Soar

by John Weisman

  Sam said, “The IMU headman made cell-phone calls all the time. So maybe you should.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Ritzik said. “Right. Sure.”

  Sam said, “Why not try?”

  Ritzik snorted. But then again, there was nothing to lose. Maybe he could get hold of the TOC—which was more than he could do on the radio. He pressed the phone’s on button. The readout was in Cyrillic. But it didn’t matter—all he needed was the keypad. The signal-strength indicator told him he’d be able to get out. “What’s the international code from here?”

  “For where?”

  “Almaty.”

  Sam’s fingers drummed on the 4x4’s dashboard. “Zero-zero-one, and then seven, then three-two-seven-two.” “Gotcha.” Ritzik started pressing keys. And then he said, “Damn.” He stopped pressing keys, pressed the end button to cancel the call, and started over again.

  He waited as the circuits completed. “It’s ringing,” he said. He pressed the phone tight against his ear. “Uh, no, sir, this isn’t Katherine. It’s Mike—Michael. Remember me?”

  51 Kilometers Southwest of Yarkant Köl.

  0242 Hours Local Time.

  “OH, YES, SIR,” Ritzik said. “Gotta keep it short.” He paused. “Got it. Okay.” He listened intently. “Sure. Yes, we’re all fine. Could you call our friends in the other place? The place we came from. Just update them—tell them we’ll be in touch sooner or later.” Ritzik screwed the phone into his ear. “You’re starting to break up.” He reached across Sam Phillips and slammed Gene Shepard on the shoulder, signaling him to stop the 4x4. The vehicle screeched to a halt and Ritzik’s thumb went up. “Yes. Good. Got it. Absolutely. Okay. Bye-bye, bye-bye. And thanks.” He pressed the end button and then shut the phone off. The damn things could be triangulated. He turned to the case officer. “Great idea, Sam.”

  Sam said, “Thanks. Who was that on the other end?”

  “The SECDEF. Robert Rockman,” Ritzik said matter of factly. He pressed his radio transmit button. “Rowdy, Loner. Pull over. We gotta head-shed.”

  0246. Sam Phillips didn’t like being cut out of the planning process, and he made his feelings known. But Ritzik was intractable. From the cryptic exchange he’d had with SECDEF, he understood that while the Chinese concentrated their efforts to the north, he had a brief window in which to move quickly. The unknown variable in this equation was Major General Zhou Yi. From what Rockman had hinted, Ritzik understood that Zhou’s Special Forces hunter-killer group was now in Kashgar. But whether it would search by air, or set up static roadblocks, was something Ritzik hadn’t been able to decipher from Rockman’s enigmatic words. God, how he would have liked the luxury of overhead surveillance.

  Sam Phillips was convinced Zhou would use his air assets. Ritzik wasn’t. “The Chinese haven’t integrated their Special Forces into air ops yet,” he said. “They have nothing like the SOAR.”

  “Common sense tells me they’ll use what they have,” Sam said. “They have aircraft—therefore they’ll use them.”

  “Their choppers have no infrared capability,” Ritzik said. “They’re blind at night. Besides, they have no way of identifying nuclear devices from the air.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I know it,” Tracy Wei-Liu interjected. “It’s my job to know those things. The Russians have two helicopters in their inventory, the MI-8MTS and the MI-8MTT, which are radiation-reconnaissance-capable. The Chinese are still negotiating with Moscow to get the MTS and MTT enhancements on their aircraft.”

  “They’re an ingenious people,” Sam said. “They improvise—and they learn fast.”

  Ritzik switched his GPS unit on. “Look,” he said. “Zhou is two hundred miles north of here. If they believe the IMU is heading northwest, they’ll be concentrating here—” He tapped the screen. “We go here—hide ourselves during the daylight hours. Even if Mr. Murphy shows, we’ll be able to get that far at least. Miss Wei-Liu will have all the time she needs to deal with the nuke.” He tapped again. “And then, after dark, we head straight up there—into the mountains.”

  Sam threw up his hands. “You’re running this, Major Ritzik,” he said. “You do what you will.”

  Ritzik took Rowdy Yates aside. The two men studied the GPS screen and spoke quietly.

