by Ian Slater
“Reminds me of a story,” said Smythe, his voice made tremulous by the rotor’s vibration. “This guy’s at an outdoor Indian convention—”
“Is he Indian?” asked Rose.
“What? Yeah, ‘course he’s Indian,” said Smythe. “Anyway, the head honcho asks him what tribe he’s from — ticking ‘em off on a clipboard, right? Indian guy says, ‘I’m a member of the Farkarwee tribe.’ Head honcho looks down, reads through the whole list from Apache to Sioux, says to the guy, ‘You sure? I can’t find the Farkarwee tribe on the list. How many are you?’
“ ‘Only me and my granddad,’ says the guy. ‘But I know we’re definitely the Farkarwee tribe.’ “
Smythe shook his head, like he was the guy with the clipboard. “Head honcho didn’t know what to do. Didn’t want to offend the guy, but he couldn’t find the tribe. Maybe it was extinct, wiped out? So he asks the guy again. Says, ‘You sure it’s the Farkarwee tribe?’
“ ‘Sure I’m sure,’ says the Indian.
“ ‘You positive?’ says the head honcho. ‘ ‘Cause it’s not on my—’
“ ‘Look,’ the Indian says, ‘there’re only two of us left, but I know we’re the Farkarwee tribe.’
“ ‘How can you be so sure?’ asked the head honcho.
“ ‘Because,’ says the Indian, ‘every mornin’ when we were comin’ across the country to this convention, my grandfather’d go out in front of the tepee, put up his hands and say, ‘Where the fark are we?’ “
Brentwood saw the cargo hold light go to red. They were five minutes from the landing zone. Once they reached it, they would rappel from the chopper down onto the muddy bank seven miles south on the river’s western bank, where the Yangtze, straightening out upstream, was at least three miles wide. A seven-mile-long, spatula-shaped island lay three-quarters of the way across from their touchdown point on the western shore. Both four-man teams and Zodiacs would be out and the chopper gone within three minutes, the men having to take out the Zodiacs semi-inflated. “Like pallbearers!” as Rose had indelicately put it during the briefing. Full inflation of the rubber boats by carbon dioxide cartridge would take place once they were outside the chopper, moments before carrying them to the riverbank.
The Pave Lows banked left to the southwest in a wide, end sweep that would be longer man a direct run in, but would keep them low over the rice fields and levees and, most importantly, clear of the three 425-foot towers situated north of the bridge.
Two minutes from the insertion point, the Paves’ pilots went from manual to hover coupler. The latter’s computer-fed data from the gyroscope inertial guidance system and altimeter automatically altered trim and yaw through rotor control to keep the chopper coming in on a steady vector low over the levees, toward the preprogrammed drop-off point by the river, now four minutes away.
The pulsating red light turned to amber.
As leader of Echo One, Brentwood, like Brady leading Echo Two, would have preferred a drop-off point closer to the bridge, and to land on the eastern, down-channel traffic side, but most of Nanking’s population lived on the eastern shore. Besides, the island would shield them from the more populated eastern bank.
Inside the cargo hold, Brentwood felt the tremulous vibration prior to the drop-off, saw the amber light switch to green.
“Go!” said the copilot, and the Pave Low’s gaping door ramp opened. Within seconds Brentwood’s Echo One and Brady’s Echo Two teams were both out of the choppers. The second Robert Brentwood touched ground, the smell of riverbank mud and human excrement from the rice fields snatched his breath away. Then his infrared goggles revealed a broad shimmering expanse that was the river, and before it a gradually sloping gray that was the riverbank. From the first step in his rubber reef walkers, which doubled as fin slippers, he could feel an icy wind moaning about his rubber suit. Through the infrared, the shimmering negativelike image that was the expanse of river became crazy-quilted, dark patches caused by gusts that had ruffled the surface and suddenly lowered the temperature of the water-air interface.
Brentwood heard the gentle hiss of air as Brady pulled the carbon dioxide cartridge on the other team’s boat. A moment later he heard another hiss, Dennison pulling the cord on Echo One, Brentwood feeling the gunwales of the rubber boat stiffening against his thigh as he caught a glimpse of Dennison steadying the WOX-5 underwater gun, its rocket projectiles against the belt-feed drums of ammunition for the minigun. The latter, a cut-down 7.62mm Gatling, had a hitherto unheard of firing rate of six thousand rounds a minute, another weapon Robert Brentwood fervently hoped they wouldn’t have to use.
