Asian Front wi-6

by Ian Slater

Using a canvas strap from the parachute he made a sling for the AK-74, the Makarov 9mm in his belt beneath his del, a pair of ten-power night-vision binoculars around his neck, and packed on — or rather, packed around — the pinion seat more cargo from the immobilized chopper, namely an RPG-7D antitank rocket launcher with five rockets. Then, courtesy of the dead Spets chopper pilot, he took off the man’s Spets uniform, including the telltale blue-and-white-striped T-shirt, rolling it into a bundle that he stuck between the seat and gas tank. The herdsman was grinning appreciatively and shook Aussie’s hand vigorously as if it were a water pump.

  Two minutes later, Aussie was lost to the herdsmen’s view in a muffled roar as the Kawasaki headed east from the gher caravan that itself was already on the move. Checking his GPS, Lewis knew exactly where he was within ten meters because of the satellite triangulation. What he couldn’t tell was what he’d meet along the way, and soon he was too far from the ghers to see what happened a half hour later when a Spets chopper out of Nalayh blasted the moving caravan of ghers to a stop, then landed and took prisoners.

  In the swirling dust storm they asked them which route me American had taken and how was he traveling — by camel, by foot — how! The Siberian fighters, probably Fulcrums, though having driven off the Americans, had reported the three dirigibles that were part of the single-line extraction technique. Where was the fourth? Was he heading north or east for the border — along the Indermeg road or even further east towards Choybalsan on the Herlen River before turning north?

  The terrified Mongolians reminded the Spets that the Mongolian People’s Republic was a friend of the Siberians and told the Spets that they did not know what direction the fourth American took. The Spets loaded them all aboard the Hind, flew it to two thousand feet above the dust cloud, where it looked like a huge, bug-eyed dragonfly, and threw all of them — seven adults and three children — out, then headed toward Choybalsan. Flying through the dust storm they could see nothing, but one never knew — a sudden shift in the wind here and there might suddenly reveal a break.

  The Spets were in no mood for any more noncooperation, especially by Mongolians whom they no longer thought of as the master race that had terrorized and subdued their world under Genghis Khan but as there lackeys of Siberian will. They glimpsed another gher village during a break in the dust cover, landed, and asked about the Americans. The herdsmen, eleven of them, had nothing to tell them and were quickly shot. Then two Spets held the youngest female — a girl of about thirteen — while a third Spets raped her by locking his arms about her neck, barely able to enter her because she was bucking so much, the other two Spets laughing until finally she was exhausted and groaning like a wounded animal, bleeding, having no option but to submit to his will. Then they shot her.

  It was clear they’d get no information from the Mongolians, who were obviously more favorably disposed to the Americans, but at least from now on word would spread quickly through the ghers that if the Spets wanted information you’d better give it to them. The Hind took off through the dust cloud. “What are we looking for?” the Spets pilot asked. “Is he on a camel, horseback, walking, or what?”

  “We don’t know,” the praporshnik, an Afghanistan veteran, snapped. “We’ll shoot anything that moves. Anything. Understood?”

  “Da!”

  * * *

  Frankly, Aussie told the wind, he would have preferred a Harley MT-350cc — better suspension. Besides, he’d always fancied himself a bit of a rake on an Electra Glide in blue and like Fonda — not his commie fawning sister — out on the road on the old Harley-Davidson. Still, the Kawasaki’s whine was just fine and, head down, goggles firmly attached, he was making good time, though learning that driving virtually blind — visibility down to fifteen feet — took more courage than he’d thought. Man, if his Olga by the Volga with the big tits could only see him now — whoa! Through the dust he could see a darker dust, looking like a huge scab, a stationary Soviet-built armed personnel carrier — a BMP-1.

  Aussie knew the odds immediately: a crew of three, three passengers with assorted nasty small arms, a main turret gun—73mm, killing range twenty-five hundred yards. Also armed with a coaxial 7.62mm and antitank guided weapons. Stifling inside, most of its infantry resting outside. Its hull armor plus or minus 19mm. Only thing in his favor was that the Kawasaki was almost twice as fast as the BMP-1, and if they’d seen him, by the time they’d loaded up with their full complement of infantry, he’d be a quarter mile ahead anyway.

