Warshot wi-5

by Ian Slater

  But if that’s what “George C. Scott,” as his troops called him, was hoping for, Norton saw that Simmet couldn’t offer the general any encouragement by way of the weather. In fact it was getting worse, a sullen sky overcast enough to sock in any air cover for the outnumbered M1A1s. And Harvey Simmet said there’d be no letup in the Arctic storm for at least thirty-six hours, its epicenter not yet having passed through the Yakutsk region.

  And if Freeman thought anything, including his prayers, would change the weather in the next half hour, Harvey Simmet knew the general was about to be bitterly disappointed. All the incoming data told the same bleak story, reaffirming his earlier forecasts. Even the Khabarovsk relay printouts showed that temperatures were likely to drop into the minus sixties and below — not unusual for Oymyakon, a town in the Yakutsk Oblast, officially recognized as the coldest town on earth, a town where minus ninety had been recorded.

  Freeman took the message sanguinely, and as well as Norton knew the general, he didn’t know whether this betokened superb acting, resignation, or resolve. The thought of Second Army suffering the same terrible fate that had overtaken III Corps, with over four thousand men slaughtered on the ice, was too much for Norton to contemplate. And what would be the reaction back home? The very thought of what the La Roche tabloids would do to Freeman, to him, to them all, likewise didn’t bear thinking about. As Norton and his most senior officers saw it, this northern battle was quickly turning out to be Freeman’s greatest risk so far, and except for the Second Army armored column now heading south from Skovorodino to the Siberian-Chinese border, awaiting the outcome of Operation Country Market, it constituted the spearhead of Freeman’s entire army. In the end Norton knew it was a question of faith in the man — a calculated risk, based on past performance, that he had not gone definitely and finally bonkers like some evangelical who, though he was of the earth, was not in it, lost in a quiet reverie of past glory. One general, Norton remembered, had smilingly declined all help to cross the Rhine. “No bother, Sar’major,” he’d said. “I shall walk across. I have been sent.”

  * * *

  The circulation of La Roche’s tabloids throughout the world was skyrocketing once again. The predicament of Freeman’s Second Army, on a tightrope between defeat and victory, allowed La Roche’s chain to make millions by describing the terrible arctic conditions under which Freeman’s soldiers were about to fight the Siberian spearhead rumbling south of Yakutsk. If Freeman managed to pull it off — which quite frankly neither La Roche nor any of his tabloid editors believed he would — then the papers could ring their hosannas and they’d make millions on the victory. If he was defeated — the prevailing opinion of the editors— then it wouldn’t be the Siberian winter that was so much to blame, but rather what their headlines would declare had been FREEMAN’S FOLLY! the leader paragraphs and descriptions of Second Army’s incompetence already in the word processors of every La Roche paper. Either way La Roche couldn’t lose.

  The only impediment to his high, his only loss, was Lana Brentwood. From his Manhattan penthouse he looked out upon the dazzling city, much of which was owned by his Asian conglomerates, a fact unknown by the millions of Americans over whose lives the conglomerates nevertheless had financial control.

  Buoyed by the prospect of setting yet higher circulation records, La Roche took a snort of angel dust, felt the rush, and right then and there determined it was time he made another takeover bid — but he knew it mustn’t look like that. He turned about and spread the two headlines — one for victory, one for defeat — that his New York editors had sent over by courier for his approval. Francine, shuffling over in her mink slippers and carrying two Bloody Marys, had never seen him so self-satisfied. “Whose side are you on?” she asked, glancing at the headline.

  “My side,” said Jay, picking up the courier envelope and smacking her on the butt. “Number one, baby — me.” He took her Bloody Mary from her and put it on the polished burl coffee table.

  “Not now,” she said, half pleading, but trying not to look too annoyed. That only made him mad.

  “Hey!” he said, and a moment later he was looking down at her, kneeling before him, the wispy negligee so transparent he could see it all. “You ever been to Alaska?”

  “No,” she said. “Why?”

  “Because we’re going there, that’s why. Dutch Harbor.”

  “Sounds cold.”

  “It is — it’s a berg.”

