Warshot wi-5

by Ian Slater

“What’s the load?” added Rose. Everybody seemed to come to life with the prospect of having to suffer more than they had already. “Fifty pounds?”

  “A tad more, Rosie,” said the chief, smiling. “An even hundred.”

  “Jesus!” said Rose, and Smythe whistled. “We gonna refloat the Arizona?”

  “We’ll do a splash-run practice tomorrow,” announced the chief. “Oh five hundred. I’ll designate flank swimmers and fuse pullers. I’ll have it ready by breakfast. Remember now, light meal, gents — don’t want anybody sinking.”

  “Light meal,” quipped Dennison. “If I’m still alive.”

  As they dismissed, young Rose told Robert Brentwood that the scuttlebutt around Pearl was that the Chinese had some kind of long-range rockets by some lake in far western China and that the SEALs were going to hit them.

  “Well, if it’s the scuttlebutt, you can be sure it’s wrong.”

  “You got it figured out, then, skipper?”

  “Well, Rose,” Brentwood answered, still unused to uttering his wife’s name so far away from her, “I’ll tell you what I think, providing you keep it to yourself. No use violating need-to-know before we have to.”

  “Absolutely, Captain.”

  “Freeman’s going to launch an attack from Korea— across the Yellow Sea — against China’s right flank. Shantung peninsula’s my guess. Just over two hundred miles due west of Inchon.”

  Rose paled. “Jesus! But… they’d chop us to pieces.”

  Robert Brentwood smiled. “To do that, the ChiComs’ll have to withdraw troops from their northern borders.”

  Now Rose saw the light. “Take the pressure off our guys up there.”

  “Right. ‘Course, we’ll have to skedaddle on out of there once they start pouring down from the north toward the peninsula.”

  “What if they don’t go for it?”

  “Rose, what would you think Washington’d do if enemy troops landed on the Baja peninsula? Way I figure it, Freeman’s going to do another MacArthur — the unexpected— and we’re going in at night to take out the underwater obstacles.”

  Robert Brentwood would soon be glad he hadn’t told the others of his hunch. After all, being half right doesn’t get you the kewpie doll. He was a first-rate navy man, but was talking through his hat. He was no politician, and as things stood, Washington, virtually under siege at home, had no intentions of expanding the war further by invading China. Such a move would be implicitly taken by Taiwan as the green light for it to attack, and that flash point could ignite all of Asia.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Harbin

  The Hutong Stank, the truck which normally collected the night carts’ cargo delayed because of the snowfall. From the tiny window, Alexsandra could see two-wheel pushcarts sitting forlornly at the end of the hutongs, abandoned. The granny brigade seemed oblivious to the stench. Much more offensive to them was the odor of their Siberian allies, many of whom were now in Harbin, frequenting the unofficial brothels that lay in the clutter of dwellings along the riverbank. Like most whites, the Siberians smelled of old, wet dog, and this morning, as the granny brigade — its three members’ red armbands vivid against the snow, their aged backs bent like vultures looking for carrion — made their way up the hutong, soldiers, both PLA and Siberians, descended to assist in the continuing search for the spy, Alexsandra Malof.

  The underground had managed to hide her successfully from the granny brigade so far by keeping her in the claustrophobic room which she had since discovered lay in the rear of a small bicycle repair shop, one of those allowed under the party’s “liberalization” program. The alleyways had remained choked with snow, and piles of it were accumulating at the end of the alley, as one of the wonders of China — complete snow removal by hand — took place each day as people emerged silently from the hutong’s hovels to clear the narrow byways on command of the local committee. The grannies as usual were supervising, noting who was where, who was absent, stopping every now and then, assiduously sniffing the snow-cleansed air for the taint of wet dog.

  “There’s a foreigner here!” announced the smallest of the grannies, all three dressed in identical padded and faded navy-blue Mao suits. It was an announcement clearly meant for everyone to hear, the three of them turning crooked necks, watching the two dozen or so people from their hutong silently busy with wooden push shovels and bramble brooms, the latter whisking against the bare flagstones, long crystals of ice snaking along in crazy patterns.

