Asian Front wi-6

by Ian Slater

  When he had finished it wasn’t pretty to look at, but if he didn’t get caught between two chunks of rogue ice, the rough raft he had fashioned would get him and the Kawasaki across the river to the northern side. He kept two sturdy roof poles apart and now put them in the center of the raft as he hauled it back toward the Kawasaki. As hard as this was, the most difficult part, he knew, would be getting the raft into the water once it was loaded with the Kawasaki, using the two poles as the raft’s slipway. Suddenly he stopped, for he thought he heard a noise nearby. He whipped out the Makharov.9mm but saw nothing, thinking it must be the bleating of one of the sheep.

  The other side of the river, which he could see only dimly now and then in the dust storm, was about a hundred yards away, and if his guess was right, the current would carry him swiftly toward a left-to-right bend in the river that would push the raft into a jumble of ice that had collected at the turn there, but that would allow him to leap ashore and anchor the raft before the. swirling eddies about the bend once again took it out into me river.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  The radio message coming in to Canadian Forces Base Esquimalt on the southern tip of Vancouver Island, just north of Washington State’s Olympic Peninsula, was garbled: “Panicky,” reported the U.S. coast guard who was also picking up the message off Whidbey Island.

  As well as being an SOS, the signal, patched together, made it seem that the Southern Star, a fish-processing factory ship out of Seattle, which had headed out to beat its competition with four small, fast trawlers, was saying something about an “enemy submarine.” It sounded highly improbable, given the extensive SOSUS — underwater hydrophone or microphone — array network along the West Coast. For this reason, neither Esquimalt nor the submarine base at Bangor, Washington, was inclined to take the report seriously.

  There was no storm that, as in the case of torpedoed tankers at the start of the Siberian war, could have masked the sound of an enemy sub attack. Besides, with the Sea Wolf-class USS Aaron Peal, the dual-purpose attack and ICBM nuclear sub, egressing through the degaussing or demagnetizing station on Behm Canal further north on the British Columbia-Alaska border, it was considered extremely unlikely that the Sea Wolf’s sonar wouldn’t have detected any large enemy sub movement.

  Further out in the North Pacific would have been a different matter, with enemy subs expected to be nosing about the perimeter of the old Soviet buffer zone that stretched, half-moon-shaped, from the Bering Sea south to southwest toward the Kuril Islands north of Japan, lying in wait for the vital convoys en route to Freeman’s Second Army. But going by the radio message, the Southern Star was within the well-patrolled two-hundred-mile zone off the Canadian-U.S. mainland.

  “Ah—” Washington State coast guard pronounced, “they probably saw one of our Hunter-Killers going out on patrol— started shitting themselves.”

  “Or a school of fish,” the second officer added. The sudden shifts in water color caused by the quicksilver-like veering of near-surface feeders could suddenly alter the pattern of water, giving it a shivery “patch” look, a patch often mistaken by fishermen, especially in wartime, for the change occasioned by rapid temperature shifts at the water-air interface caused by a sub’s venting excess fresh water, a side effect of its abundant nuclear power. A suspicious-looking patch could also be produced by the upwelling of hydrothermal vents, or hot springs, on the sea floor, whose spouting columns racing up through the cold layers produced a “bubbling” effect on the ocean’s surface akin to a huge globule of oil popping and expanding on the surface in less dense water.

  The MV Southern Star, her listing on the coast guard’s manifest showing that she was a fish processor of 15,000 tons, was asked politely, calmly, whether she could have been mistaken.

  “No way,” the immediate reply came, this time unencumbered by any kind of static.

  “Nothing garbled about that,” the coast guard duty officer said. “Must have seen something, I guess. Notify Whidbey Island. They can send out a chaser.”

  Within twenty minutes a P3 Orion, replete with sonobuoys and other ASW equipment, including eight Mk 54 depth bombs, eight 980-pound bombs, six Mk 50 torpedoes, and six two-thousand-pound mines on underwing hard points, was being dispatched on full alert speed at 470 mph. After the saboteur attack on a Trident sub by an antitank missile earlier in the war as she had egressed Hood Canal, the duty officer wasn’t about to take chances, even though he believed the lookouts on Southern Star had seen no enemy sub but perhaps a whale breaching.

