by Joe Poyer
'By God, you cut me . . .' he said, astonished. Jones whistled slowly. 'He sure as hell did!'
'You, buddy boy, are damned lucky to be alive,' Ley-cock murmured. 'I sure am glad I didn't try that.' Stowe stared at Gillon, his face ugly, then back at the blood on his fingers and stared, 'Next time friend, I'll make damned sure that you get no warning of any kind.'
And Gillon knew that he wouldn't either, but at the moment, he did not care. He was still shaking inwardly. If he had not been expecting the kick, the incident could have become very nasty.
After a moment more, Stowe turned away, intense anger evident on his face, and went aft to the lavatory. Leycock and Jones wandered forward to the galley, just aft of the cockpit, and Gillon, left alone for the moment, returned to an examination of the equipment laid out on the deck. He was breathing heavily and the adrenaline shock was beginning to drain away. He noticed that his hands were shaking slightly and he was glad the others were gone so they would not notice.
Forcing himself to relax he first checked over the mountaineering gear, tents and sleeping bags. The first were excellent quality Swiss mountain tents of very lightweight, close-woven parachute nylon. Each would accommodate one man and his gear. A single T-brace of aluminum tubing supported the triangular tent and the entire affair could not have weighed more than two pounds. The sleeping bags were five-pound goose-down mummy bags of the type supplied by the U.S. Army to the Ski Corps. Each was capable of keeping a man warm and alive in temperatures to twenty below. Lightweight wool liners added an additional five-degree safety margin. With the sleeping bags and tents, they should be able to survive a blizzard in the Antarctic.
Each pack was also suppied with an alcohol compass, tiny Primus stove, sufficient dehydrated food in individually wrapped meals for five days, two changes of nylon mesh underwear, socks and gloves, and a personal pack containing first-aid supplies, toilet articles and liquid soap with a label stating that it would not harden in below-freezing temperatures. Gillon snorted at that. Satisfied that the packs had been made up by experts in mountain survival and that everything that he would have chosen was included, he turned his attention to the outer clothing and the weapons.
Each of them was supplied with a one-piece white coverall designed to be worn over the mesh underwear. Each suit was fitted with a hood that could be drawn tightly around the face by means of a cord. Gloves,
lightweight silk affairs without padding, were supplied and at the cuff of each coverall, thickly padded mittens with trigger slits were attached with plastic zippers that allowed them to be removed if required. Lined face masks were contained in roomy pockets inside the jackets. The boots, vacuum-insulated, were one piece with each suit and over these, ski boots could be drawn. The entire suit was made of the same closely woven nylon as the tents and lined with a two-inch layer of goose down, the best insulator so far discovered for cold-weather use. Each pack was mounted on a sturdy Himalaya frame, constructed of duraluminium, and bore stickers showing that they had been purchased from Frost-line Equipment in Seattle . . . no better supplier of mountain gear in the world.
Gillon had been accustomed to the M-16 carbine for several years, considering it one of the best all-round weapons for counter-insurgency warfare yet developed. But when he picked up one of the carbines stacked against the cabin wall, he knew that he might have to change his mind. He had heard about the AR-18 but had never seen one before. A slightly smaller version of the M-16, it was a substantially lighter and, at first glance, simpler weapon. It used the same .222 caliber ammunition and if it weighed five pounds when fully loaded, Gillon would have been surprised. He stripped it down and found that it came apart much like the M-16, but went back together again much more easily.
He sat back on his heels and surveyed the neat piles of equipment before him. At least from the standpoint of supplies, he decided, this idiot-mission had been well organized.
He looked up warily as Stowe came back into the cabin. A wad of tissue stuck out of his left ear and his face was not exactly what Gillon would have described as friendly.
Stowe hesitated a moment as if undecided and then shrugged.
'Oh hell.' He grinned at Gillon. 'I guess I had that coming. I should have guessed from the way what's-hisname, Jones, kept quiet about you that he was setting me up. The Agency boys don't think much of me or my outfit because we don't do things by the book.'
