“I’ll handcuff him to me, General.”
More laughter.
“Better idea,” Freeman said. “Cuff him to the radio.” Freeman turned to his next topic and waited till the men had settled down. “I know as a prerequisite for SAS/D force every man here has to have a working knowledge of one language other than English. Now most of you swear in at least a dozen languages and we have some jokers from down under who harbor the belief that they speak English.”
“Bloody right, mate!” Aussie interjected, and was hooted down. Freeman didn’t mind the fun, for when they took off in the C-47 Chinooks for the capital of the most populous country on earth, into the very heart of communism, their mood would be somber enough.
“Right!” Freeman continued. “Listen up, now. How many Chinese speakers have we?”
Out of 160 men who would be put down in Tiananmen Square, eleven spoke Chinese.
“Mandarin?” Freeman asked. “Not Cantonese.”
Six hands went down immediately.
“Very well, gentlemen, you five will stay so close to radio operators that you’ll look like their shadows. Shadow one, two, three, four,” Freeman said, indicating Aussie Lewis, David Brentwood, Choir Williams, and Salvini, “will stay with the respective troop leaders. Number five, you’ll stay with me. Now, everyone, watches — time is now ten hundred hours. We leave at oh four hundred. We should be in the square before dawn.”
“Air cover?” someone shouted.
“Pessimistic bastard,” Freeman replied, and this got the biggest laugh of what would be a final half-hour-long briefing.
“Comanches!” the general answered.
“You mean Apaches, sir?”
“No, I do not mean Apaches. I mean Comanches. Second Army gets the first batch of fifty.”
“Let’s hope we don’t need any,” his buddy countered.
“Dreamin’, boy. You’re dreamin’.”
“As to the original question,” Freeman said, “about the broadcasting building. You’re right, Private. Damned important target — same as the telegraph office east on Xichang’ An Jie. These targets as well as other railway overpasses and bridges will be hit by cruise missiles. We don’t want to destroy anything in Beijing, however, unless it’s of military importance. We expect a number of students and workers to rise and help us. Like ten thousand or so. We don’t want to bomb them. Our mission is to become a rallying point for our attack on the compound.”
Freeman reached in his top left pocket and extracted one of the leaflets he’d had printed. “This pamphlet, drawn with the goddess of democracy in the background, promises that Second Army is here only to wrest control from the Communists so as to turn the government back to the people, to the goddess of democracy, the June Fourth Movement, et cetera…”
Next Freeman walked over to a large table that was covered in a khaki sheet backed by a row of enlarged black-and-white photos of China’s top leaders. “Now, gentlemen, I want you to pay attention to this more-detailed mock-up of our target.” And with that, Freeman, with the flourish of a Houdini, pulled the khaki sheet aside in one movement, revealing the central area of Beijing in detail. Even the model size of Tiananmen Square drew whistles of surprise. Its vastness was evident even on this scale, representing almost a hundred acres of cement. “All right,” Freeman said, opening his telescopic pointer. “You’ve had time to study the map since the first briefing. I’m facing north and standing in the middle of the square. What’s immediately to my rear?”
The answer from 160 throats sounded like a roar. “Statue of Heroes of the Revolution!” The pointer now slid north across Changan Avenue.
“Tiananmen — Gate of Heavenly Peace, and,” Freeman added, “entrance to the Forbidden City, which is two hundred and fifty acres and where we do not want to go unless we absolutely have to. We’re not here to shoot up their ancient buildings, monuments, or artifacts. If any of you land in error or have mechanical failure that puts you down inside the Forbidden City, head south immediately and get out through the Tiananmen Gate and join us in the square. All right, I’m still standing in the middle of the square. On my left-hand side to the west?”
“Great Hall of the People.”
“Correct. To the east — right-hand side?”
“Museum of the Chinese Revolution.”
“Correct.”
“Behind me, beyond the Statue of Heroes of the Revolution. To the south?”
“Mao.”
“And dead as a doornail,” Salvini said.
“You bloody hope,” Aussie cut in. It got a laugh, but not from Freeman, who, Norton noticed, rather sternly slid the pointer to the northwest corner of the square, immediately left of the Forbidden City.
“Zhongnanhai — Snakes’ Compound.”
“Good. That’s our target, so as soon as you get down in the square you get yourselves together into four troops of forty men each and head for the compound. Now I’m not going to feed you any bullshit so you might as well understand that because the buildings in the Zhongnanhai are residences as well as the offices of the elite Communists there will be women and children present.
“If it were simply a matter of killing them all we could send in a cruise missile there as well, but then we, the U.S., would knowingly be killing women and children. That’s not our way — that’s what makes us different from them — from the Communist hardheads. This is why you SAS and Delta have been asked to do the job. You’re specially trained in the split-second decision making on clearing rooms in hostage situations — so as dawn breaks let’s clear them out as carefully and as quickly as we can. Same rules as I mentioned before — choice of weapons is yours but has to be okayed by your troop leader.
“Remember, the only people we’re interested in are the State Council — Chairman Nie, Cheng, and the others on the State Council whose photos we have on the board up here. While we’re in the compound, more troops will be landing in Tiananmen. I’ll only give orders when I think our one-two-three — one, go in, two, get them, three, get back to the square — has met any unusual or unforeseen obstacles. Other than that it’s up to you to follow your four troop leaders — Brentwood, Salvini, Aussie, and Choir Williams. Any questions?’
“Sir,” Williams asked, “will the main attack against the wall at Badaling and down through the Juyong Pass coincide with our attack on the compound?”
“It will,” Freeman said, remarking that the Zhongnanhai complex “is almost as big as the Forbidden City, including the area covered by the two lakes. And I should tell you that we’ve been flying nighttime nap-of-the-earth chopper missions in and already dropping leaflets, so hopefully our entry in the Chinooks won’t elicit too much interest on their radar even if they do pick us up on screen. But everything will ultimately depend on surprise and speed. Before that, darkness and bad weather are our best camouflage.”
“Piece of cake,” Aussie said, making an eye-rolling Groucho Marx face that belied his ironic tone.
“Very well,” Freeman said. “I have one more comment to make. It’s no use glossing over the opposition. We know neither how many we’ll run into nor, if our luck holds, how few. But one thing we do know is that we’ll be at the heart of the dragon. Chinese still think they’re the center of the world — closer to heaven than anyone else. If we get the State Council out of there, if we take the mandate of heaven from them, yours will be the greatest single blow ever against the world’s last great Communist bastion. I believe if we succeed the whole edifice will fall as it did in Soviet Russia in ninety-one, and freedom’ll have a chance. You remember all those faces you saw on TV in eighty-nine — in the Tiananmen massacre? Hell, they’re on your side before you even land.” He glanced around at his audience of one hundred and sixty, and with a look of determination that harbored no anxiety, not even the slightest doubt, he proclaimed, “That’s all. Good luck and God be with you.”
“My MP5’ll be with me,” Aussie said. At thirteen and a half inches long, the submachine gun looked more like a huge pistol with a front grip, but it was perfect for confined spaces, whether you were trying to take out a hijacker in the narrow confines of an aircraft or in a large room. Like everyone else in the SAS/D team who cost two and half million dollars each to train, the men who fired the MP5 didn’t use the gun sight but fired more by intuition sharpened by hundreds of practices in “killing houses” in Wales and in the United States at Fort Bragg, trying to conceive of every possible situation. But Freeman knew that
