The rolling thunder that was Freeman’s Second Army pressing its counterattack hard all along the Orgon Tal-Honggor line was only six miles from Badaling and the Great Wall. If they reached and took the twenty-foot-high, fifteen-foot-wide wall at Badaling — at three thousand feet— then at the long, narrow cleft of the Juyong Pass running northwest to southeast they would be forty-eight miles from Beijing. But if they could not bash their way through the pass, then Freeman had ordered them to dig in and maintain positions.
It would give the Chinese an initial advantage in that if Harvey Simmet was right and the monsoon kept up, the U.S. close air support would be unable to distinguish between friend and foe in the swirling fury of the monsoon coming off the Bo Hai Gulf. But the weather was all important to the SAS/D mission, and now it became clear as to why, the plans calling for a drop of eighty men to secure an LZ — landing zone — on the east side of the Statue of Heroes of the Revolution. The worse the weather, the easier it would be for the four Chinooks to hide, despite the wokka-wokka sound of the blades.
Freeman waited to see everyone else aboard before he walked up the ramp of the first of the four Chinooks. After an LZ was secured by the SAS/D team in Tiananmen then another forty choppers, each carrying up to fifty fully equipped regulars, would come into the square, but before Freeman could even hope that this might happen he knew he had to capture the State Council, preferably alive but dead if necessary.
Now the Comanches came into play, not as troop carriers — that was the ‘Chinooks’ role — but as Stealth-skinned, heavily armed choppers riding shotgun for the Chinooks, the Comanches having less than 2 percent of the Chinooks’ radar cross section and a speed of two hundred miles per hour. Taking off from desert pads twenty minutes to the rear of Second Army’s Orgon Tal-Honggor front, the RH-77 °Comanches were state of the art for the seventy-mile, twenty-minute dash — across the edge of the northern plain and up over the mountains down into Beijing.
The Comanches made the celebrated Apache of Iraqi War fame passé. Where the Apache was a superb tank killer, as it had proved around Orgon Tal against Cheng’s T-62s, it was not designed to penetrate by itself deep into enemy territory, and while the Apache was relatively easy for an enemy to detect on radar, the radar cross section of the Stealth-sheathed Comanche was 1.07 percent of that of the “standoff’ Apache and other light attack helos. This tiny radar cross section, together with the nap-of-the-earth flying by pilot and copilot, meant that unlike the Apache, the Comanche could penetrate further into enemy territory undetected.
With its chin-mounted, remote control, twin-barreled 20mm Gatling gun sticking out beneath its infrared Starlite sensor’s nose, the chopper would be formidable in any of its four modes, from armed recon up to heavy attack, deep strike, and air combat. Its two retractable claw mounts carrying four Hellfire antitank and two Stinger air-to-air missiles, the much faster Comanches in diamond four formation would be riding shotgun for the four Chinooks and if necessary would drop decoy chaff and/or flares to draw off any ground- or air-launched Chinese missiles fired at the Chinooks. And the Comanches, their exhausts from their twin three-foot-long LHTEC-T-800 engines cooled by sucked-in air through tail vents, would not give off sufficient heat to attract heat seekers themselves.
In addition, the sound of their engines would be muffled by the antitorque fan in the enclosed tail, with its five- instead of four-bladed rotors, the latter reducing tip speed, thereby reducing the Comanches’ noise signature.
Two more squadrons of Comanches would follow on, escorting as many men as it might take to secure the landing zone in the square and finally, if all went well, with a maximum of 20 percent casualties, the square itself. The element of surprise depended on the twenty-minute run-in.
The Chinooks with their twin machine guns forward and one heavy machine gun on the open ramp would fly low, over the vast, sprawling city, their pilots hoping that the helos’ noise would be attributed by the populace to the Russian-made Hinds that had flown over Beijing during the Tiananmen Square massacre, dropping leaflets on the people and students below, pamphlets proclaiming, “The people love the PLA. The PLA loves the people,” before they had begun machine gunning the people down.
“We all set, Captain?” Freeman asked the Chinook leader.
“Yes, sir,” she answered.
“All right, take us to Beijing.”
The four Chinooks rose, creating a ministorm within the storm of the monsoon, and headed out into the dust-stinging blackness of the Orgon Tal-Honggor front.
