by Ian Slater
By the time he had collected his three remaining men he knew the SAS/D troop must have had at least a fifteen-minute head start. But there was no need to be despondent. In a few hours it would be dawn and you could see the truck’s tracks — even if they hid the truck somehow — etched clearly for miles over the hard yet fragile grasslands.
“Like Hansel and Gretel,” he told the Spets troop, four of them now, including himself. “We’ll just follow their path. Back to the Helix.”
“We still have orders to take at least one of them alive?” one of the Spets asked.
“If we can,” the praporshnik said, but he said it without any real commitment. They — the Americans — had killed four of his best men, including the radio operator, and destroyed the R-357 KM high-frequency radio set with burst transmission system — the radio nothing more now than twisted and charred metal, its plastic components having melted over it like taffy.
“I say we kill the bastards,” one of the other three troopers said.
“Yes,” another said, “as slowly as possible.”
“We have to get them first,” the third member said. He was pointing at what remained of the Helix — a burnt-out shell no doubt caught in the F-16’s napalm run, the dead pilot and copilot still strapped in their seats.
“We’ll get them!” the praporshnik promised. “Whatever it takes.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Land’s end was hauntingly beautiful, the sky’s saffron ripples spreading forever westward over the Celtic Sea, white streaks of foam from an exhausted storm flung in a golden lace about the ancient pink-brown rocks.
Trevor Brenson, M.P., had a soft spot for Cornwall with its moody air of romance and its legacy of smuggling, of defying the proprieties of the establishment. His ancestors on his mother’s side had come from Cornwall, and though he’d been born and raised in London he liked the idea that the genes of Cornish smugglers were in his blood. It didn’t stop him from having his own grand plans for taxing the populace when Labour got into power.
Meiling didn’t comment on this more obvious hypocrisy of Brenson’s. To do so would have upset the mood as Brenson and she walked atop the cliffs, their hair blown roughly by a gusty southerly, the salty air of the sea both invigorating and relaxing at the same time. Turning from the Celtic Sea in the west south toward the Atlantic and the channel, Brenson held her hand with what was for him an uncommon show of affection for his mistress.
“I feel like I’m whole down here,” he told her, his gaze fixed on the horizon where there was nothing but sea. Meiling knew what he meant. The closeness of the sea, the enormity of it, gave them at once a feeling of insignificance and yet integration with the whole world, with one another, with all things. And it was then, as in a quiet moment with a friend, that he apologized for not seeing enough of her lately, for coming to her flat burdened with files and cares of the day. What he said next surprised her, because she had thought that when it happened it would be in the quiet exhaustion of having made love, the most unguarded moment of all.
“We’ve got the Conservatives where we want them,” he explained. “They’re sucking up to the Americans as usual.”
“Oh?” She was careful not to ask why, and looked out to sea, affecting disinterest, listening more out of politeness, her focus fixed on the vista of sea, land, and sky.
“Yes,” he continued. “Yanks want to overfly Europe-bomb China. I don’t know why London didn’t tell Washington to go take a—”
“Is that a petrel?” she asked suddenly, in what she considered a flash of brilliance, even more to convey a profound indifference that only encouraged him.
“What?” he asked. “Oh, yes, I think it’s a petrel. Stormy petrel.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I interrupted. What were you saying?”
“Americans want to send bombers to China.”
“Which China? Not Taiwan, I hope,” she said flippantly.
“No. Of course not. In the far west apparently.”
The west — the “far west.” She felt her heart racing — it had to be the missile site at Turpan. It was the only target of any real military significance. She took his hand. “It’s all right,” she said of his apology for not seeing her enough. “You’re with me now.”
“Yes,” he said, and stopped, looking down at her.
“What is it?” she asked.
“I love you,” he said.
“I love you,” she lied, and kissed him. She would have to keep seeing him after she’d passed the message to the Chinese embassy via the dead drop near Hampton Court. Besides, it occurred to her that if she complained about him not seeing her enough over the next week, she might get the actual target, though she believed she probably knew enough already.
On their way back to London they stopped for tea at Penzance, and when she went to the ladies’ room she had the urge to phone but had enough control to stem her excitement, her trade craft quickly reining in her emotional high, reminding her that in a world of beam-fed directional microphones that could pick up a conversation through glass across a street, you were never to use the phone to contact the te wu—the resident or head of station. Instead, that night she worked off her nervous energy by letting him try a half-dozen positions before he finally settled on one — rear entry, mounting her like a dog.
“God, I love you,” he gasped.
“You too.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Having sped eighty miles east across the plain with dawn only two hours away, David Brentwood, Aussie Lewis, Salvini, and Choir Williams knew they would soon have to abandon the truck, for come first light the Spets would be looking for them.
In fact the Spets, whose chopper had been gutted — all but vaporized in one of the F-16’s napalm runs — had had to walk back to Nalayh before calling in helicopter gunships, among them a Hokum, and this gave David Brentwood’s SAS/D troop more time. But they were still three hundred miles from the northeastern Mongolian-Siberian border, and to be in the truck come daylight would be asking for certain death. The trouble was that, because of the distance from the nearest American chopper base, a helo pickup in time was out of the question, even given the possibility of in-air refueling. The most they could hope for was a drop of heavier weapons and supplies.
