Ian Slater: Force of Arms

Mah went into a cave whose entrance was no more than five feet wide. He heard the slow drip of melting snow, shone his flashlight inside, and looked along the beam of light before he advanced any further. The cave took several twists and turns and then ended abruptly, its walls seeping with moisture.

When he reemerged into the outside light he saw the soldier waiting. “Anything in there?” Mah asked him.

“Nothing, Comrade Major,” the soldier replied. “It’s hard to see without a flashlight.”

Mah grunted. “Your eyes get used to it. Wait a few minutes when you enter, then go on.”

“Yes, Major.”

“All right, comrade, you take that one — it looks fairly shallow. I’ll take the one over there. Looks deeper.”

“Yes, Major.”

As Aussie Lewis, David Brentwood, and thirty other SAS/D men prepared for the second and final rush on the north side of the Hall of Preserving Harmony situated atop a flight of long marble stairways, Choir Williams, Salvini, and Freeman, leading thirty-five commandos in all, ran around the front to the south side and began their attack from the marble stairs that flanked the long, stepping-stone motif of dragons among clouds. Immediately twelve members of unit 8431 opened fire, some of them taking cover behind the balustrade and long flight of steps that bracketed the carved dragons.

A ricochet hit Freeman’s Kevlar vest and fell down the marble steps like a pebble as he crouched and steadied himself and used a slugging shell in the Winchester 1200, its impact such that it blew the door to the Hall of Preserving Harmony wide open, the unhinged door flying back and knocking over a Chinese commander.

The next four cartridges Freeman fired were fléchettes, all eighty of them, and they could be heard like a hum of bees. At this short range they penetrated the steel helmets of the Chinese defenders, and Freeman could hear them screaming, a dart embedded in one man’s eye. The Chinese soldiers lost all control for a moment as Aussie Lewis, Salvini, and Choir Williams came in with three-round bursts from their Heckler & Koch submachine guns. Again, as in the field, it was the combination of guts and good gunnery that won the day for Freeman’s SAS/D force.

Suddenly it was over, and Freeman could see the civilians — seven, or was it eight? — CS smoke still thick in the air — staggering around, hands up, and two members of the PLA.

“Congratulations, sir!” Brentwood said.

“Yes, sir,” Salvini and Choir Williams added — Aussie Lewis and four other men quickly getting the prisoners in a straight line up against the wall. They were all in tears from the CS gas, if not from the defeat, and for fresh air Aussie Lewis obligingly smashed out an ornate window dating back to the Ming dynasty.

“Jesus Christ!” It was Freeman, sounding like an enraged bull, his voice clearly heard in the Hall of Preserving Harmony above the footsteps of thousands now that the students had penetrated the Forbidden City and were gathering like a great blue-and-gray sea about the Forbidden City, around Freeman, the conqueror of Beijing.

It was confusion again, with some of Salvini’s men looking around at the huge crowd forming outside, and even though they were obviously friendly, with the goddess of democracy statue carried bobbing and wobbling among them, the noise of the cheering was drowning almost anything that was said in the Hall of Preserving Harmony, so that Freeman had to thunder out his discovery.

“Where’s Cheng? Nie? The State Council?”

“You mean—” Aussie began. “Bloody hell!”

“Bloody hell is right!” Freeman thundered. “The bastards were never in the Forbidden City. Son of a bitch—” He grabbed one of the civilians, one of the officials who had stood in for the State Council members, drew his 9mm Browning, and stuck it in the man’s mouth, the man almost collapsing in fright. “Where are Cheng and Nie and all the rest?’ he yelled. “Interpreter!” But there was no need for interpretation, for at least two of the eleven captured officials spoke English, and with the crowd swirling about them they didn’t see why they should be the only ones to take the heat.

“General Cheng has gone,” one trembling official said, “with our commanders. And Nie. All the State Council. The soldiers. On the train — the airport has been bombed and—”

“Where?” Freeman demanded, pulling back the hammer.

“Gone,” the official repeated. “To — to Tanggu.”

“Where the hell’s that?” Salvini cut in.

Freeman reholstered his pistol, his hands now on his hips. “Son of a bitch and his guards are on the way by train to Tanggu. Closest port to here. A fast boat trip across Bo Hai Gulf to North Korea no doubt. Goddamn it!” Freeman, his head down, began pacing up and down as the smoke was clearing, and outside the crowd was growing even larger, all cheering his name. Suddenly Freeman stopped and looked at Williams, Salvini, and Aussie. “I’m getting on the radio and we’re gonna stop that damn train. If it ever left Beijing. Yes, sir, we’re gonna stop every goddamn train out of Beijing.” He then turned to the operator, giving him the necessary orders for the A-10s and Comanches — who by now had neutralized all airports and runways in the Beijing area — to stop any train from leaving Beijing, but particularly those bound southeast of the city toward Tanggu.

“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.