Aussie’s FAV was halfway down a dune when they heard the bang and felt the vehicle shuddering, Aussie steering hard into the skid. Beneath the vehicle an avalanche of slow-moving sand and stones followed, the stones as big as a man’s fist.
Within seconds Aussie and David Brentwood were out, their new TOW man swiveling in his seat to make sure he could cover them for the full 360 degrees while Aussie grabbed the jack and David hit the wing nut that held down the spare.
Brentwood hoped that outflanking the ChiCom tanks would be easy, given the speed of the FAV, but he knew he couldn’t be sure until the ChiCom MBTs got their first glimpse of a FAV — would they break and go after the FAVs or stay in echelon, whatever its configuration might be?
“I can hear them,” the TOW operator said.
“Can you see ‘em?” Aussie said, tightening the last bolt on the spare tire while Brentwood finished putting the emergency patch on the flat.
“No.”
“Well that’s no bloody use, is it? I can hear them, too. Every fucker within a mile can hear—” They intuitively ducked, the sound of ordnance passing overhead with that peculiar chuffing sound like a locomotive shunting at high speed made louder by the air duck with particles of sand. They quickly put the repaired tire back on the spare rack.
“Right! We’re off,” Aussie said. “I’m the first one to spot a chow. Five to one on — any takers?”
David Brentwood said nothing, peering hard through goggles, the sound of sand striking them like fine hail. The TOW operator took Aussie’s bet, for he could already see two blurs — too big to be motorcycle and sidecar units. “You’re on,” the TOW operator said. “Ten bucks.”
“Done!” Aussie said.
“I see two of ‘em — eleven o’clock.”
“What?” Aussie said, but now Brentwood could see them, too, and flecks of tracers told him the blur, whether it was an MBT or not, was firing at them.
Aussie swung hard left into a dip between two small dunes and stopped, the engine in high rev.
“You ready, TOW?”
“Ready — go!”
“Never mind,” Brentwood interjected. “Go out to the flank. It’s the radar we want.”
Swearing, Aussie dropped it into low gear and followed the line of the gully away from the tanks — or perhaps they had been APCs. “TOW,” Aussie said. “You saw those tanks or whatever they are before you made the bet?”
“No.”
“Lying bastard. Hope your prick falls off.”
“Thanks, Aussie, but you owe me fifty bucks.”
They followed the line of the gully for two hundred yards or so, then came up again. There was a sudden break in the dust storm — or was it the end of the storm? Then they came across a terrifying sight. From the left to right, as far as they could see, a brigade of MBTs — between 150 and 200 tanks, T-52s and T-72s — was making its way down an enormous dune in the strange half light, the tanks looking like a plague of huge, dark moles crawling down some enormous flesh-colored back. There was a streak of light and a more diffuse backblast from a TOW missile, fired from a FAV somewhere to Aussie’s left, and a flash of red and yellow dame as the TOW round hit a T-59.
Brentwood was furious and on the phone network within seconds, telling the FAVs to get out to the flanks. To forget the tanks. “I say again, forget the tanks—”
His voice was all but drowned out by fire from the forward five tanks in the column, which were breaking up, going into ajin ru you fang tixin rong — an echelon right — wherein each tank of the five-tank platoon broke off so that the lead tank and two others slightly behind him and to the right had their 100mm, and in some of the up-gunned tanks, their 125mm, guns pointed to the front, the two rearmost tanks having their guns pointed to the right.
Almost at the same time another one of the columns-there were fifteen tanks in it — all began moving to echelon right. It was the ChiComs’ weakest point, a legacy of having been trained, like the ChiCom fighter pilots, by the Russians, who were wedded to the doctrine of central control, allowing individual commanders little flexibility unless central control released them. Of course central control was necessary to some degree in the U.S. army as well, but the release to individual decisions as in Freeman’s leaving the FAV tactics up to Brentwood and the other FAV crews was not as freely given to the ChiComs. And the degree to which Cheng and Freeman would maintain central command would become crucial if it came to a night fight. Should this occur, Cheng knew, the Americans were better, with more experience in freeing individual tank commanders to exercise tactical flexibility, giving the Americans the edge when it came to tanks in an eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation.
