by Ian Slater
“Choppers have the range without in-flight refueling?” asked Dennison.
“No sweat. Auxiliary fuel tanks, detachable.”
“He makes it sound like a training run,” said one of Echo Two’s four-man squad.
“If you don’t screw up — it will be,” said young Rose, his desire for reassurance dressed up as a question. “Right, Bullfrog?”
“Yeah,” said Brady, turning to Brentwood. “Right, Captain?”
“What? Oh yes — absolutely. What is it the Brits say? Piece of cake’?”
“Yeah,” Bullfrog told Rose, “that’s it. Piece of cake. No sweat.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Colonel Soong’s Fourth Battalion traveled light, as did all PLA infantry. They had even discarded their NBC masks, confident that the Americans were too squeamish to use gas unless it was used on them first. Besides, the PLA had discovered a moderately effective method of dealing with gas: they ran away from it. Oh, part of their force would be lost in any such attack, but maneuvers involving tear gas had demonstrated how valuable time was lost donning cumbersome gear. And rapidly changing local wind and humidity conditions had taught Beijing what the Pentagon had discovered years before — that at best a commander could contemplate using gas only as a tactical, that is, local, weapon in a tight corner during a large battle, and not as a wider strategic weapon.
In any event, General Cheng had saved the PLA millions of yuan by not purchasing gas masks, protective clothing, and sophisticated robot sniffers through paying the money instead to La Roche Industries for better artillery shells. In doing so, Cheng had also enabled his divisions, unencumbered by the heavy NBC protective gear, to move faster on foot than any other army. It counted for Soong’s battalions closing in so quickly on the southern side of the 3,770-foot-high Argunskiy 7. Even without his spotters, Soong could tell from the less intense yet more localized area of bombardment that the enemy battery, after losing most of their guns in their retreat to A-7, had regrouped atop the six acres of heavy timber that formed the horseshoe-shaped western part of the mountain’s snow-covered summit. Not surprisingly, Soong’s supporting artillery had been slower to move up than his infantry, but based on the PLA’s yuji paodui—mobile guerrilla artillery units — all of his artillery was capable of being borne by hand, broken down like so many pieces of a Lego set, with even the wheels of each gun in four segments, so that the guns could be hauled piecemeal and assembled by manpower alone. It was an old PLA tactic, but one the PLA knew continued to astonish more mechanized foes whose trucks were more often than not stopped by the taiga.
* * *
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
David Brentwood sat on the thin, hard seat by the door of the AC-130H — a four-engine Lockheed C-130 transport converted to a Spectre gunship — and checked his wrist altimeter and watch. It was 0607. Thirty thousand feet and no moon — as dark “as a bloody coal mine in a blackout,” as Aussie Lewis put it.
At 0611 David readied himself to lead the stick of the HALO-C — high altitude, low opening circle — jump from thirty thousand feet, after which the Spectre aircraft would rapidly descend in ever-widening circles, all the while pouring down fire into the mountain’s collar of timber that surrounded and ran about the lip of A-7’s horseshoe-shaped summit.
Hopefully his SAS/D team would be able to inject sufficient firepower on the ground to secure a perimeter around the horseshoe long enough for the battered survivors of the 155mm battery — no one knew how many there would be, due to the break in radio contact — to get to the northern edge of the horseshoe clearing. Providing a secure perimeter could be achieved, the area, no more than two acres, could be used as a landing zone for rescue helicopters which would follow on from the Kalga strip ninety miles to the northeast, lying in the valley between the Argunskiy and Nerchinskiy ranges. But it would work only if the SAS/D team could gather in the remaining defenders — probably by now no more than a score or so — fast enough, and lead them to the clearing before the whole mountain was overrun by the advancing ChiCom battalions.
* * *
“Check masks!” ordered Brentwood, standing up, one gloved hand gripping the canvas webbing, the other making sure his oxygen mask seal was secure. “Infrared goggles. Check!” Next he held up his left arm, tapping its wrist altimeter, looking down the line of fifteen SAS/Delta men who would accompany him, hearing himself breathing in the mask like some trapped animal lumbering forward as he carried the inverted Bergen pack that would dangle beneath him in the fall and which would carry everything from ammunition to a winter-issue 4,200-calorie MRE — meal ready to eat, otherwise known as Meals Refused by Everybody.
