Ian Slater - Warshot

Within two hours three group armies — the Shenyang Military Region’s Sixteenth, Sixty-fourth, and Thirty-ninth — were on the move, the spearhead of an attack on a seventy-five-mile front formed by the Twenty-seventh Army group, whose reputation had been made when they had swarmed down Changan Avenue and shot children as well as the young protesters of the Democracy Movement on the night of June 3–4, 1989, when above Tiananmen the voice of Big Brother in the loudspeakers had declared, “Your movement is bound to fail. It is foreign. This is China, not America.”

“The Twenty-seventh,” promised General Cheng, who had particularly ordered that the imperialist battery that had fired the first shot of the war be taken alive for all the world to see, “will know what to do with them after.”

In General Freeman’s Khabarovsk headquarters hundreds of miles to the north, the noise level of radio traffic was near deafening, the situation board, a computer screen blowup, showing fighting had broken out all along the border in the southwest sector of the hump. ChiCom divisions were already moving north en masse, fanning out toward Kulusutay to the east and Dauriya seventy miles to the west, and in the foothills of the four-thousand-foot-high Argunskiy mountain range the infamous Twenty-seventh had already crossed the border, men and equipment making good time across the frozen marshes just south of Genghis Khan’s wall.

Freeman, for all his warnings about a breakdown of the cease-fire, was in shock, stunned now that it had actually happened. Staring at himself in the mirror, he slipped the nine-millimeter Parabellum into his waistband and was buttoning up his tunic as if in a state of hypnosis as Dick Norton knocked, waited, knocked again, then, alarmed at not receiving an answer, opened the door to the general’s room. He took the general’s silence for extreme calm under pressure, not realizing what a devastating blow it had been to Freeman.

Now that it had actually happened, it made no sense to Freeman. The American Second Army— his army — was suddenly in a war with China, a country of over a billion people. He didn’t have to imagine what effect it would have on the American public — on the White House — the almost certain attempt of his enemies in and outside the Pentagon, if not on the president’s staff itself, to hold him personally responsible for having broken the cease-fire. He was stunned by the supreme irony — that of all his warnings about the cease-fire being broken, the possibility that it would be broken by China had never, deep down, been seriously entertained by him. He had taken their border movements to be merely precautionary. But he knew that those against him back home, looking for a scapegoat, would recall his warnings about a possible cease-fire rupture, together with his wanting to pursue the Siberians before the cease-fire, and in it they would see him guilty of having made a preemptive strike.

The shock was wearing off now. He had always been contemptuous of Stalin’s state of mind upon being informed that the Wehrmacht legions were upon him after he had signed the Hitler-Stalin Pact. Now, as much as he’d detested the Communist leader, Freeman knew what it must have felt like, but for Freeman the very recognition he was in shock was the signal he was on his way out of it.

“General!” It was Norton following him out into a river of khaki, some officers, still with white snow overlays on, passing about Freeman and Norton like rapids in a stream.

“What is it, Dick?”

“Sir — the Chinese are claiming we started it.”

“Bullshit!”

Norton handed him a SATRECON photograph. It had been taken with an infrared sensor, a white spot like a pinpoint of overexposed film circled on the photo. Freeman felt his heart pounding.

“You can’t see it with the naked eye,” commented Norton, “but on computer enhancement they say you can actually see the black side blasts coming out of the muzzle brake. It’s definitely a U.S. 155mm howitzer — towed, not self-propelled.”

“So?”

Normally Norton would have lowered his voice for what he was about to tell the general, but in the near-frantic hubbub of the HQ it was unnecessary. “This was fired at oh five hundred hours, General. Ten minutes before the first report from our side of Chinese fire.”

Freeman grunted, not wanting to acknowledge the frightening implication of Norton’s words. “Probably took ten minutes for our reports to get passed down the line. You know how it is. Fog of war, Dick. The fog of—”

“We had the report within a minute, sir. It looks like we fired first.” Norton continued, anticipating the general’s next question, “We’re trying to pinpoint the unit. Seems to be one of Five Corps’ batteries near Kulusutay. They shouldn’t be where they are, but maybe they saw ChiCom infantry on the move and changed positions for a better traverse. Anyway, we can’t raise them — either their radio’s out or—”

“Doesn’t make any difference,” said Freeman, and Norton knew the general was right. Whatever the cause, battle was joined.

The White House, however, demanded that responsibility for the first shot be “ascertained immediately. Repeat— immediately.” The decoded Most Secret message from the White House added that “all hell” had broken out in the U.N. — the suspicion that Freeman had precipitated a war trumpeted to near certainty by the media, especially the La Roche chain of newspapers in the U.S. and abroad. Already The New York Times had obtained from an “anonymous” source another print of the photograph from the Pentagon showing the “first shot” SATRECON snap, which the Times said was “confirmed by independent analysis” to be genuine, the time on the photograph being automatically registered on such satellite overflights on the bottom right-hand corner of the photograph.

With three Chinese group armies, in excess of 121,000 men, coming at Second Army’s left, or southern, flank— 64,000 men — Freeman was in no mood to bother with the White House request, but knew if he didn’t, he might be out of a job. He might be out of one anyway.

“Dick!”

“Sir?” It wasn’t Norton answering but the communications duty officer cutting in.

“What is it, Major?”

“Sir, Five Corps HQ say they’ve tried to reach the battery that supposedly fired first, but there’s no radio communication and the ChiComs are closing. Five Corps’ G-2 estimates that unless we haul them out within the next ten to twelve hours, the ChiComs will overrun the position.”

“Well, what in hell is Five Corps Air Cavalry doing?” demanded Freeman. “Sitting on their butts? Get the goddamn helos in there!”

“That’s part of the problem, sir. It’s still pretty cold, but the temperature’s rising — so now we have a lot of fog and we’ve run into Qing Fives.”

“Qing Fives!” retorted Freeman angrily, contemptuous of the Chinese fighter. “God damn it, Major, a Qing Five’s just a bucket of crap with a jet engine strapped to it.”

“Yes, sir. Our fighters’ll make mincemeat of the Qings all right when they get there, but the best they can do is keep the ChiComs away from the Five Corps battery. Getting helos in there to get our boys out is another question. ChiComs are reportedly using surface-to-air missiles even against our light reconnaissance aircraft.”

“God damn it!” said Freeman, glaring at the situation board. “Soviet munitions. What’d I tell you, Dick? Birds of a feather.”

“Well, sir, the Siberians haven’t moved.”

“And thank God for that,” replied Freeman. “Dick, send in a commando team to help get those Five Corps artillery battery guys out before the damn ChiComs overrun it.” Freeman glanced up at the Special Forces availability board. “We have any SAS/Delta Force men around?”