Force of Arms wi-7, page 16
part #7 of WW III Series
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Freeman was pleased his forces had been able to rally significantly from the massive Chinese ground attack and to regain some lost ground, but the victories he’d expected from the close air support against Cheng’s main battle tanks were not forthcoming. The Chinese had made excellent use of smoke cover after the typhoon had passed, and, combined with the dust, the smoke not only obscured large areas of the battlefield and cut the Americans’ bombing and sighting laser rays and thermal sights, but made IFF — identification friend or foe — a near impossibility. Several M1s, mistaken for enemy tanks, had been taken out just south of the railway at Orgon Tal.
“At least the missile problem’s licked,” Norton said.
“For the time being,” Freeman answered. “Oh, it’ll take them quite a while to set up shop again, but we have to do something in the meantime, Dick — something so spectacular that it’ll short circuit the whole war.”
“Anything in mind, General?”
Freeman seemed not to notice Dick Norton’s voice. “I wonder whether young Brentwood shot those goddamned scientists.”
Norton was genuinely shocked. “You don’t mean that, General?” he said, but it was more a question than a statement of fact.
The general glanced at him and sighed. He was bone weary from lack of sleep. “No, Dick, I probably don’t, but have you ever thought of how we gain air superiority?”
“By more of us shooting down more of them I presume.”
“Planes or pilots?” Freeman asked.
It made Norton pause.
“Australian air ace,” Freeman continued. “Man called Caldwell used to shoot the German pilots in their parachutes in WW II. Said if he didn’t, the bastards’d be up the next day shooting down more of his buddies.” With that, Freeman looked up at the map and smacked Tibet. “Chinese scientists are same as the pilots. Long as we have them running loose they can build more missiles.”
“General,” Dick Norton said, “you once told me that no war is black and white — all have a gray area — but you said the degree of grayness is what separates us from them — an American from a totalitarian.”
“Did I?” Freeman said.
“Yes, sir, you did.”
“Well, Dick, don’t worry — just wishful thinking. I didn’t order the scientists shot. We’ll find out when Brentwood gets back. A few taken prisoner wouldn’t hurt.”
“Won’t know till he’s here, sir.” Dick Norton looked at his watch. “The three evac choppers should be reaching that Lake Nam pretty soon.”
“What are our casualties?”
“No word yet. Brentwood just used enough air time to send in the call for pickup.”
“What are we using?”
“Pave Lows.”
Freeman nodded approvingly. The MH-53J Pave Lows were superb NOE — nap of the earth — fliers. Just the kind of machine they needed in the bad weather swirling down from the twenty-thousand-foot mountain range.
“Air cover?” Freeman asked.
“F-15 Eagles on their way now — drop tanks and tankers.”
“Good.”
“We shouldn’t have any trouble with ChiCom fighters,” Norton added. “Eagles’ll eat a Shenyang alive.”
“Thank God for that. Listen, Dick, I’ve got to get some sleep.” He slapped his aide on the shoulder. “Otherwise I’ll get so goddamned tired my judgment will start to go. End up shooting scientists.” He winked.
Norton smiled. Sometimes even Norton couldn’t tell whether Freeman was kidding or not The general did have a point: The way you got air supremacy was to shoot down pilots, not just planes. The missile site near Lake Nam had been taken out, but how long would it stay that way? How long would the Chinese take to get it going again? Freeman was right; Second Army had to do something spectacular in order to shorten the war before missiles started raining down again.
Before he fell asleep, his Winchester 1200 riot shotgun by his bed, the Sig Sauer 9mm beneath his pillow, Freeman read again those sections he’d underlined from Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. The master had said surprise was a good tactic. Well, hell, it didn’t need a Chinese sage to tell you that. He made a note in his diary to the effect that one of the reasons Second Army had not collapsed along the Orgon Tal-Honggor line stemmed, he believed, from the simple fact that the U.S. soldier normally fires about 4.7 times as much live ammunition in practice as his Chinese counterpart. With all the modern weapons of war, it gave him a sense of pride that, like the long rifles of the American Revolution, American marksmanship was probably the best in the world. Even so, he was outnumbered, and he knew the U.S. front couldn’t hold forever without urgent resupply along lines that were stretched, straining to the limit, all the way from Khabarovsk to Orgon Tal.
