by Ian Slater
As clouds closed back over the moon like a cloven hoof, not even the night vision goggles could pick out the platforms, except for the one from which the RPG had just been fired, a residual infrared blur from its heat still hugging the platform. The brief glimpse of the platforms — he’d seen at least six of them — told Brentwood he’d made the right decision in bringing in his boat. He’d spotted at least one pair of platforms, possibly two, between him and where Echo Two up ahead had been hit.
He listened carefully for any increase in the putt-putting sounds of the river, for any indication of a patrol boat moving cautiously around the trip wires — but could hear none. Perhaps one of the sampans’ or barges’ putt-putting was in fact a patrol boat. He didn’t feel lucky — not after Echo Two being hit. The odds against a single round from an RPG hitting it smack on like that weren’t good, and if the Chinese luck kept up like that, well…
“Sounds like the sampans are bunching up downriver,” whispered Rose. “About the bridge.”
“Yeah,” added Dennison. “Maybe they’ve closed the upriver channel on our side. Sounds as if they’re working the river traffic like a single-lane bridge — opening it for down traffic for an hour, then to up traffic.” Smythe agreed, pointing out the ChiComs could watch one channel more easily than two.
“Maybe,” acknowledged Brentwood, simultaneously smelling the polluted stench of the river and hearing the heavy, somehow ominous-sounding heavy breathing of the other men testing their COBRA circuits. The flexible air bladders, designed not to give off any telltale bubbles of air, rose and fell like an anesthetist’s bag, responding to inhale and exhale as dangerous carbon dioxide was absorbed by a soda-lime compartment and oxygen bled in from the small, eight-hour waist tank.
To Robert Brentwood the flexible breathing bags rising and falling imparted a tension that was unrelieved by a new development: smoke from a factory on the eastern bank wafting down over the river. Though cooling rapidly over the water, the smoke was joined by water particles to form a rolling mist which, because it was still relatively warm, interfered with the infrared goggles. But even if he could see whether there were any patrol boats, Brentwood knew he couldn’t do much about it. Anyway, he told himself, it might simply be that the PLA had thought they’d already got all the saboteurs; probably content to pick up the bodies from Echo Two, or what was left of them. Maybe the ChiComs thought the Zodiac had been manned by Democracy Movement underground saboteurs and not U.S. SEALs. Yes, said Brentwood’s alter ego, and what happens when they pick up the debris and discover they were Americans? That’ll bring out more than a sampan or two.
But he knew he had to put such worries on hold and press on to the bridge. And the thought of the tens of thousands of Americans whom Echo One might save if the SEALs could sever the vital supply artery helped him quell his fears.
Easing himself quietly down the riverbank, from which the Zodiac was hidden beneath a camouflage throw wrap, Brentwood went over the equipment, giving most attention to the four “Javex” bottles, as the “upgunned” M2A3 conical-shaped charges were called. Twenty-four inches long by sixteen wide, the charges looked like four big magnums of champagne sawed off at the neck. If they could “earmuff” the charges on the south side of piers four and five, the four pairs of earmuff TNT charges having a 26,000-foot ROD — rate of detonation — pentolite detonating cord, the two simultaneous explosions should create shock waves to penetrate over four feet from either side of both piers into the solid concrete. Brentwood hoped that the ChiComs, always afraid of high-altitude bombing attempts despite their wall-to-wall AA SAM missiles about the bridge, would keep the bridge in darkness, observing their full blackout. But he thought it a vain hope. The PLA troops guarding the bridge mightn’t be first-rate — most of those would already be at the front — but if he were the ChiCom commander in Nanking, after the destruction of Echo Two he would order the bridge lit up and have every available man on and around it looking for and shooting at anything that moved in the river.
Quickly having gone over their recognition codes, call signs, and hand “squeeze” underwater signals, the four SEALs entered the water, but not before Dennison suddenly realized and pointed out to Smythe, Rose, and Brentwood that the emergency code “Mars,” chosen by the Bullfrog, was the same as the name of the Zodiac’s outboard.
“Well, if we have to use it,” whispered the more taciturn Rose, “our guys’ll know we don’t mean a frappin’ outboard.”
