Warshot

“Call our Baikal command on the cease-fire line. Ask if the lake’s breaking up.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And lieutenant…”

“Sir?”

“You wake me the moment you hear.”

“Yes, General.”

The duty officer rang back moments later, reporting, “Everything’s fine at Baikal, sir. Nothing’s moving.”

“The world’s moving, Lieutenant — we just aren’t aware of it most of the time.”

“Yes, sir.”

Relieved, Freeman knelt to finish his prayer. “Almighty God, arm us. Amen.”

Before putting out the light, he scribbled a memo to the padre who had given a sermon for twenty minutes — ten longer than necessary, in Freeman’s view — a homily in which the padre had told the Second Army congregation that prayer may not indeed be heard by a supreme being but was a way of personally reminding ourselves of our individual responsibility to the collective spirit.

Freeman had been appalled. It wasn’t enough, he told Norton, that he had to put up with weak-kneed strategists back in Washington — now he had to contend with Goddamn revisionist priests who, rather than delivering the word of God straight and undiluted, had to stoop to secular interpretation of prayer so as not to offend the liberal fairies. The general, in an unprecedented move, had risen in the Quonset during the service and, looking about at the congregation of servicemen, helmet under his arm, declared, “With all due respect to the padre here, I feel it is my duty as your commanding officer to inform you that as far as I am concerned, God directly hears your prayers and will not fail us—if we prove worthy.” As the padre’s face grew redder by the second, Freeman had continued, “It is our bounden duty to thrash these neo-Communist sons of bitches in their new garb so soundly that they will never again doubt America’s will.”

On the memo pad by his bed he also scribbled an order to Colonel Dick Norton for immediate attention to Supply: “No fairy Bibles will be permitted in Second Army. King James version only. I don’t want my men fighting and dying — should it come to that — with some namby-pamby ‘God is my pal’ version of some liberal New York hippy diocese. I expect your cooperation. Signed, General Douglas Freeman.”

* * *

On the south bank, the Chinese side, of the Argun River, which formed the western side of the Amur, or Black Dragon, hump, the first round to rupture the cease-fire was audible to the Chinese seconds before it hit them. Its staccato shuffling sounded like some giant steam locomotive moving rapidly in the blackness above them, the heat envelope of the 155mm HE head having concertinaed the frigid air. It landed a hundred yards behind them, its explosion lighting up what looked like glass-covered brambles as the hoarfrost melted from uprooted bushes that a moment before had been under a mantle of virgin snow and were now flying through the air in an eruption of black dirt and snow, shrapnel singing like bees, slashing into the advance battery of the Shenyang Military Region’s Sixteenth Army, its 130mm field guns dug in under snow-camouflage netting high above the river.

Their forward observation posts, using the Soviet-made combination infrared laser range-finder, caught the flash of the second round two to three miles across the river, and the officer commanding the battery was on the radio to group army headquarters at Manzhouli, reporting that the direct fire was coming from high ground in the direction of Srednearaunsk in the hills on the American-held side. Within two minutes four other HE rounds had bracketed the Chinese position, killing one loader and exploding a Long March ammunition truck, and the Chinese battery had returned fire with six rounds of HE from their 130mm, thirteen-mile-range guns. Soon, in this, the southwestern sector of the Amur-Argun hump, firing erupted all along the line, especially along the west to east dip formed by the still extant wall of Genghis Khan forty-three miles east of Manzhouli. Quickly other American and Chinese batteries opened up on one another. American MLRSs — multiple launch rocket systems — lit up the night sky with what the MLRS troops called “white lasers,” streaking salvos of thirteen-foot-long, nine-inch-diameter, 667 -pound rockets — each rocket with a range of eighteen miles — twelve rockets fired at once from each of a dozen MLRS units spread along the length of the Khan wall. At times there were salvos of 120 rockets in one minute, 120 white parallel lines in the night sky, the rockets not designed to take out pinpoint targets, but to saturate a wide area and to sow chaos among the enemy troops. This they did, especially among the forward units of the Shenyang Sixteenth Army as the “coffee cups,” or polyurethane foam containers, from 667-pound MLRS rockets, each carrying over six hundred antipersonnel/antimateriel submunitions, rained down. After each warhead’s time had set off its “blowout” black powder charge, thousands of tiny submunition chutes were scattered over an oval-shaped area of several miles in which the M-77 submunitions exploded on contact, ripping through flesh and/or light armor. In the Chinese battery that had been first hit, there were twenty-six dead and over two hundred wounded in the first ten minutes of combat.

