Force of Arms wi-7, page 10
part #7 of WW III Series
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Orgon Tal
“All right,” Robert Brentwood called out, his voice echoing in the hangar to which the Galaxies and Hercules had taxied after the hop from Khabarovsk, “everyone listen up. We’re using the GQ three-sixty chutes and going in HAHO.” He meant the high-altitude, high-opening technique as opposed to high-altitude, low-opening, or “HALO.” High altitude, low opening meant you were in free-fall up to two to three minutes at two hundred feet per second. It got you to the drop zone much more quickly than HAHO, but they wanted to avoid going straight down onto the ICBM site for fear that the triple A would chop them to pieces on the way down and that the PLA guards at the site would be onto them before they could break free of their harness and unlash their drop pack of extra ammo, food, etc.
Even so, Aussie Lewis, a veteran like David Brentwood, Choir Williams, and Salvini of high-altitude, low-opening, preferred to free-fall for two minutes then open the chute. Very few ground troops, he had found, could respond in under five minutes. But Brentwood said it was the CO’s idea to go high-altitude, high-opening two miles north of the ICBM site and therefore away from most of the triple A that SATREP revealed was clustered in the valley about the site. Besides, the slopes between the range of mountains and Lake Nam being only three to five miles wide meant that for such a high jump there was always the possibility of wind shears moving off the sides of the twenty-thousand-foot mountains. Freeman had decided that they should have high-opening, for this way they would have more time to steer themselves down, and also the drop planes could then turn off and so not encounter the worst of the triple A that festooned the ICBM site further along the southern end of the valley.
As Choir Williams was checking his nine-cell Ram-Air GQ chute, which had cross-port venting as well as both inside-outside stabilizers to help steady the chute in crosscurrent turbulence, Aussie Lewis made some disparaging remark about HAHO. “Oh, I don’t know, Aussie,” Choir said. “I prefer a little time going down to catch the scenery.”
At twenty feet per second, the high-opening descent from twenty-five thousand feet could take up to twenty minutes to half an hour, depending on how much glide was involved.
“We’ll be old men before we get there,” added Aussie, who was checking his insulated Gore Tex battle smock and trousers before getting into his overlay of SAS/D gear.
“All right,” Brentwood said, going down the checklist. “Oxygen masks, wrist altimeter, tether line…”
There were a hundred and one details that had to be checked, particularly the oxygen masks which, because of the danger of altitude sickness, would have to be used not only on the way down but for many on the ground as well after the freezing descent. David Brentwood was finishing getting into his all black SAS/D antiterrorist gear with his combination SF/10 respirator with oxygen tank behind. Even the eyepieces of the mask were blackened so as to withstand the flash of the famous SAS stun grenade. As well, he was sporting a Kevlar vest in black, a black Browning high-power thirteen Parabellum shot pistol, and his stockless Heckler & Koch MP5K belt kit of pouches holding extra magazines, stun and smoke grenades. Now he pulled on his Danner boots. He was pulling on his black leather gloves and checking to make sure his upside-down knife in its sheath was hanging properly from its tether in the middle of his vest.
“At-ten-hun!” Brentwood said, and Freeman, with Norton following, entered the hangar. There was a special respect that the SAS/D men had for Freeman. No matter what Washington said, he was a hands-on, at-the-front commander, and they knew that if he had his way he would have been leading the attack on the ICBM site. But the fact was that he somehow had to stabilize the military situation on his fast-disintegrating front east of Orgon Tal.
“Wish I could come along with you boys,” Freeman said, and they knew he was telling the truth. Choir had told the youngest of the commandos how Freeman had led the night raid on Pyongyang in North Korea and on Ratmanov Island. “That was a party, that was,” Choir said. Ratmanov Island was now part of the Freeman legend — how he’d led his men on the drop over the barren wastes of the Bering Strait and fought the special CIS Spetsnaz troops to a standstill in the tunnels.
“He likes tunnels,” another paratrooper said as they waited for Freeman to reach the impromptu dais made up of a wooden loading pallet.
