been Freeman’s grand plan of a dash south to the city.
Behind the T-60s, in reality in large Soviet PT-76s that had been used to good account earlier in the war against Freeman, thousands of PLA regular frontline troops moved like so many ants through the downpour of the typhoon, which did not inhibit the amphibious T-60s but hindered the retreating Americans who, devoid of tanks to protect them in this sector, relied on the lightly protected Bradley fighting vehicle. However, the Bradley’s superb mobility and speed of forty-one miles per hour was reduced by the typhoon’s headwinds, and once again targeting via laser became obscured by airborne debris.
Worst of all for the Americans was the fact that their TACAIR was grounded, the only aircraft venturing forth being a squadron of A-10 Thunderbolt IIs, or “tank busters,” as they were affectionately known after their brilliant performance in the Iraqi desert. But despite the bravery of the pilots in flying down into the typhoon, they could not shoot at what neither they nor their infrared goggles could see properly. In any case by now the ground troops of the two sides were engaged in hand-to-hand fighting, and no satisfactory ID of friend or foe could be made from the air.
“For God’s sake!” Freeman thundered. “When is this weather going to lift, Harvey?”
Because of the general’s tone, Harvey felt personally responsible for the typhoon.
“Another eight to twelve hours, General.” Freeman looked along the trace of the map. It was simply too long a trace to cover in any depth. If you rushed through here and there, another bulge would quickly appear to your rear. Freeman was in no panic, but he knew he was getting clobbered. He had earlier believed his M1A3s would be down south before the Chinese — presumably waiting for better weather — would attack. But he did not realize by how much he was being beaten, until exactly one hour after Cheng had ordered his surprise kamikazes, killing Lieutenant Roper of Philadelphia and the crews of the thirty-nine other M1A1s. Suddenly there was an advancing rush of air, like the
At first the peripheral concussion of just one of the DF5s — designated CSS-4s by the Americans — was so powerful it killed more than fifty-three men outright, the core explosion of the missile killing another seventy-three, the latter members of a marine detachment at Orgon Tal.
The red marker pins of Chinese positions advanced relentlessly across the trace. In some places Chinese infantry had simply swarmed across the DMZ, mines killing scores of them, their bodies, or rather the parts of them, forming a bridge of dead men as stepping stones of flesh for the others behind them.
The blue marker pins of the Second Army were pulling back, not only in the northeast and at Orgon Tal but in the mountains of Manchuria as well — all along the trace.
“If we can just hold,” Freeman said, “long enough for the weather to clear — well, hell, we’ll hit ‘em with everything that can fly. Harvey?”
“General?”
“Your best guesstimate is another eight hours of this nonsense until the typhoon blows itself out?”
“At least eight, General — maybe twelve.”
“Damn it, I’ll have to give ground.”
“I agree,” Norton said, “but I don’t see any other alternative.”
“But damn it, Dick, we can’t let them go on like this. This isn’t a withdrawal — it’s a goddamn rout. In forty- eight hours I won’t have any cohesiveness left on the trace. Tell everyone to dig in where they are. We’ll resupply.”
“Resupply?” Norton ventured. “How?”
“By chopper — at least we can drop supplies through all this muck.” But Freeman knew he had to do more than dig in and resupply. The Chinese had the bit between their teeth — damn it! He knew what he needed. So did Norton and Simmet: to take out the ICBM sites at Lake Nam in Tibet. If the missiles kept coming, he didn’t stand a chance. Immediately he contacted his Khabarovsk airfield. Surely the Stealths, with the Dutchman’s general target designation of Lake Nam, could find out the
After sending in the request and getting a confirmation that Stealths were already on their way with in-flight refueling over the South China Sea before the inland leg of their mission, Freeman felt a bit better, but not much. He was fighting a two-front war — that son of a bitch Cheng sending across division after division of expendable infantry, while he, Freeman, was being kicked in the butt by the ICBM launchers out of Tibet. The babble of voices, the screaming of the wind, the high screech of radio, and the constant chatter of intercepts were buzzing all around him.
“Quiet!” he bellowed. Everyone stopped talking and turned toward the general. Was the old man cracking up after all? Had he met his Waterloo in Cheng?
“While the Stealths are getting ready, what
“You got anything in mind, General?”
The general lowered his head, walking thoughtfully toward the huge wall map of China, his shadow dwarfed by its size. “Norton, ask Khabarovsk how long our boys’ll take to organize in-air refueling and how long to knock out that ICBM site up at Nam — if and when they find it.” Some of the officers wished he’d used the full name “Lake Nam” or “Nam Co”—”Nam” alone was an impediment to the American psyche. It reminded every man there how a war in Asia could start, look as if you were winning it, then eat you up. Like now!
“Wish to hell it was called Lake Iraq,” someone said.
“Don’t worry about it,” Freeman said, breaking out in a morale-raising smile. “Our boys’ll go in there with a surgical strike. Those goddamn Chinks in Tibet won’t know what hit them. These Stealths’ll know what to do.”
Somebody mumbled something about the lack of enough Stealths being part of “Clinton’s cock-up.”
The four Stealth, or “Wobbly Goblin,” pilots were Iraqi veterans and, providing the weather was clear enough over the mountains towering around Lake Nam, they knew very well what to do with their pitch black, twelve-and- a-half-foot-high F-17A Nighthawks. They knew, for example, that the best Chinese radar would be unable to track them or even glimpse them as they came in.
As pilots mounted the long stepladder into the cockpit behind the five flat one-way glass canopy windows, they knew their ATO — air tasking order — called for an ICBM site to be hit at Lake Nam, each of the four Stealths carrying two two-thousand-pound bombs equipped with nose-mounted Pave Track laser guidance kits that would steer the fourteen-foot-long bombs via laser-guided movable vanes, allowing the bomb to slide down the laser beam for a bull’s-eye hit. There would be no fighter escorts for the Wobbly Goblins as Chinese radar would be unable to get any fix on them because of the 117’s flat, angular shape reflecting any incoming radar upward rather than back at the radar. And the two General Electric turbofan engines were set deep within the wing roots to rescue their infrared signature, while the exhaust was cooled and baffled so as to deny any heat or infrared signature to the enemy.
With a maximum speed of only Mach.9, the Stealth was by no means the fastest plane in the American arsenal, but in having to fly over other countries’ air space en route to the mountains of Tibet, it was deemed highly desirable to send in the Stealth if the mission was to be kept a secret and U.S. diplomats spared notes of outrage from half a dozen governments, which would have been the case if other American airplanes that could be seen on radar were used.
The only thing holding the mission back was lack of good SATRECON — satellite-reconnaissance — photos of the area, and to reprogram the K14 satellite to take a flight path high over Tibet was extraordinarily expensive and time-consuming. And in any case, once the Chinese got a hint of the spy satellite’s new orbit they would not fire any missiles from the site while the K14 was in geosynchronous orbit overhead. But of course the four Stealth pilots would be able to see burn marks produced by the ICBM backflash at the launch site. And so it was finally a matter of waiting for the weather to clear over the roof of the world.
“Send Harvey up here, damn it!”
“Yes, sir,” Norton answered. Simmet apparently was going to be held responsible for the locked-in cloud
