“Oh, yes, I’m glad that’s over. Not a word about my shirt.” He grinned. “I guess the CIA has some clout after all. At least my clothes will make it easy for anyone trying to find me.”
Murdock looked down the companionway and shook his head. “What can we do for Nepal? Nothing. I guess we have an embassy there, but we’re twenty-five hundred to three thousand miles from that spot. Well, I guess we could have landing permission in India, if we pulled the right strings. India is to the south of Nepal if I remember right. New Delhi can’t be more than two hundred and fifty miles from that nuked-out Nepal city.”
“This is the biggest mistake China has ever made,” Stroh said. “She has stepped in a deep vat of shit and world opinion is gonna drown them in it. Reports coming in are all negative, especially from nations in the area.
“India pulled out her embassy staff from Bejing and broke off diplomatic relations. Gonna be all kinds of ugly shit flying around this one for years.”
“In the meantime China gobbles up Nepal,” DeWitt said. “What’s next for her? She want to take on India?”
“India has the bomb, too,” Murdock said. “We’re forgetting one element here. The official announcement of a state of war came from Bejing and it said the China — Pakistan forces are invading Nepal. What the hell is Pakistan doing teaming up with China?”
“I don’t see what Pakistan is trying for,” Stroh said as they worked their way through the big ship to the quarters assigned to the SEALs. They had one large compartment where they stashed their gear, weapons, and ammo and where they could hold meetings.
Murdock called the fourteen men around him. “The j.g. and I just came back from a chat with the Captain of this tub. He says he has orders to proceed to the South China Sea. We are assigned to stand by for possible work off this ship. That means we stay in top shape. Welcome to Fitness International. Senior Chief Dobler will take the platoon to the flight deck, check with a white shirt for a safe spot, and we will do an hour of calisthenics followed by a two-mile run. In case you wonder, this ship is almost eleven hundred feet long. Five laps to a mile. Uniform of the day, cammies. We have ten minutes before the Senior Chief leads us up to the flight deck. Any questions?”
“Yes sir,” Jaybird said. “What’s Pakistan have to do with this attack on Nepal?”
“Pakistan is supposedly an equal partner in the aggression; however, it was a Chinese nuke that opened the show. That’s all we know so far.”
“A week-long war?” Mahanani asked.
“The betting is for three days,” DeWitt said. “Take that long to get the Chinese and Pakistani troops in place. There won’t be much of a fight with only forty-five thousand troops with Nepal name tags.”
“Let’s get moving,” Murdock said and the men scattered to their lockers to get in uniform.
Katmandu, Nepal
Three thousand feet over the capital city of Nepal, Sergeant Chiang Pio adjusted his gear and eyed the jump light. The door of the big transport was open and he stood by it holding his first out man by the shoulder. They were the first troops into Nepal since the big bomb hit the town well to the north. Now their mission was to go in and capture the civilian airport at the nation’s capital, which then would be used for military supply by air. He had been surprised when the word came down that they would be attacking Nepal. He had always considered the tiny country a fly speck on the edge of China. A nonplayer in international politics. So why were they and Pakistan going in there with troops after dropping a nuclear bomb on one of the northern cities? It didn’t make much sense to Chiang, but he was a soldier and did as he was ordered.
Then Chiang didn’t have time to think about the mission or his family back in China. The light went from red to green and a horn sounded.
“Go, go, go,” Chiang shouted, as he gave the man a gentle push and he jumped out the door into the new light of dawn over Katmandu. Twenty-seven men left the door, then Chiang held up his hand stopping the next man as he made sure his own cord was attached to the sliding rail, then he jumped out into the suddenly chilly air. His chute jerked him severely as the wide straps jolted into his legs and shoulders, then the sudden pain eased as he saw the chute opening above him and his rate of descent slowed to a normal jump and he eyed the ground coming up at him. He had come out at the right time. Some of his men would land just before the border of the airport. He would be about fifty yards down the runway. He pulled the cord on the right side of his chute to dump some air and aim to the side of the concrete runway into the softer grass and bushes. He held his feet up a moment as the ground rushed up at him, then he dropped them and ran as he hit the ground. He overtook his chute and fell on it to collapse it, then jerked his harness off, grabbed his submachine gun from the straps on his side and shouted to two men he saw. They were from his platoon.