“You think there’ll be tunnels on this one?” a trooper asked.
“Oh no,” Salvini answered. “Don’t think so. What would they be doing with tunnels? Nah, they can just disappear whenever they want. They make themselves invisible, see, and walk straight through the fucking mountain.”
“Hey — no need for the fucking sarcasm.”
“Gentlemen!” It was Freeman, putting on his reading glasses and pulling out an extension pointer that, recessed, looked like a .45 bullet casing. “… your attention.”
Salvini checked the magazine release catch on his HK MP5 and looked at the seven-by-four-foot stand map Freeman was pointing to. The general placed the pointer on central Tibet then let it slide to latitude 30.4 north and longitude 90.62 east near Mount Nyainqemtanglha Feng. Immediately to the south of Lake Nam there was a fifty-mile-long east-west range of mountains twenty thousand feet high running parallel with the lake, a small town called Damquka on the other side of the mountains on the China-Lhasa road. The whole map shuddered and dust spilled from the prefab hangar as more heavy Chinese artillery or a warhead from one of the ICBMs exploded in the distance around the Orgon Tal railhead. “… Between this part of the mountain range that runs southwest to northeast,” Freeman continued, “is a narrow slope that is the land between the mountain range and the lake. The lake is fed by streams from the mountain range, hereafter referred to as me Nyain Range. What we have to do is come down in the valley and head along the base of the mountain until we find the launch site. Once the big door opens, we go in.”
“Sir,” Aussie called out. “Have they got any ground sensors? If so, they’ll hear us coming for miles.”
Brentwood was glad Aussie asked the question. It was at least getting his mind off Alexsandra.
Freeman shook his head. “Don’t worry about it, Lewis. Only sensors they have up in there in that godforsaken place are a yak or two.” There was laughter.
“What we depend on, men,” Freeman said, “is surprise and speed. We’ll be in and out before they can get any PLA to us.”
“Why isn’t their PLA camp near the ICBM site, General?” another trooper asked.
“They’re not stupid,” Freeman answered, “that’s why. That’d be a dead giveaway to SATRECON. No, the nearest PLA camp is at Damquka — on the other side of the mountain range. Away from the site but close enough to help with helo gunships. But remember this — it will take them time to realize what’s going on and to send troops over in choppers. That’s twenty thousand feet of mountain they have there, and choppers will have to weave their way carefully through any of the passes, particularly if there’s any overcast. Anyway, the PLA site is over there not so much a guard for the ICBM site, which we weren’t supposed to know about, but rather to keep an eye on the Tibetans along the Lhasa Road. PLA are always hurrying them on through the valley — don’t want them messing around or camping too near the lake and seeing a missile launch. Besides, Beijing has an obsession about Tibet. It wants enough troops in there just to show them who’s boss.”
“Minor question, General.” It was from Aussie. It was a measure of the standing of the elite SAS/D corps that a man from the ranks could address the general in such an informal tone.
“What is it, Lewis?”
“Suppose we bring it off. How are we going to get out?”
“Trust the Aussie,” Freeman said. “Worried about getting home.” There was a general smattering of laughter. “You making book on this, Lewis, or you got some young filly you’re keen to get back to?”
There was an awkward silence, but Freeman, with all the cares of command, could hardly be expected to know how Lewis had fallen head over heels for Alexsandra Malof. Even so, Freeman, with that sixth sense of command, knew he’d made some kind of blooper. Salvini intervened diplomatically. “He’s making book on it, General — as usual.”
The polite laughter among the old SAS/D troopers— about forty out of the eighty — eased the tension, and Norton was speaking softly to Freeman about Alexsandra Malof. Freeman nodded. “Good question, Aussie. How do we get out? The answer is by chopper. We can get MH-53J Paves with drop tanks and in-air refueling.”
“How about triple A fire, sir?” David Brentwood asked.
“Let’s look at the map,” Freeman said. “Now, left to right — southwest to northeast — we have eighty miles of mountain wall. We’re talking here about peaks of twenty thousand feet plus.” There were a few low whistles. “Now the space — the valley between this line of mountains and the lake just to the north running parallel to them — varies between five and seven miles wide with a lot of short, fast-flowing rivers coming down from the mountains into the lake.
