by Ian Slater
There was pandemonium.
Suddenly the long traffic jam of riverine vessels came alive, the shouts of “Huo!” galvanizing every Chinese throughout the long string of backed-up craft. Frantically, vessels began casting off, terrified they might get caught in the fire, the sampans nearest the propane barge using their long stern oars, as well as the putt-putting motors that were coughing awake, trying to put as much distance between them and the barge as possible. But it was chaos as sampans collided with other sampans and junks, the air filled with accusation, counteraccusation, and ancestral insults both in Mandarin and Cantonese. The docile water was slapped with jettisoned tether lines under the orders of the PLA guards, themselves running about confused on the river-bank, screaming orders to the boat owners, many of whom instructed the guards to perform acts that were anatomically impossible.
The extent of the confusion was a bonus that Robert Brentwood hadn’t counted on, but one he felt the SEALs were due for after the disastrously unlucky beginning of Operation Country Market.
Standing by the man at the wheel, gripping his arm in a half nelson, cutting him loose, Brentwood held him under the threat of the knife and directed him to start the barge’s engine. The man nodded furiously with a string of imprecations which Brentwood took to be a plea for his life. Once the huge barge was under way, nosing out under its own power, the cursing from the motley flotilla trying to escape through the darkness rose to a frenzy as the sheer bulk of the barge overruled any questions as to who had right of way. To add a touch of authenticity to his shouts of “Huo!” Brentwood tore a rag strip off the hang curtain from the wheelhouse’s sleeping compartment, stuffed it into a large Tsingtao beer bottle of cooking oil by the stove, lit it and tossed it astern. There was a small whoof! as it exploded, a flash of light, and a sampan afire. It was now definitely huo. What had merely been angry profanity rose with hysterical urgency all down the line, and in the added mayhem Brentwood indicated to the bargeman exactly where to steer. The man nodded again, talking quickly, not one word of which Brentwood understood, but the man’s terrified tone revealed a universal language. It said, “You’re in charge — whatever you say.”
As the barge entered the channel proper, Brentwood heard a dull thud, then a slight vibration — a junk rammed amidships, followed by a string of obscenities in the dark night, made blacker by the moon now being totally socked in by cumulonimbus. The PLA on the bank were shooting in the air, not knowing exactly who was responsible for the sudden exodus in direct violation of their orders, but none of the shots was aimed at the sampans, junks, and especially not at the propane barge. One shot into either of the tanks and the ensuing blast, in its heat alone, would be the closest thing to an A-bomb going off that Nanking had seen in its thousands of years on the Yangtze. Brentwood tapped the 7.62mm minigun about his neck and gestured the man to move away from the wheel or he’d get it. After already losing the four men of Echo Two to the Chinese, and seeing Rose and Smythe tied up on the bridge, Brentwood was in no mood for half measures.
On the bridge itself, off to the left a quarter mile down-stream, black squares, army trucks, were pulling up, blocking oncoming traffic from either side, searchlights mounted on their flatboards, the beams now beginning to sweep over the water, around the concrete piers and upon the dozens of boats farther aft heading toward the bridge or, more specifically, toward the two deep channels between piers four and six. Collisions continued on the way, but the putt-putting of the two-stroke motors kept up with what would have struck Brentwood as a comic insistence had it not been for the task and dangers that lay ahead of him. There was another bump, then another, more obscenities, but the barge moved inexorably toward the bridge, slowly at first, then like a monster possessed as it caught the full thrust of the current, smacking aside any craft that was so impudent as to get in its way.
Then everything changed.
Dennison, seeing the barge on its way, had dived and was already on his way downstream, jettisoning all equipment, save the Browning nine-millimeter automatic pistol and GPS with which he would rendezvous at the grid reference pickup point two miles downriver on the western bank, as agreed on by him and Brentwood. If Brentwood managed to carry it off, the GPS should bring him within a hundred feet of Dennison.
Dennison had been under way only two minutes, submerged and beneath the bridge, when he heard the muffled drone of a loudspeaker coming from the vehicular deck. Or perhaps it was from the lower railway deck, the noise being too indistinct to betray its exact point of origin.