“Fixing a flat,” the FAV just chewed out by Brentwood reported. “Couldn’t avoid firing a TOW…were taking tracers.” Now Aussie swung the FAV up out of the gully to the sharp, sandy edge, and he could no longer see the tanks, the weather closing in again as they heard the clanking of the ChiCom armor far off to the left.
Brentwood requested an update on the radar vector the Kiowas were plotting. It was the same; the mobile unit hadn’t moved. And Brentwood’s Magellan hand-held global positioning system put them only three miles away. At thirty miles per hour, a near-reckless speed, given the fifteen-to-twenty-yard visibility, it was estimated the FAVs on both flanks skirting the Chinese armor should reach the radar site within ten minutes — unless it moved again,
The motorcycle sidecar unit came out of nowhere — from behind them. The TOW operator saw it at the last minute, swung his weapon around on the swivel mount, but the burst from the ChiCom’s 7.62mm PKS hit him in the chest and face, blood pouring out of him. Aussie quickly turned left, his foot to the floor. The sidecar unit couldn’t turn fast enough, and Aussie hit it full on, the FAV’s double crash bar now bent back to the lights, the Chinese motorcyclist flung off his machine and Brentwood mowing him down then turning the weapon on the upturned sidecar, giving it two good bursts, the Chinese gunner inside screaming over the rattle of the ricocheting bullets.
Aussie and David Brentwood cut the TOW operator out of his harness, snapped off his dog tags, and went on.
“I’ll blow that fucking radar so fucking high—”
“If we find it,” Brentwood said, adding hopefully, “Should be there in ten minutes.”
In those ten minutes Admiral Kuang was receiving the message from his forward AWACS — the airborne warning and control systems — that a hurricane, force five, more powerful than those that had hit southern Florida and the Hawaiian Islands in ‘92, with winds in excess of 190 miles an hour, born in the Marianas, was now heading for Taiwan and the hundred-mile-wide strait between it and the Chinese mainland. Reluctantly, with great sadness, he ordered the fleet to turn about and head back toward Taiwan in order to meet the hurricane head-on and hopefully ride it out. As practical a man as he was, Kuang was also deeply religious, and he saw in the hurricane’s attack a clear message that the hurricane was saving him from a crushing defeat — a clear warning to wait for a more propitious time. In any case he couldn’t possibly make landings in a hurricane.
“Aussie!” a cry came from somewhere in front. It was Salvini, Choir, and the news reporter who was standing up in the stilled FAV like a mummy frozen to the roll bar. Beside them were two ChiCom motorcycle/sidecar units looking the worse for their collision with the FAV. “Had a prang, I see!” Aussie said cheekily.
“Yeah,” Salvini answered. “Both hit me at once.”
“Ah, bullshit!” Aussie said. “You guys from Brooklyn can’t drive a fucking grocery cart. Shoulda outmaneuvered -em.”
“Like we did,” David added, looking at Aussie. “The one we hit.”
“That was on purpose,” Aussie responded. “Okay, hop in. Choir, you with the TOW. Your mate”—he meant me reporter—”in the back, too.”
“What about me?” Salvini asked.
“You can fucking hoof it, Sal. Only a couple of miles.”
“Fuck you!” Sal said. “I’ll ride in one of your side litter trays.”
“Where’s your TOW, man?” Choir asked.
“Bought it a way back,” Aussie said, his tone losing its jocular vulgarity as he looked ahead, the visibility up to forty yards, asking David for a GPS vector to the target.
“Steer one seven three.”
“And hope they’re still there,” Choir said. Aussie had the FAV up to thirty miles an hour within a few seconds, then jammed on the brake, the vehicle skidding sideways, ploughing into the sand.
“What d’you see?” David asked.
“Nothing. I’ve got an idea.” He backed up to where the two ChiCom motorcycle and sidecar units were lying. “Sal— you try the one over there. I’ll try the one nearest.”
“What for?”
“See if they still rucking work after you hitting ‘em.”
