by Ian Slater
“Yeah. I mean it. That’s what I came to tell you. But I want to do it civilly. You know — sit down, figure out a little something for your folks.”
“They’re all right.”
“You know what I mean. Your brother Ray — all those bums — I know a few people who—”
“Ray’s doing fine, Jay. He’s all—”
“Okay, okay. I’m sorry. Look, I’ll level with you. I wanted to see you — that’s the truth. We’re also opening up a new plant in Anchorage. Perfume.” He laughed, that easy, gentle, good-looking laugh that had been the first thing that had attracted her to him. It seemed inconceivable now — so long ago. How she could have fallen—
“Crazy, isn’t it?” he said. “Whole damn world’s at war and people want to buy more perfume.”
“Yes,” she replied. “Well, not really I suppose—” She stopped.
“What d’you say you come into Anchorage for a day or two? We’ll settle it there. I’ll have the papers drawn up. Anything you don’t like — hey — we’re two reasonable people, right?”
“Are we?”
“Sure we are. Look, you don’t have to worry. I know about Shirer.” She felt the involuntary chill of a threat pass through her but said nothing. “That’s fine,” he went on. “I’ve got no problem with him. That’s why I came up. I don’t expect you to come back. I—” He looked thoughtfully down at his empty glass.
He’s making it up, she thought. He’s making it up as he goes along.
“I know I haven’t been any good for you, Lana.” He suddenly brightened. “On the other hand, if it wasn’t for me you’d never have met this guy and — hell, don’t make it hard, babe. All I’m saying is I know I gave you a rotten deal. A rotten deal. I can’t go back and fix that, but I can try to make amends.” He looked down at her and spoke softly. “It’s partly selfish. But I need to wipe the slate clean. I need to talk, Lana. Just you and me — sit down and straighten—”
“I don’t think so, Jay.”
“I know. Hell, on my past performance if I were you I’d think, ‘Bug off,’ but you’ve always been fair, babe. But we can’t talk here.” He looked around. “In this dump — I mean-no offense but — it’s a zoo, right? Look, forget Anchorage. We’ll settle it here. There a hotel in this burg?”
“I’m not spending a night with you, Jay. If you think you can con me into a good-bye— Well, you know what I mean. No way.”
“That’s not what I meant. Hell, bring a chaperon if you like. I just want it settled.” He smiled. “I’ll buy you a hamburger.”
She sighed. “Why don’t you just send the papers through the mail, Jay?”
“You think I haven’t thought of that? But my damn lawyers freaked out. I told them you’d settle easy enough. There’d be no hassle. But they want it watertight. Which means they want to charge me twenty thousand bucks. It has to do with the board, too, Lana. La Roche Chemicals. The agreement you sign has got to be — well — final. They need to see it — tell us what we can and can’t change. Hell,” he said. “You try to tell them to do it through the mail.”
She recognized the relentless legality of it.
“There’s a small hotel cum café—Davy Jones,” she said. ‘It’s not very fancy, but we could meet there I suppose.”
He shrugged. “Fine. Eight o’clock?”
“All right.” She turned to go.
“Lana?”
When she looked at him, both arms were dangling by his side in a way she’d never seen him before. He looked defeated. “I’ll send a driver if you want.”
“Don’t bother,” she said. “I’ll get a base cab.”
“I still love you, babe. I only wanted to see you. Is that so terrible?”
* * *
When La Roche’s entourage moved out of the PX, Francine could tell something had happened to him. A young reporter, his ID press badge reading Anchorage Spectator, tried eagerly to get a few words from him. “My name’s Johnson, Mr. La Roche. Anchorage Spectator. I was wondering if you’d care to say a few words about—”
“Fuck off!” La Roche told him.
“What are we doing, Mr. La Roche?” one of the flunkies asked.
“There’s some rat-hole in this place called the Davy Jones. Make reservations for dinner, if they know what that is. Eight o’clock. For two. And a room for me.”
“We’re booked into the Excelsior, Mr. La Roche. Nice little hotel overlooking the—”
“Well go there and draw up divorce papers.”