On the barge, Robert Brentwood had no such difficulty in hearing the loudspeaker, the PLA interpreter shouting that the two prisoners tied to the rail would be beheaded in ten minutes unless all American commandos surrendered.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
“What’s the forecast, Harvey?”
Simmet, red-eyed from fatigue, which gave his face a peculiar, rodentlike stare, glared at Norton as if he was to blame. It was misdirected anger at the general, anger for asking what Harvey called “the fucking forecast for the fourth fucking time in the last fucking hour!”
Harvey Simmet snatched the latest computer printout from the isobar printer and took it through to Freeman.
“Storm’s still heading south, General. Gusts to sixty kilometers per hour and rising. Visibility near zero.”
“The temperature, Harv — the temperature?”
“Minus fifty, General, and falling.”
“Thank you.”
“Yes, General.” As Simmet walked away, Freeman turned to Norton. “Dick, I think Harvey’s a bit pissed off.”
“Oh?” It was so painfully obvious to Norton that he didn’t know whether the general was kidding him or not. Norton had no time to decide, for the next order Freeman gave him was a shock.
“Radio our tank commanders — burst code — to fire, then to fall back ten miles and go into defilade positions. When I go up there, I don’t want to be able to see one turret. Tell them to camouflage the guns with snow netting if the snow lets up — which it doesn’t look like it will.”
“Fall back, General?”
“Something the matter with your hearing, Dick?”
“No, General, but you’ve never—”
“Now, Dick! Tell ‘em to fall back!”
What in hell did Freeman think he was doing? Norton wondered as he took down the pad and pencil for the number-for-letter burst code. He knew it would be nearly impossible to hide every one of the 227 M-1s. If the Siberians’ forward patrols were to spot even one or two hidden behind the snowbanks, experienced Siberian scouts would be sure to guess that there were many more around, and before the M-1s could move, hundreds of T-72s would be all over them.
For these troops, who had been brought up on the legend of Freeman as the swift attacker of Pyongyang and the unstoppable general who’d kept pressing home the offensive against Ratamanov Island — despite appalling losses — and won, the fallback order smacked of impending defeat. And wasn’t it Freeman who had preached that “withdrawal is the first step to disaster”? The enemy, he had said, can smell it, and it “spreads like a great fart across the battlefield — gets ‘em riled, eager for the kill.”
Ten minutes later Freeman got the report from his forward patrols that the Siberian tanks had split up into echelons of five, eighty feet between them in line abreast, the classic attack formations that the Siberians had used earlier in the war, swarming through Fulda Gap. Freeman sent Dick Norton back to what he called Harvey Simmet’s “cubbyhole” for the latest outside temperature as reported by the men who were now hurriedly retreating to defilade positions, behind either already existing snowdrifts or any fallen timber they might find close to hand. Some of the M-1 tank crews, with the rapid sarcasm troops the world over can call up for even the most popular leaders, were already calling Freeman “Dig-in Doug.”
No one liked to be a sitting target.
Norton returned from the met room. “Sir, Major Simmet’s indisposed.”
“What?”
“He’s on the can. Taken the met printout with him apparently.”
“Well get him off the can, Dick. He’s the best goddamned met officer we’ve got, and I want him to tell me the forecast.”
“Yes, sir.”
When Norton entered the “latrine module,” a series of prefabricated stalls, he could hear the wind and snow beating wildly against the aluminum exterior. When he saw Simmet’s feet and told him the general wanted another forecast, Harvey jerked the chain so hard it came right off the S arm. “Jesus, tell him it’s fucking cold and going to get colder!” bellowed Simmet.
“C’mon, Harv!” It was the general. “How cold’s that?” When Norton turned to face the general, Freeman winked at him, gesturing toward the cubicle wherein there was a furious unraveling of paper. “You say something, Harv?”
