There were murmurs of surprise running through the hall by those who hadn’t heard of the kidnapping already.
“But,” Freeman said, “I propose a reconnaissance party along the Orgon Tal trace this evening to demonstrate our displeasure. A hundred tanks,” Freeman added.
Norton leaned forward from the table and whispered, “General, how are you going to explain a reconnaissance of one hundred tanks?”
Freeman was still looking out at the sea of faces, determined to at least maintain, if he could not lift, his men’s morale, and he answered Norton without turning his face toward his aide. “It’ll be a ‘reconnaissance in force.’ “
Norton sat back. “Washington’ll have a baby if they find out, General.”
“Dick, we have to show these bozos that violation of the truce won’t be tolerated. Washington won’t let me go across the damn river, then it’s incumbent upon me to do a bit of saber rattling. We’re not here to dance. They’re damn lucky it wasn’t an American citizen, otherwise I’d be at war with the sons of bitches right now.”
“Remember, General,” Norton pressed, trying not to be too conspicuous up on the dais, “our reserves of M1A3s up north won’t be down here for another five days.”
“Agreed. That’s why it’s important to show up with a hundred tanks. Otherwise Cheng’ll think we’re frightened — that they can come across the trace and get away with it.”
Norton sat back. He’d done his best. And he had to admit the general had a point. Any sign of backing down, of losing face in front of Asian commanders, could be interpreted as weakness. Anyway, Norton guessed, push probably wouldn’t come to shove, as the Chinese would probably not see the American tanks in the rain-slashed skies of the typhoon that was about to strike. Already he, like all those in the Quonset, could hear the drumming of the rain on the roof.
Cheng saw the tanks very well, for he’d posted forward observation points with infrared binoculars along the trace near Orgon Tal where the western end of the front came to a sharp V like the end of a check mark, the right hand or tail of the check mark representing the continuation of the front northeastward up into Manchuria. He knew the American was bluffing — making out he had more tanks than he did. Well, the commander of the People’s Liberation Army had no intention whatsoever of waiting till Freeman’s M1A3 reinforcements reached him from the north. And now the Public Security Bureau had advised him from Lhasa that the Americans must now know about the ICBMs from the Dutchman’s message. Cheng could not afford to wait any longer — to do so would be militarily imprudent as well as politically inexcusable. He told Nie, and the chairman agreed. Cheng gave the order to attack — a preemptive strike.
The trace east of Orgon Tal was a hundred-foot, mile-long ridge running southeast to northeast where the trace arced up from the V of the check mark-shaped truce line, the Americans on the northern side, the PLA to the south. It was hard, stony gravel that further north a few miles, to where the bulk of the Americans were, turned from stony ground to sand dunes. To the south of the trace the stony ground led back up for two hundred miles into the bush-covered mountains that, along with the dragon-humped Great Wall, formed a protective fastness around Beijing.
The typhoon’s tai feng, or great wind, at over one hundred miles per hour, was not yet upon the area around Orgon Tal, though already gusts of up to forty and fifty miles per hour were heralding what was in store unless the typhoon lost and exhausted much of its power after hitting land coming from the east out of Bo Hai.
Freeman’s tanks went ahead in echelons of five in spear-tip formation, the two tanks furthest back acting as wing-men would in a fighter formation, paying particular attention to the flanks while the three tanks up ahead concentrated more, though not exclusively, on the trace now coming up and on the lead tanks’ right-hand side. Inside the lead tank, its commander, Lieutenant R. T. Roper from Philadelphia, wondered if this would be it. The first sign, or rather glimpse, of the enemy trenches way over on the other side of the trace was indicated by coils of razor wire, obscuring any view of the troops, though the Chinese, probably the forward artillery observers, clearly had binoculars on the first tank of Freeman’s “reconnaissance in force.”
Here and there the Americans, primarily the loader and the tank commander, could spot the muzzle of a machine gun where there was a gap in the wire, and sandbagged outposts beyond that were probably heavy 81mm mortar nests. The men in the tanks were confident and with good reason. They were in one of the best, if not the best, main battle tanks in the world. The M1A1 main gun was an M256 120mm smooth bore with one coaxially mounted 7.62mm machine gun, the other 7.62 atop the loader’s position in the turret with a Browning.50 machine gun atop the commander’s position forward and right of the loader. Left of both the commander and the gunner on the right side of the turret sat the loader, the driver outside the turret steering the behemoth in a reclined position by way of short hand bars. Yet above all the firepower there was the sheer grace of something that was on another level so brutish. Its gas turbine motor was probably the quietest of any, capable of charging ahead at forty-five miles per hour despite a larger heat signature than most, its suspension so superior that its turret remained in the same plane, despite the tracks constantly undulating like pythons as the M1s raced across the uneven ground.
“Remember,” Roper said, in Freeman’s lead tank, “we take one shot, one friggin’ rattle of a spent Chinese bullet on our beast, and we vaporize the mothers.” Everyone understood, everyone was tense, but they all agreed that Freeman was right to bring the tanks right up to the trace, otherwise the next thing the Chinese would try would be to send over a patrol and take an American prisoner or two as they had done often enough in Korea. The wind was quickening between forty and sixty-five miles per hour, blowing up small whirlwinds of gritty sand that hailed against the sloped armor.
“So how we gonna know if it’s a Chink bullet hitting us or not?” the gunner asked, referring to the noise of the coarse sand and stones being blasted at them by the typhoon’s early fury.
“You know what I mean,” Roper answered. “Something substantial.”
“Yeah, well, if it’s that substantial,” the gunner said, “maybe it’ll just shoot a jet right through us.” He meant the molten jet of metal that was formed by the HEAT — high-explosive antitank — rounds that could penetrate the M1’s body with a molten streak of metal, creating havoc inside the turret, exploding the tank as it ignited the M1A1’s own fifty or more antitank shells.
The commander got on the radio and passed the message along — the haillike sound of pebbles striking the tanks could send off a premature shot from the Americans from some nervous commander further up from the line of M1A1s. Lieutenant Roper from Philadelphia didn’t care that he was speaking in plain language and not code, wanting to be overheard by the Chinese. That was in effect the power of Freeman’s show of force. He merely wanted the Chinese, with their outdated T-59s and more up-to-date laser-equipped, range-finding T-72 tanks, to know they were there, that if push came to shove along the trace, then Cheng would have to deal with Freeman’s one hundred tanks preceded by flail, grader, and demagnetizing-pan tanks that would lead them across the mine field between the two sides, and there the Americans would deal out some heavy high-velocity punishment for any truce violation. Each man in the one hundred tanks had been in the Far East long enough to know that for Freeman not to have responded to the kidnapping of Alexsandra Malof with such a show of force would have immediately signaled weakness to the PLA, and if Washington wouldn’t understand it, Beijing would.