“Divorce papers?” the lawyer said. “But we didn’t bring any — I mean — we didn’t know you wanted anything like that on this trip, Mr. La Roche. I don’t think—”
“Then give me one of the company contracts. Something that looks legal. Can you do that much?” Jay sneered.
“Yes. Right away, Mr. La Roche.”
“Have them ready for me by eight o’clock so I can take ‘em with me to that Davy joint. And Marvin?”
“Yes, Mr. LaRoche?”
“Tell Francine to get her ass over to that hotel room. Now!”
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
Aussie’s FAV was halfway down a dune when they heard the bang and felt the vehicle shuddering, Aussie steering hard into the skid. Beneath the vehicle an avalanche of slow-moving sand and stones followed, the stones as big as a man’s fist.
Within seconds Aussie and David Brentwood were out, their new TOW man swiveling in his seat to make sure he could cover them for the full 360 degrees while Aussie grabbed the jack and David hit the wing nut that held down the spare.
Brentwood hoped that outflanking the ChiCom tanks would be easy, given the speed of the FAV, but he knew he couldn’t be sure until the ChiCom MBTs got their first glimpse of a FAV — would they break and go after the FAVs or stay in echelon, whatever its configuration might be?
“I can hear them,” the TOW operator said.
“Can you see ‘em?” Aussie said, tightening the last bolt on the spare tire while Brentwood finished putting the emergency patch on the flat.
“No.”
“Well that’s no bloody use, is it? I can hear them, too. Every fucker within a mile can hear—” They intuitively ducked, the sound of ordnance passing overhead with that peculiar chuffing sound like a locomotive shunting at high speed made louder by the air duck with particles of sand. They quickly put the repaired tire back on the spare rack.
“Right! We’re off,” Aussie said. “I’m the first one to spot a chow. Five to one on — any takers?”
David Brentwood said nothing, peering hard through goggles, the sound of sand striking them like fine hail. The TOW operator took Aussie’s bet, for he could already see two blurs — too big to be motorcycle and sidecar units. “You’re on,” the TOW operator said. “Ten bucks.”
“Done!” Aussie said.
“I see two of ‘em — eleven o’clock.”
“What?” Aussie said, but now Brentwood could see them, too, and flecks of tracers told him the blur, whether it was an MBT or not, was firing at them.
Aussie swung hard left into a dip between two small dunes and stopped, the engine in high rev.
“You ready, TOW?”
“Ready — go!”
“Never mind,” Brentwood interjected. “Go out to the flank. It’s the radar we want.”
Swearing, Aussie dropped it into low gear and followed the line of the gully away from the tanks — or perhaps they had been APCs. “TOW,” Aussie said. “You saw those tanks or whatever they are before you made the bet?”
“No.”
“Lying bastard. Hope your prick falls off.”
“Thanks, Aussie, but you owe me fifty bucks.”
They followed the line of the gully for two hundred yards or so, then came up again. There was a sudden break in the dust storm — or was it the end of the storm? Then they came across a terrifying sight. From the left to right, as far as they could see, a brigade of MBTs — between 150 and 200 tanks, T-52s and T-72s — was making it
s way down an enormous dune in the strange half light, the tanks looking like a plague of huge, dark moles crawling down some enormous flesh-colored back. There was a streak of light and a more diffuse backblast from a TOW missile, fired from a FAV somewhere to Aussie’s left, and a flash of red and yellow dame as the TOW round hit a T-59.
Brentwood was furious and on the phone network within seconds, telling the FAVs to get out to the flanks. To forget the tanks. “I say again, forget the tanks—”
His voice was all but drowned out by fire from the forward five tanks in the column, which were breaking up, going into ajin ru you fang tixin rong — an echelon right — wherein each tank of the five-tank platoon broke off so that the lead tank and two others slightly behind him and to the right had their 100mm, and in some of the up-gunned tanks, their 125mm, guns pointed to the front, the two rearmost tanks having their guns pointed to the right.
