Brentwood grabbed the radio phone to tell Freeman he could again have to slow his advance to single file or as many files as he had flail tanks that could go ahead, whipping the ground with their heavy chains to detonate the mines. He asked Freeman what they should do next, though he and Aussie and everyone on the FAV radio network guessed it already.
“Boys,” Freeman said to tank crew and FAV alike, “we’re slowing down and our tanks’ll have to get behind as many flails as we can. Cheng’s going to have time to move his guns across from the right flank, maybe directly in front of us. There’s a ridge at the end of the corridor where it narrows. They’ll use this high ground for their artillery. M1’s range is damn good at three thousand meters but it can’t overtake their thirteen-mile-range artillery. You boys in the FAVs are going to go in ahead of us.”
“Holy cow!” a FAV driver said. “If an M1 tank can’t outshoot Cheng’s artillery, how the hell are we going to?”
Freeman knew well enough they were in a tight spot, made worse by the lack of attention paid to detail by his new logistics whiz, Whitely. Up in Chita Whitely had been through every detail, from the size of every bolt to water decontamination pills, but he’d assumed that the rail gauge of the Trans-Siberian, which the Americans had to use when supplies were unloaded at the port of Rudnaya Pristan, would be the same as that of China. It wasn’t. And to change troops and their equipment from one train to another was infinitely more complex than the average person realized or could ever imagine. To move tanks, especially those fitted with flails and so vitally needed down south, was a logistical nightmare. Whitely had no contingency plan for how to get U.S. cargo moved quickly from Trans-Siberian gauge to Chinese gauge. Freeman had fired him as soon as he’d found out, but that didn’t change the situation.
What would change it was Freeman’s knowledge of the minutiae of war that yet again would contribute to the Freeman legend. It was nothing mysterious, and quite simple once explained to any soldier, or civilian for that matter, and it had to do with angles of fire.
“Now listen up,” Freeman said to the FAVs. “Quickly now! We don’t know exactly where Cheng’s guns are at the moment.”
Freeman had no way of knowing it in the blinding hell of the Gobi storm, but Cheng was about to let him know with the biggest artillery salvo since the Sino-Soviet wars of the sixties. It would be the opening barrage — over two hundred guns — of what was to become known as the battle for Orgon Tal, or “Big Dick” as it was known to Freeman’s Second Army, the tiny settlement of Orgon Tal being near the railhead Freeman hoped to capture midcorridor and so sever Cheng’s supply line from the east.
Cheng, nonplussed by reports of sightings of Freeman’s forces attacking both at the dunes to the east and regrouping in the tunneled area, had to decide now whether to rush down more troops from the northern armies on the Manchurian front. This attack of Freeman’s might well be a feint like that used against Hussein in ‘91, with the main body of the U.S.’s Second Army’s AirLand battle strategy yet to strike all across the Manchurian border as Freeman had done before shifting his attack south.
It was then that Cheng decided he needed more up-to-date intelligence, and the truth was General Cheng believed that no one could deduce more from interrogation than he could; this Malof woman, for example, the Russian Jewess who had led the underground resistance in the Jewish autonomous region on the Manchurian border and who had just been recaptured north of Harbin after several months of freedom following the cease-fire. She had been a great help to the Americans with her band of Jewish bandits harassing China border traffic all along the Black Dragon.
Whether or not this harassment was itself part of a larger set piece in the Americans’ overall battle plan would tell Cheng a great deal about Freeman’s strategy. Cheng knew that they also had, in Beijing Jail, an American SAS/D trooper, Smythe, who might be of use as well, knowing how the SAS/D worked as auxiliaries to main attacking forces. Accordingly, he ordered them both rushed to the Orgon Tal railhead with any other prisoners who had been captured within the last week or two. By four p.m. he should have at least sixteen POWs — mostly Chinese June 4 or Democracy Movement members — and saboteurs caught around Harbin, including the Russian Jewess.
Meanwhile he assumed Freeman was attacking on two fronts locally: upon the dunes to the east of Orgon Tal and through the sandstorm-blasted corridor, and accordingly gave the order that his heavy guns, especially the towed M 1955 203mm with its eleven-mile-range, 2,200-pound shells, his three-mile-range Attila Mk11 multiple rocket launchers and his D4 122mm seventeen-mile gun with its rate of fire of six to seven rounds per minute, be moved as fast as possible into the middle of the southern end of the corridor. Cheng’s troops positioned the guns on an east-west axis atop a hundred-foot tongue of clay that ran east to west for several thousand yards a few miles north of Orgon Tal railhead, so that the artillery and the railhead line formed a rough T, the artillery in effect protecting the railhead.
Cheng envisaged his trap now as a dragon’s mouth. The teeth would be the mine fields atop the network of tunnels that the American tanks would have to negotiate first, while at the back of the dragon’s mouth came the flame of the artillery, the latter’s mobile dish radars sitting like clumps of high ears atop the ridge not visible beyond thirty feet in the dust storm.
Cheng entered the Orgon Tal railway station’s waiting room, as bare of human comfort as anyone could imagine, looking more like a barrack that had been opened to the searing breath of the Gobi. But at least it afforded some shelter from the storm. The sixteen prisoners were told to stand. They ranged from a small, wiry student, shaking so much Cheng could actually hear his teeth chattering, to an old man in his seventies, his face creased like leather.
“It’s hot in here!” Cheng told the student contemptuously. “Why are you shaking?”
“I’m cold,” said the boy, about fourteen years old.
“You’re guilty!” Cheng said, his arm and hand rigid, fully extended, tapping the boy’s shoulder with such single-minded and increasing force that the boy looked as if he would collapse. The boy had already wet himself in fear.
“You are
“None, Comrade General.”
Cheng looked at him and believed him, but it didn’t matter. Often they knew more than they realized. Cheng was still unsure if this corridor attack was merely a feint to hide the fact of a massive U.S. attack south from the Amur to grab all Manchuria. He walked behind the prisoners.
“Look to your front!” a major bellowed. There was a shot — a worker’s face exploding like a melon, parts of his grayish brain scattered on the sandy wooden floor.
One prisoner, the boy, gave a moan and collapsed. Cheng pushed him gently with his boot. “Wake up. Get up!”
The major kicked the boy. “Get—”
“No!” Cheng told the major. “Don’t hurt him. Help him to his feet.”
The boy tried to get up but dry-retched and stayed on his knees, looking strangely like a wet cat. There was another shot, and the boy’s torso crumpled and seemed to melt into his arms before he fell sideways with a bump into a pool of his blood.
It was imperative to Cheng to be unpredictable in such circumstances. This held more fear than most people could bear. “I will return in a half hour. I want to know what your orders were from the Americans. Tell the major — word for word. If you tell the truth you will receive reduced prison sentences. Whatever you say will be carefully checked, and if it is found that the information you have given is incorrect, you will die — more slowly than these two.” He indicated the worker and the student.
As Cheng walked out he told the major, “I want those reports in half an hour.”
“Yes, Comrade General.”
The major had only four guards and so asked who of the prisoners could read or write.
