Ian Slater - Payback

Bone and Aussie, Aussie holding the remote detonator for the SEMTEX packs, saw the POWs crossing the road a hundred yards south of them, the POWs’ tenderfoot progress across the rough bitumen providing Aussie with the only moment of levity during the attack. “Look,” he told Bone. “Fucking Bolshoi Ballet — fairies in transit!”

But Bone Brady didn’t have time to look south, because he’d just seen an infrared “bloom” in his NVGs, which, even given its blurred outline in the rain, was clearly recognizable to him as a Chinese-made T-55 main battle tank with NKA markings. It was an old model, but both men could see it had been upgunned.

“Fark!” said Aussie. “That fucker’s loaded for bear, Bone. Time to go, mate.”

The sight of the tank not surprisingly emboldened some of the NKA soldiers across the road who’d been hunkering down behind the three-ton truck, and now their small-arms fire increased from the occasional pot shot and wild burst, most of it coming from under the truck itself.

For a moment Aussie and Bone had been so well dug in with the SAW that the first glimpse of the tank didn’t bother Bone, but the moment he and Aussie heard the T-55 slewing its turret, the big, ugly 115mm upgunned cannon swinging in their direction, they exited the gun pit after throwing five high-explosive grenades across the road. It would buy them at least ten, maybe twenty, seconds before the NKA could bring their tank-led attack to bear.

Running back to the warehouse, Aussie tossed the last two smoke grenades he had, and heard Freeman’s voice: “Five minutes!” which meant that that was all the time they had to race back down to the beach to the RS. The plan was to do it in a quick, staggered-dash withdrawal, but Salvini, the designated MANPAD-box carrier, had taken a bad fall halfway down to the beach and still hadn’t reached the RS. They’d have to buy him time. Aussie pushed the detonator button. The earth shook behind them and belched flame as the warehouse exploded in a giant orange-red ball of splintered wood, ammo casings, and ammunition, momentarily illuminating the barefooted Koreans in stark relief.

As pilot and copilot aboard the RS, Eddie Mervyn and Gomez were exercising what the instructors of Germany’s Spec Op Grenzschutzgruppe 9 routinely referred to in joint NATO Ops as “professional patience.” It was yet another military term for “staying cool,” or rather, trying to, in an increasingly stressful situation. The RS’s Zulu clock showed them that the team had only four minutes to reach the RS before castoff, the reversible-submersible sitting on the sandy bottom of the crescent beach’s surf line in two fathoms of water, and rolling in the storm surge despite the craft’s computerized stabilizer fins that were constantly moving in and out from their recessed sheaths.

“Choir’s not going to like this rockin’ and rollin’,” said copilot Gomez.

“No,” said Eddie with uncharacteristic brevity and finality. His temptation as pilot was to risk a quick “up scope,” but he dismissed the idea. Even in the twelve feet of water that afforded the RS at least a three-foot “hide” margin, they could hear the firefight moving ominously closer to the beach from the slope beyond, which meant that the team must be coming down the Y, laying suppressing fire behind them.

The team was doing just that, to allow Salvini time to recover the MANPAD box, from where he’d dropped it off trail among the stiffly resistant bushes and nettles, and reach the beach.

Raising the search scope would enable Mervyn to see what was going on, but rather than aiding Salvini in any way, the “up scope” might identify the craft’s position to any pursuing NKA troops, who by now, Mervyn guessed, were coming pell-mell down the Y.

“What the hell’s that?” Gomez asked, indicating the passive sonar’s waterfall. It looked as if the wafer-thin waterfall screen of sound lines had suddenly been violently kicked, the normally placid cascade of vertical lines broken up into a high-pitched, sizzling static. But this was not the jamming static purposely emitted by the powerful generators aboard McCain and its battle group to support the Payback team mission. It was clearly coming from a local source.

The source was the extraordinary vibrations caused by the NKA’s upgunned T-55. Having rolled past the warehouse, it was now descending the Y astride the Y’s flooded track, the tank belching coal-black exhaust from its twelve-cylinder diesel engine and spraying a hail of both 7.62mm and higher-caliber rounds from its coaxial and independently fired machine guns as it lumbered down toward the beach. Crushing all in its path, mashing stout brush and tangled vines into the rain-sodden earth, the tank’s vibrations shook the electronic life out of the RS’s waterfall screen, the RS itself now no more than seventy yards away as the behemoth dipped then climbed up the western side of the last sand dune between it and the hard, wet sand at the surf’s edge.

“They’re out of the shed,” John Cuso quietly informed Admiral Crowley as they watched the latest satellite pix’s infrared readout on McCain ’s Big Blue. Officially, Cuso was off duty, but no one in SES or on the bridge wanted to be caught sleeping during one of the most exciting McCain -launched missions in the carrier’s long and illustrious career. What made it especially riveting for the relatively small number of men and women who’d been selected to participate in the highly secretive launch of the RS was that they knew, together with the other nearly six thousand souls aboard the boat, that this had been the officially sanctioned retribution—“media deniable,” of course — for the horrors unleashed in the murderous MANPAD attacks against American civilians.

Up till now, the fury of the Force 9 charging south from Siberia into the East Sea had clouded SATPIX infrared surveillance, but, through a break in the deceptively calm eye of the storm, the big blue screen, or rather, the state-of-the-art computers that fed its data blocks with information relayed by the satellite, had enough clear weather to pick up the action 22,300 miles below the satellite’s orbit.

“Looks dicey,” commented off-duty air boss Ray Lynch. “What’s that big job with the camouflage net over it?”

“A tank ,” said one of the twelve electronic warfare officers who sat reverentially beneath Big Blue.

“Upgunned T-55, we think,” put in another, to ameliorate his fellow EWO’s sarcasm. “A hundred and thirty-five millimeter.”

“Laser guided,” proffered another EWO.

“Possibly,” said his colleague.

Air boss Ray Lynch shook his head and moved back a little from the screen, nursing his thick mug of java. He didn’t say anything, but some of these Navy guys knew squat when it came to tanks. Before he’d become air boss and was a fighter jock during the Iraqi wars, he’d been in action against tanks, particularly the ubiquitous T-55, of which Russia alone had over 25,000, and he’d never seen a 135mm T-55. Putting that size cannon on a 36-ton T-55 chassis would be like mounting a howitzer on a pickup. Fire a round and the recoil’d kill everyone aboard. But he didn’t say anything — just stood there, watching the screen.

Lynch was already violating the strict Blue Tile prohibition against smoking and bringing food and beverages into the SES, but he was allowed to get away with it because of the extraordinary stress and awesome responsibility of his job. Managing the equivalent of four metropolitan airports at peak hour simultaneously, and all this on a four-and-a-half-acre slab, required lots of coffee and the nerves of a quarterback. And he’d just brought in the entire “Snoopy Gang,” as McCain ’s aviators referred to both the roto-domed early-warning Hawkeye and the magnetic-anomaly-detecting sub hunter Viking, the two of these relatively slow, fixed-wing aircraft having been protected by Chipper Armstrong, Rhino Manowski, and the other two pilots of the Joint Strike Fighter quad. All eleven men had been talked down through the violence of the Force 9 by Ray Lynch, who hadn’t considered his job done until he’d personally observed that the Hawkeye’s pilot, copilot, Combat Information Center Officer (CICO), air control officer, and radar officer, the latter three known as the plane’s three moles, had been safely deplaned.