If Lenin’s favorite dictum, that in war quantity has a quality all its own, was to be seen in action it was on the hundred-mile Orgon Tal-Honggor section of the front. Though a straight line could be drawn between them running northeast from Orgon Tal nearly one hundred miles, the actual line with bulges made the front more than 150 miles long, the bulges consisting of four Chinese armies made up of elements of the Sixty-ninth, Sixty-third, and Twenty-seventh infantry and two armored divisions, consisting not only of infantry and the usual ninety-six tanks per army made up of three tank regiments with thirty-two tanks each, but nine regiments of reserve armor — in all, 2,815 tanks, half of which were T-72 laser-sighted.
With militia included, Cheng had fielded over 153,000 men against two U.S. infantry divisions: 36,100 men plus 732 M1A1 tanks. Both in numbers of men and tanks the Chinese had an advantage of almost four to one against the Americans.
Under cover of the typhoon, Chinese infantry, who, an old wives’ tale had it, didn’t fight well in the rain— particularly the militia units around Honggor — had made more headway than expected, the blinding dust and then rain degrading the laser sites on the M1s and making it possible for the militia to penetrate here and there to harass the already-overextended American supply line. Had it not been for the typhoon, U.S. TACAIR’s A-10 Thunderbolts could have inflicted grievous losses on Cheng’s troops, but grounded by the typhoon and with more than seven U.S. airstrips having been mortar bombed from the typhoon-obliterated perimeter, TACAIR was in no shape to render any assistance. The weather then had worked in the Chinese favor, or rather had been used by them as an advantage.
Tanks were often working blind until almost atop one another, with deadly close-order battle meaning that the M1A1’s overreach of at least a thousand yards meant little. What caused the most surprise among the Americans was the sheer tenacity and fitness of the PLA infantry. They traveled light compared to the Americans and knew the ground better.
Whatever the reason for their punching gaps through the American line, Freeman knew he would have to stem the flow quickly, not only because he feared pincer movements on his lines of supply north of the Orgon Tal-Honggor line, but that any general Chinese breakthrough might give pause to Admiral Lin and his Formosan forces. If, on the other hand, the Orgon Tal-Honggor line could be held, then the admiral, or rather his superiors, would see the staying power of the American Second Army and attack, making it a two-front war, not including the Lake Nam launch site, which had not let up its pounding deeper into the American sector.
At times, a warhead struck its own troops, but Cheng, with a four-to-one advantage, could afford “blue on blue”— “friendly fire.” Besides, he had resources of over half a million he could draw on almost immediately from the south who were being held there only because of the possibility of Taiwan attacking.
Again as on their drive south, Freeman’s men found the Chinese method of clearing a mine field insane and devastatingly effective, as one PLA soldier would use the bodies of his fallen comrades as stepping stones through the field until he either made it or was killed himself, in which case he became the next stepping stone. What was holding the Chinese up, however, were those M1s, which, once they ran out of ammunition, got close enough to ram the enemy, the ramming power of an M1 against a T-55 or 72 resulting in a demolition derby in which Chinese welding had much to answer for.
Second, the Americans, taking Freeman’s repeated warnings about the truce merely being a resupply device by the Chinese, had dug in as well as any marine had at Khe Sahn in the Vietnam War. And of primary importance in this were the prolific and well-dug American grenade sumps.
Under Freeman’s direct orders, all officers and NCOs down to and including section leaders were told that when they dug in they must be sure to dig what was in effect a dry moat about their feet so that the earth they stood on for firing positions was in fact a raised rectangle of earth that sloped away on all sides. It meant that when the Chinese tossed their stick grenades, which, being more offensive than defensive grenades, had more blast than shrapnel, many grenades simply rolled and/or were kicked away down the sloping firing platform into the deep grenade sump trench which contained the explosion. The worst off was any American who was wearing contact lenses, as the flash would throw up fine dirt that would sting and temporarily blind a man in the trench.
Lacking enough mobile artillery to cover such a huge front from Orgon Tal to the Manchurian-Siberian border, Cheng relied heavily on the plentiful supply of grenades for the infantry. The American grenades, however, being primarily defensive, as ordered by Freeman, were made less to stun than to spray dozens of splintered fragments acting like scythes among the Chinese who advanced en masse again against the dug-in Americans. And in more than one foxhole, the steam of urine rising in the typhoon’s cold air gave evidence of yet another marine cooling down his machine gun barrel as the Chinese kept coming from Orgon Tal. now designated the “ant heap” by those Americans of the Third Division’s Second and Sixth Infantry Battalions who had been stemming Cheng’s advance.
