by Ian Slater
There was a long silence. It was a trying decision for the British P.M. — already down in the polls and shortly to face a general election. A decision to assist the Americans could cost the prime minister not only personal popularity. He could well lose the entire election to Labour — a prospect infinitely more worrying to the government than French displeasure.
The P.M. took tea and thought upon the matter. His mind went back to the time during the Falklands War when he was but a junior in Whitehall. He remembered the clandestine operations made necessary by the Americans Haig, Secretary of Navy Lehmann, and U.N. envoy Jeane Kirkpatrick— especially by Kirkpatrick’s hostility toward Britain and her support, along with that of Assistant Secretary for Latin American Affairs Thomas Enders, for Argentina against the British. The American who had saved the day was Caspar Weinberger, the U.S. secretary of defense, who arranged, at great personal political danger, secret transfer of U.S. weapons and spy plane intelligence on Argentinian positions to the British.
The air-to-surface Stinger missiles, which the SAS had used to such good effect in the Falklands, were just part of the massive aid supplied by Weinberger, which included everything from air-to-air missiles to KC-135 tanker aircraft used for the midair refueling of the British Vulcan bombers. The prime minister knew that without American help the British, with only one carrier, could not have defeated General Galtieri.
“Of course we’ll help the Americans,” he said, taking up his tea again. “I should never be able to look at myself in the mirror again if we didn’t.” He looked directly at the defense minister. “We’re cousins after all.”
“Quite so,” Wright-Attersley answered.
“The polls, Prime Minister,” the private secretary suggested, one eyebrow arched apprehensively.
“Damn the polls!” He turned to his defense minister. “A friend in need, Stanley. Isn’t that right?”
“Absolutely, sir. Absolutely.”
“Don’t tell me the details, Stanley. Less they’re discussed, the better. And perhaps they won’t have to go after all. Media types get wind of this — slap a ‘D’ notice on ‘em. That’ll shut them up.”
“Very good, Prime Minister.” A Defence Ministry notice would mean anyone who published anything about the planned raid would be immediately prosecuted.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Frank Shirer wasn’t happy about the mission. It wasn’t the danger. It was the insult — like being asked to drive the school bus after a BMW. He was a fighter pilot, born and bred. He liked living on the edge of technology and had done so in the F-14 Tomcats. There was nothing like the thrust of afterburner, the twin turbofans rocketing you to Mach 2.3, slamming you back into the Martin-Baker, and the feathery rush through your genitals. It wasn’t a thing you could explain to anyone who hadn’t done it, including Lana Brentwood, with whom he’d fallen in love while recovering from wounds at Dutch Harbor and whom he wanted to marry as soon as Jay La Roche, her husband, deigned to give her a divorce. Shirer knew more than he wanted to know about La Roche — Mr. Smooth and Successful on the outside — inside, a slimeball who rolled over people as though they were ants.
Lana had left La Roche, tired of his sexual madness, and had begun a new life for herself — gone back to school, finishing her nursing training and joining the Waves, winding up, through La Roche’s malevolent influence in Congress, being posted to the naval hospital in what was called America’s Siberia: Dutch Harbor, Alaska, off Unalaska Island in the Aleutian chain, where it could go from sunshine to full blizzard within half an hour. The foul weather was mitigated, however, by her falling in love with Shirer, and then Ratmanov happened.
When the small island, the bigger of the two Diomedes, smack in the middle of the Bering Strait between Alaska and Siberia, had to be taken by Freeman’s paratroopers, Shirer had flown CAS, but close air support had got him downed, his RIO — radar intercept officer — captured by Siberian Spets, one of whose interrogators had stabbed Shirer’s left eye from sheer bloody-mindedness and to make sure Shirer never flew again. But after Ratmanov was taken by Freeman’s SAS/D commandos, Frank was sent to Dutch Harbor, where, with the help of “Mr. Doolittle,” a streetwise Cockney and fellow patient, he’d learned how to do what Doolittle called an “Adolf Galland.” Galland, who was the top Luftwaffe air ace of World War II, had only one eye. He’d cheated the charts, and Shirer likewise passed the eye test. But instead of being reassigned to fighter duty, Shirer now found himself “driving” a Buff — big, ugly, fat fellow — the acronym for the well-worn B-52. Rumor had it that he might get a crack at being posted to a Harrier squadron, but it was only that — a rumor. Besides, he wasn’t that enthused — a Harrier was small stuff next to a Tomcat.