  With its MAD — magnetic anomaly detector boom, an extension of the plane’s tail — on active, the Orion made for the last reported position of the Southern Star, and within twenty minutes of crossing the surf-fringed ribbon of Vancouver Island’s Long Beach saw the factory ship, the dots on the Southern Star’s forward deck waving frantically up at the aircraft, more crew members spilling out by the second, as if by sheer force of numbers they could somehow convince the aircraft to shepherd them into port.

  “What are they worried about?” the Orion’s radar operator asked. “No one’s gonna go after a fish boat.”

  “Yeah,” the copilot wryly said. “But figure it’s you down there, buddy boy. And you thought you’d seen a hostile. You’d want protection, too.” From the Southern Star’s position, the copilot gave the captain a search pattern for possible Hunter-Killers in the area that, taking the Southern Star as its center, extended in a circle two hundred miles in diameter.

  The only anomaly the MAD picked up was metalliferous deposits around sea mounts where superheated water from the unstable sea floor southwest of Vancouver Island had streamed up, causing minerals to be leached out as the hot plume hit the colder water of the northeast Pacific. But these anomalies were already marked clearly on the oceanographic charts.

  “Unless,” the radar operator proffered, “a hostile has nestled in all cozylike against a sea mount, using the magnetic mineral deposits as a cover?”

  “Siberian or Chinese sub wouldn’t know the sea bottom that well around here. You’d need to have it laid out like the back of your hand, buddy boy.”

  “Maybe they do.”

  “Don’t think so — our navy didn’t put up with any of the ‘oceanographic research’ bullshit the Soviet trawlers tried to pull. Goddamn things had so many aerials sproutin’ from them they looked like anemones. Kicked their ass out of here years ago. Anyway, tricky business hanging around sea mounts — all those canyons running off the base, turbidity, currents galore. Sub could end up gettin’ buried in a friggin’ great mudslide.”

  “I dunno, they might try it, ‘specially if they’re ChiCom diesels.” The senior ASW officer took the point. Everyone was thinking about Siberian subs, a cold war habit. But the Chinese had subs, too, and, being diesel electric, they were often more dangerous than nuclear subs. The nuclear boats, though faster, always had to have the water pumps going to cool the reactor and so gave off sound. The diesel electrics, just as capable at firing torpedoes or ICBMs, could go on battery and remain completely silent.

  “Hey — I’m easy to get along with,” the senior ASW officer said. “Drop a deuce and see what we get.”

  “You got it.” With that, two chute-born sonobuoys were popped out of the left side of the aircraft. The sensitive mikes that would unravel twenty feet below the air-sea interface would send back any abnormal sound from the noisy world of the deep. Freeman’s convoys couldn’t afford to lose one ship. Even so, the best ASW equipment in the world told the ASW crew aboard the P-3 Orion that the Southern Star must have seen a ghost, as when everchanging cloud patterns threw light and dark shapes on the sea. There was a tendency at sea to see what you feared most, like a child at night imagining that a coat hanging in a dark hallway was an intruder.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Aussie Lewis dragged the long ten-by-six-foot raft of wooden slats and canvas down to the river’s edge at a point where he estimated the current would take him diagonally across to the other
side, where the bend in the river was jammed with floes of ice, coagulated where the current had narrowed. With darkness approaching, he fed the two long poles that he was going to use as a slipway into the water and firmly anchored the raft by means of ten tough hide straps, which in turn were held fast by wooden stakes that he’d driven into the sandy soil with the butt of his AK-74.

