Invasion: China (Invasion America) (Volume 5) (50 page)

“That’s big,”
Grant said.

“
It was huge,” Chet said, “probably been growing since the time of the dinosaurs. Behind the cactuses was a chain-link fence and then the neighbors’ back yards. Anyway, I’d crouch in the grass across our side of the gully and just stare at the cactuses. I’d say to myself, ‘Chet, you know there’s a rabbit frozen there, watching you with its beady eye.’ That’s what rabbits do sometimes. They freeze, hoping you won’t see them. Well, I’d just scan and scan, and all of a sudden, I’d see a rabbit eye watching me. I felt like an Apache then, a tracker no rabbit could trick. Then I’d lift my pellet gun and shoot the sneaky bastard.”

“
How about that,” Grant said.

“Don’t you see?” Chet asked
him.

Grant shrugged
picked up the binoculars and scanned the Daoyizhen Bulldozer Works. After a time, he said, “I see a glint. Bet it’s a Chinaman’s rifle.”

“
Where is it?” Chet asked. “When this show gets started, I’ll give the fools some American love.”

Jake’s link crackled
in his ear. With a touch, he activated his throat-microphone.

“Sergeant,” Lieutenant Wans said.

“Here, sir,” Jake whispered.

“There’s been a change
in plans. The space boys want a crack at the plant.”

“THORs, sir?” Jake asked.

“They’re supposed to strike in ten minutes. Afterward, the Marines will go in.”

“Sounds good,” Jake said. “I’ll pass that along.”

“High Command wants to take Daoyizhen. They wouldn’t be using THORs otherwise.”

“
Got it,” Jake said.

The lieutenant grunted over the link. They used to wish each other luck
several weeks ago, but no one did that anymore. No one talked about it, but the feeling was the platoon had run out of good luck a long time ago. Asking God for it or even wishing it on another would only bring bad luck.

Jake told his boys
the news, and they waited. Ten minutes seemed to last forever. It was funny, or not so much. Take your pick. Before a firefight, time seemed to stand still. During combat, time raced at hyper-speed. Afterward, nothing mattered except that you’d lived through another journey in Hell.

“It’s started,” the lieutenant said
over the link.

Jake looked up, but of course he couldn’t see anything through the oily
rich smoke. The minutes lengthened, stretched and—
“Don’t have a visual
of this,” the lieutenant said. “But we’re hearing that Chinese particle beam stations got the—wait. We may have one THOR on its way.”

Jake looked up just in time to see an American-made meteor smash through the smoke
cloud. The twenty-pound crowbar left a luminous trail. Then the dense uranium rod crashed through the roof of the Daoyizhen Bulldozer Works. The rod struck the ground, and the white-hot uranium vapor it had left behind ignited. That produced a terrific incendiary blast. Jake watched in amazement. The entire three-block building shook as if an earthquake had struck. The blast billowed upward, a column of fire shooting out of the Bulldozer Works. A thunderous boom washed over Jake, Chet and Grant, along with a wave of heat.

Seconds later, Jake heard the lieutenant shouting at him through the link. Glancing at the assembly area, Jake saw the body
-armored Marines climb to their feet. He saw one Marine with a US flag sewn onto the back of his pack. The assault troopers began their race to the Bulldozer Factory.

Jake slapped Chet on the shoulder.
His friend glanced at Jake, who pointed. In a second, Chet gripped the butterfly controls of his heavy machine gun. He shouted at Grant, but the man probably couldn’t hear him yet because of the noise of the THOR blast.

Jake grabbed
Grant by the collar and yanked him out of the way. At the same time, Chet aimed his love and pressed his thumbs down. The bullets reached upslope and hammered the spot where Grant had seen the rifle glint earlier.

All along the line in the rubble, other heavy machine guns gave the assault troop
ers covering fire.

The THOR must have killed enemy soldiers, but it hadn’t broken the rest.
Chinese assault rifles, grenade launchers and even some mortars opened up. Marines went down, hit. Others kept going.