Murphy, his rear gunner, wasn’t happy about the mission either, but in Murphy’s case it was sheer unadulterated fright, though he tried not to show it. Murphy, for whom the there mention of China evoked childhood images of San Francisco’s Chinatown — mysterious smells and fearsome dragons, shot through with weird music — fervently wished the B-52s had had their turrets rigged for radar remote firing as they had been in the old days. However, with the new.50s with a higher rate of fire but not yet successfully slaved to the turret, the machine guns in the rear turret would have to be manned, albeit with radar assist whenever possible.
At Lakenheath in southeastern England, bemoaning the awful weather that swept in from the channel was de rigueur among the B-52 crews because it was the expected thing. Gunner Murphy always joined in, but secretly he couldn’t think of anything better than bad weather. So it might mean a rough ride, especially over the European Alps and the mountains of south central Asia, which included the Himalayas, but gray cloud socking them in would keep them out of visible sight, and as a rear gunner, despite all the advances in infrared, Starlite vision, and radar, Murphy retained an old-fashioned belief that lack of visibility in the enemy’s territory was your best defense. Besides, on the visual skyrange he’d brought down many more drones with line of sight than with radar assist.
Sometimes there were too many damn dials to watch instead of your sights. His big worry of course was that the bad weather wouldn’t hold. In spring the stratus could suddenly clear, revealing vistas of sky and earth that would be an antiaircraft battery’s heaven. To be on the safe side, Murphy went again to the Lakenheath PX and stocked up on the new and improved Pepto-Bismol tablets, tearing open the cardboard packages and stuffing the cellophane-wrapped pink tablets into every opening in his flying suit he could find. He explained away the Pepto-Bismol on the basis of having some vague stomach condition undiagnosed by the doctors but due, he was convinced, to the service food.
The PX quartermaster was shaking his head at the quantities of Pepto-Bismol that Murphy was concealing about his person. “Murph, you fart up there, the sky’ll turn pink.”
“Don’t be a smart ass. You got any more?”
“Christ, you’ve got the last six packs. You’ve bought enough for the whole damn flight.”
“What if we go down?”
“Christ, you’re a happy fella aren’t ya?”
“Cautious,” Murph said tersely. “I like to cover my ass. Rear gunner’s motto — right?”
“Listen, Murph, if you go down you’re gonna need a hell of a lot more than Pepto-Bismol.”
“Cheery son of a bit—” Murphy began, then suddenly stopped. “When’d you hear about the mission?”
The quartermaster shrugged. “Yesterday, I think. Scuttlebutt is your wing’s on call. Could be tomorrow. Could be next week. Right?”
“Right. ‘Cept you aren’t supposed to know. They tell you the target?”
“Nope.”
“Well that’s something,” Murphy said, and was gone.
When he got back to the NCO’s mess the buzz all over was that the mission had been scrapped. “Oh, shit!” Murphy said, as if he really meant it. “What’s up?”
“Politics,” someone said. “Some Labour congressman—”
&
nbsp; “M.P.,” another cut in. “Member of Parliament. They don’t have congressmen.”
“Yeah, well, some Parliament joker’s heard about the request to launch a flight from here in England and threatens to raise shit unless the Labour shadow cabinet gets a chance to hash it over.”
“Aw, shoot!” Murphy said, really getting into the disappointed flier mode now. “That could mean weeks.”
“Could mean never,” another rear gunner said.
“Aw, shit!” Murphy said.
* * *
Shirer was ambivalent about the news. On the one hand, a cancellation might mean a bit of time to grab a C17 cargo flight over the pole to Alaska to spend a few days’ leave with Lana. On the other, he didn’t like just sitting around waiting. So what if the mission would mean driving a Buff? At least that was some kind of flying. Besides, the longer it took for the politicos to make a decision — to stop the Labour party from going public — the greater the danger that news of the exact target would leak out. At the moment hopefully all that would leak was a request for a U.S. Air Force overflight, the target unspecified.
