by Ian Slater
At the same moment David Brentwood saw a white face near a candle’s flame, then caught a glimpse of Spets military fatigues beneath it, and yelled, “Abort!” into the darkness. In that instant Aussie saw Jenghiz’s hand shoot out toward him, and Aussie fired through his del, an explosion of orange silk, dark in the dim light, filling the air, Jenghiz hit twice, falling dead, and the crowd into which the SAS men turned now surging in panic, all trying to head for the exits.
There were shouts from the Siberians, a burst of jagged red fire over the crowd’s heads, but to no avail, the crowd moving even more frantically now, surging through the temple’s entrance, passing around the Spets commandos in a dark river of dels and fur caps, a roar coming from the street as the panic spread like an instant contagion. Each of the four SAS/D team members was now on his own, separated from each other by the mob and being carried along by it, past the incongruous sight of animals that one moment had been wandering in, grazing peacefully around the square, now in stampede, each SAS/D man knowing that Jenghiz had betrayed them. Each of them had to assume that their insertion point and therefore extraction point was known, realizing they would now have to revert to the emergency extraction plan. The latter called for them to rendezvous sixteen miles southwest of Ulan Bator, just north of Nalayh, the actual EEP, or emergency extraction point, at longitude 107 degrees 16 minutes east, latitude 47 degrees 52 minutes north, in a valley between two mountains, one to the north, seven thousand feet high, the other to the south, five thousand feet.
With each man carrying a hand-held, calculator-size GPS, none of them had any doubt about finding the place; the GPS could get you within fifty feet of a grid reference. The problem was, would they get there alive? And if they got there, would they get there in time? Their “window,” or time frame, was thirty hours. It was far too deep in enemy territory for a helo pickup, and so it would have to be a fighter-protected STAR — surface to air recovery — pickup. If they weren’t picked up first by the Spets seen at the monastery.
It was only then that Aussie realized that it hadn’t been a deer tripping the wire at all. It had been Jenghiz. All he’d needed was a piece of string, the resulting explosion no doubt pinpointing their position, whereas a transmitter would have been boxed in by the boulders. But right then neither Lewis, Salvini, Choir Williams, nor David Brentwood was burning with the rage of betrayal — survival being first and foremost in their minds.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
England
Meiling hadn’t found anything in the briefcase of any interest except a Xeroxed sheet notifying Brenson of a shadow cabinet meeting on the “China question.” The problem was, what China question? Was it confirmation of one of Beijing’s biggest fears: the possibility of a Taiwanese invasion on its east flank while the Americans invaded Manchuria? The PLA, with over four million in arms, counting the reservists, could more than cope with two fronts — could in fact turn them into victory. But its Achilles’ heel was what foreign businessmen like Jay La Roche had euphemistically called its “internal distribution system,” by which they meant a bad road system — one that was prey to monsoons much more than to enemy action.
In short, the difficulty for Beijing was transporting troops quickly from one part of China to another. Before the ceasefire, the double-decker road-rail bridge across the three-mile-wide Yangtze at Nanking had been hit by some of Freeman’s commandos — SEALs — and the result was a catastrophic bottleneck on the southern shore of the Yangtze that had extended as far south as Wuhan. It had been the biggest single factor forcing Cheng to sue for a cease-fire.
Now the bridge was repaired and the waters about it thoroughly mined, patrolled by Chinese frogmen, the bridge itself ringed by a thicket of AA missile batteries and by two squadrons of Soviet-built MiG-29 Fulcrums. But this kind of protection could not extend to all of the convoy’s rail links, and, taking heart from the resumption of the hostilities between the American U.N. line and China, the underground Democracy Movement was increasing its sabotage.
