“You boys,” he told Salvini, Williams, Brentwood, and Aussie Lewis, “aren’t finished yet. I want you to get aboard the first chopper we can get in here. Go to Tanggu and bring back Cheng and Nie. All the State Council if possible but definitely Cheng and Nie. Bring the bastards back in chains!”
It was simply impossible to get a Comanche, Huey, Chinook, Apache, or any other kind of helo to land in the Forbidden City. It was jam-packed with people. The same was true of Tiananmen Square, and the only way that Aussie, Brentwood, Williams, and Salvini could get out was to climb up a swinging rope ladder to a Huey hovering twenty feet above the roof of the Hall of Preserving Harmony, or what Aussie Lewis, after the battle, called “the Hall of Fucking Disharmony.”
“Christ!” Lewis yelled over the roar of the Huey’s rotors and the crowd below. “I thought we were done for the day. I’m puttin’ in for overtime, mate. No bones about it.”
The other three commandos — Salvini, Choir Williams, and Brentwood — were either too exhausted or deafened by the chopper and the mob scene below, growing bigger as the American tanks from the Marine Expeditionary Force entered the outskirts, to say anything. Besides, they all knew they needed whatever energy they had left for what they hoped would be the end of the war.
They had no way of knowing that within half an hour, when the news of the Beijing collapse got through to the southern beachhead at Xiamen, the southern armies would be recalled by the generals-cum-warlords. The north-south divisions in China were probably the oldest in history, and southern Chinese blood was not about to be spilled in defense of Communist Mandarins in the north who had already fled Beijing, the same Mandarins who had declared it was all right to burn briquettes for warmth in your home if you were north of the Yangtze, but not if you were in the south.
There were no trains out of Beijing. There were no trains coming into Beijing. Everything had been stopped by the massive uprising of the underground Democracy Movement and workers pouring out into the city now that the top Communist leaders had fled. The only trains moving, in fact, were those that had left Beijing no later than an hour before, one of these having been the train to Qinhuangdao via Beidaihe.
By now the news of Beijing’s collapse, confirmed by CNN, was flashed worldwide and to all parts of China, where local underground movements seized the moment against local Communist administrations. And it was at Qinhuangdao, en route to Shanhaiguan, that Alexsandra Malof’s train was met by a huge crowd waving banners of revolution, her Chinese student suddenly filled with courage, and confidence and a feeling of some importance that he had been chosen by fate to be escaping with Alexsandra Malof at the very moment of the Beijing clique’s defeat. With an air of authority that surprised even Alexsandra, he bellowed and shouted, making way for her through the crowd at Qinhuangdao, a place that, with its oil refineries and heavy chemical pollution, was probably one of the ugliest and most inauspicious places for such an auspicious event to occur.
There were Chinese everywhere at Honggor as Cheng’s staff, among them Colonel Soong, continued to fight on in hopes of blunting, if not defeating, the American Marine Expeditionary Force pressing the Chinese right flank. And for several hours at least, with all communications with Beijing cut and by pouring in regiment after regiment of battle-experienced ChiCom troops from Shenyang’s Twenty-fourth Army, Cheng’s staff was not only able to blunt the MEF attack on the right flank but also managed to attack Honggor successfully on the left. It was there, on the left flank, that Cheng’s veteran regiments came upon one of the few unblooded battalions of Freeman’s Second Army, and some of Freeman’s men ran.
It wasn’t picked up by the press because Freeman had done a Schwarzkopf and kept the press well behind his forces. But it was no use, Dick Norton knew, trying to tart up the report to Freeman by saying the men who ran were overwhelmed by the number of ChiComs, which they were, or that they had failed to get proper artillery support or TACAIR — also true — for the fact of the matter was that most of Charlie company—120 men — in Third Battalion broke and ran. What Charlie company’s commander had intended to be a shooting withdrawal was in fact a rout, some men even throwing their weapons away.
And as if a malevolent fate was at work, the old saying that “trouble comes not in ones or twos but in battalions!” had come true. Military police had been sent in to help stiffen the company’s resolve, to help the company find its pride again, but what the MPs found was a thoroughly demoralized force. On walking toward two of the soldiers in a foxhole, in the hope of getting them up and out and back at the front to help stem the ChiCom breakthrough, an MP, a sergeant, heard, “I can’t do it. I can’t—”
“Sure you can,” came another deeper voice. “Just relax, babe. C’mon, Danny.”
“You’ll look after me?”
“Haven’t I always, Danny?”
“Yes, but—”
The MP then heard a low, moaning noise, and when he looked over into the foxhole he saw one of them — the shorter, Danny he supposed — down on his knees, sucking off the bigger, older man.
“All right!” the MP said. “You two faggots are under arrest. Get on outta there — and surrender your arms.”
“You’re just jealous,” the older man said, remarkably unperturbed. “Isn’t that right, Danny?” Danny couldn’t look at the MP.
“So, asshole,” said the tall, hefty one, name strip Sperling, J., zipping up. “When was the last time you got it off?”
“One more word out of you,” the MP said, “and I’ll blow your fucking head off.”
“Nasty, isn’t he, Danny? We should teach the mother some manners.”
In the near distance they could hear Chinese infantry advancing. Danny was already out of the foxhole, having surrendered his rifle. Sperling followed, sneering at the MP, who was terrified the Chinese would come over the ridge any moment. Danny still couldn’t look at the MP sergeant. Instead he just kept walking shamefacedly. Sperling mussed his hair. “Don’t you worry, sweetheart. It’s all right. Be our word against his.”
To the MP’s relief, an MP Humvee came in sight, having gathered up two or three other forlorn-looking soldiers from Charlie company.
“Is this the faggot train?” the first MP asked.
“No, these boys are runners, aren’t you, boys? Yessir, we’ve got four courts-martial already with this bunch.”
“How do you like it?” Sperling asked the driver. “Up the ass?”
“Listen, you fucking queer, get in and behave or I’ll shoot you myself.”
“So what do you boys do?” Sperling said. “Think of little wifey or Playboy and wank off?”
“Maybe,” said the MP who’d caught them in fellatio, “but we don’t do it when we’re supposed to be stopping the fucking enemy from overrunning us.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
The train carrying the State Council and the remainder of unit 8431 looked no different from any of the other trains that had left Beijing in time, and already two had been stopped by the SAS/D helos and inspected by Aussie, Salvini, Choir, and Brentwood, but had yielded nothing.
The first pass by the A-10 was ignored by the next train’s engineer and only caused his assistant frantically to shovel in more coal. And so on the second pass, the pilot of the A-10 gave the engine a burst. It exploded not with a bang but rather a sound like hundreds of snakes hissing, its perforated boiler rapidly losing power, the train dying quickly.
When the train stopped, no one got out, and from the air it looked to Aussie Lewis like a short, headless snake. He counted three cars and shouted above the rotor noise, “Not exactly hauling freight, are we?”