  With slipway and raft held steady, he went up the bank to bring down the Kawasaki. He saw movement near it, dropped, and heard a noise, the same low moan he thought he’d heard before. It was a Mongolian herdsman lying next to the bike. He must have made his way down to the river as Aussie had done a last-minute check around the ghers. Aussie switched the AK-74 off safety and, going low, crawled about to the right of the Kawasaki so as to come up behind the man. If the man had punctured his gas tank, Aussie swore he’d take his head off at the neck. When Aussie was only a few feet from him he could see the old man had done nothing of the sort. Aussie could see the man’s del blood-soaked to the chest. He had been one of those who had been shot by the Spets who were punishing them for not knowing anything of the SAS/D. When he saw Aussie in the tattered del he gestured with what little energy he had left for the SAS/D trooper to come closer.

  Lewis moved his finger off the safety of the AK-74 and could tell from the old man’s chest wound that he was not long for this world. It was a miracle he had managed to crawl so far from the rubble of the ghers. Aussie Lewis knelt beside him and gave him several sips of water from the motorcycle’s canteen. The man made as if to talk but could only gesture, the same kind of moan coming from his throat, but it was as clear as a desert day in that dark, dust-riven twilight what he wanted — begging Lewis to finish him off, to see that his agony might not go on.

  Aussie couldn’t use the AK-74 for fear of the shots being heard, but the old man was reading his thoughts and drew his hand across his own throat. Aussie Lewis nodded, and with an agnostic’s hedging of the bet, made the sign of the cross on the old man, whose hands now stretched out from his side. Perhaps the old man would understand, perhaps not. Aussie took out his K-bar knife and quickly drew it across the old man’s throat. The blood spurted then gurgled like a crimson brook, and it was done. Aussie then dug a hole in the sand and covered the old man, leaving a hastily rigged cross from two of the gher slats, then he lifted the Kawasaki. It felt twice as heavy as before as he wheeled the bike aboard the raft and again had to lower it before cutting the leather straps that had held the raft in place.

  Immediately he began pushing on the stern oar — a long slat — hard to port to catch the current. A piece of jagged ice about four feet square bumped into the raft, sent a shudder through it, then another hit it amidships. “Bloody hell!” was Lewis’s response, but in the swift current he was now already a third of the way across the river with only seventy yards to go, desperately working the rudder hard to port lest he be sucked into the fast-flowing midbend channel. But the length of the raft took care of that, for it couldn’t make a sharp turn and its front end was already crashing and splintering into the packed ice of the bend.

  In a flash, Aussie was racing through the ice jam with the painter of hide and anchoring the hide rope to a stake he was driving hard into the ground. Then without pausing for breath he hauled for all his might, the ice jam now helping him slide the raft, albeit bumpily, a few feet forward, acting like glider wheels beneath the raft, but then one of two pieces obstructed him. Suddenly he could pull it no further. He felt the impact of several more lumps of ice hitting the stern of the raft but paid no attention, going back and starting the Kawasaki on its side, holding it in neutral then lifting it up and in one movement pushing it hard forward and accelerating in gear. He was off the raft in a second and up the side of the riverbank, heading north of the river through the tract-less Dornod depression, not toward the Great Wall, which was hundreds of miles to the south, but instead toward the still-existent wall of Genghis Khan. He estimated it would be about 150 miles to the border — three to four hours if he made good time, barring any other impediments. Certainly the Spets would think he was still on the southern side of the Herlen River, heading east toward Choybalsan, rather than north.

  Now and then he had to slow down on the rock-strewn stretches, but at others the firm grassland, still hard despite the thaw from its winter hardness, gave him a surprisingly fast and relatively comfortable ride. “No problems,” he assured the Kawasaki. “Not to worry.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  “An attack on the Chinese front?” Norton said. “General, I thought you said—”

  “Never mind what I said, Dick. Get my corps commanders here for a meeting at oh nine hundred hours.” The general listened intently to what David Brentwood had to say — namely that it seemed quite clear from everything they’d seen that the Mongolians were in no mood to die on Marshal Yesov’s behalf, that the Mongolians, in short, had taken perestroika and glasnost as seriously as the Eastern Europeans. The Mongolians wouldn’t be a problem, but from what they’d seen of the Spets behavior, Yesov couldn’t be trusted.

  “Never did trust that son of a bitch. How about this Lewis?”