“Get the men over here,” he shouted. “We have the two sheds at the end of the runway to clear. Move it.”
The men scurried around finding more men, sending them to the sergeant. Soon he had twenty of his thirty men and they formed up in a line of skirmishers and rushed the two sheds fifty yards away. There were only two workmen there getting ready to check the night lighting system. Neither of them had weapons.
The one man in his platoon who spoke Napali had not joined the group yet. Chiang shouted in Chinese at the men to continue their work. Then he used his hands to show the men to go on working. At last they nodded and picked up their tools.
Chiang assembled his men and marched them toward his second objective, a guard building at the south entrance to the airport used mainly for maintenance trucks. He picked up the ten missing members of his platoon. One man had a broken leg. They left him on the edge of the runway with another man as a backup and double-timed toward the guard shack.
At three hundred yards they took their first enemy fire. It was short. They fired their long-range weapons and kept running forward.
At two hundred yards, Chiang directed his troops into a small ditch at the edge of the runway. He put his Ultimax machine gun on a gentle rise and had it open fire on the guard shack. Now he saw it was made of concrete blocks or bricks and had sand bags at two windows, but none at the third.
The 5.56mm rounds from the Ultimax slammed into the window and around a facing door. That slowed firing from inside. Chiang took the opportunity to send one squad around to the rear of the small building while the rest of the platoon fired at the shack with their type 86 rifles. They were good weapons, Chiang knew, firing 7.62mm rounds and could be fully automatic or single shot. All of his men used the 30-round magazine, and each carried six loaded magazines, giving each man 210 rounds without refilling magazines.
His first squad came up behind the building and fired into it, reducing the answering fire. A moment later a pole came out of the building with a white T-shirt attached.
Chiang smiled and ordered a cease-fire. The men ran forward and charged into the small building without firing another shot.
Chiang made sure the position was secure and that he had the four Nepal soldiers captured and bound. Then he called in to his company commander on his radio.
“Sir, Red Platoon of Red Company has secured our two objectives. Where do you need us?”
“Red Platoon, hold your position for five minutes, then charge forward toward the hangar at the south end of the field. Resistance there is heavy.”
“Right, hold five minutes.” He turned off the radio and put it back in the holder on his combat webbing. “Reload all magazines. We go into a tough fight in five minutes.”
The riflemen filled partly empty magazines. The two machine gunners put on new one hundred-round drums. Chiang checked his watch. He looked out the window at the building three hundred yards ahead. It was a hundred feet wide, he couldn’t tell how long. He saw no soldiers, but he could hear firing.
“Two squads to the left and two to the right. Let’s go on a sweep. Five yards apart. Move out.”
Chiang kept in the center of th
e four squads. Nobody faltered, all stayed on line. As soon as they took fire they all went prone and returned fire. He saw two machine guns firing from bunkers at the front and back corners of the building. When did they have time to build sand-bag bunkers at a civilian airport? Chiang wondered.
With hand signals he moved the farthest right squad into a ditch that ran toward the hangar. He told them to move up and get the machine gun in a cross-fire. He was too far away for his submachine gun, but he fired a dozen rounds anyway.
More hand signals told the two right squads to concentrate on the rear machine gun. Three hundred rounds poured into the position and a moment later it went quiet. The two right-hand squads jolted upright and ran for the target. The other two squads bore down on the front machine gun and cut down its firing.
A short time later, the far right squad laid down a barrage of rifle fire from the corner of the building and wiped out the machine gun at the other corner.