  Sam Phillips walked over to where Wei-Liu stood. “He’s wrong, you know. So’re you.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “Because both of you are making decisions based on nothing more than assumptions.”

  Wei-Liu said, “We are doing nothing of the sort. We’re making empirical judgments.”

  She watched as Sam’s right index finger pulled at the skin below his right eye—French body language denoting skepticism. “You’re mocking me.”

  “Christ, the two of you sounded like our analysts at Langley. ‘According to our most current economic statistical models, we can confidently predict that the Soviet economy will be fundamentally sound and perhaps even resilient for the next fifteen to twenty years, despite the considerable fiscal pressures of maintaining military and scientific parity with the West.’ I have a copy of that particular assessment framed on my wall at home. Guess what? It was date-stamped and circulated the day before Mikhail Gorbachev formally dissolved the Soviet Union.”

  “But—”

  “Look,” Sam said. “I don’t dispute that you know all about nuclear weapons. And that when it comes to hostage rescue or counterterrorism, the major is damn proficient. And I agree that we’re much better off moving at night and hiding during daylight hours. Where I disagree is in underestimating the Chinese—and assuming their tactics will be rigid. These guys are good—and they’re flexible.”

  Wei-Liu said, “I guess we’ll see who’s right in the next few hours, Mr. Phillips.”

  “I think we will, Miss Wei-Liu.”

  The Third Forty Hours

  FUBAR

  21

  125 Kilometers East-Northeast of Tokhtamysh.

  0735 Hours Local Time.

  THEY COULD HEAR the choppers before they actually saw them, a slow crescendo of loud, reverberating whomp-whomp-whomping that echoed ominously off the rocky hills and deep ravines. The hair on the back of Ritzik’s neck stood up. The sound made him feel vulnerable because it was impossible to figure out which direction the aircraft were actually coming from, or how many of them there were. The only thing he knew for certain was that they were closing in more and more with every passing second. It was, Ritzik decided, a hell of a way to start the day.

  They’d halted just after zero six hundred, as the sky was going from midnight blue to dark purple. It seemed to take forever for the sun to come up, and the air was noticeably chilly—only in the high forties. As it grew light, shortly after seven, Ritzik saw why. Fifteen, perhaps twenty kilometers to the north and east, a line of awesome, jagged snow-covered peaks towered thousands of feet above the sparsely forested foothills. Beyond the range they could see, there was a second series of peaks. Beyond those lay Tajikistan, and safety. But they were still a long way off.

  The party had left the desert floor behind shortly after zero four-thirty. The transition had been abrupt. They’d gone from the lunarlike surface of sand and rock, then traversed a ten-klik swath of windswept, sixty-foot dunes, which in turn quickly gave way to steep, precipitous rocky hillocks. From the dunes on, it had all been uphill. The road along which they were currently bumping cut in S-curves between a series of ridges dotted with thorny scrub and clumps of dwarf evergreens bent like hunchbacks by wind and weather. It was rough, desolate, unforgiving terrain.

  “Afghanistan without the charm,” was how Rowdy’d put it just after first light.

  “I see we’re given to characteristic understatement this morning,” Ritzik had answered.

  AT ZERO SIX-TWENTY Rowdy called a halt—it was getting too light to go any farther. He detailed Goose and Tuzz to scout ahead, while Curtis and Shep grabbed one of the captured RPG launchers and four rockets and dro
pped back atop the ridgeline to make sure their six was clean. The rest of the party was detailed to cut boughs and brush to camouflage the vehicles. Which wasn’t going to be easy. The big boxy truck would stand out—unless they buried the bloody thing, which wasn’t an option. And so, while they could soften its lines and make it harder to spot from the air, anybody who was flying low and slow and wasn’t blind couldn’t help but see it.

  The rear guard brought the first piece of news at zero seven-sixteen. “There’s movement behind us,” Curtis reported by radio. “One vehicle—maybe two. I’d say about twenty miles, coming west. More or less along the same track we were on. They’re still on the desert floor, moving slowly. But they’re raising dust.”

  Ritzik frowned. “How many people we talking about?”

  “No way to tell that, Loner.”

  “Army?”

  “Dunno. Could be. Could also be civilians on the move.” There was static in Ritzik’s ear. Then: “Want us to set an ambush?”

