“I can hear them,” the TOW operator said.
“Can you see ‘em?” Aussie said, tightening the last bolt on the spare tire while Brentwood finished putting the emergency patch on the flat.
“No.”
“Well that’s no bloody use, is it? I can hear them, too. Every fucker within a mile can hear—” They intuitively ducked, the sound of ordnance passing overhead with that peculiar chuffing sound like a locomotive shunting at high speed made louder by the air duck with particles of sand. They quickly put the repaired tire back on the spare rack.
“Right! We’re off,” Aussie said. “I’m the first one to spot a chow. Five to one on — any takers?”
David Brentwood said nothing, peering hard through goggles, the sound of sand striking them like fine hail. The TOW operator took Aussie’s bet, for he could already see two blurs — too big to be motorcycle and sidecar units. “You’re on,” the TOW operator said. “Ten bucks.”
“Done!” Aussie said.
“I see two of ‘em — eleven o’clock.”
“What?” Aussie said, but now Brentwood could see them, too, and flecks of tracers told him the blur, whether it was an MBT or not, was firing at them.
Aussie swung hard left into a dip between two small dunes and stopped, the engine in high rev.
“You ready, TOW?”
“Ready — go!”
“Never mind,” Brentwood interjected. “Go out to the flank. It’s the radar we want.”
Swearing, Aussie dropped it into low gear and followed the line of the gully away from the tanks — or perhaps they had been APCs. “TOW,” Aussie said. “You saw those tanks or whatever they are before you made the bet?”
“No.”
“Lying bastard. Hope your prick falls off.”
“Thanks, Aussie, but you owe me fifty bucks.”
They followed the line of the gully for two hundred yards or so, then came up again. There was a sudden break in the dust storm — or was it the end of the storm? Then they came across a terrifying sight. From the left to right, as far as they could see, a brigade of MBTs — between 150 and 200 tanks, T-52s and T-72s — was making its way down an enormous dune in the strange half light, the tanks looking like a plague of huge, dark moles crawling down some enormous flesh-colored back. There was a streak of light and a more diffuse backblast from a TOW missile, fired from a FAV somewhere to Aussie’s left, and a flash of red and yellow dame as the TOW round hit a T-59.
Brentwood was furious and on the phone network within seconds, telling the FAVs to get out to the flanks. To forget the tanks. “I say again, forget the tanks—”
His voice was all but drowned out by fire from the forward five tanks in the column, which were breaking up, going into ajin ru you fang tixin rong — an echelon right — wherein each tank of the five-tank platoon broke off so that the lead tank and two others slightly behind him and to the right had their 100mm, and in some of the up-gunned tanks, their 125mm, guns pointed to the front, the two rearmost tanks having their guns pointed to the right.
Almost at the same time another one of the columns-there were fifteen tanks in it — all began moving to echelon right. It was the ChiComs’ weakest point, a legacy of having been trained, like the ChiCom fighter pilots, by the Russians, who were wedded to the doctrine of central control, allowing individual commanders little flexibility unless central control released them. Of course central control was necessary to some degree in the U.S. army as well, but the release to individual decisions as in Freeman’s leaving the FAV tactics up to Brentwood and the other FAV crews was not as freely given to the ChiComs. And the degree to which Cheng and Freeman would maintain central command would become crucial if it came to a night fight. Should this occur, Cheng knew, the Americans were better, with more experience in freeing individual tank commanders to exercise tactical flexibility, giving the Americans the edge when it came to tanks in an eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation.
“Fixing a flat,” the FAV just chewed out by Brentwood reported. “Couldn’t avoid firing a TOW…were taking tracers.” Now Aussie swung the FAV up out of the gully to the sharp, sandy edge, and he could no longer see the tanks, the weather closing in again as they heard the clanking of the ChiCom armor far off to the left.
Brentwood requested an update on the radar vector the Kiowas were plotting. It was the same; the mobile unit hadn’t moved. And Brentwood’s Magellan hand-held global positioning system put them only three miles away. At thirty miles per hour, a near-reckless speed, given the fifteen-to-twenty-yard visibility, it was estimated the FAVs on both flanks skirting the Chinese armor should reach the radar site within ten minutes — unless it moved again,
The motorcycle sidecar unit came out of nowhere — from behind them. The TOW operator saw it at the last minute, swung his weapon around on the swivel mount, but the burst from the ChiCom’s 7.62mm PKS hit him in the chest and face, blood pouring out of him. Aussie quickly turned left, his foot to the floor. The sidecar unit couldn’t turn fast enough, and Aussie hit it full on, the FAV’s double crash bar now bent back to the lights, the Chinese motorcyclist flung off his machine and Brentwood mowing him down then turning the weapon on the upturned sidecar, giving it two good bursts, the Chinese gunner inside screaming over the rattle of the ricocheting bullets.
Aussie and David Brentwood cut the TOW operator out of his harness, snapped off his dog tags, and went on.
“I’ll blow that fucking radar so fucking high—”
“If we find it,” Brentwood said, adding hopefully, “Should be there in ten minutes.”
In those ten minutes Admiral Kuang was receiving the message from his forward AWACS — the airborne warning and control systems — that a hurricane, force five, more powerful than those that had hit southern Florida and the Hawaiian Islands in ‘92, with winds in excess of 190 miles an hour, born in the Marianas, was now heading for Taiwan and the hundred-mile-wide strait between it and the Chinese mainland. Reluctantly, with great sadness, he ordered the fleet to turn about and head back toward Taiwan in order to meet the hurricane head-on and hopefully ride it out. As practical a man as he was, Kuang was also deeply religious, and he saw in the hurricane’s attack a clear message that the hurricane was saving him from a crushing defeat — a clear warning to wait for a more propitious time. In any case he couldn’t possibly make landings in a hurricane.
“Aussie!” a cry came from somewhere in front. It was Salvini, Choir, and the news reporter who was standing up in the stilled FAV like a mummy frozen to the roll bar. Beside them were two ChiCom motorcycle/sidecar units looking the worse for their collision with the FAV. “Had a prang, I see!” Aussie said cheekily.
“Yeah,” Salvini answered. “Both hit me at once.”
“Ah, bullshit!” Aussie said. “You guys from Brooklyn can’t drive a fucking grocery cart. Shoulda outmaneuvered -em.”
“Like we did,” David added, looking at Aussie. “The one we hit.”
“That was on purpose,” Aussie responded. “Okay, hop in. Choir, you with the TOW. Your mate”—he meant me reporter—”in the back, too.”
“What about me?” Salvini asked.
“You can fucking hoof it, Sal. Only a couple of miles.”
“Fuck you!” Sal said. “I’ll ride in one of your side litter trays.”
“Where’s your TOW, man?” Choir asked.
“Bought it a way back,” Aussie said, his tone losing its jocular vulgarity as he looked ahead, the visibility up to forty yards, asking David for a GPS vector to the target.