by Ian Slater
The reporter didn’t answer, couldn’t answer — his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth, dry as leather, his grip on the roll bar so hard that his body was rigid, despite the swaying motion of the FAV as it went over several corrugations of sand where a dune flattened out before the incline to the guns.
“What the—” Aussie began, but Brentwood had already seen it: a dozen or so civilian prisoners and captured American soldiers lashed to the wheels of the big guns. Aussie could see that one was a woman. Somebody came on the air, wondering what they should do.
“Take out the crews, for Chrissake!” Brentwood shouted, and the FAVs — now only fourteen remaining — drove resolutely toward the guns, the ChiCom infantry firing from behind them. Every time a gun went off, the prisoners ran around on their rope tethers like crazed rats in a cage, unable to get away from the crashing thunder of the guns, unable, like the gun crews, to block their ears from the earth-shattering sound.
“Smoke!” Brentwood ordered, as Aussie began a weaving pattern to throw off the Chinese small-arms fire. Soon all along the line the smoke from the 40mm canisters being fired from the FAVs rear-mounted gun was so thick that the FAV drivers had to gear down, then go quickly for the gaps created by the out-pressure of the guns still firing on Freeman’s advancing tanks two miles behind.
The FAVs wheeled around behind the guns, taking out the crew with machine gun and, in a few cases, TOW fire. Half the hostages died as a result of either American or ChiCom fire. It was a chaotic battle lasting only minutes, the FAVs’ rear gunners often literally throwing fragmentation grenades down a Pepperpot barrel or otherwise spiking the big guns so that they could no longer be used against Freeman’s main battle tanks.
There was a stomach-churning rumbling sound, like an earthquake, and the noise of the FAV ChiCom infantry battle was pierced by the high-toned squeak of metal on metal as the first echelons of Cheng’s main battle tanks now lurched forward, starting their advance toward the overrun Pepperpot artillery this side of the mines that had slowed Freeman’s echelons, which were now turning into right and left “refused” formation — three of the five tanks in an echelon having their guns aimed straight ahead, the remaining two, to one side. Cheng’s MBTs contained everything from laser-sight, up-gunned T-59s to T-72s.
Two of the FAVs were turned back by Brentwood with only a driver and gunner, the rear “cage” section with the spare wheel and the side compartments that normally carried ammo and other supplies now used to hold those few civilians who had survived the attack on the guns, one of them being Alexsandra Malof.
“Jesus Murphy!” Aussie said as the FAV carrying her and others passed him. “Would I ever like to mount—”
“All right,” Brentwood snapped. “Turn to the right flank and stay well out of range of their MBTs.”
“I can’t fucking well see the MBTs,” Aussie replied.
“You will soon enough.”
There were only ten FAVs remaining.
* * *
Freeman knew that now the big ChiCom artillery batteries had been silenced he would soon be engaging Cheng’s main battle tanks, and he knew that while the laser-ranging M1A1, with a top speed of fifty miles per hour and 120mm cannon, was considered the best MBT in the world, this was not enough to win. The American MBTs of World War II had been as inferior to the Nazis’ Tiger and Panther MBTs as the ChiCom T-59 was to the American M1A1, but the then inferior U.S. tanks had won the day through their sheer weight of numbers, ironically validating the Soviet maxim that “quantity has a quality all its own.”
It was not clear enough yet for SATRECON to see how many Chinese tanks were now aligned against Freeman following the collapse of the Pepperpot line, and the padre’s weather prayer, though stated clearly, had done no good at all. Freeman estimated Cheng would have had time to marshal at least a three-to-one MBT advantage. And if the radar station could not be found and taken out quickly enough to render the ChiComs’ triple AA defenses ineffective against the slower but deadly U.S.A. Thunderbolt and Apache tank killers, Cheng could still quickly overwhelm the Americans.
Further, once the ChiCom and American echelons mixed it up it would be near dark, and IFF — identifying friend or foe — would become increasingly difficult. The MBTs of both sides would be so close in the dust-churned night that even with friend or foe recognition not being a problem, the danger of blue-on-blue fire on the ground and from the air would become a certainty, yet only TACAIR could help redress the odds against the Americans. And so it was imperative that the ten remaining SAS/D FAVs take out the radar that would otherwise identify the incoming American planes once the weather cleared.