“Charge!” Chiang bellowed and the other two squads blasted forward, secured the corner and the machine gun placement. Then they could look into the hangar. Two large civilian jetliners sat there, but Chiang saw no soldiers. He frowned. He sent a scout into the building and waited. The man ran from one side of the huge building to the other, then came out at the far corner and gave the all-clear sign.
Chiang waved his men forward. They were halfway across the one-hundred-foot-wide building with the thirty-foot-high front folding doors, when three machine guns opened up on his platoon from inside the hangar. He and his men had no cover on the concrete floor and taxiway.
“Take cover,” Chiang shouted. He saw three of his men mowed down right in front of him before they could react to the weapons. Some of his men fired into the building, but they couldn’t see the hidden machine guns.
Five- and seven-round bursts chattered from the three positions. Chiang ran back the way they had come. The wall there was his only cover. He saw three more of his men charging for the wall. Two fell almost in front of him. He hurdled the bodies and dove forward, rolling once to get to the wall. He rolled again with bullets chipping concrete all around him. He rolled again and slithered around the wall into safety. Chiang stared at the carnage on the cold concrete floor in front of him. He had come in with twenty-eight men. Two more were back on the tarmac with the broken leg.
He counted men dead and dying in front of him. Tears seeped from his eyes. He saw two men lunge up and try to run. One dragged his right leg. A burst of five rounds hit him in the chest and leg and he went down and didn’t move. The other man almost made it to the wall and safety with two guns trained on him and two seven-round bursts plunged into his body jolting him into instant communication with his honorable ancestors.
Chiang wiped tears off his cheeks. He had four men with him, only four. The rest of them, twenty-four, lay on the hangar floor dead. He grabbed his radio.
“Captain Company Red, this is Red Platoon.” He waited but there was no response. He tried again: “Captain of Company Red, this is Red Platoon. We have trouble.”
A moment later the speaker came to life. “Yes, Red Platoon. Have you secured the south hangar?”
“No. We tried to capture the south hangar. My platoon was wiped out by hidden machine guns inside the hangar. We cleared it but missed them. I have five men left. The rest are dead. Instructions.”
“Take the hangar, Red Platoon. Surprising heavy resistance at other areas of the airport. Do the best you can. Grenades maybe.”
Chiang looked around the edge of the wall. He was low to the ground and practically invisible from anyone inside. He watched for five minutes. No sound came from the big building. Then he saw movement. One of the civilian airliners had a rear passenger access door open. He saw movement inside the shadows in the plane. That had to be one of the machine guns. He motioned for a rifle, set it on full auto and in one swift movement moved the rifle around the wall and drilled twenty rounds into the open airliner door. He jerked the rifle back as two machine guns fired at the wall, splintering it in a dozen places where he had been moments before.
Now he had more places to watch from. The hail of bullets stopped and he watched again. There were two more guns in there, but where? He figured he had silenced one of them. Again he watched the other areas of the big hangar. They had to have good fields of fire at almost all of the front of the building. That limited the spots they could hide. He narrowed down the possibilities, then watched them on a grid basis.
He sectioned the areas and concentrated on one of the squares at a time. The second time he came back to a square near the back of the building he saw that a doorway was opened more the second time around than the first. Yes, it would have the right field of fire. He reached for another rifle, made sure it had a full thirty-round magazine.
This time he barely nosed the muzzle around the wall, sighted in on the door and hosed it down with all thirty rounds in the weapon. The first burst of five rounds may have done the job. He drilled the rest of the magazine rounds into the door jolting it fully open. For a fraction of a second he saw the ugly muzzle of a machine gun there, then a round slammed it backward.
The third machine gun was later this time in firing, missing the tip of the rifle and the man firing it.
“Two down,” he told his men. One of the soldiers had vanished for a while, now he came back.
“Sergeant, there’s a back door down there near the rear. It’s locked, but I can shoot off the lock and roll in some grenades. Might catch somebody by surprise.”
“Do it when you hear me firing. I’ll try to distract them.”