Echo Two’s RTO — radio telephone operator — Petty Officer Jensen, had already slipped aboard Brady’s boat, his AN/PRC-77 radio in its waterproof pack on the back of his inflatable black life-preserver vest.
Farther back in Echo One, in a last minute check, Brentwood, his left hand firmly gripping the forward starboard lug of the boat, slid his right hand over the waterproof holster of nis stainless steel Smith & Wesson nine-millimeter Hush Puppy.
As Dennison, Rose, Brentwood, and Corpsman Smythe eased the boat into the ice-chilled water, Echo Two’s four-man team and their 1,300 pounds of equipment were already pushing off, making a sucking sound on the sloping bank, which seemed to them as loud as a gunshot. But Brentwood knew it was probably no noisier than a rat plopping into the river mud, the last of the four SEALs in Brady’s Echo Two ahead of them having stepped into a knee-deep silt hole. Brentwood pushed the thought of water rats out of his mind. It was one of the reasons he used to tell his younger brothers that he joined the pig boats — the submarines — and not the surface navy. In a sub there wasn’t enough room for a rat to hide.
Waiting several seconds for Echo Two to make some distance before his Echo One pushed off, Brentwood could already hear a distant putt-putting: river boats. He was surprised, however, that there wasn’t more sound, given the volume of water traffic Freeman’s HQ had told them to expect. Glancing at his GPS through the infrared goggles, he saw it was 2250. The current was running around three to six knots, and so all being well, using paddle assist, they could expect to be in the vicinity of the bridge well within the hour, only using the engines in the event of unpredictable swirl holes. Pickup, unless something went wrong and they were forced to go SOS on the emergency band, would be at 0300 hours. “Ample time,” as the briefer aboard Salt Lake City had put it, to recon the shore defenses near the bridge and slip in unseen, using the faint navigation lights on the sampans as pointers for the channel approach to the piers. If either boat thought they had been sighted, the decision to either start the outboard engine as cover or to engage would be left up to Brady, commanding Echo Two, and Brentwood in Echo One.
The two small boats caught the current, Echo Two already well offshore about a hundred yards ahead, Robert Brentwood back in Echo One, wishing dearly that the Chinese would never imagine, let alone suspect, such a daring raid.
The four men of Echo Two in Brady’s boat had a bad fright within thirty seconds of shoving off when an enormous barge — its navigation lights air-raid blinkered, port and starboard lights mere pinpricks in the vast blackness of the Yangtze — all but capsized the twelve-foot-long, six-foot-wide rubber boat, heavily laden as it was with anchor, ropes, tackle, C-4 plastique, and weapons. Brady, in the bow of Echo Two, only managed to see the barge, loaded with four rail-car tankers heading for the tank farm downriver of the Nanking Bridge, at the last moment, giving Echo Two a bare two seconds to avoid it, the barge’s wash alone threatening to swamp them as Brady managed to swing the Zodiac’s tiller, putting her bow on to the barge’s waves. The tank farm, faintly visible through the recon photos despite the smog over Nanking, had itself been a tempting target for the SEALs, but one that they’d rightly decided to forego in lieu of blowing up the bridge to sever the ChiCom supply line.
Another surprise for Echo Two, being the first boat out, was that though they had been told by Freeman’s HQ that according to China�
�s river traffic laws the right lane was the downriver route, in fact the rule, as evidenced by the sight of the enormous barge in the middle of the river, was made by the boats’ captains. It was the oldest rule in the world, on the river or anywhere else: the biggest won. Normally it would have been of little moment to the SEALs, but it made for an added hazard in their clandestine mission, Brady making a mental note of it for their debriefing.
