curtain, then how could Cheng’s tanks have seen the Bradley? Unless the smoke laid by the ChiCom armor was “particle infused,” that is, thickened to make it harder for the thermal and night-vision viewers on the M1A2 to penetrate.
There was only one way, Freeman saw, to counter such a possibility — close the gap between him and them as fast as possible. Freeman ordered a full-speed attack in wedge formations. His two hundred tanks moved from refused right and refused left configurations to the arrowhead-shaped wedge formations wherein the lead tank pointed its 120mm gun and coaxial machine gun straight ahead, the two tanks to the left and two slightly back and to the right covering the flanks by having their main guns pointing left and right respectively. And if necessary all would be able to fire straight ahead without hitting one another.
“Must be using high-particle smoke,” the gunner said, the reclined driver flexing his wrist on the handlebar control, his line-of-sight responsibility being the front, the loader on Freeman’s left responsible for the left side, Freeman responsible for the right and the all-round view and with the capability of overriding his gunner.
“Well, wait till the bastards get a taste of this high-ratio gearbox,” Freeman said, and with that the M1A2s moved quickly and efficiently over the sand, main gun steady, chassis undulating as if on a gimbals mounting, into the dense smoke. Ahead, the round, hunkered down domes of upgunned T-59s and T-72s were dimly, then more clearly, discerned, the weak sun no brighter than the moon as it sank over the desert. The driver picked up the first T-59, gave its position, and the gunner readied his 120mm — the HEAT, or high explosive antitank round, streaking out of the barrel a split second later.
“One o’clock — three hundred yards!” Freeman shouted as the first T-59 exploded from the molten jet that cut through its thick steel.
“In sight!” the gunner confirmed, the loader already shoving another HEAT round into “pussy,” as the breech was affectionately called, the round now en route to another T-59, the round striking its 75mm-thick glacis plate.
The fire-control computer aboard the M1A2 was already making minor adjustments for barrel drift, the gunner using the coaxial machine bursts so that his thermal imager picked up the tracer dots more easily in the smoke and dust, aligning the gun for the third shot in fourteen seconds, when a deafening bang, then a ringing noise, shook the M1A2 as if some giant had hit it with a mallet. The blow had come from a ChiCom infantry-fired RPG7, its shaped-charge round going instantly into a molten jet. But the jet of steel was prevented from penetrating the sloped armor of the M1A2 because of the tank’s reactive armor pack, which blew up upon the impact of me RPG7, diffusing the molten jet. There had been much debate in the Pentagon about the pluses and minuses of reactive armor, but for the men in Freeman’s tank it had worked admirably.
The moment the ChiComs’ RPG hit the M1A2 another HESH round had left the Abrams and another T-59 exploded but did not stop, its buckled tracks still somehow grinding forward, keeping the tank rolling down a dune, albeit arthritically, while it continued to disintegrate as a chain reaction was set off like some massive string of firecrackers, its crew having no time to escape but one of them, the driver, visible as a charred torso dangling from the driver’s exit beyond the turret. The air was pungent with diesel and gasoline fumes mixed in with the hot stench of burning skin melting into the sand, some of which was fused into glass by the molten jet of shaped charges.
“Three down!” the loader exulted, his voice a fusion of excitement and terror.
Freeman said nothing, conscious that even with a three-to-one kill ratio he might yet be unable to defeat the Chinese if they outnumbered him by more than three to one. Which they did. Freeman’s driver, acutely aware that the M1A2’s fuel tank was immediately to his left, started up from his nearly fully reclined position when he heard the tattoo of light machine gun fire raking the metal only inches from his ear.
“Goddamn infantry!” Freeman shouted. “Run the bastards over!”
For some inexplicable reason the driver started to laugh and couldn’t stop. The loader, hearing him on the intercom, also started cackling. Freeman glowered as the loader only with difficulty thrust another round home but couldn’t stop laughing. It was like a child being chased — full of fear and excitement, the vision of every M1A2 breaking formation, frantically taking off after individual Chinese, having struck the crew as insanely funny.