  “Say bye-bye to Ivan!” Aussie told the Kawasaki and gave it full throttle. The next minute he was airborne, the bike skidding furiously in front of him, the right side of his del shredded to pieces by the gravel rash, the spill driving the Makharov hard into his groin. He had the bike up, its wheels still spinning, and was resaddled in a matter of seconds, pride a little punctured, the earth exploding about him with small-arms fire. But then he was flat out again, into the curtain of dirt.

  The BMP’s 7.62 started chattering as if it felt left out, followed by the steady thud-thud-thud of the 73mm, but the shots were wild and well behind him. But of course now the word would be out: the lone SAS was on a motorcycle heading east for Choybalsan. The BMP didn’t even start its engine, no doubt radioing his position to the next roadblock as he rode parallel to the Herlen River road.

  * * *

  Aboard the Talon combat aircraft David Brentwood, Salvini, and Choir Williams were grim-faced at having had to leave Aussie behind. The only good news they could give Freeman’s headquarters was that from what they’d seen, the Mongolians were clearly anti-Chinese, and that Marshal Yesov, if he did have any plans of attacking the Americans from the west, wasn’t going to get much help from the Mongolian militia or the regulars; otherwise the Mongolian president would have had the foothills and the flats around the Hentiyn Nuruu swarming with patrols looking for the SAS/D team. Instead, he’d left it entirely up to his Siberian “guests.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  The thing that struck Frank Shirer immediately about Peshawar was the smell of the northern Pakistani town — one of smoke, dust, dung, gasoline, and spices that he was unfamiliar with, which arose from the town’s bazaars, where one could wander down the Street of Partridge Lovers or the Street of the Storytellers, looking at the famed Persian carpets and watching the coppersmiths beating out their wares in the time-honored way. But if he thought he was in for any more sightseeing he was in for a shock, as within an hour of landing at Peshawar he was being familiarized with what had once been the Cinderella of the fighter production line: the Harrier vertical/short takeoff and landing close-support/reconnaissance fighter.

  “Now, see ‘ere,” a British NCO said with me same kind of accent as that of the man called Doolittle who had managed to help Shirer fake his way through the eye chart exam at Dutch Harbor earlier in the war. “See we’ve placed two 30mm cannon — hundred rounds per gun — under the fuselage. Can carry up to eight thousand pounds of disposables if you like, but if you’re going up over the Hindu Kush, mate, it’s not bombs you’re gonna need, it’s height. So apart from the air-to-air missiles we’ll put on your underwing hard points, most of your weight’ll be extra gas and thirty-millimeter rounds. Okay?”

  “Suits me,” Shirer said.

  “Now, how many hours have you had in ‘em?” the NCO asked.

  “None,” Shirer said.

  The NCO looked at him aghast. “None? Blimey, mate, I ‘ope you’re a quick learner.”

  “I can fly anything from a Tomcat to a B-52.”

  “Yeah — maybe so, mate, but you got runways there, ‘aven’t you?”

  “Well before the instructor gets here,” Shirer said, “why don’t you show me round the kitchen?”

  “Crikey, you’re keen, I’ll say that about you.”

  “Thanks.”

  The NCO began with the ejector seat. “Martin-Baker Mark Nine — just in case. Right?”

  “I like your sense of priorities, Sergeant.” The sergeant gr
inned, loosened up a bit. “There you’ve got your HUD— Smith’s — can’t get ‘em better than that, and a Smith’s air data computer. It comes to radar warning, we hand you over to old Marconi here, and if you get lucky you can lock on with the Ferranti laser range finder and target seeker. You’re strapped on top of a Rolls-Royce Pegasus vectored-thrust turbofan, maximum speed at low altitude plus or minus point nine, maybe Mach one if you fart.”

  “I’ll remember.”

  “This little baby’s big winner is the old Viff. Those two tits”—he meant the ferry tips or low-drag jet nozzles—”are little marvels, they are. Wivout them you might as well leave ‘er parked in the garage. That’s what you’ll be spending most of your time on — how to control those little buggers. Up, down, and around. Handled right can make a faster attacker look bloody stupid. Hopefully of course you won’t have anyone attacking you.”

