wind was quickening between forty and sixty-five miles per hour, blowing up small whirlwinds of gritty sand that hailed against the sloped armor.
“So how we gonna know if it’s a Chink bullet hitting us or not?” the gunner asked, referring to the noise of the coarse sand and stones being blasted at them by the typhoon’s early fury.
“You know what I mean,” Roper answered. “Something substantial.”
“Yeah, well, if it’s that substantial,” the gunner said, “maybe it’ll just shoot a jet right through us.” He meant the molten jet of metal that was formed by the HEAT — high-explosive antitank — rounds that could penetrate the M1’s body with a molten streak of metal, creating havoc inside the turret, exploding the tank as it ignited the M1A1’s own fifty or more antitank shells.
The commander got on the radio and passed the message along — the haillike sound of pebbles striking the tanks could send off a premature shot from the Americans from some nervous commander further up from the line of M1A1s. Lieutenant Roper from Philadelphia didn’t care that he was speaking in plain language and not code, wanting to be overheard by the Chinese. That was in effect the power of Freeman’s show of force. He merely wanted the Chinese, with their outdated T-59s and more up-to-date laser-equipped, range-finding T-72 tanks, to know they were there, that if push came to shove along the trace, then Cheng would have to deal with Freeman’s one hundred tanks preceded by flail, grader, and demagnetizing-pan tanks that would lead them across the mine field between the two sides, and there the Americans would deal out some heavy high-velocity punishment for any truce violation. Each man in the one hundred tanks had been in the Far East long enough to know that for Freeman not to have responded to the kidnapping of Alexsandra Malof with such a show of force would have immediately signaled weakness to the PLA, and if Washington wouldn’t understand it, Beijing would.
Cheng spoke to the fifty men from the Sixty-five and Sixty-six armies based near Beijing who had volunteered to spearhead his attack. He had held up a book — or rather a thick monograph, its hundreds of computer pages on a ring binder. It was an account of all of Freeman’s battles, from grand strategy to local tactics, including his background, right down to the fact that in matters of food he did not like sushi, was partial to Tsing Tao beer because it had no preservatives in it that would give you a headache, and that he intensely disliked the American actress Jane Fonda and enjoyed westerns. Cheng told them he had studied it all: the man and his tactics. He had studied how Freeman had studied
“Then why, Comrade General,” the captain asked, “does Washington not recall him for insubordination?”
“Because,” Cheng answered wryly, “he is the best fighting general they have — but I do not think he’ll be ready for an attack at the head of the typhoon. Remember the rain will bog him down. The mud will harden within hours of the typhoon exhausting itself over Inner Mongolia, but for those few hours, comrades, it will be a quagmire, a sea of mud and rushing streams for a hundred miles to the south and north of us. Are you ready?”
There was a cheer of a team confident of victory.
“The Americans’ eyes will pop out,” one of the volunteers said. “Freeman will see his own strategy turned upon him with a new twist. It will astonish him.”
“Where did Freeman first use the technique?” another driver asked.
“Up on the Inland Sea,” he answered, by which he meant up on Lake Baikal.
“Yes,” another put in. “He sent several hovercraft across the ice with commandos to blow up the midget sub base from which the Siberians had been launching missiles then hiding out in the lake’s deeps.”
“Did he get them?”
“The subs? Yes, and he wrecked the base.”
“Well, now it’s his turn to suffer.”
“You’re right,” another commented. “You see, the old saying is incorrect — you
This elicited raucous laughter and even produced a smile on Cheng’s lips. His men were in high spirits — they understood the mission, they understood what they’d volunteered for, and they understood the rewards for the mission.
“For now,” Cheng told his troops, “relax as much as you can — as many cigarettes as you want.” Then in the thick, smoky air they heard the typhoon approaching, a rattling sound outside the doors of their tents.
The battle-stations alarm was on, and like the diving alarm not loud enough to cause a noise short — that is, noise that could be picked up from outside the sub — but penetrating enough to send every man moving as fast as he could to battle stations, one man heading toward the reactor room in his socks, all the quicker to put on the regulation yellow slippers that he would wear while in the reactor room lest he pick up even the minutest radiation and which he would take off when he left the reactor room.
An unknown ship—”possible hostile”—had been picked up by
“Threat library?” Robert Brentwood asked.
“Nothing yet, sir. Possible merchantman — new registration.”
“Or hostile running with baffles.”
“Don’t think so, sir. Cavitation of screw not baffle.” Brentwood knew he could get an exact fix on it if he used his active pinging sonar, but then the unknown ship could pick the
At the Bangor base in Bremerton, Washington State, it was 8:00 p.m. and Andrea had organized an officers’ wives’ “ball-out,” a bowling competition. “Course you don’t want to play,” she told Rosemary. “But come along and watch. Keep score if you want.”
“No thanks. My specialty is English literature, not mathematics. I’m afraid I’d make an awful mess.”
“Oh rats,” Andrea riposted. “So just sit and cheer. Don’t even have to cheer. B’sides, if you go into premature labor you’ll have a travelin’ moms brigade with you. You could have a choice — hospital or number one lane.”
“You’re impossible,” Rosemary said, awkwardly shifting herself out of the love seat in her base bungalow. “Maybe it would do me good to get out. And to be quite honest—”
“What is it?” Andrea cut in, adopting Rosemary’s semi-conspiratorial tone.
“Chips — what you call fries. I have a craving.”
Andrea clapped her hands in victory. ‘There you go. We’ll pig out on fries, popcorn, and pop.”
“And we’ll pop in the morning,” Rosemary said.
“No, we’ll do twenty minutes with Jane Fonda’s workout — pregnant ladies excused I guess.”
“You don’t have a Jane Fonda tape?” Rosemary asked in a tone of disbelief.
“Yeah. I know all the guys hate her for that North Vietnam thing, but hell, that’s over, right?”
“Then your husband does object?”
“Object? Honey, he’d lose all his hair if he knew. I’ve got it hidden — video label says ‘Home Cooking.’ He’ll never know. ‘Sides, if he does twig to it I’ll tell him it’s either the tape or me.”
Rosemary looked nonplussed. “You would leave—?”
“Oh hell no. But I’d cut him off for a week or two.”
“Oh I see,” Rosemary said. “After a long patrol. Isn’t that a little drastic?”
“Honey, I cut off one guy for a month!”
Rosemary was appalled, Andrea collapsing with laughter. “You — you really thought — oh Rosie, you’re a kick!”
Rosemary wasn’t sure what a kick was, but it had been said good-naturedly.
“C’mon, let’s go bowlin’,” Andrea said, looking for the key to the dead bolt. There’d been a rash of B and E