In the early hours of dawn, before the pale gray was transformed into cerulean blue, the four SAS/D troopers approached a group of ghers, the round felt-and-canvas dwellings of the Mongolian nomad herders a welcome sight. They had deliberately chosen a group of six or seven ghers south of where they had abandoned the out-of-gas Zil, assuming that any search party would naturally fan out north of the abandoned truck, which had been heading northeast toward the Mongolian-Siberian border and not south. It was a calculated risk to buy time, for if the Siberians and/or Mongolians who were looking for them came to the ghers before any U.S. aircraft could reach them for a drop, it would all be over for the four men.
Apart from the chance of a resupply drop to aid a possible escape, the SAS/D’s only confidence lay in what they’d been told about Mongolian herdsmen at Second Army’s HQ briefing. For the Mongolian, long used to the vast emptiness and often rocky harshness of the steppe, to refuse a stranger hospitality was to be regarded as a cur — not fit for the company of humans. The problem, as Aussie Lewis reminded the others, was that in every group there was the possibility of a cur, or, as he more colloquially put it, the danger that some “son of a bitch” who’d had a “bad day on the range” might take his frustration out on the strangers rather than on the expensive camel or mare who’d kicked him. Or, if any one of the herdsmen was a good party man, he might saddle up and bring down the wrath of the authorities on the small group of long-noses.
The four men were now half a mile from the gher, walking down a ridge, careful to avoid its summit lest they silhouette themselves against the brightening dawn. A gust of wind quickly gathered itself into a spiraling eddy like a miniature tornado and David Brentwood hoped it wasn’t an
omen, like the first trickle of a grain of earth that starts a smothering avalanche.
He tried to dismiss his fear as unworthy of the SAS/D team, but he remained distinctly uneasy, and as if to confirm his suspicions, spiraling clouds of dust could be seen weaving their way through the knee-high spring grass with surprising speed, lifting the topsoil with them, at times hiding the ghers from view. Brentwood hoped he hadn’t made a mistake, that soon they would be safe and he could have Salvini send a transmit requesting a drop.
* * *
If Brentwood hadn’t made a mistake, Freeman had. Assuming that Cheng’s orders for the air conditioners indicated a summer, not a spring, offensive, Freeman had allowed a battalion of lighter, tougher Block 3 M1 tanks with their new gun and modular armor to be given a lower priority on his Sea-Lift resupply convoys, so that the newest and latest tanks were only now leaving the U.S. west coast for the Siberian and Manchurian theaters.
Meanwhile, Freeman knew Cheng would be building up his echelons of tanks, Freeman’s G-2 estimating the Chinese T-59 to American M1 ratio at four-to-one. There was no doubt that the M1 was the superior weapons platform, with its see-through smoke and laser range finders, but no matter how good a range finder was against a T-59 and no matter how much better me M1’s 120mm cannon was against the T-59’s 105mm, the best tank commander in the U.S. Army knew that if you had to kill four tanks against the enemy killing just one of yours just to stay even, you were in deep trouble.
But first the M1s had to come up to strength, which meant the convoys had to get through unmolested. This was considered a cinch — after all, while the Chinese had seventy-five submarines, only two were nuclear. Besides which the U.S. SOSUS — sound surveillance system — underwater microphone network along the U.S. coasts could, it was said, pick up a whale’s fart and classify the whale by species, which was a gross exaggeration, but was a measure of the confidence the Pentagon had in the SOSUS. It could certainly classify any ship from a threat library of known prop cavitation sounds in the same way a mechanic could tell the make of a car by its engine sound printout.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Manhattan’s lights spread out below his penthouse like spangled jewels, Jay La Roche was celebrating his court victory — already drunk on champagne and ordering one of his covey of lawyers to go get some “chicken,” by which La Roche meant young boys whom he could play around with later.
Francine, who’d started as a bar girl in La Roche’s D Trovatore and who had been “promoted” to his stable of “fillies,” as he called them, wasn’t amused. It wasn’t that she cared much one way or the other about the kids that La Roche would be having it off with, but she saw his request as a rejection of her that night. She knew that for her it was a love-hate thing with La Roche, but she couldn’t help it. The things he made her do sometimes turned her stomach, but for the security his money and position brought her, she figured being humiliated every time they had sex — he’d urinate on her — was a temporary inconvenience. Animal that he was, he was the one man who was untouchable in the city — as in the way his lawyers had beaten the “treason” charge, for example. However cruel he was, and he was, if you were with Jay La Roche you were protected from “out there.”
Now Jay, slowing down his drinking, eyes bright from a snort or two of angel dust, was announcing a new plan to the assembled party. He was atop the grand piano, boasting that La Roche Industries was going to go ahead and do what it had intended to do before the “buffoons” from Washington “falsely accused me”—that La Roche Industries wasn’t going to be put off going to visit the guys and gals at the front to show La Roche Industries’ continued support for the American war effort. There was a lot of yahooing and clapping. Francine noticed a face in the crowd that she’d seen in the newspapers — some politician or other. She remarked on the fact to Jimmy, the barman, who was wrapping a towel around another bottle of champagne.
