Ian Slater: Warshot

The circulation of La Roche’s tabloids throughout the world was skyrocketing once again. The predicament of Freeman’s Second Army, on a tightrope between defeat and victory, allowed La Roche’s chain to make millions by describing the terrible arctic conditions under which Freeman’s soldiers were about to fight the Siberian spearhead rumbling south of Yakutsk. If Freeman managed to pull it off — which quite frankly neither La Roche nor any of his tabloid editors believed he would — then the papers could ring their hosannas and they’d make millions on the victory. If he was defeated — the prevailing opinion of the editors— then it wouldn’t be the Siberian winter that was so much to blame, but rather what their headlines would declare had been FREEMAN’S FOLLY! the leader paragraphs and descriptions of Second Army’s incompetence already in the word processors of every La Roche paper. Either way La Roche couldn’t lose.

The only impediment to his high, his only loss, was Lana Brentwood. From his Manhattan penthouse he looked out upon the dazzling city, much of which was owned by his Asian conglomerates, a fact unknown by the millions of Americans over whose lives the conglomerates nevertheless had financial control.

Buoyed by the prospect of setting yet higher circulation records, La Roche took a snort of angel dust, felt the rush, and right then and there determined it was time he made another takeover bid — but he knew it mustn’t look like that. He turned about and spread the two headlines — one for victory, one for defeat — that his New York editors had sent over by courier for his approval. Francine, shuffling over in her mink slippers and carrying two Bloody Marys, had never seen him so self-satisfied. “Whose side are you on?” she asked, glancing at the headline.

“My side,” said Jay, picking up the courier envelope and smacking her on the butt. “Number one, baby — me.” He took her Bloody Mary from her and put it on the polished burl coffee table.

“Not now,” she said, half pleading, but trying not to look too annoyed. That only made him mad.

“Hey!” he said, and a moment later he was looking down at her, kneeling before him, the wispy negligee so transparent he could see it all. “You ever been to Alaska?”

“No,” she said. “Why?”

“Because we’re going there, that’s why. Dutch Harbor.”

“Sounds cold.”

“It is — it’s a berg.”

“Then what’s the big attraction?” asked Francine, swishing her auburn hair back.

“My wife.”

“Oh — I don’t wanna go.”

“You’ll do what you’re told.” She knew she had no choice. He’d bought her, and if she didn’t like it, he told her she could always go back to working bar — for peanuts.

“When are we going?”

“Soon. La Roche Chemicals says thanks to the boys and gals at the front — all that shit. How’s that grab you?”

She shrugged disinterestedly.

“Come on,” he told her, brusquely pulling her face to his unbuttoned fly. “And for Chrissakes watch your teeth.”

On A-7 it was quite obvious to Colonel Soong, despite the American propaganda, what had taken place: the enemy SAS/D teams landing on the mountain were sent in with the Flying Dragon to rescue the American gunners, but instead, when they found they could not stop the Chinese attack, they did the next best thing to hide their aggression from the world by removing all the dog tags from the American dead, as he had found done on the American bodies. Ah, but they had not had time to remove the incriminating evidence of the shoulder patches, which he had sent back to Beijing and which were being exhibited to the world to show that America was guilty of aggression.

Of course, the Americans denied it and said that army patches could be bought by anyone from military surplus stores all over America and that they would be willing to let a neutral country verify this and examine whatever bodies were returned to them. And of course the running dog lackeys of America — such as Canada and England — on the Security Council supported the Americans’ attempted cover-up by what Beijing rightly called “the outright American imperialist lie.”

While Robert Brentwood began his two-mile swim away from Dennison toward the far side of the river, Colonel Soong, more than a thousand miles to the north, was consolidating his capture of A-7 from what he still believed had been an American battery. He was determined that A-7, with its panoramic view of the Siberian-Chinese border, would never again be taken by the enemy. When the Siberians had effected their pincer movement against the Americans with their northern armored columns from Yakutsk, then Beijing would claim this territory around A-7 in the traditional buffer zone between China and Siberia as China’s. They had captured it — it should now remain theirs, a price that Novosibirsk would surely cede to Beijing in payment for the assistance that had been rendered them by the peace-loving Chinese people against the American imperialists.

Soong had tank traps dug around the entire ten-mile base of A-7, and radiating out from these there were more traps and antitank ditches for another thousand meters.

The weather was bad generally but good for such work — little trouble from the odd U.S. Air Force fighter patrols that dared to risk empty tanks at the outer perimeter of their defense zone west of Khabarovsk. Besides, the hard manual labor warmed the soldiers, and as they carefully covered the traps with snow-laden vegetation, like soldiers anywhere they began to treat the traps as their own habitat. The snow atop them — even though no fires were permitted, so as to prevent infrared emission to any U.S. satellite overflights — acted much like an igloo. And so the deep tank traps became the best cover they could hope for, along with their Gore-Tex sleeping bags, the best the Chinese army had ever seen, purchased from the American firm of La Roche.

The irony of American sleeping bags making it possible for the PLA to better rest up and so kill Americans, if and when the counterattack came, gave Colonel Soong the first good laugh he’d had after his grueling, twenty-four-hour-a-day exertions — making sure all the antitank fortifications were up to standard.

Two miles south of A-7 Soong could hear a noise like that of insects climbing over a metal dish. It was the sound of the reinforcement Shenyang Brigade, deployed from Harbin and amply supplied with the shoulder-launched HN-5A surface-to-air missiles and Red Arrow tube-launched, optically tracked, wire-command infrared antitank missiles, these having a kill probability in excess of eighty-six percent.

Even if the weather broke and the Americans managed to launch refuel-in-air attacks to drop napalm — their most popular aerial weapon against high concentrations of ground troops — they would have to come down five hundred meters or so in order to have the free-tumbling petroleum gel pods hit the general target area. And Soong knew that one of the best-kept secrets of modern warfare — certainly one not known by the general public — was that any plane, no matter how fast, flying under a thousand meters into a phalanx of saturation, small-caliber, high-velocity AA fire, had no better than a fifty-fifty chance of survival. And Soong had such a phalanx of AA weapons, including the nine-and-a-half-ounce thirty-millimeter fired from the PLA’s mobile, multiple-barreled, tripod-mounted turrets, one quad of ZSUs capable of throwing up a near impenetrable shield of over 35,000 rounds a minute. The ZSUs, ammunition for them purchased from La Roche, were so deadly that their fire was akin to ancient hunters letting clouds of mosquitoes and black flies swarm onto a galloping caribou until its mouth, ears, and anus were oozing with them and it finally fell from sheer exhaustion. Soong recalled how a U.S. observer who had seen the Chinese thirty-millimeter ZSUs in action earlier in the war in Korea had, in a mixed metaphor, described how the quads had “nickeled and dimed the fighters to death.” And only one or two bullets in a jet intake or in one of the black fly-by-wire boxes would be enough.