In Lhasa the half-starved wild dog packs were howling and on the prowl.
“You have surprised us,” Major Mah conceded. “You’ve held up remarkably well.”
Hartog was curled up in the fetal position, in shock, all his finger- and toenails torn off, making him look in the dim, depressing bulb light as if he had painted his nails with bright red nail polish. Though his whole body trembled, his jaws were clamped so tightly that he had broken a tooth, and this too was bleeding.
“Now of course,” Mah said, his voice rising as if Hartog couldn’t hear him properly, “there is no point. Freeman has sent paratroopers to the site, the site you, Mr. Hartog, told them about.”
Hartog remained silent, his demented gaze fixed on some point on the cell wall beneath the bars, one of whose shadows bisected his face. It seemed to the major that Hartog was on the fine line between utter madness and possible recovery. But Mah also knew they would never find out.
When the guard came in with the placard of the type criminals had to wear and be paraded in during the Cultural Revolution, the major helped the guard put it over Hartog’s head and put a large dunce cap on him. “Get up!” the major said. “Otherwise this will hurt.”
Hartog put his hands out, looking like a man just cut down from a cross as they helped him to his feet. He was so weak he had to be carried down, screaming each time his feet or a hand got in the way.
They left him sitting at the entrance to Iron Mountain, from where he could see the holy Potala Palace from which he’d been dragged. They covered him with blankets to keep off the lightly falling snow, his guard having explicit orders that he was not allowed to parade the prisoner until dawn— until the Tibetans were about their business.
For Hartog, the snow was a gift from God. Each flake he let fall on his feet numbed him a little more, freezing out the pain, though he was no fool, knowing that when the snow stopped and the temperature rose by even a degree or two — or worse, if it was a sunny spring day — the unbearable pain would return. He thought of the orange groves of Israel, how they had borne fruit from the desert, and he could see the bright green leaves, so green they looked as if they were polished, and at that moment he promised that no matter what humiliation he would have to bear if they led him through town like a common thief, the Tibetans would be on his side anyway, and he would not break, he would will himself to survive, to be exchanged for one of MOSSAD’s prisoners. And then he would see the orange groves again.
The huge door seen through the infrared scopes was slightly open now, moving only inches at a time to the left and revealing a vertical split of darkness that was nevertheless awash from heat waves emanating from inside the enormous underground site, the gap the door was creating growing with each minute. The door was sliding, opening faster now, and soon the large black mouth, fifty feet wide and fifty feet high, was revealed as the cave’s entrance became visible in the infrared wash against the colder background of the mountain, and now another white, wavy pattern emerged on the infrared scopes, coming out of the mountain.
“Rifle flares!” Brentwood ordered. “Three.”
There were three thumps, and night became day, revealing an enormous rail platform on which a steel-webbed firing cradle rested, and on the cradle was a huge multiwarheaded DF5 East Wind missile, shrouded in a mist that rose in consequence of the warm hydraulic lines and the like meeting the minus-thirty-degree outside temperature. The tanks opened up with an HE round from each, and there was another chattering of the machine guns. Flitting shadows could be seen as regular Chinese guard troops — in white overlay — dashed from one boulder to another closer to the tanks.
“‘AH right, all right,” Aussie said as he pulled back the bolt of his troop’s Haskins M500B rifle. “We’ll keep our heads down, don’t worry.”
The missile platform, a long, reinforced flatcar, stopped about a hundred yards from the cave mouth. The door began to close, and the massive missile rose gradually up from its rail flatcar like one of the great Paris guns of World War I. Aussie guessed it would be another five minutes before it was in its vertical position amid what looked like a huge Mechano-set-like platform that rose with the rocket to form a gantry.
The Haskins M500B rifle, like the Haskins M500, had a weight-reducing fluted barrel that made the barrel cooler after a shot, an adjustable stock with bipod, a ten-power telescope and sight, and a muzzle brake that reduced the kick of the rifle. It wasn’t a beautiful weapon to look at, for it had been made for utility, not for looks. But it could hit a target the size of a man at two thousand five hundred feet — almost half a mile away. Like the Haskins M500, me 500B had a bolt action, but unlike me M500, it had a six-round magazine instead of a single-shot mechanism, and was mounted with a Kigre KN200F intensifier image sight that could be used night or day.
