“Sir?” It was one of Choir Williams’s troop, a Chinese American, during the final briefing. “How about the broadcasting building?”
Freeman nodded at Norton, a sign that the SAS/D man had impressed him. “You know where it is, son?”
“On Fuxingmenwai Dajie — the main drag, sir.”
“You’ve been to Beijing?’
“Yes, sir.”
“In what capacity?”
“Tourist, sir. My mother and father were born there and took me back on holidays — that was in—”
“All right, son,” Freeman cut in good-naturedly. “Don’t need your biography.” There was a smattering of laughter. “Fact that you’re in the SAS/D is good enough.” Freeman looked out at Choir Williams. “Mr. Williams, you keep that boy real close to you.”
“I’ll handcuff him to me, General.”
More laughter.
“Better idea,” Freeman said. “Cuff him to the radio.” Freeman turned to his next topic and waited till the men had settled down. “I know as a prerequisite for SAS/D force every man here has to have a working knowledge of one language other than English. Now most of you swear in at least a dozen languages and we have some jokers from down under who harbor the belief that they speak English.”
“Bloody right, mate!” Aussie interjected, and was hooted down. Freeman didn’t mind the fun, for when they took off in the C-47 Chinooks for the capital of the most populous country on earth, into the very heart of communism, their mood would be somber enough.
“Right!” Freeman continued. “Listen up, now. How many Chinese speakers have we?”
Out of 160 men who would be put down in Tiananmen Square, eleven spoke Chinese.
“Mandarin?” Freeman asked. “Not Cantonese.”
Six hands went down immediately.
“Very well, gentlemen, you five will stay so close to radio operators that you’ll look like their shadows. Shadow one, two, three, four,” Freeman said, indicating Aussie Lewis, David Brentwood, Choir Williams, and Salvini, “will stay with the respective troop leaders. Number five, you’ll stay with me. Now, everyone, watches — time is now ten hundred hours. We leave at oh four hundred. We should be in the square before dawn.”
“Air cover?” someone shouted.
“Pessimistic bastard,” Freeman replied, and this got the biggest laugh of what would be a final half-hour-long briefing.
“Comanches!” the general answered.
“You mean Apaches, sir?”
“No, I do not mean Apaches. I mean Comanches. Second Army gets the first batch of fifty.”
“All right!” a tall, black Tennesseean said.
“Let’s hope we don’t need any,” his buddy countered.
“Dreamin’, boy. You’re dreamin’.”
“As to the original question,” Freeman said, “about the broadcasting building. You’re right, Private. Damned important target — same as the telegraph office east on Xichang’ An Jie. These targets as well as other railway overpasses and bridges will be hit by cruise missiles. We don’t want to destroy anything in Beijing, however, unless it’s of military importance. We expect a number of students and workers to rise and help us. Like ten thousand or so. We don’t want to bomb them. Our mission is to become a rallying point for our attack on the compound.”
Freeman reached in his top left pocket and extracted one of the leaflets he’d had printed. “This pamphlet, drawn with the goddess of democracy in the background, promises that Second Army is here only to wrest control from the Communists so as to turn the government back to the people, to the goddess of democracy, the June Fourth Movement, et cetera…”
Next Freeman walked over to a large table that was covered in a khaki sheet backed by a row of enlarged black-and-white photos of China’s top leaders. “Now, gentlemen, I want you to pay attention to this more-detailed mock-up of our target.” And with that, Freeman, with the flourish of a Houdini, pulled the khaki sheet aside in one movement, revealing the central area of Beijing in detail. Even the model size of Tiananmen Square drew whistles of surprise. Its vastness was evident even on this scale, representing almost a hundred acres of cement. “All right,” Freeman said, opening his telescopic pointer. “You’ve had time to study the map since the first briefing. I’m facing north and standing in the middle of the square. What’s immediately to my rear?”
The answer from 160 throats sounded like a roar. “Statue of Heroes of the Revolution!” The pointer now slid north across Changan Avenue.
“Tiananmen — Gate of Heavenly Peace, and,” Freeman added, “entrance to the Forbidden City, which is two hundred and fifty acres and where we do not want to go unless we absolutely have to. We’re not here to shoot up their ancient buildings, monuments, or artifacts. If any of you land in error or have mechanical failure that puts you down inside the Forbidden City, head south immediately and get out through the Tiananmen Gate and join us in the square. All right, I’m still standing in the middle of the square. On my left-hand side to the west?”
“Great Hall of the People.”
“Correct. To the east — right-hand side?”
