the Russians, who were wedded to the doctrine of central control, allowing individual commanders little flexibility unless central control released them. Of course central control was necessary to some degree in the U.S. army as well, but the release to individual decisions as in Freeman’s leaving the FAV tactics up to Brentwood and the other FAV crews was not as freely given to the ChiComs. And the degree to which Cheng and Freeman would maintain central command would become crucial if it came to a night fight. Should this occur, Cheng knew, the Americans were better, with more experience in freeing individual tank commanders to exercise tactical flexibility, giving the Americans the edge when it came to tanks in an eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation.
“Fixing a flat,” the FAV just chewed out by Brentwood reported. “Couldn’t avoid firing a TOW…were taking tracers.” Now Aussie swung the FAV up out of the gully to the sharp, sandy edge, and he could no longer see the tanks, the weather closing in again as they heard the clanking of the ChiCom armor far off to the left.
Brentwood requested an update on the radar vector the Kiowas were plotting. It was the same; the mobile unit hadn’t moved. And Brentwood’s Magellan hand-held global positioning system put them only three miles away. At thirty miles per hour, a near-reckless speed, given the fifteen-to-twenty-yard visibility, it was estimated the FAVs on both flanks skirting the Chinese armor should reach the radar site within ten minutes — unless it moved again,
The motorcycle sidecar unit came out of nowhere — from behind them. The TOW operator saw it at the last minute, swung his weapon around on the swivel mount, but the burst from the ChiCom’s 7.62mm PKS hit him in the chest and face, blood pouring out of him. Aussie quickly turned left, his foot to the floor. The sidecar unit couldn’t turn fast enough, and Aussie hit it full on, the FAV’s double crash bar now bent back to the lights, the Chinese motorcyclist flung off his machine and Brentwood mowing him down then turning the weapon on the upturned sidecar, giving it two good bursts, the Chinese gunner inside screaming over the rattle of the ricocheting bullets.
Aussie and David Brentwood cut the TOW operator out of his harness, snapped off his dog tags, and went on.
“I’ll blow that fucking radar so fucking high—”
“If we find it,” Brentwood said, adding hopefully, “Should be there in ten minutes.”
In those ten minutes Admiral Kuang was receiving the message from his forward AWACS — the airborne warning and control systems — that a hurricane, force five, more powerful than those that had hit southern Florida and the Hawaiian Islands in ‘92, with winds in excess of 190 miles an hour, born in the Marianas, was now heading for Taiwan and the hundred-mile-wide strait between it and the Chinese mainland. Reluctantly, with great sadness, he ordered the fleet to turn about and head back toward Taiwan in order to meet the hurricane head-on and hopefully ride it out. As practical a man as he was, Kuang was also deeply religious, and he saw in the hurricane’s attack a clear message that the hurricane was saving him from a crushing defeat — a clear warning to wait for a more propitious time. In any case he couldn’t possibly make landings in a hurricane.
“Aussie!” a cry came from somewhere in front. It was Salvini, Choir, and the news reporter who was standing up in the stilled FAV like a mummy frozen to the roll bar. Beside them were two ChiCom motorcycle/sidecar units looking the worse for their collision with the FAV. “Had a prang, I see!” Aussie said cheekily.
“Yeah,” Salvini answered. “Both hit me at once.”
“Ah, bullshit!” Aussie said. “You guys from Brooklyn can’t drive a fucking grocery cart. Shoulda outmaneuvered -em.”
“Like we did,” David added, looking at Aussie. “The one we hit.”
“That was on purpose,” Aussie responded. “Okay, hop in. Choir, you with the TOW. Your mate”—he meant me reporter—”in the back, too.”
“What about me?” Salvini asked.
“You can fucking hoof it, Sal. Only a couple of miles.”
“Fuck you!” Sal said. “I’ll ride in one of your side litter trays.”
“Where’s your TOW, man?” Choir asked.
“Bought it a way back,” Aussie said, his tone losing its jocular vulgarity as he looked ahead, the visibility up to forty yards, asking David for a GPS vector to the target.
“Steer one seven three.”
“And hope they’re still there,” Choir said. Aussie had the FAV up to thirty miles an hour within a few seconds, then jammed on the brake, the vehicle skidding sideways, ploughing into the sand.
“What d’you see?” David asked.
“Nothing. I’ve got an idea.” He backed up to where the two ChiCom motorcycle and sidecar units were lying. “Sal— you try the one over there. I’ll try the one nearest.”
“What for?”
“See if they still rucking work after you hitting ‘em.”
One’s front wheel was bent beyond hope, while the other had its gas tank so shot up that it too was finished. The sound of armor fighting armor now drowned out Aussie’s voice. Several thousand yards back in the mustard fog of dust and smoke, Freeman’s first echelon had come within sight of the ChiComs. Aussie took off again in the FAV, David, his legs braced against the floor, taking a firm hold of the M-60 machine gun. For a second the FAV was engulfed with the stench of excrement. “Don’t worry about it, boyo,” Choir said to the La Roche newsman.
“It was Salvini,” Aussie said, as Salvini lay on his side, gripping the metal lattice work of the litter for support, his head bumping on a pillow of C charges.
“What’s up with you, you Australian—”
“Stop!” Choir yelled. “Target! One o’clock!”
As the FAV came to an abrupt halt in the loose, sugary sand, Choir fired his second-to-last TOW, its back- blast lighting up the FAV, the FAV in its most vulnerable position, still, giving Choir time to guide the optically tracked, wire-guided missile.
The motorcycle and sidecar unit that he’d aimed at dipped over a dune, the TOW blowing the top of the dune off like the flying spray of some enormous brown wave. Next second the sidecar unit was coming back at them out of the fold between the dunes in which it had temporarily disappeared, the ChiCom in the sidecar pointing a shaped-charge RPG at them.
“Cheeky bastard!” Aussie said, and was already into a series of S curves and dips. The RPG fired, a hot sliver of shrapnel slicing open the front left tire like butter, amputating two inches or so from the foot-long pack of C-4 plastique, ending up taking a chip out of the stock of the Winchester 1200 riot shotgun that was strapped to the cage.
Brentwood was still firing the machine gun and saw the ChiCom driver shaking as if he were some kind of machine coining apart, falling away, the long burst of machine gun fire literally chopping him to pieces. The motorcycle jack-knifed and was over on its side.
“Shit!” It was Aussie. “Two flats in one day.”
“Aussie — can it.” It was David, looking suddenly older than his years. “Anyone hurt?”
“No.” He turned back toward the La Roche reporter, who shook his head like a child on the verge of tears, accused of something he didn’t do.
“All right,” David said. “Now listen up — all of you.”
Salvini was already changing tires.
In the lead M1A2, General Freeman watched through his viewer while the gunner below and immediately in front of him scanned his thermal-imaging sight. Freeman was confident that with so much dust and now smoke from smoke grenades in the air it would be the Americans who would have the edge — able to see through the polluted air in the same way that Schwarzkopf had reported how the American sights had been able to better see through the hot fog of war than had the Iraqi tanks.
The concussion from the explosion of a Bradley armored personnel carrier behind him off to his left could be felt, not so much by any impact or discernible earth tremor but by the sudden surge in the M1A2’s air conditioner and ventilation system, the inside pressure now rising, not to keep out poison gas, though it could do that, too, but rather the thick dust caused by the Bradley’s sudden demise.
It was a shock as much to Freeman as his other three crewmen. If they couldn’t see through the smoke
