Ian Slater: Asian Front

“It was Salvini,” Aussie said, as Salvini lay on his side, gripping the metal lattice work of the litter for support, his head bumping on a pillow of C charges.

“What’s up with you, you Australian—”

“Stop!” Choir yelled. “Target! One o’clock!”

As the FAV came to an abrupt halt in the loose, sugary sand, Choir fired his second-to-last TOW, its back-blast lighting up the FAV, the FAV in its most vulnerable position, still, giving Choir time to guide the optically tracked, wire-guided missile.

The motorcycle and sidecar unit that he’d aimed at dipped over a dune, the TOW blowing the top of the dune off like the flying spray of some enormous brown wave. Next second the sidecar unit was coming back at them out of the fold between the dunes in which it had temporarily disappeared, the ChiCom in the sidecar pointing a shaped-charge RPG at them.

“Cheeky bastard!” Aussie said, and was already into a series of S curves and dips. The RPG fired, a hot sliver of shrapnel slicing open the front left tire like butter, amputating two inches or so from the foot-long pack of C-4 plastique, ending up taking a chip out of the stock of the Winchester 1200 riot shotgun that was strapped to the cage.

Brentwood was still firing the machine gun and saw the ChiCom driver shaking as if he were some kind of machine coining apart, falling away, the long burst of machine gun fire literally chopping him to pieces. The motorcycle jack-knifed and was over on its side.

“Shit!” It was Aussie. “Two flats in one day.”

“Aussie — can it.” It was David, looking suddenly older than his years. “Anyone hurt?”

“No.” He turned back toward the La Roche reporter, who shook his head like a child on the verge of tears, accused of something he didn’t do.

“All right,” David said. “Now listen up — all of you.”

Salvini was already changing tires.

In the lead M1A2, General Freeman watched through his viewer while the gunner below and immediately in front of him scanned his thermal-imaging sight. Freeman was confident that with so much dust and now smoke from smoke grenades in the air it would be the Americans who would have the edge — able to see through the polluted air in the same way that Schwarzkopf had reported how the American sights had been able to better see through the hot fog of war than had the Iraqi tanks.

The concussion from the explosion of a Bradley armored personnel carrier behind him off to his left could be felt, not so much by any impact or discernible earth tremor but by the sudden surge in the M1A2’s air conditioner and ventilation system, the inside pressure now rising, not to keep out poison gas, though it could do that, too, but rather the thick dust caused by the Bradley’s sudden demise.

It was a shock as much to Freeman as his other three crewmen. If they couldn’t see through the smoke curtain, then how could Cheng’s tanks have seen the Bradley? Unless the smoke laid by the ChiCom armor was “particle infused,” that is, thickened to make it harder for the thermal and night-vision viewers on the M1A2 to penetrate.

There was only one way, Freeman saw, to counter such a possibility — close the gap between him and them as fast as possible. Freeman ordered a full-speed attack in wedge formations. His two hundred tanks moved from refused right and refused left configurations to the arrowhead-shaped wedge formations wherein the lead tank pointed its 120mm gun and coaxial machine gun straight ahead, the two tanks to the left and two slightly back and to the right covering the flanks by having their main guns pointing left and right respectively. And if necessary all would be able to fire straight ahead without hitting one another.

“Must be using high-particle smoke,” the gunner said, the reclined driver flexing his wrist on the handlebar control, his line-of-sight responsibility being the front, the loader on Freeman’s left responsible for the left side, Freeman responsible for the right and the all-round view and with the capability of overriding his gunner.

“Well, wait till the bastards get a taste of this high-ratio gearbox,” Freeman said, and with that the M1A2s moved quickly and efficiently over the sand, main gun steady, chassis undulating as if on a gimbals mounting, into the dense smoke. Ahead, the round, hunkered down domes of upgunned T-59s and T-72s were dimly, then more clearly, discerned, the weak sun no brighter than the moon as it sank over the desert. The driver picked up the first T-59, gave its position, and the gunner readied his 120mm — the HEAT, or high explosive antitank round, streaking out of the barrel a split second later.

“One o’clock — three hundred yards!” Freeman shouted as the first T-59 exploded from the molten jet that cut through its thick steel.

“In sight!” the gunner confirmed, the loader already shoving another HEAT round into “pussy,” as the breech was affectionately called, the round now en route to another T-59, the round striking its 75mm-thick glacis plate.

The fire-control computer aboard the M1A2 was already making minor adjustments for barrel drift, the gunner using the coaxial machine bursts so that his thermal imager picked up the tracer dots more easily in the smoke and dust, aligning the gun for the third shot in fourteen seconds, when a deafening bang, then a ringing noise, shook the M1A2 as if some giant had hit it with a mallet. The blow had come from a ChiCom infantry-fired RPG7, its shaped-charge round going instantly into a molten jet. But the jet of steel was prevented from penetrating the sloped armor of the M1A2 because of the tank’s reactive armor pack, which blew up upon the impact of me RPG7, diffusing the molten jet. There had been much debate in the Pentagon about the pluses and minuses of reactive armor, but for the men in Freeman’s tank it had worked admirably.

The moment the ChiComs’ RPG hit the M1A2 another HESH round had left the Abrams and another T-59 exploded but did not stop, its buckled tracks still somehow grinding forward, keeping the tank rolling down a dune, albeit arthritically, while it continued to disintegrate as a chain reaction was set off like some massive string of firecrackers, its crew having no time to escape but one of them, the driver, visible as a charred torso dangling from the driver’s exit beyond the turret. The air was pungent with diesel and gasoline fumes mixed in with the hot stench of burning skin melting into the sand, some of which was fused into glass by the molten jet of shaped charges.

“Three down!” the loader exulted, his voice a fusion of excitement and terror.

Freeman said nothing, conscious that even with a three-to-one kill ratio he might yet be unable to defeat the Chinese if they outnumbered him by more than three to one. Which they did. Freeman’s driver, acutely aware that the M1A2’s fuel tank was immediately to his left, started up from his nearly fully reclined position when he heard the tattoo of light machine gun fire raking the metal only inches from his ear.

“Goddamn infantry!” Freeman shouted. “Run the bastards over!”

For some inexplicable reason the driver started to laugh and couldn’t stop. The loader, hearing him on the intercom, also started cackling. Freeman glowered as the loader only with difficulty thrust another round home but couldn’t stop laughing. It was like a child being chased — full of fear and excitement, the vision of every M1A2 breaking formation, frantically taking off after individual Chinese, having struck the crew as insanely funny.

“What in hell’s the matter with you!” Freeman said, while pressing the thumb “traverse” control and hearing the rattle of machine gun bullets hitting the cupola. The loader was laughing so hard, hunched over by the shell racks, he was afraid he might have to urinate into his helmet. It was a kind of hysterical terror that only tankers and submariners know.