The colonel in charge of the Zhongnanhai was now a junior lieutenant, ten years of promotions demolished in two minutes as Cheng humiliated him. The fact that two Molotovs had been thrown was bad enough, but the failure to close down the block on Changan Avenue and to recognize the “hooligans” on the video feed from the lamppost-mounted cameras along the avenue only compounded the error in Cheng’s view.
Apart from losing face over the incident, the worst insult not only to the colonel but to the two hundred men responsible for the security of the Communist elite of the State Council, was the news that spread like wildfire that Cheng had announced, endorsed by Nie, that from now on security of the Zhongnanhai was to be the responsibility of Special Security Unit 8431 under the direct command of the Central Military Committee.
SS Unit 8431 was the toughest of the tough, used to going anywhere to immediately douse “ideological fires” or “demonstrations” that got out of hand. The commander of the unit 8431 was asked defiantly by the recent colonel what he, the commander of 8431, would have done to resolve the Molotov incident.
“Two armored vehicles would have been dispatched immediately,” the commander answered.
“To do what?” the disgraced colonel pressed.
“To annihilate the antisocial vermin immediately.”
“Oh? And how would you have distinguished them from the mass of people moving past the Zhongnanhai section of Changan Avenue?”
“It would not be necessary to make that distinction,” the CO of 8431 said.
“You would have killed them all?” the ex-colonel asked incredulously.
“Every one,” the commander answered. “Without hesitation.” With that, Commander Hu of unit 8431 contemptuously dismissed the one-time colonel and set about arranging the new security for the Zhongnanhai.
No one would be allowed to use the two lakes, he said— all boats were to be housed in the boathouse by the gazebo in the center of the south lake. He did not expect the Americans to be so foolhardy as to attack the Zhongnanhai, but in the event that any other social degenerates might try to breach the compound he would have divers carry out round-the-clock underwater inspections as well.
All the same, Hu realized that a wall that defended you could also box you in, as the Americans had found at their famous Alamo. Originally arrangements had been made for the entire State Council to be moved, in a time of war, via the supposedly secret subway station in the Zhongnanhai, to Xishan military base. For years it had been assumed that no one outside the State Council knew about this escape route from the Zhongnanhai, but then a map showing it was found on a June Fourth Democracy Movement cell leader.
Besides, Commander Hu had concluded that if the Americans ever did reach the capital, the line to Xishan would be one of the first blown up by the Democracy Movement traitors. Accordingly, Hu decided he would need a space in which to put the State Council, to give them visibility so the populace would know they had not deserted the city, and yet one that was capable of being defended in depth if necessary.
Julia Reid had never seen a snow leopard, period, let alone one in the wild. Yet here was the beautiful, lithe creature stock-still, the left front paw extended, the right slightly bent, caught in a moment of indecision, the old man either not having seen the animal or, if so, ignoring it with a mountain man’s sixth sense about such things.
Julia felt inside her sheep wool coat for the .45, its grip giving her enough of a sense of security that she steeled her nerves and managed to pass within fifteen feet of the leopard, the yak she was riding keeping up a steady pace, either pretending that he did not see or smell the potential enemy or, thought Julia, perhaps the yak knew there was no way he could defend himself from the leopard. When she looked ahead at the old man she was surprised to see him staring at her, his mouth hidden by the thick cashmere scarf but his eyes so alive that for a moment he seemed much younger. Only now did she discern that the look was a warning, not of her sexual attractiveness to him but a warning not to draw her pistol. “One shot,” he said, and then passed his ancient hand across his throat, “An’ Chin-eze.”
“Yes,” she said. “I understand.”
He turned from her, his knees motioning the yak on, and through the fine-grained but stinging hail he led her higher until she had to tell him by the appropriate sign language that her headache was so severe she couldn’t go on. It humiliated her more than she could have imagined, and in her mind’s eye she saw lines of tormenting faces — all male, all pilots, the bovine grins on their faces saying, “We told you women couldn’t hack it!” She was feeling dizzy and nauseated as well. Either she was weakening, or the nomad had taken her too high, albeit gradually.
