Force of Arms

totally unexpected and absolute love for her the message of the ICBMs paled into nothingness, but for Freeman and the more than three hundred thousand men in Second Army, it was everything, should the truce fail. For the hitherto blase Australian, the loss of the woman he loved was infinitely more pressing and unbearable. For the first time in his life Aussie Lewis wanted more than sex from a woman. He wanted to possess her not only sexually but in every other way. He needed her.

* * *

There was a rumble as the officers, NCOs, and some enlisted men rose in the Quonset headquarters hut at Orgon Tal as Freeman entered.

Salvini turned to Aussie Lewis, hoping to cheer him up.

“He’s got that look, Aussie.”

“What?” Aussie asked, his mind far away on the banks of the Amur River with Alexsandra.

“The George C. Scott look,” Salvini said. “Somebody’s gonna get shit.”

“Fucking MPs should be reamed out.” It took Salvini a moment or two to realize Aussie was talking about the MPs who had let the Humvee carrying Alexsandra pass through the gates at the refugee camp.

“At ease,” Freeman said, his voice booming off the metallic roof. After the coughing and usual scrabbling of feet had died down, during which Freeman looked out upon them with his remarkable facility for making every single man think it was he whom the general was talking to, Freeman slapped his birch switch against the huge wall map of China, Tibet, and the Himalayas.

“Problem — our entire army is under the threat of ICBM attack. With this activity going on, the truce can only be interpreted as temporary at best — the Chinese waiting for the most propitious moment to move and/or build new silos in and around the mountains surrounding Lake Nam. This is the roof of the world, gentlemen. We’re talking fourteen thousand feet plus. Now we’re going to put more SATRECON over that lake and adjacent mountain area and once we find their mobile launch trucks and/or shelters we are going to send in our Stealths and blow the hell out of them.”

There was a hand up — a brigadier general.

“Yes, Tommy?”

“Sir, there was an incident this morning — a kidnapping of one of our refugees which I interpret as an act of war. Am I correct?”

Aussie suddenly sat up, fairly bursting at the general’s remark. “That’s the way, General,” he said, looking toward the brigadier. “Give the fuckers—”

“I concur,” Freeman agreed, “but unfortunately—” And here he paused, the birch switch smacking his leg impatiently. “—Washington has strictly forbidden any attempt by us to cross the river despite the fact that the leader of the JAO guerrillas has been taken.”

There were murmurs of surprise running through the hall by those who hadn’t heard of the kidnapping already.

“But,” Freeman said, “I propose a reconnaissance party along the Orgon Tal trace this evening to demonstrate our displeasure. A hundred tanks,” Freeman added.

Norton leaned forward from the table and whispered, “General, how are you going to explain a reconnaissance of one hundred tanks?”

Freeman was still looking out at the sea of faces, determined to at least maintain, if he could not lift, his men’s morale, and he answered Norton without turning his face toward his aide. “It’ll be a ‘reconnaissance in force.’ “

Norton sat back. “Washington’ll have a baby if they find out, General.”

“Dick, we have to show these bozos that violation of the truce won’t be tolerated. Washington won’t let me go across the damn river, then it’s incumbent upon me to do a bit of saber rattling. We’re not here to dance. They’re damn lucky it wasn’t an American citizen, otherwise I’d be at war with the sons of bitches right now.”

“Remember, General,” Norton pressed, trying not to be too conspicuous up on the dais, “our reserves of M1A3s up north won’t be down here for another five days.”

“Agreed. That’s why it’s important to show up with a hundred tanks. Otherwise Cheng’ll think we’re frightened — that they can come across the trace and get away with it.”

Norton sat back. He’d done his best. And he had to admit the general had a point. Any sign of backing down, of losing face in front of Asian commanders, could be interpreted as weakness. Anyway, Norton guessed, push probably wouldn’t come to shove, as the Chinese would probably not see the American tanks in the rain-slashed skies of the typhoon that was about to strike. Already he, like all those in the Quonset, could hear the drumming of the rain on the roof.

* * *

Cheng saw the tanks very well, for he’d posted forward observation points with infrared binoculars along the trace near Orgon Tal where the western end of the front came to a sharp V like the end of a check mark, the right hand or tail of the check mark representing the continuation of the front northeastward up into Manchuria. He knew the American was bluffing — making out he had more tanks than he did. Well, the commander of the People’s Liberation Army had no intention whatsoever of waiting till Freeman’s M1A3 reinforcements reached him from the north. And now the Public Security Bureau had advised him from Lhasa that the Americans must now know about the ICBMs from the Dutchman’s message. Cheng could not afford to wait any longer — to do so would be militarily imprudent as well as politically inexcusable. He told Nie, and the chairman agreed. Cheng gave the order to attack — a preemptive strike.

* * *

The trace east of Orgon Tal was a hundred-foot, mile-long ridge running southeast to northeast where the trace arced up from the V of the check mark-shaped truce line, the Americans on the northern side, the PLA to the south. It was hard, stony gravel that further north a few miles, to where the bulk of the Americans were, turned from stony ground to sand dunes. To the south of the trace the stony ground led back up for two hundred miles into the bush-covered mountains that, along with the dragon-humped Great Wall, formed a protective fastness around Beijing.

The typhoon’s tai feng, or great wind, at over one hundred miles per hour, was not yet upon the area around Orgon Tal, though already gusts of up to forty and fifty miles per hour were heralding what was in store unless the typhoon lost and exhausted much of its power after hitting land coming from the east out of Bo Hai.

Freeman’s tanks went ahead in echelons of five in spear-tip formation, the two tanks furthest back acting as wing-men would in a fighter formation, paying particular attention to the flanks while the three tanks up ahead concentrated more, though not exclusively, on the trace now coming up and on the lead tanks’ right-hand side. Inside the lead tank, its commander, Lieutenant R. T. Roper from Philadelphia, wondered if this would be it. The first sign, or rather glimpse, of the enemy trenches way over on the other side of the trace was indicated by coils of razor wire, obscuring any view of the troops, though the Chinese, probably the forward artillery observers, clearly had binoculars on the first tank of Freeman’s “reconnaissance in force.”

Here and there the Americans, primarily the loader and the tank commander, could spot the muzzle of a machine gun where there was a gap in the wire, and sandbagged outposts beyond that were probably heavy 81mm mortar nests. The men in the tanks were confident and with good reason. They were in one of the best, if not the best, main battle tanks in the world. The M1A1 main gun was an M256 120mm smooth bore with one coaxially mounted 7.62mm machine gun, the other 7.62 atop the loader’s position in the turret with a Browning.50 machine gun atop the commander’s position forward and right of the loader. Left of both the commander and the gunner on the right side of the turret sat the loader, the driver outside the turret steering the behemoth in a reclined position by way of short hand bars. Yet above all the firepower there was the sheer grace of something that was on another level so brutish. Its gas turbine motor was probably the quietest of any, capable of charging ahead at forty-five miles per hour despite a larger heat signature than most, its suspension so superior that its turret remained in the same plane, despite the tracks constantly undulating like pythons as the M1s raced across the uneven ground.

“Remember,” Roper said, in Freeman’s lead tank, “we take one shot, one friggin’ rattle of a spent Chinese bullet on our beast, and we vaporize the mothers.” Everyone understood, everyone was tense, but they all agreed that Freeman was right to bring the tanks right up to the trace, otherwise the next thing the Chinese would try would be to send over a patrol and take an American prisoner or two as they had done often enough in Korea. The