  “Then what’s the big attraction?” asked Francine, swishing her auburn hair back.

  “My wife.”

  “Oh — I don’t wanna go.”

  “You’ll do what you’re told.” She knew she had no choice. He’d bought her, and if she didn’t like it, he told her she could always go back to working bar — for peanuts.

  “When are we going?”

  “Soon. La Roche Chemicals says thanks to the boys and gals at the front — all that shit. How’s that grab you?”

  She shrugged disinterestedly.

  “Come on,” he told her, brusquely pulling her face to his unbuttoned fly. “And for Chrissakes watch your teeth.”

  CHAPTER FORTY

  On A-7 it was quite obvious to Colonel Soong, despite the American propaganda, what had taken place: the enemy SAS/D teams landing on the mountain were sent in with the Flying Dragon to rescue the American gunners, but instead, when they found they could not stop the Chinese attack, they did the next best thing to hide their aggression from the world by removing all the dog tags from the American dead, as he had found done on the American bodies. Ah, but they had not had time to remove the incriminating evidence of the shoulder patches, which he had sent back to Beijing and which were being exhibited to the world to show that America was guilty of aggression.

  Of course, the Americans denied it and said that army patches could be bought by anyone from military surplus stores all over America and that they would be willing to let a neutral country verify this and examine whatever bodies were returned to them. And of course the running dog lackeys of America — such as Canada and England — on the Security Council supported the Americans’ attempted cover-up by what Beijing rightly called “the outright American imperialist lie.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  While Robert Brentwood began his two-mile swim away from Dennison toward the far side of the river, Colonel Soong, more than a thousand miles to the north, was consolidating his capture of A-7 from what he still believed had been an American battery. He was determined that A-7, with its panoramic view of the Siberian-Chinese border, would never again be taken by the enemy. When the Siberians had effected their pincer movement against the Americans with their northern armored columns from Yakutsk, then Beijing would claim this territory around A-7 in the traditional buffer zone between China and Siberia as China’s. They had captured it — it should now remain theirs, a price that Novosibirsk would surely cede to Beijing in payment for the assistance that had been rendered them by the peace-loving Chinese people against the American imperialists.

  Soong had tank traps dug around the entire ten-mile base of A-7, and radiating out from these there were more traps and antitank ditches for another thousand meters.

  The weather was bad generally but good for such work — little trouble from the odd U.S. Air Force fighter patrols that dared to risk empty tanks at the outer perimeter of their defense zone west of Khabarovsk. Besides, the hard manual labor warmed the soldiers, and as they carefully covered the traps with snow-laden vegetation, like soldiers anywhere they began to treat the traps as their own habitat. The snow atop them — even though no fires were permitted, so as to prevent infrared emission to any U.S. satellite overflights — acted much like an igloo. And so the deep tank traps became the best cover they could hope for, along with their Gore-Tex sleeping bags, the best the Chinese army had ever seen, purchased from the American firm of La Roche.

  The irony of American sleeping bags making it possible for the PLA to better rest up and so kill Americans,
if and when the counterattack came, gave Colonel Soong the first good laugh he’d had after his grueling, twenty-four-hour-a-day exertions — making sure all the antitank fortifications were up to standard.

  Two miles south of A-7 Soong could hear a noise like that of insects climbing over a metal dish. It was the sound of the reinforcement Shenyang Brigade, deployed from Harbin and amply supplied with the shoulder-launched HN-5A surface-to-air missiles and Red Arrow tube-launched, optically tracked, wire-command infrared antitank missiles, these having a kill probability in excess of eighty-six percent.