“Don’t sweat it,” Brentwood said. “We won’t need it.”
Submerged, Brentwood and Dennison as one pair, Rose and Smythe the other, were connected by a nylon feel line, Brentwood and Dennison heading for pier four, Rose and Smythe toward pier five barely a mile ahead.
The current was swift, and it seemed that in no time they were closing, only a quarter mile from the enormous black shape of the double-deck Nanking Bridge, hearing the rumble of the motor traffic on the bridge’s top lane and the roar of three steam locomotives in tandem thundering across the lower. Brentwood could also hear the putt-putting of the sampans through the water, a sound that was progressively overwhelmed by a slower but heavier and more persistent beat, shot through with a sound of metal on metal and then a lazy plump-plump-plump.
Dennison tugged the feel line, but Brentwood already knew — he’d heard it all before aboard both the Roosevelt and the Reagan—the sound of depth charges rolling off a boat’s stern. Brentwood estimated that he and the other three SEALs were now five hundred yards from the bridge. The whump! of the first explosion sent shock waves racing through the water at over three thousand feet per second, even the outer rings of the depth charges’ detonations so gut-wrenching that Brentwood felt a wave of cold nausea, and he could only hope for the safety of Smythe and Rose.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Flying side by side, the better to communicate while they observed radio silence, the two Siberian choppers, bulbous-eyed Hind A’s, taking the coordinates of Freeman’s position from General Malik in Nizhneangarsk south to Port Baikal and Irkutsk, beyond the blizzard, were halfway down the 390-mile lake. The overcast was still thick, metallic-looking and low, but visibility was at five kilometers when they spotted what looked like a SPETS chopper coming toward them. It appeared to be a Hind D but, given the near whiteout conditions, when depth perception suffered, it was possible that it could be a bogey, an American Sea Stallion — one of the enemy choppers that, coming in low over the frozen lake, were attempting to pick up remnants of the retreating and decimated American III Corps, whose tiny fleeing figures looked like white ants amid the black and burning detritus of their rout.
The Hind A pilot wasn’t about to take any chances, and had his copilot use the flashlamp to signal his comrade in the other Hind A — a hundred meters on his right side, nearer the western shore of the lake and Port Baikal — that he was going to warn off the oncoming chopper, even if it was a SPETS. The pilot in the other Hind gave a thumbs-up acknowledgment of the message and put his Hind in a tight right bank toward Port Baikal. The remaining Hind headed straight for the oncoming bogey, now only two miles away, but still indistinct in the blur of snow, and began a hard left-right, right-left swaying motion, signaling the other chopper to land. The chopper kept coming, and so now, Malik’s order in mind, the Hind’s pilot hesitated no longer and began to “jiggle” and “jinx” in response to his weapons officer’s commands coming up from the nose bubble below him. Switching on his “flowerpot” infrared suppressor, he fired two Aphid air-to-air missiles. The other chopper turned sharply, rose, then dropped like a brick, both missiles missing him, their white contrails now clearly visible to the fleeing Americans of III Corps beneath. But the chopper’s evasive action was to no avail, its cockpit disintegrating, the attacker’s undernose 12.7mm gun, slaved to the pilot’s sighting system, already pouring a deadly fire into the bogey, bits of rear rotor flying off. Now the attackers could see it was a U.S. Marine Sea Stallion as it fell hard to the right, hitting the ice with
a whoomp, sending spidery fissures racing along the ice, its main rotors striking the frozen lake, wheeling the chopper around in ever-increasing circles until the rotor blades snapped. Six-foot-long segments of rotor flew into a fleeing American sapper company like errant boomerangs, making a heavy “chunka-chunka” sound, beheading and disemboweling clumps of U.S. troops trying desperately to cross the lake, their blood and entrails smearing the ice.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Alexsandra Malofs tongue was raw from licking the rough, wet stone wall of her jail cell. Chained to the wall, she had lost twenty pounds in ten days in the Harbin Number One Jail. On Ilya Latov’s express orders, her jailers hadn’t given her any food or water for the last three days. They were further instructed not to give her any until she told them who helped her in her escape from Baikal to Harbin and what information she’d given to the underground Chinese Democracy Movement which had aided her before she was captured.
