Chinese up in the vast underground tunnel system that traversed the ridge, then at least they couldn’t exit.
“So they can’t crawl out and head north?” Freeman asked.
“Yes,” Vinh said. “Then tomorrow we smoke out the tunnels through the camouflaged entrances and exits we found on the southern side today.”
Now Freeman saw the extent of the Vietnamese general’s strategy: bottle their northern escape route overnight by ceaselessly bombing the northern side of the ridge, and in daylight man all entrances and exits you could find and smoke them out — with “white phosphorus” if necessary.
Freeman ruled out white phosphorus, but not purely on humanitarian grounds. After all, the USVUN forces and the Chinese were already using white phosphorus grenades. But a regular grenade was one thing, a phosphorus grenade was something else. You couldn’t pump white phosphorus down into a tunnel system when you weren’t sure where the hell it was going to come up. If it got on your own men’s skin, you might kill more USVUN troops than those of the enemy.
“Very well,” Vinh concluded, “we will use purple smoke. Blow that down, and wherever it comes up we’ll seal unless they agree to surrender.”
“What if they decide to backtrack?” Freeman asked. “I mean what if Wang decides to come back through the tunnels to the fields behind us?”
“Why go back to old ground you have lost?”
“To try and escape south,” Freeman answered. “We don’t know how far south the tunnels go, do we? Besides, they have two battalions at least from their Fourteenth Chengdu Army down there in Disney World. Around a thousand men— infantry and some engineers.”
“Why engineers?” Cline put in.
“Because the bastards know how to dig, damn it! General Vinh here’ll tell you. Hell, his boys had over two hundred miles of tunnels in the Chu Chi system down south during ‘Nam. And despite all our technology, we couldn’t rout them.”
“What makes you think we can do it here, General?”
“Because—” Freeman hesitated. He was proud of his Second Army and he was loath to take anything away from them. “Because, Major, the Vietnamese have been at it a hell of a lot longer than we have, and in the tunnels, they’re better than we are.” He held up his bandaged hand.
Cline nodded. “All right, but meanwhile where’s General Wei?”
Vinh pointed at the map. “Last intelligence reports say he is still proceeding down the Lang Son-Lang Ro road three miles to the west of us. But our — I mean, the USVUN heavy artillery is lined up along Lang Son-Ban Re railroad and are pounding shits out of them.”
Freeman roared with laughter at the interpreter’s phrasing, adding, “By God, General, I hope you’re right. We don’t want our left flank penetrated.”
“No.”
That night the ridge became known as Disney Hill, not only to the men of Freeman’s Second Army and the USVUN forces, but by the pilots of the fighters and bombers preparing to take off from the
There were no laser-guided bombs on this mission, for while the north side, and not the south side, of Disney Hill was to be hit, it would not be pinpoint bombing that was required to either kill or trap the Chinese in the southside tunnels, it would be power bombing — brute poundage. This was to be excavation by high explosive.
Already in Primary Flight Control, the “handler,” PRI-FLY’s second in command, whose job was so complicated and many-faceted that it often could not be computerized, watched his models of the aircraft on his grid-crossed table. Nowhere is war as complicated as on the flight deck of a carrier when men and machines move in a rough ballet of hand signals amid a forest of constantly moving, different-colored jerseys.
Two of these, gunner’s mates, Albright Stevens and Elizabeth Franks, a “grape” who in her purple jacket was helping to fuel one of the F-18 Hornets with JP-5 gasoline, had been lovers ever since he’d taken her to the movie at the beginning of the voyage. Both of them had since found time together in some of the hundreds of nooks and crannies aboard the huge ship, which, as well as launching planes in any weather, had to feed and minister to over five thousand crew members.
“Lucky we ain’t on a sub,” Albright had told her.
“You’d find a way,” she’d said.
“Believe I would.”
But that was then, and now they were in the Gulf of Tonkin, not a happy place in the annals of American history, and around them they knew the PLA navy was determined to somehow penetrate the carrier’s protective shield.
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
Hopes by General Jorgensen’s Hanoi HQ that relief might come to Freeman’s USVUN troops through sabotage by proxy — by having Taiwan-run saboteurs hit China’s southern supply route on the Ningming-Dong Dang railway — began to fade as night fell upon the battle zone.
The vote in Taiwan’s Li-fa Yuan was close, with several nonpartisan or independent members swinging the slim majority to the side of the Democratic Progressive party against the “old ones,” the second-generation right- wing remnants of the old Kuomintang party of Chiang Kai-shek.
In one of the strangest ironies of politics, the Kuomintang on the far right agreed with the Communist party on the far left that Taiwan was still a province of China. But here the agreement between left and right ended, for while the Kuomintang supported the USVUN presence against the Beijing regime, the Communist party was vehemently opposed. The majority of votes swung to the left, crucial independents afraid that any Taiwanese support for the USVUN would not only infuriate Beijing but be the end of the “understanding” between Beijing and Taipei. The understanding was a promise from Beijing that in return for Taipei’s support for China’s South China Sea claims, Beijing would split certain oil concessions in the northern part of the South China Sea, with fifty-one per-rent de facto control for Beijing, forty-nine percent for Taiwan.
“We can’t wait,” Douglas Freeman said, “for the Taiwanese Chinese to make up their minds.” His HQ staff were looking it the red pins that stood for PLA positions on and around Disney Hill.
“But our State Department boys might be able to swing a few of the independents over to our side,” Cline remarked. Then maybe the Taiwanese’ll authorize some of their agents in China to blow the Ningming-Dong Dang rail line.”
“Huh!” Freeman grunted dismissively, his right fist punching the map of the southern China-Vietnamese border area. Too many maybes, mights, and what-ifs for my liking. By the time those fairies in State get off their butts, Chinese reinforcements’ll be trundling down from the Ningming railhead — in their goddamn thousands.”
“Sir,” his nervous press aide interjected, “it’s not, ah, politically correct to refer to people as fairies. And if you mean gays, I’d advise you to modify—”
Freeman paused, but only to get air. “All right, look, here’s what we do. We send in a Special Forces squad to blow the shit out of the Ningming-Dong Dang line, and I don’t mean just in one place, I mean at least three breaks west of Ningming proper. Then again at Xiash and Pingxiang. They’ll nave to mend the line in so many friggin’ places