He nodded knowingly, and sliding off his yak, he approached and motioned for her to unbutton her coat. She hesitated. Was he smiling? She couldn’t tell. He took her hand and, taking a step closer, placed it over his heart. She nodded that she now understood that he was only being solicitous of her health and wanted — no, needed — to feel her heartbeat. She pointed to her wrist. He shook his head vigorously, his fist now on his own heart and him making a wheezing noise through his scarf. Ah — he wanted to listen to her chest. “Quick! Quick!” he told her. It amazed her how specific he was with his English, given that he apparently knew so few words.
She undid her sheepskin coat and he quickly put his ear to her breast In the icy blast of the snowstorm she felt frigid, despite her other sweaters and flight jacket. Whatever, he seemed to take an inordinately long time listening to her. As she was about to say something, he abruptly finished, nodded knowingly, and said, “The wheeze.” Her head was pounding as if an iron band were tightening about her. He turned his yak into the storm and, though she couldn’t be sure, it seemed to her that they were going back down the mountainside, but it was difficult to tell, her vision blurring, her disorientation increasing with white upon white, the rain of small hailstones coming at her like tracer, taking her back to the dogfight with the Fulcrum, another time, another world away.
In the near distance, about fifty yards away, beyond which she could see nothing, an outcrop of rock appeared, the old man driving the yak toward it. Everything went black, and she felt herself pitching forward, losing the reins, vomiting, falling.
As the choppers entered the rain of the monsoon, the noise against their skins grew to a sustained roar, even the wokka-wokka of the Chinooks’ rotors subdued by the noise. The pilot of Chinook One was already sweating, and she didn’t care if Freeman saw it. There wasn’t one visible fix you could see, only the rain-filled darkness, the helos having to fly by instrumentation alone. The only thing that gave the Chinook pilots any comfort was that even though they were flying nap of the earth, by virtue of the infrared contour sensors, their noise would be muffled by the banshee howling of the monsoon.
“They’ll never expect a raid in this weather,” one of Aussie Lewis’s troops aboard the second chopper said.
“Fuck them” his buddy replied from across the aisle. “I never expected a raid in this freakin’ weather.”
“Just so they don’t drop me in that fuckin’ moat,” another said, referring to the moat that separated the Forbidden City from the Zhongnanhai on the latter’s eastern side.
“Fuck the moat,” Aussie Lewis put in. “You’d better hope they don’t drop you in the friggin’ lake.”
“Which one?” another joshed. “The central — the Zhonghai — or the south lake?”
“Neither of the fuckers. I can’t swim.”
This got a great laugh, for SAS/D troopers were required to swim with weapon and several clips of ammunition, their training the most brutal in the world.
“Bullshit, man,” the Tennesseean said. “We ain’t going in no fucking lake. I was told we were on a fast rope insertion.”
“Yeah, fast rope right in the fuckin’ lake.”
“All right, you guys,” Aussie yelled. “Pay up or shut up. Five to one someone lands in the pool?”
“Some friggin’ pool.”
“Come on,” Aussie pressed. “Five to one—” And out came his small black book from his vest and a small purple indelible pencil from his first-aid pack under his helmet strap. He gave the pencil a lick, looking for all the world like a bookmaker’s tout
“Put me down for two bucks,” a trooper said.
“That’s two bucks you’ve lost already, Aussie.”
More bets were shouted, Aussie writing quickly.
“Hey Aussie,” called out the Tennesseean — the tall black soldier sitting by the ramp. “What if you get hit, man?”
“Come on,” Aussie riposted. “Get real. I can’t get hit. It’s against the fuckin’ Geneva Convention. Besides, I have a plan for which there is no known defense. It’s called the Aussie Auxiliary!”
“Jeez — you’re full of it, man,” the Tennesseean replied, half the forty troopers in the Chinook clapping Aussie, the rest waving him off.
Aussie flashed the book at the Tennessean. “So how about it, Tennessee? You game or not?”
“Mr. Lewis,” the black man said with mock formality. “How long have I known you?”
“Too fuckin’ long,” someone else said.
“The gentleman’s correct,” the Tennesseean acknowledged. “Too long. And that’s why I’ll not bet a cent.” He turned to the soldiers nearest him, raising his voice. “You’ll notice he said ‘pool,’ but what particular pool does he mean, gents? The lakes, the moat?”
