Ian Slater - Warshot

It was a grim morning all around, the simultaneous successes of the attacks on Hillsboro, Bangor, Miramar, and the rest proof positive that Novosibirsk’s network of “sleepers” were wreaking havoc on American morale, quite apart from the human and materiel carnage they’d already inflicted on America’s ability to wage war.

“How long till I go on?” Mayne asked Trainor.

“Two minutes, Mr. President.”

Mayne closed the latest damage reports and went over his speech once more. As the red light went on and Mayne cleared his throat and shuffled his papers, readying for his extraordinary address to the nation, David Brentwood, Lana Brentwood’s younger brother, attached to Britain’s SAS and now on a long-awaited honeymoon in the Canadian Rockies, was being urgently summoned, like so many other Americans, for immediate return to active service.

Across the Pacific it was dusk along the Black Dragon River on China’s northern border, and Colonel Soong, commanding the Fourth Battalion of the People’s Liberation Army’s Shenyang XVI Corps, was readying his nine hundred men to overrun the position just north of Manzhouli, from where the Chinese army had first been shelled and which had precipitated their entry into the war. Soong had designated five attack points so as to break up the enemy’s fire, which he estimated was battalion size with three batteries of eight guns each, together with a headquarters battery containing communication and fire control. With about ten men per gun crew plus ammunition and support troops, the U.S. battalion on the hill, Soong estimated, would number around five hundred men.

It had been a fierce fight, with the enemy’s 155mms having the advantage of the high ground even as they had pulled back to the horseshoe-shaped summit of the mountain designated A-7 in the Argunskiy range, and Soong knew it would become even fiercer, the dead lying everywhere as he ordered his three companies to regroup for yet another assault. Nearby, off to his left, he saw what he guessed must have been one of the most forward American fire-control spotters, the man’s torso missing an arm, his other sliced neatly through. The American’s shoulder patch, stuck to his shoulder’s shattered bone and showing the screaming eagle of the Eighty-first Airborne, had been cut neatly in half by shrapnel, as if sliced through with a band saw, blood congealing purple against the snow in the fading light.

Soong took it as a good omen, and, crouching, made his way through the dead clumps of uprooted aspen and pine, their earth-clogged roots dark against the now freezing snow, the acrid stench of cordite and the singed-meat smell of burning bodies heavy in the air. Soong was so occupied making sure the slope leading down to the river, still a half mile ahead, wasn’t mined, that he didn’t notice a mottled-green-camouflaged enemy helo — American — a Blackhawk UH-60A, hung up in tall pine a hundred yards to his right.

Normally Soong would have been back with his battalion HQ staff and not so far forward with his troops, but the capture of A-7 Mountain had become a top priority of General Cheng’s, and indeed PLA photographers had been sent to record the event. The battle of the Black Dragon River, which Beijing was now calling it—”Black Dragon” having much stronger patriotic connotations than “Mount A-7”—was a misnomer, as southwest of the Amur hump near A-7 there was no Amur. But for Beijing the battle for A-7 came to symbolize the war for the Amur hump as a whole, and a victory on the mountain would be a showcase victory early in the war against the Americans.

Colonel Soong, now ordering up heavy mortars, was determined to lead the final attack. He was disappointed that there seemed to be so few dead about, no more than a dozen or so, suggesting that despite the distances involved from Chita to the northwest and from Khabarovsk to the east, the Americans might already have managed to withdraw most of the battery crews and spiked the guns. If so, the fierce battle so far might now suddenly give way to a hollow victory, one that, if the enemy had managed to be snatched from the surrounding Chinese battalions, would deny Cheng the crushing total victory he and Beijing so urgently desired. As if in answer, he heard a shout from a company commander off to his left, a long burst of AK-47 fire, and then the steady chump, chump, chump of a U.S. Marine Mk-19 throwing out high-velocity forty-millimeter antipersonnel/armor-piercing grenades from its linked belts no more than a thousand meters away, from some unseen clearing deep within the taiga.

At a rate of fire of over 350 rounds per minute, the American grenade gun was a deadly weapon in any situation. In defense it was particularly formidable, capable of breaking up the most determined infantry assault, its persistent dull thumping filling in the vacuum created by the temporary lull in 155mm artillery fire, the latter having dropped off in intensity under the ox-horn-shaped advance of the Shenyang army’s IX Corps.

Exhorting his men not to stop, Soong moved forward into an area of taiga that had the strange appearance of having suffered a forest fire without the trees being burned, as leaves and whole branches were shredded by the flaying shrapnel of the grenades. He heard a shuffle of air, felt the increasing pressure on his eardrums, and dove to ground, using the body of a dead comrade as protection. Only now could he properly see the American chopper wedged high in the branches of two trees, its shattered rotors no doubt responsible in part for the fallen foliage. When he saw a body in it move — the pilot’s — and a fall of snow, he instinctively raised his Kalashnikov, but it was the whole chopper moving.

Whether from concussion of the incoming 155mms or from the wind groaning through the trees, or both, the American helo slid, tail first, another foot or two, then stopped, its scraping noise against the branches barely ceasing before he spotted the body moving again against the angle at which the aircraft was leaning. Firing a long burst, Soong saw the body jerking in violent spasm, and watched the chopper suddenly plunge another ten feet, tail first, upended in the pine, the now dead pilot still in harness, head and arms dangling from the twisted fuselage, blood pouring from his neck, splattering the snow and branches beneath.

It wasn’t that Soong particularly hated Americans, that he hadn’t even thought of taking the American captive, but there were no real provisions for POWs. In Beijing’s opinion they cost too much.

As Soong’s battalion moved forward, taking out the grenade gun at high cost — over seventeen dead — the Shenyang infantry came across more American choppers that had been brought down by the highly effective ChiCom antiaircraft fire. Equally as deadly, in Soong’s view, was the fact that the enemy battery itself was so far from American air bases in Siberia, mat even after succeeding with hazardous air-to-air refueling, the would-be rescue helicopters could have had only enough petrol for several — no more than five to ten — minutes or so over the besieged summit. The upturned chopper in the trees nearest him moved again, and instinctively he raised his Kalashnikov and swung toward it, but the only thing moving was the chopper itself, a local gust sending the craft crashing down.

Advancing once again, Soong concluded from the relatively few enemy dead he was now seeing, and the failed chopper rescue, that Shenyang’s XVI Corps was on the tail of a panicked American withdrawal to A-7’s summit. He could have no idea that five thousand miles away across the Pacific, many in the continental United States itself were on the brink of such panic.

“…My fellow Americans, nothing is more repugnant to our sense of justice and fair play than the curtailing of individual rights. But the unprecedented and coordinated enemy attacks on our ports and other bases within the United States not only constitute a grave threat to the vital supply lines to our troops in Siberia, but also constitute a grave threat to all of us here at home.”