Now quantity was starting to tell as the American supply line, severed in more than one place, was unable to keep up with the wastage at the front. Of all that he hated most, Freeman hated giving an order to retreat. But if he was “shot through,” as Wolsey said of Thomas More, with pride, he was not profligate with his men, and if he could save one American life he would do so, as Cheng had learned from Freeman’s insistence during the truce that the Chinese hand over a lone SEAL, by the name of Smythe. Smythe was still being held in Beijing jail as a spy because he “bore no proper uniform when caught at the Nanking Bridge,” which the SEALs had blown before the truce.
With Freeman’s retreat to another line twenty miles to the northwest, Chinese poured into the gap, but here the mechanical aspect of the U.S. Army outdistanced the Chinese now overrunning the U.S.’s abandoned positions. The Americans, as Cheng well knew, loved wheels and would not go anywhere without transport, reminding Cheng of the French troops in the counterattack at Verdun in ‘14 who were driven out from Paris to the front in thousands of taxis. But Cheng did not care that so many potential American POWs had escaped. What was important to the Chinese commander was that he had won a decisive battle, forcing Second Army to yield over two thousand square miles of territory, even if, as Nie was fond of saying, the territory was fit only for Gobi Bactrian camels, who, because they were so perfectly camouflaged in the desert, had been used by the Chinese hauling up tons of supplies to the front, for even the lightly outfitted Chinese soldier needed ammunition and rice resupply to press home the fight against Freeman’s “imperialist warmongers.”
The news flashing across China and — courtesy of CNN — across the world was that a great victory by the People’s Liberation Army had been won all along the Orgon Tal-Honggor line, and the Americans were in full retreat. In the Mideast, millions took to the streets of Iraq and Iran to cheer the Chinese victory, and in the United States, antiwar protests were appearing outside the White House.
For Freeman, one of the worst blows was the discovery by the Chinese of dozens of blivets — enormous, water bedlike containers of fuel — buried at strategic points in the desert in the event of his armor — Bradleys, M1s, and armored personnel carriers — having to fall back. Much of the soil used to hide the blivets had been blown off by the typhoon, revealing bald patches of earth where a section of the blivet was visible.
The Chinese immediately set fire to them so that many of the M1s returning to what they thought was a hidden fuel depot found there raging fires going up in orange-black flames hundreds of feet high. Some of the blivets were used to refuel the PLA’s T-62s, and entire blivet dumps were ignited by the warheads from the Tibetan ICBMs. At Honggor, the U.S. Seventh Corps under General Meisen were badly mauled, caught in a Chinese outflanking movement coming up through the dunes, and over three thousand Americans were taken POW.
In the United States, talk of recalling Freeman and suing for a peace treaty was growing louder with each newscast of the withdrawing Americans. Reporters continued to get it wrong, including CNN, by repeatedly referring to army personnel carriers as tanks and creating the impression that U.S. armored losses were catastrophic, whereas the truth was that the M1s had acquitted themselves magnificently, but without gas they were merely heavily armored coffins.
“Goddamn it!” Freeman thundered. “We’ve got to get back into the fight. How far away from Lake Nam is the SAS/D detachment?”
“A half hour, General,” Norton said. “Chinese radar probably has them on screen now—”
“But we’ve got Wild Weasels running countermeasures, haven’t we?” Freeman pressed.
“Yes, sir. Just hope it works.”
Over the remote town of Kormeng seventy-five miles northeast of the drop zone, the planes had picked up an active Chinese radar signal, and so the countermeasures began from the Wild Weasels, and the fighter cover began sending out powerful active signals of their own, so powerful that instead of seeing the dot or dots of incoming enemy planes, all the Chinese saw was a wide, incandescent cone that they knew contained American planes but that was so fuzzy and wide that no one plane could be spotted, nor a general bearing ascertained. As well as this jamming of the Chinese signal, two of the F-15Es detected at the widest part of the Chinese signal a side lobe, like the outer rings of a ripple, the fighters producing strong return signals in the lobes that misled the Chinese radars by creating what seemed to be a signal bouncing off the American fighter but was in fact a ghost signal from the side lobe, thus giving a false bearing — a case of the F-15Es using the ChiCom radar against the Chinese.