Everything changes and everything remains the same. It was the last phrase David Brentwood thought of as he dove from the Spectre into the void above A-7, the frigid air screaming about him in its banshee rage.
Aussie Lewis went out after him, then came Salvini, Choir Williams leading the S/D troop of one officer — David Brentwood — and fifteen men, each SAS man a veteran, and most graduates of either SAS’s CQB — Close Quarter Battle—”house” in Hereford near the Welsh Black Mountains or of Fort Bragg’s four-roomed “shooting house,” where they had been trained relentlessly for rapid deployment surgical strikes.
During the two-minute free fall, his arms and legs out in “frog” steering position — simultaneously braking and guiding his fall, careful not to “grab air” too much in front of him lest he put himself into a spin, and shifting the weight of his pack away from his center line — David could hear the feral roar of the AC-130 still in its pylon turn far beneath them.
The air force brass called the AC-130 an “aircraft capable of substantial support firepower.” To the crew of fourteen who manned the converted Lockheeds, however, the AC-130 was simply called “Spectre” or “Spooky Two.” And until this morning the official designation given the plane by the Chinese High Command was “special operations enemy gunship.” But from the moment it began unleashing its deadly thunder over the mountain, the AC-130 would be forever known as the “Flying Dragon.” It was so named because of the long, thin, red tongues spewing down parabolas of fire from the left side of the aircraft where its two 7.62mm, seven-barreled, twenty-millimeter Vulcan Gatling guns, forty-millimeter Bofors pompoms, and 105mm howitzer filled the air with hot metal.
The worst part for the Chinese below was the fact that the dragon was not flying blind, merely shooting for effect, its IRR — imaging infrared — and LLTV — low light television— sensors mounted mid-belly between the “Black Crow” radio direction-finder pod and the twin Vulcans showing up the Chinese infantry as clear white dots on the flickering gray screen. In this way the gunship’s target computers, in attaining their own vectors, were overcoming the failure, following the initial ChiCom attacks, to receive any radio beacon guide from the 155mm battery. The infrared sensors also obviated the necessity for using the two-kilowatt 1.5-million-candlepower searchlight mounted near the Diane’s rail, a fact which the five gunners aboard the Spectre appreciated, for while the beam would have better illuminated the moving targets below, it would also have pointed directly back to them.
Colonel Soong gave the order to cease firing at the dragon and to hit the ground, an order calculated by him to both conserve ammunition and as the only real way of combating the infrared sensors which could identify moving targets much more readily than stationary ones.
It was probably the only order of Soong’s that had ever been disobeyed, for it was a natural human reaction to turn on whatever was shooting down at you, the Spectre’s 105mm shells and the ChiCom enfilades of small arms fire rounds filling the air with multiple high-pitched whistles, the smallest piece of the white-hot metal penetrating skin and bone as if they were butter. The very air was vibrating with the sustained roar of the Spectre’s weapons, the howitzer’s gunners in particular priding themselves on having one of the thirty-two-pound rounds “en route” even as the preceding one was exploding, the noise drowning the s
teady pulsation of the aircraft’s four turbo props, HE and shrapnel continuing to crash into the ChiCom positions. The ChiCom infantry return fire was ineffective, literally bouncing off the 6,900 pounds of armor plate that encased the Spectre, whose highly incendiary metal-alloy rounds from its four-clip forty-millimeter pompoms kept exploding among Soong’s hapless infantry.
Then, as quickly as it had begun, it ended with the Spectre’s fire-control officer’s command to break off the attack, an order which, apart from the obvious, told all crew members that the S/D “skydivers” circle was now entering the DAW — designated air window — above the landing zone.
As he approached nearly 120 mph, the thunder-filled air that was streaming past his oxygen mask and over his tethered ammo pack below him seemed colder to Aussie Lewis than in any of the other jumps he’d made. He was nearing the chute-opening height of 2,500 feet, the ear-shattering noise caused by the Spectre’s covering fire now ended, the irregular circle of snow that was the two-acre clearing on A-7’s summit rushing up at him. He checked the wrist altimeter, saw it was 2,900 feet, pulled the rip cord and felt, then heard, the “snap”: the jerk of the two-ply, banana-shaped chute opening. Immediately he began playing out his weapons/equipment pack twenty feet below on the tether to lessen his landing impact, and started working the riser cords, pouring air quickly from the left- to right-side panels, sliding into a spiraling corkscrew trajectory that would bring him away from the snow-covered timber around the clearing. Each of the fifteen SAS/D men knew he had to establish a perimeter fast.