  Even if the weather broke and the Americans managed to launch refuel-in-air attacks to drop napalm — their most popular aerial weapon against high concentrations of ground troops — they would have to come down five hundred meters or so in order to have the free-tumbling petroleum gel pods hit the general target area. And Soong knew that one of the best-kept secrets of modern warfare — certainly one not known by the general public — was that any plane, no matter how fast, flying under a thousand meters into a phalanx of saturation, small-caliber, high-velocity AA fire, had no better than a fifty-fifty chance of survival. And Soong had such a phalanx of AA weapons, including the nine-and-a-half-ounce thirty-millimeter fired from the PLA’s mobile, multiple-barreled, tripod-mounted turrets, one quad of ZSUs capable of throwing up a near impenetrable shield of over 35,000 rounds a minute. The ZSUs, ammunition for them purchased from La Roche, were so deadly that their fire was akin to ancient hunters letting clouds of mosquitoes and black flies swarm onto a galloping caribou until its mouth, ears, and anus were oozing with them and it finally fell from sheer exhaustion. Soong recalled how a U.S. observer who had seen the Chinese thirty-millimeter ZSUs in action earlier in the war in Korea had, in a mixed metaphor, described how the quads had “nickeled and dimed the fighters to death.” And only one or two bullets in a jet intake or in one of the black fly-by-wire boxes would be enough.

  Soong started to relax. With the arrival of the Shenyang brigade, A-7 would be bristling with gun and SA missile quads for which the tank traps doubled as ideal cover, bamboo ladders at the ready should the PLA need to move out of them quickly in the event of a U.S. armor attack. For Soong, however, it seemed doubtful the Americans could muster the wherewithal to attack, given that their general, Freeman, was in for a surprise during the big tank fight looming in the Yakutsk Oblast, and given that the logistical pipeline pouring weapons and food over the Yangtze at Nanking north to the Shenyang army was still intact.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  The twenty minute count over, Dennison surfaced in the dark shadow of one of the trusses, his Remington machine/shotgun in his right hand, his left reaching forward to tear off the plastic protector cap. He found himself exactly where he wanted to be: no more than thirty yards from piers one and two. Flicking down the infrared overlay goggles, he could see Rose and Smythe still strapped to the railing above piers four and five, the white blur of their body heat eerily present as a ghostly outline around their wet suits, the radiant heat telling him they were still alive.

  He lifted the Remington, its unfolded butt now pressing firmly but not too tightly in his shoulder. The gun’s telescopic sight was filled with the huge white sun of the floodlight high above the concrete base of pier one. Deliberately shutting out the noise of the bridge so he could better concentrate, Dennison took a breath, exhaled slightly, stayed his breath, and squeezed the trigger. Not even he heard the click, but he felt the kick. There was no explosion, only the “whoosh” then tinkling sound of the floodlight’s glass disintegrating, the light dying. Dennison gave a push with his right flipper, lifted the gun again, sighted pier two’s light and fired, the noiseless Remington expelling nine.33 bullets from a single 00 buckshot casing, taking out the second light, leaving him six shots in the mag and seven lights to go.

  Now there was a lot of screaming up on the bridge’s top, four-lane motor vehicle deck; the first light’s demise, Dennison thought, probably being attributed by the Chinese to a bulb going. But two lights in a row had no doubt spurred the bridge’s guards into action. Yet they couldn’t have heard any other sound than the splintering of glass. Dennison noted the distance to the next girder shadow cast by the trusses in front of lights three and four, and once there — only a matter of three minutes swimming — he surfaced and took them out within ten seconds.

  Now the searchlights from the city side were probing frantically out through the mist, crisscrossing one another. But after a quarter mile the beams were eaten up by the mist, the light too diffused, producing phantom images of light on light, one of which caused the PLA gunners to blast away with RPGs and a barrage of small arms at two of their own trip-wire platforms, obviously mistaking the shapes for enemy boats from which the light-destroying shots must be coming. This allowed Dennison, who was on his fourth “Hail Mary, full of grace…” to get off, his next two shots taking out lights five and six, leaving him only two shots, with lights seven, eight, and nine to go. But as he took aim at the seventh, a wash wave, perhaps from a patrol boat mid-river, slopped over him, knocking him off aim at the precise moment he pulled the trigger. His last shot took seven out cleanly. This left him with an empty chamber with lights eight and nine still on, and the other seven out. Most of the southern side of me bridge was in utter darkness anyway, except for the pinpoints of flashlights frantically dashing back and forth like fireflies on the top deck.

