Ian Slater - Force of Arms

“Go!” he told them, and the two men stood so that the barrels of their weapons were pointing almost straight up, and an instant later two yellow streaks of liquid fire went into the eyes of the brooding Meridian Gate. Within seconds the lacquered red top of the gate was ablaze, and Freeman’s sappers — two of David Brentwood’s men — were placing satchel charges of pentolite and TNT with a thirty-second fuse up against the huge, closed door of the Meridian Gate. The explosion blew open the heavy doors, not by much, but enough for the SAS/D commandos to pass through with withering machine gun fire preceding them.

“Up the stairs!” Brentwood yelled. “Clean ‘em out!”

But Chinese regulars were already coming down, coughing from the acrid smoke of the fires that had been started and easy targets for the SAS/D who cut them down with three-round bursts from their HK MP5s and fire from; M-16s.

“Masks on!” someone yelled, and within seconds the SAS/D men who were going up into the smoke had donned masks and continued the slaughter as the Chinese, blinded by the smoke, practically ran into them.

They had been running so hard and so fast that the architectural beauty of the Forbidden City was the last thing any of the SAS/D troopers thought or cared about. For them the overwhelming aspect of the Forbidden City was its sheer size: 720 acres, eight hundred buildings, and nine thousand rooms.

Beyond the Wumen, or Meridian, Gate they came to the five marble bridges over the Golden River, the moat below shaped like a Tartar bow. Here they came under more heavy fire from the towers of the Gate of Supreme Harmony ahead of them.

The SAS/D was giving as much as it was taking, but Freeman knew they needed high ground fast and so ran forward across the central marble bridge and onto the great flagstone square where one group directed heavy fire at the Taihe — the Hall of Supreme Harmony — providing cover for the commandos running to take cover in the Hongi and Tairen pavilions. And once the Hongi and Tairen towers were reached, with six men lost in the process, the men in and around these two pavilions fed long bursts of fire into ±e Hall of Supreme Harmony.

It was when he reached the hall that Freeman realized what had happened, and his anger at himself stung him with humiliation. The legendary Freeman of Second Army, of Ratmanov Island, the Dortmund-Bielefeld Pocket, the Freeman of the victory in the snows of Siberia and the hero of the brilliant attack on Orgon Tal before the truce, and of the celebrated night raid on Pyongyang earlier in the war, realized that the hunted, by retreating from the Zhongnanhai to the Forbidden Palace, had become the hunters, having lured the Americans inside the moat-bordered palace of 250 acres. As neat a trap as you could have planned for.

In the fog of war, confusion an ever-present player, Freeman had concentrated on going for a quick surgical strike to take out the State Council. But the quarry had been moved into what turned out to be the maze of the Forbidden City, and with them so had the elite members of unit 8431, their snipers buying time for army units to be recalled from the Orgon Tal-Honggor front back to Beijing and the Forbidden City, where the American general would be captured and, with his remaining eighty or so troops, be humiliated before the State Council in the great square of Tiananmen — a world telecast of the Americans in chains. Already Beijing radio was broadcasting reports, picked up and reported by CNN, of the imminent victory over the American “warmongers,” who were “vandalizing one of China’s great cultural landmarks.”

“Vandalizing!” Freeman roared. “Goddamn it, they’re the ones who are using the place as an ambuscade. Like some gunman running into a church then pleading piety to his enemy. Well, hell, I don’t want to violate their national treasures any more than anyone else, but damned if they’re going to stop me.” He remembered all the men who had been lost trying to take Monte Cassino in WW II — not allowing the Italian monastery to be bombed — until too many men had died. He wasn’t going to let the same thing happen here. Freeman looked around the graceful and ancient rooms in the Hall of Supreme Harmony. “Radio!”

Two men held up their hands.

“Over here, son,” Freeman said to one. “Now this is what I want you to encode.” Next he looked at his grid map of Beijing and gave the operator the coordinates.

Her vision blurring again from the mountain sickness, the .45 trembling in her hand, Julia had nevertheless made the figure out to be that of the old man. He had brought her scoops of hail and snow in a salt bag and made rubbing motions across her forehead. “Headache,” he said, gave her another salt bag of ice, and left.

When he returned to where the two yaks were tethered he sniffed at the hailstorm and looked down at the earlier footprints back further in the sea of snow that surrounded the ridge. There had been enough snow and hail by now to obliterate the latest tracks. He walked the two yaks for two hundred yards or so, crossing the wind-blasted summit, and then started down with the two animals, making fresh prints away from the ridge.

In the Bo Hai Gulf the Sea Wolf II-class USS Reagan, though submerged two hundred miles off the China coast, was trailing her long VLF — very low frequency — aerial and was receiving Freeman’s message via the Khabarovsk relay.

Within seconds of the decode, Robert Brentwood, from the raised podium of the control room’s attack center, ordered, “Man battle stations missile!” and the alarm mounded, water immediately shut off from all showers so that men in them could hear the call. The sudden absence of water meant that at least one man — a steward — had to quickly vacate the shower, his head and shoulders covered in sticky shampoo.

Robert Brentwood’s hands gripped the brass railing that guarded the bigger search and smaller attack periscope housings. “Set condition one SQ.”

This was the highest alert.

“Set condition one SQ,” confirmed Rolston, the officer of the deck. No sooner had the OOD said it than the various departments throughout the sub were punching in “ready” status.

“Condition one SQ all set,” Rolston confirmed.

“Very well,” Brentwood answered. “Mutual trim.”

“Mutual trim now, sir.”

“Very well. Prepare to spin. Stand by to flood forward tubes one and two, aft tubes five and six.” There was a faint sound of rushing water as the tubes were flooded. Tubes one and two forward and five and six aft were already housing 3,500-pound, 28-mile-range Mark 48 torpedoes with contact fuses.

It was a precautionary measure should the sound of the USS Reagan firing off Tomahawk cruise missiles be picked up by an enemy Hunter-Killer who might in turn launch an immediate attack against the Reagan.

“Missile status report?” Brentwood asked.

“Spin-up complete, sir.”

“Very well. Prepare for ripple fire.”

“Yes, sir. Prepare for ripple fire.”

Throughout the Reagan crewmen moved quickly but without panic to their firing positions. The ripple or staggered firing sequence meant that as one cruise missile was being fired on the starboard side, the water rushing into its silo would be balanced by the water pouring into the next silo of the next missile fired, which would be on the port side, thus minimizing the yaw created by the inrush of water on the starboard side and vice versa.

The weapons officer waited. His assistant, with wire trailing from headphones, moved, head bent in priestly concentration, up and down “Blood Alley,” the rigged-for-red corridor made up of banks of computers, as he constantly monitored the missiles’, in this case the cruise missiles’, status.