cover over Lake Nam and the surrounding mountains. What particularly annoyed Douglas Freeman was the fact that, knowing he was in the right, he had said a prayer for good weather, but cumulus cloud remained glued to the mountaintops despite his incantations.
“Maybe the Chinese are praying, too, General,” Simmet suggested.
Freeman swung about from the map. “Chinese are goddamned atheists.”
“The leadership perhaps,” Simmet answered, “but not—”
“Don’t contradict me, Harvey. I know the leadership are and that’s who I’m talking about, not the people. Why do you think I’ve given express orders to everyone in Second Army that I won’t tolerate any vandalism or ‘collecting memorabilia’ from temples, et cetera. When we win I want the Chinese to be a help in the reconst —”
There was a sound above the drumming of the rain like that of a roaring train, and instantly the three men hit the deck of the Orgon Tal headquarters hut. The earth shook, the noise the most terrifying and sustained roar Norton had ever heard, so much so that his knees were shaking as he got up, half stunned, Harvey Simmet almost falling over because of the concussion-produced imbalance in his inner ear.
Behind them, further down “Radio Alley,” dust was still falling, but the babble, momentarily silenced, was now back at full volume, a tone of new urgency, even excitement, detectable, and for those who had felt the close wings of death about them, this moment was exhilaratingly alive.
It wasn’t the same, however, for Three Armored Corps’s fifty-five tanks fighting a desperate action to stem the tide of Chinese following on from the suicide hovercraft attacks and the creeping barrage of the T-59s. Three Corps HQ would undoubtedly have been overrun had it not been for the M1 overreach. Its 105mm cannon had a range of four thousand yards, two thousand yards better than the Chinese T-72s and three thousand yards better than their T-55s. It was this overreach and only this overreach that prevented the Chinese from pummeling Three Corps HQ at Orgon Tal, an HQ that was caught up in the frantic business of readying for withdrawal. But it was far from a one-way fight, as the Chinese-like amphibious T-60s were now paying the price for their lack of armor. With the rain still routing down, the M1s could see the Chinese even if the rain cut the laser beams, and it was fire at will. Within twenty-three minutes, seventy-five of Cheng’s tanks were tin cans, blown apart bodies, or rather body parts, scattered across the wet, stony ground, one tank, driverless, still rolling forward until another APDS — armor-piercing discarding sabot — round hit it and blew up its ammunition supply in a spectacular explosion of bluish white and red.
But if the Chinese had been stopped around Orgon Tal, Three Corps supporting forces, from gas tanker trucks to signals, were smoking ruins with over two hundred men killed and 312 wounded by just one warhead from a DF5 missile. Freeman immediately gave orders to retreat northwest some thirty miles back to higher ground toward the Mongolian border. Even so, now that Freeman’s Second Army on the whole had recovered from the initial surprise in the typhoon, the Chinese were meeting with more sustained and coordinated resistance from MLRs — multiple- launch rocket systems — which found their targets via forward artillery spotters who could now call in U.S. howitzer fire without fear of “blue on blue”—or friendly fire— hitting the retreating Americans. With twelve MLR units firing simultaneously, 144 rockets were sent screaming into the screaming typhoon, raining down twelve miles away on the Chinese positions, and, while not hitting any ChiCom tanks, were filling the air with white-hot shrapnel.
But Freeman knew that while he was now undoubtedly putting up a more coordinated retreat, it was still a retreat and would remain so until the weather, by which he meant the cloud cover more than wind or rain, lifted at Orgon Tal, allowing his A-10s to go in low. But even with this, as long as the ICBMs coming out of the launch site in the Lake Nam area kept coming, he would be run out of China’s northeast Liaoning province and would not be safe anywhere in what was for now Second Army’s territory.
Tactical rockets, though with nothing like the range of the DF5 being fired from the Tibetan site, were now coming out of Beijing. Their accuracy, despite their shorter range, was paradoxically not as good as the DF5s’ coming in from Tibet, and while many of them were landing among the Chinese frontline troops as well as the Americans, Freeman knew there’d be no letup in the Beijing rocket barrage because Cheng could afford thousands of his men to be killed as the cost for killing hundreds of Americans.
