To be on the safe side Cheng had kept his armor well back behind the rail line spur at Orgon Tal, to be deployed only should any of Freeman’s armor break through the artillery-pounded corridor. To further bolster his confidence there was the fact that his T-59 and T-72 main battle tanks outnumbered the Americans four to one and, as he’d told his superiors, were manned by China’s best, not by demoralized Iraqis.
“What about the prisoners?” the major asked Cheng. “Shoot them?”
Cheng shrugged. “Now or later. But I’d prefer the Americans to do it.”
The major was puzzled.
“Keep them in the cages for now,” Cheng instructed.
“Yes, General.”
Cheng, they said, had a use for everything. In a winter campaign against the Siberians many years ago he had used the frozen corpses of his own dead strapped together to make up sleds so as to pull more ammunition and supplies across the frozen lakes and through the snow.
Reports were coming in that some of the light American fast-attack vehicles were in advance of the tanks. Saggers had hit three or four, but they were still coming. Cheng was perplexed. It was so un-American — why on earth was Freeman sacrificing relatively lightly armed vehicles, compared to the M1 tanks he had, at the front? Another one of Freeman’s feints perhaps?
“But if these ‘buggies’ get through to the guns,” the major suggested worriedly, “they could cause havoc with our gun crews.”
Cheng looked at the major as if he were mad. “Our Pepperpots would blow them to kingdom come before they got anywhere near us, Major.”
“If we could see them,” the major began, “and if—”
“All right,” Cheng said, “we’ll surprise them.” With that he gave the order for all tunnel troops to exit — to forget about the tanks, which could be dealt with by the big guns. To exit and make their priority targets the American “dune buggies.”
Then, one of the American FAV drivers said, it was as if God had suddenly intervened — on the Chinese side. The storm suddenly began to abate, making the ChiCom infantry and the American FAVs more visible and allowing the dish antennae of the ChiComs’ radar to start picking up some of the FAVs.
“Take them out!” Brentwood yelled above the storm into the FAV radio net. “Fast!”
With needles quivering on their 4,400 rpm dials, the Chenowth Fast Attack Vehicles, souped up to hit seventy-five miles per hour in battle conditions, hadn’t been seen before by the Chinese troops.
The FAVs had extraordinary firepower, with an M-60 machine gun fore and aft and assault rifle for each of the three men strapped into the vehicle, a 40mm grenade launcher, laser target designator, and an antitank missile launcher with steel-webbed side compartments for casualty litters if necessary or for extra ammo and boxes of explosive. They were moving much fester than the tanks. The air-cooled FAV engine was well muffled and rear mounted, its cooling fins low down so that its infrared signature would be low to the enemy ahead.
The Chinese poured out of the tunnels, and for the first time in the newspaper reports the phrase “swarms of attacking Chinese” was appropriate. There was no doubt that the ChiComs, with their Red Arrow antitank missiles and machine guns, would take out at least a third of the 70 FAVs, others already starting to be attacked by saturation mortar bombardments. The buggies were often picked up off the ground by the concussion only to disappear in explosions marked by oily orange smudges in a rain of dust. It was not known whether the Chinese would have time to stop all of them.
One FAV came up over a rise at forty miles an hour, and ran down five ChiComs just as they were emerging from their tunnel exit. Another FAV — its engine hit, stalled in the sand — became a magnet to a platoon of ChiCom infantry, like ants encircling a piece of meat. The three Americans were cut to pieces, but there was no longer a Chinese platoon of thirty men — only half of them remained to claim a passing victory, and several of these were fatally wounded.
Back further, an M1 Abrams stopped, its front right track spinning off under the blow of shrapnel from a Pepperpot high-explosive shell hitting the earth only yards away. Then coming from the south through the gaps in their artillery at the Chinese end of the corridor came several companies of ChiCom motorcycle- and machine-gun-mounted sidecars, every fifth motorcycle and sidecar unit carrying a Sagger.
“One o’clock in the dip!” Aussie yelled to Brentwood, his face creasing momentarily from the sickly sweet stench of burning bodies. But even as he spoke he felt the hot rush of superheated air from the TOW’s backblast. The pinion occupants of the motorcycle and sidecar unit were firing frantically and in the sidecar another ChiCom was working the toggle on his Sagger when the motorcyclist, still on his bike, was lifted skyward, and, in a somersault, was aflame, the sidecar no more than a hunk of burning metal sixty yards away from where the burning motorcyclist landed and broke in half, his body shriveled black, pieces of him peeling off in the high wind like sheets of burned newspaper.
Driving with his left hand, his right firing his assault rifle, which he had braced against the passenger’s side M-60, Aussie was heading for another motorbike and sidecar coming straight at him, the sidecar machine gunner having only a ninety degree front-to-left arc in which to fire, otherwise there was danger of him shooting his driver. Aussie pulled the FAV hard left, giving the machine gunner on the sidecar even less of an angle as Brentwood popped off four 40mm grenades from their launcher. None actually hit the motorcycle and sidecar unit, but the shrapnel cut into the motorcyclist, who looked down, saw blood, and for a second lost concentration. The front wheel of the bike jackknifed, and they were over, the sidecar man crawling out, drawing his sidearm.
“Keep going!” Brentwood shouted, conscious that it was still a race to the Chinese guns before the storm cleared enough for the ChiCom radars to be effective against the M1A1s. There was the zing of small-arms fire off the “cage” of the FAV’s roll bar frame.
“Cheeky bastard!” Aussie yelled. “I oughta go back and run ‘im over.”
“Keep going!” Brentwood shouted.
“Yes, sir! Righto, sir!” Already everything was mustard looking, visibility twenty feet maximum. “Jesus, we’re doing sixty!”
“Faster!”
The sand-blasted desert was now taking on the aspect of a moonscape caused by everything from the explosions of the big PLA 160mm, 100mm, and the 82mm mortars to the huge Pepperpots, their HE shells screaming overhead louder than normal because of sand blown onto hot metal, the sense of a hot moonscape added to by the explosions of SAS/D TOW missiles, though Brentwood could be heard yelling above the sandstorm on the FAV radio network that they should conserve TOW rounds for heavier targets. He meant PLA armored personnel carriers type 82 and multiple rocket launchers mounted atop type-85 APCs, as well as the Hongjian 8 missiles carried by the type-531 APCs.