Within two hours three group armies — the Shenyang Military Region’s Sixteenth, Sixty-fourth, and Thirty- ninth — were on the move, the spearhead of an attack on a seventy-five-mile front formed by the Twenty-seventh Army group, whose reputation had been made when they had swarmed down Changan Avenue and shot children as well as the young protesters of the Democracy Movement on the night of June 3–4, 1989, when above Tiananmen the voice of Big Brother in the loudspeakers had declared, “Your movement is bound to fail. It is foreign. This is China, not America.”

“The Twenty-seventh,” promised General Cheng, who had particularly ordered that the imperialist battery that had fired the first shot of the war be taken alive for all the world to see, “will know what to do with them after.”

* * *

In General Freeman’s Khabarovsk headquarters hundreds of miles to the north, the noise level of radio traffic was near deafening, the situation board, a computer screen blowup, showing fighting had broken out all along the border in the southwest sector of the hump. ChiCom divisions were already moving north en masse, fanning out toward Kulusutay to the east and Dauriya seventy miles to the west, and in the foothills of the four-thousand-foot- high Argunskiy mountain range the infamous Twenty-seventh had already crossed the border, men and equipment making good time across the frozen marshes just south of Genghis Khan’s wall.

Freeman, for all his warnings about a breakdown of the cease-fire, was in shock, stunned now that it had actually happened. Staring at himself in the mirror, he slipped the nine-millimeter Parabellum into his waistband and was buttoning up his tunic as if in a state of hypnosis as Dick Norton knocked, waited, knocked again, then, alarmed at not receiving an answer, opened the door to the general’s room. He took the general’s silence for extreme calm under pressure, not realizing what a devastating blow it had been to Freeman.

Now that it had actually happened, it made no sense to Freeman. The American Second Army— his army — was suddenly in a war with China, a country of over a billion people. He didn’t have to imagine what effect it would have on the American public — on the White House — the almost certain attempt of his enemies in and outside the Pentagon, if not on the president’s staff itself, to hold him personally responsible for having broken the cease-fire. He was stunned by the supreme irony — that of all his warnings about the cease-fire being broken, the possibility that it would be broken by China had never, deep down, been seriously entertained by him. He had taken their border movements to be merely precautionary. But he knew that those against him back home, looking for a scapegoat, would recall his warnings about a possible cease-fire rupture, together with his wanting to pursue the Siberians before the cease-fire, and in it they would see him guilty of having made a preemptive strike.

The shock was wearing off now. He had always been contemptuous of Stalin’s state of mind upon being informed that the Wehrmacht legions were upon him after he had signed the Hitler-Stalin Pact. Now, as much as he’d detested the Communist leader, Freeman knew what it must have felt like, but for Freeman the very recognition he was in shock was the signal he was on his way out of it.

“General!” It was Norton following him out into a river of khaki, some officers, still with white snow overlays on, passing about Freeman and Norton like rapids in a stream.

“What is it, Dick?”

“Sir — the Chinese are claiming we started it.”

“Bullshit!”

Norton handed him a SATRECON photograph. It had been taken with an infrared sensor, a white spot like a pinpoint of overexposed film circled on the photo. Freeman felt his heart pounding.

“You can’t see it with the naked eye,” commented Norton, “but on computer enhancement they say you can