by Ian Slater
When this monster came to a halt, it did so so abruptly that a wave of broken ice, reeds, and feathers surged forward from its wake along the midline of the tank just as the turret slewed to bring the main gun in line with the tunnel’s exit which, for Melissa, was two hundred yards away at two o’clock but only fifty yards dead ahead for the tank.
Melissa heard the telltale rotor slap of Cobra gunships. Then, a few seconds later, the much bigger air-pummeling noise of Super Stallions and other helos she couldn’t identify. Her heart pounding, she was elated, confused. Yorktown’s angels couldn’t possibly have returned so soon. Or could they? It must, she reasoned, be the pain of the multiple insect bites that was momentarily stupefying her brain until, her mind in excited overdrive, she realized the obvious truth, that Yorktown had managed to scramble an ad hoc second wave of helos from all around the fleet. Any helo that could carry drop tanks of extra fuel to cover the distance to Lake Khanka had no doubt been pressed into service, once SATPIX or HUMINT indicated to McCain’s Blue Tile boys that there was still terrorist tank movement after the cease-fire deadline, and such terrorist movement posed an undeniably clear and present danger to whatever elements of Yorktown’s MEU remained to be evacuated.
Melissa saw the T-90 belch recoil like a drunken garbage truck, the boom of its big 125 mm gun frightening her more than anything since the “water facility” at Parris Island. The crash of the high explosive round echoing back from the base of the exit stairway ninety feet below the surface was gut-punching and deafening. The blast wave hurled cement forward into the tunnels as well as spewing dirty clouds up the exit, hitting the T-90, the din momentarily drowning what had been the soft drumming of the rain.
While Melissa Thomas had started with fright, Freeman was knocked flat, as if some huge, invisible fist had slammed him down, winding him so severely that in order to breathe he rolled onto his back, tore off his gas mask, and gulped for air in the dust-thick darkness, his right — pistol — hand flung out in a desperate effort to take in as much air as possible. As well as much-needed oxygen, he also inhaled more residual tear gas. Still on his back, he put the mask back on and saw a white rain coming down onto his NVGs, sodden peat as well as red-hot pieces of floor grating falling indiscriminately about him, a brick striking his helmet, another hitting the chest area of his Kevlar vest, and yet another fragment striking his face, or rather the eyepiece of his gas mask, with such force that it spiderwebbed the hardened glass of the right lens, ramming the whole mask so hard against his face that the general felt as if he’d been in a barroom brawl. He could taste blood, and it was a moment or two before he recovered his senses, realizing that what had saved him from a worse fate was that as he’d rolled over the det cord, most of his head had been covered, not only by the gas mask and helmet but by the overhang afforded by the edge of the long, metallic MANPAD assembly table.
Now he could smell smoke.
Ninety feet above what had been the tunnels’ guard antechamber at the base of the exit steps, the cupola of the T-90 opened, terrifyingly close to Melissa who, no more than thirty feet away, was hunkered down near the fallen twisted branch and sea of reeds and realized that what she was looking at was not a regular T-90 but an upgraded version, reminiscent of the brilliant Israeli Merkava main battle tank with its troop squad section added to the rear of the tank that contained a commander, gunner, loader, and driver. She saw the tank commander appear, babbling excitedly, his torso above the cupola, and she could hear raucous laughter from the tank crew. Before she realized it, her weapon stock was hard into her shoulder, her left eye closed, the right cupped by the M40A1’s scope, only part of the commander’s head filling her water-streaked telescopic sight. She held a half breath to steady — and didn’t fire. The commander was getting out of the tank, followed by another crew member, then another, which told her that something must be wrong with the automatic loader. It was being replaced by a third crew member. But why were the terrorists exiting the tank?
The cupola banged shut, the tank buttoned up. The commander huddled momentarily in the downpour then drew his pistol, turning to one of the other two terrorists, one of whom handed him a flashlight.