“Get ready!” the jump master was informing the troops by placing both palms of his hands toward them. David Brentwood and the other seventy-nine SAS/D men rose in two lines of forty each. The jump master had his hands on his chest as if he were holding two suspenders, then the jump master’s right arm dropped to a forty-five-degree angle signifying “Stand by door — prepare to jump.” The warning light had gone from red to warning yellow.
David Brentwood waddled to the door like a pregnant bear in his antiterrorist hood and his seventy-pound drop bag of equipment. The light went green, and he was gone— into the swirling, icy darkness twenty-five thousand feet up. It was déjà vu. He was over a five-to-eight-mile gap between the twenty-thousand-foot-high mountain range and the vast salt lake somewhere off on his right, but he was also back over Ratmanov Island, the clouds whistling past in various shadows through his infrared goggles, their cold wetness and insubstantial forms wrapping around him like wet cloth so that soon he felt everything had frozen solid, barely hearing the quickness of his breathing, like a trapped animal, as he pulled the rip cord, felt the sudden jerk, the uprising, the descent again, and the punch in his stomach that he and every other man on the mission felt as they tumbled into the howling vortex of screaming wind and felt the concussion of heavy AA exploding. But by then the Hercules had already turned with its fighter escort, and the troopers were parachuting, or rather gliding and steering their way down in the night.
Aussie Lewis lowered the right toggle of his chute, pulling the right side of the arcing, rectangular chute down in the rear and so in effect braking it as it turned right. Then, in a clear, moon-flooded sky between stratus clouds at eighteen thousand, he pulled the right toggle down to his waist level, putting himself in the tightest possible spiral turn, which was pulling him away from the lake, a vast, polished blackness far down on his right, hoping that he was moving more toward the base of the mountain range on his left, but not too far, otherwise he would be on the side of a mountain.
No one could know if any of the eighty troopers were lost until they reached earth and could use their beeper transmitter and hand-held Magellan 3 GPS — geosynchronous positioning system — accurate in placing a man’s position with a maximum error of ten feet.
As Aussie descended he heard his heavy breathing like a pilot pulling four Gs over the banshee howling of the high Tibetan wind. Each man carried four hours of oxygen for both the oxygen-starved jump and the fact that Lake Nam was three thousand feet higher than Lhasa, and even in Lhasa there was often oxygen starvation bad enough to produce both benign and malignant AMS, or altitude sickness. It could start with headache, unusual behavior, dizziness, nausea, and vomiting, the malignant form ending in coma and death. Even the Acetazolamide 250mg tablets every eight hours, which the SAS troopers had with them, were only marginally useful in reducing the headache, but for the more serious cases of AMS, the patient, failing to get enough oxygen, would breathe faster and the blood would thicken. Needing six liters of oxygen a minute, the SAS drop packs on the end of their twelve-foot tether line carried two additional small high-pressure O2 tanks.
Triple A was now coming in their direction, now that the planes were gone, enough metal about the paratroopers to give off faint radar echoes.
Glancing at his wrist altimeter in the fleeting moonlight, Aussie, through the infrared goggles, saw that he was at six thousand feet. He wouldn’t put down his tether line and pack until he was three hundred feet above the ground. At the moment, his “infrareds” revealed nothing in the swirling grayness beneath him, only the odd streak of tracer more than a mile away. Then suddenly the sky seemed to explode, filling with a volcanic roar and a pulsating whitish gray in the infrared goggles — in reality a crimson-orange glow that streaked heavenward, a DSS-5.
Those lower than Aussie, having been dragged down faster than they would have liked by wind shear, got a good infrared fix on the missile’s plume, and had its point of liftoff cross-referenced to a position plus or minus a mile. It was the height of Chinese contempt for the enemy. Knowing it was unable to be bombed, so confident in the impregnability of their mountain redoubt, the Chinese had simply dismissed the appearance of paratroopers on the screen as yet another futile Allied attempt, and had rolled out the rail car base platform to fire off yet another missile that would strike Second Army over two thousand miles away.
