force.
Suddenly it was over, and Freeman could see the civilians — seven, or was it eight? — CS smoke still thick in the air — staggering around, hands up, and two members of the PLA.
“Congratulations, sir!” Brentwood said.
“Yes, sir,” Salvini and Choir Williams added — Aussie Lewis and four other men quickly getting the prisoners in a straight line up against the wall. They were all in tears from the CS gas, if not from the defeat, and for fresh air Aussie Lewis obligingly smashed out an ornate window dating back to the Ming dynasty.
“Jesus Christ!” It was Freeman, sounding like an enraged bull, his voice clearly heard in the Hall of Preserving Harmony above the footsteps of thousands now that the students had penetrated the Forbidden City and were gathering like a great blue-and-gray sea about the Forbidden City, around Freeman, the conqueror of Beijing.
It was confusion again, with some of Salvini’s men looking around at the huge crowd forming outside, and even though they were obviously friendly, with the goddess of democracy statue carried bobbing and wobbling among them, the noise of the cheering was drowning almost anything that was said in the Hall of Preserving Harmony, so that Freeman had to thunder out his discovery.
“Where’s Cheng? Nie? The State Council?”
“You mean—” Aussie began. “Bloody hell!”
“Bloody hell is right!” Freeman thundered. “The bastards were
“General Cheng has gone,” one trembling official said, “with our commanders. And Nie. All the State Council. The soldiers. On the train — the airport has been bombed and—”
“Where?” Freeman demanded, pulling back the hammer.
“Gone,” the official repeated. “To — to Tanggu.”
“Where the hell’s that?” Salvini cut in.
Freeman reholstered his pistol, his hands now on his hips. “Son of a bitch and his guards are on the way by train to Tanggu. Closest port to here. A fast boat trip across Bo Hai Gulf to North Korea no doubt. Goddamn it!” Freeman, his head down, began pacing up and down as the smoke was clearing, and outside the crowd was growing even larger, all cheering his name. Suddenly Freeman stopped and looked at Williams, Salvini, and Aussie. “I’m getting on the radio and we’re gonna stop that damn train. If it ever left Beijing. Yes, sir, we’re gonna stop every goddamn train out of Beijing.” He then turned to the operator, giving him the necessary orders for the A-10s and Comanches — who by now had neutralized all airports and runways in the Beijing area — to stop any train from leaving Beijing, but particularly those bound southeast of the city toward Tanggu.
“You boys,” he told Salvini, Williams, Brentwood, and Aussie Lewis, “aren’t finished yet. I want you to get aboard the first chopper we can get in here. Go to Tanggu and bring back Cheng and Nie. All the State Council if possible but definitely Cheng and Nie. Bring the bastards back in chains!”
It was simply impossible to get a Comanche, Huey, Chinook, Apache, or any other kind of helo to land in the Forbidden City. It was jam-packed with people. The same was true of Tiananmen Square, and the only way that Aussie, Brentwood, Williams, and Salvini could get out was to climb up a swinging rope ladder to a Huey hovering twenty feet above the roof of the Hall of Preserving Harmony, or what Aussie Lewis, after the battle, called “the Hall of Fucking Disharmony.”
“Christ!” Lewis yelled over the roar of the Huey’s rotors and the crowd below. “I thought we were done for the day. I’m puttin’ in for overtime, mate. No bones about it.”
The other three commandos — Salvini, Choir Williams, and Brentwood — were either too exhausted or deafened by the chopper and the mob scene below, growing bigger as the American tanks from the Marine Expeditionary Force entered the outskirts, to say anything. Besides, they all knew they needed whatever energy they had left for what they hoped would be the end of the war.
They had no way of knowing that within half an hour, when the news of the Beijing collapse got through to the southern beachhead at Xiamen, the southern armies would be recalled by the generals-cum-warlords. The north-south divisions in China were probably the oldest in history, and southern Chinese blood was not about to be spilled in defense of Communist Mandarins in the north who had already fled Beijing, the same Mandarins who had declared it was all right to burn briquettes for warmth in your home if you were north of the Yangtze, but not if you were in the south.
There were no trains out of Beijing. There were no trains coming into Beijing. Everything had been stopped by the massive uprising of the underground Democracy Movement and workers pouring out into the city now that the top Communist leaders had fled. The only trains moving, in fact, were those that had left Beijing no later than an hour before, one of these having been the train to Qinhuangdao via Beidaihe.
By now the news of Beijing’s collapse, confirmed by CNN, was flashed worldwide and to all parts of China, where local underground movements seized the moment against local Communist administrations. And it was at Qinhuangdao, en route to Shanhaiguan, that Alexsandra Malof’s train was met by a huge crowd waving banners of revolution, her Chinese student suddenly filled with courage, and confidence and a feeling of some importance that he had been chosen by fate to be escaping with Alexsandra Malof at the very moment of the Beijing clique’s defeat. With an air of authority that surprised even Alexsandra, he bellowed and shouted, making way for her through the crowd at Qinhuangdao, a place that, with its oil refineries and heavy chemical pollution, was probably one of the ugliest and most inauspicious places for such an auspicious event to occur.
There were Chinese everywhere at Honggor as Cheng’s staff, among them Colonel Soong, continued to fight on in hopes of blunting, if not defeating, the American Marine Expeditionary Force pressing the Chinese right flank. And for several hours at least, with all communications with Beijing cut and by pouring in regiment after regiment of battle-experienced ChiCom troops from Shenyang’s Twenty-fourth Army, Cheng’s staff was not only able to blunt the MEF attack on the right flank but also managed to attack Honggor successfully on the left. It was there, on the left flank, that Cheng’s veteran regiments came upon one of the few unblooded battalions of Freeman’s Second Army, and some of Freeman’s men ran.
It wasn’t picked up by the press because Freeman had done a Schwarzkopf and kept the press well behind his forces. But it was no use, Dick Norton knew, trying to tart up the report to Freeman by saying the men who ran were overwhelmed by the number of ChiComs, which they were, or that they had failed to get proper artillery support or TACAIR — also true — for the fact of the matter was that most of Charlie company—120 men — in Third Battalion broke and ran. What Charlie company’s commander had intended to be a shooting withdrawal was in fact a rout, some men even throwing their weapons away.
And as if a malevolent fate was at work, the old saying that “trouble comes not in ones or twos but in battalions!” had come true. Military police had been sent in to help stiffen the company’s resolve, to help the company find its pride again, but what the MPs found was a thoroughly demoralized force. On walking toward two of the soldiers in a foxhole, in the hope of getting them up and out and back at the front to help stem the ChiCom breakthrough, an MP, a sergeant, heard, “I can’t do it. I can’t—”
“Sure you can,” came another deeper voice. “Just relax, babe. C’mon, Danny.”
“You’ll look after me?”
“Haven’t I always, Danny?”
“Yes, but—”
The MP then heard a low, moaning noise, and when he looked over into the foxhole he saw one of them — the shorter, Danny he supposed — down on his knees, sucking off the bigger, older man.
“All right!” the MP said. “You two faggots are under arrest. Get on outta there — and surrender your arms.”
“You’re just jealous,” the older man said, remarkably unperturbed. “Isn’t that right, Danny?” Danny couldn’t look at the MP.