The two boats — Echo One a hundred yards farther back, due to its later push-off, Brady farther toward the right shore — were about fifty yards apart going downriver. The smell of China washed over them, the odors of Nanking, like the few lights the great metropolis showed in the darkness, less exotic than anticipated — difficult to isolate in fact, beneath the pervasive smell of the ordure from the fields on either side of the mighty river.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Now Aussie Lewis saw the shape of an American helmet coming out of the artillery-cropped copse of aspen, and gave a low whistle. “Hey, mate! Buddy! Over here!” The man, about thirty feet away, silhouetted by a moon break in the clouds, stopped dead, then fell, his weapon spitting fire. As Lewis rolled, firing his HK in a tight, overbody arc, his face splattered by snow, he was aware of a searing sensation in his left foot. There was more firing off to his right from Choir Williams, and the man who’d fired at Lewis fell screaming, hands flailing in the snow for his dropped weapon. Lewis gave him a full burst and, in Lewis’s infrared goggles, the man’s body jumped, was still, then became a flapping gray. Lewis could smell a burning, rubbery odor where the man — who Lewis thought had obviously mistaken him for a Russian — had clipped Lewis’s left boot, singeing part of the Vibram sole. Lewis’s foot felt wet, but whether it was blood or snow, he couldn’t tell; he felt for the elastic-band-held medipac on the side of his helmet. SAS and Delta were bred to be tough. They were also taught it was false heroics — stupid — not to take a shot of morphine if it could keep you fighting rather than being a burden on your buddies.
It was David Brentwood who, under cover of a long burst of 5.56mm from Choir Williams’s HK 11 A1, made the dash across to Lewis to break the news. It had been discovered that the man they’d shot and a second one brought down by a Delta trooper on the northern side of the horseshoe of timber didn’t have dog tags. Special Forces — SEALs, the SAS, and Delta Force — did the same thing if they were on clandestine ops — but not regular army artillery. They never, but never, took off their dog tags. Some widow might miss out on the $50,000 death benefit.
“Christ!” said Lewis as the import of Brentwood’s “no ID” information hit him. “What you think, Davey? OMONS or SPETS?”
“Has to be Special Forces of some kind,” David Brentwood conceded. As he spoke, he saw more shapes slipping through the artillery-denuded pine into the thicker timber encircling the mountaintop clearing.
“Freeman was right,” said David Brentwood in a whisper. “We didn’t start the war.”
“Cunning bastards!” hissed Lewis, now grimacing, a sharp, hot pain piercing his ankle. “Siberian bastards started it — shelled the ChiComs themselves, made ‘em think it was us to get the ChiComs in on their side.”
“Freeman’s not going to like this,” said Brentwood, in what had to be the understatement of the war so far.
“Fuck Freeman!” hissed Lewis. “I don’t fuckin’ like it. We’d better get out of here, Davey. And fast. Fuckin’ Sibirs aren’t gonna want witnesses.”
“Why the hell didn’t they get out?” asked David. “I mean, why the hell—” Then he stopped, the answer frighteningly obvious. As he had told Lewis, the Siberians— Novosibirsk, to be correct — obviously hadn’t wanted their SPETS, OMONS, whichever, to get out. Obviously, all they’d been told was to shell the ChiCom positions and hold.
“Purple-flare time, mate,” said Lewis. “Get those friggin’ Wokkas in here fast.” He meant the CH-47 Chinook evac choppers from Kalga. There was nothing to rescue now but themselves, and they had to get out the word about who had really broken the cease-fire. It wouldn’t be believed by the ChiComs, of course. In any case, Beijing was probably now only concerned with having the opportunity to gain more territory. But maybe the truth would make some difference to internal Chinese resistance.
Flickering high above them, the parachute flare turned night to day, transforming the two acres of snow into an undulating mauve blanket. It also unleashed a fierce Siberian counterattack. In seconds the air was flailed with the crack and whistle of small arms fire punctuated by the stomach-punching crump-crump-crump of heavy hundred-millimeter mortars.
“Least the ChiComs won’t use their artillery this close to their own,” said Aussie Lewis, clipping in another mag and immediately realizing the foolishness of his remark. Both he and David Brentwood knew that, unlike the Americans, the Chinese commander would have no compunction about sacrificing a hundred or so infantry — more — to gain a position. And every SAS/D man on the mountaintop now knew that the Siberians, caught out in their deception, would be more intent on killing Americans than worrying about being overrun by the Chinese.
