Ian Slater: Force of Arms

Atop the Meridian Gate two SS Unit 8431 riflemen, armed with 7.62 semiautomatic sniping rifles with four-power telescopic sights, zeroed in on the Hall of Supreme Harmony. They had killed four SAS/D men before Aussie yelled amid the din and smell of cordite for the Haskins. The soldier who had been issued — or “married to,” in the SAS troop’s lexicon — the twenty-three-pound Haskins M500 came over to Aussie’s side. At relatively close ranges, even in the 250 acres of the Forbidden City, the ten-power magnification of the Haskins M500 telescopic sight meant that anything that moved completely filled the cross hairs. With this weapon eight Chinese members of Special Unit 8431 were “lifted”—blasted away — from the wall of the Meridian Gate, two falling headfirst over the balustrade to the cobblestone expanse below, their blood pooling near the five marble bridges and trickling down into the Golden River.

The armored thrust pivoting south of Orgon Tal was doing much better than those about Honggor to the east. While no gain was easy, Cheng’s troops contesting every meter, those elements of Freeman’s ground force heading for the wall at Badaling — forty-two miles northwest of Beijing — and Juyong Pass six miles further south found the going not as tough. Some would ascribe it to the monsoon being more powerful at Honggor, but the mud and wet sand that had to be negotiated were about the same either end of the trace. All other things being equal it was a mystery— the kind of mystery military analysts are well acquainted with but not at ease with, for it does not lend itself to the cold logic of logistics but belongs more to the spirit, a matter that cannot be easily defined or boxed neatly in DoD compartments.

Some argued it was explicable when one paid close attention to the disposition of forces — in this case, those pivoting about Orgon Tal had been longer under Freeman’s command and had been taught that whatever else happens on the battlefield you must keep moving. But those troops at Honggor also knew Freeman’s adage, and yet the advance had gone not nearly so well, and not only amid the infantry but amid the armored thrust. At Orgon Tal, Norton was closer to the answer than anyone when he pointed to the long distances the M1s had to be driven east to Honggor before going into action. It was one of the best-kept secrets in the American Armored Corps that the driver’s seat, built in the reclining position or what some called the TVRM — TV recliner mode — was simply so comfortable that often drivers dozed off at the wheel.

Whatever the reason for Honggor’s poor showing insofar as they were holding positions and not advancing like those from Orgon Tal, the commander of the whole trace was anxious for the marine corps’s attack on Cheng’s right flank.

“Ready to detonate SEAL packs,” Robert Brentwood ordered.

“Ready to detonate SEAL packs. Aye.”

“Detonate SEAL packs.”

“Detonate SEAL packs. SEAL packs detonated.”

“Very well. Sonar — active sweep one eight zero.”

“Active sonar sweep one eight zero degrees,” the confirmation came.

One minute later sonar reported, “Three obstacles above required CV depth.” This meant that for the CVs — surface vessels of the Marine Expeditionary Force — three “China gates” remained intact, but three obstacles was a number that Brentwood knew the marine major general in charge of the MEF could live with. Landing craft carrying the 48,000 marines ashore would simply have to go about the unseen obstacles, the latter’s positions indicated by fluorescent red marker buoys being readied for eject from the USS Reagan.

Meanwhile the four sleek, eighteen-foot-long Tomahawk cruise missiles went in over the China coast at six hundred miles an hour with a strong tail wind, hugging the beach at an altitude of twenty feet, then beginning their contoured flights over the higher ground, each only thirty seconds behind the next, each missile’s terrain contour matching computer, computer-radar-altimeter and inertial-guidance-system steering every second, going around hills rather than over them on their three-hundred-mile, half-hour journey to Beijing. As they passed by coastal defenses some triple A came their way, but they were flying so low that in most cases the triple A gun barrels couldn’t be sufficiently depressed to get their fire anywhere near them, and those AA guns that were depressed often as not hit the land forms around which the missiles were turning, causing civilian casualties.

Below the Tomahawks that were speeding at ten miles per minute, the missiles were seen by workers in the rice paddies and seemed to be going as fast as the big passenger jets of China Air. Immediately Shenyang fighters were dispatched, but if the peasants in the patchwork fields saw the Tomahawks easily in the trail of the monsoon, the fighters couldn’t. The fighters’ radar couldn’t help them, for all they were getting back from trying to pick up the missiles, which were rarely more than fifty feet above ground, was ground clutter, one pilot glimpsing them for a moment over the eastern suburbs of Beijing.

The person who got the best view was the French reporter from La Monde who, in his Beijing Hotel room, was sipping a Scotch and ice and in utter astonishment saw four missiles flash past his window, the first one making a sharp right off Changan Avenue, the Avenue of Eternal Peace, and slamming into its target, the Gate of Heavenly Peace— the Tiananmen Gate. More tremors were felt as moments later this was followed by the second one exploding in the Meridian Gate by the bow-shaped Golden River and the last two, in what was a stroke of targeting selection genius by Freeman, slamming into the Hall of Preserving Harmony, thus taking out all the SS unit’s snipers and others immediately to his front and rear.

In seconds the situation had changed dramatically, and without further ado Freeman called out, “Masks!” and ordered the firing of CS canisters toward the building of the Nine Dragon Screen in order to flush out the State Council believed to be hiding there.

Within seconds the Hall of Supreme Harmony emptied of SAS/D commandos, who made the fast run to the Nine Dragon Screen. Overhead there was the whir of rotors and the constant chattering of machine-gun fire as Russian-made Chinese Hind A choppers mixed it with the Comanches. Not one Comanche was downed out of forty, and the Chinese lost eight Hinds. One of the Comanches coming in on Freeman’s frequency reported what looked like a line of officials with a couple of PLA officers among them running from the building designated FC15, the Hall of Manifest Harmony, to FC12, the Gate of Divine Military Genius.

In the few moments of the Tomahawk cruise missile attacks, Freeman saw that now was his chance to take the offensive, which he did by being the first of the SAS/D troopers to fire his CS gas canister toward the Dragon Screen as he made his dash to the Hall of Preserving Harmony, a step closer but still some way from the Gate of Divine Military Genius, the last building on the northern side, from which the members of unit 8431 were pouring deadly fire at students fleeing in the huge parking area below between upturned and burning buses that were being bumped and smashed aside by a T-69 and other tanks arriving from the Orgon Tal-Honggor front

They could afford to, for the battle of the Orgon Tal-Honggor front had taken a turn for the worse. In short, a disaster had taken place on the American left, or eastern, flank around Honggor.

Here the PLA had successfully constructed a formidable defense of tank traps and tunnels that both halted and confounded the American echelons. The tank traps were crude and effective large pits whose sheer walls prevented any escape by the tank once it had tumbled through the camouflage of soil- and bush-dotted netting. The M1’s coaxial machine gun was immediately rendered useless, leaving the.50 caliber atop the tank’s cupola but with the “up” angle so acute that the tank commander had to keep down in the cupola in order to fire, and he could not see all about him at the same time.