Cheng needed to know how deep they had infiltrated the party structure and what else they were planning to sabotage should the opportunity present itself. It was particularly important that his agent in London find out what it was about the China theater of operations that was preoccupying the British political parties. Oh of course, he told his comrades, it would most probably be an air attack if the British were involved — a European overflight perhaps, which would mean the attack would come from the west. But where along the thousands of miles to the west? Or perhaps it was to be a flight further north to sever the Trans-Siberian that forked off at Ulan Ude to become the Trans-Mongolian — to bomb it, hoping to thwart any Siberian assistance from the north. But railways were notoriously difficult to keep out of action for long by air attacks. Fake rails and quick mending by ground crew could make it a losing proposition for the enemy.
It might, of course, be an air attack on the missile complex at Turpan, but Cheng had to be sure. If he had to move fighters west, away from the east coast, this would weaken his coastal defenses. Once again he was struck by the fact that you could have all the SATRECON reports, have all the experts and all the computer enhancements you liked, but there were times when there was no substitute for a beautiful woman who was prepared to go to bed with the enemy, especially the ones like Lin Meiling who enjoyed it. She pretended, of course, that she was not promiscuous, and this only made the men more anxious to conquer her. Cheng sent a message to London that Meiling was to find out precisely what the Chinese question was, and to this end she must do whatever was necessary.
* * *
This time as Brenson was having a shower, Meiling drew the translucent shower curtain aside. Brenson’s naked body was steaming, filling me bathroom with a dense fog. “Are you finished?” she said slowly, disappointedly. “Already?”
“I’m in a hurry,” he replied, grinning, flicking the towel behind him, ready to dry his back.
“You sure you’re clean?” she asked him cheekily. She had the cake of soap in her hands and caressed it and squeezed it, producing a ring of suds around her forefinger and thumb. “You need someone to wash you,” she said, smiling. Demurely she got into the tub and, pushing herself into him, began massaging his buttocks, kissing his chest, sucking on him before her soapy hands slid between his buttocks, pulling him even closer against her damp, scarlet lace panties.
“Undo me,” she whispered, and in a second the scarlet bra fell to the side of the tub, her breasts rising, pressing-lunging forward.
“Aren’t you going to turn the water on?” she inquired.
“What — oh — yes, of course. Oh, Meiling, you don’t know how much—”
“Shh—” she whispered, and now a gossamer spray of warm water cascaded over them, washing away the soap as, one arm about her, Brenson slid down, licked her, and with the other arm pulled the suction rubber that down from the side of the bath. “Don’t want to break our necks,” he said.
“Or something else,” she giggled.
“Oh Lord — Meiling—”
Suddenly she stepped out of the tub, jerked the long fluffy towel off the bar, and wrapped it about her, prancing out to the living room, her panties still about her thighs where he’d pulled them down in eager anticipation. “What the hell are you doing?”
“Teasing,” she shot back, giggling, pulling her panties up so high they seemed to be cutting into her.
“Why — you little slut,” he yelled boyishly. “Wait till I get you.”
“Have to catch me first!” She was glad to see him fully aroused. At his most vulnerable she would ask him…
There was no time — he took her hard and fast and rolled off her, satiated and silent.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
When the CIS — Commonwealth of Independent States, or what used to be the Soviet Union — was desperately short of cash in 1990, it sold a twenty-four-plane squadron of Mikoyan Gurevich MiG-29 Fulcrum jet fighters to the German Luftwaffe. The Germa
ns, Americans, and others had seen the highly rated Soviet counterair fighter performing at air shows with its computer-controlled maneuvering flaps and the canton lever structure of its twin-finned tail unit demonstrating its agility.
But until now the West had never had a Fulcrum really to put through its paces, and all of the experts knew that air-show flying was one thing, air combat something else. The Fulcrum had demonstrated its ability, for example, to go into a tail-slide climb, a characteristic underscored in the hammerhead stall/tail-slide maneuver the aircraft was able to accomplish at a relatively low altitude of 2,500-3,000 feet, losing itself on radar in the near-vertical hover position.
