Ian Slater - Asian Front

“An army,” Freeman said.

“Yes, sir. They’re theater-level offensive all right — not divisional. That’s why I thought you ought to see them straight away.”

Freeman sat down, patting his shirt for his bifocals, couldn’t find them, and had to go to the makeshift bedroom where he retrieved a spare pair from atop a Gideon Bible, its pages held open by a box of buckshot cartridges for the Winchester 1200 shotgun he kept by his bedside. The general found he didn’t need his glasses after all, for even without them Israeli and Pentagon intelligence reports had already concurred with Dick Norton’s assessment, classifying the missiles in large, black capitals as INF — intermediate nuclear forces — from PLA’s Second Artillery. He was shaking his head in disgust as well as alarm.

“I told them in Washington. I told them the moment those goddamned fairies signed that INF treaty with the Russians. While we were sending our Pershings to the scrap heap, and the Russians were doing the same—” He looked up at Norton, then back down at the missiles, a cluster of six of them. “Beijing, my friend, was grinning — ear-to-ear. Moment Gorby and Reagan signed the INF, China became the number one INF power in the world. You figure the fairies didn’t think of that?” Freeman was getting madder by the second. “I tell you what, Norton, when I think of all that goddamn incompetence running around loose in Washington it makes my blood—” The general stopped midsentence, directing a wary glance at Norton. “These infrared confirmed?”

“Yes, sir.” Norton knew that the general was remembering the humiliation heaped upon him by the press — the La Roche tabloids in particular — for the casualties Second Army had suffered earlier in the Siberian campaign, when Freeman believed, as intelligence had reported, that he was about to engage a division of enemy tanks hidden in the taiga. They had also been infrared confirmed, the Siberians having simply put battery-powered heaters inside the plastic mockups of the T-80s to give off a sufficient infrared signature to fool aerial reconnaissance.

As well as leading his armor into the trap, Freeman had sent Apaches on ahead to soften the Siberian armor up, only to have over fifteen of the Hellfire missile-armed choppers blown out of the sky by VAMs, or vertical area mines. Freeman knew that he’d been lucky that he’d lost only the battle on the Never-Skovorodino road and not the war. It was a lesson he’d not soon forget. “Any other confirmation?” he pressed Norton.

Norton reached over, turning past the photographs to page three of the typed report. “Yes, sir. Indentation. We can tell from blowups of the tire tracks in the desert approximately how many tons the carrier vehicles and loads are. The indentation weight equals that of a missile. If they’re fakes, they’re sure as hell heavy ones. And you know how the ChiComs are about fuel. It’s damn near a capital offense to waste a gallon in the Chinese army. I don’t think they’d be driving heavy fakes around for fun.”

From the coordinates, Freeman could tell at a glance that it was somewhere in Sinkiang province, Lanzhou military region. “Missile sites at Lop Nor?”

“Further west than that,” Norton answered. “Past the Turpan depression — in the foothills of the Tien Shan range. Pentagon and Israeli intelligence figure the missiles were originally situated there because Moscow was well within striking distance. They still don’t trust one another. Especially now. With the breakup of the old Soviet Union, Beijing’s afraid the disease’ll spread.”

“Maybe,” Freeman replied, “but the point is, Dick, their three-thousand-mile radius means they could easily reach us.”

“That’s what the report concludes, General. Washington and Tel Aviv are agreed on that. Only need to hit us with two or three in the first salvo and that’d be it for Second Army.”

Freeman was tapping his teeth with his bifocals, a habit that annoyed Norton intensely.

“By God, Dick, what we need is a preemptive strike. Apart from anything else those missiles are so close to the border they’re a gift to Yesov if he wanted to use them against us — if he and the Chinese are in cahoots. Remember in Siberia, Novosibirsk doesn’t like Moscow any more than Beijing.” The general saw Norton’s unease about a preemptive strike.

“I know, I know.” Freeman waved his hand impatiently. “Fairies’ll have a fit. Hopefully the White House will back us this time. I think that’s why MOSSAD sent their report straight to Washington.”

“But if we move anything in there, General, we’d be in a much wider war with China. Sixty-eight divisions against our forty-four, and these’re only the divisions on the Sino-Siberian border.”

Freeman didn’t need the figures. He already knew that China’s full-time army alone stood at over one hundred divisions — a million and a half men — and this ignored the two million men they had in the reserves. And Freeman knew the Chinese weren’t Iraqis. It wouldn’t be simply a mass of poorly led conscripts he’d have to face if it hit the fan. To a man, the Chinese were volunteers, and long-term volunteers at that. Like the German Wehrmacht, the PLA had taken pains to make sure that the members of any unit came from not only the same province, but wherever possible from the same village. It seemed like a small enough detail, but Freeman pointed out it was enormously important in terms of morale. You might bug out in front of strangers, but it’d be a long time before you’d let your own village down. Everyone in the village knew you and your parents. The disgrace would be total. It went a long way to making up for lack of sophisticated weaponry — the United States had learned that in ‘Nam.

And, as they’d shown in Korea, the ChiCom commanders knew a few more tricks than the Iraqis, like slipping a division or two — over twenty thousand men — right under your damn nose. They’d wait for a thunderstorm to trip off all the ground-movement sensors, then move. And PLA officers, while paid more, were much closer to their men than the Iraqi officers had been to theirs. In this respect the Chinese were more like their traditional enemies, the Vietnamese. Still, Freeman was confronted by the brutal reality of the missiles. A massive attack on Second Army could take out its heart. The problem would be to get permission for a bombing mission to try to take out the missiles. It was so deep into China—2,300 miles — that if the bombers were to stand a chance of getting through to the target, the flight, given the fractures found in more Stealths, would have to consist of B-52s originating out of western Europe.

But most likely France wouldn’t allow it — just as she’d refused permission for the U.S. to overfly French soil in the raid against Qaddafi in Libya. There was nothing for it but to ask the White House to ask the Brits. Still, Maggie Thatcher was long gone, and elements of the leftist Labour party opposition were bound to oppose such a flight as they had in the case of Libya.

In Beijing, meanwhile, the extent of General Beatty’s unexpected response had made it clear that China was now de facto in a war with the United States. Both Premier Nie’s and General Cheng’s forcefully stated determination to defend China’s borders “against imperialist U.S. aggression” immediately gave way to reawakening Asian memories of the humiliating defeat inflicted upon the Americans in Vietnam.

The Chinese hated the Vietnamese, who were continually arguing over border areas and the resource-rich islands in the South China Sea, but nevertheless Nie and Cheng had no qualms about invoking the Vietnamese victory over the Americans to remind the PLA that a much smaller Asian country had defeated the mighty U.S.A. Besides, the PLA was many times the size of the North Vietnamese army, and for the PLA to be victorious over the Americans along the Black Dragon River in the north would enhance China’s reputation in all Asia, particularly given the vacuum left by the demise of the USSR.