war — a three-front war if you counted the stalemate along the Amur to the north.
The Communist Chinese navy was primarily a coastal defense force and did not have big ordnance or the superior training of the American-tutored Taiwanese navy. Nor could the Communists’ Shenyang F-6s — updated versions of the old MiG-19s — pose any real threat.
“Hawkeye radar report, sir. Unidentified vessel. Bearing two seven zero. Range seven zero miles. Proceeding south.”
“Any others?” Admiral Kuang asked the officer of the watch.
“Nothing yet, sir.”
“When we rendezvous with our landing craft off Hsilo River we will know. Meanwhile, tell me if the unidentified turns.”
“Possible hostile,” the operator said, receiving the Hawk-eye feed. “… Hostile confirmed.”
“Type?” Kuang asked.
“Huangfen. Missile attack boat — two hundred tons. Speed, twenty knots. Four HY2 surface-to-surface. Two twin 30mms — one forward, one aft.”
“Radar capability?” Kuang asked. “It cannot be more than twenty miles.”
“Less than six, sir, and there’s a haze. He won’t have us on passive sonar either. Unless he stops. His three diesels are twelve thousand horsepower each. That would wash out any of our sound.”
The admiral nodded. “Quite so.”
If all went well, he knew they would be off the mainland peninsula an hour before dawn. Then it would be no longer possible to conceal themselves — unless the goddess Matsu was still with them and kept the curtain of mist wrapped about them. Kuang prayed fervently. He held fast to his vision — his private vision — of him personally on behalf of the ROC accepting the Red Chinese surrender at the war’s end. He would go to the beautiful city of Hangchow, the home of his ancestors, his dream to be consummated the moment his limousine drove through the garden-surrounded gates of Mao’s villa on the West Lake, whereupon he would alight in triumph to personally remove the stain of Mao’s house from the earth.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
The first sign was a hazing over of the sun so that only a dull, purplish corona of it showed through the mounting turbulence. It was one of the great Gobi storms without rain, one of the terrible gritty and blinding storms borne westward in the desert, this time of year, April, being the worst month, and added to by the sand-pregnant winds out of the Tien Shan Mountains in China’s westernmost province of Sinkiang, where the line of the mustard sky could be seen eating up the blue before the banshee howling and the pebble-hailing assault enveloped all.
Cheng was pleased. He had prepared without the hope of a storm though he knew it was the time of the year for them, but now he could see the massive storm gathering he welcomed it; it would make his trap so much more terrible for the Americans. Oh, the Americans had done well in the desert in Iraq, Cheng told his subordinates, and the incompetent Hussein helped them by being such a fool of a tactician. Besides, Cheng reminded his commanders, the PLA had had time — months, years — to prepare for any invasion from the north down the corridor between the great sandy desert to the west and the harder semidesert to the east — the corridor Freeman was heading for about ten miles in width and twenty-three in depth.
“You must understand, comrades,” Cheng reassured his HQ staff, “that the Vietnamese defeated the Americans because they realized the falseness of an American adage — that the jungle was neutral, that it was equally difficult for the Americans and North Vietnamese alike. This, of course, was an incorrect assumption because the Vietnamese used the jungle as their friend. As we will use the desert. Remember we are on home soil and have had more time to prepare than Iraq.” He paused. “Is everyone in position?” His commanders assured him that they were.
“If anyone breaks camouflage he is to be shot immediately. Understood?”
They did, each platoon officer having been supplied with a noise suppressor on his revolver so that such a shot would not be heard.
Driving south, Freeman planned to take the path of least resistance between the great sand dunes around Qagan Nur or Qagan Lake and the salt lakes south of it, the corridor extending from the dunes on his left or eastern flank to the railhead of Erenhot on the Chinese-Mongolian border. Freeman’s objective was the capture of the rail spur line that stuck twenty-three miles out northward from the east-west main line and which stopped at the small settlement of Qagan Lake, even though me town was actually ninety-five miles south of the lake it was named after.
Cheng’s strategy owed something not only to the Vietnamese, whom the Chinese detested, but also to the Egyptians’ highly successful foxhole strategy against the Israeli tanks in the Yom Kippur War. And he had elaborated upon it, not with a tactic from Sun Tzu but from the Turks of World War I.
There had been no way to gain satellite reconnaissance during the dust storms that Cheng had used as cover during the weeks of the cease-fire. No way for U.S., or any other satellites for that matter, to discover that beneath this corridor, the most obvious funnel to the south, he, General Cheng, had used only a fraction of his three-million- strong army to dig a vast interlocking system of reinforced tunnels.
Unlike the Viet Cong tunnels, they were not elaborately built insofar as they were not elbow- or S-shaped, nor did they have the misleading cul-de-sacs or sudden angular changes in elevation that in the darkness might trip any enemy brave or foolish enough to descend into them. Rather it was a honeycomb of tunnels that led to hundreds of foxholes easily concealed and manned by an elite infantry division from Shenyang’s military district Group Army 40 and some elements of the infamous Beijing military district’s Thirty-eighth Army — of Tiananmen Massacre fame. After firing an antitank missile from one foxhole, a PLA team could quickly remove itself to another, and in most cases the angle of depression of the M-1 or M-60 tank’s big gun would be useless against them at any close range — only the tank’s machine guns could effectively come into play.
“Son of a bitch!” commented the pilot of one of Freeman’s Kiowa scout choppers, which had come low behind the protection of boulders the size of bungalows. “Can’t see a friggin’ thing.” The chopper’s copilot pushed the button that raised the periscopelike “two-eyed” mast-mounted sight still higher above the rock.
Still nothing.
They were in the fog of war wherein even the best commanders become confused by a lack of information or too much conflicting information. The chopper went higher, but they still couldn’t see through the dust, the chopper’s intake filters in danger of clogging, when they began getting radar blips, which were duly reported to Freeman but which could not be identified. Freeman ordered the Kiowas forward, and already mine-detector equipment and antimine blades and flails on mine-clearing tanks were called up from the columns as he ordered them to go into single file formation.
No mines were reported, but one Kiowa came in with a report of dozens of what its crew believed, but could not be sure, were Red Arrow 8 antitank-missile-tracked vehicles. A small screen in Freeman’s command tank selected the Red Arrow from the computer’s threat library, telling him that the vehicle had an effective range of three thousand meters, a rate of fire of two to three missiles per minute — warhead diameter 120mm. Hit probability greater than 90 percent. But they were still a good six thousand meters off.
Then there came SITREPs — situation reports — from another Kiowa of what they thought were T-69II main battle tanks equipped with laser range finder, though the dust should render the laser useless in the storm.
Freeman realized that the Chinese probably could not see him either, but the noise of the Kiowa scouts alone must certainly have alerted the Chinese to his presence. No doubt Cheng, like the Americans, wasn’t going to fight blind — it would be a matter of who would be seen first by whom, and Freeman’s tanks could outreach the T-59s by three thousand yards and the T-72s by two hundred yards as they had in the Iraqi desert, standing back beyond the range of the enemy’s T-59 105mm and T-72 125mm cannon while using their own 120mm to deadly effect.
But in the midst of the blinding storm that was still not anywhere near its zenith, Freeman was haunted again by what had befallen his tanks along the Never-Skovorodino road earlier in the war when Second Army had fallen into a trap baited in the taiga by dummy tanks, inflatables that looked like the real thing from only a hundred yards