  “There’s a foreigner here!” The brooms kept whisking, as if no one could hear her, save for an old man who, straightening up, looked about, confused, unsure of whether he’d heard a command.

  The few children who had been playing quickly disappeared, swallowed by the hovels as if struck by some silent, felt message from their parents. The grannies also split up, their heads moving now with an extraordinary agility for their age as they shuffled along, noting the numbers of the houses, the smallest granny blowing her whistle shrilly.

  Within minutes the street security committee arrived: three young zealots, their gender hidden under identical Mao suits, red armbands at large. They had a right to inspect each house indicated by the granny brigade. A policeman would normally accompany them — at least, this was the party regulation — but with a war going on against the American imperialists, the security committees had assumed greater authority, engendering more fear than usual in every soul in every hutong in the city of 2.7 million.

  Soon an army policeman, his thick, cotton-padded, olive-green winter uniform flecked with snow, appeared, walking in from the direction of the main road.

  There were no histrionics for the Lings, who ran the repair shop. Besides, there was nowhere to go. As Mr. Ling looked out the window of his cramped kitchen, he spotted a khaki truck, its tire treads choked with packed snow, PLA troops spilling out of it, a dozen heading left down the main road, another dozen or so to the right, encircling the hutong. Directly behind Ling’s repair shop lay more cluttered, snowcapped hovels leading down to the frozen river. Ling knew it was quite hopeless. He was surrounded. Besides, if there was the slightest opposition, they’d take his eight-year-old son, his only child, away as well. He went in and told Alexsandra they had discovered her. He was sorry. Their eyes met only for a moment in the grim morning light, and in that moment they both understood there was nothing they could do. To run was futile; she might as well save her strength.

  The charges were that she and Ling, as “running dog jackals” of the “fascist pro-democracy movement,” were guilty of treasonous “antirevolutionary” activity.

  “I could smell her!” pronounced the diminutive granny victoriously. “I could smell her!”

  Mr. Ling looked at the old woman with quiet contempt. “You smell nothing but your own fear.”

  Within minutes the Public Security man arrived and Alexsandra and Ling were shackled, hands behind their backs, the chain passing around the front of the waist between their legs and back up to a metal collar. She was taken out to the PSB car, a battered blue Fiat, Ling to a police motorcycle and sidecar nearby. “Someone has betrayed us!” he yelled back at the hutong.

  The PSB rider slapped him across the ear with a rough suede driving glove. “Zhu kou!” Shut up!

  * * *

  The moment Alexsandra felt herself pushed into the small blue Fiat, its upholstery a dusty faded-gray velour, she experienced a strange sense of relief — the warmth of the car’s heater was luxurious. It was the warmest she’d been for days, and in her relief came the sudden smothering fear that if she was so weak as to have already surrendered to this slight creature comfort, what would she tell the PSB interrogators once faced with another bone-aching cold cell? Even the Yakuts of her native Siberia, who lived in the region where the temperature often dropped below minus sixty, grudgingly admired the legendary ability of the northern Chinese to endure the cold. Her fear of dying cold was, she knew, as irrational as having hoped she would ever be free. Her rape by the
Siberians at Baikal had never left her.

  And what was it all worth — her silence? She didn’t even know whether the message about the Nanking Bridge had gotten through. Yet all this now paled next to her simple but overwhelming desire to be warm again, her craving for even the smallest candle subduing all reason, all prior resolve. For now she knew it would almost certainly end with a bullet in the neck, the traditional party execution for counterrevolutionaries. Most likely it would be a public affair, as public and as exaggerated as her arrest, a warning to all those who might have sympathy with the pro-democracy movement. And if she was cold, she would shiver as she knelt and they would think it was fear. If only to deny them that, she longed to be warm.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  As Freeman finalized preparations for his attack on Nizhneangarsk, Major Truet’s Charlie Company, cut off from the main body of III Corps, waited anxiously at the southern end of the lake, still dug in, facing westward, the rail tracks and concrete tunnels atop the cliff overlooking the lake a hundred yards behind them. In the night the moonlit fringe of the boreal forest stood like an impenetrable curtain barely a hundred yards in front of them, the snowdrifts so high they’d climbed halfway up the trunks of the trees whose branches were now stiff to breaking point from the weight of snow.

