Force of Arms wi-7, page 4
part #7 of WW III Series
“Intelligence reports it’s tense — odd shot fired here and there. Maybe Chinese killing takin.” He meant the species of goat antelope that wandered the Manchurian slopes to the north. “But I still think the truce will hold for another few days.”
* * *
There was another reason for what the boys had done near Tomortei. They wanted to disrupt Cheng’s supply line all right, but they also wanted to send a clear signal to all dissident groups that the June Fourth Democracy Movement was alive, if not always well, and was ready to lead the way.
* * *
The FAV — fast-attack vehicle or “dune buggy”—with Aussie Lewis driving, David Brentwood on the.50 machine gun to his right, and Choir Williams mounting the TOW antitank launcher behind them on the elevated seat, had reported that the sabotage seemed to be nothing more than a single line break. It would take Cheng’s forces a matter of hours to fix it, but then it would be open for rail traffic again. Freeman made calls up and down the line wanting SITREP, but except for the explosion on the Orgon Tal line, everything seemed quiet, the tension notwithstanding.
“Thank God for that,” Freeman said, thwacking his right leg again with the birch stick before using it as a pointer on the map. “Because, Norton, if that fox Cheng hits us anytime before the ten days are up, we are up the proverbial creek without a paddle.”
“Well, sir,” Norton said hopefully, “the weather’s closing in.”
Freeman turned about. “Who told you that? Harvey Simmet?”
“No, CNN.”
“Hmm — I ever tell you about that survey they did in England of all those weather wrap-ups on TV?”
“No, sir.”
“Well they found out hardly anyone who listens to weather forecasts can remember anything that was said five minutes later. All those damn isobars, arrows, convection currents, jet streams flying about complicate it to hell. Best weather report came from a TV channel that had no graphics, ho gimmicky electronics, just someone telling the audience that tomorrow it will be wet and windy.”
“I guess you’re right, General. I’m usually too busy watching the presenter.”
“So am I,” Freeman confided. Thwack! “Good-looking wenches on those newscasts.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Still,” Freeman responded, his tone more businesslike now, “I’d like an accurate reading on the weather within the last half hour. Get Harvey up here right away, will you?” The general turned back to the map of the three provinces, one of which lay directly ahead of him, the other two on his flanks.
* * *
Norton glanced at his watch. Seventeen hundred hours. Well, it was just starting to get dark at mealtime. He didn’t know how it happened, but usually whenever the general called for Harvey Simmet, the chief met officer of Second Army HQ was either about to eat or was asleep. Sleepy eyed, Simmet would trudge to the HQ tent usually wrapped up like an Indian during the winter of 1806.
Simmet wasn’t in his tent, however, and had to be paged. He was just sitting down to his favorite meal, ham and mashed potatoes with raisin sauce, and he had his fork loaded.
“Old man wants to see you, Harvey.”
Everyone in the officers’ mess started laughing.
“Gotcha again, Harv!.. Atta boy, Harvey… Duty calls.”
Harvey Simmet looked at the fork piled high with the succulent ham and potato dripping in the raisin sauce….
“No,” he said emphatically, “I’m not going to rush it. Damn it — Cookie, can you keep this under the lamp?”
“Better than that, sir. Give you a fresh lot when you come back.”
“You’re a gentleman and a scholar, Cookie.”
Norton slapped Harvey amicably on the shoulder. “I don’t think the general’ll keep you long.” They left the mess tent.
“He’s put a hex on me,” Harvey said as they made their way up toward the headquarters hut. “Last time he sent someone for me I was on the can. You believe that?”
“Harvey, I believe you anytime. He wants to know if the weather’s closing in.”
“It is.”
“Yeah, but you know!”
“Yes, I know, he wants it up to date every friggin’ five minutes.”
“Maybe, Harv, but remember Yakutsk.”
“Yeah,” Harvey said, glancing skyward at the velvet darkness of the Inner Mongolian sky. “I remember Yakutsk.”