Grant
fed Chet’s machine gun as the former rabbit hunter worked his section of the Bulldozer Works. Puffs of concrete showed where the rounds stuck. Then some American artillery tubes got into the game, firing in direct line of sight. Loud
crashes
sounded. Shells screamed overhead.
Booms
told a wonderful story as they wrecked more of the mighty building, killed some of the defenders and allowed half the Marines to make it to the base of the Bulldozer Works.

“Get your people ready,” the lieutenant told Jake.
“It’s our turn next.”

“Roger that,” Jake said. He crawled along the line.
At one point, he watched the last Marine disappear through a huge hole in the wall into the factory.

Gathering his squad, Jake waited for the lieutenant to give the word. It came too soon, and Jake found himself making the long dash
across the open terrain. Enemy bullets scored near his feet. A man yelled.

“
Grant’s hit!” Chet shouted.

Jake wanted to keep running
toward the factory. The need to escape consumed him. He could hear the Chinese machine gun firing and see spouts of dirt shoot up near him. But he was the sergeant, and Grant was his friend. With an effort of will, he stopped, turned around and took the steps needed to reach the wounded soldier lying on the ground.

“Ain’t no big deal,”
Grant told him. Then three more 12.7mm bullets stitched across him. One drilled a hole in his helmet, making brains squish out. Two others tore into Grant’s chest. He twitched several times. Then he died as the lights went out behind his eyes.

Jake didn’t remember much after that. It was
a lot like a drunken blackout. Only this was combat madness. Scenes flashed before his eyes. He saw jagged ground as he sprinted. Air hurt going down his throat. He felt something hot in his side and heard a man cry, “Medic!” He touched his side, flinched because it hurt, and looked at the blood on his fingers.

“Ain’t no big deal,” he said. Jake remembered saying that
; he sure did. It was something Grant might have said, did say. This was so screwed up.

Scenes, right—there was jagged ground, a hole in the Daoyizhen Bulldozer Works and him jumping through. Twilight zone time: or maybe it was just the
odd lighting. Smoke drifted. Sunlight slashed through gaps, only there was no sun, but a strange, fumy unreality. Jake heard laughter, crazy sounds of someone going insane. At his side, an assault rifle kicked. Oh right, he fired the weapon. He went through rooms, through chambers, putting down enemy soldiers so they could never brain-pop a guy like Grant again.

“Slow down, Sergeant! We can’t keep up with you.”

Brave Chinese showed their faces as they tried counterattacks. Jake shot them. He hurled grenades. He felt a hot stain on his neck. No blood this time, felt like a rug burn—a bullet burn.

You’ve been burned, baby
.

He heard more crazy laughter, and he felt hands on him, pulling him back. Then a terrific explosion caused wood and bits of concrete to rain on them. Jake looked up, and he saw a fist-sized chunk
of something. It fell straight down, and it hit his helmet, dashing him onto the floor, ending his strange dream scenes.

Jake groaned, and his head throbbed.

“Is he dead?” a man asked. It sounded like the lieutenant.

Chet looked down at him. For some reason, his best friend looked as if he was far away
up a tunnel.

“Jake?” Chet asked.

“Yeah?”

“You feeling okay?”

“My head hurts.”

“Let me take off your helmet, okay?”

Jake frowned, and that made his headache worse. Chet almost sounded scared. “Sure,” Jake said. “Remove my helmet.”

“He’s back, Lieutenant.”

What did that mean?

Jake winced as Chet took off the helmet. “Is it bad?”
he asked

“You could only hope,” Chet
told him. “No. There’s a bump, but that’s it. Maybe it will knock some sense into you.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Crazy man, you’ve been charging through the Bulldozer Works, trying to win the war all by your lonesome. You went berserk after Grant died.”

“Oh,” Jake said. After a few seconds, “They killed
Grant.”