There was another snap, but this time it was followed by the steady tattoo of a machine gun, and Aussie Lewis saw red tracer climbing lazily toward him, its deceptively graceful arcs curving past him. His feet hit the snowy ground and he tumbled, the tracer arcs lowering in his general direction. “Don’t shoot, you stupid bastards!” he yelled ineffectually into his mask, furious, for all his training to be cool, and at heart deeply and truly afraid of only one thing — the ever present possibility in each rescue mission that you could end up as “collateral damage,” killed by “friendly fire.” Everyone on the SAS/D team was more aware than most in Freeman’s Second Army of the acute danger of being hit by your own side — that even in America’s most successful war, in Iraq, twenty-four percent, 35 of the 148 Americans killed, died because they were mistaken by their own side as the enemy. It was a percentage that Brentwood, Lewis, Salvini, Choir Williams, and the rest knew could double here in as many minutes, given the fact they’d been unable to make radio contact with those they were attempting to rescue.
Dragged a few feet by the chute, Lewis punched the release, and within a minute had hauled the Bergen pack across the waist-deep snow and had the Heckler & Koch 11 A1 out of its wrap. The butt stock of the forty-inch-long gun in place, its safety off, his thumb moved from the white S through E to full automatic as naturally as he breathed, the gun’s barrel tooled to accept either the old NATO 5.6mm round or the heavier but harder-hitting Siberian 7.62mm— Soviet surplus. It had been an important consideration, given the unlikelihood of being resupplied by air should they find it necessary to counterattack into the timber, where, if their ammo ran out — some ammo boxes would inevitably be lost — they might have to use abandoned ChiCom-Soviet 7.62mm in their attempt to secure a perimeter.
Snapping out the bipod, Lewis planted the gun left of a shattered tree stump at the edge of the clearing and unwrapped the spare barrel, placing it by his side should he be forced to overheat the first barrel in what he already expected to be a massive counterattack by the ChiCom. The one thing on which the SAS/D team was depending was that most, if not all, of the artillery battery’s gunners they were trying to extract would have Starlight infrared binoculars and/or goggles, so that although not being in radio contact, they would readily make out fellow American shapes in the clearing. Even so, it was risky, for it was possible that a PLA patrol had penetrated farther into the timber about the clearing than anticipated, the tracer coming at Lewis just before he touched down a case in point.
Through his own “bug eyes” Lewis could see the infrared blur of Brentwood, who had made a perfect walk-away landing, immediately taking up his position to the right of Lewis on the westernmost arc of the snowy, horseshoe-shaped clearing. Meanwhile, Salvini, Choir Williams, and others were spreading left of Lewis around the eastern curve of the horseshoe. Then, through the trees, he saw a shape moving through a clump of pine that had been stripped of their needles by what he guessed must have been artillery and mortar rounds, the stripped trees looking strangely naked, like so many huge, torn umbrellas upended in the snow. And through this wild, denuded wood, Lewis saw shapes moving; several others, their outline more indistinct because of a stand of unshelled timber, following the first; Lewis and the other SAS/D men who’d spotted them, holding their fire while peering anxiously through their nighttime goggles to make a clear friend-or-foe identification.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Devoid of star- or moonlight to guide them, coming in low westward from the East China Sea, lost to enemy radar because of the sea clutter, the two MH-53J Pave Low helos carrying four SEALs apiece skirted the wide confluence of the Huangpu and the Yangtze deltas ten miles to their south. Sea clutter gave way to the low stratus and cumulonimbus thunderheads massing along the coast, and the two SOS — special operations squadron — choppers were still below the ChiCom coast radar net, their look-down radar guiding them up and over the contours of the earth, no more than fifty feet above ground. The seven men aboard each chopper — four SEALs and the chopper’s crew of three — were hoping and praying NOE flying would keep them undetected.