But if Shirer was concerned about that, the one thing he had to feel good about was that Jay La Roche was about to go on trial in the States for “treasonable activity”—selling arms to China before the cease-fire, many of the weapons having been used in the slaughter of Freeman’s III Corps on Lake Baikal. He’d been out on bail ever since his arrest on the last night of the presidential moratorium — an Emergency Powers Act that had allowed police to arrest on due suspicion only and without having to Mirandize or to release their prisoner if a charge had not been made. Although the moratorium was over, there was speculation that it might be quickly reintroduced by the president if hostilities increased — to combat any potential internal sabotage in the United States.
In any case, La Roche had been arrested twenty minutes before midnight, midnight having been given by the president as the end of the moratorium, and La Roche had been flown from Alaska for trial in Manhattan.
The newspapers were full of it — except La Roche’s tabloid chains — and Frank was looking forward, like many others, to seeing La Roche put away. If La Roche had been locked up for what he’d already done against some of the underage boys and girls he’d had picked up to perform oral sex on him as well as beating them up he would the in jail. So far, however, his money and influence had thwarted any such charges. But now they had him cold on the selling of weapons to the PLA through his Hong Kong front men, one of the Hong Kong Chinese having “spilled his guts,” in La Roche’s words, in return for not being prosecuted and being under the protection of the government witnesses program.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The Pave Low’s blades chopped the air, its FLIR-forward-looking infrared sensor — guiding it over the corrugations that on the radar were the ridges radiating out of the Hentiyn Nuruu Mountains fifty miles northeast of Ulan Bator. The helicopter’s vibrations could be felt in the bone. Aussie Lewis and Salvini were asleep, Aussie snoring so loudly that, because of the Pave’s relatively quiet rotors, he could be heard by the others.
David Brentwood and Choir Williams were reassured by their colleague’s apparent cool, but David had seen it often enough before — something that civilians never believed, how men, going into harm’s way, in this case flying over hostile territory, about to land on a dangerous mission, could manage to fall asleep. But they did. For like mountain climbers who were sometimes able to strap themselves to the pitons on a narrow ledge and take a nap, their nervous energy had been exhausted by the meticulous preparation, the adrenaline put in reserve as the body demanded rest before the final push. David had seen SAS and Delta commandos catnapping with only a few minutes before the descent or the drop. David shook the Australian awake, then Salvini.
“What time is it?” Aussie asked.
“Oh four hundred hours,” David said. “Dark as pitch. No moon. Pilot must be sweating it.”
Aussie Lewis began strapping on his gear: haversack containing his Mongolian herdsman’s outfit, two three-and-a-half-pound Claymore mines, ten top-feed mags of 5.7mm ammunition for the P-90, a canteen of water, six hand grenades, folding spade, and furled “washing line” satellite antenna. They were still on radio silence and would remain so until they accomplished their mission and/or were back at the insertion point. Should their mission have to be aborted, a radio burst — an SOS giving their position — condensed into a fraction of a second would be permitted, plus any information on Siberian troop movements into Mongolia. The latter, often called the sixteenth Soviet republic, still had Siberian advisers and their units along the railroad from Ulan Ude near Lake Baikal south to Ulan Bator, the rail being a branch off the Trans-Siberian.
The stony terrain being too risky for a landing at night, the Pave Low would hover as Brentwood, Salvini, Aussie Lewis, Choir Williams, and Jenghiz fast-roped down with their heavy packs. Aussie Lewis was putting on rubber gloves to prevent rope burn.
In preparation for the mission that would take them through the foothills and down to the pasture-rich plain before Ulan Bator, none of the men had been permitted to wash or shave for several days, and the air in the chopper was, as Aussie Lewis put it, “like a bloody parrot cage.” But better this than the smell of aftershave, which could cost them their lives. Jenghiz swore that a plainsman could smell foreigners a mile off. The cabin’s red glow gave way to an eerie green, and the Pave Low’s ramp opened, the rope uncoiling fast like a huge snake frantically descending into the abyss.
Jenghiz was the first to touch ground, and the dusty smell of cold wind and of a few spring bushes that had flowered high in the Hentiyn Nuruu, together with the rushing sound of water nearby, flooded him with a nostalgia that brought tears to his eyes.