It was a town in the Yakutsk oblast, or region, northeast of Lake Baikal. The Siberians were chopping up Second Army’s Ten Corps as they tried to withdraw across the frozen lake. Outnumbered and outgunned by more than three to one in main battle tanks, Freeman had given what to his men was the almost incredible order to withdraw, all the time asking Harvey Simmet by his side what the temperature was in the Yakutsk area — the coldest place in the Soviet Union, where the temperature often plummeted to more than minus seventy degrees centigrade. Simmet told him it was minus sixty and still dropping.
American tanks were ensconced in revetment areas, some dug in so deep in defilade position that only the edge of their cupolas and muzzle of their main gun showed as they waited for a point-blank exchange. Then they got another order from Freeman to retreat still further. A few tank commanders thought aloud that the old man’s nerve had cracked. But when the temperature dropped to minus sixty-nine degrees, the general thanked Harvey and suddenly told the American tanks to charge. It would go down in military history as one of the most brilliant tactical moves ever made. From the mastery of the minutiae of war to the mastery of grand strategy, Freeman knew that Siberian T-72s and T-55s would now grind to a standstill. The inferior refined Siberian oil would begin settling out in the vicious cold, the waxes in the oil solidifying like chunks of cholesterol stuck in the bloodstream — hydraulics would overheat and the tanks would become immobile.
It had been called the Yakutsk turkey shoot, and Siberian tanks that one minute were a threat now were stuck, unable to move as the M1s, with the higher-quality American-refined oil, raced ahead through the deep snow, slewed and turned and took out the Siberian armor on the move. The snowy explosions, their bases black fountains of undersoil, rose high in the air as red-hot metal from the M1A1s tore into the T-72s and more than evened the score.
* * *
“Good of you to come, Harv,” the general said, as if Harvey Simmet had any choice in the matter. “Harv, they tell me this weather’s ‘closing in,’ moving in on our left flank from the Bo Hai Gulf. Now what specifically does that mean for Orgon Tal?”
It had been an hour since Harvey had monitored the incoming SATREP — satellite reports — and in two hours a lot had happened: the wind picking up at the three-thousand-foot level, cold air from the northeast hitting the hot Gobi air, producing fog in northern Manchuria, and minor dust storms from Ulan Bator in Mongolia down as far as Orgon Tal 280 miles northwest of Beijing. Harvey made a call to the met tent and got the latest isobar readouts and cloud pattern through on the fax. It was not showing at the moment, but in his mind’s eye the data told him that soon the air pattern would go into an ominous circular spiral path, heading in fast from the coast. But he saw it as good news for Freeman. “Looks like a typhoon’s forming, General— over Bo Hai Gulf. Winds will increase from forty to sixty-five — maybe seventy — miles per hour, and the cloud density promises heavy rain that will probably peter out at the edge of the Gobi here at Orgon Tal, most of the rain falling on me mountain range northwest of Beijing.”
“Bog his armor down, General,” Norton said.
“And ours,” Freeman commented.
“Yes, sir, but I mean—”
“Yes—” Freeman finished the sentence for him. “Lousy weather for him to move in — to attack.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Thank you, Harv.”
When Simmet got back to the mess there’d been a snafu. Cookie had gone off for a few minutes to check the coffee and someone had grabbed the last plate of ham and raisin sauce.
“Ham’s finished,” Simmet was informed by a new server.
“Jesus!” Harvey said. “I tell you he’s got a hex on me.”
“Sir, we’ve got an MRE.” He meant one of the “meals ready to eat” in a foil-wrapped dinner tray that could be warmed by body heat and were unaffectionately known by the troops as “meals refused by everybody.”
As Harvey Simmet stabbed his fork unenthusiastically at the chicken a la king and viewed the Tootsie Roll and crackers and gobs of mixed fruit and peanut butter, he cursed his luck. He had no way of knowing that in Beijing’s Number Two jail there was an American, Smythe, a SEAL who had been captured during the raid on the Yangtze Bridge earlier in the war, who would have thought he’d died and gone to heaven, given the luxury of an MRE instead of the fetid rice and vermin he had to crunch up and use as protein in his cell. Who was it that said comparison is the source of all unhappiness? Smythe dreamed of MREs.