Aussie checked the magazine of six.50 caliber rounds, each round designed to take out a vehicle and/or smash into an aircraft’s vitals, the 1.5-ounce bullet having more than four times the whack of a 7.62mm round and capable of punching through four inches of armor with a hardened tungsten-carbide penetrator in the bullet, the rest of the bullet hard packed with high explosive and incendiary material.
“All right,” Aussie told his runner. “Keep your ass down and tell Brentwood and his boys to open up for ‘overwatch.’ Tell him we need to get a half mile from the cave. It’ll take us within the T-59’s range, so I’ll want everyone with an Arpac ready to go.”
In his troop, Salvini turned to young Brooklyn. “Right, sport, you can pack an Arpac and lead the way while we make our overwatch move. Let’s see whether you can bust a tank.”
Suddenly the boulder-strewn, two-mile-wide strip between the mountains and Lake Nam was filled with noise as Brentwood’s troops, most equipped with the HK11A1 light machine guns, let rip as they moved toward the three ChiCom tanks, which in turn opened up with cannon and machine guns, the echo of the cannon’s booms causing loose snow to fall down over the steel door like curtains of salt. A T-59’s shrapnel flagellated the air, hitting two troopers, one with arm lacerations, the other a bad gash in his thigh. Despite his top physical condition, Aussie, under the camouflage overwhites and polyester, was still sweating, as were most of his troops as they ran forward for a second rime after Brentwood, Salvini, and Choir provided a hail of covering fire, the battle joined by Chinese infantry clustering around the tanks.
And now the heavy Chinese mortars were “getting in the act,” as Aussie noted, their kill zone about a thousand yards in front of the tanks. The mortars were in fact much more deadly than the T-59 high-explosive rounds. Once the high-explosive round went off in the boulders and spread its shrapnel, that was it, most of it ricocheting skyward or at least over the heads of the SAS/D commandos. But when the Chinese mortars struck in relatively open ground, their shrapnel proved much more deadly, the Chinese mortars using time-fused rounds that often went off in air bursts, showering down amid the SAS/D men, four of them being hit, two killed outright, the other two severely wounded.
Now Salvini’s group moved up as Brentwood and Aussie and Choir provided covering fire. Amid the earsplitting cacophony of machine gun, rifle, cannon, and rifle grenade fire and the crash of mortar rounds, the night alive with tracers, Aussie reached a point two thousand meters — over a mile — from the launch rail car. He centered the crosshairs on the lower half of the missile, which now looked like an enormous redwood tree in his scope shrouded by mist rising like dry ice about the rail car, the two railway engines used to shunt it out now going back into the cave where the door was closing.
Aussie could hear the high whine of the hydraulics lifting the big missile to the vertical position, as he breathed in slowly, trying to ignore the adrenaline rush, exhaled only half the air he’d taken in, and squeezed rather than pulled the trigger. The crack of the Haskins, no more than a finger-snapping noise within the sustained roar of battle between the Chinese and SAS/D troops, would not be heard till after the bullet struck its target. Aussie did not take his eye off the telescopic sight and was first to see the small glow, like a dandelion shedding its seeds, yellow suddenly filling the scope, and then a crimson red flash. “Jesus Christ!”
The base of the missile, not yet free of the gantry but still manacled to it, shot out, or rather blew out sideways after trying to shoot up from the cradle. Instead it ripped the gantry to pieces like a wild animal tethered to its cage. Ignited fuel spilled, roared in a river of fire, surging about the base of the great sliding door, buckling the ball-bearing runners, the warhead section of the rocket tumbling to earth amid snow and boulders like some huge cone, and then the feral roar of the second stage fuel igniting filling the air, its hot blast dry as the Gobi Desert. Several Chinese were aflame and screaming horribly until taken out either by SAS fire or their own comrades.
Brentwood fired a green flare, and his and Salvini’s troops formed one line, making their way quickly, snaking through the boulders while Aussie Lewis’s and Choir Williams’s troops formed the second line of advance, but they were not firing, conserving ammunition for the next overwatch if there was going to be one, unless Brentwood thought enough damage had already been done. Brentwood signaled to his troop to continue covering fire and ran fast on a curving track through the boulders till he reached Aussie Lewis.