Why on earth, wondered Melissa, would they bother venturing down the tunnel after the one HE round? Did they know Freeman was down there? Oh, shit! She’d been talking to him on their throat-mike radios. A scanner could have located them pretty accurately, if not with pinpoint precision. Now she could hear louder, distant sounds of Cobras and other helos of the second evac wave. Even given the normal confusion that characterizes the most elementary ship-shore-ship exercise, surely someone must remember to revisit the exit area? On the other hand, it was quite possible that as yet no one of authority in the fleet had heard about Freeman’s absence, but they knew that there were dozens of marines still spread throughout the marshes, waiting.
And did the terrorists want to kill Freeman so badly that they’d violate the twenty-four-hour deadline? She immediately berated herself for such an asinine question, excusing it as the product of her exhaustion. Here was a man, already a legend amongst men at arms, who had humiliated his opposition from one side of the globe to the other. Even his critics had conceded that he had been the soldier who, more than any other, had faced down the homegrown terrorist camps of white supremacists riding what he referred to, and was nearly fired for saying it, as “the understandable anti-immigrant mood” of the U.S. southwestern border states.
Melissa, fighting the cold in her sodden uniform, began shivering violently, her body assaulted by paroxysms of uncontrollable muscle spasms. All she had to cling to was the image of her DI at the water facility, his peaked hat, trouser crease sharp as a knife, arms akimbo, standing like the one and only God, declaring simply, but with the steel voice of utter conviction, “Cadet Thomas, you will prevail. Water is your friend, not your enemy. The chemical soup of your mother’s womb was the same as the sea. You are in your element, marine. Swim. Swim. Swim for the corps.”
She’d hated him for it, the badgering, but now it was his image, his immaculate sense of order and calm in the face and fear of chaos, that made her fight.
The three Russians walked toward the exit then hesitated, dust and debris still issuing forth too thick to breathe through. The commander returned to the tank, banged on the cupola, and shouted. The cupola opened and a crewman in a leather-ribbed helmet emerged and began passing down three biochem masks. Melissa took a half breath and squeezed the trigger. There was a bullwhiplike crack and the crewman’s head jerked sideways, his body slumping, half in and half out of the cupola. Thomas worked the bolt action on her sniper rifle — up-back-forward-down — so fast she had the tank commander in sight before he could step back off the tank’s front glacis plate, his hands dropping two of the biochem masks as he hit the ground where he died instantly from Melissa’s chest shot. Unable to get back into the tank because of the terrorist slumped in the cupola, the other two men started to run for the tunnel exit. She felled one of them, the other running blindly into the exit’s thick haze. She ignored him, her open sight back on the cupola. Her brain simply bullied her pain and cold aside, adrenaline alone stoking her determination as she smartly assessed the situation. The tank wouldn’t move yet. An open cupola with Cobra gunships around was guaranteed death. All she needed was a hand in her scope. A second would be plenty. Someone was going to have to pull or push the dead man out of the cupola so they could close the thing before a grenade came their way. They had no idea whether Melissa’s fire had come from one marine or more. She could hear panic in the tank, then the turret suddenly slewed, the 7.62 coaxial machine gun opening up, the turret moving through 180 degrees, but Marine Thomas kept her cool. It was something the Marine Corps held in contempt: wild, unfocused fire. At Parris they called it “Hollywood fire”—wasting ammunition. A marine’s shot, on the other hand, was always aimed to kill. The fire from the 7.62 was too high — the bullets zipped overhead. She saw the man’s body that was slumped half i
n, half out of the cupola suddenly, noisily, fall down back into the tank, then a hand shot up to grab hold of the cupola lid’s inside hand grip and she fired, heard a scream, and fell to the ground as the 7.62 mm rounds began chopping into the wood close right and — damn, she hadn’t warned Freeman. She flicked on her mike. “General, it’s Marine Thomas. There’s a terrorist in the tunnel and—”
“There was,” came the general’s nasal reply. She heard the general laugh. “Damned fool switched on a flashlight. Those stupid leather helmets they wear. ID’d him straightaway.”
