When Wang Ran regained consciousness he was lying in the battlefield first-aid station. Standing next to him was a reporter for the army newspaper.
“How many tanks do we have left in the battalion?” he asked weakly.
“Not a one,” the reporter said. He should have known. The tanks were close enough to set a world record for armored-vehicle combat. The reporter added, “But I should congratulate you: One to one-point-two! We turned around the relative damage rate for the first time! Your tank destroyed two of theirs, one Leclerc and one Challenger.”
“Zhang Qiang’s amazing,” Wang Ran said, nodding, despite his splitting headache, in recognition of his tank’s gunner.
“So are you. Only one was due to shooting. You flipped the other on impact!”
Wang Ran felt drowsy again owing to lack of blood, and he dropped off with the sounds of frenzied shooting echoing in his ears like a rainstorm beating down endlessly on a metal roof. But all his eyes saw were those abstract patterns on the brick wall.
The commander of Wang Ran’s armored division stood on a low hill watching the last of her battalions roll out. When the steel skirmish line reached the enemy’s position and the tanks switched on their smoke generators, all she could see was a band of white smoke. A rapid series of explosions followed, and although from this vantage point she couldn’t see the enemy’s tanks, she could see the explosions of the shells they fired at hers, lighting up the band of smoke with dazzling balls of light. At times a silhouette would momentarily be visible amid the fog and explosions. The thirteen-year-old commander had the sudden sense of familiar recognition: back on the morning of the first Spring Festival she set off firecrackers, she had been so frightened after lighting them she had thrown the entire long strand on the ground, where it cracked and thundered, sending hundreds of tiny flashes into the drifting smoke….
But the battle didn’t even last as long as the firecrackers had, and in fact to the commander it seemed even longer than it actually was. Afterward she learned that the shooting had only lasted for twelve seconds. In twelve short seconds, enough to take six breaths, the commander’s one remaining division was annihilated. The Type 99s sat in flames before her; under the thinning smoke it was almost as if they were torches obscured beneath a gauze curtain.
“What’s the damage rate?” the commander asked a staff officer beside her, unable to keep the tremor out of her voice. She stood on the crossroads between heaven and hell, a ghost asking God which road to take. The staffer took off his wireless earpiece and uttered the fiery, icy figure they had obtained at the price of a hundred-odd children’s lives.
“One-point-three to one, sir.”
“Tolerable. Not over the limit,” the commander said, and let out a long breath. She knew that in the invisible distance, enemy tanks equivalent to ten-thirteenths the number of her own were also aflame. The game was still in progress, but she had completed her mission, and kept their relative damage rate below the limit.
Second Lieutenant Wei Ming, one of Huahua’s classmates, took part in the heavy-weapons subcategory of the tank vs. infantry games with his armored platoon. Unlike the light-arms subcategory, which restricted soldiers to antitank grenades, soldiers in this game were able to use antitank guns and guided missiles against their opponents. By no means did this given them an easier time of it, because while the other game pitted a platoon against a single tank, they were facing three main battle tanks or five light tanks simultaneously.
Today was a group match, and Wei Ming and his young comrades had spent the night poring over the battle plans. The previous day they had watched their company’s Second Platoon use the country’s most advanced antitank missile, the HJ-12, which their adult instructors had raved over, in particular the three types of guidance it utilized, including its cutting-edge visual pattern matching. In the game itself, all three of the missiles Second Platoon had fired were jammed and went wide of their targets, and only five soldiers survived. The rest were taken down by the guns and cannons of three Leclercs. The M1A2 tanks that Wei Ming’s platoon now faced had an even more powerful jamming system, so they had decided to use the more outdated, wire-guided HJ-73 missiles. They had less range, but were resistant to jamming, and the warheads had been improved to increase the armor-penetration capability from 300 mm to 800 mm.
Now their preparations were complete. Three antitank missiles were set up in a line in their small base, no grander-looking than three white-painted wooden pegs. The Indian judge at their side motioned to indicate that the game had begun, and then scurried off to hide behind a line of sandbags and train her binoculars on them. The tank vs. infantry game was not easy on judges; it had already killed two and wounded five.
Wei Ming was operating one of the three missiles. During training in the adults’ time, he had posted the highest total performance in this discipline, owing to his love of playing with a video camera back home. Missile operation consisted of keeping the target captured in the crosshairs from start to finish to guide the missile in its flight.
Dust appeared on the horizon, and through binoculars Wei Ming saw a large group of tanks. With an entire infantry regiment taking part in today’s game, all but three of the M1A2s were attacking other targets. Wei Ming quickly picked out the three that were on their preset path, tiny shapes that didn’t seem at all ferocious from far away.
Letting go of the binoculars, he dropped down to the missile to track one of the tanks in the viewfinder, keeping the crosshairs steady on the black spot that showed indistinctly through the dust. When he was certain it was within his three-thousand-meter firing range, he pressed the button to fire, and the missile next to him took off with a whoosh, trailing the wire behind it. He heard two more whooshes as the other two missiles took off. Now fire flashed from the front of the three M1A2s, like they were opening their eyes, and two or three seconds later the shells landed to the right and back of them, and then a few earsplitting explosions and a storm of dirt and stones rained down on them. More shells followed, and Wei Ming involuntarily shielded his head with his arms amid the explosions. He recovered quickly, but when he turned to the viewfinder all he could see was the horizon, rocking unsteadily. By the time he found the target again and locked it in the crosshairs, he saw a column of dust rising up to the tank’s right side, and he knew that his missile had gone wide. Looking up from the eyepiece, he saw two other dust columns behind the tanks. All three missiles had missed. The tanks charged toward them, clearly recognizing that without any missiles the base was no longer a threat. It had become a light-weapons game, but the platoon was facing not one but three tanks.
“Ready antitank grenades!” Wei Ming shouted, taking out one of his own and crouching in the shell scrape as the tanks grew ever closer. With magnetic material in its head, the grenade was heavy in his hand.
“Sir… how does it work? I never learned!” a kid next to him said anxiously. Indeed they had never learned how; the adults who had trained them had never imagined their charges would be going up against the world’s most ferocious main battle tanks armed only with hand grenades.
As the three iron beasts closed in, Wei Ming could feel their vibrations in the ground beneath his feet. He ducked as machine-gun rounds zipped overhead, and had to estimate the tanks’ distance. When he sensed they were charging into the base, he stood up and hurled his grenade at the middle tank, and at the same moment saw a flash from the muzzle of the turret machine gun pointed straight at him, and a bullet whisked just past his ear. The grenade traced an arc through the air and stuck to the side of the M1A2’s sloped turret a little to the front of the smokescreen outlet, scaring the American kid manning the gun back inside.