  “No,” Rowdy broke in. “You guys get your butts back here. Let’s not waste people or time. I don’t want to expend anything we don’t have to. We’ll keep an eye out. See how the situation develops.”

  “Wilco.”

  Ritzik turned and looked around, searching. “Tracy?”

  He finally spotted her clambering over the ridgeline. “Where the hell—”

  She picked her way through the scrub, blushing. “We girls need some privacy, y’know.”

  “Sorry.” He pointed toward the truck. “It’s all yours.”

  “And about time.” Wei-Liu patted the small canvas sack she carried. “I was able to make some preliminary studies overnight.”

  “How does it look?”

  “Old. Fragile. The batteries are in terrible shape—you can smell the acid. Obviously, I wasn’t about to touch anything while we were bouncing around.”

  “Good idea.”

  She waited for him to say something else. When he didn’t, she said, “Okay, I’ll get to work.”

  0728. She’d just laid out her tools and secured the rear flap open to give herself some light when she thought she heard the low rumble of distant thunder. Within seconds, Rowdy appeared above the tailgate. She thought he and the rest of them all looked somewhat ridiculous with their faces striped with black, green, and brown camouflage cream. She hadn’t noticed in the dark. But in daylight, they simply looked foolish.

  “We got aircraft approaching, ma’am,” he said. “You gotta clear out—take cover.”

  Wei-Liu stood her ground. “I’m perfectly all right where I am, Rowdy.”

  “The major wants you outside with him in case there’s gunfire,” Rowdy insisted. He vaulted into the truck, followed by Doc Masland. The pair of them rummaged through the crates until they came up with four RPG launchers and two haversacks each holding four of the 85mm rocket-propelled grenades. Rowdy handed a launcher and one of the haversacks to Ty Weaver, who was standing below the truck bed. The sniper pulled the rockets from their pouches, screwed the RDX-explosive warheads and sustainer motors into the tail-finned booster-charge units, slipped one of the assembled rockets into the mouth of the launcher, and held on to the other.

  “Get that set to Mickey D,” Rowdy said.

  “Roger.”

  The sergeant major threw another pair of launchers over his shoulder and dropped his legs over the transom. “Doc—” Rowdy handed the remaining two armed rockets and one launcher to Masland. Then he reached for the remaining launcher and the haversack of projectiles and jumped off the truck. He looked back. “Ma’am …”

  Wei-Liu stared at Yates until his expression told her she’d better move. “It would be nice … “ She began to gather her tools.

  “Ma’am,” he said, “leave ‘em right where they are. You’re wasting precious seconds.” He pointed through the truck cab. “The major’s straight up the hill—sixty, sixty-five yards.”

  FROM JUST BELOW the ridgeline, Ritzik pressed his transmit button. “Goose, Loner. Sit-rep.” “Nada.”

  “What’s your position?”

  “A klik and a half out, to your northeast.”

  “Where the hell are they?”

  Then Tuzz’s voice: “I have a visual. Loner, they’re coming from the south. Repeat, the south.”

  “How many?”

  “Two.” There was a pause. “HIPs, I think.”

  Goose broke in. “Confirm two HIPs, Loner.”

  Attack transports. That meant troops—HIPs could carry as many as twenty-four. Ritzik had war-gamed against HIPs in Israel, during joint exercises with Sayeret Matkal, the country’s lead counterterrorist army unit. The choppers were agile, despite their size and weight. The Israelis had great respect for the big, boxy Special Operations aircraft, too: during the 1973 October War, the Egyptians had used one hundred of them to insert commandos behind Israeli lines in Sinai. Anwar Sadat’s bold move had almost broken Israel’s life-or-death counterattack.

  The whine of the twin turboshafts grew louder, sound slapping off the landscape. “Here.” Ty Weaver dropped the armed launcher and a second rocket into Mickey D’s arms. The pilot swung the launcher around to make sure he had clearance, propped himself up so the backblast wouldn’t do anybody any harm. Then he pulled scrub over himself.

  The sniper dropped into a small revetment half a dozen yards from Ritzik. He uncapped the telescopic sight on the big HK, sighted through it, then dropped out of sight. Doc came up the ridge, rockets slung over his shoulder. He settled in fifteen yards from where Ty was concealed.