He knelt by his bed and prayed for all his men and that he might be given a chance for victory.
* * *
On the shores of Lake Nam the SAS/D detachment was met by the four paratroopers who had not made the rendezvous. With them they had brought six Chinese prisoners, four of them scientists whom they’d picked up on their way down to the lake after they’d heard the enormous explosion and figured correctly that the missile site had been blown and that the best they could do was to make the rendezvous for pickup at the lake.
“Well stone the crows!” Aussie said upon seeing the four SAS/D men. “About time, fellas. Where you been? Wanking yourself off by the lake? Lovely!”
“We damn near drowned in the lake,” a corporal said. “Damn lucky we made it to shore.”
“Where’d you find this lot?” Aussie asked, swinging his Haskins in the direction of the six forlorn-looking Chinese, their padded Mao suits the worse for their escape from the inferno.
“Here,” the SAS/D corporal said. “They were here by the lake. When they spotted one of our guys with an AK-47 they thought it was Christmas — till they saw our mugs.”
“They don’t look too fuckin’ happy, do they?” Aussie observed. The laughter started to build, and in the relief following the enormous tension of the mission, Aussie’s wry comment took on the aspect of one hell of a joke, then one man slipped and fell, butt first, on a pile of bird droppings that were all around the edge of the lake, it being a bird sanctuary. “Oh, shit!”
“That’s right,” Salvini said, and some of the commandos were laughing so hard, tears were streaming down their faces.
“Okay, settle down,” Brentwood said. “Remember Pave Lows will have their hover coupler on to bring ‘em to this exact GPS spot through all the cloud and mist. But if the weather closes in, the choppers won’t risk landing when they can’t see the ground — it’ll be standard hover coupler procedure. Means they’ll be about forty or fifty feet above us. They drop the rope ladders and we go up to them. Divide yourselves up into three groups of around twenty each.”
* * *
By now three ski platoons from the PLA’s Damquka camp on the other northeastern side of the twenty-thousand-foot mountain range had been dispatched via six Shenyang-made M1-4 fourteen-seat helicopters over the pass and on down toward the direction of the lake, but they were still airborne a good two miles from its nearest shoreline.
“Why don’t the bastards come right on down?” someone asked. Aussie Lewis had his Haskins and eight incendiary bullets ready. If a chopper got much closer he’d have a target that would fill the scope. Another commando readied one of the two Stinger ground-to-air missiles.
“Come on, you pricks…” Aussie said, “come closer.” But that was as far as the Chinese would come, and it puzzled Brentwood.
“Hey Aussie,” Salvini called out, “they must have heard about your sharpshooting with the jolly Hask.”
“They don’t want my Stinger,” one of the two antimissile missile commandos called out.
“Kawowski,” Aussie quipped, “nobody’d want your ricking Stinger! Dunno where it’s been.”
The six Chinese helicopters disappeared from view in mist that suddenly swept down through the pass and hid everything, including a good part of the lake.
“I don’t like it,” Brentwood commented. “Not coming closer like that.”
“Neither do I,” Aussie concurred. “Bit bloody queer isn’t it? I mean, it’ll take them a good half hour to get here by foot. By that time we should be outta here.”
“Maybe,” Choir Williams said, “they’re worried about our fighters jumping them and they want to stay close up there by the mountain range. Harder turning for a fighter.”
“Maybe,” Brentwood said, unconvinced. “Anyway, we’ve got to get to work on the defensive perimeter before they get here and—”
The trooper next to him was lifted off the ground and flung back with the force of the AK-47’s burst, and the next second another SAS/D man was dead.