One’s front wheel was bent beyond hope, while the other had its gas tank so shot up that it too was finished. The sound of armor fighting armor now drowned out Aussie’s voice. Several thousand yards back in the mustard fog of dust and smoke, Freeman’s first echelon had come within sight of the ChiComs. Aussie took off again in the FAV, David, his legs braced against the floor, taking a firm hold of the M-60 machine gun. For a second the FAV was engulfed with the stench of excrement. “Don’t worry about it, boyo,” Choir said to the La Roche newsman.
“It was Salvini,” Aussie said, as Salvini lay on his side, gripping the metal lattice work of the litter for support, his head bumping on a pillow of C charges.
“What’s up with you, you Australian—”
“Stop!” Choir yelled. “Target! One o’clock!”
As the FAV came to an abrupt halt in the loose, sugary sand, Choir fired his second-to-last TOW, its back-blast lighting up the FAV, the FAV in its most vulnerable position, still, giving Choir time to guide the optically tracked, wire-guided missile.
The motorcycle and sidecar unit that he’d aimed at dipped over a dune, the TOW blowing the top of the dune off like the flying spray of some enormous brown wave. Next second the sidecar unit was coming back at them out of the fold between the dunes in which it had temporarily disappeared, the ChiCom in the sidecar pointing a shaped-charge RPG at them.
“Cheeky bastard!” Aussie said, and was already into a series of S curves and dips. The RPG fired, a hot sliver of shrapnel slicing open the front left tire like butter, amputating two inches or so from the foot-long pack of C-4 plastique, ending up taking a chip out of the stock of the Winchester 1200 riot shotgun that was strapped to the cage.
Brentwood was still firing the machine gun and saw the ChiCom driver shaking as if he were some kind of machine coining apart, falling away, the long burst of machine gun fire literally chopping him to pieces. The motorcycle jack-knifed and was over on its side.
“Shit!” It was Aussie. “Two flats in one day.”
“Aussie — can it.” It was David, looking suddenly older than his years. “Anyone hurt?”
“No.” He turned back toward the La Roche reporter, who shook his head like a child on the verge of tears, accused of something he didn’t do.
“All right,” David said. “Now listen up — all of you.”
Salvini was already changing tires.
In the lead M1A2, General Freeman watched through his viewer while the gunner below and immediately in front of him scanned his thermal-imaging sight. Freeman was confident that with so much dust and now smoke from smoke grenades in the air it would be the Americans who would have the edge — able to see through the polluted air in the same way that Schwarzkopf had reported how the American sights had been able to better see through the hot fog of war than had the Iraqi tanks.
The concussion from the explosion of a Bradley armored personnel carrier behind him off to his left could be felt, not so much by any impact or discernible earth tremor but by the sudden surge in the M1A2’s air conditioner and ventilation system, the inside pressure now rising, not to keep out poison gas, though it could do that, too, but rather the thick dust caused by the Bradley’s sudden demise.
It was a shock as much to Freeman as his other three crewmen. If they couldn’t see through the smoke curtain, then how could Cheng’s tanks have seen the Bradley? Unless the smoke laid by the ChiCom armor was “particle infused,” that is, thickened to make it harder for the thermal and night-vision viewers on the M1A2 to penetrate.
There was only one way, Freeman saw, to counter such a possibility — close the gap between him and them as fast as possible. Freeman ordered a full-speed attack in wedge formations. His two hundred tanks moved from refused right and refused left configurations to the arrowhead-shaped wedge formations wherein the lead tank pointed its 120mm gun and coaxial machine gun straight ahead, the two tanks to the left and two slightly back and to the right covering the flanks by having their main guns pointing left and right respectively. And if necessary all would be able to fire straight ahead without hitting one another.
“Must be using high-particle smoke,” the gunner said, the reclined driver flexing his wrist on the handlebar control, his line-of-sight responsibility being the front, the loader on Freeman’s left responsible for the left side, Freeman responsible for the right and the all-round view and with the capability of overriding his gunner.
“Well, wait till the bastards get a taste of this high-ratio gearbox,” Freeman said, and with that the M1A2s moved quickly and efficiently over the sand, main gun steady, chassis undulating as if on a gimbals mounting, into the dense smoke. Ahead, the round, hunkered down domes of upgunned T-59s and T-72s were dimly, then more clearly, discerned, the weak sun no brighter than the moon as it sank over the desert. The driver picked up the first T-59, gave its position, and the gunner readied his 120mm — the HEAT, or high explosive antitank round, streaking out of the barrel a split second later.