As their packs hit the soft snow and the chutes collapsed, the commandos were already extracting their weapons, and section leaders were taking stock of how many had landed. In all, seven were unaccounted for: three, including Aussie, from Aussie Lewis’s troop of twenty, and four from Salvini’s troop. They all knew the rule: no one would wait for the seven, but all would proceed as quickly as possible to the target area. No one man or small group of men could delay the attack, because for every multiwarheaded missile fired, the equivalent of ten enemy missiles being launched at once, more Americans would die.
“Just my friggin’ luck!” Aussie said as he hauled in the chute, quickly rolling it up and burying it in the snow. From the plume of the missile he had reckoned he’d been “sheared” two miles northwest of the missile site, two high ridges between him and the site, the ridges forming part of the mountain range’s foothills.
He clipped a banana-shaped magazine of thirty 9mm Parabellum cartridges into the 12.8-inch-long Heckler & Koch MP5K, set it for three-round bursts, and then, putting on his winter-white-sheathed pack, he began heading southeast toward the missile site. Clouds of wind-whipped snow streamed off the ridges, creating whiteouts.
After walking for about five minutes, Aussie paused and knelt to tighten the white overlay hood that fitted snugly over his National Plastics ballistic composite helmet and to pull down on the Velcro tab of the Kevlar vest’s groin panel. As he got up he saw the imprint of a boot. He couldn’t tell whether it was a Vibram sole or a Chinese imprint because of the powder-drift snow that had all but filled in the indentation.
Pulling down his infrared goggles, he began following the tracks, which he could tell belonged to only one man and not a patrol. But he could be in between a patrol’s forward scout and the rest of the patrol, and so he made sure to walk in the tracks so as not to alert any patrol further back to his presence. He was struck by the coincidence that whoever he was following must be about the same build as he was — the footprints remarkably similar to his — until he consulted his wrist compass and discovered that in the whiteouts he’d gone full circle, had in fact been tracking himself for the last five minutes. “You fucking zombie!” he told himself, chagrined at the ribbing he would take if any of the SAS/D comrades ever found out.
The bullet that hit him threw him back six feet into the snow, the impact of the 7.6 round ripping open his snow-white camouflage overall but absorbed by the plasticine layers of the vest. Within a second of hitting the snow he had the HK on fully automatic and got off a spray, hearing several of the bullets striking hard rock beneath the flecks of snow.
He rolled fast left — could see a blob — and let the HK have its head. The blob shivered into a blur and fell on the snow. Clipping in another mag, he ran to the right of the body now lying about forty feet from him. As he got near he could smell human excrement and turned the man, who was dressed in Mao padded winter issue. There was a bloody hole where his chest used to be, and Aussie guessed he was the point man for a ChiCom patrol. The others couldn’t be far away, coming up behind him from the direction of the missile site. He and they might be less than a hundred feet apart, hidden from one another’s view by the whiteouts.
The thing that infuriated the Australian was that here he was, slated to lead his troop into the main attack, and instead he had landed nowhere near them and run into a patrol to boot.
The best he figured he could do was take off his helmet, don the earflap Mao headpiece the ChiCom was wearing, and put his helmet on the dead ChiCom. After this he put the empty mag back into the HK and took the AK-47. Lewis then put his HK in the man’s right hand and put an HE grenade under the man’s right thigh, pulled the pin— the ChiCom’s weight holding down the spring clip — and moved off to the left of the man’s trail behind several snow-capped forty-four-gallon-size drums and waited with the AK-47.
Within a minute he could hear the tired shuffle of boots through the snow. They weren’t lifting their feet up and placing them down “smartly!” as the SAS sar’major would say. No, they were obviously regular army troops out patrolling the godforsaken perimeter of the site, probably convinced — until they’d heard the exchange between the HK and AK-47—that they were thankfully out of the fighting that they could now hear two miles back over the two snow-covered, treeless ridges.
The moment they saw the body, covered in its winter overwhites as they were, its head covered by an Allied special-forces helmet, a Heckler & Koch SMG by his side, there was a celebratory call for their forward scout.
“The HK is mine,” one of the Chinese claimed, and as the others fanned out slightly, still calling for their point man, one of them put his foot under what he believed was the dead American’s torso. He glimpsed the grenade and the snow-covered face and turned to run. It was too late. The grenade exploded, killing him instantly. But Lewis wasn’t watching him.