“Down!” Aussie yelled, and in the scramble for cover behind the nearest boulder he dove into the snow, which racked the end of the Haskins’ barrel with ice. He put the muzzle brake at the end of the fluted barrel into his mouth, inhaling then exhaling into it, like giving a drowning victim the kiss of life.
He had made an understandable but disastrously wrong estimate.
The ChiComs from Damquka camp on the other side of the range weren’t regular mountain troops — they were ski troops. In a mogul-jumping advance that would have pleased any professional skier, they had cut the normal hiking time between where they had landed and the lake’s shore by more than a half. What would have been a twenty-minute or half-hour journey for an average hiker in good condition was slashed to five minutes via the speed of collapsible skis, telescoping poles, and Silvretta step-in bindings — and, where they needed them, light, tough magnesium snowshoes, their camouflage overwhites as effective as those of the SAS/D contingent. In another four minutes the fresh eighty-four ChiCom ski troops were all around the little more than sixty SAS/D troops.
Brentwood prayed that the three Pave Lows wouldn’t show up for a while, as an attempted evacuation by helicopters now would prove suicidal. Brentwood had no sooner clipped a new magazine into his HK MP5K submachine gun than he heard two fighters overhead.
“Our Eagles,” one man in Salvini’s group proffered.
“Don’t know,” Brentwood said. Then they could hear the steady chopping of the air that marked the approach of helos in the mist.
“Everybody,” Brentwood ordered, “defensive positions.” Within seconds the SAS/D had all but disappeared between the rocks along the foreshore, or in their white overlays were lying inert against the snow.
“It’s all right!” Brentwood shouted. “Must be the Paves.” There were three rope ladders dangling from the mist. Aussie and the other SAS/D men materialized from their hiding places to go up the rope ladders, the mist and fog rolling down the mountainsides and mixing in a bone-chilling whiteness that completely obscured the sight of the helicopters that were hovering in the pea soup, presumably no more than forty feet above them.
But the ChiComs from Damquka could be heard — a kind of eerie shuffling noise — obviously hoping to kill the Americans before they could get anywhere near the rope ladders and disappear into the churning mist and fog, the deadly stutter of Chinese T-85 submachine guns complimented by a lot of shouting. The sound of a Chinese bugle and the chatter of older but effective Soviet-made PPSh-41 submachine guns that filled the air was coming closer with dramatic suddenness. The initial wave of fifteen or more Chinese was cut down by the defensive circle of SAS/D troopers, but at the cost of four men from Salvini’s group.
The second wave, taking advantage of the first wave’s shock, took protective positions amid the many rock spills and boulders that lay covered in snow. Brentwood grabbed the radio and warned off the Pave Lows and the fighters, even as he was struck by the irony of having the world’s best strikers above him while he was unable to call them in as TACAIR, given the close proximity of SAS/D and ChiCom troops. And he knew that the longer he waited to call in the helos the more fuel they’d burn up, to a point where they would have to turn back as their fuel was consumed in the waiting.
Meanwhile, the Chinese were lobbing stick grenades all over the place. A few SAS men tossed the grenades back, but in all it was mainly a game of bluff on both sides— neither knowing exactly where the others were. Now the fog and mist became thicker, and Brentwood didn’t hesitate. “Withdraw to purple!” he called, and fired the flare, guessing the distance at about a hundred yards — nearer the edge of the lake. Reverse overarch — that is, retreating in stages of overarching protective fire — was something the SAS/D troops had rehearsed and performed elsewhere many times. The fog made it more difficult and dangerous, but still they could do it, and in squads of four they began the withdrawal to the purple smoke — a purple halo in the falling snow, the sound of the choppers near but out of the purple corona and glow that would have given them away to the Chinese.
Seven more SAS/D men were lost during the pull-back, but those that made the purple were next to two SAS/D from Salvini’s troop — or rather, what was left of it — and were pointed in the direction of the hanging rope ladders just beyond the penumbra of light cast by the flare. In another five minutes most of the remaining fifty-three SAS/D troops had made it to safety beyond the surreal purplish world of swirling snow, whiteout, and the deafening sound of rotors, approximately seventeen men allotted to each of the three Pave Lows. In another ten minutes they should be safe.