“One o’clock — three hundred yards!” Freeman shouted as the first T-59 exploded from the molten jet that cut through its thick steel.
“In sight!” the gunner confirmed, the loader already shoving another HEAT round into “pussy,” as the breech was affectionately called, the round now en route to another T-59, the round striking its 75mm-thick glacis plate.
The fire-control computer aboard the M1A2 was already making minor adjustments for barrel drift, the gunner using the coaxial machine bursts so that his thermal imager picked up the tracer dots more easily in the smoke and dust, aligning the gun for the third shot in fourteen seconds, when a deafening bang, then a ringing noise, shook the M1A2 as if some giant had hit it with a mallet. The blow had come from a ChiCom infantry-fired RPG7, its shaped-charge round going instantly into a molten jet. But the jet of steel was prevented from penetrating the sloped armor of the M1A2 because of the tank’s reactive armor pack, which blew up upon the impact of me RPG7, diffusing the molten jet. There had been much debate in the Pentagon about the pluses and minuses of reactive armor, but for the men in Freeman’s tank it had worked admirably.
The moment the ChiComs’ RPG hit the M1A2 another HESH round had left the Abrams and another T-59 exploded but did not stop, its buckled tracks still somehow grinding forward, keeping the tank rolling down a dune, albeit arthritically, while it continued to disintegrate as a chain reaction was set off like some massive string of firecrackers, its crew having no time to escape but one of them, the driver, visible as a charred torso dangling from the driver’s exit beyond the turret. The air was pungent with diesel and gasoline fumes mixed in with the hot stench of burning skin melting into the sand, some of which was fused into glass by the molten jet of shaped charges.
“Three down!” the loader exulted, his voice a fusion of excitement and terror.
Freeman said nothing, conscious that even with a three-to-one kill ratio he might yet be unable to defeat the Chinese if they outnumbered him by more than three to one. Which they did. Freeman’s driver, acutely aware that the M1A2’s fuel tank was immediately to his left, started up from his nearly fully reclined position when he heard the tattoo of light machine gun fire raking the metal only inches from his ear.
“Goddamn infantry!” Freeman shouted. “Run the bastards over!”
For some inexplicable reason the driver started to laugh and couldn’t stop. The loader, hearing him on the intercom, also started cackling. Freeman glowered as the loader only with difficulty thrust another round home but couldn’t stop laughing. It was like a child being chased — full of fear and excitement, the vision of every M1A2 breaking formation, frantically taking off after individual Chinese, having struck the crew as insanely funny.
“What in hell’s the matter with you!” Freeman said, while pressing the thumb “traverse” control and hearing the rattle of machine gun bullets hitting the cupola. The loader was laughing so hard, hunched over by the shell racks, he was afraid he might have to urinate into his helmet. It was a kind of hysterical terror that only tankers and submariners know.
Several miles southward, beyond the ChiCom tanks, the dust was thinning out as Aussie’s FAV stopped just below the crest of a dune. Aussie and Brentwood, crawling on their bellies to the crest, looked down between two giant hills of sand on a sight so unexpected that it literally took their breath away — a forest so ordered and alien in its sudden appearance that they knew at once it was like the massive windbreaks of forests around Turpan — a reforestation project with menggulu or Mongolian willow forming the outer acres like a moat. There was also some shaji or seabuck thorn among them. Most of the forest, however, that looked to be about a mile wide and, through the scopes, about five miles deep, was made up of huyang — Chinese poplars, an island of green amid a sea of brown dunes.
“Well I’ll be buggered,” Aussie said. “So now what d’we do?”
“Over there,” Brentwood said, pointing to a dune about two hundred yards off to their left. “There’s one.” It was a ChiCom mobile radar van whose rectangular dish, the size of a collapsible bridge table, and housing set atop a hydraulic-legged ChiCom truck resembled a U.S. TPQ-63 type so much that Aussie suspected it was an American unit, probably bought, despite U.S. law forbidding it, through Chinese front companies in Hong Kong.