  Despite Thomis’s incurable pessimism, the rest of second platoon remained confident that Freeman would eventually get evacuation choppers across the lake from the east. But for now all they could do was wait, all available choppers busy ferrying what men they could find in the hell that lay beneath the cloud covering the lake. The sound of Yesov’s juggernaut was still rolling and thundering, the Siberians now getting behind as well as in front of III Corps to finish off what was left of the American retreat. Though knowing this, Thomis remained bitterly disappointed at the choppers’ failure, so far, to rescue him, and he continued to argue forcefully that they should move back to the cover of the tunnels.

  * * *

  When it came, the weak, creaking sound of the Siberian reserve armor no more than half a mile away sounded like unoiled rail cars, the occasional clankiness of more tanks moving through the forest belying the awesome power of the main battle tanks. Each T-72 weighed 49,000 pounds and was outfitted with a 125mm smoothbore, one of the largest tank cannons in the world. They moved at no more than fifteen miles per hour, until General Minsky gave the order for a thirty-five-mile-per-hour burst of speed as they approached the edge of the treeline beyond which lay C Company. Cold was seeping down from the forest’s edge, pouring into the foxholes and trenches around Thomis and his buddies like dry ice, at times obscuring the slit openings between the log-raft cover of some of Charlie Company’s trenches.

  What Thomis, Valdez, Emory — the Georgian — and others couldn’t figure out was how, with the treeline so thick at the forest edge, the tanks could hope to exit directly in front of the trenches — unless the Siberians intended bringing bulldozers forward. But this would give Charlie Company time to triangulate mortar attacks which, while they mightn’t harm the tanks, would give C Company’s antitank crews more time and pin down the Siberian infantry. But then, Siberian tactics weren’t known for showing particular concern for numbers of troops lost, so long as the objective was obtained. And anyway, Thomis hissed, it didn’t matter “what the fuck their strategy is, man — where in hell we gonna go, with a sheer hundred-fifty-foot drop behind us?”

  “Jump into the lake!” opined Valdez nervously.

  Thomis was stamping his feet to keep warm. “Very fucking amusing, Valdez.”

  A reconnaissance patrol from C Company was almost shot as it scurried back from the treeline, their report succinct: “Fuckers are everywhere. Headin’ straight for us.”

  “How far?” asked Major Truet.

  “Half a mile — maybe less…”

  “We could try rappeling down the cliff,” said Emory.

  Thomis sneered. “Oh, terrific,” he said, cupping his hands about the M-16’s breech to stop it freezing up, “and while we’re going down, what the fuck you think the Siberians’ll be doing? Having tea? Anyway, where the hell would we go on the ice — taking a fucking stroll while they pick us off from the cliffs?”

  No one answered. Thomis was a pain, but on this one his pessimism was justified. Valdez said the tanks were probably farther in the woods than anyone thought, that maybe they’d turn — run parallel to the tracks — and would go past Charlie Company, not toward them. Maybe they were going along some logging road, north toward Port Baikal to reinforce Yesov’s attack on the retreating III Corps.

  “Jesus!” said Thomis, looking behind him, down out over the moon-bathed white cloud that obscured the lake.

  “What?” asked Valdez, but then he saw, as Thomis had, what looked like a canal, or rather, a long, jagged slit in the ice; in fact, it was through a narrow break in the cloud cover that he and the rest in the squad glimpsed the flashes of the guns. They’d been at it all day and now, through his Starlight binoculars, Valdez for one could see clearly, in the surreal-looking green world of the night vision glasses, the slaughter of the remnants of III Corps caught out on the ice. “They’re being massa—” began Valdez.

  “Shut up!” hissed Thomis. “Listen!”

  The creak of the tanks had stopped. To the right of second platoon’s heavy machine gun trench and scattered foxholes, a branch collapsed, the snow pouring down from the tree like sugar. Valdez slid his M-16 forward on the frozen ice rest he’d sculptured in front of him.

