by Ian Slater
When Aussie Lewis showed up, his blue-and-white Spets shirt was filthy, torn to shreds; also his del was missing.
“What happened to your dress?” Choir asked.
“Yeah,” Salvini said. “You can’t come like that.”
“I can come anywhere,” Aussie said. “Where we goin’?”
“Little job on the old rampart,” Salvini answered.
“What fucking rampart?”
“Genghis Khan’s, you ignorant man,” Choir said. “Not the Great Wall — another one in Manchuria. Only a couple of hours flying from here.”
“Christ, I haven’t had breakfast!” the Australian replied.
Choir Williams tut-tutted. “It’s breakfast he wants. Should’ve kept up with us then, boyo—’stead of playing silly buggers on that bike.”
“Yeah,” Salvini added. “And you owe me five bucks.”
David Brentwood smiled inwardly at the esprit de corps among the commandos, at the unemotional emotion of welcoming Aussie back.
“All right,” Lewis said, as someone threw him a towel and a bar of soap. “What’s it this time? Mongolian gear or Wall Street bankers?”
“In our own kit, mate,” Choir Williams said. “Full SAS.”
Aussie was impressed. “Must be serious then.”
“It is,” Brentwood confirmed, pointing down at the computer-enhanced, three-dimensional map of northern Manchuria. “Simulated attacks all along the line.”
“Simulated?” Aussie asked. “You mean we just yell out at them? Frighten ‘em a bit?”
“Real attacks,” David answered. “Half a dozen places, from Manzhouli in the west to Fuyuan in the east near Khabarovsk. Right across the Manchurian front.”
“But if we go full frontal—” Aussie began.
“That’d be crazy,” David Brentwood finished for him.
“Agreed,” Aussie said.
“The general knows that,” Brentwood assured him. “What we have to do is create so much racket — make it look like a full frontal attack — do more than yell at them, Aussie. Tie down Cheng’s troops all along the Manchurian border so that our Second Army can make its dash south of Manzhouli into the Gobi where Freeman can hit them on their left flank.”
“If it works,” Sal said, “we’ll be halfway to Beijing before Cheng wakes up and can withdraw any of his forces from the north to reinforce his left flank.”
“All right,” Aussie said, “but how are we going to convince the Chinese it’s a full-out attack when it isn’t? Don’t you think they’ll twig to that?”
David Brentwood looked up from the three-dimensional mock-up. “You know Freeman goes to sleep reading Sun Tzu.”
“Who the hell’s Son Sue?”
“An ancient Chinese general,” Brentwood said. “Very big on the art of war. Very big on deception.”
“Right,” Aussie said. “I don’t suppose it occurred to any of you blokes that old Cheng might read this Son Sue — you know, being Chinese and all that.”
Salvini looked worried.
“I think,” Brentwood said, “that when you have the chance to see the plan in detail you’ll see how Freeman’ll outfox Cheng.” David Brentwood paused. “By the way, Aussie, everyone is to bring a lighter with him — there’s a box of Bics over on the counter — and one quart bag of this.” He nodded toward a cardboard box packed with quart-size plastic bags, each bag filled with what looked like gray powder.
“What the hell’s that?” Aussie asked.
“Wolf dung,” Brentwood answered matter-of-factly.
“Don’t bullshit me!” Aussie riposted.
Brentwood shook his head at Salvini and Williams. “He’s a hard man to convince.”
“Ten bucks it’s wolf dung,” Choir Williams proffered.
Salvini couldn’t suppress a snort of laughter. Aussie eyed them suspiciously. “What are you bastards up to?”
“Go on,” Brentwood told him. “Clean up, have breakfast, and hit the sack. We’ll fill you in en route.”
* * *
“All right,” David Brentwood said, “it’s AirLand battle, right?”
“Right!” came the chorus of twenty SAS/D troopers. There were a million details for any AirLand battle, and for the twenty men to be led by David Brentwood, the first was weapon selection and uniform. Weapon selection was very much an individual affair among the commandos, but the uniform wasn’t — not on this predawn attack that hopefully would penetrate the ChiCom line in enough places to convince Cheng that a full-scale frontal attack was in progress.