He was right. Jay La Roche had bought ten used units supposedly on sale for Taiwan and instead delivered them to China by diverting the cargo through Hong Kong.
Not far behind and below the radar unit on a wide, stony flat nearer the closer, or northern, end of the reforested area between the dunes there was what looked like a long refrigeration truck on stout hydraulic legs beneath a webbed camouflage netting, possibly an RAM-C, a radar management center, where the radar inputs from the various mobile sites would be collated and from where the deadly AA fire network would be operated. And in a flash David Brentwood realized that if the RAM-C unit could be taken out then no matter how many mobile radars there were — Freeman’s intelligence now suspected five on the move — destruction of the RAM-C would be killing the brain of the whole radar network.
The dust was clearing and the sun sinking fast. David Brentwood yearned for more smoke and dust cover, long enough for the attack. “Use the TOW!” he ordered Choir Williams.
“Yes,” Aussie put in, “but for Chrissake don’t miss!”
“I won’t, boyo,” Choir said as he aligned the weapon. He tried to fire it again — still nothing. Its circuit was dead.
“All right,” David said. “Now listen. We’ll have to go in with the FAV — straight for the RAM-C. Choir, you and I’ll hit the RAM-C. See those two doors midway along it?” It looked like a long camper.
“Yes.”
“You take the left, I’ll take the right. Aussie keeps the motor running.” He said nothing to the La Roche reporter who was sitting down next to Choir, his eyes glazed in a terrified stare. “Salvini, you cover us. Got it?”
“Got it!” Aussie cut in. “You have the fun while I sit on my ass!”
“You and Salvini take out any guards stupid enough to try and stop us.”
“I don’t see any,” Aussie said.
“That’s good,” Brentwood said. “Come on — let’s go!” The FAV mounted the crest. They heard a motorcycle/sidecar unit starting up, and Aussie put the FAV into reverse. Darkness had fallen, but with their SAS-issue Litton night goggles that in the daytime converted to binoculars they could see clearly between the dunes but were still at a loss to know precisely where the noise was coming from. Choir couldn’t tell, as his ears were still ringing from the thunderous sound of the titanic tank battle not far off.
“Between the dunes to the right somewhere,” Aussie proffered.
David Brentwood had his 7.62mm machine gun mounted on the dash pointed in the direction of the noise. Aussie reached over for the Haskins rifle strapped to the right seat strut, Choir unclipping it for him.
“Let me have a go with the suppressor.”
“Quickly then!” Brentwood said. Aussie had cut the engine and was out in a second and at the crest, looking down the dunes both ways. The dust was thinning, but it was still falling like pepper in the night-vision goggles. Soon, through this curtain, he could see a high rooster feather of dust, the motorcycle and sidecar unit now just a dot four hundred yards away and moving along the flat, skirting the RAM-C or whatever it was and climbing up toward the dune and coming in the general direction of the SAS/D group. If he didn’t have to he wouldn’t shoot at them and would let them pass, but if they kept coming up over the dune toward the FAV he’d have no choice. They sure as hell were taking their time — bloody putt-putting along, as his father would have said.
Four thousand miles to the northeast in the Aleutian Islands, a bitterly cold wind howled across Dutch Harbor as Lana Brentwood, her parka hood dusted in fine white snow, made her way quickly from the motor pool’s shuttle bus into the warmth of the Davy Jones Restaurant. As she entered, CNN was interrupting a pretaped senior citizens’ pro golf tournament in New Orleans with news of the massive tank battle now taking place in China some three hundred miles north of Beijing and only 280 miles from the Great Wall, bad weather apparently preventing the effective use of the tank-killing American A-10 Thunderbolts.
Jay La Roche had been the only one who, complaining, “Where are we here — Hicksville?” had objected to the TV being turned on in the first place, conspicuously not watching it while most of the other patrons in the dimly lit booths had paused to hear the news flash. He sat desultorily stirring the Manhattan in front of him, having complained to the waitress that he’d ordered “on the rocks,” not “a fucking iceberg!” The young, ruddy-faced reporter from the Anchorage Spectator came in, spotted Jay, and once again tried eagerly to get a few words from him.