Almost at the same time another one of the columns-there were fifteen tanks in it — all began moving to echelon right. It was the ChiComs’ weakest point, a legacy of having been trained, like the ChiCom fighter pilots, by the Russians, who were wedded to the doctrine of central control, allowing individual commanders little flexibility unless central control released them. Of course central control was necessary to some degree in the U.S. army as well, but the release to individual decisions as in Freeman’s leaving the FAV tactics up to Brentwood and the other FAV crews was not as freely given to the ChiComs. And the degree to which Cheng and Freeman would maintain central command would become crucial if it came to a night fight. Should this occur, Cheng knew, the Americans were better, with more experience in freeing individual tank commanders to exercise tactical flexibility, giving the Americans the edge when it came to tanks in an eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation.
“Fixing a flat,” the FAV just chewed out by Brentwood reported. “Couldn’t avoid firing a TOW…were taking tracers.” Now Aussie swung the FAV up out of the gully to the sharp, sandy edge, and he could no longer see the tanks, the weather closing in again as they heard the clanking of the ChiCom armor far off to the left.
Brentwood requested an update on the radar vector the Kiowas were plotting. It was the same; the mobile unit hadn’t moved. And Brentwood’s Magellan hand-held global positioning system put them only three miles away. At thirty miles per hour, a near-reckless speed, given the fifteen-to-twenty-yard visibility, it was estimated the FAVs on both flanks skirting the Chinese armor should reach the radar site within ten minutes — unless it moved again,
The motorcycle sidecar unit came out of nowhere — from behind them. The TOW operator saw it at the last minute, swung his weapon around on the swivel mount, but the burst from the ChiCom’s 7.62mm PKS hit him in the chest and face, blood pouring out of him. Aussie quickly turned left, his foot to the floor. The sidecar unit couldn’t turn fast enough, and Aussie hit it full on, the FAV’s double crash bar now bent back to the lights, the Chinese motorcyclist flung off his machine and Brentwood mowing him down then turning the weapon on the upturned sidecar, giving it two good bursts, the Chinese gunner inside screaming over the rattle of the ricocheting bullets.
Aussie and David Brentwood cut the TOW operator out of his harness, snapped off his dog tags, and went on.
“I’ll blow that fucking radar so fucking high—”
“If we find it,” Brentwood said, adding hopefully, “Should be there in ten minutes.”
* * *
In those ten minutes Admiral Kuang was receiving the message from his forward AWACS — the airborne warning and control systems — that a hurricane, force five, more powerful than those that had hit southern Florida and the Hawaiian Islands in ‘92, with winds in excess of 190 miles an hour, born in the Marianas, was now heading for Taiwan and the hundred-mile-wide strait between it and the Chinese mainland. Reluctantly, with great sadness, he ordered the fleet to turn about and head back toward Taiwan in order to meet the hurricane head-on and hopefully ride it out. As practical a man as he was, Kuang was also deeply religious, and he saw in the hurricane’s attack a clear message that the hurricane was saving him from a crushing defeat — a clear warning to wait for a more propitious time. In any case he couldn’t possibly make landings in a hurricane.
* * *
“Aussie!” a cry came from somewhere in front. It was Salvini, Choir, and the news reporter who was standing up in the stilled FAV like a mummy frozen to the roll bar. Beside them were two ChiCom motorcycle/sidecar units looking the worse for their collision with the FAV. “Had a prang, I see!” Aussie said cheekily.
“Yeah,” Salvini answered. “Both hit me at once.”
“Ah, bullshit!” Aussie said. “You guys from Brooklyn can’t drive a fucking grocery cart. Shoulda outmaneuvered -em.”
“Like we did,” David added, looking at Aussie. “The one we hit.”
“That was on purpose,” Aussie responded. “Okay, hop in. Choir, you with the TOW. Your mate”—he meant me reporter—”in the back, too.”
“What about me?” Salvini asked.
“You can fucking hoof it, Sal. Only a couple of miles.”
“Fuck you!” Sal said. “I’ll ride in one of your side litter trays.”
“Where’s your TOW, man?” Choir asked.
“Bought it a way back,” Aussie said, his tone losing its jocular vulgarity as he looked ahead, the visibility up to forty yards, asking David for a GPS vector to the target.
“Steer one seven three.”