They had strung Smythe up by his thumbs so often that by now they were useless, forcing him to use his first and second fingers to shovel in the meager rice and cockroaches from the wooden bowl. Nie’s interrogators for the Public Security Bureau wanted to know the location of all SEAL units. Smythe had told them he didn’t know, which was true. But by now daily torture had become routine, his screams mixed with those of many others — nearly all of them classified as either dissidents or “hooligans” against the state, hooliganism being a meeting of three or more people.
* * *
“Where have you been?” the PSB asked the three boys from Huade who were all in their late teens and had seen their hopes of a new China disappear, blown away like the sand in the Gobi.
“Fighting the oppression of the state!” one dramatically said, causing an expulsion of breath from his mother, whose shame was as keen as her surprise.
“And you two?” the PSB asked the others.
“Fighting the oppression of the state!” they answered in unison, sounding rather silly, albeit serious.
“Parrots!” the PSB inspector declared. “Parroting your bourgeois bosses.” Gun in hand, he demanded they tell him whom they took their orders from.
“From our heart,” the oldest of them said.
“Your heart,” the PSB sneered. “That’s an unreliable authority, boy.”
“From the goddess of democracy,” the third boy said, adding, “Malof xiapjie”—Miss Malof. In fact she had given them no such order to sabotage — they had never even seen her — but mentioning her name he hoped would take the sneer off the PSB’s face. It did. The inspector pistol-whipped the boy’s face, instantly drawing blood, and he told the squad of eight soldiers inside the house to take them in hand.
The inspector was sure the three had never met or laid eyes on the criminal Malof woman, but he was just as certain, especially when he had sniffed a rotten-egg odor of sulfuric acid on one of the boys’ sleeves, that they had blown up the track near Tomortei.
“You could have killed many soldiers,” he told the boys. “Your brothers.”
“They’re not our brothers,” the eldest of the three said. By now two truckloads of PLA had arrived, and the parents were beside themselves as the soldiers piled out of the trucks, beams of flashlights roiling with dust, and shouted commands coming through the darkness, which soon had the soldiers in a huge circle around the three boys and the PSB inspector. The inspector now held a bullhorn — the battery wasn’t working, but he used it anyhow to bellow out to the soldiers. “Remember what the democracy hooligans of Tiananmen did to your comrades in arms!”
It was a powerful appeal, immediately visible in the way the circle of troops seemed to constrict in a solid ring and grow smaller yet more menacing, as every soldier took a step forward against the saboteurs whose earlier defiance now paled in the spotlight formed by several beams. In Tiananmen, or rather throughout Beijing, the demonstrators once attacked by the soldiers had in turn attacked many of the soldiers, the most infamous incident being when one of the soldiers had been castrated and hung from a wire noose, his body nothing more than black cinder after it had burned in a torch of gasoline.
Now there were screams coming from the houses down the dark hutongs, punctuated by declarations of “It serves them right!” from the Granny Brigade, and on the inspector’s orders the soldiers turned and fixed bayonets against any possible interference from the crowd.
It took at least twelve soldiers to hold down the three boys who were now screaming as each was castrated, the bloody lumps of testicles thrown into the dust like pieces of meat. Then they were left, hands tied behind them, all out of their minds with pain, bleeding profusely into the dust, the rough placards hung about their necks reading, “Long live the people, death to the fifth columnists!” The circle of bayonets remained until the last of the boys had made his final plea for forgiveness, screaming like a wild animal, and then died. One PSB inspector ordered the bodies thrown in the truck and taken to the sabotage site near Tomortei, where their mutilated bodies were to be tied to stakes.
When Chairman Nie was told, he promised himself that he personally would shoot the Malof woman after she had been publicly humiliated in Tiananmen. He had no doubt that they would catch her eventually, and as everyone knew, Nie had a patience that was impressive, even by Chinese standards. He had waited a long time to be chairman, and he could certainly wait a little longer to have the PSB hunt down the Malof woman. The best way of course would be to bait a trap she couldn’t resist.