“Jesus — what a mess!” uttered Aussie, his words lost to the feral roar of David Brentwood’s Heckler & Koch submachine gun and the crash of mortars. “Where are those friggin’ chop—” began a Delta trooper ten yards to Brentwood’s left, but he never finished, decapitated by shrapnel, the stump of what had been his neck bubbling white with blood in David’s infrared goggles.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
His F-15 and F-18 strikers already aloft from Yerofey Pavlovich, Second Army’s forwardmost air base, flying ahead to provide an air umbrella, the pilots searching for breaks in the blizzard but not finding them, General Freeman looked at his watch. It was 0200 hours, cold, and still overcast. He tapped the pilot of the C-130 transport. “Let’s go, son! Can’t wait here all night.”
With that, the big Hercules lumbered forward on the Marsden steel-web runway, followed by another whose 220 paratroopers, together with Freeman and his 219 paratroopers in the first aircraft, would be responsible for securing the Nizhneangarsk drop zone — a frozen salt marsh ten miles east of Lake Baikal’s northern end. The remaining airborne troops would follow and be jumping from eight much longer, 245-foot C-5 Galaxies, each holding 345 men.
Freeman had few worries about the two-hour, 575-mile flight to the BAM — Baikal-Amur mainline — railhead at Nizhneangarsk. Although there would be three thousand men in all, the biggest airborne operation since the disastrous American and Allied drop over Arnhem in ‘44, he was confident the Siberians wouldn’t be expecting him. As added insurance, a USAF squadron of Wild Weasels, electronic jammers, was already airborne to scramble the radars ringing Yesov’s crack Sixty-fourth Division at Nizhneangarsk. The problem would be, once the Siberians made visual contact, how quickly Yesov’s Nizhneangarsk garrison could move up their heavy artillery and tanks to the drop zone. Freeman regretted the operation had to be carried out at dawn, but with any operation involving more than a hundred men, he knew it would have been suicidal to try it at night, when the zone on the frozen marsh was no more than a quarter-mile square in the taiga.
* * *
The jamming around Nizhneangarsk was only partly successful, the Wild Weasels, four hundred miles from Yerofey Pavlovich, coming under attack by a squadron of MiG Fulcrums, diving from fifteen thousand. Freeman’s assumption that the Siberians could be fought off by the Eagles and F-18s proved correct — most of the furballs, or dogfights, going in the Americans’ favor — but one C-130 transport was taken out; whether by the Fulcrums or friendly fire was not known. In the confusion of dogfights and thick cloud, no one knew. What Freeman, aboard the lead Hercules, did know, however, was that already over three hundred of his paratroopers were dead, cutting his force to two-thirds before he’d even reached the drop zone.
Inside the roar of the Hercules, the beefy-faced jump-master stood up, both gloved hands outstretched in front of him, palms forward as if about to push against an invis
ible wall, his voice raised against the thundering roar of the engines. “Get ready!”
There was a long shuffling noise, the heavily laden paratroopers still sitting, but moving closer now to the edge of the long plank seats.
“Stand up!” yelled the jumpmaster.
“Stand up!” repeated Freeman, the first of the stick, but at this moment no longer the boss aboard the aircraft.
The jumpmaster’s hands moved from the palms-out front position to his sides, as if he was describing the big one that got away, and as one the paratroopers rose awkwardly with their heavy gear, hooked up and checked that snap hooks were clipped on properly to the overhead cable without allowing too much slack on the long yellow static line. Each man checked the static line of the man in front of him.
The light still red, the jumpmaster’s right hand shot out, down to the right like an umpire pointing at the bag. Obediently Freeman, as the first of the stick, crouched at the door, looking out into the enormity of a swirling gray world of cloud mixing furiously with snow, his tight chin strap giving his face an older yet even more determined look than usual. The red light turned green.
“Go!”
The stick fell out as smoothly as could be expected under the circumstances, only one paratrooper fouling — his fifteen-foot static line still holding the deployment bag, but his connector links breaking too early in a wind shear. He was jerked hard against the fuselage, the soft, crimson explosion of his head seen but not heard by the next two men in line.