  “You mean there’s a good chance the mission might be off?” Shirer asked.

  “Oh — I dunno about the politics of it, mate. But I mean the chows’d’ave to get their crackerjack fighters west in a big hurry in time to intercept any bombing raid, wouldn’t they?”

  “I keep thinking they might have thought of that,” Shirer said sardonically.

  “Only if they know about the mission, and with these dummy runs we’ve been making they probably don’t have a clue.”

  The ground crew sergeant had no sooner finished talking than Squadron Leader J. Williams came out excitedly on the tarmac to exclaim, “It’s on! Just come through from London HQ. Turpan.”

  “When, ma’am?” the sergeant asked.

  “Four days time — five at the outside.”

  Shirer was in shock. Squadron Leader Williams was a petite blonde.

  “Christ!”

  It was out before Shirer could stop himself.

  “You’re Major Shirer, aren’t you?” she asked tersely, taking her mood from his.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “We’ve heard quite a lot about you. You and your nemesis, Marchenko. How many times did he shoot you down?”

  Bloody hell, thought the sergeant, if he didn’t get in between them there’d be blood on the tarmac. “Squadron Leader Williams’ll be leading the Harrier cover.”

  “I take it that doesn’t meet with your approval, Major?” she said tartly.

  “What — er, no. I mean — fine. That’s fine.”

  “I hope you’re a better flier than you are a liar.” She flashed an angry smile.

  “I’ll try.”

  “Good, because you’ve only got four days. Think you can handle it?”

  “I’ll handle it.”

  “We’ll see.”

  Shirer knew rationally that there was no reason a woman shouldn’t be a combat pilot, no reason her reflexes shouldn’t be as quick as his, that she didn’t need a man’s physical strength to fly by wire, so what was his problem? He didn’t like it, that’s what.

  “Ah, Major Shirer?” the sergeant tentatively said.

  “Yes?”

  “Ah, we don’t call the ferry tips ‘tits’ when the boss is around.”

  “Anything else I ought to know?”

  “Yes, sir. She’s a damn good pilot. Can turn this little gremlin on a dime. One more thing — she’s a stickler for discipline.”

  “Sounds like fun.”

  That night Frank sat down to write a quick note to Lana at Dutch Harbor. He had to be circumspect about what he said, and his letter was terse, not only because of what the squadron censors would take out or because he was fatigued from ten hours straight on the Harrier without yet having taken it up, but because he simply could not bring himself as a once-household name in America — an American ace, a Tomcat veteran — to tell Lana that his boss was female and younger than he. “My boss is English,” he said, and left it at that.

  He knew he should be more broad-minded, more magnanimous, but damn it — he’d flown Tomcats, hooking the three-wire in zero visibility on a rolling deck, when she’d been going through puberty. No way he’d let on to Thompson, his replacement on the B-52, that he was under the direct command of a woman. Damn, now he knew why that toffee-nosed Fowler-Jones had talked him into it. They were so short of Harrier pilots they were having to use skirts. It was humiliating, that’s what it was. All right, so he was a male chauvinist pig, but hell — it just didn’t seem right. One thing for damn sure, he was going to learn every possible thing about the Harrier — this “little gremlin,” as the NCO had put it — that he could. He’d live on coffee alone in the next few days, if that’s what it took, and go over the gremlin inch by inch until he knew every part of it.

  Why was it, he wondered, that men always called their ships and their aircraft “she”? He pushed it out of his mind and buried himself in the manual for the Ferranti 541 inertial navigation and attack system, the Smith Head Up Display much the same as he’d seen before.

  * * *

  Red-eyed and determined, Shirer mastered the vertical takeoff and landing over the next twenty-four hours and was ready for high-altitude tests. What was it she had said? “Your nemesis, Marchenko.”

  Cheeky bitch! And whether it was her or some of the other pilots in the Harrier squadron, a rumor was going around that Marchenko was now stationed somewhere in eastern China as an adviser on the MiG-29s.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  As the crunchy ice gave way beneath his boots, Freeman had pondered his strategy. To go south while the missiles remained intact at Turpan to the southwest would be suicide, yet to wait much longer for Cheng to build up his forces in Manchuria east of the bulk of Second Army would be equally disastrous. Yet to mount a frontal attack on the Manchurian border — all along the Amur — would also be suicidal.

