Cheng’s strategy owed something not only to the Vietnamese, whom the Chinese detested, but also to the Egyptians’ highly successful foxhole strategy against the Israeli tanks in the Yom Kippur War. And he had elaborated upon it, not with a tactic from Sun Tzu but from the Turks of World War I.
There had been no way to gain satellite reconnaissance during the dust storms that Cheng had used as cover during the weeks of the cease-fire. No way for U.S., or any other satellites for that matter, to discover that beneath this corridor, the most obvious funnel to the south, he, General Cheng, had used only a fraction of his three-million-strong army to dig a vast interlocking system of reinforced tunnels.
Unlike the Viet Cong tunnels, they were not elaborately built insofar as they were not elbow- or S-shaped, nor did they have the misleading cul-de-sacs or sudden angular changes in elevation that in the darkness might trip any enemy brave or foolish enough to descend into them. Rather it was a honeycomb of tunnels that led to hundreds of foxholes easily concealed and manned by an elite infantry division from Shenyang’s military district Group Army 40 and some elements of the infamous Beijing military district’s Thirty-eighth Army — of Tiananmen Massacre fame. After firing an antitank missile from one foxhole, a PLA team could quickly remove itself to another, and in most cases the angle of depression of the M-1 or M-60 tank’s big gun would be useless against them at any close range — only the tank’s machine guns could effectively come into play.
“Son of a bitch!” commented the pilot of one of Freeman’s Kiowa scout choppers, which had come low behind the protection of boulders the size of bungalows. “Can’t see a friggin’ thing.” The chopper’s copilot pushed the button that raised the periscopelike “two-eyed” mast-mounted sight still higher above the rock.
Still nothing.
They were in the fog of war wherein even the best commanders become confused by a lack of information or too much conflicting information. The chopper went higher, but they still couldn’t see through the dust, the chopper’s intake filters in danger of clogging, when they began getting radar blips, which were duly reported to Freeman but which could not be identified. Freeman ordered the Kiowas forward, and already mine-detector equipment and antimine blades and flails on mine-clearing tanks were called up from the columns as he ordered them to go into single file formation.
No mines were reported, but one Kiowa came in with a report of dozens of what its crew believed, but could not be sure, were Red Arrow 8 antitank-missile-tracked vehicles. A small screen in Freeman’s command tank selected the Red Arrow from the computer’s threat library, telling him that the vehicle had an effective range of three thousand meters, a rate of fire of two to three missiles per minute — warhead diameter 120mm. Hit probability greater than 90 percent. But they were still a good six thousand meters off.
Then there came SITREPs — situation reports — from another Kiowa of what they thought were T-69II main battle tanks equipped with laser range finder, though the dust should render the laser useless in the storm.
Freeman realized that the Chinese probably could not see him either, but the noise of the Kiowa scouts alone must certainly have alerted the Chinese to his presence. No doubt Cheng, like the Americans, wasn’t going to fight blind — it would be a matter of who would be seen first by whom, and Freeman’s tanks could outreach the T-59s by three thousand yards and the T-72s by two hundred yards as they had in the Iraqi desert, standing back beyond the range of the enemy’s T-59 105mm and T-72 125mm cannon while using their own 120mm to deadly effect.
But in the midst of the blinding storm that was still not anywhere near its zenith, Freeman was haunted again by what had befallen his tanks along the Never-Skovorodino road earlier in the war when Second Army had fallen into a trap baited in the taiga by dummy tanks, inflatables that looked like the real thing from only a hundred yards away, and with cheap oil lanterns in each to give off enough heat for an infrared signature; when he’d sent in the Apaches, the Siberians had unleashed their VAMs — vertical area mines— whose sensors were triggered by the sound of the approaching rotors and lifted off, spewing up submunitions that cost him a third of his Apaches and their crews.
“Slow to ten miles per hour,” he told the driver.
“Slow to ten.”
Sitting there in the turret, the gunner seated just below him, the loader to his left and the driver well forward beyond the turret wall, down under the 120mm gun and coaxial 12.6mm machine gun, Freeman wanted to send Apaches forward, but the dust storm was so thick it was unlikely they’d get a clear shot at anything.
Besides, if they were so close to the Chinese, only a matter of a mile or so, there was always the danger of a blue on blue when you could easily mistake the outline of one of your own tanks for one of theirs. Any visible insignia, in this case a black arrow stenciled on the M1A1’s cupola sides, front and back, would be almost impossible to see in the sandstorm. He could not afford to go ahead blind and so ordered several Apaches in to try to find and blast a hole through the Chinese armor, which was still nowhere in sight.
The air, however, was now thick with smoke as well as dust, the smoke additive just one of the items purchased through La Roche Chemicals and something Cheng had paid particular attention to after remembering Schwarzkopf’s boasting about how the Americans could see through the dust much better than the T-59s.
“But we saw through this crap in Iraq,” Freeman said.
“Not the same crap, General,” the gunner replied. “They’ve somehow made it so thick that we just can’t pick up anything — infrared or laser. We’re running blind.”
“Well so are they,” Freeman said, but he was right only up to a point. The flail tanks had as yet reported no mines. There was a string of profanity followed by “Back up! Back up!”
“What the fuck—”
Over his radio network Freeman could hear the gas turbine of a flail tank roaring.
“We struck some kind of berm or—”
The next minute Freeman’s ears were ringing. He couldn’t hear anything for the explosion transmitted by the radio of the flail tank before it went dead. In an instant Freeman made his decision, ordering the entire armored column, which prudence had just made him form a single file, to withdraw. “Don’t deviate a millimeter from your incoming tracks!” he ordered.
Of course this was impossible, as most of the tank tracks were blown over or already half filled with sand, but each tank commander and driver knew what he meant: turn your tank on its own radius and get the hell out of here.
The full realization of what might have happened had all his tanks been aligned for a frontal attack now hit him — that every one, or certainly most, would have suffered the fate of the flail tank that had crashed through what appeared to be some kind of tank trap, the chains from the flail tank digging up the sand deep enough before it crashed through in what Freeman now realized might be a tunnel-strewn corridor, each one of them allowing two-man RPG 40mm type-69 antitank grenade launcher teams to take on his tanks.
He was wrong — the tunnel had in fact been dug so as to bear the weight of the M1, not to collapse as had happened in this case, and to allow access warrens for RPG teams.
During Freeman’s hasty retreat, several more tanks were lost to teams who, realizing the American column had failed to take the bait at the last minute, had come out of their holes prematurely, most of them being killed at such close range by the M1s’.50 Brownings. Nevertheless two of Freeman’s tanks were lost to RPG teams, the tanks’ four-man crews cut to pieces by the Chinese as they tried to exit the burning vehicles. At the very least the Chinese had mauled Freeman’s column and caused him to give the uncharacteristic order to pull back. Cheng was furious that Freeman had not come on in a frontal battle charge, but the storm had brought caution to the Americans’ tactics and confusion to both sides.