“Congratulations!” Brentwood said.
“Haskins are beautiful, aren’t they?” Aussie said, patting the weapon like an old friend.
“Yeah, but d’you think it was enough?”
Aussie Lewis wanted to shout yes, of course it was enough. He wanted to break radio silence and ask for the pickup by the helos that the U.S.-led forces had acquired with some arm-twisting on the border of India after the SAS mission had already left. He wanted to say yes and get back as fast as possible and do what he could for Alexsandra. “No,” he said, “it’s not enough. If they have a spare gantry inside, behind that bloody great door, they could be back in business in a day or two.”
“Well, if we went forward and blew up the rail lines?”
“Same thing, Dave — they could replace it in a matter of hours. Besides, there’s got to be a whole bloody store of missiles inside somewhere. We’ll have to go in.”
David Brentwood nodded his head. “You’re right I guess. But we’d better do it fast before they move in troops from Damquka on the other side of the mountain range.”
“Right,” Aussie said, and took aim at the nearest T-59’s infrared searchlight mounted to the right of the cannon. He blew it apart, then did the same with the other two.
“Why the hell didn’t you do that before?” someone asked.
“I’ve got two mags of point fifty sniper rounds, buddy. Missile had the first priority.”
“All right let’s go!” Brentwood said, and with that he returned to his men and another green flare shot in the air as a signal, not as a light, for the commandos had all the illumination they wanted in front of them in the burning fuel whose flames were silhouetting the Chinese as they dashed from boulder to boulder. Even so, the SAS lost another three men in a fifty-yard dash, and counting the four still missing since the drop they had seventy-one out of the original eighty.
A half mile from the roof exits high on either side of the door and back in the snow, much of which had been melted to ice by the fuel fire, the SAS/D saw more Chinese coming out — shot two of them, which kept the others’ heads low.
“Let’s concentrate on one exit!” Brentwood yelled.
Aussie disagreed. “You and Sal take the left — Choir and me the right.”
“Roger!” Brentwood acknowledged. “But be damned careful of shooting our lot once we’re inside.”
“You too,” Aussie said, and the seventy-one men split into two groups of thirty-five and thirty-six. All they were waiting for was to take out the three tanks.
Young Brooklyn had got to within a hundred yards of the nearest T-59, and he lifted the French-made Arpac, steadying its small tube against a rock, waited till the T-59 filled the peep sight, inhaled, held his breath, and fired. The sliding barrel recoiled, and the missile’s motor blasted from the tube at 247 feet per second without any telltale flash. The tank exploded. Again Aussie almost wished he’d told Brentwood that one DF5 missile blown up was enough, for he knew that in this close, the fighting must soon be hand to hand, and even veterans had no stomach for that.
In Lhasa it was dark and still snowing, despite the fact that it was officially spring. This was not that unusual for the Tibetan capital, nor were the wild dog packs that were congregating about the base of Iron Mountain. Its radio mast, which had received the signal that told the major that the attack on the missile site was taking place, was no longer visible in the snow, and the guard wasn’t sure whether the Dutchman was suffering from hypothermia or whether his shivering was because of the beating. A bit of both, he thought.
As the snow eased, more Tibetans could be seen emerging from their cluttered buildings onto the street. The major told the guard that Hartog was free to go. The guard prodded him with his bayonet and Hartog half fell, half scrambled down the stone steps. The dogs had not eaten, for the human feces they often lived on were covered by snow, and instead it was the smell of the Dutchman’s wounds that drew them, slowly at first, but then when the curs realized no Tibetan would help the downed man — the Chinese squad ready to deal with anyone who would try — the dogs moved in and tore the Dutchman to pieces, his screams drawing a large crowd, the placard proclaiming that he was an enemy of the people sodden and torn asunder by the dogs in their frenzied attempt to get at his vitals. A Tibetan monk was objecting, lecturing the Chinese on nonviolence until the major drew his pistol, and the monk’s colleagues hurried him away.