  He watched the small trickles of water formed by the stamp of his boots flattening the ice and was reminded how at night images of rivers had kept running through his dreams — not in a gurgling, hypnotic, sleep-giving way but more as impediments to his sleep. In childhood, rain falling on the barn roof in the Midwest and later on the barracks at Fort Ord and his home at Monterey had always given him comfort. So why not now? What was the running water trying to tell him?

  Often before, a problem had resolved itself for him while he had been asleep, but, to date, the dreams of water were elusive in their message: If the ice suddenly melted on the Amur, his tanks would sink without a trace, but anyone knew that. The more he thought of the message of the water, the more he thought of the work of the ancient Chinese warrior whose book on the art of war had been beside his bedside along with the King James version of the Bible. What was it that Cao Cao, one of Sun Tzu’s lieutenants, had said to him? “The military has no constant form, just as water has no constant shape — adapt as you face the enemy.”

  “Adapt,” Freeman told himself, and now another of Master Sun’s lieutenants spoke to him. “Use deception to throw them into confusion. Lead them on in order to take them.” Freeman stopped suddenly in the snow, more rivulets running from his boots like streams finding the easiest runoff path, the line of least resistance. Often the most obvious answers were hidden because of the maze of detail. What was it? You couldn’t see the woods for the trees. Well Freeman had suddenly seen through the trees into the heart of Sun Tzu. As he turned back to his headquarters hut, his “minders” found it difficult to keep up with him, he was walking so fast.

  * * *

  Aussie Lewis knew he was on the horns of a dilemma. The Spets knew he was headed east in the direction of Choybalsan, where he would no doubt turn north, but now all the river crossings that would take him north to the U.S.-controlled Siberian border would be manned — if not blocked — by BMP-1s. And the river was deep, wide, and particularly dangerous now; great lumps of ice were piling up at the bends in the river.

  It was a strange landscape, the temperature rising daily, sending up forests of mist, dropping to freezing and below at night, and now the dust storm was beginning to abate. It was 3:00 p.m. Come morning the s
torm would probably disappear altogether, a fresh easterly overcoming the west wind that had brought on the storm. He saw a blur up ahead, then another. For a moment they seemed, in his fatigued, saddle-sore state, like sheep, but in fact they were the outlines of two or three ghers.

  The question was, had the Spets had time to reach this settlement and spring some kind of trap? Shutting down the Kawasaki then lowering it with some effort to its side to break any possible silhouette, he took out his K-bar knife and moved forward into the dust storm. It was only as he got a hundred yards or so closer that he realized what had happened, why the settlement of the three or four ghers had looked like sheep, shrunken in size.

  The smell of wood smoke now mixed with the dust, and he guessed in a moment what had happened. As he came stealthily upon the first gher, his guess was proven right. The ghers had been burned to the ground, and in a small depression in the middle of them lay the murdered bodies of the few families who had been there and who could not tell the Spets that they had seen the escaping American.

  Lewis had seen some painful sights in his time, but this turned his stomach, one of the children disemboweled. He could feel the bile rising within him as he saw another small child’s body, its head crushed by a rock, a rag doll held tightly. Lying still in the dust storm that was howling eerily about him, the sand smattering on his goggles, Aussie could see a circle of sand and pebbles that had been thrown up by the Spets helicopter.

  The butchery had all the signs of a ferocious haste, one of the ghers still smoking, one Mongolian, an elder, probably the head herdsman, having been struck halfway down between two of the ghers surrounded now by bleating sheep. It was clear the chopper had gone, but Lewis, taking no chances, crept slowly toward the wreckage of the first gher and smiled, whispering, as if Choir, Brentwood, or Salvini was by his side, “The stupid bastards.”

  With the canvas, felt, wooden doors, and slats, Lewis went to work with his K-bar knife, stopping now and then to make a quick circuit of the burned-out ghers in the event that anyone had returned, but he was alone in the dust storm.