looking out with reassuring smiles and holding Rosemary’s hand as the contractions increased, and then just as vividly in the dream a terrifying metamorphosis would take place as her kindly face was replaced with the indistinct face of a stranger — a man who did not smile but who pursued her and who seemed Oriental. Always in the background of Rosemary’s dream, fading in and out of view but always present, was the man’s implacable stare, extending his hand in friendship, only to have him grasp the baby by the throat, at which point, as she did now, Rosemary would sit bolt upright, sweating, immediately feeling her stomach and then suddenly relieved as she felt the baby kicking.
She was a competent teacher, with all the self-confidence that that entailed, but as a mother-to-be she felt entirely inadequate and, without Robert, more alone than she’d ever been. She had the sudden urge to ring Andrea, saw how late it was, and decided instead to make a cup of tea. She thought she heard something moving in the kitchen and froze, and then heard the squeaking of a dolphin paperweight, the white dolphins in the blue sea inside the transparent weight making their crying sounds if the slightest movement vibrated the paperweight. Rosemary had never intended them to be an alarm, but something the baby might like in the crib. Slowly she pulled out the service .45 from the drawer in her bedstead, flicked the safety catch off, as Robert had told her, and called, “Who’s there?”
All she could hear was a light breeze that through the trees of the base outside sounded like running water. “I’m armed!” she said, with as much menace as she could muster, which was hardly any at all. Her hands shaking, she thought of telephoning base security, but then whoever was there, if there
She heard another rush of wind through the trees, and then the dolphins squeaked again. She approached the hallway leading to the kitchen. It took her a full thirty seconds before, heart pounding and hands trembling, she reached the hallway and immediately saw the push-out window above the sink hadn’t been closed to the last notch, and so the window frame was being blown against the ledge above the sink, causing the dolphins to squeal. Still shaking, weak with relief, she returned to the bedroom, put the gun back in the drawer, and went to the kitchen to make tea.
For a moment of ice-chilling fear she suddenly felt she was being watched again, but by whom and from where she didn’t know. It was five a.m., and she picked up the phone to dial Andrea, decided it was too early to impose her prenatal jitteriness on her American friend, and instead replaced the phone down in its cradle. “When the wind blows,” she remembered, “the cradle will rock.”
Turning back toward the kitchen, she gave herself a dressing down. All right, Rosemary, enough of the hysterics please. Get a hold of yourself. Whatever would Robert think. Really—
And the dolphins squeaked again, and it was little wonder, Rosemary thought, with all her walking and bumping around. She’d make herself a nice cup of “char,” breathe easily, and wait patiently for the morning. As an extra precaution she walked all about the bungalow to see whether all the locks were on. They were, and she felt safe.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
If Lenin’s favorite dictum, that in war quantity has a quality all its own, was to be seen in action it was on the hundred-mile Orgon Tal-Honggor section of the front. Though a straight line could be drawn between them running northeast from Orgon Tal nearly one hundred miles, the actual line with bulges made the front more than 150 miles long, the bulges consisting of four Chinese armies made up of elements of the Sixty-ninth, Sixty-third, and Twenty- seventh infantry and two armored divisions, consisting not only of infantry and the usual ninety-six tanks per army made up of three tank regiments with thirty-two tanks each, but nine regiments of reserve armor — in all, 2,815 tanks, half of which were T-72 laser-sighted.
With militia included, Cheng had fielded over 153,000 men against two U.S. infantry divisions: 36,100 men plus 732 M1A1 tanks. Both in numbers of men and tanks the Chinese had an advantage of almost four to one against the Americans.
Under cover of the typhoon, Chinese infantry, who, an old wives’ tale had it, didn’t fight well in the rain— particularly the militia units around Honggor — had made more headway than expected, the blinding dust and then rain degrading the laser sites on the M1s and making it possible for the militia to penetrate here and there to harass the already-overextended American supply line. Had it not been for the typhoon, U.S. TACAIR’s A-10 Thunderbolts could have inflicted grievous losses on Cheng’s troops, but grounded by the typhoon and with more than seven U.S. airstrips having been mortar bombed from the typhoon-obliterated perimeter, TACAIR was in no shape to render any assistance. The weather then had worked in the Chinese favor, or rather had been used by them as an advantage.
Tanks were often working blind until almost atop one another, with deadly close-order battle meaning that the M1A1’s overreach of at least a thousand yards meant little. What caused the most surprise among the Americans was the sheer tenacity and fitness of the PLA infantry. They traveled light compared to the Americans and knew the ground better.
Whatever the reason for their punching gaps through the American line, Freeman knew he would have to stem the flow quickly, not only because he feared pincer movements on his lines of supply north of the Orgon Tal- Honggor line, but that any general Chinese breakthrough might give pause to Admiral Lin and his Formosan forces. If, on the other hand, the Orgon Tal-Honggor line could be held, then the admiral, or rather his superiors, would see the staying power of the American Second Army and attack, making it a two-front war, not including the Lake Nam launch site, which had not let up its pounding deeper into the American sector.
At times, a warhead struck its own troops, but Cheng, with a four-to-one advantage, could afford “blue on blue”— “friendly fire.” Besides, he had resources of over half a million he could draw on almost immediately from the south who were being held there only because of the possibility of Taiwan attacking.
Again as on their drive south, Freeman’s men found the Chinese method of clearing a mine field insane and devastatingly effective, as one PLA soldier would use the bodies of his fallen comrades as stepping stones through the field until he either made it or was killed himself, in which case he became the next stepping stone. What was holding the Chinese up, however, were those M1s, which, once they ran out of ammunition, got close enough to ram the enemy, the ramming power of an M1 against a T-55 or 72 resulting in a demolition derby in which Chinese welding had much to answer for.
Second, the Americans, taking Freeman’s repeated warnings about the truce merely being a resupply device by the Chinese, had dug in as well as any marine had at Khe Sahn in the Vietnam War. And of primary importance in this were the prolific and well-dug American grenade sumps.
Under Freeman’s direct orders, all officers and NCOs down to and including section leaders were told that when they dug in they must be sure to dig what was in effect a dry moat about their feet so that the earth they stood on for firing positions was in fact a raised rectangle of earth that sloped away on all sides. It meant that when the Chinese tossed their stick grenades, which, being more offensive than defensive grenades, had more blast than shrapnel, many grenades simply rolled and/or were kicked away down the sloping firing platform into the deep grenade sump trench which contained the explosion. The worst off was any American who was wearing contact lenses, as the flash would throw up fine dirt that would sting and temporarily blind a man in the trench.
Lacking enough mobile artillery to cover such a huge front from Orgon Tal to the Manchurian-Siberian border, Cheng relied heavily on the plentiful supply of grenades for the infantry. The American grenades, however, being primarily defensive, as ordered by Freeman, were made less to stun than to spray dozens of splintered fragments acting like scythes among the Chinese who advanced en masse again against the dug-in Americans. And in more than one foxhole, the steam of urine rising in the typhoon’s cold air gave evidence of yet another marine cooling down his machine gun barrel as the Chinese kept coming from Orgon Tal. now designated the “ant heap” by those Americans of the Third Division’s Second and Sixth Infantry Battalions who had been stemming Cheng’s advance.
Now quantity was starting to tell as the American supply line, severed in more than one place, was unable to keep up with the wastage at the front. Of all that he hated most, Freeman hated giving an order to retreat. But if he was “shot through,” as Wolsey said of Thomas More, with pride, he was not profligate with his men, and if he could