Freeman’s lead tank, identifiable by its two aerials rather than one, received a burst-coded message of the latest intelligence estimate out of Khabarovsk of the enemy MBT strength based upon rail movements along the southern Manchurian mainlines and from Beijing to Erenhot.
“What are the odds, sir?” the loader asked.
“I was wrong,” the general said. “It’s not a three-to-one advantage after all.”
“That’s good—”
“It’s five to one,” Freeman said.
“Visibility’s increasing to fifty yards, sir,” the driver reported. “Dust storm seems to be falling off a little.”
“Huh,” Freeman grunted. “Maybe we’ll just pass one another — eh, Lawson? Like two ships in the night.”
“Unlikely, General.”
“Damned unlikely, son. Anyway, you wouldn’t want to miss it, would you?”
“No, sir,” lied Lawson, who was now berating himself for all the times he’d been grumpy at having to put his two kids to bed at night and knowing now he’d give anything to be doing that at this moment, and if he died, would God, if there was a God, forgive him? “Visibility increasing,” he said. “Sixty yards.”
A minute later he reported that the dust had closed in again — visibility back down to forty yards.
The other bad news was that Freeman’s earlier hope that the ChiCom radar complex was a fixed installation — which once the weather cleared might be an ideal smart bomb target — was dashed by a recent burst of radar waves from the ChiCom side that came in on a different vector. This meant that the radar unit was mobile, yet another reason why an air strike would yield nothing in a sky through which the American pilots couldn’t see. A reconnaissance Kiowa had been sent out to test infrared visibility through the dust, but no radar target could be found, which puzzled Freeman’s HQ. In any event, even if the weather had cleared in time, Freeman was remembering how most ordnance dropped in the Gulf War missed its targets — what the public saw on CBN were the relatively few hits. He knew it was up to Brentwood and his FAVs to take out the ChiCom radar. If they didn’t, Freeman would lose any TACAIR advantage he might otherwise have.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
His private jet approaching Dutch Harbor from Anchorage, Alaska, Jay La Roche was reclining in his Spanish calfskin chair, a bevy of “gofers” attending his every need. He had lost only one deal in his life, and her name was Lana, née Brentwood, now, in his view, wasting herself in some berg of an island, “playing at nurse,” as he derisively put it. He’d kicked her out in Shanghai years ago, he told Francine and anyone who would listen, and, for the kind of money La Roche had, a lot of people did. He neglected to tell the whole truth: that in Lana’s case she had been the one to leave him when, in a frenzy of his orgiastic sadism, he’d beaten and choked her till she was near death — the climax of his sexual passion often, as Francine could attest to, being to urinate and defecate on his partner.
At those moments he was uncontrollable, but he consistently viewed such forays as occasional lapses, a self-deception that even now allowed him to think he could get his wife to come back to him. He had tried, through Congressman Hailey, to get her transferred out of Dutch Harbor nearer to New York. Hailey had tried but failed, even though urged on by La Roche’s color stills of the elected official’s dalliances with several congr
essional page boys.
“What happened to him?” Francine had asked, trying to be nonchalant but remembering the congressman’s name had been mentioned once or twice to her by Il Trovatore’s barman as a warning about never crossing La Roche.
“Had an accident,” La Roche explained. “Gun went off in his mouth.” What disturbed Francine wasn’t so much the story of the suicide — she’d seen enough of those in her time— but the way Jay told it. He enjoyed it. A lot. And she knew what was bugging him about Lana. Though Francine had never met her, only knowing what she looked like from the photo he kept in the New York penthouse and from some of the old magazine photos of the wedding before the war, Francine figured it was Lana’s very resistance to La Roche that drew him to her. She was the only “piece of ass” next to his male secretary, La Roche had told Francine, who had been “stupid” enough to run away from him. By “stupid” Francine knew Jay meant Lana had been the only woman who’d had the guts to try to run from him. But to an ego like Jay’s, the very fact that somewhere in the world, in this case in Dutch Harbor, there was somebody — anybody, especially a woman — whom he couldn’t own “tit-to-toe” and “right through,” as he delicately put it, wasn’t merely galling, it was intolerable.
