closing in on them a hundred yards to the left, a ricochet ripping open David Brentwood’s left cheek before Salvini reached forward around him, cut the throttle, and got off the pillion seat, throwing up his hands. “Don’t shoot! We’re Americans.”
“Stay where you fucking are!” a skeptical voice came.
“Mount Rushmore’s ours!” Salvini yelled.
“Stay where you fucking are, buddy!”
When they were close enough to sort it all out, there were apologies aplenty, but the apologies didn’t do anything for Aussie’s wounded arm or David’s face, which, as Choir drove over in the other FAV to meet them, was being held together by tape until they could get him back to a field hospital.
CHAPTER FIFTY
Cheng now committed his reserve battalions to the battle as Freeman’s line had seemed to falter. But Freeman had just given orders to slow down his advance, as he did not want to start mixing it up at close quarters with Cheng’s armor and troops until TACAIR — now that the sky was clearing somewhat — had a chance to inflict maximum damage.
Cheng interpreted the slowing down of Freeman’s armor, however, as a sign that his, Cheng’s, advantage of four tanks to one was starting to tell. Hurriedly he ordered up more reserves as Freeman’s echelons began to slow, throwing up a steady barrage of thick white smoke grenades from their launch tubes on both sides of their turrets.
With the falling off of the dust storm and darkness having already descended, the ChiComs’ T-59s and T-72s could be picked up by Freeman’s TACAIR — spearheaded by the A-10 Thunderbolts. With their tank-killing seven- barrel Gatling gun, its ammo drum the size of a Honda Accord, the Thunderbolts’ guns poured out seventy of their 1,350 30mm armor-piercing shells per second, the planes appearing to be in a near stall as the weakest part of the Chinese tanks, their cupolas, seemed literally to soak up the fire before bursting.
Without their radar and RAM-C, taken out by Brentwood’s SAS/D team, to pick up the low-flying Thunderbolts, the ChiCom tanks were swooped upon. In eleven minutes of the most intensive infrared A-10 attacks since and including the Iraqi War, the ChiComs lost forty-two tanks, some of them reserves. But the burning Chinese tanks added to the smoke, and soon the A-10s’ usefulness, impressive as it was, was nullified by the chemical-made fog of the battlefield and dark black exhaust of the ChiComs’ diesel engines as opposed to that of the M-1s’ clean gas turbine.
Freeman gave another order, to “Charge!”—not an order in the manual, but one that Freeman well knew would cut through static on the radio network. Soon the ChiComs and Americans were at close quarters again, mixing it up, echelon against echelon and finally tank against tank. What had been the flanks where the FAVs had been operating were now quickly being taken over by the combatants as, turrets slewing, they wheeled, skidded, and climbed the clay rise and surrounding dunes in high whine, the positions of the dozen remaining FAVs becoming more precarious in what at first sight looked like a vast crazy traffic jam.
As Choir drove, Aussie slumped in the back, holding his shoulder below the TOW mounting and next to the La Roche reporter while Brentwood insisted on manning the dash-mounted machine gun until, despite the field dressing on his face, the blood from his seeping cheek wound soaked through and caught in the slipstream. This making it impossible for him to see, he reluctantly had to give the machine gun up to Salvini while he took Salvini’s place in the right-hand litter.
T-59s and T-72s were using the infrared searchlights on the Americans, and the Americans were using their own night-vision goggles. But for all the equipment it was still a confusion with blue-on-blue mistakes on both sides, and strain and cacophony of the battle added to by the almost unbelievable din of machine guns chattering, tank cannon roaring, and the sound of tanks exploding, as the deadly fireworks of magazines blew up in towering, multihued flames, some men’s blood vaporizing in the heat, others’ literally boiling as combinations of HESH — heat solid shot-discarding Sabot, and APFSDS — armor-piercing fin stabilized discarding Sabot — rounds exploded.
Two American commanders, frustrated by the inability of their viewers to see well enough through the smoke, took up the “Israeli” position — that is, not staying “buttoned up” but standing up in the turret for a better view — only to be killed almost instantly by the machine gun fire of Chinese armored personnel carriers.
“Two aerials! Two aerials!” Cheng’s Commander Soong yelled, exhorting his men to try to pick out the command tanks. But the men of his three battalions of 180 Soviet-made T-72s, who had been hunkering down in defilade position behind the dunes’ crests before the battle, knew it would be almost impossible to pick out the two-aerial tanks. It was hard enough to see anything before you yourself were seen. And at times no one knew what the huge shadow looming in the night was — enemy or friend. Soong, glued to his periscope viewer as another round was extracted from the T-72’s autoloader’s carousel and rammed home, did not know who was winning the massive dogfight among the tanks.
Meanwhile David Brentwood and the few remaining FAVs drove about looking for knocked-out motorcycle and sidecar units to siphon off enough gas, any hope of reaching their own refueling depots at night a slim chance at best, given the vastness of the dunes, clay flats, and a small dry salt lake bed about them where the armored battle raged in fiercely chaotic duels that would go till dawn.
The American M1A1 was more than holding its own. In fact there would be fewer American tanks remaining in the morning than Chinese because of the four-to-one ratio, but the Chinese took a terrible punishment. The victory, Freeman knew, would not go to the side who merely held its own but who could break through the other’s lines of defense.
In the end it was Freeman’s Bradley armored personnel carriers that turned the tide. The twenty-two-ton American IFV — infantry fighting vehicle — was markedly superior to the ChiComs’ 531 with its Hongjian 8 missile launcher. The Bradley’s speed of forty-one miles per hour was something to behold along with its deadly TOWs, cannon, and ball gun ports on either side. Like the M1A1, the Bradley, even over the roughest ground, could continue firing its TOWs and cannon atop an independently sprung chassis that was near perfection itself.
Through that night there was another dust storm, but this one was completely man made as over a thousand tanks and IFVs slugged it out in the darkness, the night illuminated now and then by huge white green-orange flashes, filled with the stench of cordite and the head-throbbing smell of burning diesel, tracers constantly arcing through the night, seeking the right range for the main guns. Men screamed beneath the tracks of an M-1 or T-59 bearing down on them, often their presence unknown by the tank drivers who were pressing for larger game. More sand turned to glass as molten metal jets from HEAT rounds passed through a foot of enemy armor before hitting the sand.
Gradually, by about 0314 hours, the Americans gained ground, penetrating the Chinese defenses, and at 0400 it was clear that the Chinese were withdrawing.
By 0430 there was a sudden drop-off of firing from the Chinese. By dawn they were in full retreat. Freeman kept after them, and by 0800 there were more American than Chinese tanks, the ChiCom losses being greatest in the last hour of the rout, the bodies of some of the ChiCom crews of the broken-down and burned-out hulks sitting in grotesque positions.
Freeman’s victory could not have been claimed for any particular moment, but rather the turning point, like the end of weeding a garden, suddenly happened — a few stragglers captured at will. In the final hour of the battle, eye sockets dark, eyes red with fatigue, Freeman had lost twenty-seven tanks, the Chinese, 102, not counting the Chinese APCs that had fallen easy victim to the Bradleys. And none of it would have been possible but for the SAS/D FAV charge against the guns.
Numbed by the excessive battle, few thought of what would follow — all they yearned for was rest. But Freeman was exhilarated. For him it was as if the battle had injected him with a determination to press on, though he knew that in the interest of his men he would at least have to pause. And Washington was ordering him not merely to pause but to stop and not go a step further. Even this massive tank battle, the largest since Iraq, was being cheekily described by him to Washington as a “reconnaissance in force”!