  Brentwood said they just didn’t know. He was as resourceful in the desert as any other clime that the SAS had been trained for. And they had dropped him a Kawasaki.

  “A what?”

  “Kawasaki.”

  “Jesus Christ!” Freeman said. “You mean we couldn’t even get him an all-American bike?”

  No one knew quite what to say.

  “I’ll tell you something, Brentwood,” the general said, his eyes glowering. “Someone back in Detroit needs their ass kicked for letting Japan take over like that. Goddamn disgraceful!”

  “Yes, General.”

  “Course,” Freeman said, “it was Doug MacArthur’s fault. Got to thinking he was goddamn king of Japan. Gave women the vote then helped Japan build up new factories to out-industrialize us. I tell you, Brentwood, that’s what happens when a man gets too far from the good old U.S. of A. and he starts going native and NATO on you. Eisenhower was the same, damn it — kept holding Georgie Patton back on a leash. Patton could’ve stopped the cold war before it began.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Yes, well long as the son-of-a-bitch motorbike gets him here. He got a rescue beeper, purple flare?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Well I want every chopper outfit west of Manzhouli to keep on alert so that we can go in and pick him up soon as he’s close enough. If he gets close enough.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Now, if he gets back he’ll be part of ‘Operation Front Door,’ the door, gentlemen, being the Amur or, as the ChiComs call it, the Black Dragon. Brentwood!”

  “Sir?”

  “I want you to take a squadron of your men in here…”

  As Norton listened to the plan unfold, a smile began to replace his earlier apprehension. It was brilliant. Vintage Freeman. Daring all right, but still there was always the question, Would it work? After the general left the Quonset hut to relieve himself someone remarked, “I’m glad our helos are American made.”

  “Right,” another said. “But the friggin’ beeper isn’t, and half the electronics aboard the chopper are Japa—”

  “Quiet, here he comes.”

  As Freeman began to go into more detail, Salvini, Brentwood, and Choir found it hard to concentrate. They were thinking of Aussie Lewis, alone in the Mongolian expanse. Special Operations had already lost one man earlier in the war in a commando raid near Nanking — Smythe — and he was now rotting away in Beijing Jail Number One. A Chinese jail, they said, was unimaginable. The Jewish woman, Alexsandra Malof, had been in the Harbin jail. To stay alive she had to lick the walls for moisture and pick out tiny pieces of undigested food from her feces. When she escaped, they said she was thin as a rake.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  In Beijing, General Cheng was about to switch off his reading light above the antimacassar-topped lounge chair that was the on
ly luxury he allowed himself. He was reading transcripts of General Schwarzkopf’s press conferences during the Iraqi War. Most of it was routine stuff — silly questions by silly reporters who had no idea of the complexity of war, but one answer of Schwarzkopf’s was burned into Cheng’s memory, and he had it marked for the red box — the documents that would be taken to the military Central Committee. Schwarzkopf had said,

  There’s black smoke and haze in the air. It’s an infantryman’s weather. God loves the infantryman, and that’s just the kind of weather the infantryman likes to fight in. But I would also tell you that our sights have worked fantastically well in their ability to acquire, through that kind of dust and haze, the enemy targets. And the enemy sights have not worked that well. As a matter of fact, we’ve had several anecdotal reports today of enemy who were saying to us that they couldn’t see anything through their sights, and all of a sudden their tank exploded when their tank was hit by our sights.

  Cheng had made an immediate rush order via La Roche’s front companies in Hong Kong for the infrared night vision, particularly the thermal-imaging sights that could cut through smoke and dust, plus additional supplies of smoke thickener that had caused Freeman’s tanks so much trouble when Yesov had used it up around Lake Baikal before the cease-fire. The other thing Cheng was banking on was that delivery of the newer Abrams M1A2 tank, which had two gun sights — one for the gunner and one for the tank commander, to track two targets simultaneously, unlike the M1, in which both commander and gunner had to share the same sight. The delivery had been delayed by the widespread sabotage carried out in the United States from dockside to communications.