“Fuck off.” La Roche told the boy, who, acutely embarrassed, started to apologize profusely, but La Roche wasn’t interested. He saw Lana taking off her parka by the door and hanging it up. Immediately his expression of surly discontent vanished and he rose, smiling, moving out of the booth. She knew he was going to try to kiss her. Quickly she slid into the opposite side of the booth. “Sorry I’m late. Quite a flap on at the base. We’re part of the logistical tail for Freeman’s tooth. He takes quite a bite.”
“No sweat,” he said. “I could wait for you all day.”
“Weather over there’s been lousy,” she said. “Some huge dust storm or other coming out of the Gobi Desert. And the Chinese are apparently using some U.S. radar equipment against us and are trying to—”
“Hey — no shop talk. Okay?” He sat back, spreading his arms imploringly.
She shrugged. “All right. Where are the papers?”
“I thought we were going to have dinner first?”
“I never said that,” she answered.
“You had dinner?”
“No.”
“Well, then—”
“I’m not hungry, Jay.”
“Sure you are. You could do with a few more pounds. They’re workin’ you too—”
“No thanks.” She took her Wave hat off and put it, businesslike, beside her. “You told me you’d have the divorce papers ready for signing.”
“Hey, Lana. I thought we’d agreed on a civil good-bye? I came all this way. Is that too much to ask?”
She paused. With a private Lear jet and all his connections, Lana knew it hadn’t exactly been a chore for Jay to come “all this way,” as he put it. “After what you put me through, Jay — not to mention your threatening to smear my parents in your gutter press — yes, I would say it’s too much to ask. Dinner with you is too much. I agreed to meet. That’s all.”
“Hey,” he said easily, “that’s fine.”
She moved her head away from him, her hair catching the golden sheen of the candlelight. She turned back angrily and looked across the table at him. “Jay, I have no interest in you. I don’t want to see you anymore. Ever. There’s no point in all the smooth talk or the smutty innuendos that your whores probably think are so cute. Have you brought divorce papers or not? We’ll need a witness.”
“Yes. I’ve got one of my staff Xeroxing the damn set for you now.” He looked uncomfortable, jabbing at the crushed ice with his swizzle stick. “Hey, I’m sorry, all right? I didn’t want to screw this up but — I guess with you and me it’s oil and water now.”
“Yes,” she said solemnly. “I guess it is.”
“Okay—” He raised his glass, beckoning her to pick up hers. She hesitated. “Don’t tell me I got that wrong, too?” he said smiling. “Give me a break. You haven’t gone off martinis? Used to be your favorite poison.”
She loathed him now and couldn’t hide it. Her stare seemed an eternity to him.
“What’s wrong?” he asked. “Now you’re not gonna drink with me? Was I that bad to you?” Quickly he held up his hands. “Okay, I was. If you don’t want to drink with me, fine, but it’s, well — it’s kind of petty isn’t it? Christ — I’m going to give you a fair settlement, babe. A lot of bucks, believe me.”
She was still staring at him. “I remember,” she said, “in Shanghai one time you slipped me a drink. All friendly, lovey-dovey—”
“Jesus, Lana! Is that what you’re on about? Paranoid. Want to switch drinks? Unless,” he jibed sarcastically, “you think I got some venereal disease? Besides, I haven’t touched it. Been waiting for you. For my old flame.” She said nothing.
“Cheers,” he said, ignoring her, raising his glass. Reluctantly she lifted her glass and let his clink against hers and took a sip. The truth was, she was thirsty and would have killed for a Manhattan after a long shift at the base and another day of worrying about Frank — where he was, wondering when next they’d see one another — if ever. She couldn’t bear the possibility of him being killed.
The sound of the patrol motorcycle and sidecar was muted, its rattle absorbed by the enormous walls of sand that rose on either side of the gully between the dunes, a whirligig twisting along a crest, throwing the fine sand up like brown sugar. Then the rider turned up toward the crest, not fast and not at a steep angle but making a gradual, unhurried approach at no more than ten miles an hour.