Freeman couldn’t hear any more machine gun fire in the background; the only sound now was the muffled rotor slap of the helos’ second-wave evacuation. It was the sound of promise, of getting out, of freedom in its most literal, easy-to-understand manifestation, the freedom of a human being able to go from one place to another at will, not subject to some order from a totalitarian regime where terrorists such as the Taliban ruled.
Forcing himself back to the task at hand, the general felt for the det cord again, resumed his crawl, and, after a few more yards, realized why half of what had earlier been a more or less continuous line of terrorist bodies was now partially obscured: A crate of heavy MANPAD parts had fallen in the melée from the top of a stack of crates that had been piled high in the middle tunnel, the impact of the crate’s sharp edge against the metal grid severing the det cord. He pushed the box of MANPAD parts off the det cord, then, using his knife, he quickly cut the cord and overlapped the two ends by about a foot and attached det cord clips. He then took out his time-delay pencil initiator and crushed the vial, releasing the acid that in five minutes would eat away a thin restraining wire that would in turn release the spring-held firing pin, the pin then striking a percussion cap which would initiate the final sequence in the explosive train.
The general now quickly moved back toward the exit. His NVGs picked up a speckled bloom of light, caused by still-falling dust particles whose radiant heat from the tank round was still enough to faintly illuminate the exit stairs. Suddenly he felt, then heard, the earth trembling above him. It was the forty-seven-ton T-90, crewless except for the driver who was screaming in agony from a bullet-smashed right hand.
With three minutes to go in the tunnel, Freeman easily cleared the body of a terrorist whose flashlight was still on, the general then crashing into a folding card table that against all odds was still standing, albeit with one severed leg. But the general was up and running, with two minutes to go. As he reached the last five stairs to the top of the exit he was aware of a flash of light “blooming out” his NVGs with overload. Though virtually blind for the next few seconds, he felt the wet draft of air on his hands and on the skin between his battle jacket and the bottom of the gas mask. He remembered to turn hard left away from the mined area, running into an uneven patch of tank-mashed reeds, falling, getting up, his feet unable to gain purchase, the ground shifting, then he heard the “whoomp,” the roiling of the explosion knocking him off his feet. As if a ballistic missile had been launched from its silo, a huge V of dirt and debris shot out and up from the exit toward the higher ground, falling near the edge of the wood where he’d last seen Melissa Thomas. But now all was a cloud of dark gray dust over sodden earth, the clouds of burned chemicals and noxious fumes from the incinerated terrorists’ dungeon now spreading out.
Unable to see more than a foot in front of him, all Douglas Freeman could identify with certainty was the eardunning sound of the Cobra gunships’ chain guns, the Cobras’ tracers, if his sense of direction was intact, streaming toward the H-block. It was a maelstrom of fire, being delivered as punishment for the terrorists having violated the twenty-four-hour agreement, a venting of the Americans’ outrage against what the gunships’ pilots had clearly seen themselves and heard from rescued marine stragglers who had alerted the marine forces to the presence and activity of the T-90 tanks.
Freeman flicked on his mike to contact the pilots, but he could tell immediately that that bastard Murphy had struck again. All he could hear was static. And he was worried about Melissa Thomas.
At least the rain was easing, and a fragrant wind was rushing in from the Wanda Shan to replace the harsh, hot air of the detonation, an explosion which Freeman knew had completely destroyed the three tunnels, assembly lines, and the terrorists’ entire stock of shoulder-fired MANPADs, hypersonic small rounds, and torpedo prototypes. Boosting the general’s weary, yet decidedly effusive, mood, was the rapid withdrawal of the T-90 that had fired point-blank into the exit and was now paying for it by being attacked by the Cobras, who had initially come into Khanka as nothing more than escorts for the evac Stallions. The general’s celebratory high was quickly punctured, however, by his growing concern for Melissa Thomas. With the radio out, no flare gun, and the air around him thick with debris, how could he communicate his and her situation to the mission’s air arm? “Wait a minute,” he scolded himself. “Run, you bastard, run out of this crap cloud. No one can see you here. Run!” And he did, until he saw the two dead tank crewmen, whom he immediately checked for flares. Nothing. He ran on until his knees seemed to be on fire and he burst out into relatively clear air and the reeds. The choppers were gone, their gas tanks’ loiter times exhausted.