“What in hell’s the matter with you!” Freeman said, while pressing the thumb “traverse” control and hearing the rattle of machine gun bullets hitting the cupola. The loader was laughing so hard, hunched over by the shell racks, he was afraid he might have to urinate into his helmet. It was a kind of hysterical terror that only tankers and submariners know.
Several miles southward, beyond the ChiCom tanks, the dust was thinning out as Aussie’s FAV stopped just below the crest of a dune. Aussie and Brentwood, crawling on their bellies to the crest, looked down between two giant hills of sand on a sight so unexpected that it literally took their breath away — a forest so ordered and alien in its sudden appearance that they knew at once it was like the massive windbreaks of forests around Turpan — a reforestation project with menggulu or Mongolian willow forming the outer acres like a moat. There was also some shaji or seabuck thorn among them. Most of the forest, however, that looked to be about a mile wide and, through the scopes, about five miles deep, was made up of huyang — Chinese poplars, an island of green amid a sea of brown dunes.
“Well I’ll be buggered,” Aussie said. “So now what d’we do?”
“Over there,” Brentwood said, pointing to a dune about two hundred yards off to their left. “There’s one.” It was a ChiCom mobile radar van whose rectangular dish, the size of a collapsible bridge table, and housing set atop a hydraulic-legged ChiCom truck resembled a U.S. TPQ-63 type so much that Aussie suspected it
He was right. Jay La Roche had bought ten used units supposedly on sale for Taiwan and instead delivered them to China by diverting the cargo through Hong Kong.
Not far behind and below the radar unit on a wide, stony flat nearer the closer, or northern, end of the reforested area between the dunes there was what looked like a long refrigeration truck on stout hydraulic legs beneath a webbed camouflage netting, possibly an RAM-C, a radar management center, where the radar inputs from the various mobile sites would be collated and from where the deadly AA fire network would be operated. And in a flash David Brentwood realized that if the RAM-C unit could be taken out then no matter how many mobile radars there were — Freeman’s intelligence now suspected five on the move — destruction of the RAM-C would be killing the brain of the whole radar network.
The dust was clearing and the sun sinking fast. David Brentwood yearned for more smoke and dust cover, long enough for the attack. “Use the TOW!” he ordered Choir Williams.
“Yes,” Aussie put in, “but for Chrissake don’t miss!”
“I won’t, boyo,” Choir said as he aligned the weapon. He tried to fire it again — still nothing. Its circuit was dead.
“All right,” David said. “Now listen. We’ll have to go in with the FAV — straight for the RAM-C. Choir, you and I’ll hit the RAM-C. See those two doors midway along it?” It looked like a long camper.
“Yes.”
“You take the left, I’ll take the right. Aussie keeps the motor running.” He said nothing to the La Roche reporter who was sitting down next to Choir, his eyes glazed in a terrified stare. “Salvini, you cover us. Got it?”
“Got it!” Aussie cut in. “You have the fun while I sit on my ass!”
“You and Salvini take out any guards stupid enough to try and stop us.”
“I don’t see any,” Aussie said.
“That’s good,” Brentwood said. “Come on — let’s go!” The FAV mounted the crest. They heard a motorcycle/sidecar unit starting up, and Aussie put the FAV into reverse. Darkness had fallen, but with their SAS- issue Litton night goggles that in the daytime converted to binoculars they could see clearly between the dunes but were still at a loss to know precisely where the noise was coming from. Choir couldn’t tell, as his ears were still ringing from the thunderous sound of the titanic tank battle not far off.
“Between the dunes to the right somewhere,” Aussie proffered.
David Brentwood had his 7.62mm machine gun mounted on the dash pointed in the direction of the noise. Aussie reached over for the Haskins rifle strapped to the right seat strut, Choir unclipping it for him.
“Let me have a go with the suppressor.”
“Quickly then!” Brentwood said. Aussie had cut the engine and was out in a second and at the crest, looking down the dunes both ways. The dust was thinning, but it was still falling like pepper in the night-vision goggles.