* * *
“After the swelling goes down,” the makeup artist told Chairman Nie, “I’ll need four — perhaps six — hours.”
“I can keep the cameras far enough away,” the “All China News” producer added. “No closeups of course.”
“But when,” asked Nie, “will the swelling go down?”
The makeup artist shrugged. “I’m no doctor, but I’d say four — six — days. Good food — fresh air.”
“All right,” Nie said, decidedly unhappy about the turn of events but seeing that he couldn’t do very much about it at the moment. The trouble was, the Politburo was becoming impatient. There had been widespread reports of “hooliganism” in Harbin and to the south in Fuchow province just across the straits from Taiwan.
“Hooliganism” was now even a wider net, meaning anything from reading a capitalist newspaper from Hong Kong to actual insurrection. It could also get you shot.
Nie needed a confession coming from her own lips. That was the propaganda he wanted. Instead of her starvation diet they would feed her well, fatten her up a little, get her looking healthy. In Harbin they had captured four undercover conspirators, and in Beijing jail they still had the American SEAL, Smythe. If she did not confess he would have the four conspirators and Smythe all shot in front of her, not at once but as the questioning proceeded.
* * *
That evening one of the night nurses on her rounds came to the prisoner’s bed and could not see her. The nurse panicked and had almost sounded the alarm when she thought to check the lavatory, and found the Malof woman there. All her bandages were off, and she had a gruesome black eye that she did not have before.
It was self-abuse, they told Nie, to get more time in hospital, the action of a coward.
No, Nie said, it certainly wasn’t the action of a coward but of a “brave enemy agent.” Yes, she no doubt had given herself a black eye and unbandaged herself to delay her recovery, to delay her questioning, and that told him that she was afraid of something happening, that finally her will would break under the pain.
* * *
Aussie and the two men with the Stingers waited till last before they began their climb up into the mist, voices lost to the wind under the roaring of rotor blades. As he began his climb, Aussie heard a sound like firecrackers in the distance and then mortar fire, not toward him but out on the lake. Beneath a long tongue of mist he could see water spouts as mortar rounds hit the lake, and then a strange mist — or was it fog? — seemed to rise up from the enormous lake to join the mist above.
Salvini, Choir Williams, and Aussie Lewis were the last three to approach the last Pave Low, ten men having gone before them, one badly wounded and bleeding profusely. The trooper beside him gave him a shot of morphine from his helmet pack then proceeded to make a tourniquet out of his belt.
“Last three!” Salvini yelled up at the two chopper crewmen at the door. One of the crewmen, despite the strain, the expectation that any second a wild burst of ChiCom machine gun fire from the pickup zone might riddle him and the chopper, still found time to laugh, calling out to the other crewman, “These guys might be tough ‘uns, but they sure as hell can’t count!”
“Whaddya mean?” the other man shouted back, barely audible over the noise of the rotor slap. The other crewman pointed down. “There are four of ‘em, not three.”
The other trooper shrugged — what did it matter? long as they didn’t leave anybody, and they could only wait another five minutes before the fuel gauge would dictate they head out.
Aussie was carrying the Haskins sniper rifle, weighing twenty-three pounds, and in the swirling vortex of wind caused by the prop wash he was trying to make sure that the last trooper, below him, wasn’t bothered by the muzzle brake and the end of the barrel, which had a tendency to swing a bit like a pendulum in the high wind, despite its weight.
“You okay, mate?” he yelled down.
There was no answer. “Hey buddy, you okay?” Aussie yelled, letting the barrel tap the man’s helmet. “You in trouble?” Suddenly he saw a black blob pass him into the open door. He heard a shout from above and saw the grenade come out again, bursting open about ten feet below him, and felt a hot sting in his right buttock. By now realizing the man below him was a ChiCom, he let the barrel of the Haskins swing in close directly above the man’s white overlay hood. The ChiCom’s right hand came up to push the rifle away, his left hand holding another grenade.