Norton was starting to get worried. It wasn’t uncommon for commanders to come a bit unglued, albeit temporarily, under extreme stress. Schwarzkopf could lose his temper— blow a gasket. At times Freeman dealt with the pressure by trying to be the Far East Jay Leno. But any hope of a joke with Simmet died as the outside door slammed. It was a messenger coming in from Signals. A forward American observation post was reporting that the spearhead echelons of the Siberian tank army were less than seven miles away from the dug-in M-1s.
Harvey Simmet, pulling his trousers up, was reading off the printout, “Snow gusts increasing to one hundred kilometers — sixty miles per hour, General. Visibility zero.”
“Not zero visibility for infrared and laser sights, Harvey!” Freeman commented.
“They’ve got infrared sights and laser, too, General.”
Freeman said nothing, but his frown told Harvey that Jay Leno was gone for the night. Coming out of the cubicle, Harvey looked apprehensively at Norton for reassurance that Freeman hadn’t miscalculated. Norton couldn’t give him any.
“Temperature?” Freeman asked Simmet.
Simmet dropped the printout in a puddle of melted snow by the urinal as he was lifting his suspenders. He cussed. “Minus fifty-five. Going to get worse,” he warned, looking up at Norton.
“Norton,” ordered Freeman, “signal all commanders to fall back another ten miles.”
Norton didn’t argue. He didn’t know what to think. It made sense to withdraw, given the odds, but that wasn’t the general’s style. Was Freeman finally seeing the light, or had Jay Leno metamorphosized into “Duck-Away Doug”?
* * *
Watching the vertical and crisscross-trussed girders of the lower railway deck coming at him like huge X’s in the darkness, truck-back floodlights above them on the vehicular deck, Robert Brentwood took off his Mae West vest, cut the Chinese bargeman free, pulled the cartridge on the Mae West, handed the inflated vest to the man, and gestured back over his shoulder to the river. The man was off the stern in three seconds. Brentwood heard the faint splash even amid the babble and excited yells on the Nanking Bridge and all around him in the jumbled bumping of sampans and junks, caught in the wash of the searchlights, scattered every which way, putting as much distance between them and the oncoming barge as possible.
Fifty yards from the channel, between piers four and five, he reached over to the rope trailing from the barge’s capstan and jerked out the holding bolt, the resulting run of the anchor chain sounding like a dump truck upending a load of marbles. Now there was a splitting sound that grew rapidly: a volley of gunfire aimed at the bamboo housing but well aft of the propane tanks, in the PLA’s desperate attempt to stop what they now realized was a boat with American commandos aboard.
The barge’s bow struck the pier and shuddered, its stern swinging about, pivoting on the anchor chain, the stem bashing into the concrete midway under the bridge along the base of pier four. The barge was now completely covered by the rail decking above it, the small arms fire ceasing because of the danger of ricocheting off the crisscross trusses into the propane tanks. Brentwood had determined that to spend time trying to rescue either Rose or Smythe would be to jeopardize the whole mission, and against impulse had to weigh the lives of thousands of Americans that lay in the balance to the north should the Nanking Bridge not be blown. He pulled the ten-minute acid-ampule timer. But then, with heart-stopping suddenness, he realized that with the PLA’s fear of firing down at him for fear of hitting the tanks, he had a sudden chance, albeit a short one, as he climbed off the barge onto the narrow maintenance ladder running from pier five’s base to the rail decking and the vehicular deck above it. A roaring like another great river entering the Yangtze could be heard off to his right, the glaring headlight of a northbound goods train starting across the bridge. Halfway up the ladder, his left hand on a rung, he swung the mini machine hard right, firing from the hip, several of the long bursts crashing into the train’s headlamp, denying the PLA any clear sight of him. Immediately above Rose he saw several PLA figures silhouetted against the rail. He fired another burst, and cut Rose loose as the PLA clambered over the rail, still too frightened to shoot but determined to exact a price.
“Go! Go!” It was Smythe yelling, tied high above pier four off to the left, cheering them on.
“C’mon!” hissed Brentwood, Rose following him down the ladder above the propane tank so quickly that, his muscles stiff from having been tied up, Rose almost fell, his left heel smashing into Brentwood’s nose.