“Museum of the Chinese Revolution.”
“Correct.”
“Behind me, beyond the Statue of Heroes of the Revolution. To the south?”
“Mao.”
“And dead as a doornail,” Salvini said.
“You bloody hope,” Aussie cut in. It got a laugh, but not from Freeman, who, Norton noticed, rather sternly slid the pointer to the northwest corner of the square, immediately left of the Forbidden City.
“Zhongnanhai — Snakes’ Compound.”
“Good. That’s our target, so as soon as you get down in the square you get yourselves together into four troops of forty men each and head for the compound. Now I’m not going to feed you any bullshit so you might as well understand that because the buildings in the Zhongnanhai are residences as well as the offices of the elite Communists there will be women and children present.
“If it were simply a matter of killing them all we could send in a cruise missile there as well, but then we, the U.S., would knowingly be killing women and children. That’s not our way — that’s what makes us different from them — from the Communist hardheads. This is why you SAS and Delta have been asked to do the job. You’re specially trained in the split-second decision making on clearing rooms in hostage situations — so as dawn breaks let’s clear them out as carefully and as quickly as we can. Same rules as I mentioned before — choice of weapons is yours but has to be okayed by your troop leader.
“Remember, the only people we’re interested in are the State Council — Chairman Nie, Cheng, and the others on the State Council whose photos we have on the board up here. While we’re in the compound, more troops will be landing in Tiananmen. I’ll only give orders when I think our one-two-three — one, go in, two, get them, three, get back to the square — has met any unusual or unforeseen obstacles. Other than that it’s up to you to follow your four troop leaders — Brentwood, Salvini, Aussie, and Choir Williams. Any questions?’
“Sir,” Williams asked, “will the main attack against the wall at Badaling and down through the Juyong Pass coincide with our attack on the compound?”
“It will,” Freeman said, remarking that the Zhongnanhai complex “is almost as big as the Forbidden City, including the area covered by the two lakes. And I should tell you that we’ve been flying nighttime nap-of-the-earth chopper missions in and already dropping leaflets, so hopefully our entry in the Chinooks won’t elicit too much interest on their radar even if they do pick us up on screen. But everything will ultimately depend on surprise and speed. Before that, darkness and bad weather are our best camouflage.”
“Piece of cake,” Aussie said, making an eye-rolling Groucho Marx face that belied his ironic tone.
“Very well,” Freeman said. “I have one more comment to make. It’s no use glossing over the opposition. We know neither how many we’ll run into nor, if our luck holds, how few. But one thing we do know is that we’ll be at the heart of the dragon. Chinese still think they’re the center of the world — closer to heaven than anyone else. If we get the State Council out of there, if we take the mandate of heaven from them, yours will be the greatest single blow ever against the world’s last great Communist bastion. I believe if we succeed the whole edifice will fall as it did in Soviet Russia in ninety-one, and freedom’ll have a chance. You remember all those faces you saw on TV in eighty-nine — in the Tiananmen massacre? Hell, they’re on your side before you even land.” He glanced around at his audience of one hundred and sixty, and with a look of determination that harbored no anxiety, not even the slightest doubt, he proclaimed, “That’s all. Good luck and God be with you.”
“My MP5’ll be with me,” Aussie said. At thirteen and a half inches long, the submachine gun looked more like a huge pistol with a front grip, but it was perfect for confined spaces, whether you were trying to take out a hijacker in the narrow confines of an aircraft or in a large room. Like everyone else in the SAS/D team who cost two and half million dollars each to train, the men who fired the MP5 didn’t use the gun sight but fired more by intuition sharpened by hundreds of practices in “killing houses” in Wales and in the United States at Fort Bragg, trying to conceive of every possible situation. But Freeman knew that this situation was one they could have only partially been readied for, because it had more unknowns than most missions.
After the briefing, Norton mentioned to the general that he hadn’t seemed too pleased when Aussie Lewis had made the comment about hoping Mao was dead.
“Well I’ll tell you, Norton, first, you’re damned observant — as usual. Second, Mao’s memory is one of the unknown factors in this. I believe I’m right in assuming the minorities are with us, and a good many of the Han Chinese even though they’re in the majority. But I don’t underestimate the power of myth — the myth of Mao. He’s beyond death — he’s a god for the godless, and invoking his name alone may cause an otherwise rebellious Chinese to hesitate. That’s why it’s so damned important to keep civilians out of this as far as possible — I mean not out of it, but no mass bombing over any Chinese town — to make it clear to them that we’re only going for those corrupt warlords who call themselves the Communist leadership.”