But how dazzling would it be when put through the tight, gut-wrenching maneuvers dictated by a dogfight against, say, an F-14 Tomcat? The first up-close inspection of the Fulcrum by western experts didn’t look that promising. The German engineers sent from Messerschmitt kicked the tires and felt the plane’s skin and were frankly disdainful. One of them from Frankfurt contemptuously called the skin “Rice Krispies,” the plane’s bumpy surface, compared with the smooth surfaces produced for the American fighters, being the result of inferior rolling of the metal.
Then the Luftwaffe pilots took the Fulcrum up and were ecstatic. Some claimed the MiG-29 was the best fighter ever built. At Mach2.3, or 1,520 miles per hour, the plane, which could pull eleven G’s as opposed to an American nine, was a relatively small fighter. It was only 37 feet 4½ inches from wingtip to wingtip, and 57 feet long, as opposed to the American Tomcat’s 64 feet 1½ inch width and length of 62 feet. The plane’s box intake engines pushed the Fulcrum faster not only than the Tomcat but also the F-16 Falcon and F-18 Hornet, and it had a faster rate of climb than the Hornet. Only the F-15 Eagle could match its speed, but even then the Fulcrum was so good in its double S turns, loops, its flip-up midflight attack, and its spectacular dives on afterburner — its pilot equipped with an amazingly simple and cheap infrared “look-shoot” system — that the Luftwaffe quickly incorporated the Fulcrum squadron into its air force. And then the habitually skeptical engineers made the most intriguing discovery of all — namely that the inferior bumpy skin afforded the aircraft substantially more lift than the smoother, better-milled skin of its Allied counterparts.
Its two serious weaknesses were a comparatively small fuel capacity, giving it a maximum in-air time of only two hours without external tanks, which would have made it heavier, and, like all CIS-made fighters, it had been built to be directed by ground control and could take only one target on at a time. If ground control went out then the Fulcrum was effectively out, as opposed to the Allied pilots who fought largely independently of ground control. This factor notwithstanding, the speed and sheer agility of the Fulcrum made it a superb aircraft, and China, through the timely purchases of General Cheng, congratulated itself on gaining fifty of the aircraft from the CIS, all fifty planes stationed on airfields throughout the populous eastern half of the country.
One of the Siberian instructors who had come to China with the fifty aircraft was Sergei Marchenko, the renowned air ace who had downed over seventeen U.S. fighters, among them Frank Shirer’s F-14 Tomcat. Shirer had returned the compliment over Korea, but like him, Marchenko had managed to bail out to live and fight another day.
Shirer doubted he would ever get the chance to go up against Marchenko again. Even the talk of him possibly being given a try on the Harrier in Britain was no real consolation. Oh, the Harrier was a fighter, all right, but with a maximum speed of only 607 miles per hour, 5 Mach — not much faster than some commercial airliners — it was hardly a promotion to top-of-the-line. If flying B-52s was like driving a bus after the thrill of a BMW, then a Harrier was like getting a station wagon to drive after having handled a formula one racer. It would be a step up of sorts from the bombers, perhaps, but the Harrier was so damn slow compared to the Tomcat. And besides, he knew he was being asked only because of the shortage of Harrier pilots, most of them having graduated upward to the Falcons and Hornets.
* * *
Sergei Marchenko’s reputation in Siberia as the Ubiytsa yanki— “Yankee Killer”—ace came with him, though in Beijing he was called the cat man, the man of many lives. Whatever he was called he was held in awe, for despite the fact that he was a long-nose — a Caucasian — the Chinese pilots knew they had a lot to learn from his experience. And even if he was aloof and sometimes distant toward his PLA hosts, his ability to take the Fulcrum into a hammerhead stall/slide — to go into a near vertical climb, reduce the thrust of the twin 18,300-pound augmented bypass turbojets, and then let the plane slide earthward, all under 2,600 feet — was legendary. And when the Chinese saw how this maneuver could play havoc with enemy radar — which because of the lack of relative speed momentarily lost the Fulcrum from its screen — Marchenko’s skill was greeted with gasps of admiration.