“What’s that senator doing here?” she asked.
“Congressman,” Jimmy corrected her, running the bottle along a line of sparkling tulip glasses. “He wants to be seen with Jay. Don’t we all.”
Francine still didn’t get it. Oh, she didn’t mind what Jimmy was doing with Jay La Roche, ready to go up and have it off with La Roche whenever La Roche rang for him, but she told Jimmy she didn’t know the congressman was gay. He wasn’t, and Jimmy was shaking his head at her. Francine was an all right kid but naive as a babe — mostly about herself. More than once, as when Jimmy had to go up to the penthouse when La Roche had pulled a knife from the drawer and cut off her bra, it had taken him half an hour to calm her down before he realized that she sort of liked it. The danger, not knowing the rules, somehow made it more exciting.
“Isn’t he running a risk?” Francine said. “What if he’s photographed by—”
“Don’t worry,” Jimmy assured her, his voice all but drowned out by the party. “The congressman won’t get his picture in the paper. See that gorilla by the door?”
Francine sipped some champagne. “Yeah.”
“Wears size thirteen — D. Specializes in stomping on cameras. Congressman’s safe so long as he does what he’s told. Votes the way La Roche tells him to and as long as he keeps La Roche’s wife stationed up in Alaska.”
“He can do that?” Francine asked.
“Jesus Christ, Francine. When you gonna learn La Roche has these guys’ IOUs all over the friggin’ place. Remember that guy—” A hand came out of the crowd and snatched four glasses of champagne without a word.
“And thank you, dear—” Jimmy said. “That congressman who shot himself.” Jimmy reminded her. “Hailey— ‘bout a year ago?”
“No.”
“Hey, Francine. You stoned or what? Anyway this congressman was asked to do La Roche a big favor. Congressman didn’t want to do it, so La Roche showed him a few Polaroids of the congressman with a page boy.” Jimmy paused, pouring the champagne. “Pretty, too. Anyway, the congressman was caught between a rock and a hard place as they say. Couldn’t pull off the favor. Couldn’t bear the photos coming out for all his kids in college to see. So bang! Funny thing is, La Roche’s papers gave him the front page: ‘Tragic Death,’ blah, blah, blah!”
Francine wasn’t listening. She was anxious to get to the powder room to take another snort. It made it easier to go down on him and lick him behind, which is what he really liked after he got his load off. He was still up on the piano, singing “North to Alaska,” the flunky congressman standing in the crowd of flunkies with that fixed “I’m-having-a-great-time-Mr.-La-Roche” stare on their faces. Reelection cost ten million these days, and without La Roche Industries it would be a near impossible run.
Francine saw a TV starlet take off her high heels, now gyrating, shoving pussy at La Roche atop the piano like she was trying to break down a door with it. It made Francine jealous, mad, and smug all at the same time. Jealous because she knew she wasn’t the only one he could give security to, and smug because she knew something the others didn’t— that Jay La Roche, when he gave you the strap to beat him before he did his thing with you, before he used you like a piece of toilet paper — kept calling out “Lana,” the name of his estranged wife. He’d had something beautiful in her and had lost it. The starlet — even if the bitch got to lick him all way round — would be strictly a one-night stand. So long as Lana La Roche, nee Brentwood, stayed in that outhouse of a burg, Dutch Harbor up in Alaska, Francine would be first filly in the stable.
* * *
Colonel Soong’s soldiers weren’t taking any chances. It was bad weather all over northern Manchuria — excellent cover from enemy photo reconnaissance, but any unnecessary sound, such as the mules’ braying, could travel across the mist-shrouded, snow-patched valleys, and so Soong’s men were thrusting their arms down the mules’ throats, severing their vocal chords as they continued moving men and equipment and many heavy one-hundred-pound, 81mm mortars up along the east-west ridge lines that ran like an extension eastward of the Genghi
s Khan wall, much of it, like the Great Wall, still intact.
General Cheng, deciding that whatever happened, the Americans would not use gas, had made a decision that, though small enough in itself, allowed each man to carry extra rounds and rice in place of the cumbersome biological and chemical warfare protective suits.
“How can you be so sure?” Chairman Nie had pressed him. “That the Americans won’t use gas?”
“Because the Americans have bourgeois notions of war, comrade,” Cheng answered. “No matter that they have tons of VX and Sarin — they’ve never used the nerve gases. They proved that earlier in Korea, even when the NKA almost pushed them into the sea. They didn’t use it in Vietnam or Iraq. They won’t use it here.”
“But,” the commander of the Shenyang armies cut in, “what if they do, General?”
General Cheng’s reply was as even as that of a schoolmaster who had been asked a simple mathematical problem. He had thought he had made this clear earlier in the war. “We run away, comrade.”
Cheng knew that gas attacks depended much on local conditions, and rather than lose precious time climbing into a suit so heavy that many more pounds of supplies could be carried in its stead — and never mind the cost of the suit — it was better to have the men simply flee the field. Oh, certainly you’d lose some, but the ratio of the PLA to the U.S. Second Army was fifteen-to-one. The PLA could afford to take the risk.