  By then Robert Brentwood had reached the logjam of black shapes — the riverine craft that had been held up before the bridge and which were now tethered to the right bank. Taking the load of the explosives off him by tethering one end of the explosive line to the keel guard of the propane barge, the other end to his weight belt, it was easy for him to do a chin-up on the stern rub. Water dripped from the 7.62mm minigun slung around his neck as he hauled himself over the stern and crouched on the mist-slippery deck, every muscle taut. He could hear two voices approaching the stern on the narrow walkway that ran alongside the flat-roofed bamboo wheelhouse. Quickly he slithered back over the stern, holding on to the prop guard as he submerged, his head about a foot or so underwater directly below the prop. The voices above him were muffled, but he could still hear them, and then another sound — a sprinkling above his head — then more of it, the two Chinese continuing to talk as they urinated off the stern. In a few moments they were gone and he was back up and over, drawing his K-bar knife from its ankle sheath. Through the slats of bamboo he could dimly see a small coal fire, like a ruby heart, in the darkness, a man squatting beside it, brewing tea. The other man was still walking forward, disappearing on the catwalk a couple of feet above the decking of the barge, between the two huge cigar-shaped tanks which Brentwood guessed were about thirty feet long and ten feet in diameter. He knew earmuff charges alone would have been enough to weaken a pier if he could have climbed up on the bridge to place them. The idea had been that shock waves from either side of the pier meeting then rebounding would have stretched the molecular structure of the concrete to its limit. But there wouldn’t have been enough elasticity in the concrete to take the shock, resulting in a fracture. But with Echo Two gone, Rose and Smythe prisoners, surprise had been lost. He and Dennison wouldn’t get onto the base of the concrete piers, let alone high enough above them to place the earmuffs. What he needed was to cut the trusses, as with an oxyacetylene torch — use the C-4 plastique as a primary charge to raise the propane to its flashpoint.

  Making his way quietly forward by walking around the starboard stern walkway, Brentwood felt for the stern line, his knife cutting its hemp with surprising speed, as if it was string.

  The man in the wheelhouse immediately felt the slight shift, the barge yawning slowly out from the bank, the man no doubt alert to every nuance in the barge’s movement. As he turned about and stepped outside of the bamboo wheel-house to investigate, Brentwood’s left arm closed quickly, the man’s hands instinctively coming up to pull Brentwood’s arm from his neck, leaving his chest completely
exposed, into which Brentwood drove the K-bar to its hilt and twisted sharply before he lowered the man to the deck. Quickly, almost slipping on the blood, he moved up toward the dark crevice between the propane tanks, and saw the other man coming back toward him. The man called out something.

  “Chow mein?” said Brentwood. The man stopped, then turned, but Brentwood was already on him, the man’s body hitting the slick decking hard. For a moment Brentwood feared he’d broken the man’s neck, but he was only winded, gasping for air and dissuaded from yelling by Brentwood’s blood-warmed knife against his throat. The man was rigid with fright. Brentwood lifted him up, turned him about swiftly, slamming him belly first against the side of the port tank, and within four seconds had a slip knot of primacord tying the man’s wrists behind his back. Next, taking him by the collar, Brentwood steered him up toward the bow, the bowline — now extremely taut — cracking and creaking as the barge strained to be free. As he cut each strand, it protested with an anguished spitting and splitting. Then, just as quickly, the big barge was floating out into the channel, bow swinging out slowly, caught by the eddies at the periphery of the main channel’s current. Someone in front of the barge shouted up from a small sampan, and the shouting became a tirade. Then other sampan skippers joined in, cursing the barge and its turtle owner as the barge’s wash, if not its sheer bulk, threatened to swamp them.

  Invisible in his black wet suit, Brentwood took the man into the bamboo deckhouse, lashed him to the tiller spar, then just as rapidly hauled up the bag of explosives from beneath the prop guard. He heard a voice yelling aft of the barge, and another. “Huo!” yelled Brentwood. Next to pi-jiu! — ”beer!”—it was the most important phrase for any U.S. serviceman in prewar China. “Huo!” Brentwood yelled again. Fire!