Shortly before dark the weather lifted briefly as the worst of the typhoon passed over and the “Warthogs,” the A-10 Thunderbolts, came in low, their GAU-8 Avenger 30mm seven-barreled rotary cannon spitting out a deadly stream of heavy depleted uranium that went through the Chinese tanks like ball bearings through glass, their white-hot fragments setting off the tanks’ ammunition and fuel tanks, creating great blowouts of orange-black flame.
The Stealths did not give any active radar signals, for this would be to obviate their whole purpose, and so they depended entirely on what they could see, either visibly or through the infrared and starlight goggles. The moon bathed the Himalayas and the mountains to the north in a beautiful, ghostly light, the summit of Everest clearly in sight but the lower parts of the mountain packed tight with snow that looked uncannily like bluish white cotton batten.
Everest was now well to the south on their left and out of sight, clouds shrouding its summit, but below they could see the steep valley formed by the mountains behind Lake Nam off to their right, the mountains furthest to the west faintly visible through scudding cloud. Suddenly there was a blossom of orange light that faded then kept on only with a lower intensity — an ICBM lift-off. Both the leader and his wingman got a fix and dived, laser beams streaking out into the night at the target: the light source. Then the light source disappeared, leaving only an infrared patch of the ICBM’s backblast, the residual heat waves washing about the base of the mountain as if it were a mirage in the desert.
“Christ!” the pilot of Nighthawk One murmured, talking to himself. “It’s a steel door. The bastards have the missile sliding out on a rail.” Only now did he break radio silence and tell the other three what he’d seen, ending up with “We go for the door,” and with that his computer, via infrared and laser information, quickly got the exact range and told him he could pickle off the bombs. One slid down the laser beam, and all four Stealth Nighthawk pilots saw the explosion as the two-thousand-pound bomb hit. The four Nighthawks made two runs each, dropping the second bomb amid a sky now pocked with triple A — antiaircraft artillery — the red traces coming so fast, probably one in four, that it seemed as if continuous red lines were shooting up through the night sky, an enormous pile of ice and rock debris about the huge door, heat coming from it like a smoking quarry.
They got out before any of the searchlights that came alive in the valley could zero in on them. Three hours and seven minutes later, Freeman’s Six Corps, up near Manchuria’s Harbin, took direct hits from three DF5 warheads and, falling back in disarray, reported over three hundred casualties. The number of dead were not yet known, human remains strewn about the trace, and the commanding officer missing, either captured in the aftermath by advancing Chinese infantry or killed, blown to pieces so that his fate might never be known for certain.
A half hour after mat, Second Army intelligence — with a noticeable lack of surprise — was reporting to Freeman that closeup computer-enhanced photos from the Stealths showed that a huge steel door had possibly been dented somewhat but that the door, obviously a superhardened entrance to a superhardened silo or the interior of the mountain, had suffered only minor damage.
Stereoscopic blowups from the Stealths’ videos revealed lines about 1,435 millimeters apart: rail tracks. The ICBMs were apparently rail mounted for firing, the launcher then shunted back quickly behind the immense armor- plated door.
“Very clever,” Norton said. “If the Stealth with laser-guided bombs can’t take them out, what can?”
“An A-bomb,” Freeman said.
Norton’s face drained of color.
“Don’t worry, Dick,” Freeman told him. “I’m not that crazy.” Norton exhaled heavily with relief, but the problem still remained.
The only answer was to get someone down inside the mountain — to blow up the launcher platform.
“Special forces?” Norton proffered.
Freeman nodded. “It’s a hell of a thing to ask them, but it’s our only chance. Have to be the most experienced men we have, Norton,” and the general’s aide knew straightaway that Freeman meant Second Army’s elite: the SAS/D British Special Air Services and American Delta combination team that had served him so well before.
“It’ll be risky, General,” Norton said. “Going into a narrow valley between twenty-thousand-foot peaks.”