Sergeant Chiang gave his man time to get to the other end of the hangar, then he pushed the weapon around the door and fired at the back of the hangar. He jerked the weapon back a second before the MG there fired again. Over the murderous sound of the weapon he heard two explosions. They were muffled and he hoped they were grenades. The machine gun stuttered, then stopped. A moment later he heard the flat barking sound of the infantryman’s rife. Then all was quiet.
Four minutes later he heard another grenade go off and more rifle fire. He looked around the wall and saw his soldier running across the hangar toward him.
“Hangar clear, Sergeant,” the soldier said. A door opened on the other airliner and a submachine gun stuttered. The soldier on the floor stopped in mid stride looking up in surprise at the Nepal soldier in the airplane who had killed him.
Sergeant Chiang bellowed in surprise and anger and stepped around the wall and fired fifteen rounds from his submachine gun at the man who stood in the airliner door. The Nepalese soldier shuddered as half the rounds punctured his chest. He dropped his weapon, turned halfway around and fell off the airliner to the concrete twelve feet below.
Chiang slumped to the floor and took out his radio. “Red Platoon to Red Captain. We have captured the south hangar. It’s secure. I’m down to four men. No more missions possible.”
8
Coronado, California
Girl talk. That’s all it was supposed to be. They had agreed to meet at Maria Fernandez apartment at 6:00 P.M. that Tuesday. Milly came five minutes late.
“Some trouble at the office,” she said. Milly worked at Deltron Electronics where she was a lead supervisor in computer services for some of the biggest companies in America. Their hardware and software problems were her problems and she hustled herself and her crews to find the answers before whole computer systems went down. “We fixed the huge glitz, but it took longer than we figured.” She looked around. “No Nancy yet?”
“Not so far. Don’t worry. I talked to her on the phone about noon and her spirits seemed to be up.”
They had coffee in the kitchen around the table. Neither one mentioned the China — Pakistan war that was all over the news media. Maria talked about kids and school and anything else.
“God, it’s almost six twenty,” Milly said. She crinkled her forehead. “You suppose Nancy isn’t coming?”
Maria let out a long sigh. �
�Lord, I hope she comes. That woman worries me. She just can’t let go of her fear. That’s what’s behind it all, raw, blundering, agonizing fear for the safety of her man.”
Both women were silent for a moment. Both thinking the same thing. They had the fear, too, but over the years had learned to cope with it, push it aside, and concentrate on something else.
A horn honked outside, three shorts and a long.
“That’s V in Morse code,” Maria said. They looked out the front window. Nancy sat on the front fender of her car. She saw them looking and waved.
“Bet you tarts didn’t think I’d show up,” she crowed a minute later when she ran up the stairs and into the front room.
“Wondered,” Maria said.
“Hey, I knew you’d be here,” Milly said. “Who can pass up the cherry pie that this girl promised us along with our fancy cups of tea?”
Inwardly, Maria groaned. Nancy’s eyes were bright and her head held high. She had that cocaine swagger that Maria had seen often when she had worked in drug rehab.
“Well, we’re all here. Coffee or tea, Nancy?”
“Take tea and see,” Nancy said doing a little dance over to the third chair at the table and sat down. “Where’s this delicious type pie I was promised?”
“Coming up.”
Milly turned to Nancy but before she could say a word she saw Nancy starting to unravel. She slumped, elbows on the table, one hand holding her chin. It slipped off and she barely recovered before her chin hit the table. The cup of tea skittered to one side, tipped over and flooded half the white table cloth.
Without a word, Maria tossed a kitchen towel to Milly to start mopping up.
“Oh fuck!” Nancy said. She leaned back in the chair and began to laugh. “I sure as hell fucked up again. Damn it. Shit why can’t I do it like you two bitches do? Why in hell can’t I be normal for just a few God-damned more days?”
Tears spilled out of her eyes and she cried silently. She made no move to wipe the tears away.
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