Politically speaking, Marchenko, a Russian, son of the one-time STAVKA, or High Command, member Kiril Marchenko in Moscow, had no particularly strong beliefs one way or the other about the Chinese, the Siberians — or the Americans for that matter. But he was a Russian, proud of it, and, like Shirer, all he cared about was flying. If this involved killing Americans, so be it. All he wanted to do was to maintain his reputation as the top ace, and he was somewhat chagrined by the fact that unless the Americans crossed the Manchurian border in significant numbers of aircraft, it didn’t seem as if he’d be doing any more than training Chinese pilots as part of the fifty-plane deal.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
The fact that their journey to Ulan Bator had been on one of the nights of the baraany zah—the weekly three-day open-air market — meant it had been easier for the SAS/D four to escape the indeterminate boundaries of the flat city where the round, pointed-roofed, canvas-and-felt tent houses, or ghers, inhabited by the Mongolian herdsmen, stood next to modern buildings, the culture of the plains meeting, but not yet quite intermingling with, that of the city.
As Aussie Lewis quickly made his way past the new Mongolian stock exchange building on Sukhbaatar Square, he saw there were not as many Mongolian regulars roaring by in trucks as there were Siberians. It was stark enough evidence of Freeman’s view that the Mongolians were caught in a squeeze between the Han Chinese to the south, whom they detested, and the Siberians, whom they were more fond of but not friendly enough toward to want to be dragged into a war by proxy because of them.
Even so, the political views of the soldiers hunting you, Aussie knew, didn’t make any difference. A bullet from a Siberian AK-74 could kill you as easily as a bullet from the older Mongolian AK-47. His adrenaline up, Lewis didn’t notice the cold until he was well beyond the city’s limits, the khaki color of his blue-silk-lined del making him invisible against the dark foothills of the Hentiyn Nuruu.
By avoiding the main roads, such as they were, one leading south to Saynshand and China and the other east to Choybalsan, Lewis followed the course of the Tuul River for a few miles south, then headed due east, figuring that by skirting the base of the six-thousand-foot mountain he could be at the rendezvous point between it and the higher mountain to the north within the thirty-hour deadline.
All his senses were heightened, more intense, and he could smell the sweet spring grass and feel the cold that was now invading the warm wrap of the del and, as it had done with Salvini, was turning his perspiration to ice. He slowed the pace and got his second wind. He heard a truck coming in his direction about a mile behind him on the rolling grassland of the foothills, much of them still crusted here and there with patches of snow.
Often drivers on the steppes didn’t bother about a road as such, the land being so amenable to vehicular traffic, even in the stonier southern regions of the Gobi, that a driver, providing he had a good compass and/or good sense of direction, could easily make his own road. In doing so, he scarred the topsoil for decades. The earth was so porous, the hold of the grass so tenuous, that once driven over it took decades to heal.
The truck, its he
adlights two dim orange blobs, was off to his left, following the course of the river, probably heading for some gher settlement of a few nomadic herder families. Often herders were told when and where to move to better pastures by the party, whether they liked it or not. Suddenly something moved in front of him. His hand dove for the 9mm but in a vibrant moonlight he saw it was a tarbagan, a marmotlike animal, scuttling down toward the river. It was then he heard the feint but distinctive wokka-wokka of a helo coming eastward from the city.
He scanned the sky for any sign of a chopper’s searchlights, but in the cloudless black velvet sky of Mongolia, where stars were so clear that they seemed to spangle just above his head, he could see nothing.
He heard the helicopter sound the away and felt reassured by the feet that the SAS/D’s greatest weapon was that they were moving south from the city to escape, before turning east. It was the exact opposite of the direction someone heading out of the city would take if he wanted to head back toward the Hentiyn Nuruu, closer to the Siberian-Mongolian border. All logic would tell the Spets to head north, into the mountains, to where the SAS/D had been inserted, and not to head south, away from the Siberian-Mongolian border.
