Ian Slater - Force of Arms

If PFC Walton could have, he would have killed Sergeant Hamish right there on the deck, but there was no strength in him.

As the task force sailed into the frenzied wake of the typhoon, thousands of miles eastward Rosemary Brentwood, in premature labor brought on by the shock of the intruder, was having her baby by cesarean section because it was in the breach position. On top of the trauma of having shot the intruder dead, it was a nightmarish experience for her as she had a bad reaction to the local anaesthetic Marcaine used for the epidural, which produced hallucinations of such terrifying proportions that Andrea Rolston, out in the waiting room, could hear her friend’s primeval scream.

Twenty minutes later, a hospital-gowned nurse, her mask still on, came quickly through the door, taking the premature baby, a boy, into the intensive pediatric care ward. “The baby all right?” Andrea asked.

“Don’t know,” the nurse said abruptly as she rushed by, heading toward the IC unit in which Andrea then saw the nurse hooking up the baby to various tubes, assisted by two other nurses. Andrea immediately thought about the familygram Rosemary had sent her husband — before the, break-in, the shooting, and now this. “Everything fine,” had been her last two words.

As dawn broke, Major Mah and twenty-one privates aboard a Zil-151 truck arrived at the nomads’ campsite and began screaming at people. But if the Tibetans, already up attending to their animals, understood Chinese, none admitted to it, and they stood silently, some open-mouthed, gaping Chinese provincial style at the soldiers.

One of the children was rolling a snowball, rounding and tapping it so expertly it looked like a huge, white, round stone in his hand. He threw it at the truck, and Major Mah started screaming again — signaling impatiently for the interpreter, who then proceeded to tell them all that if they’d been found to be hiding American criminals—”pirates of the air” being the literal translation — then he would shoot one person from every tent, then burn down the huts.

All Tibetans by now, Mah said, should understand that the PLA loves the people and the people love the PLA. The child who had thrown the snowball was making another when his mother — despite her offspring’s resistance — took it from him and crumbled it. The child began to cry, and a pet goat from the nearest tent suddenly ran out, causing Mah to step back, drawing his pistol before he realized what it was. This evoked great laughter from all the Tibetans and a few of the troops. Enraged, Mah fired into the air.

“What’s he doing?” a little girl asked her father.

“Shooting at air pirates!” the father said.

By now Mah’s men had been through all the tents, causing no small confusion and panic among the pets who scattered every which way as bayonets were thrust into piles of blankets.

“If we find you have been hiding anyone we will take all your salt!” Mah warned them, upping the ante. This caused a rumble of resentment and fright among the nomads, for their salt packs filled from the salt pans of the salt lakes were precious, not only for their personal culinary use but as tender for bartering. One of the Chinese soldiers left the main body and, walking about the camp, looked through the scope of his rifle. It was infrared capable, able to pick up the temperature differentials even where snow had fallen but where a footprint had recently been. He called out excitedly to Major Mah — he had found tracks, two yaks probably heading away from the camp — not very old tracks, perhaps a half hour at most.

Mah left five men with the truck — which could climb no higher — to stay in the encampment should anyone return to the tents. He placed himself with the remaining fourteen soldiers and began to follow the man with the infrared scope.

The sonar operator aboard the Chinese sub Perch did not hear the distant thud of another hatch being closed and so stayed on station but decided to surface, for it was time to get a resupply of air and run awhile to recharge its batteries.

The periscope revealed nothing but a scud of dirty cloud to the east, and indeed when the Perch broke the surface and had lookouts posted the scud seemed just as dirty and a lot bigger through the binoculars. “Well at least we don’t have to put up with bad weather,” the captain told his officer of the deck. “Once it starts getting rough we’ll pop below where it’s nice and calm.” It was the one great consolation of being a submariner.

He kept the sub on an easterly heading, not using his active sonar for fear of giving away his position but merely going slowly and watching what, if anything, was coming in on the green screen out of the passive sonar array. All the sonar operator could hear was a frying, sizzling sound, the noise of millions of shrimp mating — either that or a very good imitation of it put out by an enemy sub. The lookouts were attentive to their tasks as the fresh, bracing sea air awoke them from the kind of torpor that overtakes submariners short of oxygen and with their lungs full of hydrocarbons from the diesel fumes.

The starboard lookout shouted that he saw something. When the captain fixed his binoculars on the horizon he saw only another scud of cumulus, and the lookout had to concede if there had been anything there it had disappeared. The captain shook his head as much in amusement as disappointment. Being a lookout was no easy business. Most people, in the way they saw faces or forms in the clouds, tended to see what they wanted, or expected, to see if you left them there long enough. The trick was to give as many men a rum as possible as lookout. In any case, everyone getting a turn in the fresh air did wonders for morale.

The Sea Wolf sub USS Reagan, traveling at fifty miles an hour, was sixty miles due east of Bo Hai Gulf when Brentwood ordered a twenty-two degree turn on the right rudder. The helmsman pushed in the wheel slightly and executed the turn. This would put them on a heading to meet a U.S. carrier force now steaming south from South Korea to join the Marine Expeditionary Force on its way to the Taiwan Strait. The sub would surface briefly to transfer the mine-field and obstacle intelligence that had been gained from the SEALs’ survey of the Middle Beach at Beidaihe, a beach whose obstacles the SEALs, aboard USS Reagan, were ready to blow once the carrier-centered force got close enough to provide support for the amphibious landing vehicles— if they were used and remained a feint to draw more ChiCom forces away from the Beijing Military Region.

Aboard his Intruder aircraft-laden carrier, Admiral Lin Kuang was handed the decoded message flashed to him by the ROC — Republic of China — agents who, like him, had remained determined to one day bring down the Communists:

American invasion fleet heading south for possible beach landing off Fukien.

“Possible beach landing off Fukien,” the taciturn admiral repeated. “Where else could it be? Where else do we have big guns like those we have on Amoy and Quemoy islands to give us cover on the beaches?”

It became not a matter of prudence or of the inclement weather building up, but rather it came down to an old-fashioned, bone-deep matter of pride. Kuang was determined that the first soldiers that should land on the Communist mainland from the sea must be Chinese troops — his troops. To all his ships and aircraft he flashed, “Summer Palace.” The invasion of mainland China from the sea was under way, as the war within China, inside her northern borders, raged along the bends and hills of the Orgon Tal-Honggor front.