Ian Slater - Warshot

“By God, Norton,” said Freeman, “Harvey looks like hell. You watch him when we get back. Make sure he gets more sleep — valuable man, Harvey.”

As Norton spoke beneath his balaclava, he swore his breath was turning to ice particles before his words were out.

It wasn’t simply a victory for Freeman — it was the slaughter of the entire Siberian armored division, and within forty minutes Norton had seen why. The T-72s and the “little surprise” Colonel Soong had known about — over seventy T-80s with up-gunned 130mm cannon, also with laser sighting — were stilled, sitting ducks while the M1A1s broke cover, bursting forth like wild animals from snow-laden lairs, careening and wheeling and wheeling back again at over fifty miles an hour, and with unerring precision belched flame and shot, most of it APDS — armor-piercing discarding sabot — the projectiles hitting the Siberian tanks at over six thousand feet per second, often puncturing a hole only a few centimeters across. But through that hole came a molten jet of white-hot metal that, spraying inside the tank, created injuries and explosions unimaginable to any but the American gunners and tank crews who saw the T-80s and T-72s buck, snow flying off them like white flour, then engulfed in red, black-streaked flames. Many of the tanks, still a moment before, were suddenly jolted by the heat, moving — some forward, some backward — spewing sparks and lavalike flows as their ammunition stores exploded, the human and matériel detritus bubbling forth from the moving carcasses of what were once five hundred of the Siberians’ crack main battle tanks. The reason: long ago, Americans whose names were not known, who had attended to the dull, analytical side of war and who were driven by the demons of perfection and Department of Defense specifications — specifications in this case insisted upon by none other than Freeman himself — had produced lubricants for the M1A1 that would not freeze. Or, more accurately, lubricants in which the waxes would not separate out and, like cholesterol in the blood, clog the vital hydraulic arteries of the world’s best main battle tank. It was a tank that, thanks to American know-how, would keep running to temperatures below minus sixty degrees, at which point the Siberian tanks, good enough in themselves, simply shuddered and stopped, the petroleum waxes, because of more crudely refined oil, thick in their blood, with only the implosions of the American 120mm shells which killed them capable of heating them up enough to move.

Harvey Simmet forgave Freeman for disturbing his peace on the can, for when the temperature had fallen below fifty and showed no sign of easing up, Freeman knew all he’d had to do was wait. It was the kind of American can-do know-how that allowed Johnny Ferrago and the other “sandhogs” to dig the third tunnel under Manhattan.

With the Nanking Bridge knocked out, the effect was not felt in the north for another three days, during which the southern arm of Freeman’s Second Army readied themselves for counterattack in the vicinity of A-7. But if it took three days for Colonel Soong to see the stream of ammunition and food slow to a trickle, the effect of the Americans having taken out the vital crossing across the Yangtze was felt within hours in Harbin.

If the American commandos could strike that deep in China from their carriers in the East China Sea, then, Chen argued to his Harbin cell of the June Fourth Democracy Movement, it should not be too long before the Americans would drive south from the Siberian-Chinese border — so that now would be the opportune moment for the Harbin underground to strike. It would be a signal and example to all the underground movements in China to rise, for, as he pointed out, something the American commandos could not have known was the enormous symbolic power of the Nanking Bridge.

Quite apart from the vital strategic importance that the bridge had held for the Chinese Communists, its spans across the mighty Yangtze, joining north and south after the revolution, had been touted by the Communists as the joining of old enemies, of two Chinas, into one — a Communist China ever after. Now the link between the two Chinas, the northerners and the southerners, had been broken.

“What do you propose?” Chen’s comrades asked him.

“The jail!” he said.

“To get the Siberian out?” asked another, not particularly enthusiastic about risking his neck for any long nose.

“To get our friend out,” responded Chen.

“It will be dangerous.”

“Living is dangerous, comrades. She is our friend.” Chen said it to save face. Even so, he was lying. They were all lying. A long nose was a long nose, and in their view would not stand up to torture as well as Chinese. Friendship was not enough to move them. The truth, he knew, was that if the Public Security Bureau broke her — if she talked — die Harbin chapter of the Democratic Movement, and their own escape line through Manchuria should they need it, would be finished.

Chen gave them another reason that they should act. “We should begin to sabotage. Start the fire here, comrades — in Harbin! The Americans will now push south. Harbin is the first major city in their path of liberation.”

“And what if the Americans don’t attack?” asked a comrade. “If this Freeman doesn’t come through?”

“He will,” answered Chen. “The bridge is gone, and now we hear the Siberians have suffered a major defeat in the north around Baikal, which will leave the Americans free to turn all their forces south against our border and push the PLA back.”

There was a show of hands. Chen won the vote.

His plan was simple. They would pretend drunkenness and call on Chen’s brother-in-law Wong.

“Wong’s a turtle!” said someone. Against this grievous insult, there was no defense from Chen. Wong was, indisputably a turtle. But he could help, Chen told them.

“How?”

“We will ask him to show us this crazy foreigner who eats her own shit.”

In Harbin they would call it the night of the west wind. For the PLA guards on duty at Harbin Number One Jail, however, it would be the night of the hornets, for the Democracy Movement guerrillas swarmed all about them like a wild sea and seemed to be everywhere at once.

Within minutes of Wong having self-importantly opened the door to show off his power and to show his brother-in-law the foreign devil who ate her own excrement, the guerrillas were upon them in a kind of fearful ferocity, and the already grimy, yellow-bricked walls of the police station were streaked in blood.

Harbin was shaken to its core, and within an hour of the attack the PLA had rallied sufficiently to be scouring the streets in an outburst of officially sanctioned panic and revenge, the death knell of several guerrillas being the fact that to distinguish one another in the melee they had used cheaply dyed neck kerchiefs whose blue dye ran easily under the heat of their perspiration, so that even though they had taken the kerchiefs off, a stain mark was left on their necks. Less than half of the 150 arrested as Democracy Movement terrorists and “enemies of the people” actually belonged to the Democracy Movement, the others having been people, both men and women, unable or unwilling to account for their whereabouts to local granny committees or to the investigating police. Several were beheaded in public executions for no other reason than a cheaply dyed shirt had left a blue stain on their skin.

Ling and his wife were immediately taken out and shot in the tiny exercise yard, the bullets deliberately not aimed at their spinal cords, so as to have them bleed to death over a number of hours. Their small boy was sent the next day for adoption to Shanghai, but with it being known that he was the offspring of enemies of the state, no one would have him. He was then sent to the Fourteenth Reform School for thought correction.