kids out, they’ll be the next to run.”
“No they won’t.” No one had seen Freeman enter the barracks, glued as they were to CNN.
“Turn that damn thing off!”
“Yes, sir.”
“If you think the Chinese leadership is going to vacate Beijing because a couple of guys tossed in a Molotov cocktail and shot two guards, you don’t know much about the Chinese. They leave Beijing now and they lose face, my friend. They lose that, they lose it all.”
A slow smile now spread across Freeman’s face. Of course everyone knew the general was right, but then Aussie quickly pointed out, “They’re bound to have reinforced security though.”
“Yes,” Freeman said coolly, almost dispassionately, and Norton detected in the general’s tone a kind of resoluteness that had never wavered in the face of odds. “Would you expect a commando attack after that?” Freeman asked the assembled SAS/D men. “I sure as hell wouldn’t. Would you, Aussie?”
“No, sir!”
“Which is precisely why the raid’s still on. See you at the choppers.”
“Jesus, he’s a cool one,” one of Salvini’s troop of forty said.
“He’s nuts, that’s what he is,” said another, a first-timer. The men who had served with Freeman before reserved judgment. “If he loses, everybody’ll call him nuts. If he wins, it’ll be ticker tape down Fifth Avenue.” As Freeman had once told them in an attack on Ratmanov Island in the Bering Strait, “When you’re in charge it’s either hoots or hosannas and you’d better get used to both.”
He had then quoted Douglas MacArthur, who had listened to all the arguments against landing at Inchon in the Korean War: Inchon had the world’s highest tides and at low tide the harbor was a vast mud flat, both conditions disqualifying it from the highly complex business of amphibious assault by seventy thousand marines. MacArthur, Freeman reminded them, had listened patiently to all the objections and replied, “The very arguments you have made as to the impracticability involved will tend to ensure for me the element of surprise. The enemy commander will reason that no one would be so brash as to make such an attempt…. Surprise is the most vital element for success in modern war.”
“Yeah,” an SAS/D trooper said. “Is that when he threw up?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
The rolling thunder that was Freeman’s Second Army pressing its counterattack hard all along the Orgon Tal-Honggor line was only six miles from Badaling and the Great Wall. If they reached and took the twenty-foot- high, fifteen-foot-wide wall at Badaling — at three thousand feet— then at the long, narrow cleft of the Juyong Pass running northwest to southeast they would be forty-eight miles from Beijing. But if they could not bash their way through the pass, then Freeman had ordered them to dig in and maintain positions.
It would give the Chinese an initial advantage in that if Harvey Simmet was right and the monsoon kept up, the U.S. close air support would be unable to distinguish between friend and foe in the swirling fury of the monsoon coming off the Bo Hai Gulf. But the weather was all important to the SAS/D mission, and now it became clear as to why, the plans calling for a drop of eighty men to secure an LZ — landing zone — on the east side of the Statue of Heroes of the Revolution. The worse the weather, the easier it would be for the four Chinooks to hide, despite the
Freeman waited to see everyone else aboard before he walked up the ramp of the first of the four Chinooks. After an LZ was secured by the SAS/D team in Tiananmen then another forty choppers, each carrying up to fifty fully equipped regulars, would come into the square, but before Freeman could even hope that this might happen he knew he had to capture the State Council, preferably alive but dead if necessary.
Now the Comanches came into play, not as troop carriers — that was the ‘Chinooks’ role — but as Stealth- skinned, heavily armed choppers riding shotgun for the Chinooks, the Comanches having less than 2 percent of the Chinooks’ radar cross section and a speed of two hundred miles per hour. Taking off from desert pads twenty minutes to the rear of Second Army’s Orgon Tal-Honggor front, the RH-77 °Comanches were state of the art for the seventy-mile, twenty-minute dash — across the edge of the northern plain and up over the mountains down into Beijing.
The Comanches made the celebrated Apache of Iraqi War fame passe. Where the Apache was a superb tank killer, as it had proved around Orgon Tal against Cheng’s T-62s, it was not designed to penetrate by itself deep into enemy territory, and while the Apache was relatively easy for an enemy to detect on radar, the radar cross section of the Stealth-sheathed Comanche was 1.07 percent of that of the “standoff’ Apache and other light attack helos. This tiny radar cross section, together with the nap-of-the-earth flying by pilot and copilot, meant that unlike the Apache, the Comanche could penetrate further into enemy territory undetected.
With its chin-mounted, remote control, twin-barreled 20mm Gatling gun sticking out beneath its infrared Starlite sensor’s nose, the chopper would be formidable in any of its four modes, from armed recon up to heavy attack, deep strike, and air combat. Its two retractable claw mounts carrying four Hellfire antitank and two Stinger air-to-air missiles, the much faster Comanches in diamond four formation would be riding shotgun for the four Chinooks and if necessary would drop decoy chaff and/or flares to draw off any ground- or air-launched Chinese missiles fired at the Chinooks. And the Comanches, their exhausts from their twin three-foot-long LHTEC-T-800 engines cooled by sucked-in air through tail vents, would not give off sufficient heat to attract heat seekers themselves.
In addition, the sound of their engines would be muffled by the antitorque fan in the enclosed tail, with its five- instead of four-bladed rotors, the latter reducing tip speed, thereby reducing the Comanches’ noise signature.
Two more squadrons of Comanches would follow on, escorting as many men as it might take to secure the landing zone in the square and finally, if all went well, with a maximum of 20 percent casualties, the square itself. The element of surprise depended on the twenty-minute run-in.
The Chinooks with their twin machine guns forward and one heavy machine gun on the open ramp would fly low, over the vast, sprawling city, their pilots hoping that the helos’ noise would be attributed by the populace to the Russian-made Hinds that had flown over Beijing during the Tiananmen Square massacre, dropping leaflets on the people and students below, pamphlets proclaiming, “The people love the PLA. The PLA loves the people,” before they had begun machine gunning the people down.
“We all set, Captain?” Freeman asked the Chinook leader.
“Yes, sir,” she answered.
“All right, take us to Beijing.”
The four Chinooks rose, creating a ministorm within the storm of the monsoon, and headed out into the dust-stinging blackness of the Orgon Tal-Honggor front.
The colonel in charge of the Zhongnanhai was now a junior lieutenant, ten years of promotions demolished in two minutes as Cheng humiliated him. The fact that two Molotovs had been thrown was bad enough, but the failure to close down the block on Changan Avenue and to recognize the “hooligans” on the video feed from the lamppost-mounted cameras along the avenue only compounded the error in Cheng’s view.
Apart from losing face over the incident, the worst insult not only to the colonel but to the two hundred men responsible for the security of the Communist elite of the State Council, was the news that spread like wildfire that Cheng had announced, endorsed by Nie, that from now on security of the Zhongnanhai was to be the responsibility of Special Security Unit 8431 under the direct command of the Central Military Committee.
SS Unit 8431 was the toughest of the tough, used to going anywhere to immediately douse “ideological fires” or “demonstrations” that got out of hand. The commander of the unit 8431 was asked defiantly by the recent colonel what he, the commander of 8431, would have done to resolve the Molotov incident.
“Two armored vehicles would have been dispatched immediately,” the commander answered.
“To do what?” the disgraced colonel pressed.
“To annihilate the antisocial vermin immediately.”