“The lake is salty, by the way, and it’s already four thousand meters high, so some of you might need oxygen from your tanks during the attack.
“Another thing — the bases of these mountains, as you can see, are splayed out like so many long, bony chicken feet reaching down toward the lake. SATRECON tells us that all of the AA is between two of these fingers — that is, around the ICBM site. Once we finish and get back out from between those two fingers and behind another one just next to it, their AA will be useless. It can’t fire around corners.
“Also, I want you men to know I wouldn’t have asked you to do this if there were any other way, but remember that after all the hoopla during the Iraqi war we learned that over 70 percent of all bombs dropped on Iraq failed to hit their target. And that, gentlemen, was in a desert, not in a chain of mountains like the Himalayas. We’ve got no other way of doing it. You have to go in there and take it out. You’ll be given fighter escort and support as far as weather allows. Triple A boys want to compete, then our boys’ 30mm cannon and ATG missiles can deal with them. Your job will be to get to that door — blow it open and make one godawful mess of that place. If you hit the large fuel tanks — also under cover inside the site because we can’t see any of them outside — you won’t have to worry about anything else. That’ll do the job.”
“And how about us, sir?” a recently graduated recruit ventured.
“You run, you silly bastard!” Aussie said.
There was raucous laughter that brought a smile to Freeman’s face. He couldn’t ask for better morale. The ability of the Australian to spring back from his low mood about his woman and to get his mind back on the task ahead was just the kind of quality he, Freeman, expected in the SAS/D, and they had never disappointed him.
“Very well, gentlemen. Godspeed and good luck.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
One hundred miles off the mainland, Admiral Lin Kuang waited with his Taiwanese fleet, not only because the last of the typhoon had yet to pass through the strait but because he knew that as long as the Tibetan ICBM site was intact, any attack by him against the mainland would result in his fleet being rained upon by the conventional warheads of the ICBMs. On one hand he felt that he was letting his allies, the Americans, down, for what they needed now was an attack on China’s southern provinces by Kuang to draw divisions away from Cheng’s offensive against the trace. And the admiral, or rather his envoys, had promised Freeman support. But it was a matter of timing. There was no point in risking the fleet now until Freeman’s forces had silenced the hidden launch site in Tibet. And if Freeman’s men failed, then what use would the fleet be?
He asked for SITREPs from his agents in Beijing and was told that despite the martial law imposed there, people seemed generally well behaved. But how much this good behavior was merely for show and not real could not be easily ascertained. The admiral knew that his mainland brothers and sisters had had long training in self-discipline and in parroting the official party line if they knew what was good for them. Many of the older ones had passed through the “Cultural Revolution,” an orgy of spite, envy, and hatred that swept the land like locusts, and attacked religious shrines and, among millions of others, had victimized and killed those who dared make the slightest protest against Mao’s line.
The other reason, the agents suspected, for the acquiescence of the population, not only in Beijing but even as far north as Harbin, was the ruthless efficiency of Chairman Nie’s Public Security Bureau. But Admiral Kuang knew if all the secret dissidents managed to come together simultaneously, and then were given some real encouragement, they would pose a considerable problem for the authorities in Beijing. But now — following the calamitous typhoon — a spirit of cooperation was alive and well as people began helping one another rebuild some of the worst-hit areas. It was for this reason Freeman had warned his air force not to bomb Beijing or any Chinese city for that matter. He knew that with high-explosive bombs ripping the earth up all around you, you do not care who is dropping the bombs, only that whoever is doing it is your enemy.
Such cooperation between workers and students, however, worried Nie, who hadn’t rested easily since Tiananmen Square on the night of June 3, 1989. What had worried him and the “old men” running the party was that for the first time in a long while workers had marched with, and not against, the students. And it was workers in the main, not students, who had killed the trapped members of the PLA. Thus a prime aim of Nie’s internal policy was to drive a wedge between the students and workers, to spread lies and set one against the other. If only he could make the Malof woman publicly confess her crimes as a foreign agent provocateur, then her role as a rallying point for the dissidents, be they workers or students, would vanish. For Nie it would be a major victory. He would feed her well and have the experts from the Beijing film studios make her up as if no pressure had been applied—if she cooperated.
