And it was only Cheng — certainly none of Freeman’s commanders — who divined the time of attack, 1400 hours, as most propitious for the Americans. Freeman, Cheng realized, had chosen 1400 hours for the beginning of the attack because he knew one thing the Chinese Army was fervent about was xiuxi, the two-hour spell-off period between 1:00 and 3:00 guaranteed them by Article Forty-nine of the Constitution. Two p.m. was halfway through the siesta, where most units’ efficiency was at its lowest. Pulling them out of it was like pulling a westerner out of his jet lag and telling him to fight.
The battle to breach the Great Wall at Badaling was not difficult with helo-ferried troops taken over to the southern side of the wall and getting the ChiCom defenders in a deadly cross fire. The Great Wall, as Freeman had predicted, was a great folly in modern warfare, another example of what Patton had once said — namely that “fixed fortifications are monuments to the stupidity of man,” that “anything man can build he can just as easily tear down.”
The Chinese didn’t believe in the wall any more than Freeman. Cheng hoped instead that the American graveyard would be Juyong Pass, six miles to the southeast, where there were particularly steep walled gorges that must be passed through — an ideal trap for armor. But it was there in the narrow confines of the pass, when friend and foe were clearly visible as the monsoon’s rain abated, that the A-10 Thunderbolts, or Warthogs, as they were affectionately known by those who flew and serviced them, attacked the ChiComs’ T-62s that Cheng, in his first real blunder — or so it appeared — had ordered in to spearhead the Chinese counterattack. The American pilots were left shaking their heads as they took down the planes and punctured tank after tank with the enormous A-10 Thunderbolts’ rotary-barreled GAU-8 Avengers, firing their 30mm depleted uranium-tipped bullets. Hadn’t the Chinese seen what the Warthogs had done in Iraq — on the road to Basra? As it turned out, Cheng had ordered all armored personnel, including maintenance crews, as part of their training, to go see the CNN footage, which the PLA had copied.
After what could only be described as a slaughter of Chinese armor in Juyong Pass, the Warthogs returned to base, some with photo recon aboard, and declared the winding Chinese column of sixty T-62s dead. The first one to notice something odd about the carnage was Corporal Glenda Lipcott of the photo recon intelligence unit. She reported to her commanding officer that there was something funny about the corpses.
“Oh — what?”
“Well, sir, I don’t mean there’s anything unusual with the corpses themselves, but I can’t find more than one corpse per tank.”
“What do you mean? You can’t see inside the tanks with photo recon.”
“After they’re attacked by the Warthogs you can, sir. Opens them up like a tin can — spare rounds inside the tank blow up.”
“I know that,” the colonel said liverishly, “but what I’m saying is that it looks like a butcher shop inside. So how can you tell?”
“DPBs, sir.” She meant distinct body parts — heads mainly, limbs, etc.
“All right,” the colonel said, “let’s say you’re correct. No tank has more than one corpse.”
“Ah, all except the first one,” Lipcott corrected herself.
“So?” the colonel pressed. Smart women irritated him.
“Well, sir, it looks as if the only crewman aboard each tank was the driver. First one probably had a commander in the turret to direct the driver to the exact spot Cheng wanted them stopped.”
“Stopped — what in hell for?”
“Well, sir—” The colonel glowered at her. If she said “Well, sir,” one more time—
“Sir, I think the Chinese wanted to be held up in Juyong Pass. It has narrow defiles, and if you jam one road section, particularly if you select one that’s not straight but winding, then you have to remove all those wrecks. One by one, cranes’ll have to lift…”
“Yes, of course you’re right. Give me some of those photos will you?” She passed him a folder with ten 10-by- 14-inch shots.
When Orgon Tal’s HQ — moved sixty miles southeast around Ondor-Sum — received the information they were initially angered by what the A-10s had achieved until they saw how it had been a no-win situation: whether the tanks had been stopped by the U.S. aircraft or had been sabotaged by their own troops they had effectively closed down the road and stopped the drive to Beijing, only nineteen miles to the southeast past the Ming Tombs and the capital’s fragrant Western Hills. Norton, chief aide at the Ondor-Sum HQ, enquired as to how the information of one Chinese corpse per tank had been deduced. The colonel, in a self-deprecating manner, confessed that it was the photos that first gave him the idea. Norton made a note of it. It was the kind of thing Freeman would like to hear about those serving him in Second Army. It was quite brilliant of Cheng. At the most he’d sacrificed sixty-one men to hold up the entire Orgon Tal-Ondor-Sum push at Juyong Pass.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
There was much more firing now from outside the northern moat of the Forbidden City, where students were massing in the thousands while other students and workers massed at the southern end on Changan and the other avenues. It brought traffic to a standstill, and now there was a sea of people in which it was clear that the people did not love the PLA and the PLA did not love the people. It was a slaughter, hundreds of students either run over by the tanks or flailed by the army’s machine guns. But then the Molotov cocktails had appeared, and four T-69s were burning, their crews either shot or battered to death as they tried to escape from the hatches.
At the northern end of the Forbidden City, a crossing leading over the moat had long been blocked by the students, and now, with more buses and tanks, it became even more congested with the arrival of thousands of students around the Dasanyuan Restaurant and Jingshan Park, many of them armed with AK-47s and large improvised Molotov slingshots that kept harrowing the tank line with small-arms fire and a steady rain of the gasoline bombs.
Warthogs appeared overhead, despite the smoke and the bad weather that was following the monsoon, but the crowds had become so enormous all round the Forbidden City, spilling out on Tiananmen Square, that the A-10s couldn’t fire at the tanks because of the certainty that if they did the tanks exploding would kill more students than PLA. But then students, seeing the A-10 Thunderbolts diving then having to pull away, thwarted in their attack, began screaming at everyone to get away from the moat in front of which the Chinese tanks were parked.
At first a margin of fifty yards separated the tanks from the still-firing students, some of the tanks belching smoke, having used their cannon to shoot point-blank into the students. Given the margin of fifty yards or so, the few A-10s managed to sweep down and, as if in some fantastic dance macabre, five tanks seemed to be soaking up the golden rain that the A-10s poured down. Suddenly the tanks exploded in a spectacular scene that made the CNN cameraman atop the Statue of Heroes of the Revolution momentarily ecstatic. But the Chinese tank commander was no fool, and within a few minutes he had ordered the remaining tanks to advance more quickly in line into the receding crowd, for in killing the crowd lay his protection.
The tens of thousands of students, many workers joining them, surged from the northern end of the Forbidden City southward to Changan Avenue and Tiananmen Square, some of the thousands already in the square escaping a similar tank charge by retreating behind Mao’s mausoleum at the southern end of the square, around Beijing’s Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet — two-piece dinner with fries and hot Mao bun, three yuan.