Though she hadn’t been fed, her licking the condensation off the cell’s cold stone walls prevented her from becoming fatally dehydrated. But the stones were so rough, her tongue had become badly lacerated and swollen, and now her mouth was filled with the metallic taste of blood, her nostrils filled with the stench of her own waste emanating from the small wooden bucket by her side. But only once — during the moment of her arrest in the hutong — had she weakened, considered telling them anything. And even then she had been determined not to tell them about sending the message about the Nanking Bridge to Khabarovsk via Ling’s underground cell.
She had been afraid her determination would weaken with her body, but her refusal to talk had become the one thing that had kept her going — the one thing to which she could tether her sanity. Even so, Alexsandra knew that all the will in the world to resist couldn’t prevent her dying. Soon she must eat. But what? She had no strength left to try to catch the rats and roaches that scrabbled over her at night when she tried to sleep. And even if she could think of a way of killing them, the thought of eating them raw revolted her. She had managed to squash several of the cockroaches, but could not bring herself to devour them, the thought of their hard shell crackling beneath her teeth enough to make her almost vomit. Yet she knew she must eat if she was to survive.
One of the Chinese guards, whom she knew only as Wong, a middle-aged man — in his late forties, perhaps— took particular pleasure in her plight. In any other country Wong could have looked merely well-fed, but here in Harbin he looked positively rotund compared to the other guards. Wong smiled a lot at Alexsandra, and on the third day of her imprisonment — when he had come in to take out her toilet bucket — he had stood over her, holding a fresh stick of youtiao, the long sweet bread, undoing his fly with the other hand and pursing his lips, his gesture with the youtiao telling her what she had to do to get the bread. Contemptuous, she turned away from him. He laughed and left, making a snorting noise as he ate the bread, telling her that soon she would submit, that he had seen it all before. At the door he turned and declared that a prisoner would do anything for a scrap of bread, let alone sweet stick. It was a basic instinct. She refused to look at him, keeping her head facing the cell wall, but she’d been badly frightened, afraid he was right.
If he offered her the bread again tomorrow… She could feel her resolve slipping. Remembering the time she had spent in the hands of the Siberian secret police, and now this squalor and degradation, she began to cry. Half choking, she ordered herself to stop, knowing that her very tears were robbing her of vital moisture. She thought of the Russians starving, of her great-grandfather in Leningrad during the Great Patriotic War of 1941-45 and of how they had begun eating the wallpaper paste and…
Even with her fear of how she might be tempted to satisfy him, it still took all the courage she had left, but slowly she did it. Dragging the toilet bucket over, she removed the lid tentatively, the flies so insolent they didn’t even bother to move. Steeling herself, remembering how her forebears had survived, she stared at the putrid stools — at the tiny imbedded scraps of undigested rice and chicken innards. Here and there a speck of corn. If her forebears had found the will to do it — to survive — she could. She would not give in.
One of the guards who’d heard Wong laughingly tell everyone in the station house that the white jinu— “whore”—in number 12 “is eating her own shit,” had told his brother-in-law Chen, who’d laughed, too, and who was a blood member of the June Fourth Movement — Harbin’s offshoot of the Democracy Movement. Chen knew it meant that Alexsandra Malof hadn’t broken — hadn’t told her captors about the bridge message. But all evening Chen was grumpy, shouting at his only child, calling him a “little emperor.” “That’s the trouble with the government’s one-child policy,” he told his wife. “It turns them into spoiled brats. When I was young…”
Later that evening, his wife mentioned that Wong had asked another guard and his wife and them over for dinner. Wong could afford it, she told Chen. “While everyone else is on war rations, Wong gets extra food from the prison.” Her unspoken question was, Why can’t you scrounge more food?
“Wong ba,” muttered Chen disgustedly, his wife gaping. It meant “turtle”—the very worst kind of insult. She knew that night they would not be making love.
* * *
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Personally overseeing the first prisoners brought in, Freeman noticed that their greatcoats were surprisingly devoid of snow, which was coming down in tiny balls so hard that it bounced off the coats, collecting at the collar folds.