“And hope they’re still there,” Choir said. Aussie had the FAV up to thirty miles an hour within a few seconds, then jammed on the brake, the vehicle skidding sideways, ploughing into the sand.
“What d’you see?” David asked.
“Nothing. I’ve got an idea.” He backed up to where the two ChiCom motorcycle and sidecar units were lying. “Sal— you try the one over there. I’ll try the one nearest.”
“What for?”
“See if they still rucking work after you hitting ‘em.”
One’s front wheel was bent beyond hope, while the other had its gas tank so shot up that it too was finished. The sound of armor fighting armor now drowned out Aussie’s voice. Several thousand yards back in the mustard fog of dust and smoke, Freeman’s first echelon had come within sight of the ChiComs. Aussie took off again in the FAV, David, his legs braced against the floor, taking a firm hold of the M-60 machine gun. For a second the FAV was engulfed with the stench of excrement. “Don’t worry about it, boyo,” Choir said to the La Roche newsman.
“It was Salvini,” Aussie said, as Salvini lay on his side, gripping the metal lattice work of the litter for support, his head bumping on a pillow of C charges.
“What’s up with you, you Australian—”
“Stop!” Choir yelled. “Target! One o’clock!”
As the FAV came to an abrupt halt in the loose, sugary sand, Choir fired his second-to-last TOW, its back-blast lighting up the FAV, the FAV in its most vulnerable position, still, giving Choir time to guide the optically tracked, wire-guided missile.
The motorcycle and sidecar unit that he’d aimed at dipped over a dune, the TOW blowing the top of the dune off like the flying spray of some enormous brown wave. Next second the sidecar unit was coming back at them out of the fold between the dunes in which it had temporarily disappeared, the ChiCom in the sidecar pointing a shaped-charge RPG at them.
“Cheeky bastard!” Aussie said, and was already into a series of S curves and dips. The RPG fired, a hot sliver of shrapnel slicing open the front left tire like butter, amputating two inches or so from the foot-long pack of C-4 plastique, ending up taking a chip out of the stock of the Winchester 1200 riot shotgun that was strapped to the cage.
Brentwood was still firing the machine gun and saw the ChiCom driver shaking as if he were some kind of machine coining apart, falling away, the long burst of machine gun fire literally chopping him to pieces. The motorcycle jack-knifed and was over on its side.
“Shit!” It was Aussie. “T
wo flats in one day.”
“Aussie — can it.” It was David, looking suddenly older than his years. “Anyone hurt?”
“No.” He turned back toward the La Roche reporter, who shook his head like a child on the verge of tears, accused of something he didn’t do.
“All right,” David said. “Now listen up — all of you.”
Salvini was already changing tires.
* * *
In the lead M1A2, General Freeman watched through his viewer while the gunner below and immediately in front of him scanned his thermal-imaging sight. Freeman was confident that with so much dust and now smoke from smoke grenades in the air it would be the Americans who would have the edge — able to see through the polluted air in the same way that Schwarzkopf had reported how the American sights had been able to better see through the hot fog of war than had the Iraqi tanks.
The concussion from the explosion of a Bradley armored personnel carrier behind him off to his left could be felt, not so much by any impact or discernible earth tremor but by the sudden surge in the M1A2’s air conditioner and ventilation system, the inside pressure now rising, not to keep out poison gas, though it could do that, too, but rather the thick dust caused by the Bradley’s sudden demise.
It was a shock as much to Freeman as his other three crewmen. If they couldn’t see through the smoke curtain, then how could Cheng’s tanks have seen the Bradley? Unless the smoke laid by the ChiCom armor was “particle infused,” that is, thickened to make it harder for the thermal and night-vision viewers on the M1A2 to penetrate.
There was only one way, Freeman saw, to counter such a possibility — close the gap between him and them as fast as possible. Freeman ordered a full-speed attack in wedge formations. His two hundred tanks moved from refused right and refused left configurations to the arrowhead-shaped wedge formations wherein the lead tank pointed its 120mm gun and coaxial machine gun straight ahead, the two tanks to the left and two slightly back and to the right covering the flanks by having their main guns pointing left and right respectively. And if necessary all would be able to fire straight ahead without hitting one another.