“Right,” David Brentwood said as they all regrouped. “Jenghiz, lead the way.”
“Okay, roger,” Jenghiz said cheerfully. David had told him several times that the double affirmative wasn’t necessary, that either “okay” or “roger” would suffice, but Jenghiz would simply smile and still say, “Okay, roger.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Praporshnik—or Warrant Officer — Petrov, in charge of the seven-man Spetsnaz commando team, checked his gear: an AKS-74 5 .45mm with noise suppressor, front pouch magazines, half a dozen RGD-5 grenades and five F-1 grenades, an RR-392 VHF transceiver, a “Dozhd” air mattress, ten-power B-N1 night binoculars, gas mask, canteen, map case, and 9mm Makarov pistol. Finally he checked his MR-1 throwing knife attached to his calf.
Next he turned to his radio operator, helping him to check his R-357 high-frequency burst transmission radio, AK-74, 9mm Makarov pistol, and RPG-22 antitank grenade launcher. The third man in the seven-man Spetsnaz commando team carried a 7.62 SVD sniper rifle along with 12cm-diameter contact-fused PMN antipersonnel mines. Like the other six members he also carried one of the MON-50 trip wire fragmentation mines that could destroy anything up to 150 feet away and which were now being collected in the middle of the squad.
The MON-50s would be used to “square off” the area where the transmitter had first indicated the American helicopter had stopped, either by hovering or landing to let off the four SAS/D commandos. Whether or not the American chopper had actually touched down, the Spetsnaz couldn’t be sure, only that the transmitter had indicated the zone exactly. It had all been easier to arrange than anybody at the Glavnoye Razvedyvatelnoye Upravleniye — GRU — or military intelligence quarters — had had any right to expect. The guide, Jenghiz, was well known in Khabarovsk for his knowledge of eastern Mongolia and so his relatives in Ulan Bator were just as easy to trace. He had been given a simple choice by the GRU: Take the cigarette-lighter-size transmitter they gave him, or “we’ll kill all your relatives.” Praporshnik Petrov joked how he wished he’d been given the same chance to be rid of his mother-in-law.
The Spets had been worried that because of the rugged, mountainous area north of the capital the transmitter would at times be “blinded�
� by the natural terrain. For a while this had happened, but then they’d been in luck and picked it up again.
The seven-man Spetsnaz squad’s orders were specific, for the guide Jenghiz did not know the purpose of the SAS mission, acting as guide only. The Spets had opted not to use their Hind A helicopter to overfly the SAS/D group, as this would only create a firefight, and the purpose of the SAS/D mission might the with the firefight between Spets and the SAS/D. GRU HQ had ordered Warrant Officer Petrov to take at least two of the SAS/D alive — if not all of them. Petrov, however, and the six men in his squad agreed that the only way you were going to take an SAS/D man alive was to get him in his sleep — overpower the guard and be onto him before he had a chance to know what was happening. For this too a chopper was ruled out — it could only be used at night, but even then only when the SAS/D team was far enough away not to hear its approach. The Spets were not worried about the SAS/D getting out, for when the American helo came back, in two or three days or whenever, it would set off the trip wire once it landed, the resultant fusillade of fragmentation pieces from the MON-50s’ explosions so deadly that the American helo would look like a sieve.
As the Spets chopper, carrying only two Spets, rose then banked to fly due north for ten miles toward the map reference that marked the SAS/D drop-off zone from which the transmitter was now moving and where the Spets would plant the mines, the other five Spets spread out following Petrov, whose radio operator was locked onto the transmitter signal. The SAS/D commandos would almost certainly stop to hide and rest just before dawn rather than risk being seen approaching the capital in daylight.
* * *
In this assumption the Spets were not to be disappointed, for by 5:30 a.m., when the first hint of dawn presented itself on the horizon, David Brentwood gave the order to wrap it up for the night and go to cover. They selected a spill of auto-size boulders scattered about the end of the escarpment. There were several caves nearby in the foothills, but the SAS/D avoided them. A cave was marvelous for making you feel safe, but if anything happened and you were discovered there was only one way out and this could easily be curtained off by enemy fire.