attack the Forbidden City from wherever they were — most of them being with Freeman, clustered about the Statue of Heroes of the Revolution in the square, and about to advance, original plans having gone awry with the State Council’s quitting the Zhongnanhai.
The recon operator was about to report one man down— when he saw Lewis thrown back, rolling over, facedown on the cobbled path. Then two of the other seven men lifted him up to his feet. He waved them off with a nod of thanks. The front of his antiterrorist uniform had what looked like a burn mark through it; the Kevlar vest underneath had hardly a scratch on it.
“Thank Christ,” someone said.
“Thank Dupont,” Aussie said as he got back his wind and was figuring out the best way to deploy the reccy patrol. “Tell Freeman we’ll move up from along the Zhongnanhai wall and try to sniper out a few if we can. We have a Haskins.”
The reconnaissance patrol response was appreciated by Freeman, who had already sent another patrol down the right-hand, or eastern, side of the Working People’s Cultural Palace, which came before the Tiananmen Gate, but where they too found the Donghua Men, another bridge, had been blown. In fact all the crossings over the moat had been blown, and the commandos were hearing from another Comanche pilot that tons of rubble now lay where the rear entrance to the Forbidden City — the Gate of Divine Military Genius — used to be. The only way through was via the Tiananmen Gate, and it was toward this that Freeman and the bulk of the commandos were headed.
There was no doubt in Freeman’s mind that he had caught them off guard in making his monsoon attack, but the prudence of unit 8431’s commander in having moved everybody to a new location had equally surprised Freeman. Indeed it alarmed him, for if they couldn’t get the State Council quickly rounded up and back to the square before Second Army broke through at Badaling, the whole mission would be a failure, and with every passing minute Cheng would have a chance to increase the odds against the 125 or so commandos achieving their mission.
What in Freeman’s mind was meant to be a hard, quick, if not clean, snatch and grab of the Communist leadership was now promising to be a much longer, drawn out affair.
Freeman and his commandos rushed toward the Gate of Eternal Peace, or Tiananmen, ready any moment to have machine-gun fire rain down upon them from the ramparts where Mao had made so many of his momentous speeches. Once through Tiananmen, they had to pass through the second gate. Still there was no firing, no opposition.
“I don’t fuckin’ like this,” Salvini said, he and the three survivors of his forty-man troop now grouping with Choir’s troop of forty.
“Well,” Choir said, keeping up the pace, their Vibram boots silent, ideally suited for the run on the ancient flagstones, “if we don’t get any fire from the Meridian Gate”—the actual entrance to the Forbidden City, now three hundred yards in front of them—”I’m a China—”
Suddenly there was the tearing tarpaper sound of multiple ChiCom type 56-1 machine guns opening up behind them, and ten of the SAS/D men went down in a hail of 7.62mm bullets coming from atop the gate they’d just passed through.
“Keep going!” Freeman yelled, leading the way to the Meridian Gate. “SAWs cover!”
Ten squad automatic weapons raked the Chinese high up on the gate’s battlement, that is, toward the second gate between Tiananmen and the Meridian that Freeman and the rest of the commandos were making their way toward.
By now ninety-seven SAS/D commandos had reached the base of the Meridian Gate, the entrance to the Forbidden City proper, and were firing at the railings-cum-battlements above.
Two commandos — Harrison and Bernstein — from Choir Williams’s troop were ordered by Freeman to use their weapons. It was something Freeman hated to do, but the future sightseers of Beijing would just have to forgive him. Right now he had barely ninety men left, a little more than half of what he’d started out with.
“Go!” he told them, and the two men stood so that the barrels of their weapons were pointing almost straight up, and an instant later two yellow streaks of liquid fire went into the eyes of the brooding Meridian Gate. Within seconds the lacquered red top of the gate was ablaze, and Freeman’s sappers — two of David Brentwood’s men — were placing satchel charges of pentolite and TNT with a thirty-second fuse up against the huge, closed door of the Meridian Gate. The explosion blew open the heavy doors, not by much, but enough for the SAS/D commandos to pass through with withering machine gun fire preceding them.
“Up the stairs!” Brentwood yelled. “Clean ‘em out!”
But Chinese regulars were already coming down, coughing from the acrid smoke of the fires that had been started and easy targets for the SAS/D who cut them down with three-round bursts from their HK MP5s and fire from; M-16s.
“Masks on!” someone yelled, and within seconds the SAS/D men who were going up into the smoke had donned masks and continued the slaughter as the Chinese, blinded by the smoke, practically ran into them.
They had been running so hard and so fast that the architectural beauty of the Forbidden City was the last thing any of the SAS/D troopers thought or cared about. For them the overwhelming aspect of the Forbidden City was its sheer size: 720 acres, eight hundred buildings, and nine thousand rooms.
Beyond the Wumen, or Meridian, Gate they came to the five marble bridges over the Golden River, the moat below shaped like a Tartar bow. Here they came under more heavy fire from the towers of the Gate of Supreme Harmony ahead of them.
The SAS/D was giving as much as it was taking, but Freeman knew they needed high ground fast and so ran forward across the central marble bridge and onto the great flagstone square where one group directed heavy fire at the Taihe — the Hall of Supreme Harmony — providing cover for the commandos running to take cover in the Hongi and Tairen pavilions. And once the Hongi and Tairen towers were reached, with six men lost in the process, the men in and around these two pavilions fed long bursts of fire into ±e Hall of Supreme Harmony.
It was when he reached the hall that Freeman realized what had happened, and his anger at himself stung him with humiliation. The legendary Freeman of Second Army, of Ratmanov Island, the Dortmund-Bielefeld Pocket, the Freeman of the victory in the snows of Siberia and the hero of the brilliant attack on Orgon Tal before the truce, and of the celebrated night raid on Pyongyang earlier in the war, realized that the hunted, by retreating from the Zhongnanhai to the Forbidden Palace, had become the hunters, having lured the Americans inside the moat- bordered palace of 250 acres. As neat a trap as you could have planned for.
In the fog of war, confusion an ever-present player, Freeman had concentrated on going for a quick surgical strike to take out the State Council. But the quarry had been moved into what turned out to be the maze of the Forbidden City, and with them so had the elite members of unit 8431, their snipers buying time for army units to be recalled from the Orgon Tal-Honggor front back to Beijing and the Forbidden City, where the American general would be captured and, with his remaining eighty or so troops, be humiliated before the State Council in the great square of Tiananmen — a world telecast of the Americans in chains. Already Beijing radio was broadcasting reports, picked up and reported by CNN, of the imminent victory over the American “warmongers,” who were “vandalizing one of China’s great cultural landmarks.”
Two men held up their hands.
“Over here, son,” Freeman said to one. “Now this is what I want you to encode.” Next he looked at his grid map of Beijing and gave the operator the coordinates.
Her vision blurring again from the mountain sickness, the .45 trembling in her hand, Julia had nevertheless made the figure out to be that of the old man. He had brought her scoops of hail and snow in a salt bag and made rubbing motions across her forehead. “Headache,” he said, gave her another salt bag of ice, and left.
When he returned to where the two yaks were tethered he sniffed at the hailstorm and looked down at the earlier footprints back further in the sea of snow that surrounded the ridge. There had been enough snow and hail by now to obliterate the latest tracks. He walked the two yaks for two hundred yards or so, crossing the wind-