So that was it. Gillon thought to himself. A setup to teach Stowe who was boss and at the same time to find out if he was as good as his record indicated. Very neat, very neat indeed. His respect for Jones rose another notch.
'Forget it,' he said carefully. 'We were both set up.'
Stowe nodded and went on forward. Gillon sank down in his seat and stared at the cabin lights reflecting in the window, considering, wondering what other surprises they might have in line for him.
They were not unique, he thought, Jones, or whatever his real name was, Leycock and Stowe. He was the unique one, unique in the sense that he was part of a dying breed – the professional soldier. When you came right down to it, he mused, it really was not such a bad life. Most of your decisions were made for you and your responsibility was only to carry them out – within narrow limitations. But either the world had grown too small and the weapons too terrible or else civilization was at long last passing from intemperate adolescence to maturity. It seemed to him that warfare had been taking on two or three new aspects since the end of World War II, new aspects that were rapidly consigning overt warfare to extinction. The so-called Wars of National Liberation – Malaya, the Philippines, Korea, etc. – had pretty much died out in the mid-1960's, as the Communists changed their tack from indirect or direct aggression to internal subversive movements such as had taken place in Indochina. That one had been a mistake all the way around, resulting from considerable misunderstanding on the part of North Vietnam and the United States as to the intentions and commitments of the other and so it had blown up into a full-scale land war. It would be, he knew, a long time before that ever happened again.
The little wars, Gambia, Bolivia, Nigeria/Biafra, Colombia, etc., were really internal affairs, civil wars of a kind, but complicated by big-power interference. But even these were dying out as the emerging nations gained maturity and learned to handle their problems in other, less deadly ways. Africa could never be compared to the two-hundred-year reign of terror that had wreck-
ed Central Europe – and in particular the Balkans. All considered, Africa, with little in the way of human resources, had moved quite peacefully from direct imperialistic control to a series of independent nations in less than twenty years. The few wars that had broken out, with only one or two exceptions, had been confined to within national borders rather than to aggressive attacks on other nations.
Warfare had become a push-button affair – as had long been expected – in which highly trained technicians monitored surveillance consoles, fingers poised over triple-locked buttons that could unleash forces capable of destroying civilization. Except for skirmishes here and there and chronic problem areas – war, active, overt war was fast disappearing. But disappearing by becoming submerged in the third aspect, the silent wars. The wars of international surveillance or espionage involved the same old power blocs, but considerably fewer people and with much less dangerous effect. And Jones, Ley-cock and Stowe represented the new soldier. To him their work was a game, a silly, almost useless game involving 99 per cent newspaper clipping and only 1 per cent direct action. But to them, it was a deadly life-ordeath struggle, as overt war was to the professional soldier.
Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal, the new driving out the old. And that's what he was, the old species watching himself give way to a younger, more clever breed. He would hold his own while the new breed slowly gained ascendancy, but slowly, surely, his would die out.
CHAPTER SIX
Sometime after dawn, Gillon woke again to find that he felt rested for the first time in months. He stretched, then wan
dered forward to find some coffee. Jones, Stowe and Leycock were still asleep in their seats and in the cockpit, Gillon found the radio operator stretched out on a small fold-down bunk. The pilot was dozing at the controls and the copilot staring moodily through
the cockpit windscreen. The sun was just clearing the horizon and the land below them was in darkness. From one horizon to the other, Gillon noted with interest, the skies were perfectly free of cloud. During the long night, they had obviously outflown the storm cell.
Gillon drew two cups of coffee in the galley and handed one to the co-pilot. In silence, they watched the sun inch higher and higher until with a sudden burst of radiance, a flood of golden light sped swiftly toward them as they raced to meet the sun. The copilot polished a pair of sunglasses on his shirt and put them on. Gillon contented himself with shielding his eyes against the glare of the moment. Within minutes, the countryside was flooded in the clear, soft light of dawn, revealing a carpet of gold-polished white wool.