Freeman’s uncertainty gave Norton a pulse-jarring moment, but Freeman was still the gambler, the general who had turned a number of different situations here and abroad to his own advantage, from Ratmanov Island and the Dortmund-Bielefeld Pocket to Lake Baikal. In any event, Norton could see it was too late to abort, even if the general did have second thoughts. Like most great battles, at one point one is too far inside the enemy territory to pull out, even if you want to. They were too deep into China, and the awesome bureaucracy needed to coordinate the separate attacks as one offensive was too far along to stop, for it had, like all bureaucracies, attained its own momentum. It was either win this battle or Cheng would have time to get his second wind and redirect his three-million-man army to devour Second Army piecemeal.
At Orgon Tal, Three Corps was already preparing for the offensive that would be launched simultaneously with the SAS/D attack on the Zhongnanhai, and at Honggor three divisions limbered up for an advance, the star players being those halfway along the line, for these would bear the frontal attack on the Great Wall nearest Beijing, the forces at Orgon Tal and Honggor sweeping in from the west and east respectively to close about Beijing in a giant pincer movement.
The backbone of the forces at the midpoint was comprised of the eighteen-mile-range towed M198 155mm howitzer and the self-propelled M109 155mm howitzer with a range of eleven miles and a speed of thirty-three miles per hour that made the monolithic weapon the mostversatile of the heavy field guns in the U.S. armory, the turret having a full width bustle in which twenty-two rounds of ammunition could be stored, including HE, chemical, smoke, flare, and, if needed, nuclear.
Anticipating massed infantry charges after initial penetration by ChiCom armor and/or artillery, Freeman had made sure that all battalion commandos in the area had the six-barrel Vulcan antiaircraft guns for both antiaircraft fire, at three thousand 20mm rounds a minute, and the reduced one-thousand-rounds-per-minute rate for enemy infantry. Mounted on an armored personnel carrier, the gun could be moved at forty-three miles per hour, and it was hoped that modification on it since the Gulf War, where it performed well, would allow it to operate with the same efficiency in the snow and rain conditions of the northern Chinese spring.
In addition, engineer battalions were not only ready to lay marsden matting for airstrips that would have to be bulldozed out of the desert regions south of the Orgon Tal-Honggor front, but would also help in grading minefields, pushing the mines either side of an enormous plow blade, to be dismantled later. As the time for the battle neared, the men’s nerves were taut, and the monsoon, though not at full force, was already strong enough to blow the sand across both the Chinese and American forces.
The M1 main battle tanks started up, the smell of their exhausts quickly blown away by the monsoon and inhaled by the American infantry boarding the APCs, Vulcans riding nearby and motorcycles probing the chosen attack routes for possible mine traps. But here Cheng’s forces had not had sufficient time to make the elaborately hidden traps that had earlier caught Freeman’s tanks unawares.
The U.S. carrier battle group proceeding south from Korea was what the French call “triple layered,” that is, the carrier, being the heart of the force, had a protective screen beyond it for 213 miles in any direction. At a distance of two hundred miles from the carrier, Robert Brentwood’s Hunter-Killer/ICBM Sea Wolf II, the USS Reagan, was on outer escort duty for the carrier force. A hundred miles closer in to the carrier there were the surface ships, an Aegis cruiser, two destroyers, and four frigates.
Further in, in a tighter defensive ring ten miles from the carrier, were another cruiser and two destroyers, the whole two-hundred-plus-mile defensive rings covered by an aerial umbrella of Hawkeye early-warning aircraft. In addition there were three pairs of combat fighters forming CAPs, combat air patrols, to intercept any enemy planes before they had the range to fire antiship missiles. The CAPs extended to seventy thousand feet.
To increase her security, the carrier the USS Carl Vinson had gone to “switch off,” wherein all the active radars on the ship were turned off, no active pulses being emitted that could give any enemy radar the carrier’s position. For information on any enemy approaching her, the Aegis cruiser’s radar acted as the eyes of the carrier, feeding her with an endless stream of information while the carrier simply remained invisible to enemy radar screens over the horizon. But she was still vulnerable to a sub attack if the sub had also forsaken sending out active radar pulses to gain echo bounce-back and instead was simply listening on passive radar mikes.
On the Perch, her air supply replenished, the second last lookout on the starboard quarter saw one of the second zone’s frigates. She waited, hearing the bigger game of the carrier, the powerful pounding of its engines sending sound waves through the sea at five times sound’s speed in air because of the sea’s salinity.