There would be many more SAS/D troops along the Amur together with regular elements of Second Army involved. Most of the SAS elected to arm themselves with the American 5.56mm M-16 rifle rather than the three-pounds-heavier British 7.62mm, particularly with the M203 grenade launcher fitted beneath the barrel of the M-16 rifle.
Others, like Brentwood, who had seen Freeman in action on Ratmanov Island, opted for the military-modified Winchester 1200 riot gun with five shotgun shells, one up the spout, four in the tubular magazine, the pumping effected by the forestock going back and forth, the range of the shotgun increased from 150 to 900 yards by fléchettes, twenty high-quality steel darts. Lead-slug shells were also carried, these being capable of passing right through an engine block at over fifty meters or blowing a door out of its frame. And almost every man carried at least several “soup cans”— smoke grenades — and the smaller palm-size SAS special, the stun grenade. But because it would be an attack in darkness and could well be at close quarters in the town of Manzhouli, the uniform was the all-black SAS antiterrorist gear, including the SF 10 respirator in case the Chinese used gas, black leather gloves for rappelling down or climbing up the Genghis Khan wall, or any other wall for that matter, Danner lightweight firm-grip boots favored by U.S. SWAT teams, and each man’s black belt kit holding magazine pouches and grenades and thirteen rounds of 9mm for the Browning automatic.
“All right, fellas, now let’s go over the AirLand prayer. One?”
“Maneuver!” the chorused reply came.
“Two?”
“Fire support!”
“Three?”
“Command and control!”
“Four?”
“Intelligence!”
“Five?”
“Combat service support!”
“Six?”
“Mobility — survivability!”
“Seven?”
“Air defense!”
“Eight?” Aussie shouted.
“Best of fucking luck!”
Brentwood grinned. “Now our short-range fighter-bombers and Wild Weasel jammers will penetrate as deeply as they can at points all along the line to simulate full frontal attack. Main battle tanks will go in where possible with Bradley fast-fighting infantry vehicles behind and with Apache helos as antitank cover. This will be followed by Hueys— eleven men apiece, some helos carrying a one oh five millimeter howitzer and crew. Now behind all this there’s the Patriot missile defense should we be bothered by anything from Turpan. But remember, the Patriot is great but is overestimated. Unless it hits the enemy missile’s warhead and explodes it midair, it simply blasts the body of the incoming missile, and the warhead still comes down. It isn’t a great deal of help to us — no matter what you read in the papers. Got it?”
“Got it.”
“Now,” Brentwood continued, “there’ll be SAS/D-Green Beret, Special Operations squadrons hitting Fuyuan near Khabarovsk, another SAS/D team hitting at Heihe— halfway along the Amur, a third commando force targeting Shiwei, and the fourth team, us, will be paying a return visit near our old friend A-7.”
There was a groan from several of the veterans who had vivid memories of the fighting atop the 3,770-foot mountain just north of Manzhouli in the Siberian Argunskiy range. It marked the most northwesterly point or corner of the Manchurian arc defense line that stretched from Khabarovsk up around Never-Skovorodino and down into western Manchuria. A-7 had been the very spot where the w
ar had started before the so-called cease-fire, and so would now be heavily fortified, its high ground having a commanding view of the American side of the line.
“Don’t worry,” David said, anticipating his men. “A-7 will be left to our air force.”
“And about time,” Choir Williams quipped.
“So give us the bad news,” Aussie said.
“We’ll be going southeast beyond A-7 into Manzhouli,” Brentwood answered. “Just east of Manzhouli. We’re to secure the railhead there so Cheng can’t move troops west out of northern Manchuria and hit Freeman’s left flank.”
“Old Cheng won’t have to move anything,” Choir Williams said, “if those chink missiles aren’t taken out in Turpan.”
“That’s the air force’s job,” David said.
“Well they better get on with it, boyo, or else we’ll be in range while we’re in bloody Manzhouli.”
“Question!” It was from one of the young American SAS/D troopers. “Look, I know our short-range bombers can’t take out Turpan, it’s just too far west, but why cant we use them against Manzhouli? I mean, just go in and blow up the tracks?”