The general morphed into an angry savage, cursing with such force and volume that he dared any damned Russian terrorists who hadn’t had enough to show themselves and he’d personally shoot them. And when he ran out of ammunition he’d go strangle the bastards with his bare hands. Battle fatigue, he told himself. He saw a white blur coming at him and fired two quick shots. It was a small, man-sized parachute, one of half a dozen dropped either by either the unseen Cobra gunships or the Super Stallions.
“They’re message chutes. I’ve opened one.” He swung around, startled by her voice. Relieved, fatigued, and enormously embarrassed for having been caught firing at a parachute, and a small one at that, Freeman hurried over to the voice and found Melissa Thomas shivering violently, whereas he was perspiring profusely underneath the layers of Kevlar and battle tunic, with heat to spare. He embraced her in a bear hug.
The message in the milk-pail-sized canister attached to the chute was
ENCLOSED INFRARED X FOR SATELLITE OVERFLIGHT STOP MOTHER WILL THEN EXECUTE STAR STOP GOOD LUCK
“I’ve—” She was shivering so badly she could hardly speak. “—spread — the X over there.” Her hand shaking, Melissa was pointing to a flattened area of reeds. Freeman could see her face was tinged with the telltale bluish hue of impending hypothermia.
She pointed to the word STAR. “I — haven’t — a clue what—”
“Don’t talk. You’ll waste energy,” he advised her, while simultaneously trying not to show his alarm at the gross violation of operational procedure exhibited by whomever it was who had sent a message, especially one with such specific instructions. What if the enemy had picked it up? The fact that HQ had taken such a risk, however, told Freeman just how desperate operational HQ must be, the message, indeed the drop itself, stark evidence that time was quickly running out for him and Melissa Thomas. “We’ve got to get you warm,” he told her. “Don’t worry about STAR. It’s an acronym for a recovery system. I’ll tell you more about it if and when they see that X. They may wait till dark in case any of these terrorist bastards are wandering around—” He paused for breath. “—though I expect by now they know their money machine’s kaput, so what’s the point?” He looked around at the wood and marsh. Everything was soaking wet. “We’ve got to get you under cover. We’ll go into the tunnel exit. We can get dry clothes down there. Wrap ourselves in those and snuggle, if you’ve no objection. Warm you up. We’ll hear Mother when she comes.” He meant “if” a rescue plane comes, but Thomas didn’t need discouragement on top of her plummeting body temperature.
Once in the driest, least bloodstained clothes he could bring her, dressing himself only after he’d helped her, they set up an improvised machine gun nest just in from the tunnel’s exit, he dra
gging in the dead T-90 captain and crewman to use as an ad hoc barricade on which to rest his AK-74 and her sniper rifle, he down to his last clip of thirty rounds. He embraced her with his left arm, leaving his right holding the Kalashnikov, ready to fire. “No time to be shy, Marine,” he told her. “I’m old enough to be your grandfather!” he joked. “Come in close. I’ve got enough hot air to thaw a frozen turkey.” She tried to smile, but her mouth wouldn’t respond, her teeth literally chattering, but she did feel a suggestion of warmth.
As Freeman held the young woman, like other soldiers who had saved their comrades in the same manner from perishing of cold, he became aware of a smell other than their body odor and the reek of charred equipment and burnt flesh in the tunnels. It was the faint but very definite smell of a woman, and he thought of his first wife, Catherine, and Margaret. It was so distant, as if their love-making had been a dream long ago.
“Don’t you ever tell anyone,” he told Melissa, “that I shot at a damned parachute.” She said nothing, barely hearing him over the soft moan of the China wind whistling about the tunnel exit, the warmth of his closeness seeping into her. No one at Parris would believe it, and she sure as hell wasn’t going to tell anyone for the sake of both their reputations. She felt the general start. Something had spooked him.