On all the aircraft specifications charts provided to avid journalists in the Iraqi War, the big, fat, squat Pave Low hadn’t been featured — it didn’t look “sexy” enough in some editors’ opinions. But it was the unmentioned Pave Lows, four of them — despite the Apaches reaping all the glory in the press — that had struck the decisive blow against Saddam Hussein. Loaded with DEPNAV — the highly precise deep-penetration navigation computer — and nap of the earth early warning equipment, including their Doppler radar, the four Pave Lows had led the four Apaches in the predawn darkness of January 17, 1991. Flying low and deep across the Iraqi border into the western desert, the Apaches’ Hellfire took out two critical “overlapping zone” radar sites, thus assuring a “radar-black” hole. Then pouring through the hole came the undetected Allied air forces, delivering the first thunder of Desert Storm.
* * *
With insertion by air rather than by submarine having been decided on by Freeman because of the unknown configuration of sub nets at the mouth of the Yangtze and Huangpu, Robert Brentwood felt even more that he was the odd man out among the SEALs. Though with his rank he was the “wheel”—the senior officer in charge of Operation Country Garden — he was at least ten to fifteen years older than most of the two four-man Echo One and Echo Two teams.
And there were dozens of details he had to worry about, any of which, if not attended to, could foul up the mission. Even the relatively quiet purr of the muffled thirty-five horsepower outboard engines, should they have to use them, might be picked up by river traffic, though during the bull-pen briefing board Salt Lake City, intelligence reports had assured him that the noise wouldn’t be heard amid the distinctive and unvarying two-stroke putt-putting sound of the Chinese barges. The Chinese apparently used the same engines on all their waterways. It was as if, in his free-floating anxiety before the mission, his mind, keyed for action, needed to alight on some concrete detail as a temporary way of escape, a way of filling in the time before the inevitable unknown.
But the other SEALs were giving all their attention to their weapons. In the first Pave Low, carrying Brentwood’s Echo One team, Rose was checking the number-four buckshot cartridges for his AAI — Aircraft Armaments Inc. — ”double S,” or silent shotgun. Using a plastic pusher piston, the gun could send the buckshot out at over four hundred feet a second, the she
ll’s expanding metal preventing any gases escaping; meaning that if the weapon had to be used, its only sound would be the soft click of the double S’s firing pin. Apart from the explosives, the remainder of the SEALs’ small but lethal arsenal included Smith & Wesson .38 pistols, fragmentation and smoke grenades, emergency flares, and in Bullfrog Brady’s Echo Two team, a Smith & Wesson Model 76 submachine gun carried by Echo Two’s radio operator. In Echo One, Robert Brentwood was also armed with a Smith & Wesson Model 76, while Diver First Class Dennison packed a Stoner MK-23 with a 150-round belt-box feed.
In Echo One’s last-minute check, Brentwood had Rose, Dennison, and Medical Corpsman Smythe — who was also Echo One’s radio operator — make sure each of the three thirty-second-fuse Claymore mines was in the semi-inflated boat, trusting that Brady was making the same equipment check aboard the Echo Two Pave Low, a quarter mile aft of them. Unconsciously, Brentwood felt for the Griptite sheath of the high-carbon steel knife strapped to his calf and for the small, pen-sized signal light. Glancing at the C-4 plastique explosive packs, he detected an odor that shouldn’t be aboard the helo. He’d ordered everyone to eat one of the regional Chinese meals before they’d taken off from the carrier. ChiComs could smell American food a hundred yards away. More than one U.S. soldier had died in Korea and ‘Nam because of that, the Americans’ red meat diet especially detectable by Asians.
“Everyone on rice and fish before we took off?”
Dennison, Rose, and Smythe all nodded affirmatively, the perfume-like smell of gum apparently coming from the chopper’s electronic warfare officer. Brentwood told him to get rid of it.
“Well, gentlemen,” Brentwood noted, to ease the tension a little, “according to my GPS here, we’re right on the money.” The handheld global positioning system, fed by satellite atomic clocks in orbit, was giving him a second-by-second readout of precisely where they were over the velvety blackness of rice fields south of Taizhou, just seventy miles east of Nanking. “We’re exactly five hundred and eighty-eight miles east sou’east of Beijing. Error factor — no more than twenty yards — in case you were wondering where you are.”