Instead he had already thrown two other grenades, and as they detonated in flashes of brilliant purple, cutting down the tail end Charlie and the two men nearest him, Lewis moved the AK-47 to the remaining two, who were running for cover, one tripping in the snow, his partner brought down by a single shot from Lewis sixty feet behind him. There was a click from the Kalashnikov. Without hesitation Aussie Lewis drew his thirteen-shot Browning .45 and started running, unclipping a flash-bang stun grenade now his HEs were spent.
The man who fell never got up as Lewis fired two shots on the run from his Browning automatic. The last man swung around, out of breath. He looked like a polar bear enraged but at a distinct disadvantage. He was up against one of the SAS who had spent hundreds of hours in calm to gale-force winds pursuing one another across the wild moors and in the Black Mountains on the Welsh border. If you weren’t fit enough to run miles at a time and fire accurately on the run then you failed the course. The last ChiCom sprayed left to right with his AK-47. Lewis hit the snow, used both hands to fire, and hit the ChiCom, and in his mind’s eye saw the mustachioed SAS regiment’s sergeant major berating him, bellowing, “You bloody wastrel, Lewis. Queen pays for your board and keep and you go wasting bullets. Pull yourself together, man. One target, one shot!”
Lewis was too busy to celebrate his one-man ambuscade. Picking up his HK and helmet, he only hoped that he wasn’t missing out on the action at the missile base, and then there was the small matter of “extraction”—getting out via the Pave Low choppers after the raid.
He began a steady, loping, long-distance run toward the two ridges, fervently hoping that all the troopers who’d made it near the target were as lucky as he had been.
They weren’t
The mountain cave that had been selected by the Chinese for expansion into a bomb-proof shelter for the launching of its ICBMs was at the bottom of a north-south V that was formed by two enormous toes or foothills coming out of the twenty-thousand-foot mountain range opposite Lake Nam.
Back-checking on the Pentagon computers had ascertained that it had been the site some years earlier of a Chinese underground atomic test for which, taking advantage of a natural fissure in the rock, had been excavated a hole a mile into the base of the mountain range. A hundred-ton rolled steel door on left-to-right slider rails blocked the entrance of the cave and was opened only long enough for the rail-mounted missile-firing rig to be wheeled out, or rather shunted out, by two locomotives, just long enough for the launch. It was this out-in launch procedure that had given birth to “Cuckoo Clock,” Freeman’s code name for the attack on the Chinese ICBM site.
“Jesus,” one of the men in Salvini’s team said, “we’re the ones that are cuckoo.” He was looking through Salvini’s infrared binoculars, and the door, even half a mile away, did indeed look impregnable. But that would only be the start of it. If they could blow it, they would still have to go inside and wreak such damage on the site that it would be permanently out of action.
The Second Artillery — Chinese nuclear arm — was renamed the “Strategic Rocket Troops” in 1984, but many of the older commanders like General Wei still knew it as the Second Artillery and referred to it as such in their communiqués.
To protect the massive cave site, Wei had two hundred specially trained mountain troops from the Damquka base from the other side of the mountain range, and upon one of their patrols’ report that at least fifty, possibly a hundred, enemy paratroopers had landed, Wei sent a hundred of his mountain troops out to deal with them, leaving a hundred in reserve inside the cave.
Wei knew that an attacker needed at least a three-to-one advantage if he hoped to make any headway at all, and even at that it would be tough going. Besides, his mountain troops and his one-hundred-man company of regular troops were already acclimatized, anyone who had suffered from altitude sickness having been weeded out and returned to the lower-altitude regiments. Wei expected his men to make short work of the enemy paratroopers, who had no support akin to that of his own troops.
Despite the multilayered nature of their uniforms, from polypropylene underwear, quilted polyester pants and jacket to the white Gore Tex camouflage hooded parka and pants over their black antiterrorist uniforms, the SAS troopers moved easily in the snow, and in the starlight-activated binoculars, David Brentwood could see the huge, one-hundred-ton door now one mile away. Then through me infrared binoculars he could see two streams of heat waves shimmering like a summer mirage as two lines of PLA soldiers, only their body heat visible, exited somewhere beneath a high mantle of snow well above and back from the door.
It meant that there must be exits atop the complex, for at least twenty, maybe twenty-five, came out each side, quickly disappearing into a jumble of snow-covered rocks and boulders mat trailed off either side of the solid steel door that now glistened in the starlight goggles as a green sheen, covered in a sheath of solid ice in the minus-thirty-degree weather.