Now on the green vertical roll of the Chinese sonar screens sine waves began and were repeated and repeated again, giving a good enough sound print. It wasn’t particularly good seamanship that the Chinese sub had managed to find out the carrier’s approximate position. It was luck, the kind of luck that the skipper of the Perch had had in mah-jongg. He was known for it. All his tubes were loaded with warshots, and if the carrier kept up its present heading it would pass within two miles of the Perch in a matter of hours.
The officer of the deck had already done the computerized trigonometry, the readout on his computer giving the Perch the most advantageous vectors for the four fish the Perch was willing to expend on the carrier. If only the American leviathan kept on the same heading, the skipper of the Perch needed only the smallest, quietest of tones on silent running to realign — at five hundred feet in the subsurface currents — what could be his kill shots.
That evening Pin Dao, a member of the university’s June Fourth Movement and one of those who believed the Americans were coming, by which he meant they would probably make a frontal attack on Beijing from the northern plain, was a passenger with two others in the back of his brother’s three-wheel pickup. Beside him he had one of the AK-47s that the students had snatched from the PLA in the Tiananmen massacre in ‘89, and each of the other two had, from the labels at least, a twenty-six-ounce bottle of Tsing Tao beer, but the bottles were in reality filled with gasoline and a petrol-soaked rag.
Slowing in traffic by the Zhongnanhai gate, Pin Dao could see the two immaculate, white-gloved guards. He lifted the Kalashnikov and shot them both in two quick bursts at practically point-blank range. He immediately ducked, and the other two threw the lighted Molotov cocktails through the gate.
“Go!” Pin Dao’s brother yelled — but already a bevy of Public Security men were running out the gate through the crowd, a siren wail coming immediately after them.
The two Molotov throwers jumped out and disappeared in the river of people flowing down Changan. Pin Dao kept-firing at the gate, felling a second guard, then he too abandoned the vehicle and ran into the crowd. Several pistol shots were fired, then a scream, and there was pandemonium across and along the Avenue of Eternal Peace.
Two hours later a pirated and, under Chinese law, thoroughly illegal videotape was shown on CNN’s French channel and picked up by all CNN feeds. From Beijing it was reported that criminal antisocial elements had attacked the Zhongnanhai. Arrests were expected soon. Meanwhile all women and children of high-ranking officials would be taken to the country, which all Chinese knew meant “out of the way.”
General Freeman’s headquarters was stunned.
“The stupid bastards!” Aussie Lewis said. “They’ve fucked up the whole plan. After moving their wives and kids out, they’ll be the next to run.”
“No they won’t.” No one had seen Freeman enter the barracks, glued as they were to CNN.
“Turn that damn thing off!”
“Yes, sir.”
“If you think the Chinese leadership is going to vacate Beijing because a couple of guys tossed in a Molotov cocktail and shot two guards, you don’t know much about the Chinese. They leave Beijing now and they lose face, my friend. They lose that, they lose it all.”
A slow smile now spread across Freeman’s face. Of course everyone knew the general was right, but then Aussie quickly pointed out, “They’re bound to have reinforced security though.”
“Yes,” Freeman said coolly, almost dispassionately, and Norton detected in the general’s tone a kind of resoluteness that had never wavered in the face of odds. “Would you expect a commando attack after that?” Freeman asked the assembled SAS/D men. “I sure as hell wouldn’t. Would you, Aussie?”
“No, sir!”
“Which is precisely why the raid’s still on. See you at the choppers.”
“Jesus, he’s a cool one,” one of Salvini’s troop of forty said.
“He’s nuts, that’s what he is,” said another, a first-timer. The men who had served with Freeman before reserved judgment. “If he loses, everybody’ll call him nuts. If he wins, it’ll be ticker tape down Fifth Avenue.” As Freeman had once told them in an attack on Ratmanov Island in the Bering Strait, “When you’re in charge it’s either hoots or hosannas and you’d better get used to both.”
He had then quoted Douglas MacArthur, who had listened to all the arguments against landing at Inchon in the Korean War: Inchon had the world’s highest tides and at low tide the harbor was a vast mud flat, both conditions disqualifying it from the highly complex business of amphibious assault by seventy thousand marines. MacArthur, Freeman reminded them, had listened patiently to all the objections and replied, “The very arguments you have made as to the impracticability involved will tend to ensure for me the element of surprise. The enemy commander will reason that no one would be so brash as to make such an attempt…. Surprise is the most vital element for success in modern war.”
“Yeah,” an SAS/D trooper said. “Is that when he threw up?”