Ian Slater - Force of Arms

It happened in the last forty minutes before the latest cease-fire.

The Medevac choppers came in and found themselves almost immediately bracketed by heavy ChiCom 82mm and light 60mm mortar fire, a dozen U.S. Blackhawk helos either afire or unable to take off with the wounded some of whom were ChiComs who had been gathered up and put in the wire litters that were carried both in and astride the helos.

One such wounded was Wan Zhang, a private from Shenyangs Sixteenth Army who had been hit by an unexploded American 60mm mortar round that passed into the mans body via his shoulder girdle, penetrating the pectoralis major and entering the axilla, the unexploded mortar bomb, seen clearly in the X ray, finally lodging subcutaneously down outside the rib cage in the patients right side just above the crest of his right hip.

The only other case on record of an unexploded round in a soldier had occurred in Vietnam. Even without the X rays, the surgeon at the inflatable MUST Medical Unit Self-contained Transportable hospital behind the lines at Orgon Tal could see the bombs outline bulging in the patients right side. They injected Zhang with morphine and left him on the stretcher well outside the MUST, lest the round go off and kill other patients as well as the ChiCom.

The operating table had to have sandbags all about it to a height of five feet in case something should go wrong and the mortar bomb explode.

All right, said the chief surgeon, Colonel Walter Paine. The operation on the prisoner is purely voluntary. Ill welcome any help I get, folks, but its your call. Anyone want out? One of the nurses looked at the other, but no one moved in the team of two doctors, two nurses, and the anesthetist.

All right, lets do it, the colonel said. Despite the sandbags and the Kevlar vests and helmets they would be wearing, Paine said he would allow only one nurse near the sandbagged area at a time. Meanwhile, another blast wall was being erected between the operating room and the patient area of the MUST and around the anesthetist.

Should let the mother die! one of the patients opined, a sapper next to the operating rooms wall.

Thatd make us just like the Communists, the Medevac corporal said. Makes me damn proud to be American.

Yeah, the sapper said, well you arent near the fuckin wall!

Ill stay here then, said the corporal, whod been passing through. We can play a round of gin rummy.

Please yourself.

Everyone except two men whod been blinded in action saw the trolley slowly pass through the ward, the only noise the flapping of the inflatable hospitals sides like some huge kite in the threatening wind. Several men involuntarily held their breath as Wan Zhang passed them.

Fresh from the States, an eager young logistics captain was assigned to the Khabarovsk headquarters of General Douglas Freemans Second Army, the spearhead of a U.N. task force sent to prevent any further annexation of territory in the Far East by either the newly declared Siberian Republic or China.

Freeman, his forces now on the northern plain 280 miles north of Beijing and the Great Wall, was absorbed in studying a relief map of Chinas northern and central provinces. Even so, he took time to acknowledge the majors salute with a friendly, Welcome to Second Army.

Thank you, sir. I

Whats the gauge of the Trans-Siberian? Freeman asked without looking up from the relief map.

The captain was nonplussed of all the questions still, he kept his cool. Fifteen twenty millimeters, sir.

Chinese railways? Freeman asked.

Ah the same, sir.

Son, Freeman said, still immersed in studying the relief map, moving about the table, as intent on a possible artillery position as a pool player lining up his cue, with that information youd be responsible for the biggest logistical fuckup since Arnhem where they dropped spare berets to the commandos instead of ammo. Take you days instead of hours to move a division. And what are you going to do with a sixty-ton Abrams M1? Carry it across from one rail to the next on your back? Chinese gauge is fourteen thirty-five millimeters. Youll be assigned patrol duty along the trace. Dismissed.

Yes, sir. The captain saluted and walked out, his ego shattered. But soon when he got to the trace, the DMZ between the Peoples Liberation Army and the U.S. he was glad hed been fired from the HQ logistics job. No way he wanted to work for a pickass like Freeman.

The incident, small enough in itself, was another example of Freemans command of even the minutiae of logistics that added to his legend as Americas foremost fighting general. But railway gauges werent the only thing General Freeman was sure of. He believed, like the Taiwanese, that the truce agreed to by the diplomats of the U.N. and China would not hold and that there were many Chinas none strong enough by itself to overcome the oppressive Beijing regime but all wanting more freedom waiting.

General Douglas Freemans Second Army stood on the northern plain beyond Beijing following a fierce tank battle with the Chinese Peoples Liberation Army from the Amur River south across the Gobi Desert. Sent to head the U.N.s peacekeeping forces along the Amur River, the Americans, with some help from the British and underground fighters in the Siberian border area known as the JAO Jewish Autonomous Oblast, or region were now the only players in the Allied push south. Meanwhile, Admiral Kuangs Taiwanese invasion fleet lay poised a hundred miles across the Formosa Strait eager to regain power in Beijing after all these years, should the opportunity present itself.

In the MUST operating room, surgeon Colonel Paine had called for forceps and gingerly begun to extract the 60mm mortar bomb from Wan Zhang, pulling it by its stabilizer fins, when it exploded, killing Paine with shrapnel that passed up under his chin, through the roof of his mouth, into his brain. One nurse was blinded in one eye, the anesthetist suffered multiple lacerations to the face, and the other doctor and nurse were badly burned about the head. The explosion, hitting the oxygen feed, immediately started a fire that was quickly extinguished, but not before it had rendered the MUST OR a burned-out shell. The story quickly passed down the line and was taken as a bad beginning to any kind of truce, the ChiComs quickly claiming that Wan Zhang had been tortured to death. With this in mind, it was clear to each and every ChiCom that it was better to die than fall prisoner to the Americans.

Halfway around the world, a combination Hunter-Killer/ICBM sub, a Sea Wolf II, the USS Reagan, was about to get under way. Some of the crew had been joking about making love a dawn breaker on the day they were to leave. Others said nothing about it, the tension of their impending goodbyes having inhibited rather than released sexual passion. And the older members of the Reagans gold crew said little, for most of them were married and had children, and trying to make time for lovemaking on the day the Sea Wolf was about to slip out of Bangor was like trying to arrange a kids birthday party. In the end, it defeated you, and so they hugged a lot, knowing they would have to wait until their six months of duty were complete and it was time for them to return to base and hand the Reagan over to the blue crew for the next six months.

The skipper, Commander Robert Brentwood, to all outward appearances was the cool, let-go-aft voice of reason as the sub slipped out toward Hood Canal and one of the degaussing stations that would wipe out its magnetic signature should enemy subs be lurking beyond the two-hundred-mile limit, trying to get a fix on the craft through comparing her signature to those in a threat library of sound prints.