Gillon went back to his seat and gathered up his shaving kit. Twenty minutes in the tiny shower facility on the aircraft and he literally felt like a new man.
Sometime later, Gillon finished the large breakfast put together by Jones and Leycock and was enjoying the first cigarette of the day. He had just spread a copy of the map describing their route into the Tien Shan on his lap when a flicker of light caught his attention. He turned to the window in time to see the sleek shape of a Mig 21 sliding into place off their port wing. Its pilot glanced over at the Jetstar and waved. Gillon felt the Jetstar rock abruptly as their pilot waggled his wings in answer. Through a window across the aisle, he could just see a second Mig arriving to lead them in.
'Company,' he announced, and pointed toward the Mig on the starboard side. The other three hurried to the windows.
'Sure is,' Leycock muttered. 'I hope to hell they're expecting us.'
'If they weren't, you wouldn't be standing here making dumb remarks,' Stowe muttered.
'Christ almighty,' Leycock exploded, 'doesn't anything ever help your disposition?'
Jones gave Stowe a disgusted look, shook his head and wandered back to his breakfast, leaving Stowe staring after Leycock with a faint grin on his face.
Ahead of them, Gillon spotted a peculiarly flat, some-
what bowl-shaped area and a quick map check showed it to be Ala Kul. Moments later, the Jetstar bore around to the north, the Migs following smoothly, and a small airfield on the southern edge of the lake slid into view. As the turn was completed, the Migs accelerated ahead to lead them in.
Jones walked back from the galley, leaning heavily against the centrifugal pull of the aircraft as the pilot completed the turn, and dropped into the seat beside Gillon. He pointed to a line of distant mountains and there was an undercurrent of anticipation and excitement in his voice.
`Those are' the Tien Shan! The Chinese border is just about in line with that farthest peak.'
Even from a distance of nearly seventy miles, the Tien Shan looked bleak and forbidding, Gillon thought. And damned dangerous as well. Snow lay thick down to the foothills and in the higher elevations deep winter raged, And, he thought, most of their time would be spent at elevations above nine thousand feet. Interminably, the mountains stretched from horizon to horizon, northeast to southwest. In the early morning light, they were a steel-blue barrier, the jagged peaks wreathed with heavy clouds. The sight of these almost unknown mountains –although unknown only to the West, inhabited as they had been for thousands of years by Siberian, Mongolian and Chinese tribesmen – did nothing to increase Gillon's enthusiasm.
This view of the mountain range from ten thousand feet and a vantage point of seventy miles made it clear why the Soviets had insisted that the mission start from Ala Kul. It would be a straight flight due south to the massive escarpment that marked the beginning of the Tien Shan. In some ways the escarpment reminded him of the eastern flank of the Sierra Nevada range in California. At midrange, the northeastern wall of the Sierras was a single, three-hundred-mile-long massif rearing above the Owens Valley. The Sierras had been caused, he knew, by some eons-old series of cataclysms that had literally snapped free the crust of the mantle and tilted it upward like a broken paving block. He wondered if
a similar event might not be responsible for the Tien Shan.
Gillon turned back to the airfield in time to see the Migs touching down. Moments later, the edge of the runway flashed past beneath and the Jetstar was down and taxiing after the Migs as they made for a hangar on the far side of the field. The airfield had a curiously deserted air about it, in spite of the bustle around an Aeroflot TU-144 airliner loading passengers at a small terminal. Heads turned in curiosity as the Jetstar taxied past and Gillon wondered if the national markings were still in place. They had been when he boarded the plane in Conakry, but they could easily have been changed in Rome without him having noticed.
The Jetstar eased to a halt in front of an old worn-out hangar. Staring through the window at the weather-beaten building, Gillon reckoned that it must have been built at least thirty years before, probably before World War II to protect the Russian southern flank as the Japanese had moved westward. Now it merely served as a forward base from which this 'safe' area of the Chinese border could be watched. There was, Gillon realized, only the remotest possibility that the Chinese would dream of mounting a land attack through the harrier imposed by the Tien Shan. Border actions might certainly be fought in the high passes and meadows, but hardly anything more serious. Only someone with the courage and stubbornness of a Hannibal would even dream of trying, and technology had long ago replaced elephants with less efficient means of locomotion. And further, since this territory was never in dispute with the Chinese, there was little likelihood that they would press for border adjustments as they had done further north along the Sinkiang border, or in the Far East along the Ussuri River.
