Five minutes had passed when she heard footsteps again, faintly at first but then growing, making a crunchy sound on the pebbles that had accumulated in the cave. Whoever it was was not yet around the S and so remained hidden. She drew out the .45 and moved to a kneeling position, her hands shaking not only from fear but from the mountain sickness. She released the safety.
Running the half mile west along Changan Avenue — the Avenue of Eternal Peace — for the Zhongnanhai, Aussie and his reconnaissance patrol caused no interference but only drop-jawed stares of the early-rising citizens of Beijing as they bicycled down the avenue, there being fewer than usual about at this time of the morning because of the rain that had followed the monsoon’s tail and that was still falling.
Then from up ahead there came two short cracks and more. Immediately Aussie signaled the reccy patrol to split — five on the southern side of the meridian, his group of four on the right-hand side, both groups moving toward the Zhongnanhai Gate from where the shots had come and where the two guards were lying down for better aim in front of the high, varnished red gates.
Aussie called to the others across the street to take them out with the SAW — squad automatic weapon. The SAS/D trooper stopped, the sling belt of the SAW over his right shoulder, the twenty-two-pound machine gun pumping out a burst of 5.56mm that silenced the two guards.
People were fleeing in all directions, but in a strangely almost habitual way as if this had been a weekly occurrence. The other part of Aussie’s patrol crossed the road and joined his foursome.
Someone was clapping and several others joined in. An old man, a red armband to show he was one of the elder brigadesmen — or rather, local snoops — called out angrily, waving his fists, telling those who were clapping that these were “foreign devils,” to which the first clapper told him to go to the night cart in his hutong and eat shit.
At the gate one SAS/D man braced himself against the wall, and Aussie Lewis took a run up and in one jump, using the man’s cupped hands as a stirrup, he put his other foot on the broken glass top a fraction of a second before he jumped down on the other side. He landed on the edge of a pebbled path leading in from the gate, but at the guardhouse inside, which was deserted, he couldn’t understand any of the Chinese signs. Not wanting to waste time calling over for the Chinese interpreter, he pressed every button he could. A siren sounded and died, but by then he’d pressed another button and the Zhongnanhai Gate opened.
The moment it was open the remaining nine members of the reconnaissance patrol came in, fanning left and right, two men designated by Aussie Lewis to take the left footpath and check out the little pavilion in the center of the round southern lake, the rest of the patrol running northalong the cobblestone pathways to the apartments and bungalows of the elite.
Even from the pathways it was difficult to see the extent of the buildings, as they were carefully hidden by meticulously attended shrubbery, trees, and gardens that followed the contours of the elite’s houses. There was no sign of the downed Comanche in the south lake. As they went into one door after another, the signs of a hasty retreat were everywhere, from unfinished tea to meals half-eaten, and in another building, the heat still on.
It wasn’t until the ninth or tenth apartment that they saw the stepladder that had been used by the State Council to climb over the wall and vacate the Zhongnanhai via row-boats over to the Forbidden City across a moat a hundred and seventy feet wide, a moat that flowed around the Forbidden City.
Aussie reached the top of the wall on the aluminum step-ladder, and all he could see was the dark green moat, then the sandstone-colored wall on its far side, and behind the wall the rusty red of the walls of the Forbidden City.
“How’d they get over the moat?” the SAW operator asked.
“That bridge down there has been blown,” another SAS/D pointed out.
“Probably had boats lined up ready,” another began, poking his head up over the wall. “See, down by—”
He didn’t finish, his body knocked from the ladder as if struck by a lance from a horse, the crack of the rifle shot that hit him reverberating against the moat and throughout the great squares of the Forbidden City. The radio “receiving” light came on, and the recon radio patrol operator snatched up the hand-piece. “Recon leader to—” and all he could hear was firing and static on the line. “Say again!”
“… everyone will proceed to the lounge bar.”
“Roger,” the recon operator said, knowing that this message was most likely being listened to by the Chinese. “Lounge bar” was the designated code name for the Forbidden City. Not that anyone had thought they would be using it. And “everyone will proceed” meant that the recon patrol, like everyone else, was expected to attack the Forbidden City from wherever they were — most of them being with Freeman, clustered about the Statue of Heroes of the Revolution in the square, and about to advance, original plans having gone awry with the State Council’s quitting the Zhongnanhai.
The recon operator was about to report one man down— when he saw Lewis thrown back, rolling over, facedown on the cobbled path. Then two of the other seven men lifted him up to his feet. He waved them off with a nod of thanks. The front of his antiterrorist uniform had what looked like a burn mark through it; the Kevlar vest underneath had hardly a scratch on it.
“Thank Christ,” someone said.
“Thank Dupont,” Aussie said as he got back his wind and was figuring out the best way to deploy the reccy patrol. “Tell Freeman we’ll move up from along the Zhongnanhai wall and try to sniper out a few if we can. We have a Haskins.”
The reconnaissance patrol response was appreciated by Freeman, who had already sent another patrol down the right-hand, or eastern, side of the Working People’s Cultural Palace, which came before the Tiananmen Gate, but where they too found the Donghua Men, another bridge, had been blown. In fact all the crossings over the moat had been blown, and the commandos were hearing from another Comanche pilot that tons of rubble now lay where the rear entrance to the Forbidden City — the Gate of Divine Military Genius — used to be. The only way through was via the Tiananmen Gate, and it was toward this that Freeman and the bulk of the commandos were headed.
There was no doubt in Freeman’s mind that he had caught them off guard in making his monsoon attack, but the prudence of unit 8431’s commander in having moved everybody to a new location had equally surprised Freeman. Indeed it alarmed him, for if they couldn’t get the State Council quickly rounded up and back to the square before Second Army broke through at Badaling, the whole mission would be a failure, and with every passing minute Cheng would have a chance to increase the odds against the 125 or so commandos achieving their mission.
What in Freeman’s mind was meant to be a hard, quick, if not clean, snatch and grab of the Communist leadership was now promising to be a much longer, drawn out affair.
Freeman and his commandos rushed toward the Gate of Eternal Peace, or Tiananmen, ready any moment to have machine-gun fire rain down upon them from the ramparts where Mao had made so many of his momentous speeches. Once through Tiananmen, they had to pass through the second gate. Still there was no firing, no opposition.