This started a flak of spirited questions directed at Aussie, who held both hands up. “The lakes only,” he said. “Right? Fair enough? The lakes.”
In preparation for fast-roping it down into the square, they were all pulling on their gloves, and those who already had them on pulled them on that much tighter. The Tennessean did the same thing. Quite irrationally there was something that made one feel invulnerable, pulling leather gloves on tightly, flexing the knuckles, seating each finger snugly. Aussie looked across at the black man, a longtime friend and colleague. “Thanks a lot, you fucker. What pool? Christ, nearly had a riot.”
“Keep the riot for the Zhongnanhai,” the Tennesseean said good-naturedly.
Up front in Chopper One Freeman held up his hand. “You boys ready?” There was a unified and boisterous response. It could have been a football game. And going out into the darkness each man had the same gut-tightening experience.
“Ten minutes!” Freeman announced, holding up the fingers of each hand to underscore the point, and everyone fell silent, most watching the red five-minute warning light and feeling the Chinook’s buffeting by a dying monsoon.
David Brentwood, who stood behind Freeman, the general’s backpack pushing against him as they dropped suddenly in an air pocket, had been quiet for most of the trip. He was thinking of Georgina, his wife — how they’d been honeymooning in the Canadian Rockies when he was recalled to Second Army. A master’s degree in political science from the London School of Economics and Political Science meant she knew much more than David about the political situation and intrigues that so often led to war, and it had taken awhile for David to accept the fact that she was more intellectual than he and wasn’t talking down to him. It was her British accent that created that impression. She spoke so beautifully that he worried about what he figured would be the inevitable clash between Georgina and his friend Aussie. Well maybe everything would be all right — maybe the same thing that happened to the Australian once he’d met and fallen head over heels for the Alexsandra Malof woman would occur and he would show his politely spoken better half. Or was that the better half? Once they landed on the square that rougher side of Aussie would help get the job done. They would all have to be uncivilized if they were to go in and take the Zhongnanhai.
“That’s what I heard,” came a voice on Choir’s chopper, a first-timer from further down the line. “Chinks don’t like to fight in the rain.”
“Ferris, you’d believe any fuckin’ thing.”
“I’m just tellin’ ya what I heard. Right?’
“Yeah, yeah, you know that’s the same kind of shit they gave us about the Japanese.”
“What?”
“Said there was no way a Japanese could fly at night ‘cause his eyes were too fucking narrow.”
“Yeah, well, hell — that’s just plain dumb!” the first-timer said.
“That’s right. About as dumb as believing Chinks won’t fight in the rain.”
“Well,” the first-timer said, snorting with superiority, “you know the kind of shit you hear from the grunts.”
“Yeah, well just remember the moment you hit terra firma you’re a Delta commando. Remember what you’ve been taught.” He paused. “You’ll be okay. Hell, we’ve been through that mock-up ten times at least, right?”
“Right.”
“Five minutes!” Freeman called aboard Chopper One, holding up his black-gloved hand and making his way back from the pilot so that he would be one of the first to go down on the ropes. The worst part about fast-roping it was the downwash of the rotors — like a water bed on your head it was so powerful.
They had been flying over the city’s outskirts for some time, but there were few lights. Not only was the city normally dimly lit by modem standards, but Cheng had put a blackout in effect the moment he broke the cease-fire.
Up in the cockpit before he’d taken his place by the leftside door, Freeman had seen through the infrared binoculars that coming in from the northeast they’d already passed over Purple Bamboo Park, avoiding the high chimney between the park and the Beijing Zoo, and had started a right-hand turn above Xizhimen Railroad Yards, over the Xinhua printing plant and the bird and fish market where they saw the infrared blobs of white faces looking up at them from a gray wash of background — the market people being early risers along with the farmers and fishermen. They were passing by the chimney before the old Presbyterian church and everything went crazy, the sky lighting up in deceptively lazy-looking traces of green-and-red tracer and over the sound of the passing monsoon the steady bump, bump, bump of triple A fire.
