World War II had been as inferior to the Nazis’ Tiger and Panther MBTs as the ChiCom T-59 was to the American M1A1, but the then inferior U.S. tanks had won the day through their sheer weight of numbers, ironically validating the Soviet maxim that “quantity has a quality all its own.”
It was not clear enough yet for SATRECON to see how many Chinese tanks were now aligned against Freeman following the collapse of the Pepperpot line, and the padre’s weather prayer, though stated clearly, had done no good at all. Freeman estimated Cheng would have had time to marshal at least a three-to-one MBT advantage. And if the radar station could not be found and taken out quickly enough to render the ChiComs’ triple AA defenses ineffective against the slower but deadly U.S.A. Thunderbolt and Apache tank killers, Cheng could still quickly overwhelm the Americans.
Further, once the ChiCom and American echelons mixed it up it would be near dark, and IFF — identifying friend or foe — would become increasingly difficult. The MBTs of both sides would be so close in the dust-churned night that even with friend or foe recognition not being a problem, the danger of blue-on-blue fire on the ground and from the air would become a certainty, yet only TACAIR could help redress the odds against the Americans. And so it was imperative that the ten remaining SAS/D FAVs take out the radar that would otherwise identify the incoming American planes once the weather cleared.
Freeman’s lead tank, identifiable by its two aerials rather than one, received a burst-coded message of the latest intelligence estimate out of Khabarovsk of the enemy MBT strength based upon rail movements along the southern Manchurian mainlines and from Beijing to Erenhot.
“What are the odds, sir?” the loader asked.
“I was wrong,” the general said. “It’s not a three-to-one advantage after all.”
“That’s good—”
“It’s
“Visibility’s increasing to fifty yards, sir,” the driver reported. “Dust storm seems to be falling off a little.”
“Huh,” Freeman grunted. “Maybe we’ll just pass one another — eh, Lawson? Like two ships in the night.”
“Unlikely, General.”
“Damned unlikely, son. Anyway, you wouldn’t want to miss it, would you?”
“No, sir,” lied Lawson, who was now berating himself for all the times he’d been grumpy at having to put his two kids to bed at night and knowing now he’d give anything to be doing that at this moment, and if he died, would God, if there was a God, forgive him? “Visibility increasing,” he said. “Sixty yards.”
A minute later he reported that the dust had closed in again — visibility back down to forty yards.
The other bad news was that Freeman’s earlier hope that the ChiCom radar complex was a fixed installation — which once the weather cleared might be an ideal smart bomb target — was dashed by a recent burst of radar waves from the ChiCom side that came in on a different vector. This meant that the radar unit was mobile, yet another reason why an air strike would yield nothing in a sky through which the American pilots couldn’t see. A reconnaissance Kiowa had been sent out to test infrared visibility through the dust, but no radar target could be found, which puzzled Freeman’s HQ. In any event, even if the weather had cleared in time, Freeman was remembering how most ordnance dropped in the Gulf War missed its targets — what the public saw on CBN were the relatively few hits. He knew it was up to Brentwood and his FAVs to take out the ChiCom radar. If they didn’t, Freeman would lose any TACAIR advantage he might otherwise have.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
His private jet approaching Dutch Harbor from Anchorage, Alaska, Jay La Roche was reclining in his Spanish calfskin chair, a bevy of “gofers” attending his every need. He had lost only one deal in his life, and her name was Lana, nee Brentwood, now, in his view, wasting herself in some berg of an island, “playing at nurse,” as he derisively put it. He’d kicked her out in Shanghai years ago, he told Francine and anyone who would listen, and, for the kind of money La Roche had, a lot of people did. He neglected to tell the whole truth: that in Lana’s case
At those moments he was uncontrollable, but he consistently viewed such forays as occasional lapses, a self-deception that even now allowed him to think he could get his wife to come back to him. He had tried, through Congressman Hailey, to get her transferred out of Dutch Harbor nearer to New York. Hailey had tried but failed, even though urged on by La Roche’s color stills of the elected official’s dalliances with several congressional page boys.
“What happened to him?” Francine had asked, trying to be nonchalant but remembering the congressman’s name had been mentioned once or twice to her by Il Trovatore’s barman as a warning about never crossing La Roche.
“Had an accident,” La Roche explained. “Gun went off in his mouth.” What disturbed Francine wasn’t so much the story of the suicide — she’d seen enough of those in her time— but the way Jay told it. He enjoyed it. A lot. And she knew what was bugging him about Lana. Though Francine had never met her, only knowing what she looked like from the photo he kept in the New York penthouse and from some of the old magazine photos of the wedding before the war, Francine figured it was Lana’s very resistance to La Roche that drew him to her. She was the only “piece of ass” next to his male secretary, La Roche had told Francine, who had been “stupid” enough to run away from him. By “stupid” Francine knew Jay meant Lana had been the only woman who’d had the guts to try to run from him. But to an ego like Jay’s, the very fact that somewhere in the world, in this case in Dutch Harbor, there was somebody — anybody, especially a woman — whom he couldn’t own “tit-to-toe” and “right through,” as he delicately put it, wasn’t merely galling, it was intolerable.
Now he was telling the stories of how he’d beaten Uncle Sam — how though he was the largest supplier of chemical warfare agents to the United States, he was also the sole supplier of GB, Sarin, and VX nerve gas to Asia. Chinese, North Koreans, Vietnamese, Japanese — La Roche didn’t care who he sold it to, and when the Congress passed legislation forbidding U.S. citizens to trade with the enemy, La Roche’s army of lawyers had gone on the march, as he gloatingly explained it, finding, Jay boasted to Francine, “as many loopholes” as “chickens in a barnyard.”
If La Roche’s metaphors were mixed as he told the story, everyone on his private jet knew that “chickens” meant child prostitutes, of either sex, whom Jay frequently used as “dawn breakers.” Just as his lawyers had found a way out of Congress’s restrictive legislation by the use of “front” nonenemy Asian companies, primarily in Burma, through which to ship the poison-gas-producing liquids to Iraq, North Korea, and China, so too had the lawyers protected him from the slightest whiff of “chicken” scandal. The lawyers’ hands were strengthened by La Roche’s ownership of his tabloid chain in North America and western Europe. If a decent paper went up against La Roche, as his wife had once done when she told him she’d sue for divorce, they would soon find themselves, as she had, up against not only La Roche’s battery of experts but against threatened tabloid “exposes”, of their families. Lana had been so naive at first, La Roche boasted to Francine, that she actually believed that if the stories he’d threatened to publish about her parents weren’t true, the papers couldn’t print them.
“How about this for a headline?” he’d threatened her. “ ‘Retired Admiral Brentwood Denies He is Homosexual!’ “ Occasionally, he’d told Francine, “someone like that fool Hailey,” who couldn’t use his influence in Congress to have Lana transferred, would snuff it rather than have his family smeared across the tabloids. But usually it worked.
“That’s enough,” he said, pushing the hair dryer away, checking the back and sides of his lean, darkly handsome face in the mirror, pulling out his gold mouthwash nebulizer, squirting it, rolling his tongue around and showing off his immaculate white teeth.
As the plane began to descend, Francine’s sulkiness increased. Till now she’d been under the illusion that she was what he called his “number one pussy”—with all the lavish goodies and status that attached itself to the scrum of sycophants surrounding him.
“Moment we land in this burg,” he instructed his flunkies, “I want lots of pictures in that Army PX. You know