As he walked, hand behind his back, past the solitary cells, his eyes began to water from the astringent odor of urine and feces. When the guard opened number seventeen cell, the light barely penetrated from the few small holes in the brick high on the stone wall. Immediately, Nie struck a match and lit his American cigarette to try to smother the stench.
Alexsandra had never smoked — she had neither the desire nor the money when she worked as a waitress in the Jewish autonomous region — but right now she craved a cigarette — to taste something, anything other than the fetid vegetable slop she was given once a day and the polluted water from the rusted-out plumbing of the prison that officially had been slated for demolition ten years ago. Her legs were bloody, as female prisoners were issued neither tampons nor even the large sanitary napkins available to the better-behaved prisoners. They had thrown her some rags, and now in the corner she held her legs tightly against her, yet her eyes were as defiant as those of a trapped animal.
“It is your wish to live like this?” Nie said very formally, blowing out a long trail of smoke, its dark and pale blues streaming in strange currents about the cell. He heard her breathe in the smoke and savor the alternate odor.
“Would you like a cigarette?” Nie asked. “And good food, eh? This would be nice.”
She told him he was a turtle and that all his forebears had been turtles. Nie was so incensed by the insult he threw down the cigarette on the cold wet flagstone of the cell, stamped it out, and yelled, “You will not have this cigarette or another. You will not have — things to keep your wretched body clean. Or fresh water until you confess. I–I could beat you!”
“Then beat me!” This was a brave but foolish thing for Alexsandra to say, for her having challenged Nie in front of the guard meant that Nie must now follow through with his threat or lose face.
“Beat her!” he ordered the guard. “Do what you like with her.” But the guard was no fool, which is why he had been put in charge of looking after such an important political criminal. The guard understood that what Chairman Nie meant was, beat her by all means but not about the face or forearms or anywhere else where, during the trial that would follow her public confession, bruises could be seen by the cameras. That she would yield, the guard had no doubt. As the echo of Nie’s footsteps faded, Alexsandra turned her face to the wall. She wanted to cry, but tears would not come — it was beyond that.
The guard returned — a tall man for a Chinese — and he brought her a whole packet of tampons and a bucket of fresh water. “Clean yourself. You look disgusting.” She grabbed the tampons, clutching them to her. “Gundan!” —Go away! — she ordered.
“Ha!” he laughed. “Ha!” But her tone had had the desired effect. “I’m going now,” he said, looking down at her, and then with a most childish gesture he wiggled a finger at her. “But I’ll be back!” And with that he used his other hand to massage his groin. “Okay?”
She raised her head from the bucket, which she had leaned upon with one arm, using the other to sweep her long hair away from her face. She thanked God she still had her hair, because she knew that as long as they left her hair alone she would be alive. They daren’t have her with a shaven head in a show trial, for it would tell the gallery how far they had humiliated her before bringing her to trial.
“Is that,” she began, looking at the guard’s obscene gestures, “what Comrade Mao taught you to do to women?’
“Ha, ha!” the guard said, in a forced tone of fuck you, adding, “Comrade Mao is dead.”
“His sayings also?” Alexsandra pressed gamely. “Are they dead, too?”
“Ha, ha!” he said, and was gone. If he came back to rape her, she knew he would bring others. That last “ha ha” about Chairman Mao’s sayings would need some strength through numbers to overcome any scruples he might otherwise have. The fools — did they really think raping her would make her confess? She had been raped before in the jails at Lake Baikal and in Harbin. She had almost starved to death, too, but had survived by going through her feces to extract the undigested pieces of corn. Who did they think she was? See how the bully of a guard was shamed into leaving a moment ago? In any case she knew he would not assault her while she was still bleeding. He meant later, after her period had passed.