With radio silence a must, a runner from Salvini’s troop, another from Aussie’s, and the last from Choir Williams’s troop, gathered around David Brentwood, who could now see that the originally envisaged plan of attack to blow out the huge reinforced steel door was impractical as well as foolhardy, given the sudden appearance of about fifty enemy troops, and these were only the ones they’d seen exiting through what must have been holes bored through the solid granite roof, exits that not even the Stealth bombs could penetrate.
Brentwood checked his Heckler & Koch and told the runners that a frontal assault on the door was pointless. The best way in is where they came out. Whoever’s in charge in there must be a rocket man — he sure as hell isn’t an infantry commander. Shouldn’t have deployed his force so quickly — now he’s given away two exit-cum-entrances, one high left of the door and back, ditto for the right side. Now I want my troop and Aussie’s to take the left flank, Choir Williams and Salvini—” There was a whistling through the air. They all hit the deck and felt the crunch of a heavy 81mm mortar exploding about a hundred yards off, sending up a white spume of snow and ice rising high in the air, a sign of just how deep the snow and ice layer was. It immediately told Brentwood that neither side would be digging in unless they had a front-end loader, and so it would have to be a bounding “overwatch” advance, using the snow- and ice-crusted rocks that had been used to excavate space for the door as cover and that now lay about the cave entrance as massive boulder debris.
Aussie Lewis had reached the top of the first ridge, which was about a hundred and fifty feet high. Despite the absorbency of the Gore Tex overlay, he was sweating profusely and knew he couldn’t afford to pause for long lest the perspiration quickly turn to ice in the minus-twenty-to minus-thirty-degree weather. He checked his HK. It was a beautiful submachine gun, its constituent parts engineered and turned by the best German industry had to offer. However, like so many precision instruments, if one section was even slightly out of kilter the whole was endangered. But all felt well as he moved from the three-round-burst position to full automatic.
There was now about a mile to go — down the side of the ridge onto the summit of the next — and then below him he should see the missile site — if his boys hadn’t already penetrated it
At the top of the next ridge, its summit more acutely angled than the last and subsequently much icier, he could see nothing but fog, creating a complete whiteout. Then for a few seconds it lifted, and he glimpsed a parachute flare, its stuttering light revealing what seemed to be a massive sheet of ice, like a frozen waterfall, about a mile away, and infrared hot spots bleeding from atop it on either side. He guessed it must be exits above the door, but in the dying light of the flare the sheen of ice took on a darker sheen like black ice, and he couldn’t be sure it was the door. Now everything was black again, and the wetness of the fog clung about him like a heavy web. He heard a noise — a tumble of snow — and froze, sensing someone was moving toward him but unsure from which direction he was coming. He readied for a full 360-degree swivel. Then he heard a voice that told him whoever it was must have a bead on him. The voice came again. “Who goes there?”
He was so relieved he let his HK go loose for a moment as he said, “Princess Di goes here!” and suddenly realized it could be an English-speaking ChiCom. The HK came up again.
“Son of a bitch! It’s Aussie!”
It was one — no, two Americans, both lost souls from Salvini’s troop who, like Aussie, had been blown off course. When they emerged close enough for him to see, he recognized one but not the other.
“Was it you doin’ all that shooting back there?”
“Yes,” Aussie said. “Ran into a ChiCom patrol!”
“You outflank ‘em?”
“Outflank, fuck. They sleep with the fishes!”
“What fucking fishes?” the younger of the two whispered.
“Fishes in the fuckin’ lake,” Aussie replied.
“How many?” said the older one, the man Aussie had recognized.
“Seven of ‘em.”
“Seven? Shit — you get the Kewpie doll?”
“What’s a Kewpie doll?” the younger trooper asked.
“Jesus Christ, Morely. Where you been?”
“All right,” Aussie said. “Let’s cut the social chitchat, boys. Nice fast run down to the main show. Watch out for loose boulders. If I remember correctly there was a lot of debris indicated on the SATRECON shots — when they blew out that great bloody hole for the missile site. Friggin’ mountain blew out toward the lake, making a kind of boulder-strewn valley between.”
