Ian Slater - Asian Front

“And what about shooting them?” Norton couldn’t tell whether Freeman was bluffing — couldn’t see his eyes clearly enough through the goggles — but the general was just unpredictable enough…

“That’d be murder, General.”

Freeman leaned over, his voice barely audible above the storm. “Yes, but they don’t know that.” There was a trace of a grin, but then it was gone, the general saying, “Soldiers ratting like that on their own men deserve shooting.”

“I thought you didn’t like the party either.”

“I don’t. But to risk their own men’s lives by telling us. I don’t go for that. That’s despicable.”

“But,” Norton said as the general mounted his M1 and stepped into the cupola, “you’re glad they did.”

As Freeman stood, his head out of the cupola, binoculars raised in the hope of seeing something in this forlorn wasteland, he rapped on the tank for the M1 to start off. There was a subdued growl from the gas turbine engine. “I’m a general, Norton. Not a fool. You get those coordinates to Brentwood, or if his FAV’s gone give them to the next in command, but it has to be done or we’ll have us a massacre out here once it clears and their radar starts working.”

“By last report we only have twenty-four FAVs left, General.”

“Get it done, Dick!” Freeman yelled back.

Norton was incorrect, for as they spoke there were only eighteen FAVs left out of the original seventy.

Harvey Simmet arrived and told Freeman that the met forecast was actually wrong. Freeman was delighted, thinking that the storm would last until he could get past the Chinese guns.

“No,” Harvey Simmet said. “The storm is about to abate.”

It meant the FAVs had less time to take the guns and to do anything about the radar complex.

“Damn it, Harvey, what kind of forecast is that?”

“I can’t change the weather, General. I’m not God.”

Freeman suddenly remembered Patton’s relief of Bastogne when bad weather had delayed him until he ordered a prayer for good weather and got it. Freeman sent for the padre and told him to get rid of “this appalling bitch of a sandstorm!” Harvey Simmet and Norton exchanged glances but said nothing.

“By God!” Freeman thundered. “We have to start killing Chinese — soon as we can.”

Aussie watched the needle on the 4,400 rpm dial quivering, his right foot jammed so hard down on the accelerator he thought he’d push it right through the floor as the Wrangler’s tires gripped and kicked up sand on a thirty-degree slope, hauling the two-thousand-pound vehicle and exerting 165 pounds per square inch as its ninety-four-horsepower engine gave all it had.

It mounted the summit of a dune, and was immediately taking fire from no more than thirty yards away. Brentwood responded with a long burst of tracer from his front-mounted 50mm machine gun. There was an explosion — a burst of lemon-colored light in the dust storm. Only now did he see he had committed a “blue on blue”—fired on a friendly FAV, the latter rearing up like some wounded metallic monster, its cage engulfed in flame, its TOW controller already afire, the driver still strapped into his seat as it came down with a thump, the right-seated gunner, Brentwood’s opposite number, having released his seatbelt and been thrown clear. There was no time to mourn — everyone knew “blue on blue” was a high danger in the dust storm and was the very reason Freeman could not yet commit AIRTAC to the battle.

Aussie drove toward the burning vehicle, the flame giving the afflicted FAV the appearance more of a skeletal, tubular frame than the fighting vehicle it had been seconds before.

Brentwood was out of his FAV before Aussie had brought it to a complete stop and was rolling the burning TOW operator over and over in the sand, extinguishing the flames, the gunner, who had been thrown free and only slightly wounded, trying with Aussie to douse the driver with the extinguisher, but soon the foam was exhausted, the driver dead. The TOW operator had been saved, but the man was horribly burned, his face looking as if half of it had simply melted and slid away. It immediately reminded David Brentwood of the seemingly endless plastic surgery that had had to be performed on his brother Ray, who had received third degree burns aboard a Perry-class guided frigate at the beginning of the war. David turned his attention to the gunner. “How about you? Okay?”

“Yes, sir — sorry, sir, we thought you were a ChiCom motorcycle/sidecar coming over the rise and—”

“Never mind,” Brentwood said. “Stay with your buddy. I’ll radio your GPS position back to the main column for medics.”

“Yes—” He hadn’t even got the “sir” out before Brentwood was back in his seat and Aussie was driving off, Brentwood realizing he’d killed two of bis own men — his silence now infused with tension.

“They fired first, mate,” Aussie said, moving the FAV from zero to forty miles per hour, despite the poor visibility.

“I know that, damn it!”

Two other FAVs were lost in other “blue-on-blue” engagements as they passed from the big guns’ killing range into the zone where, because of the declination of the guns being only minus two degrees, and because the guns themselves were on the clay ridge, the shells could no longer bother them. The remaining fifteen FAVs, as Freeman had hoped, like those horsemen in the last great cavalry charge in history — the Australian Light Horse at Beersheba in 1917— were under the guns, the fifteen FAVs racing up toward the looming enormities that were the ChiCom’s Pepperpot batteries.

ChiCom infantry and APCs came out to meet them. But here the sheer mobility of the FAVs, with their relative lightness and stunningly accurate TOW missiles, took a deadly toll of the slower Chinese personnel carriers, and the much heavier firepower of the FAVs was creating a hosing fire that ignited one APC after another.

“Go for the gun crews!” Brentwood shouted on the FAV network. “The gun crews!” he repeated. “Then go to the flanks. Repeat, gun crews, then the flanks. Do not engage their tanks.” Conscious that “flank” might sound like “tank” in the confusion of static and explosions, David repeated, “First the gun crews, then find the radar. Repeat, first the…”

Salvini swung hard right, and there were two sudden bumps and screams as he ran down two ChiCom infantry exiting one of the manholes, his TOW operator exhilarated by having taken out three APCs and now “pissed off,” in his own words, that they had to stick to the original plan to take out the gun crews first. Choir yelled back at the La Roche reporter. “Lively enough for you, boyo?”

The reporter didn’t answer, couldn’t answer — his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth, dry as leather, his grip on the roll bar so hard that his body was rigid, despite the swaying motion of the FAV as it went over several corrugations of sand where a dune flattened out before the incline to the guns.

“What the—” Aussie began, but Brentwood had already seen it: a dozen or so civilian prisoners and captured American soldiers lashed to the wheels of the big guns. Aussie could see that one was a woman. Somebody came on the air, wondering what they should do.

“Take out the crews, for Chrissake!” Brentwood shouted, and the FAVs — now only fourteen remaining — drove resolutely toward the guns, the ChiCom infantry firing from behind them. Every time a gun went off, the prisoners ran around on their rope tethers like crazed rats in a cage, unable to get away from the crashing thunder of the guns, unable, like the gun crews, to block their ears from the earth-shattering sound.