Ian Slater - Force of Arms

The action suckered the fourteen-hundred-meters-per-second Soviet-made Acrid infrared or heat seeker. But the other Fulcrum was on Angel Two, firing a radar-seeking missile, and clumps of foil were being jettisoned as the second F-15 made a defensive turn hard left toward the Fulcrum and fired its cannon. The Fulcrum went straight up, and Angel One fired a Sidewinder, saw the Fulcrum tailslide, but it was too late, the missile hitting the Fulcrum’s left wing, creating a ball of flame. The second Fulcrum disengaged.

Out of chaff, or foil, to dummy a second radar-seeker missile fired by the second Fulcrum, Angel One released its lure, a small, cable-attached decoy emitting strong false echoes. The Fulcrum’s missile made a sharp left and slammed into the decoy in an orange-black ball that roiled and rolled upward into the night.

The Hercules pilots felt well protected but began veering away from their original course deeper into western Mongolian airspace so as not to give away the previous vector, which, because of fuel considerations, they had drawn straight to the target in Tibet — still hours away.

“Bad sign,” the copilot said.

“What is?” the pilot asked.

“Well, I mean we’re out just over an hour and to get picked up like that.”

“Ah, don’t sweat it,” the pilot replied. “Probably saw us on local radar — had to send up the bogeys to have a look see. Nah, they’ll figure we’re on a resupply run.”

“Where to, Mongolia?”

“You worry too much.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Relax. How’d you like to be those poor bastards back there?” He indicated the rear of the plane. “Going for the big bungee jump into the pitch dark. Freeze your balls off for a start.”

The copilot said nothing, so the pilot pressed him for morale’s sake. “Come on, where would you rather be? Up here with the defrosters going or in the middle of fucking Tibet?”

“Up here,” the copilot said.

“All right, then, let’s get it done.”

They saw two F-15s going up behind the tanker, saw the tanker’s “shuttlecock”-tipped refueling boom arcing down, the small pinpoints of light for the final few seconds of the hookup, the lights out, and beyond them the moon so bright it would have given triple A a perfect shot, radar or not.

“Relax,” the pilot repeated. “The moon’ll be covered by cloud where we’re going.”

“Then how we gonna see?”

“Why is it that you have no confidence in instrument flying? You’re qualified.”

“Yeah, sure, but I like to see where I’m dropping my cargo, that’s all.”

“Relax, Mel. They’ve been in cloud before. This isn’t some weekend sky-jumping gig, you know. These guys drive their chutes.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. SAS and Delta boys can do it in their sleep. Man, you know what kind of training they go through? Tough as fucking nails. Out on their own, days at a time in stinking below-zero weather — can stay concealed in shallow trenches — can even shit and piss in those trenches and not move they’re so good at it. You remember the Falklands War?”

“Yeah.”

“SAS first in — blew up an Argentinian squadron on the ground. Every one of them can take an eye out of a needle with a submachine gun.”

“Yeah, how about the needle? Anything left?”

The pilot pursed his lips and shook his head. “Not much, Mel.”

“You stupid bastard,” Mel said, grinning, and felt better in the warm near-darkness of the instrument panel. He was worrying too much — it’d probably be a milk run.

Thousands of miles away across the Pacific it was early morning, and Rosemary Brentwood was sleeping fitfully, her dreams of childbirth at once reassuring and frightening — reassuring because Andrea Rolston kept looking out with reassuring smiles and holding Rosemary’s hand as the contractions increased, and then just as vividly in the dream a terrifying metamorphosis would take place as her kindly face was replaced with the indistinct face of a stranger — a man who did not smile but who pursued her and who seemed Oriental. Always in the background of Rosemary’s dream, fading in and out of view but always present, was the man’s implacable stare, extending his hand in friendship, only to have him grasp the baby by the throat, at which point, as she did now, Rosemary would sit bolt upright, sweating, immediately feeling her stomach and then suddenly relieved as she felt the baby kicking.

She was a competent teacher, with all the self-confidence that that entailed, but as a mother-to-be she felt entirely inadequate and, without Robert, more alone than she’d ever been. She had the sudden urge to ring Andrea, saw how late it was, and decided instead to make a cup of tea. She thought she heard something moving in the kitchen and froze, and then heard the squeaking of a dolphin paperweight, the white dolphins in the blue sea inside the transparent weight making their crying sounds if the slightest movement vibrated the paperweight. Rosemary had never intended them to be an alarm, but something the baby might like in the crib. Slowly she pulled out the service .45 from the drawer in her bedstead, flicked the safety catch off, as Robert had told her, and called, “Who’s there?”

All she could hear was a light breeze that through the trees of the base outside sounded like running water. “I’m armed!” she said, with as much menace as she could muster, which was hardly any at all. Her hands shaking, she thought of telephoning base security, but then whoever was there, if there was someone there, would have an advantage, as she knew that having to use one hand for the phone would mean she couldn’t hold the .45 still enough.

She heard another rush of wind through the trees, and then the dolphins squeaked again. She approached the hallway leading to the kitchen. It took her a full thirty seconds before, heart pounding and hands trembling, she reached the hallway and immediately saw the push-out window above the sink hadn’t been closed to the last notch, and so the window frame was being blown against the ledge above the sink, causing the dolphins to squeal. Still shaking, weak with relief, she returned to the bedroom, put the gun back in the drawer, and went to the kitchen to make tea.

For a moment of ice-chilling fear she suddenly felt she was being watched again, but by whom and from where she didn’t know. It was five a.m., and she picked up the phone to dial Andrea, decided it was too early to impose her prenatal jitteriness on her American friend, and instead replaced the phone down in its cradle. “When the wind blows,” she remembered, “the cradle will rock.”

Turning back toward the kitchen, she gave herself a dressing down. All right, Rosemary, enough of the hysterics please. Get a hold of yourself. Whatever would Robert think. Really—

And the dolphins squeaked again, and it was little wonder, Rosemary thought, with all her walking and bumping around. She’d make herself a nice cup of “char,” breathe easily, and wait patiently for the morning. As an extra precaution she walked all about the bungalow to see whether all the locks were on. They were, and she felt safe.

If Lenin’s favorite dictum, that in war quantity has a quality all its own, was to be seen in action it was on the hundred-mile Orgon Tal-Honggor section of the front. Though a straight line could be drawn between them running northeast from Orgon Tal nearly one hundred miles, the actual line with bulges made the front more than 150 miles long, the bulges consisting of four Chinese armies made up of elements of the Sixty-ninth, Sixty-third, and Twenty-seventh infantry and two armored divisions, consisting not only of infantry and the usual ninety-six tanks per army made up of three tank regiments with thirty-two tanks each, but nine regiments of reserve armor — in all, 2,815 tanks, half of which were T-72 laser-sighted.