Now he was telling the stories of how he’d beaten Uncle Sam — how though he was the largest supplier of chemical warfare agents to the United States, he was also the sole supplier of GB, Sarin, and VX nerve gas to Asia. Chinese, North Koreans, Vietnamese, Japanese — La Roche didn’t care who he sold it to, and when the Congress passed legislation forbidding U.S. citizens to trade with the enemy, La Roche’s army of lawyers had gone on the march, as he gloatingly explained it, finding, Jay boasted to Francine, “as many loopholes” as “chickens in a barnyard.”
If La Roche’s metaphors were mixed as he told the story, everyone on his private jet knew that “chickens” meant child prostitutes, of either sex, whom Jay frequently used as “dawn breakers.” Just as his lawyers had found a way out of Congress’s restrictive legislation by the use of “front” nonenemy Asian companies, primarily in Burma, through which to ship the poison-gas-producing liquids to Iraq, North Korea, and China, so too had the lawyers protected him from the slightest whiff of “chicken” scandal. The lawyers’ hands were strengthened by La Roche’s ownership of his tabloid chain in North America and western Europe. If a decent paper went up against La Roche, as his wife had once done when she told him she’d sue for divorce, they would soon find themselves, as she had, up against not only La Roche’s battery of experts but against threatened tabloid “exposes”, of their families. Lana had been so naive at first, La Roche boasted to Francine, that she actually believed that if the stories he’d threatened to publish about her parents weren’t true, the papers couldn’t print them.
“How about this for a headline?” he’d threatened her. “ ‘Retired Admiral Brentwood Denies He is Homosexual!’ “ Occasionally, he’d told Francine, “someone like that fool Hailey,” who couldn’t use his influence in Congress to have Lana transferred, would snuff it rather than have his family smeared across the tabloids. But usually it worked.
“That’s enough,” he said, pushing the hair dryer away, checking the back and sides of his lean, darkly handsome face in the mirror, pulling out his gold mouthwash nebulizer, squirting it, rolling his tongue around and showing off his immaculate white teeth.
As the plane began to descend, Francine’s sulkiness increased. Till now she’d been under the illusion that she was what he called his “number one pussy”—with all the lavish goodies and status that attached itself to the scrum of sycophants surrounding him.
“Moment we land in this burg,” he instructed his flunkies, “I want lots of pictures in that Army PX. You know the kind of crap — corporate sponsor visits to thank our boys and gals at the front.” The fasten seatbelts sign was on, but Jay ignored it. “You got it? La Roche Chemicals pays tribute to our brave boys wounded in battle. Pile it on. And Francine — keep your fanny off the corporate gifts there.” There was loud, raucous laughter. “And for Chrissake cross your legs. I don’t want to see your beaver all over the New York Times.” There were more loud guffaws.
“How about in the Investigator, Mr. La Roche?” It was one of the La Roche tabloids.
“Hey! Now you’re talking. Legs wide apart, Francine.” There was another snorting, snuffling run of laughter. Francine watched him as he bent low, slightly off balance, looking out the window. If she knew anything, he was on something — not booze, nothing you could smell. She’d seen him like it often enough — before he’d hand her the strap for her to play “Mommy.”
“Maybe Lana’s on duty?” someone said. La Roche turned around, his face thin stone. “Hey, joker. This little soiree I told you to fix up with our gallant boys in the sticks is costing me change. I told the army, the navy, the fucking air force I wanted to meet all the nurses. If she isn’t there, joker, I’m gonna throw someone outta the fucking plane.”
The laughter died.