David gave a wry smile — the trooper was one of the latest recruits, not yet blooded. “If we’d been able to blow up train tracks and trails we’d have won the Vietnam War in the first two years. Only way to make sure that railway stays ours is to go into Manzhouli. There are a hundred different ways of the enemy making it look as if you’ve destroyed their train lines from the air and the next morning they’ve passed a thousand tons of munitions over it. Only way is to go in on the ground and make sure. Besides, they’ve got a communications tower there so we’ll have to hit it with C charges. Aussie, that’ll be your troop’s job.”
“Thanks very much.”
“Well, hell, Aussie, you can’t ask for everything,” someone shouted.
“Jesus, I wish I was with that Fuyuan crowd.”
A few of the newer men didn’t understand and weren’t as confident as veterans like Aussie or Brentwood, Salvini or Williams in knowing there was no shame in saying you’d rather be somewhere else.
“Ah,” Choir Williams said, nodding his head toward Aussie. “Pay him no mind, lads. He misses Olga, he does. He likes the titty!”
“Bloody right I do,” Aussie said.
“Why are we all black?” Aussie asked. His question wasn’t meant as any kind of joke, for normally SAS were allowed some leeway in the choice of uniform, but all black— antiterrorist — usually meant close-quarter combat.
“Freeman doesn’t want Manzhouli bombed, so if we’re to clear it it’ll be house to house,” Brentwood said tersely.
“Right,” Aussie said, quickly exchanging an M-16 for a stockless Heckler & Koch 9mm MP5K submachine gun. You aimed it by jabbing it toward the target and adjusting your aim according to the hits.
The last thing that every man checked was the black gloves, for quite apart from the rappelling down and climbing up that might be necessary, word had come down that it would be a “fast rope” descent from the helos. H hour was set for 0500 hours; the pilots aboard the Pave Lows would be flying on night vision and by hover coupler, which would orchestrate gyroscope, radar, altimeter, and inertial guidance system readouts to keep the helo steady and very low.
“Apart from anything else,” Salvini reminded one of the newcomers, “the SAS black antiterrorist uniform is meant to frighten the enemy.”
“You don’t need one then, Sal,” Aussie quipped. “You’re ugly enough already. We show them Salvini and it’s instant fuckin’ surrender!”
“Up yours!” Salvini told Aussie.
“Promise?”
“All right, you guys,” Brentwood said. “Let’s move out. Four of you attach yourselves to myself, Lewis, Williams, or Salvini.”
“Hey, Davey,” Aussie asked Brentwood as they went out onto the Chita strip. “What’s all this crap about Freeman not wanting to bomb the towns and villages?”
“Don’t know, Aussie. Part of the strategy.”
“He gone soft in the head or something?”
“Freeman? I doubt it.”
“So do I. So why the hell—” Brentwood couldn’t hear Aussie’s last word as a brisk wind was blowing east off of Lake Baikal, a bitter edge to it as the Pave Lows began warming up, their stuttering now a full roar, their warm wash felt through the all-black uniforms.
* * *
As those sectors of Freeman’s forces designated to simulate an all-out attack on the Manchurian front started to move out, Freeman received word that at long last the Labour opposition in Britain had conceded to the B-52 overflight over Britain. France still wouldn’t agree, however, and this would mean a diversion around Spain, but at least the mission of the big bombers was on. The problem was, would it come in time? Yet he could wait no longer with the north Chinese buildup of men and materiel about to burst upon him from the Manchurian fastness. Besides, Admiral Huang would tie up the southern forces.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Lakenheath, England
As he climbed into the rear barbette of the lead B-52, Sergeant Murphy, or “Pepto-Bismol,” as he was now known, was very unhappy and festooned with packets of the “new and improved” antacid tablets.
“Crabbing it,” their wheels angling into the crosswind, compensating for their natural tendency to drift to one side on takeoff, the nine B-52Gs forming the nine-plane wave of Stratofortresses from the Forty-second Wing of the U.S. Sixty-ninth Bombardment Squadron thundered along the runway and roared into the night sky over southeastern England. Each of the eight thirteen-thousand-pound-thrust Pratt-and-Whitney jet engines on the Big Ugly Fat Fellows was in high scream as the bombers, tops painted wavy khaki green, undersides white-gray, headed across the channel at the beginning of their 4,700-mile mission half a world away to attack the missile sites at Turpan.
