“Right,” Salvini muttered, “here we go!” And with that he rested his AIS rifle against a low pine. The accuracy of the international supermagnum sniper rifle came from its Kigre KN 200 F night-vision image intensifier. Through the scope he could see a PLA cap and torso crouching. He squeezed the trigger and the torso was lost amid an explosion of green flecks as the depleted-uranium bullet tore right through him and kicked up the snow back of him. Within seven seconds Salvini had felled three more ChiComs in the green circle of his night scope, and he could hear the single whacks of the Heckler & Koch MP5K submachine gun and an occasional quick rip of it set on three-round bursts, which meant that some of the ChiComs were reaching the edge of the wood and could still be seen in the fading flare light so as to be easily targeted without night-vision optics. The last thing Ko wanted was another flare light now he’d seen his strategy backfire on him, but Brentwood yelled, “Choir! Flare!”
Choir lifted his M-203 grenade launcher that was attached to his M-16 so that its skyward flare shot would not come back at him from overhanging branches, screaming aloft instead, well clear of the timber. There was a quick sound like the belch of a sinkhole emptying, and moonlight went to daylight again as the magnesium sun floated slowly down.
Ko ordered his men into the woods, and the Chinese, about fifty yards on either side of the snow clearing, charged into the woods to fight it out man to man. There was a roar of fire, AK-47s, AK-74s, 7.62 bayonet-equipped type-56 Chinese carbines, rype-43 and -50 7.62mm ChiCom submachine guns, and from the woods either side the eruption of the SAS/D’s Heckler & Koch 9mm Parabellums streaming out at over eight hundred rounds a minute, the crash of grenades, and the terrible whistling of fléchettes. These steel darts, fired by the SAS/D Winchester 1200 shotgun, twenty darts for each shot, drove through ChiCom helmets at a hundred yards as if they were butter, those without helmets falling, their heads exploding, spraying blood everywhere.
Ko was not to know that the enemy was the SAS/D elite, otherwise he might have elected to withdraw, but close-encounter warfare was what the SAS/D called a “specialty of the house.” For the SAS this meant the CQB — close quarter battle — practiced at the house in Hereford, England, and what the Delta men referred to as the “shooting house” at Fort Bragg, both houses training the commandos for everything there was to know about CQB. Adding to this, the Varo flip-up/flip-down night-vision goggles supplied to the SAS/D men helped reduce what had been a six-to-one ChiCom advantage to a three-to-one advantage during the firefight. And now, the fight being closer in, SAS/D cold steel found bone, ripping the ChiComs to pieces.
Ko’s contingent fought bravely, and it wasn’t until the first light of dawn after the C charges had blown, injuring two SAS/D men with shrapnel, that the full extent of the carnage could be gauged, the snow pocked red with the dead, the wounded, and the dying. The victory for the SAS/D was somewhat hollow, however, when it was discovered that as well as four SAS/D men killed, all of the Pave Low’s crewmen had died, despite the best efforts of the SAS/D men to protect them.
“Damn!” David Brentwood said with an uncharacteristic vehemence. “I should have told them to wait with the chopper.”
“Ah, rats!” Aussie said. “None of us knew whether the Chinese would find the chopper and—”
Commandos were now setting charges in the railway control boxes and on other lines. With radios unable to get through the jamming of Freeman’s Wild Weasels, the SAS lit orange and purple flares for pickup. The wall of Genghis Khan had clearly been breached by the SAS/D team, but to make it official two SAS/D men — Salvini and Aussie — were dispatched to light the wolf dung fire by the base of one of the watchtowers atop the old wall.
“What the fuck’s all this about?” Salvini asked Aussie.
“Don’t ask me, sport. Davey’s the only one that knows, and he’s apparently under orders to keep it mum till we’re out of here.”
The arrival of the Pave Lows was interrupted for a minute or so by a Chinese sniper hiding out in the woods, but he was taken out by a scope-mounted M-16 and the helos came down and took aboard the living and the dead.
“So?” Aussie yelled as the Pave Low rose with the dawn, heading away from the tall but distinctly gray-white trail of wolf dung smoke. “What’s all this business with me wolf shit?”
“Wait till we get a few hundred feet,” Brentwood said, his face still grim after the loss of the crew from the Pave Low, which they had blown to pieces with a C charge before takeoff, denying any of the helo’s weapons or electronics to the ChiComs.
“Why?” Aussie began, and then he and all the other commandos saw it: All along the front for as far as they could see, spirals of the same grayish smoke could be seen rising straight, high into the dawning sky.
“What’s the idea?” Salvini asked.
“It’s the traditional Chinese signal,” Brentwood explained. “For some reason the chemical composition of wolf dung makes it burn thick and go straight up — straighter than any other kind of smoke.”
“Yeah, but signal for what?” Salvini pressed.
“The wall — China’s defenses being breached.”
“I get it,” Aussie said. “Cheng and his buddies can’t get squat info from his radios, so with the smoke signal they’ll think we’ve broken through all along the line.”
“We have,” Brentwood said. “But what they don’t know is for how long. Hopefully Cheng’ll be rushing fresh troops — all his reserves — up north instead of westward.”
“While Freeman’s armored spearhead heads south,” Salvini said. “Brilliant. Meanwhile, we go back to base. I love it.”
“That crafty bastard!” Aussie said, and everyone knew he meant Freeman. The wolf dung smoke trails could be seen along the entire length of the Black Dragon River by the Chinese reserve battalions miles back from the front but already moving northward to counter what they saw as the enemy’s penetration of the Black Dragon line.
Cheng was not completely sold on the reports — slow in coming because of the radio jamming — that the wall had been breached everywhere. He guessed there must be some copycat panic down the line. But what sold him was the intelligence reports further south of the front amid the villages and towns along the few roads that snaked through the Manchurian vastness.
While all ChiCom military targets — at least those not camouflaged well enough — had been hit, not one single town or village on the sparse roadways through Manchuria had been destroyed. This was not, Cheng believed, because of any humanitarian gesture on Freeman’s part not to bomb civilians, but because bombed-out villages and towns in such mountainous terrain caused so much rubble on the narrow roads that it would be a major impediment to any armored columns snaking through the steep valleys, and indeed would bunch up armor, making it much more vulnerable to attack by small guerrilla bands.
Ironically, while the high columns of wolf dung smoke had alarmed other commanders along the line, it was the care that Freeman had taken not to create such rubble rather than the wolf dung that convinced Cheng it was an all-out deep attack by Freeman’s army against China’s northern defenses.
By now Freeman’s armor was well underway west and south of Manzhouli, his M1A1 tanks leading, his Bradley infantry vehicles following, at times on the flank. Reports kept coming in to Freeman that Chinese troops were still taking the bait and on the move northward in Manchuria from Shenyang toward the Amur or Black Dragon River.