His confidence was infectious, but even so, Norton, Harvey Simmet, and others knew that it would be touch and go. If he lost, they’d drum him out of the army. If he won, well — they’d have to wait and see.
CHAPTER NINTEEN
Inside Beijing and the other big Chinese cities from Harbin to Shanghai, the sirens of military convoys were constant, many of them two to three truckloads of soldiers going to yet another public execution of “hooligans” and those suspected of being “fifth columnists.”
In the Beijing prison yard, where the first blooms of spring had popped up along the wall, the killing posts were chipped and scarred by the seemingly endless procession of Nie’s firing squads.
From her drab hospital bed in a ward that in any other country in the world would have been condemned under the Health Act, Alexsandra could see those being executed — mostly men but women, too. A day or so after Alexsandra had arrived they had done away with any ceremony, not even bothering to blindfold them — just made them kneel, their hands tied behind their backs, and one shot through the base of the skull.
Alexsandra tried to pull the blinds closed. The blinds were removed, and her bed and side table wheeled closer to the window in such a way that she could not help seeing the daily executions down in the courtyard. Nie was determined that she should daily observe what happened to those who did not cooperate with the Party. After her beating, Nie had said her sentence could be commuted to life if she confessed.
Two Chinese group armies — a total of one hundred thousand reinforcements — were on their way to Orgon Tal-Honggor from the Beijing military district as well as a tank division, two artillery divisions, and four engineering regiments, the latter called up because of serious flooding of the rivers following the typhoon. Also, the Chinese had a problem with their bridges once they got outside the greater general metropolitan area. Here many old bridges simply could not take anything bigger than a fifty-ton load, and the engineers were there to ply emergency spans across swollen streams and irrigation channels that had become rivers in the spring storm.
Alexsandra knew that the further north you went the worse the bridges became. As she was thinking about the bridges as a metaphor for her own journey, how she had crossed the Black River so many times from the Jewish autonomous region in the north into Manchuria, she wondered if she had come to the last bridge of her life. A confession would allow her to pass from certain death to life and hope — if the Americans won. But she knew she would not cross the bridge if the toll for it was a confession against her comrades. She sat forlornly watching another “conspirator” die. When first she’d entered the jail a few days before, they had only tied the condemned prisoners’ hands. Now they had gags on as well.
“Why are they gagging them?” she asked the young nurse on duty. The nurse was busy writing reports, and she did not look up. “They call your name!”
For Alexsandra, those few words were like being struck again by the guard who’d brutalized her. But the sorrow she felt, the humility, the realization that people were dying with her name on their lips, undid her, and she wept, the tears starting down her cheek and stinging the ugly purple-red bruises on her cheekbone. The nurse, a short, pert woman — a no-nonsense air about her — told her to be quiet or she would have to sedate her. If she didn’t keep quiet it would set off an unruly protest by the other patients. Alexsandra didn’t care now what they did; the bravery of men and women dying for her cause and theirs had stripped her pride utterly.
“Very well,” the nurse said, and came bossily behind the screen with the hypodermic of ten millimeters of Diazepam. She also placed a kidney basin on the small bedside table and in it a white strip of paper. She pointed to the paper as she brushed Alexsandra’s arm with a swab of cold cotton wool smelling of alcohol. Alexsandra turned over the paper. It said simply, “1:00 a.m. Be ready.”
With that the nurse injected Alexsandra, put the hypodermic in the kidney basin, and walked curtly away. The Diazepam wouldn’t knock her out but would calm her enough so that she might get an hour or two’s sleep. She buzzed the nurse and asked her assistance to go to the toilet. Despite the Diazepam coursing through her veins, she was still alert and said simply but very quietly, “You must tell our friends to blow all the bridges.”
She knew it would make little difference to Freeman’s army, for its replacement tanks were already too heavy to use most of the China bridges and would have to be either airlifted over or put across on bridges of their own, but the bridges were still strong enough for the lighter Chinese tanks, and if they were blown, it would cost the Chinese divisions crucial time in trying to stop any American counterattack.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Freeman’s Second Army was as ready as it would ever be, and the speed with which his new armor had arrived on the scene within the last few days once again owed something to his legendary attention to the tactical details as well as the strategy of war. In having fired a young logistics officer for not knowing the difference between the Siberian and Chinese railway gauges, which could have caused a defeat at the rail terminals, he had served notice to the logistics officers and engineers to get busy adapting rail cars for the shorter gauge. The resulting smooth transition from ship to railhead southward proved a crucial factor in Second Army’s logistical buildup, and it was clear to the Chinese, having to move cautiously through rain-swollen creeks, rivers, and other conduits, that a major American counterattack was under way.
The shape of the attack was that of an arrowhead or triangular formation, the widest part or baseline being the line between Orgon Tal and Honggor, the intent of both ends to meet in an arrow tip of overwhelming mobile force near Badaling on the Great Wall, forty miles from Beijing and then on through the Juyong Pass, past the western hills to the city thirty-five miles to the southeast.
On the map of the city, Freeman connected the targets that would form a rough V shape. The left top of the V was Beijing University, at the bottom of the V, Tiananmen Square, the Great Hall of the People on the left, or western, side of Tiananmen, as well as the Zhongnanhai compound, which housed the “Central Authority”—the top party officials — and to the northeast, or top right-hand side of the V, Shoudu Airport.
Regular Second Army paratroopers would be dropped over the airport to secure it for Second Army, but if they could not take it then TACAIR would go in with the tarmac-busting air-drop mines that would both pockmark and booby-trap the runways, preventing the Chinese from using or repairing them. But the main business of the 160 men of the SAS/D force in the inner city was to take the Zhongnanhai, built around two lakes next to the moat- protected Forbidden City, the ancient imperial capital of China.
“Remember, our main job,” Freeman told his SAS/D men, “is to take the Zhongnanhai. Officially its name means ‘central and south seas’ because its residences and offices are built around two connecting lakes — Lake Zhonghai, the central lake, and Lake Nanhai, the southern lake. The two are about a mile long and vary in width from a third of a mile to the north to three-quarters of a mile wide at the southern end. Now there’s reconstruction and new building going on with new sauna baths and enlarging some of the residences here and there. We don’t know exactly what bungalows are being worked on, nor if the families of the Party bosses will be there. You’ll need to be very careful when clearing rooms. This’ll mean flash-stun grenades rather than HE to be thrown by the first pair. But quick response to anyone you see, and remember to shout a challenge in any possible IFF mix-up. The Zhongnanhai, as you can see, is to the west of you if you’re in Tiananmen Square looking north at the Gate of Heavenly Peace where Mao’s photograph is hung.
“Zhongnanhai is walled, and so once we get in, the wall can serve as a protective barrier from any PLA coming too quickly to the rescue — we hope. Anyway, our job is to take out the leadership and to hold until relieved by our main forces attacking through the wall at Juyong Pass, thirty-seven miles north.”
‘How about the PLA
“A small force — possibly two to three platoons at the most. They always have the two white-gloved sentries at the gate. Here inside the model you can see there is a series of walks and bungalows — luxurious bungalows — for the exclusive use of the Party bosses. While we’re going into the Zhongnanhai, pamphlets will be dropped into the Beijing and Qinghua universities to explain how we’ve come to liberate the city from the old Communist bosses
