The fear in the reporter’s eyes was hidden by the goggles.
“We’ll be testing for mines,” Choir informed him, having to shout over the FAV’s engine.
“Testing?”
“Aye. Freeman doesn’t know if the chinks ‘ave mined the corridor as well as tunneled it. We doubt it — but the ChiComs sure as hell are having mines dropped on the dunes now that Cheng thinks we’re taking the dune route on our left.”
“Until he sees us,” the reporter said, “coming back to the corridor.”
“Aye,” Choir said. “But he’ll be getting reports of our tanks over by the dunes and he’ll have to decide where he wants to concentrate his strength.”
“Why can’t the tanks test the mines?”
“Don’t be daft, laddie. M-1 costs four million dollars. Fast attack vehicle comes in around twenty-five thousand.”
“Thanks,” the reporter shouted. “That makes me feel better.”
“Oh it’s a fine dune buggy is the FAV. Your readers might be interested,” Choir said. “Thirteen and a half feet long, five foot high, six foot wide — tubular steel frame, can negotiate almost any terrain, and faster than a bloody tank. Seventy mile an hour attack speed, boyo.”
“Is there someplace I can get off?” the reporter asked.
Choir smacked the newsman good-naturedly on the shoulder. “Ah — you’re a cool one, boyo. Stand-up comic we have here, lads!” But Salvini and his machine gunner couldn’t hear him in the wild banshee sound of the storm.
The next minute they were airborne at fifty miles an hour, the reporter’s legs off the steel floor, his knuckles bone white on the roll bar. Choir pulled him down. Salvini saw a blur on the enormous blur of the mustard-colored dust storm. The blur seemed to be turning, or rather spinning, and looked about the size of a baseball.
“Sagger!” he yelled, yanking the wheel hard left while his codriver, manning a.50 machine gun, fired in the general direction of the Sagger. He couldn’t see the man firing it but knew that the operator had to remain in line of sight of his target in order to guide the Russian-made antitank weapon to its target. And the U.S. soldiers had learned from POWs taken before the cease-fire that machine gun fire coming in your direction had a way of unsettling your concentration on the Sagger control toggle. The Sagger kept coming toward them, and Salvini turned hard right. The Sagger couldn’t make the acute turn and passed them by.
A quarter mile on, Brentwood saw another Sagger’s back-flash. “Two o’clock!” he yelled at Aussie. “A hundred yards.” The FAV was doing fifty-five, and Aussie pressed his boot to the floor. The two-man Sagger team, though they needed only one man to guide the missile, was scrambling back into the manhole. The first one made it. Aussie braked hard to prevent engine damage and hit the second man full on, rolling him under the car, fast like a big, soft log. Aussie backed up to make sure and David fired a long burst into the manhole cover, its sandy wooden top flying apart like cardboard, then he dropped in two grenades, and they were off again. “No mines so far!” Aussie told Brentwood.
“No,” Brentwood said, “but we’re only five miles into the corridor — another bumpy seven straight ahead.” The next two miles were not the hard-baked semidesert terrain that they’d been bouncing through so far but a mile-wide spill of sand, and in this the FAV was superb, up one side of a dune and down the other in its natural element. Aussie’s FAV was still in the lead when he slowed and pointed off to his left. “TMD.”
“Shit!” the response came from the usually moderate Brentwood.
“What is it?” the SAS/D man behind them on the TOW asked.
“Wooden-cased mine — bloody worst.”
“So metal detectors wouldn’t pick it up,” the man on the TOW said.
“Right,” Aussie answered, “and we’re only running on seventy pounds overpressure. Which is why we mightn’t have set off any — if we ran over them. They could be the TMD-B4 type. Only go off under a main battle tank — won’t waste them as antipersonnel. Need something really heavy to detonate them. A buggy probably wouldn’t do it.”
“How can we be sure?” David said.
“Everybody out,” Aussie said.
“I’m in command here, Aussie. I’ll do it,” Brentwood said.
“Fuck off!”
“This is an order,” Brentwood said. “Get unbuckled. I’ll drive.”
“I’m the fucking driver. I’m not moving till you’re out.”
David looked up at the man on the TOW. “How about you, Stansfield?”
“I can’t get out,” he lied. “Something’s wrong with my buckle.”
“You stupid bastards,” Aussie said. “All right, hang on!” With that, Aussie drove through the howling, spitting wind directly at the 28cm wooden-cased mine. As he saw it looming up he shifted uneasily in his seat and, driving over it, cupped his left hand under his genitals and closed his eyes. Nothing happened. He put the FAV quickly in reverse and ran over it again. Then he pulled the pin on a five-second grenade, dropped it by the mine, and put his boot to the accelerator. A hundred feet from it the explosion sent out a shock wave through the sand that was like a ripple through water.
“Well,” Aussie said, “we know they’re not dummies. Bastards are genuine enough. But they won’t be set off by a FAV’s overpressure. That’s something anyway.”
Brentwood grabbed the radio phone to tell Freeman he could again have to slow his advance to single file or as many files as he had flail tanks that could go ahead, whipping the ground with their heavy chains to detonate the mines. He asked Freeman what they should do next, though he and Aussie and everyone on the FAV radio network guessed it already.
“Boys,” Freeman said to tank crew and FAV alike, “we’re slowing down and our tanks’ll have to get behind as many flails as we can. Cheng’s going to have time to move his guns across from the right flank, maybe directly in front of us. There’s a ridge at the end of the corridor where it narrows. They’ll use this high ground for their artillery. M1’s range is damn good at three thousand meters but it can’t overtake their thirteen-mile-range artillery. You boys in the FAVs are going to go in ahead of us.”
“Holy cow!” a FAV driver said. “If an M1 tank can’t outshoot Cheng’s artillery, how the hell are we going to?”
Freeman knew well enough they were in a tight spot, made worse by the lack of attention paid to detail by his new logistics whiz, Whitely. Up in Chita Whitely had been through every detail, from the size of every bolt to water decontamination pills, but he’d assumed that the rail gauge of the Trans-Siberian, which the Americans had to use when supplies were unloaded at the port of Rudnaya Pristan, would be the same as that of China. It wasn’t. And to change troops and their equipment from one train to another was infinitely more complex than the average person realized or could ever imagine. To move tanks, especially those fitted with flails and so vitally needed down south, was a logistical nightmare. Whitely had no contingency plan for how to get U.S. cargo moved quickly from Trans-Siberian gauge to Chinese gauge. Freeman had fired him as soon as he’d found out, but that didn’t change the situation.
What would change it was Freeman’s knowledge of the minutiae of war that yet again would contribute to the Freeman legend. It was nothing mysterious, and quite simple once explained to any soldier, or civilian for that matter, and it had to do with angles of fire.
“Now listen up,” Freeman said to the FAVs. “Quickly now! We don’t know exactly where Cheng’s guns are at the moment.”
Freeman had no way of knowing it in the blinding hell of the Gobi storm, but Cheng was about to let him know with the biggest artillery salvo since the Sino-Soviet wars of the sixties. It would be the opening barrage — over two hundred guns — of what was to become known as the battle for Orgon Tal, or “Big Dick” as it was known to Freeman’s Second Army, the tiny settlement of Orgon Tal being near the railhead Freeman hoped to capture midcorridor and so sever Cheng’s supply line from the east.