away, and with cheap oil lanterns in each to give off enough heat for an infrared signature; when he’d sent in the Apaches, the Siberians had unleashed their VAMs — vertical area mines— whose sensors were triggered by the sound of the approaching rotors and lifted off, spewing up submunitions that cost him a third of his Apaches and their crews.
“Slow to ten miles per hour,” he told the driver.
“Slow to ten.”
Sitting there in the turret, the gunner seated just below him, the loader to his left and the driver well forward beyond the turret wall, down under the 120mm gun and coaxial 12.6mm machine gun, Freeman wanted to send Apaches forward, but the dust storm was so thick it was unlikely they’d get a clear shot at anything.
Besides, if they were so close to the Chinese, only a matter of a mile or so, there was always the danger of a blue on blue when you could easily mistake the outline of one of your own tanks for one of theirs. Any visible insignia, in this case a black arrow stenciled on the M1A1’s cupola sides, front and back, would be almost impossible to see in the sandstorm. He could not afford to go ahead blind and so ordered several Apaches in to try to find and blast a hole through the Chinese armor, which was still nowhere in sight.
The air, however, was now thick with smoke as well as dust, the smoke additive just one of the items purchased through La Roche Chemicals and something Cheng had paid particular attention to after remembering Schwarzkopf’s boasting about how the Americans could see through the dust much better than the T-59s.
“But we saw through this crap in Iraq,” Freeman said.
“Not the same crap, General,” the gunner replied. “They’ve somehow made it so thick that we just can’t pick up anything — infrared or laser. We’re running blind.”
“Well so are they,” Freeman said, but he was right only up to a point. The flail tanks had as yet reported no mines. There was a string of profanity followed by “Back up! Back up!”
“What the fuck—”
Over his radio network Freeman could hear the gas turbine of a flail tank roaring.
“We struck some kind of berm or—”
The next minute Freeman’s ears were ringing. He couldn’t hear anything for the explosion transmitted by the radio of the flail tank before it went dead. In an instant Freeman made his decision, ordering the entire armored column, which prudence had just made him form a single file, to withdraw. “Don’t deviate a millimeter from your incoming tracks!” he ordered.
Of course this was impossible, as most of the tank tracks were blown over or already half filled with sand, but each tank commander and driver knew what he meant: turn your tank on its own radius and get the hell out of here.
The full realization of what might have happened had all his tanks been aligned for a frontal attack now hit him — that every one, or certainly most, would have suffered the fate of the flail tank that had crashed through what appeared to be some kind of tank trap, the chains from the flail tank digging up the sand deep enough before it crashed through in what Freeman now realized might be a tunnel-strewn corridor, each one of them allowing two-man RPG 40mm type-69 antitank grenade launcher teams to take on his tanks.
He was wrong — the tunnel had in fact been dug so as to bear the weight of the M1, not to collapse as had happened in this case, and to allow access warrens for RPG teams.
During Freeman’s hasty retreat, several more tanks were lost to teams who, realizing the American column had failed to take the bait at the last minute, had come out of their holes prematurely, most of them being killed at such close range by the M1s’.50 Brownings. Nevertheless two of Freeman’s tanks were lost to RPG teams, the tanks’ four-man crews cut to pieces by the Chinese as they tried to exit the burning vehicles. At the very least the Chinese had mauled Freeman’s column and caused him to give the uncharacteristic order to pull back. Cheng was furious that Freeman had not come on in a frontal battle charge, but the storm had brought caution to the Americans’ tactics and confusion to both sides.
“Very well,” Cheng said. “Now he retreats, where does he go? He must either come through the corridor or —”
“Go eastward to the dunes that border the corridor,” his aide suggested. Cheng uttered an ancient oath. With the corridor mined as well as honeycombed by tunnels, there was only one place Freeman could go: toward the dunes. But it was impossible to tunnel the dunes. Sand had the insistent habit of falling in on you the moment you tried to dig a foxhole in it.
Very well, Cheng thought, returning to Sun Tzu’s axiom: “The military has no constant form, just as water has no constant shape — adapt as you face the enemy.” It must adapt. Freeman had, and so would he.
“Colonel,” Cheng ordered, “get me Shenyang air army HQ immediately.” The drop he had in mind would be a little haphazard and it would have to be done in execrable conditions, but it was the only way to stop the Americans. Besides, it gave Cheng a sense of perverse satisfaction to know that the very weapons he’d be using against Freeman had been provided by an American, La Roche, out of Warsaw Pact surplus. Cheng recalled how hard he had to fight the Central Committee for the allocation funds to buy the weapons. Now he would be vindicated.
If there was one thing Freeman hated it was retreat, and already a CBN reporter well in the rear of me logistical tail of the armored column, hearing that Freeman’s armored spearhead was withdrawing, was in immediate contact with his Tokyo affiliate via his “four wire” satellite dish phone.
Within the hour the La Roche tabloids around me world were spewing forth FREEMAN ON THE RUN. Freeman was flipping over the leaves of his satchel-size operational map pad, assuring himself that you either went through the corridor between the dunes to the east and the Mongolian border to the west where SATRECON in one photo out of fifty had peeked through a brief clearing in the storm and spotted hundreds of heavy ChiCom field batteries — or you could try a fast end run across the dunes on his extreme left, then wheel about southwest in the sand. But if he knew this he knew that Cheng must know it, too, so if you were Cheng you’d try to stop the Americans at the dunes or better still try to take them out before they reached the dunes.
Freeman knew his M1A1s had a distinct advantage over the Chinese T-72s and T-59s in that the M1 was much faster. Then he got the bad news that the most forward of his tanks, which were now withdrawing from the antitank tunnel corridor and swinging east toward the dunes, were already reported as being under attack by swarms of ChiCom motorcycle and sidecar battalions, many equipped with Sagger optically controlled antitank missiles. It was difficult enough to deal with antitank ordnance normally, which is why Freeman had ordered the withdrawal from the tunnel-honeycombed corridor. But mobile Sagger antitank teams were a much more dangerous threat, even though Freeman knew it would probably be as difficult for the ChiCom sidecar units to spot his tanks in the blinding dust storm as it was for the tanks to see them.
Despite the blinding sandstorm, however, the quick turning ability of the motorcycle sidecar units was a distinct advantage for the ChiComs. There was the muffled
The battalion of American tanks racing for the dunes on Freeman’s left flank were told not to enter the dunes the moment Freeman had received a report from the forward-most tank that aircraft could be heard there above the dust storm.
“You sure they’re not our Apaches trying to get a look see?”
“Positive — definitely fixed-wing aircraft, General.”
“Right,” Freeman acknowledged, “then we must assume the ChiComs are dropping mines — thousands of them — onto the dunes.”
It left him with no choice. He would either have to retreat fully or hope his FAVs as outriders could somehow navigate a safe passage through the corridor.