Straight ahead the pilots could see the bell and drum towers across the Houhai, the top of each tower alive with triple A streaming from it, then both towers exploded from Hellfire missiles as the Comanches came into play. Now all they could hear was the rain and the explosion and the Comanches leading the Chinooks over the art college before turning right again down over Number 101 High School, the Ministry of Culture, Congan Hospital, turning right again over the Post Office and now hovering over the Museum of the Chinese Revolution on the eastern side of Tiananmen. Suddenly there was a terrific bang by the chopper, the scream of its engines, and the pilot’s voice: “In your seats — we’re going down! In your seats!”
It was a double shock to most — the announcement and the sound of a woman. Men fell backward hard against their packs, cussing and buckling up again.
‘‘We’re hit!” the woman’s voice came. “We’re going down — hold tight!”
“Hold—” Brentwood began, but whatever he said was lost in the crunch of the chopper buckling over its landing gear.
“Out!” Freeman yelled as the ramp went down, slaming hard on the concrete.
“Terrific,” Brentwood said, his finger on the H&K safety. “No damn ropes.” Last to leave were the chopper crew: the captain, her copilot, and the three gunners.
In the drumming rain of the metallic dawn the sky above them was pockmarked with black smudges of AA fire, and one Chinook, Salvini’s, was ablaze a hundred yards from them. Some SAS/D were fast-roping it as the big, banana-shaped Chinook kept hovering. Only three men made it down, however — Salvini and two of his troopers free of the ropes before the Chinook exploded, breaking in half and spilling men from it like so much burned detritus, their screams heard above the roar of the Comanches attacking every possible AA fire emplacement, one of them sweeping low over the square, flames issuing from its belly and decoying three heat-seeking missiles intended for three choppers now on the ground, fast roping forgotten with surprise having been lost.
Freeman was already in contact with the Comanche’s leader, who had flown over the Zhongnanhai to check for any mortar or heavy machine gun positions. He reported none. Repeat none. He had come in low, his 20mm Gatling gun ready, and had seen no one. Not on infrared, not on Starlite goggles — not that the rain would permit anything much to show up on them — but definitely nothing on infrared that looked like troops.
He banked the Comanche hard right over the vast Forbidden City, ready for another run over the Zhongnanhai, again to match any infrared images he saw with his preprogrammed threat library. Any matchup between the target seen and the target in the computer would automatically tell him what weapons should be used and would also “prioritize” the targets in order of their danger.
He was at five hundred feet above the Working People’s Cultural Palace, then over the Tiananmen Gate as he leveled off from the turn to go over the Zhongnanhai again. Oh, he picked up infrared neutrals — that is, the heat exhaust from the State Council’s furnaces and the like — but there were no guards, no soldiers, a fact he quickly conveyed to Freeman.
“Women and kids are out,” Freeman said. “We know that. Maybe they’re in some underground shelter in the Zhongnanhai,” he posited.
“General, there’s no one — Jesus!” The copilot-gunner saw the rocket streak for him and dropped flare and foil decoys. The missile exploded twenty feet from the chopper, but the missile stabilizers or fins had chopped into the pilot’s four-axis control unit and slashed open a port-side fuel tank beneath the copilot who sat up and behind the pilot. Simultaneously the threat library identified the AA missile as an AA-6RH Acrid. The Comanche’s left-hand-side retractable claws slid out and opened. Within seconds a Hell-fire air-to-ground was selected and fired, not at the Zhongnanhai, for the pilot was right — it had been abandoned. The Chinese ground-to-air missile had come from the Forbidden City!
“Comanche leader to S/D leader. They’re holed up in the Forbidden—” The end of the transmit was swallowed by the explosion of the Comanche as it fell from the sky like a fiery rock into me south lake inside the Zhongnanhai.
“Aussie?” Freeman called.
“Sir.”
“Take a nine-man recon patrol to the Zhongnanhai and see if either of the Comanche crew made it. Brentwood, Salvini, Williams — over here.”
“Sir.”
“They’ve holed up in die Forbidden City,” Freeman informed them.
“Shit!” It was Salvini. “Fucking place has over ten thousand rooms.”
“Nine thousand, to be exact,” Freeman said. “But first we have to get over the moat.”
The second Comanche came on the air reporting that due north of Tiananmen Square past the Tiananmen Gate there was considerable enemy activity inside the Forbidden City. The pilot’s estimate was two to three companies — around 250 to 300 men — most probably, he said, just regular infantry hurriedly trucked in to guard the State Council.