“No sweat,” the navigator answered, giving their position over the Bay of Biscay as they were heading over Spain for Turkey, Iran, and Iraq, their flight taking them over the bay because as with the American raid on Qaddafi’s Libya, they were not allowed to fly over French soil. Also, AC Thompson wanted to keep as far away as possible from the trigger-happy new Soviet republics. Hence the southern crescent-shaped detour. Also time had to be allowed for Phantom-4G Wild Weasels to go in just ahead of the bombers to jam as much ChiCom ground-to-air communications and radar as possible.
In Freeman’s AirLand battle opening up all along the Amur front, first the medium-range bombers and fighters went in, shooting up everything in sight, including superbly camouflaged oil-lamp-heated dugouts, which their infrared targeted as tanks in defilade position. Even so, the Chinese were struck by the ferocity of the American offensive.
Colonel Soong, north of Manzhouli, had his troops well dug in atop A-7 but was paid a return visit by a C-130 Spectre gunship whose crew’s infrared night-vision capacity enabled it to pour down a deadly rain of fire. But whereas during an attack on A-7 earlier in the war a C-130 had finally fallen prey to a surface-to-air missile, this time the SAM sites had been raked by F-15 Eagles.
Each Eagle dropped sixteen thousand pounds of smart ordnance from its underfuselage and underwing hard points, so that the C-130 was left unthreatened save for small-arms fire. As it continued in its devastating counterclockwise spiral, spewing out its deadly fire, if any of the Chinese troops lifted a rifle or RPG, or any other weapon in a desperate attempt to down it, they were immediately sighted on the infrared screens and targeted.
From Fuyuan in the east near Khabarovsk to Manzhouli in the west, the night was rent by fire. In Fuyuan the Americans received unexpected help from the Jewish underground in the nearby Jewish Autonomous Oblast and actually succeeded in pushing the Chinese four miles back across a frozen section of the river.
The advance, General C. Clay reported, was getting out of hand. One of the most aggressive groups was a Jewish contingent led by Alexsandra Malof, the woman who had been tortured by Siberian and Chinese alike and who was determined to help the Americans. It was she who, with other Jewish women, had been forced to fraternize, who had been the poprosili — the requested ones — for the pleasure of the Siberian fliers in Khabarovsk before the Americans came. Aleksandra had been a favorite of the ace, Sergei Marchenko. But she was only one, and so many had scores to settle against both Sibirs, as they called them, and the Chinese that General Clay had to order a slowdown in order for his logistical tail to catch up with his forward troops in the rugged ravines of the Manchurian fastness.
Up around Never and Skovorodino, sites of one of Freeman’s fiercest-fought battles earlier in the war, the Chinese gave as good as they got. The ChiCom regulars wouldn’t yield even to the marines’ M-60s, whose 105mm guns, atop the tortoiselike appearance of the tanks caused by blocks of reactive armor all over them, blasted PLA infantry positions across the river. Salvos of expensive, at least for the Chinese, RPGs were fired at the M-60s, but the reactive armor blowing up as it was struck neutralized the Chinese attack in the main and the M-60s kept up a deafening fire that resounded like thunder through the still-snow-dusted hills and along the flats of the river at the foot of cleft-hewn mountains.
Cheng could tolerate the situation so far, but what he was asking his aides for was any reports coming in from around Manzhouli to the west on his left flank, where Chinese positions stretched along the wall of Genghis Khan, and beyond to the south, where the country became flatter — and would be much more suitable for the American Abrams forty-five-mile-per-hour main battle tank.
“Nothing, General.”
“What do you mean, nothing?” Cheng asked, though his voice was subdued and surprisingly calm.
“Only static, General! The American Wild Weasels’ electronic interceptors are jamming all radio communications.”
“We don’t know what’s going on anywhere,” another said. “They’re attacking on so many points we don’t know where their main concentration lies.”
“Freeman’s no fool,” Cheng said. “He knows better than to spread his forces that thinly from Manzhouli to Khabarovsk — over a 1,200-mile front. No army in the world can attack equally along such a lengthy front. If our radios are jammed we’ll have to rely on our motorcycle couriers.”
“But General, it would take them hours — in some cases, days — before they could reach—”
“Not to us here in Beijing, you fool. I mean between regimental commands. We have good men up there. They will use their initiative.”
Indeed they were, one motorbike signal company already moving couriers out along the narrow roads through the mountainous cold. They might as well have been carrying a neon sign, however, saying, “Here we are,” for the F-16s and F-15s, while they didn’t kill all of them in the narrow defiles, did get most of them.
As the Pave Low banked, Aussie felt his Bergen pack shift despite its tight rigging, and now they were coming into the darkness of Manzhouli, the rail lines ribbons of steely light beneath the moon running east of the wall, which was now being breached by the Pave Lows.
“Bloody great orb!” Aussie said, cursing the break in the clouds. “Might as well send up a flare.” The Pave Low took a whack and seemed to skid in midair, but it was shrapnel from AA fire hitting the second chopper and perhaps the third.
“Second chopper’s going down!” someone said.
The red light went to green and they felt the icy rush of air.
“Go!”
And one by one they went down the rope, the big Pave in a clearing not a quarter mile north of the railway station. The choppers would return in forty-five minutes.
Aussie felt the heat through his black gloves as he descended on the rope and fell back into gritty snow. Within a minute he had the 9mm Heckler & Koch MP5K in one hand, shucking the chute with the other, then joined the other nineteen men from the three Paves. The chopper that had been hit had landed, albeit bumpily, and discharged its six SAS/D men but was now unable to take off, the other two choppers already up and away.
“Right!” David Brentwood called out to the crew of the damaged chopper. “You’re with us. Keep in the center.” There was a chance — just a chance — that the Pave Lows, some of the best nap-of-the-earth fliers in me world, had come in so low via their ground-sensing radar that despite the AA fire that could well have been directed at the helos’ sound, none of the ChiCom guards atop the wall several hundred yards in front of them, or at the railway complex a quarter mile ahead of them, had actually seen the choppers. Then again if the ChiComs had been trying to make regular radio calls to units up along the Genghis Khan Wall they would have quickly realized that the static jamming their lines was so intense as to be more than merely atmospheric in origin.
In fact, the whole garrison of 12 °Chinese troops at Manzhouli was alerted, having seen one of the Pave Lows pass like a bulky chariot across me moon, and the garrison’s commander, an unafraid twenty-three-year-old Captain Ko, made the eminently sensible decision to go out straight away to meet his attackers head on rather than do half the job for them by staying bottled up in the railway station. Surprise was to be met by surprise. To begin with, the small town of Manzhouli had been evacuated by all its citizens, and only the military remained.