PLA had copied.
After what could only be described as a slaughter of Chinese armor in Juyong Pass, the Warthogs returned to base, some with photo recon aboard, and declared the winding Chinese column of sixty T-62s dead. The first one to notice something odd about the carnage was Corporal Glenda Lipcott of the photo recon intelligence unit. She reported to her commanding officer that there was something funny about the corpses.
“Oh — what?”
“Well, sir, I don’t mean there’s anything unusual with the corpses themselves, but I can’t find more than one corpse per tank.”
“What do you mean? You can’t see inside the tanks with photo recon.”
“After they’re attacked by the Warthogs you can, sir. Opens them up like a tin can — spare rounds inside the tank blow up.”
“I know that,” the colonel said liverishly, “but what I’m saying is that it looks like a butcher shop inside. So how can you tell?”
“DPBs, sir.” She meant distinct body parts — heads mainly, limbs, etc.
“All right,” the colonel said, “let’s say you’re correct. No tank has more than one corpse.”
“Ah, all except the first one,” Lipcott corrected herself.
“So?” the colonel pressed. Smart women irritated him.
“Well, sir, it looks as if the only crewman aboard each tank was the driver. First one probably had a commander in the turret to direct the driver to the exact spot Cheng wanted them stopped.”
“Stopped — what in hell for?”
“Well, sir—” The colonel glowered at her. If she said “Well, sir,” one more time—
“Sir, I think the Chinese wanted to be held up in Juyong Pass. It has narrow defiles, and if you jam one road section, particularly if you select one that’s not straight but winding, then you have to remove all those wrecks. One by one, cranes’ll have to lift…”
“Yes, of course you’re right. Give me some of those photos will you?” She passed him a folder with ten 10-by- 14-inch shots.
When Orgon Tal’s HQ — moved sixty miles southeast around Ondor-Sum — received the information they were initially angered by what the A-10s had achieved until they saw how it had been a no-win situation: whether the tanks had been stopped by the U.S. aircraft or had been sabotaged by their own troops they had effectively closed down the road and stopped the drive to Beijing, only nineteen miles to the southeast past the Ming Tombs and the capital’s fragrant Western Hills. Norton, chief aide at the Ondor-Sum HQ, enquired as to how the information of one Chinese corpse per tank had been deduced. The colonel, in a self-deprecating manner, confessed that it was the photos that first gave him the idea. Norton made a note of it. It was the kind of thing Freeman would like to hear about those serving him in Second Army. It was quite brilliant of Cheng. At the most he’d sacrificed sixty-one men to hold up the entire Orgon Tal-Ondor-Sum push at Juyong Pass.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
There was much more firing now from outside the northern moat of the Forbidden City, where students were massing in the thousands while other students and workers massed at the southern end on Changan and the other avenues. It brought traffic to a standstill, and now there was a sea of people in which it was clear that the people did
At the northern end of the Forbidden City, a crossing leading over the moat had long been blocked by the students, and now, with more buses and tanks, it became even more congested with the arrival of thousands of students around the Dasanyuan Restaurant and Jingshan Park, many of them armed with AK-47s and large improvised Molotov slingshots that kept harrowing the tank line with small-arms fire and a steady rain of the gasoline bombs.
Warthogs appeared overhead, despite the smoke and the bad weather that was following the monsoon, but the crowds had become so enormous all round the Forbidden City, spilling out on Tiananmen Square, that the A-10s couldn’t fire at the tanks because of the certainty that if they did the tanks exploding would kill more students than PLA. But then students, seeing the A-10 Thunderbolts diving then having to pull away, thwarted in their attack, began screaming at everyone to get away from the moat in front of which the Chinese tanks were parked.
At first a margin of fifty yards separated the tanks from the still-firing students, some of the tanks belching smoke, having used their cannon to shoot point-blank into the students. Given the margin of fifty yards or so, the few A-10s managed to sweep down and, as if in some fantastic dance macabre, five tanks seemed to be soaking up the golden rain that the A-10s poured down. Suddenly the tanks exploded in a spectacular scene that made the CNN cameraman atop the Statue of Heroes of the Revolution momentarily ecstatic. But the Chinese tank commander was no fool, and within a few minutes he had ordered the remaining tanks to advance more quickly in line into the receding crowd, for in killing the crowd lay his protection.
The tens of thousands of students, many workers joining them, surged from the northern end of the Forbidden City southward to Changan Avenue and Tiananmen Square, some of the thousands already in the square escaping a similar tank charge by retreating behind Mao’s mausoleum at the southern end of the square, around Beijing’s Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet — two-piece dinner with fries and hot Mao bun, three yuan.
The surveillance cameras on the posts along Changan were smashed in the event that the Americans didn’t win and the Public Security Bureau used the videotape to round up suspects as they had done after the massacre of June 4, 1989, when for a time the students, thinking they had won, had heard Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” booming through the loudspeakers in the square.
By now Freeman’s remaining radio operator — one dead, one wounded fatally, the SAS/D team down to seventy men — received a transmit that about the same number of civilians and two PLA officers had been seen reentering FC7, the Hall of Preserving Harmony.
“Bastards have doubled back on us!” Aussie said. To ask how was pointless, as despite the neat, methodically laid out plan of the Forbidden City, its myriad hallways and secret doors were in fact a labyrinth.
Turning back, the SAS/D contingent led by Freeman, Aussie, Williams, and Salvini first had to retake FC7, the Hall of Preserving Harmony, and it was here that unit 8431 had collected its strength. Then Brentwood and Salvini, Salvini bleeding from a flesh wound in his upper left arm, saw what looked like a thousand mushrooms coming down over Tiananmen and the Forbidden City. ChiCom paratroopers on a short, five-hundred-foot drop. In Tiananmen it was no trouble. The students swarmed back, placing the paratroopers between themselves and the advancing line of tanks that were moving southward away from the moat on the southern end of the Forbidden City. If many students died, there would be no doubt that most of the paratroopers would also perish, precisely the fate that the paratroopers coming down
On what was now the Juyong Pass-Honggor front, Freeman’s strategy was approaching the top of the curve. It was true that the power of the Soviet-made T-72s that Cheng had used around Honggor under a Colonel Soong were a serious threat to the Abrams M1A1. For a start the Soviet-made gun was bigger, 125mm versus the American 120. It was a smooth bore weapon and could fire a forty-six-pound APFSDS — armor-piercing fin- stabilized discarding-sabot round — at eighteen hundred meters per second as opposed to me M1A1 Abrams’s 1650 meters per second.
The driver in Colonel Soong’s lead tank had switched over to the gyro drive of his TPD-K1 sight. Three minutes later he uncaged the gyro, the red light coming on followed by the green light mat told him he could begin traversing. Next the laser range-finder was activated, and he slewed the turret as Colonel Soong, in the same tank but in his independent cupola, was able to traverse. Soong saw the first M1A1 crossing the line and got ready to fire. However, even though the T-72 has an automatic loader and all one has to do is select the type of round from one of the twenty-two ammunition cassettes, the automatic breech must be opened by hand for the first round.