As they started off, Lewis leading, ready for a 180-degree arc, the second man, Hogan, pointing his weapon left, young Morely with his weapon pointing right but ready for a full rear traverse, Morely whispered to Hogan, “What’s a Kewpie doll?”
“Be quiet!” ordered Aussie, who knew that as they approached the drop zone they’d have to be careful not to spook anyone. He was also figuring out the best way to go at what he was sure was the door. But first he’d have to confirm that it was the door with Brentwood, Choir, and Salvini.
“Aussie?” a voice came in the darkness.
The three of them stopped, Hogan almost hitting the Australian’s backpack.
“Yeah?” Aussie answered.
“Over here, sir. Captain Brentwood wants to see you.”
“Right,” Aussie said. “I want to see him. Where’s Choir and Salvini?”
“Down there,” the trooper said. “We’re all down there— ‘cept for you guys and I think four more.”
“Yeah,” Aussie said, “well we got ‘sheared’ off, didn’t we?”
The trooper sensed the Australian’s annoyance. Morely whispered to Hogan, “You asshole — no such thing as a fuckin’ Kewpie doll.”
“Fuckin’ is.”
“Take me to your leader,” Aussie commanded the trooper from Brentwood’s group. “I’ve just had a bloody brain wave!”
“All right,” Brentwood said, after hearing Aussie out, “but we’ll still have to prepare for overwatch.”
“No sweat,” Aussie said.
Now the Chinese had four more mortars on the go, but from a mile away — trying to zero in for a kill zone on the mile-wide stretch of snow-covered boulders and ice that separated the SAS/D troopers from the launch site.
“All right,” Brentwood said. “My troop and Aussie’s will go first.” He turned to the other runners. “You tell Salvini and Choir Williams to cover us. When we’re settled we’ll give you a green flare, then you move to the next overwatch position and we’ll give you cover and so on until we can get as close as we can. Keep going as long as you get green flares from me. One red flare and we stop everything.”
“So when we get near the door,” a trooper said, “instead of going for it we go for the exits, right?”
“Right!” Aussie cut in. “The exits — that’s our ticket.” It was then that Brentwood heard through the darkness the distinctive unoiled squeak that was either a bicycle or a fifty-ton tank.
The new boys, about six of them, in Aussie’s seventeen-man force, looked at one another and tried to smile. Aussie Lewis had commanded them to smile whenever they saw a tank — said that it helped overcome the natural terror of seeing the monster bearing down on you and made you remember that if you did it right, if you kept your nerve, one man could kill a tank.
“T-59 probably,” Aussie said. “Fucking tin can. We’ll take care of the bastard.”
The mortar attack had eased off — the ChiComs had either found the killing zone they’d zero in on should the SAS/D attack, or they might have wanted to avoid hitting Chinese infantry that might now be halfway across the two-mile-wide, boulder-strewn gap between the lakeside and the mountain fastness towering in front of them.
“Arpac!” Aussie called out. He was calling for the disposable French antitank missile and launcher. The launcher was small — forty centimeters long with a bore less than three inches wide and weighing just over three pounds with a range of one hundred yards, so small in fact that an old SAS joke was that if you weren’t careful you’d lose it in your pocket.
Once the trooper with an Arpac came up, Aussie told him, “We’ll have to get a lot closer, mate. But just be ready. If we advance quietly and fast enough and nobody shows their noggin, the Chows won’t see—”
They all heard the crack of the hundred-millimeter cannon.
“Down!” Aussie yelled as an HE shell slammed into a boulder fifty yards behind him.
“Shit!” one of the troopers said. “Bastards must be on infrared.”
“Okay,” Aussie said calmly, “let’s draw ‘em out a bit. He’s at the maximum of his range now.”
“Christ, Aussie, we can’t draw ‘em out much further. How far back can we go?”
“To the fuckin’ lake if necessary.”
Now they could see another two tanks joining the one that had just fired. “They can’t climb boulders, son,” Aussie assured the SAS man with the Arpac. “They’re going to have to come closer if they want us.”
It was a stalemate — the SAS/D could go forward with its leapfrogging or bounding overwatch advance, but the ChiComs’ three cannon and six machine guns — three coaxial with the cannon — formed a formidable barrier unless the SAS could get closer, which meant dodging behind boulders and emitting infrared signatures that meant you might as well wave “a bloody flag,” as Aussie told it, and yell out, “Here I am!”
