Ian Slater - Force of Arms

“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.”

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.