  Wei-Liu followed—lagging behind.

  “Tracy, get the hell up here now,” Ritzik yelled. “Jeezus H.”

  She looked confused. She saw Mickey D, then finally spied Ritzik.

  Who grabbed her by the arm roughly. “Get … down.”

  She settled next to him, irate. He reached into his pocket and brought out a small container. “C’mere.”

  Wei-Liu turned her face toward him. Before she knew what was happening, he’d daubed dark paste on her forehead, cheeks, and neck. She tried to pull away, but he held her firm.

  “What the hell do you think—”

  “Your skin reflects light,” he said matter-of-factly. He peered at her face and applied more of the greasy cream. “They can see exposed skin from above.” He smeared the backs of her hands and the exposed parts of her wrists. He turned her face left, then right, examining his work. Then he smudged more goop under her eyes and behind her ears.

  She’d been self-conscious like this earlier. The forced intimacy of the parachute jump had made her uneasy. And yet there was something comforting about being close to Ritzik that had made Wei-Liu feel good; feel safe. And yet he was always distant; removed; disinterested. She’d never met anyone so intensely single-minded before.

  Ritzik pointed toward a stunted conifer about ten yards away. The evergreen was partially obscured by a small rock outcropping. “See that tree? Get under it—squeeze as close to the trunk as you can. Then lie down—and stay down until I tell you otherwise.”

  The echoes from the chopper’s big blades were more pronounced now—which meant they were getting close. He looked at Wei-Liu, his face dead serious. “Tracy…”

  “Yes?”

  “Do not move. Do not look up. Do not shift your position, or squirm.” His face was severe. “Got it?”

  “Yes, I got it.” She was pissed at being told what to do. But his tone had conveyed the absolute gravity of the situation. She saluted. “Yes, sir, Major, sir.”

  He thrust her toward the tree, oblivious to sarcasm. “Go.”

  She’d no sooner settled under the little tree than the whomp-whomp-whomping grew unbearably loud—and then suddenly eased off, the rotor sound replaced by the high-pitched whine of the HP’s twin turboshaft engines.

  And then Ritzik saw the first chopper as its bulbous, glass-enclosed snout rose above the south ridge, three hundred yards away, roughly two hundred feet above the ground. It was a troop tra
nsport all right—painted in the Beijing Military District camouflage colors: mottled blotches of gray, blue green, and tan. The flight deck was completely glass-enclosed. He could look past the windshield wipers and see the pilots in their khaki flight suits, their hands on the collective and cyclic controls, even the flight manuals stowed next to the seats and their legs running down to the pedals that controlled the tail rotor pitch.

  He pressed his transmit button. “If we’re spotted, take ‘em out.” When he realized what he’d just said, the enormity of it smacked him like a gut punch. He’d just single-handedly told his people to wage war against the duly constituted armed forces of the People’s Republic of China. But there’d been no other option. They were cornered and they’d have to come out fighting.

  The big bird shifted its attitude slightly, providing a broadside as it dropped its nose over the ridgeline and moved north. The port-side hatch was open—the door slid aft in its track and secured. A machine gun on an elbowed, free-floating gimbal mount protruded aggressively from the doorway. The gunner, in headphones and goggles, craned his head through the hatch.

  As the chopper turned, Ritzik could make out the identification on the side of the fuselage and was surprised to see that the lettering was Western, not Chinese. He hunkered, hidden—he prayed—by the branches and the ground. But knowing in his heart that unless the chopper was being flown by Ray Charles and the machine gun was manned by Stevie Wonder, there was no way on God’s earth that the truck and the 4x4 would go unseen. Face it: he was screwed.

  Ritzik pressed his transmit button. “Ty—”

  “Loner, Ty.”

  “The pilots. Shoot the pilots.”

  “Roger that.”

  From where Wei-Liu lay, she couldn’t see the aircraft. But she could see Ty Weaver as he brought his long gun up over the edge of the rocks where he lay. The heavy black weapon was draped in cloth. The sniper had shredded one of the Russian anoraks and wound the green-, gray-, and brown-flecked camouflage fabric around the stock, barrel, and telescopic sight.