Some of the younger Turks in the four troops were sorely disappointed. Nearly all the training they’d done was for hit fast, hit hard operations: rappel down the side of a building, stun grenade through a window, take out terrorists, clear the room. Quick, fast, furious, and efficient.
“What the hell are we sittin’ on our butts for?” one said.
“You want to die?” Salvini said. “Then just stick up your head and that T-59 will oblige.”
“Where the hell’s all the infantry we saw piling out?” another asked.
“Doing what we’re doing, sport,” Salvini answered, “keeping behind cover, and when they do move, staying right behind the tanks. Where would you fuckin’ be? Want to try to rush ‘em? SAS/D ‘who dares wins’—is that it?”
“Well it’s better than ‘he who sits, shits.’”
“All right, Joe, when we move in,” Salvini said, “you can lead. Right?”
“Right!”
“Okay?”
“Okay!”
“You want it like the movies,” Salvini said.
“I want to do something, not just stay out of range and freeze my nuts off.”
Salvini gave him a wicked grin. “Oh, don’t worry, sport. You’ll get your chance. You can be tunneler one.”
“What?” There was a chattering of 7.62mm opening up again and long, orange flashes of tracer in the blackness.
“You can be tunneler one.”
“We goin’ down a fuckin’ tunnel?”
“No, you asshole. We’re going into one, and you can lead the way. Attach the infrared goggles and take us in.”
“Where?”
“The mountain, for Chrissake.”
“When?”
“When Aussie’s got it figured out, that’s when.”
“He’s not figurin’ anything out. He’s still yakking up there with Brentwood. Think they should have planned better right from the start.”
“Oh, spare me,” Salvini said, getting mad. He didn’t mind the open give and take that NCOs, officers, and privates had among one another — it was the same in most elite units where mutual respect was earned in the tough, gut-wrenching, mind-building training, but it was still a team effort, and this kid was opening his yap once too often. He was from Brooklyn, like Salvini.
“We didn’t have all the info, did we?” he put it to young Brooklyn. “If we’d been told exactly what to expect, exactly what was here, we could have planned it better. We didn’t know. You never know the whole story so welcome to the fucking war.”
Aussie, Brentwood, and Choir knew as well as Salvini that they were in a stalemate situation. “Both looking down one another’s throats,” Salvini explained.
“You think,” another trooper asked, a black Kentuckian, “they’ll be firing another rocket soon?”
“Aha!” Salvini said. “Give the man a cigar. That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question, buddy. Longer we hold them up, more time our boys back along the DMZ will have without being dumped on every half hour.”
“Well, hell,” young Brooklyn said, “we’re not gonna stop ‘em sittin’ here, are we?”
“Maybe you’re right,” Salvini said.
“Well, Jesus, man, we oughta just break radio silence— pull out the four phone, spring open the satellite aerial, and call for pickup.”
“Where would you suggest?” Salvini asked.
Young Brooklyn looked hard at Salvini. Was the troop leader taking the piss out of him or what? He seemed serious, so young Brooklyn said, “Down by the lake’d be the best place to get us out.”
“I agree,” Salvini said.
“You want me to make the call?” young Brooklyn pressed.
Salvini smiled. “You do and I’ll blow your fuckin’ head off.”
A trooper from further down the line walked in, crouched down behind the row of boulders, and hissed, “Can anyone tell us what the fuck we’re doing?”
“We’re waiting to see if they’ll fire off another rocket,” Salvini said.
“What if they don’t?”
“Then we’ve done our job.”
“All right — what if they fucking do?”
“Ah,” Salvini said, “now that’d be different.”
Over in Choir Williams’s troop, made up of most of the Delta contingent of the SAS/D force, Choir was quietly humming the stirring “Men of Harlech.” Gwyn Jones joined in, and a cockney from Kilburn said it was nice to be serenaded “before we all die.” David Jones, no relation to Gwyn, said that maybe if the Chinese heard Gwyn Jones sing it one more time they’d surrender. They were all on edge — they’d wanted to hit hard and fast, to do what they were trained to do. This waiting around was the worst kind of enemy — gave a man too much time to count the odds.
Salvini lifted the flash protector on his watch and saw it was 0420 hours. At 0425 there was an enormous rumbling sound like the echo of a storm way to the south toward the Himalayas. It was the hundred-ton door moving.