The moment he saw that the surrendering Siberians were wearing civilian clothing underneath, Freeman got on the Humvee’s radio and ordered the entire Airborne to ignore prisoners giving themselves up unless they opened fire, in which case they were to be cut down. Apart from that, prisoners were to be simply disarmed and left to find their own way to the rear. “I’m not about to fall for that old ploy,” he informed Norton, “letting columns of refugees cloy your advance.”
General Malik’s planned attacks against Freeman’s flanks by his two motorized regiments were foiled by the U-shaped area of chopper-dropped mines, the two 155mm howitzers meanwhile laying deadly fire on Nizhneangarsk. The blizzard afforded more cover for Freeman’s foot soldiers than for the squeaky Siberian T-80s whose laser range finders were cut by the blizzard, four of the tanks erupting in flame, hit by American LAW 80 rounds, and in one case engulfed by flame thrower. It didn’t mean there wasn’t hard fighting, Freeman’s first battalion engaging a company of SPETS troops in the open area immediately northwest of the Nizhneangarsk tower, where the brine of the salt marshes had turned the edge of the lake a dirty cream color. Here combat was often hand-to-hand, and the two Lynx helicopters with eight ninety-five-pound Hellfire missiles apiece attacked, having dealt with another six of Malik’s lead tanks. One of the Lynx helos that had helped lay the mines, so that the Siberians had only a quarter-mile-wide front on which to attack, was temporarily downed because of shrapnel from a prematurely detonated mine whose fragments were too big for the self-sealing fuel tank to handle. Nevertheless, the Lynx had taken down one of Malik’s vital forward Hind D spotter helos just before the blizzard promised from the north hit full force.
But if there was a general collapse of morale among Nizhneangarsk’s regular troops, there was no such weakening of the Siberian Sixth Guards Regiment aboard the enormous air-cushioned vehicles — Aists — whose huge propellers were speeding them north from Port Baikal under orders from Irkutsk HQ. Though Freeman had as yet no report of them, they were now only a half hour from his paratroopers.
The Siberian Sixth Guards, quite apart from being the best shturmoviki—”trouble shooting”—regiment unit in the Siberian army, had a special reason for wanting to close with Freeman. The Guards were veterans of the Sixty-fourth Siberian Division, which boasted among its battle honors the defeat of the Wehrmacht at Stalingrad, but who had been routed and humiliated by Freeman’s Second Army before the cease-fire. Indeed, it was
in part the devastation wrought upon the Sixty-fourth by Freeman’s breakout at that time, following the destruction of Baikal’s sub base, that had convinced Yesov to yield and to sue for a cease in hostilities.
It was only when Freeman’s paratroopers had reached Nizhneangarsk, securing the rail line — the surprise and rapidity of the American paratroopers’ attack having overwhelmed the garrison — that the first of several reports came in from one of the Lynxes that the Aists. — at least eight, maybe more — had been sighted. The report said they were approximately fifteen miles south of Nizhneangarsk, which meant they’d be at the railhead in fifteen minutes — Freeman knowing his paratroopers didn’t have anything like the huge, heavily armed and armored Aists with which to resist.
Colonel Dick Norton felt his throat constrict. “What now, General?”
Standing on a slight rise, arms akimbo in his characteristic, defiant pose, snow peppering him as he overlooked the white on white that was the expanse of the lake stretching south from him, Freeman thought he could see the Aists’ blobs. Or was it a mirage or some other trick of the whiteout? It couldn’t be them, as it was still snowing too heavily, reducing his visibility to no more than a quarter mile or so. It struck him that he may have momentarily been a victim of what he called “Hegel sight”—the ever-present danger he constantly warned his troops about: that in times of excitement, particularly in moments of high stress, you often see what you expect to see, projecting your worst fears outward — in this case to the ice. To a small boy at night, for example, an old coat on a doorknob could easily become the feared intruder. It took training and a victory over fear to see what in fact was there. “Dick, I want those two howitzers up here right now, plus heavy mortars and sappers. Fast!”