In the few moments of the Tomahawk cruise missile attacks, Freeman saw that now was his chance to take the offensive, which he did by being the first of the SAS/D troopers to fire his CS gas canister toward the Dragon Screen as he made his dash to the Hall of Preserving Harmony, a step closer but still some way from the Gate of Divine Military Genius, the last building on the northern side, from which the members of unit 8431 were pouring deadly fire at students fleeing in the huge parking area below between upturned and burning buses that were being bumped and smashed aside by a T-69 and other tanks arriving from the Orgon Tal-Honggor front
They could afford to, for the battle of the Orgon Tal-Honggor front had taken a turn for the worse. In short, a disaster had taken place on the American left, or eastern, flank around Honggor.
Here the PLA had successfully constructed a formidable defense of tank traps and tunnels that both halted and confounded the American echelons. The tank traps were crude and effective large pits whose sheer walls prevented any escape by the tank once it had tumbled through the camouflage of soil- and bush-dotted netting. The M1’s coaxial machine gun was immediately rendered useless, leaving the.50 caliber atop the tank’s cupola but with the “up” angle so acute that the tank commander had to keep down in the cupola in order to fire, and he could not see all about him at the same time.
The result was that ChiComs about the rim of the trap could shoot down at will — which they did, in addition to dropping deadly Molotov cocktails, obliging the cupola’s machine gunner to withdraw and the cupola’s hatch to be closed, sealing the American’s fate. The tunnels there were of the kind Second Army had encountered earlier in the war when Freeman’s armored column and his FAVs — fast attack vehicles — had stormed the ChiCom artillery wall at Orgon Tal, but now there was, however, the added danger of the tank traps that would accommodate a FAV, or “dune buggy” as they were often called, as easily as any tank. The crews of the American FAVs had more mobility in that they could be out of their seat belts and firing M-16s and the.50 front-mounted machine gun at any angle. Still, a stick grenade or two tossed down into the trap put an end to that, and in all, over three hundred FAV drivers, machine gunners, and TOW antitank missile operators were killed in that battle alone.
Still it was Freeman’s armor that took the worst beating, with seventy-eight M1s and crews lost. The tunnels dug at night during the cease-fire were in fact in front of the tank traps so that the ChiComs could wait until the U.S. infantry, which had been following behind the protective shield of tanks, passed over them. At this point, Cheng’s troops would emerge from behind the Americans in ambuscades of withering fire.
The result of this penetration behind the moving American line was that Honggor, which was to be the pivot about which the Orgon Tal-Honggor line would sweep, was a shambles of burned-out tanks, dead tank crews, and, most demoralizing of all, on the point of collapse with the subsequent withdrawal of the American front.
No retreat is pretty to watch, but even among the veterans of Freeman’s army, men who’d been trapped on the Never-Skovorodino road and who had been with him in Korea, broke and ran to save themselves. There were not many at first, but the pace of a rout is determined by those who are first to bolt, and their speed was such that it terrified reinforcements, some of whom were yet to be blooded and so had been put on a second line of defense. And in the rout they were met by a fusillade of shots fired by the ChiComs’ tunnel battalions. In just over two hours 194 Americans were killed and more than three hundred wounded.
At least Harvey Simmet had been right in his prediction of the monsoon, and the wind from the east was strong so that Freeman and his SAS/D troops, by firing their canisters at the northeastern corner of the Forbidden City, saw the CS gas sweep across the northern sector of the compound like smoke.
Here Cheng’s budget constraints, which did not allow for updating to state-of-the-art protective gear, caused his men to be more on the defensive as their masks were of the old American pre-Iraqi style and were neither plentiful in the PLA nor used enough to offer the Chinese any real protection.
Freeman’s personal weapon for the attack was his Winchester 1200 shotgun, his ammunition cartridges of twenty fléchettes packed in each of the cartridges, each dart effective up to a thousand yards and best used in open areas such as those between the Forbidden City’s buildings. For closer in work, there were cartridges made of a hardened lead slug in a polyethylene sabot or sleeve, the slug so powerful it was used to take out anything substantial up to 450 yards away. One such slug slammed into the door of the Hall of Preserving Harmony, and the door gave way. The last cartridge was followed by CS gas bomblets bursting, the liquid becoming an aerosol on impact and making the large room uninhabitable in seconds without a mask. Now they could hear shouting in the near distance, and though it was difficult to tell exactly where it was originating from, it seemed at times to come in waves from beyond the Forbidden City, possibly behind them from the vastness of Tiananmen Square.
What was happening was that while some of the armies were racing back from Shenyang to Beijing to help what they believed was a general attack on the city, some of their commanders couldn’t have cared less whether they arrived later than sooner.
In short, let the Americans finish off the State Council, then take the Americans, and whoever was left standing at the end of the day would win China.
The widespread myth of cohesiveness between the military command was shown to be just that — a myth — as armored columns reached the city’s outskirts. Cheng’s rivals in the Eleventh, Twenty-fourth, and Twenty-eighth armies were taking their time. Others, however, were racing, namely the Shenyang Thirty-ninth, Fortieth, and Sixty-fourth armies, who were keen to get into the fight first, for not only were their commanding officers all related, but the ones who won the day would have the first claim to the booty after the Americans were defeated, and Cheng would be indebted to them for their intervention whether he liked it or not.
Each LCU — landing craft unit — coxswain and his three-man crew of bowman, stern-sheets man, and stoker mechanic were working hard to keep the LCU from smashing against the side as the marines scrambled down the nets of the mother ships into the landing crafts, which, even though they were on the leeward side, were rising and dropping through six-foot swells.
Once the thirty-man complement had been loaded, the coxswain wasted no time shoving off and joining the other circling loaded LCUs so that when they made for shore they would hopefully proceed in waves, the ideal being to have all the LCUs hitting the beach simultaneously, thus giving the Chinese so many targets at once rather than allowing any one LCU to stray too far ahead where it would draw the fire of all the, ChiComs dug into the beach’s defensive positions.
At least half the men had been seasick, with the ships having been caught earlier by the monsoon. And many, despite all their training, were scared, the sound of the big ships’ guns pounding the shoreline bunkers so loud that it seemed as if there were a continuous roiling thunder. Each coxswain had his own way of trying to calm everyone as he stood in the stern, left hand on the wheel, right hand resting on the port and starboard throttles. Members of this MEF, whether they were going to be ferried in by air-cushion vehicles, LCUs, or choppers, were all aware of Freeman’s cash prize for the best joke told aboard any landing craft — only one joke per LC allowed as the official entry. Norton had once pointed out to General Freeman that there was no regulation to allow such a contest, especially not in combat. Freeman had agreed, but he said it was his money — besides which it served “one hell of a good purpose” in keeping up morale during that terrible ten-to-fifteen-minute run into the beach.