It gave Aussie no choice. He flicked up the sand guard on the Haskins’s scope, fixed the machine gunner in the sidecar in the cross hairs, inhaled, let out half his breath, held it, and squeezed. The suppressor kept the noise to a quick “bump” sound, the machine gunner’s head and arms flying back like a rag doll’s against the white smear of the infrared-sighted exhaust. The driver made a quick U-turn but Aussie had the cross hairs on him and squeezed again. The bike coughed once or twice like some animal and fell over on its right side, the wheel of its sidecar still spinning. Aussie made his way quickly back to the FAV, the sound of the tank battle roaring unabated in the distance. Whether Freeman was winning or losing he had no idea — every crew was fighting its own war. Handing Salvini the Haskins, Aussie buckled himself in, saying quietly, “That Haskins is the best fucking rifle in the army.”
“The M-fourteen,” Salvini opined.
“Balls,” Aussie replied, starting the FAV up. “Ten to one you’re wrong.”
“Yeah — who’s to judge?”
Aussie slipped me FAV into low gear and moved toward the crest. “We pick two guys each — four in all — and they fire the Haskins and the M-fourteen — winner’ll be the Haskins.”
“Balls,” Salvini said.
“Come on — you in or out?”
“In.”
“Right,” Aussie whispered as they made the crest. Going down the other side they were all silent, Aussie confident that the thunderous reverberations from the tank battle would cover the approach of the FAV.
“No windows,” Choir observed, looking through his night-vision binoculars at me RAM-C.
“There will be when we hit it,” Aussie said.
“Remember,” David cautioned, the trailer hut now only three hundred yards off, “you stay in the car, Aussie.”
“Yes, mother!”
They were at the bottom of the crest where sand gave way to hard, cracked earth, when a hand clamped Aussie’s shoulder in a viselike grip.
“What the—?”
“Mine!” It was the first time in the last hour or so that the La Roche reporter had said anything. No one believed him until Choir saw it, too: poorly laid but a sliver of its black circumference showing. The loose soil dug up to cover it had almost completely been blown away.
“He’s right, boyo!” Choir confirmed. “Antipersonnel.”
“Jesus!” Aussie said. “What now? Must be all around us. They hear one of those going off and they’ll know—” He was interrupted by Brentwood, who was known to be “head fast,” as they called it in the SAS/D, and now showed why.
“Back up the dune — they won’t have laid them there — too much shifting sand. Come on, Aussie — back up.”
Aussie did so, and when they were back over the crest Salvini reminded them that if they didn’t knock out the RAM-C quickly the entire American advance would be incapable of receiving TACAIR support in time. Too much longer and the American and ChiCom tanks would be so close together, mixing it up at such close range, that not even the A-10 Thunderbolts could help.
“Aussie,” Brentwood said, “you get in the sidecar. Choir, you stay here with the FAV with the dashboard machine gun. Salvini, you behind me on the pillion seat. We’ll retrace their path through the mine field around the RAM-C.”
“Okay,” Aussie said. “Let’s go.” And within two minutes Aussie, taking one of the dead Chinese’s helmets, was in the sidecar behind a belt-feed PKS 7.62mm gun. Salvini, with his Heckler & Koch 9mm submachine gun slung over his right shoulder, sat on the pillion seat behind Brentwood, who had taken the other Chinese helmet and who was now adjusting his night-vision goggles, lowering them and blowing grains of dust off the eyepiece before he could pick up the two-wheeled track of the motorcycle and sidecar. It ran along a fifty-yard-wide porous clay gully between the dunes for a hundred yards or so and then turned left, through a man-made gap in the dune and on to more clay around what they were certain was a RAM-C trailer a hundred and fifty yards in front of them.
The La Roche reporter was licking his lips nervously. Suddenly one of the two side-by-side doors in the long trailer opened and shut. In that moment Choir had seen the dull, bloodred glow from the interior, and through the infrared sight could see a hot, white stream coming from the man who, facing away from the FAV, was urinating. When the ChiCom turned, shaking himself, buttoning up his fly, he looked over at the motorcycle and sidecar.