Traveling at forty thousand feet plus, each of the nine bombers that made up the three cells — Ebony, Gold, and Purple — carried in its bomb bay and beneath its 185-foot wingspan the conventional bomb-load equivalent of fifteen World War II B-17s. Due to recent malfunctions in the normally remote-control console of the rear barbette with itsfour 12.7-millimeter cannon, the guns were manned, Murphy being the rear barbette gunner in Ebony’s lead plane. The heavy ordnance aboard the B-52s included thirty eleven-hundred-pound FAE, or fuel air explosive, bombs, each bomb of jellied gasoline over four times as powerful as the equivalent weight of high-explosive. In addition, each plane carried twelve five-hundred-pound free-fall high-explosive iron contact bombs with Pave conversion kits that turned them into smart bombs.
“Wish we were carrying cruise,” the radar navigator aboard Ebony One’s leader commented.
“You and me both,” added the ECM — electronic countermeasures or electronics warfare officer, a technician who when the war broke out had been selling the superfast Cray computers.
“It was a political decision,” answered Ebony’s captain, the air commander of the nine-plane wave. “Washington doesn’t want us carrying cruise missiles anywhere near the Mideast. Wouldn’t give us a ‘weapons free’ release even if we were packing them. Too risky. The Iranians are the worst. They pick up a cruise missile, think we’re popping off nuclear warheads, and bingo! The balloon goes up.”
To make especially sure that no such interpretation would be made by any one of the countries they’d be flying over, each one of the nine planes in Ebony, Gold, and Purple had been fitted with the special flared-wing fairings, which, if the B-52s were picked up by satellite, would identify them as being “cruise free.”
None of the six-man crew aboard Ebony One — the pilot and aircraft commander Colonel Thompson, copilot, navigator, radar navigator, EWO — electronics warfare officer— and gunner — was at all happy about the decision, but neither were they anxious about starting what was euphemistically referred to in air force manuals as a “nuclear exchange.” Even so, me EWO, in the cramped, windowless electronics recess of the tiny lower dec
k, had confided to the navigator and radar navigator forward of him on the lower deck that if he was to be downed, he’d just as soon go out in a “mushroom” as in some Iranian prison camp — the sight of the POWs in Vietnam and of the American hostages of the eighties and nineties was still a chilling memory for the American fliers. Several of the crew, teenagers then, could still recall the terrifying images of the Ayatollah seen on television and the humiliation of the Americans.
Above the EWO, the air commander and his pilot were carrying out visual checks, using the erratic wash of moonlight to make sure that all the contact bombs on the extender racks beneath the wings were well in place. The fine wires that would extract the safety pins of the primers could not be seen in the moonlight, but none of the bombs looked askew to the AC as he scanned the huge 185-foot wingspan that, supporting the four pods of the twin engines and the bombs, rose slowly as they gained altitude though the line of the wing was still below that of the fuselage, the tanks “loaded to me gills,” as Murphy, the rear gunner, was fond of putting it, with over thirty-five thousand gallons of kerosene.
As the English Channel, now a silver squiggle, receded far below them, the three cells disappeared in cloud, the navigator on Ebony One already going over his trace with the electronic warfare officer, who would have to coordinate his “jammer” pod against any ground-to-air missile batteries that protected the mobile sites around Turpan. Reading the coordinates from the computer, the navigator drew, as manual backup, the intersect lines with his protractor. The EWO circled in the last reported satellite digital photo relay showing the missile shelters around Turpan, but there were now seven additional “tents” showing up on the computer-enhanced photo.
“Are they more CS-2s, Ted?” the radar navigator asked. “Or SAMs?”
“Don’t know,” the EWO replied. “All I know is that we’re going to have to drop our load from as high as we can and I’ll be using every jammer we’ve got. Are we spot on the track, Charlie?” the EWO asked the navigator.
“No sweat,” the navigator answered, giving their position over the Bay of Biscay as they were heading over Spain for Turkey, Iran, and Iraq, their flight taking them over the bay because as with the American raid on Qaddafi’s Libya, they were not allowed to fly over French soil. Also, AC Thompson wanted to keep as far away as possible from the trigger-happy new Soviet republics. Hence the southern crescent-shaped detour. Also time had to be allowed for Phantom-4G Wild Weasels to go in just ahead of the bombers to jam as much ChiCom ground-to-air communications and radar as possible.