the guide, all she knew for certain from her watch-compass was that she was headed east into the wilderness of the Chang Tang.
She could hear the sound of the motor about a mile away, she thought, behind them, and it kept getting louder. Then abruptly it stopped. The old man turned to her in the saddle, pointing back toward the camp. “Chin-eze.”
Then the old man slid off his yak and, still holding its rein, came back to her and motioned for her to get off. As her feet touched the snow, the old man pointed down at their track marks. They were discernible at least twenty to thirty yards back, the snow not falling heavily enough to fill in the yaks’ footprints. The old man now indicated that they must walk with the yaks. It would mean more but lighter footprints, which the snow would fill in more quickly. At the campsite, the woman in the tent had given her a beaded necklace of carved bone and stones, said to ward off evil spirits that lurked in the mountain passes to trap the unwary. She fingered it like a rosary as they went higher into the Chang Tang.
Aboard the USS Reagan in the South China Sea, the high-speed burst message received gave Robert Brentwood his orders from Freeman, CIC Far Eastern Forces. Eight SEALs would be parachuted over a rendezvous point, their purpose a beach survey. It wasn’t Robert Brentwood’s favorite occupation. You never knew when your sub might be the victim of magnetic, or worse, nonmagnetic, mines activated by the sound print of the sub, depending on how good, how current, the PLA’s threat library of sound prints was. Since China had purchased some Russian subs after the collapse of the Soviet Union when the minorities rose there, there would now be more need to update the Reagan’s threat library of sound prints given off by the PLA navy, particularly as the Reagan entered Bo Hai gulf.
On this mission Robert Brentwood wouldn’t be part of the SEAL team as he had been before the cease-fire fell on the Yangtze. His job now was to insert the team of eight “surveyors,” one officer swimmer and seven other members, off the middle beach and then extract them four hours later after the SEALs, equipped with bubble-free Draeger rebreather systems, “cased the joint,” in the words of the chief of the boat, Petty Officer Rowan, by which Rowan meant they would go in in four pairs, a hundred yards from one another.
The SEALs would drop their lead-weighted sinker line every twenty-five yards to get the depth, which would be marked on their plastic thigh plates. Then they would work in grids to check systematically for any undersea obstacles, making a note of these on the slate and getting their exact position by waterproof GPS, or global positioning system.
The divers could then place a magnetic pinger, with a battery life of at least four days, or they could use malleable lumps of C4 plastique with primacord inserted. Then all the primacords could be attached to a master detonating cord.
It was a long, painstaking job in the darkness, particularly as the men found a fence of “hedgehogs”—six-pointed steel tripods, Chinese versions of the old Normandy landing’s Belgian gates — where a wall of twelve-by-twelve-foot cross sections of steel girders was supported by a large, backward-sloping, and flat-based system of girders. With floating contact mines attached to the top of the obstacle, they could blow a landing craft right out of the water. While the officer made his way toward the so-called “shark” net — in reality a sub net — the other seven swimmers in his team found over fifty of the China gates that made up an almost solid line of obstacles across the deepest channel at high tide.
The officer in charge had crossed the shark net of the middle beach and threaded it with primacord and Hagensen packs of C2 explosive and affixed his primacord to the master cord, which in turn was attached to a subsurface floater or bladder buoy, which would not be bobbing around on the surface but which was anchored by means of a Danforth anchor and which would be marked on the grid system as the detonation point for any incoming force.
When they returned to the sub — they had been out for over four hours — every SEAL was dog tired reentering the chamber, which had to be pumped free of water before they could dry off and earn a well-deserved rest in the sub. When the last man let go of the hatch too quickly and its bang resonated throughout the sub, the passive sonar operator tore his headset off. “Jesus Murphy!”
Brentwood heard it, too. In fact he doubted whether anyone else on the watch hadn’t heard it. There was one, the assistant cook, but he’d had his head stuck in the freezer, moving around heavy lumps of frozen beef.
The Chinese Navy had heard it. It wasn’t one of their few nuclear subs that had picked up the sound racing through the water at four times the speed it would have in air, but the Perch, a refitted diesel electric, one of the early Russian clankers known as “honeymoon machines” for all the noise they made — like a toolbox on the move. Normally the Reagan would have picked her up had she been under way with her diesels, but the Chinese sub was still, on station, diesels shut down, maintaining her position only by means of her battery power. As such she was silent as a tomb, much quieter man the pump of the nuclear sub Reagan, which had to be kept on at all times.
The question for the Chinese captain was whether the other submarine would give off any more noise “shorts.” And yet his battery power would last for only another hour. Should he move in closer to shore or wait? It was unlikely the other sub would be going in any closer to shore but would rather be egressing into the gulf.
He decided to wait. Meantime, all his torpedo tubes were loaded with warshots. Besides, the gulf was relatively quiet, so that subsurface sea clutter should be at a minimum and make any unusual noise easier to detect.
When the ship’s writer let it be known the familygram burst messages had arrived, the atmosphere aboard the Reagan immediately seemed infused with a festive air as crew members eagerly, yet trying not to seem overly excited, waited for news of home. All they needed to hear was that the family, wife, or sweetheart was fine. “Everything’s fine” was all their psyches needed. Anything else — a newborn having put on weight, a student getting honors, a football team in good spirits, victorious or not— was what the officers and men of USS Reagan considered the icing on the cake. “Puss in boots is waiting” almost ousted Andrea Rolston’s anonymous “I need meat. Can you bring home the bacon?” as raunchiest ‘gram of the month.
When Rolston saw a duplicate of it, unsigned, pinned up on the notice board as ‘gram of the month, he shook his head, tut-tutting, “Geez, what some gals will write. Disgusting.”
“Oh no, sir,” a torpedo man first class said. “That’s beautiful.”
“You’re sick, Mulvaney,” Rolston joshed.
“Well, I’d sure like to meet whoever the gal is.”