After the Lear touched down on the rain-slashed runway, droplets streaming against the Perspex, the plane taxiing toward the small, but obviously busy, terminal, Francine saw a row of heavy khaki overcoats and navy blue uniforms. She recognized Lana before the plane came to a stop. You could spot her at once, Francine thought — one of those women who looked beautiful even if you draped them in a sack. Gorgeous figure that was flattered, not flattened, by the Navy Waves’ dark blue uniform. And the spiffy little white hat with the snappy upturned brim made Francine sick. And Lana’s dark hair — that was the last straw. Whipped with rain and it just sat there, full and behaving itself. Ten minutes in that weather and Francine knew her own hair would be a wet mop.
Francine slipped on her siren-red coat, but despite the cold she left enough of it open so there’d be no mistake about her cleavage. Hell, she had to do something. She followed Jay out. He shook hands with the base commander, but ignored the rest of the staff, particularly Lana, as he and his party were ushered into the waiting USO army cars. With Lana left back on the tarmac, Francine was starting to feel better already.
Colonel Rodin, the commanding officer of Dutch Harbor, loathed La Roche and his ilk, but he was a professional and he wasn’t a fool. La Roche had splashed a lot of money and publicity around — and God knew the men posted in “America’s Siberia” deserved a little attention. Besides, if La Roche wasn’t happy and leaned hard enough on the Alaska congressman for Dutch Harbor and environs, there was a very good chance the CO could find something he loathed even more than La Roche: pushing a pen back in Washington. Even so, he afforded La Roche professional military hospitality but no more.
After the photo session, during which a bunch of reporters from Anchorage, including a photographer and reporter from Stars and Stripes, got their shots of the multinational financier shaking the CO’s hand, Colonel Rodin excused himself. In the crowded PX he sought Lana out and told her that Washington had “requested” that they be as cooperative as possible to La Roche Chemicals, “a major military contractor.”
“I’d prefer not to, Colonel,” Lana said rather grimly.
“I understand, Lieutenant. I’m merely conveying Washington’s wishes. Tell you—” He hesitated but said it anyway. “None of my business but I don’t blame you. They don’t look my sort of people either. Must be at least six guys there of draft age.”
“Health exemptions,” Lana said knowingly. “Four-F.”
Colonel Rodin grunted. “I guess. Well, please yourself, Lieutenant. Whatever you do is okay by me. Walk out if you want.”
“Thank you, Colonel. I appreciate that.” But she knew she had to at least say hello or some toady back in Washington was going to get paid to complain to the Pentagon about Colonel Rodin’s unhelpfulness.
As she walked over toward him through the crowd, La Roche didn’t turn around but kept talking to Francine.
“She coming?” he asked.
“Yes,” Francine said. “Lah-de-dah, if
you ask me.”
“I didn’t.”
“Jay.”
He swung around. “Lana!”
Francine wanted to throw up but, as instructed, moved off, swiping another drink from a tray passing by, its bearer, a GI, all but losing his eyeballs to the wonders of her chest.
“How are you, sweetie?” Jay asked Lana.
“Fine. You?”
“Terrific, terrific. What you think of my little party?”
She could hardly hear herself in the buzz of the PX commotion. “Very nice.”
“Yeah. Something for the boys at the front. And you gals, too, of course.” He laughed easily. “Get you something to drink?”
“No, thank you.”
He lowered his voice, still smiling. “Hey, loosen up, babe. Muhammad comes to the mountain, right? Isn’t that enough?”
“For what?”
He reached out and took another soft drink. “See? No booze. On the wagon.” He downed the pop in one go. “Want you to come back, babe. Miss you. Hey — hey — before you say anything, I want to say I’m sorry. Mea culpa. Okay?” He moved to touch her arm. She withdrew it.
“Hey, swear to God, Lana. Checked in with a shrink. The whole bit. Cost me a bundle but I’m straightened out.”
“I’m glad.” It was the first thing she’d said to him that she had meant.
“God, but you’re beautiful.”
She said nothing, unmoved.
“Lana — this stinking war—” He glimpsed Francine watching them, sipping her Diet Coke. “Changed everything, right? None of us are the same people.” For a moment neither of them spoke. “Look, honey, you want the divorce, you can have it.”
She looked up at him.