  “Hold it!” cautioned Emory softly. “Maybe it just fell.”

  “ ‘Course it fucking fell!” hissed Thomis. “You idiot!”

  Emory took no offense. He knew it was Thomis’s fear talking, the same kind of fear that had suddenly made his own mouth dry as sandpaper.

  “No firing!” said the lieutenant softly, yet urgently, his voice on the walkie-talkie distinct, without a trace of static, as he turned the volume as low as he possibly could. He was listening so intently that he seemed to feel everything at once, the wind moaning through the trees, snow plopping down here and there, a crack of a branch, the distant crackle of small arms fire on the lake below, and in the distance the scream of more Siberian rocket salvos, their fiery tails a fizzing white in the night goggles, his concentration and the weight of the goggles giving him a cluster headache that started to radiate down his right arm.

  “Bastards!” said Thomis, by which he meant, What the hell were the Siberians up to?

  “No such luck,” Thomis heard the lieutenant reply in answer to Valdez’s hope that C Company was being bypassed by the Siberians.

  Another patrol sent out earlier following the rail tracks south of C Company’s position had spotted an enemy troop concentration — at least five hundred, possibly brigade size — collecting around Kultuk. There was absolutely no doubt about it — Charlie Company was trapped between Kultuk twenty-five miles to the south and Port Baikal twenty miles to the north, and by cliffs above the artillery-ruptured ice behind them.

  Suddenly someone said they could hear a chopper. “One of ours!” said Emory.

  “One of theirs!” countered Thomis.

  The truth was, it was impossible to tell amid the cacophony of echoes rebounding about the cliffs.

  “I told you,” said Valdez. “Old Doug said he’d try to get evac through to us.”

  “Old Doug’s in Khabarovsk!” said Thomis.

  “Can it!” ordered Truet, who could hear them as he came down the line. But excitement was rising. Emory said it sounded like a Chinook. Throw all the crap out of it — seats, fire extinguishers, rescue winch — you could get forty or so men in a C-47, evac a whole platoon. More if you jettisoned your weapons. Truet said nothing; raising expectations was bad news if you couldn’t follow through. “Men’ll lose confidence in your leadership,” they told him at West Point, and he knew they were right.

  Thomis was in the worst state, and only Emory knew what was eating away at him. Thomis and his wife had had a
real dustup the night before he’d shipped out from Frisco. All the way through the tunnel they’d argued because he’d smacked young Wendy — she was ten — that morning for giving lip to her mother. He tried to make up, telling her he’d buy her something really nice for her eleventh birthday, but she’d gone into the big sulk. He’d hit her pretty hard — on the backside — and now he was thinking about how he used to kneel down, say her prayers with her. “Jesus, tender shepherd, hear me…” “Honest to God,” he’d told Emory in a quieter moment, “I’d’ve given my right hand not to have left her like that — hurting her. Her old man goes off, doesn’t come back, all she’ll remember—”

  The “chunka-chunka” sound — a C-47?—grew louder, and a few of the guys started to get wound up.

  “Easy now,” the sergeant told them. “Watch your perimeter.”

  Thomis promised God right there and then that if he ever got out of it, he’d never hit Wendy again. Wouldn’t take any crap, but he’d never hit her — never. He could smell her warm, baby-powder smell after her bath — and her hair golden, just like her mom’s. There was another fall of snow from the trees, and he wondered whether other men in the line were making deals with the Almighty. Just get me out of this, God, and I promise…

  * * *

  In the dank cell, the Harbin Public Security Bureau guards had difficulty attaching the small alligator clamps to Ling’s testicles. Ling was so terrified, despite his determination not to show it, that his sheer fright and the cold combined to shrink the skin around the scrotum into a small, tight, corrugated ball with the consistency of tough old elephant skin. One of the guards jerked hard on the single rope tie that passed through Ling’s arms and around his neck. The guard had a lot of practice, having been very active in the Thirty-eighth Army’s “police action” against “antisocial elements” following Tiananmen Square in the summer of ‘89. He had tied the arms of many of the hooligans of the pro-democracy movement before they’d been executed.