With only three minutes to go before the acid ampule would eat through the primacord, igniting the charges, Brentwood went back up the ladder another two rungs, putting himself above the level of the passing train, its hot slipstream buffeting him. He saw three black figures on the northern side ladder under the bridge and fired a long burst. Two men fell, their screams barely audible above the rush of the goods train, one body bouncing off a boxcar into the girders, the other falling into the river over a hundred feet below.
The moment they hit the barge deck, Brentwood handed Rose his penlight. “Rendezvous point with Dennison — two miles down the river. If we get separated, head for the west shore. One flash — I’ll respond with two, ten seconds apart. Got it?”
“Got it.” Suddenly the train was gone, and in the half slice of a flashlight’s beam on a girder Brentwood saw two more PLA figures fifty feet above him. He fired a burst, saw one slump, and holding the gun tightly to his chest, dove off, feeling the cold current moving him swiftly downriver, feet kicking as he submerged more powerfully than in the most rigorous training session. Immediately in the underwater blackness he made for his left, where the current would carry him to the west bank. For several seconds time raced as he tried to make as much distance between him and the barge as possible, waiting for the sound of the detonation. Then it seemed as if minutes had passed, that something had gone wrong, that the primacord had—
There was a tremendous flash of orange light, turning night into day, the barge going up in a feral roar, lifted ten feet out of the water, flames from it shooting hundreds of feet high, engulfing the two spans between piers four and six, the ball of fire a quarter mile across quickly narrowing about its central concentrated core beneath what seconds before had been cold steel but which was now plasticized. Brentwood could hear the steel groaning, starting to cave in, dropping then toppling like some enormous Play-Doh Lego set just behind him. In fact, swept down by the swiftly moving current, he was already a quarter mile from it. Still, the shock wave of the explosion hit him like a baseball bat in the small of the back, and a moment later his body was literally surfed toward the downstream shore by a series of five-to-eight-foot waves radiating from the explosion. He could see the river crimson behind him, its turbulent surface reflecting variegated colors, the blues and orange of the burning propane eating into the curling, thick black smoke that was tumbling over the water. Through it here and there he saw that not only the space between piers four and five, but that between five and six, had sagged, buckled, and come apart, pieces of them still falling into the river in a hissing stream; and he knew that Smythe was dead,
vaporized in the fiercest fire he’d ever seen.
* * *
“Mars! Mars! Mars!” radioed Dennison, his message immediately picked up by the Pave Low as it banked hard south toward the GPS coordinates. The moment he finished the message and heard, “Fire delay flare,” he pulled the flare from his pack, stuck it into the mud at a thirty-degree angle and pulled the cord. It hissed off, the delay seven seconds, its chute opening two hundred yards farther downriver, the flare beginning its flickering mauve burn-off, the delay a safety precaution to divert the PLA away from the actual rendezvous point, which, it was hoped, would give Brentwood time to rendezvous. In fact it was Rose he saw, Brentwood nowhere in sight.
* * *
“Set, Aussie?” David Brentwood yelled over the thunder of the rotors.
“Set!”
“Right. Sal, you and Choir — cover fire from the chopper.”
“Right!”
The Pave Low’s electronic wizardry didn’t fail as its automatic fix took it down to a hundred, then a bare fifty feet above a marshy levee; for it to go lower and risk a wind shear in the unstable air currents from the fire would be to risk slamming down or getting bogged.
Within two seconds Aussie and David Brentwood were rappeling down two of the five dangerously swinging STABO lines. Dennison put himself in the spring harness at the end of one of the STABO lines and Rose did the same.
“That’s it?” yelled Aussie. “Anybody else?”
“Yeah,” called out Dennison, having no way of knowing he was talking to the brother of Robert Brentwood and making no effort to lower his voice under the roar of the Pave’s blades. “The boss.”
David Brentwood knew it was up to him. Now they saw more searchlights frantically sweeping through the smoke south of the burning midsection of the bridge. At least two patrol boats could be heard. David couldn’t risk it. This was where the speed of a STABO extraction was worth every penny of the taxpayer’s money. “In harness, Aussie!” he ordered.