“
I just said that. Well…never mind. It’s a madhouse in here.”

“I thought you liked
the war,” Jake said.

“No… I think I’m getting a little tired of this.”

Jake tried to sit up, and everything went spinning. He groaned, and he threw up a bit in his mouth. It tasted awful.

“You might have a concussion. So you want to take it a little easy
, okay?”

“Did we win?” Jake asked.

“How do you tell?”

“Did we take this place?”

“We’re still in the middle of the battle. But I’ll tell you one thing.”

“Yeah?”
Jake asked.

“We got ourselves a piece
of it anyway. And it sure was something seeing that THOR hit.”

“Yeah,” Jake said. Then he closed his eyes, deciding he des
erved a break from the war, maybe a real long break.

From
Military History: Past to Present
, by Vance Holbrook:

The Invasion of Manchuria, 2042

2042, August 3-10. Chinese Counterattack in Inner Mongolia
. Halting the Americans and Russians before Shenyang, Chinese High Command scraped the last reserves into one strike force. Instead of sending them against the entrenched enemy in Shenyang’s suburbs, Marshal Kiang launched an infantry-heavy offensive against the German and Russian forces waiting at the farther edge of the Khingan Mountains in the 9th Army Group. Russian High Command was divided on the army group’s next objective: Beijing to the south or a dash through the mountains to add their considerable weight to a new Shenyang offensive.

Chinese wave assaults backed by ballistic and cruise missiles
proved deadly but exceedingly costly to execute. The wave assaults took the Germans and Russians by surprise. Wisely, the mobile forces retreated as they took a bloody toll of the enemy infantry. In places, Chinese casualties were ten to one of the Russians and German machines. Yet they forced the 9th Army Group to backtrack, sometimes as much as fifty miles. By August 10, the Sino offensive came to a grinding halt. The Chinese armies were mere shells from their beginning strengths, but for the first time in the campaign, they had forced the Russians and Germans to retreat, causing the 9th Army Group to expend a costly amount of fuel, ammunition and materiel.

COMMENT.
Much like the Tet Offensive in Vietnam in 1967, the Inner Mongolian Attack was a tactical failure. The Chinese gained sand and wasteland in exchange for grim losses. Once restocked with supplies, the Russian 9th Army Group could easily advance at leisure, pushing aside the bled-white Chinese divisions. But, like the Tet Offensive did to American leadership in ’67 and beyond, the Inner Mongolian Attack shook Premier Konev’s confidence. Russia had sustained more losses than he had anticipated to this point. It began to dawn on Konev that Russia would not be able to pay the human costs of extended occupation of conquered Manchuria for more than one or two years. Unknown to American leadership, Konev sent a secret envoy to Beijing to sound out Chairman Hong on a peace treaty that recognized the Russian conquest of Siberia and Kazakhstan in return for an exit from Inner and Outer Mongolia and Manchuria.

V CORPS HQ, LIAONING PROVINCE

“What’s this about, sir?” Stan asked.

He’d driven from his division stationed west of Daoyizhen, a suburb of Shenyang. The tanks held open ground. High Command was still wise enough to keep his Jeffersons out of giant urban areas. Stan was here because General Taylor had ordered him to drive the ten mile from 10th Division to V Corps HQ.

Stan sat alone inside a comm-shack with the latest high-tech equipment
. He could hear the air-conditioner switch on and begin to buzz with effort. General Taylor of V Corps had personally explained it to him. General McGraw had flown to Alaska, and a special comm-drone had been sent aloft between Asia and North America somewhere over the Bering Sea. The signal from this comm-shack bounced off the drone to General McGraw in his Alaskan site.

Stan viewed McGraw on the computer screen. Tom had bags under his eyes and his features showed strain.
McGraw didn’t smile, although he attempted it a time or two.

“Stan, old son,” McGraw said. “I’ve got to talk to someone who will tell me the truth.”