With a thoroughness for which the Japanese were known in their industrial policy, the JDF battalion organized itself promptly into a classic perimeter defense, with the JDF commander true to his U.N. mission playing no favorites — both the western and eastern sectors of the perimeter that fronted American garrisons no less manned than the southern side of the five-by-ten-mile sector where JDF troops looked across the Amur River into Manchuria.
The Japanese were determined to look and to be as professional as possible — after all, this was only the second time Japanese troops had been abroad since World War II over sixty years ago, and the nation would be watching, expecting them to meet the highest standards. Japanese pride was not about to be embarrassed by any attack — even by Chinese bandits who in this sparsely populated region of Manchuria could come down from the high country across the river and conceivably launch a raid across the river on the Siberian villages. In fact Beijing had warned the U.N. central command before the Japanese Defense Force had even been despatched that it, Beijing, could not be responsible for the actions of Chinese border brigands. The admission constituted something of a loss of face for Beijing, apparently conceding that part of the People’s Republic was not completely under Communist control. But Beijing’s caution about brigands was seen by Washington as a genuine effort to forestall any possible misunderstanding should a local warlord and his followers forge over the river and cause the PLA to be blamed for violating the cease-fire.
Freeman, on the other hand, dismissed Cheng’s plea as “Beijing bullshit!” claiming that it was a “goddamned façade, a ready-made excuse for the PLA to hit and run wherever they like and then blame it on some bandit.”
“Why would they bother?” he was asked by Washington.
“Because it’s a hidden message to us that says, ‘You boys want a U.N. line, fine — but be prepared to lose men in “border raids” over the next twenty years.’ Same as Korea. There are still people in the U.S. who don’t know we lose men every year in ‘incidents’ on that damn Thirty-eighth parallel. This ‘bandit’ cover is Beijing’s way of reminding us that we’re stuck here to garrison the U.N. line and to pay for it — a trace ten times longer than the Korean DMZ — for the next twenty years.”
“Douglas,” they said in Washington, “is just looking for a fight. Get him out of here. Fast.”
And now he was sitting with Marjorie on the eve of April the twenty-fourth, watching the JDF set up camp on the U.N. line. At one point he could do nothing more than shake his head in disgust and disbelief. CBN was already interviewing members of the Japanese contingent.
“Beautiful,” Freeman said, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “Look at the background for this interview — you could plot their sections, strong points, and battle positions to the nearest yard. CBN’s giving us an aerial shot now — Jesus! Why don’t they just send the plans to Beijing and be done with it?”
“Well,” Marjorie said — she’d long given up on Douglas’s blasphemy—”I’m sure it will all work out for the best, Douglas.” She was an “all-for-the-best” lady — she could have turned the battle for Hue into an “all-for-the-best” event. She was getting on his nerves, and he was trying to think of a way of telling her that from now on he had decided to stay up at Fort Ord. He figured his duty to his dead wife, to give Marjorie a chance to “look after you,” had long been fulfilled. Though he was watching an earlier taped newscast of the JDF near Poyarkovo, it was already dawn there and a phone call from a sympathetic colleague at the Pentagon informed him that Poyarkovo was as of this moment under heavy attack — U.S. fire-support teams being rushed from both the western and eastern sectors of the rectangle to try to help the JDF hold. The forward slope nearest the Amur, or Black Dragon, as the Chinese called it, was already under heavy 81mm mortar assault.
By the time the Americans got there it was too late for the JDF to regroup and retake the forward slope they’d lost. Now they had to fell back along a five-point reverse slope defense behind a crest on the northern side of the river, the forward half of the five-by-ten-mile area already lost to waves of what were being called “Chinese irregulars.”
The Japanese were in shock. While they had quickly placed LAW antitank teams and machine gun nests on either flank, producing a withering fire, a tank ditch as the TRP — target reference point — the Chinese, none of whom were dressed in army garb, were running through the mine fields. As one man fell, another used him as a stepping stone just as the Russians had done at Stalingrad. And Chinese were already using bamboo ladders to cross the eight-foot-wide by five-foot-deep antitank ditch only yards below the crest. But where had so many Chinese come from, taking the JDF by complete surprise?
That question was about to be answered by a reconnaissance flight immediately ordered by Colonel Dick Norton.
A Stealth F-117B fighter was at Sapporo Airfield in northern Japan, but a hairline fracture had been found in its RAM (radar-absorbing material) contoured intake grid. The concern was that the fracture, under the enormous stresses imposed on the aircraft, might suddenly become something much larger, possibly radiating out to the wing. In any event this was the reason that the carrier USS Salt Lake City in the East China Sea was contacted and ordered to launch immediately a photo reconnaissance of the Poyarkovo area.
Though by now the F-4 Phantom, the wondrous fighter of an earlier age, was all but extinct, relegated to a secondary role as a quick photo recon aircraft, it was at this moment exactly the right plane in the right place and so was given the mission to find out just how much ChiCom activity was going on along the sector of the U.N. line now under attack and how many troops were massing on the southern bank of the Amur, in Manchuria. Was this a local warlord action or merely a tactical probe for something much larger?
As the carrier steamed into a saffron China dawn, twin ribbons of steam rose and broke ghostlike from its angled deck catapults, and the deck director, a yellow dot against the wide gray expanse of sea and sky, watched as the F-4’s deck crew swung into action. Suddenly the plane had the most important mission aboard, a return to its old glory, the Phantom’s twin nose wheels rising slightly as they passed up over the shuttle, the catapult bridle looped over the shuttle and onto the two wing forgings.
The bridle’s slack was taken up, the cable now looking like a huge black rubber band stretched beneath the nose strut, which now rose to full flight attitude, and the wings. On deck the bitterly cold wind whistled about the plane’s canopy, kerosene fumes mixing with the salt air of the sea, the pilot watching the deck director raise his hands, turning them as if he were securing twin-valve wheels aboard a submarine. It was the signal to go to full afterburner thrust. The howl of the notoriously smoky J79 engine became a banshee scream, the fighter straining full against the bridle.
The yellow-jacketed deck officer dropped to one knee, right arm extended sideways, pointing seaward out over the deck. His action was immediately followed by the Phantom, as the plane, its pilot slammed back hard against the Martin-Baker ejector seat, was hurled aloft in 2.4 seconds in less than a two-hundred-foot run. The Phantom banked sharply to the left and headed toward the blurred squiggle of gray that was the Manchurian coast.