Intuitively, Aussie waved. The man waved back and reentered the control center. But a second later both doors opened and David could see the orange spit of a submachine gun, its bullets chopping up the dirt around them. Aussie pulled the trigger and gave the longest burst he could remember, and bodies were toppling from the trailer.
They were only fifty yards away now, with tracers arcing over from Choir’s position off to the left, ripping and thudding into the trailer until the motorcycle and sidecar were only twenty feet from it. But then the door of the mobile radar hut three hundred yards away atop a dune flung open, and several troops came out firing. Choir swung his fire across toward them. The door closed, but he could see figures moving outside in the dark, their bodies, warmer than the air, giving off an ample heat signature. He fired two bursts, saw one drop and another two scuttling under the van.
In the trailer it was chaos — men shouting, wood and aluminum splintering from Aussie’s and Salvini’s machine gun fire at what was virtually point-blank range. Brentwood tossed in two grenades and covered his ears. The explosions totaled the trailer, fire and smoke causing the remaining Chinese, about six of them, to come out, one firing a pistol, the other falling, another on fire, and Aussie felt himself slammed back into the sidecar seat, his left shoulder warm and wet. David could now see the motorcycle and sidecar tracks leading from the RAM-C to the radar van and within a minute was over by it, Aussie giving all the weight from his right shoulder to the machine gun’s stock and spraying the hut, one man falling down the stairs, dead before he hit the ground, another coming out from beneath the hut, his hands up, frantically yelling.
Salvini kept his Heckler & Koch on him while Brentwood tossed in two more grenades. The hut boomed and issued forth a rancid electrical-fire smell, smoke pouring through the shattered door seams.
Salvini told Brentwood to take them up close to the radar van, then pulled a pin out of the grenade, stood back, counted one, two, threw it at the radar mast, and quickly dashed under the van. There was a bluish purple flash above them, and then the mast was nothing more than a forlorn and tangled web of heat-fused steel, still standing, remarkably enough, but in no shape for reuse.
“What do we do with him?” Aussie said, indicating the Chinese soldier, his hands still thrust up high in the air, standing about six yards from them. “Can’t shoot the bastard. Can’t take him back.”
“Let him go!” Brentwood said.
“Vamoose!” Salvini said to the Chinese soldier.
“Go on!” Aussie added. “Piss off!”
The man took off in panic, glanced back briefly, and kept running.
“Oh, shit!” Aussie said, but he was too late, a mine exploding so powerfully that all Aussie could see in his night-vision goggles was a fine spray like a reddish fountain blown awry in the wind. It was the man’s blood vaporized by a mine that Freeman’s troops called “pink mist.”
As they were tracing their way back, Choir got on the radio network, informing Freeman’s HQ that “Mount Rushmore is ours. Repeat, Mount Rushmore—”
“No it isn’t — goddamn it!” Freeman’s loud reply came. “We’re still getting radar signals from the same damn sector.”
“Maybe so, General,” Brentwood reported, “but they’re not able to send their reports to any RAM-Center because—”
“Goddamn it!” Freeman shouted. “I called in TACAIR and we’ve lost three Thunderbolts already.”
It was at that moment that Brentwood, looking at Aussie, experienced a sinking feeling.
“Jesus!” Aussie said. “It’s in the forest. That trailer we shot up must’ve only been a relay. The friggin’ radar management center is in the bloody forest.”
“Then,” Freeman shouted, “take it out!”
With that, Freeman was off the air and silence reigned over the most embarrassed SAS/D troopers in all of Second Army, until Aussie proclaimed, “Must have land lines.”
“You’re right,” Brentwood said. “Fiber-optic probably. To stop our aircraft jamming their communication they’d have to use land lines running to a central control.”
“From that trailer we shot up,” Salvini put in.
“You see any?” Aussie asked. “Anyone?”
There was no answer.
“All right, let’s go back,” Aussie said.
“You’re wounded,” Brentwood said.
“Nah — just a nick in the shoulder. I’ll be all right. You coming with us, CBN?” Aussie added.
“I stay here,” the reporter answered.
“Can the bike and sidecar unit carry four of us back there?” asked Choir.
“Piece of cake,” Aussie said. “Come on.”