Gillon studied the building opposite them some three hundred feet. To judge by the multitude of signs nailed to its front the hangar did double duty as an administrative center. Weather-beaten and paint peeling, it nevertheless did not induce that empty feeling that most such World 'War II-vintage military buildings all over the world did, whether still in use or not.
Jones got up and reached into the rack for his parka. Gillon did the same, and, shrugging it on, he joined the others in the aisle, stretched and waited for the next-development.
Shortly, the co-pilot stuck his head into the cabin.
'Captain says you may as well go on and get out. The control tower doesn't speak English and now they won't even answer us. Nobody else seems to be around.'
A worried frown appeared on Jones's face for a moment, but he motioned toward the back of the cabin. 'Let's go see what the holdup is all about.'
Leycock nodded and with a glance at the carbines in the overhead racks, walked to the hatch, unlatched and shoved it open and pushed the button to extend the ramp.
The sun had been up for less than two hours, but already the sky was an intense cobalt blue with scattered, blindingly white clouds. The terrain, incredibly flat, stretched unbroken, west to the horizon. To the east, it butted sharply against the distant Tien Shan escarpment. From the level of the airfield, the mountains were completely covered with snow; the slopes icy gray and blue with long lines of shadow lacing sharp white ridges.
The intervening distance was ethereal, mirage-like in quality, so that it seemed no more than a walk of a mile or two to the rearing barrier of snow and ice.
Gillon turned to the north; again a similar vista. Flat steppe covered with snow stretching away to the horizon, the monotony of the terrain somewhat relieved by the demanding line of peaks curving away to the northeast. Gillon was struck by the majesty and serenity of these vast mountains.
He shook his head and glanced around to see if the others were as affected as he was by the quiet immensity of Central Asia. After a subdued moment, Leycock coughed in the cold air and the spell was broken.
/> 'God almighty,' Stowe muttered, stamping his feet. 'This place is about as deserted as those mountains.'
'Don't let it fool you,' Jones said tightly. 'Neither is. This place is full of Russians and they are probably wondering who the hell we are because some damn fool clerk in Moscow forgot to process the paperwork. And,
over there,' he said, pointing toward the mountains, àre more Chinese soldiers than you ever thought existed, all waiting for us to come bumbling across their border.'
His words were strangely prophetic and Gillon was to think back on them bitterly in the coming days. Stowe snorted. 'You're probably right . .
Òver there,' Leycock interrupted, pointing across the field. A bright red snowplow, almost black in the distance, was plodding comfortably down the far runway. A crystal plume of blown snow towered thirty feet above the cab, spraying a fine mist of flashing rainbows as it drifted slowly in the bright sunlight.
`Hey, you guys, wake up.' The co-pilot was standing above them in the hatch with a pack in either hand. He tossed both down and reached back inside for two duffle bags. which he passed down to Gillon.
`What are we supposed to do with these now?' Stowe yelled up at the co-pilot.
`For God's sake, if you don't know by now, then you _ better get hack .' He stopped abruptly and stared at the hangar.
`Who the devil?' Jones began, and took a few paces forward.
The sound of booted feet trotting in rhythm floated around the side of the hangar and Gillon moved up next to Jones just as a squad of Russian soldiers trotted into sight. There were ten soldiers, five abreast and all carrying rifles at port arms while a sergeant trotted beside them calling cadence. Gillon and Tones stared at each other in surprise and both stared hack to the Jet-star just as two jeeplike vehicles roared up behind, one jamming to a stop in front of the aircraft's nosewheel, effectively blocking any movement, and the other skidding to a halt beside them. A young officer vaulted out as the soldiers reached them, rifles levelled.