* * *
News of the capture of the three saboteurs and their fate traveled like wildfire down both sides of the DMZ and then on national Beijing radio, which also announced that China would insist upon maintaining her territorial integrity and would petition the United Nations to have the imperialist forces of the United States return the Jewish autonomous region to China where it belonged. It had been such border disputes that first caused the U.N. to send Freeman’s Second Army and some British SAS troops to settle.
Nie’s ambassador at the U.N. brazenly stated that regardless of the truce, the JAO was a separate issue and it must be ceded forthwith to Chinese control. It was an elaborate plan by Nie, for in fact he didn’t care about the JAO — he even suspected that the Jews had proper claim, but if anything would flush the JAO goddess of the democracy movement out into the open where the PSB could get her, and at one stroke immobilize a leaderless Democracy Movement, this U.N. move might.
The truth was that Nie’s plan — his baiting of the trap with the demand for Chinese sovereignty over the JAO— worked better than he’d had any right to expect, for PSB informants in the JAO reported that Alexsandra Malof was surfacing to go personally to the U.N. to plead the JAO case, envisioning the JAO area as a separate democratic state between Siberia and China. Nie ordered his PSB informants to watch all refugee camps from Orgon Tal to Khabarovsk.
* * *
That evening Aussie and Alexsandra were saying their good-byes before he headed south for Orgon Tal. Second Army had a plane ready for Alexsandra, believing that in the U.N. the beautiful and articulate Alexsandra arguing her case would win over many delegates.
“I’ll not be too long away,” she told Aussie.
“You be careful, luv,” Aussie advised her. “Don’t go strolling off by yourself.”
She leaned over and straightened the collar of his SAS battlefield smock and kissed him. “I’ll have U.N. bodyguards,” she said.
Aussie for once had nothing to say. Gently he pulled her toward him, and in their embrace he could feel the beating of her heart.
* * *
“No,” Nie said, “not in the air. Our Shenyangs wouldn’t get near them. The U.S. still has air supremacy, or had you forgotten that minor fact, Comrade?”
“No, sir,” the chief of the PLA’s air arm replied. “I haven’t forgotten, but we wouldn’t be using Shenyangs. We would send up our squadron of Soviet Fulcrums. They’d stand a good chance of getting through the American air cover.”
“And,” Nie said, “at what cost?” The air force chief began to say something, but Nie held up his hand, silencing him.
“I know what you’re going to tell me. The Fulcrum is a match for the F-16 or whatever, but the squadron of Fulcrums in the Beijing grid are the only ones we have and none of them can be risked. Besides, the shooting down of an Air America plane would tear the truce apart. Particularly with a woman aboard it.”
“The truce is very thin already,” the air force general said. “These three hooligans you found sabotaged the Orgon Tal line. They were obviously sent by the Americans to provoke us.”
Nie stared at the air force general as an irate headmaster might upbraid one of his staff. “You can’t seriously believe that, Comrade? That Freeman would precipitate an action before his armor is ready — before it comes down to him at Orgon Tal and points east along our Manchurian front.”
But the air force general, though chagrined, retorted, “Perhaps not, Comrade Chairman, but what I am sure of is that no one could ever be sure of what Freeman will do. He’s entirely unpredictable. If he hadn’t tricked us before with his feints here and there and his main attack elsewhere he wouldn’t be only two hundred and eighty miles from the capital.”
“Oh, he’s a fox,” Nie said. “A fox, yes. I grant you that, Comrade, but he’s not a fool. The Americans like all their matériel ready, tested, and accounted for, before they make a move. He won’t move before his replacement tanks are here.”
The air force general agreed but shrewdly riposted, “But if he has not got his tanks ready, we needn’t worry about his moving against us.”
Nie’s face took on a splotchy effect, his temper infused by a recognition that the air force general had a point.
“I did not mean he will do nothing, Comrade, before the tanks are here. If you down one of his planes, however, he could very well unleash air strikes anywhere along the DMZ. Even over Beijing.”
The air force general knew he was rapidly losing ground but fired one more salvo in the battle of egos.
