Ian Slater - Force of Arms

Pulling down his infrared goggles, he began following the tracks, which he could tell belonged to only one man and not a patrol. But he could be in between a patrol’s forward scout and the rest of the patrol, and so he made sure to walk in the tracks so as not to alert any patrol further back to his presence. He was struck by the coincidence that whoever he was following must be about the same build as he was — the footprints remarkably similar to his — until he consulted his wrist compass and discovered that in the whiteouts he’d gone full circle, had in fact been tracking himself for the last five minutes. “You fucking zombie!” he told himself, chagrined at the ribbing he would take if any of the SAS/D comrades ever found out.

The bullet that hit him threw him back six feet into the snow, the impact of the 7.6 round ripping open his snow-white camouflage overall but absorbed by the plasticine layers of the vest. Within a second of hitting the snow he had the HK on fully automatic and got off a spray, hearing several of the bullets striking hard rock beneath the flecks of snow.

He rolled fast left — could see a blob — and let the HK have its head. The blob shivered into a blur and fell on the snow. Clipping in another mag, he ran to the right of the body now lying about forty feet from him. As he got near he could smell human excrement and turned the man, who was dressed in Mao padded winter issue. There was a bloody hole where his chest used to be, and Aussie guessed he was the point man for a ChiCom patrol. The others couldn’t be far away, coming up behind him from the direction of the missile site. He and they might be less than a hundred feet apart, hidden from one another’s view by the whiteouts.

The thing that infuriated the Australian was that here he was, slated to lead his troop into the main attack, and instead he had landed nowhere near them and run into a patrol to boot.

The best he figured he could do was take off his helmet, don the earflap Mao headpiece the ChiCom was wearing, and put his helmet on the dead ChiCom. After this he put the empty mag back into the HK and took the AK-47. Lewis then put his HK in the man’s right hand and put an HE grenade under the man’s right thigh, pulled the pin— the ChiCom’s weight holding down the spring clip — and moved off to the left of the man’s trail behind several snow-capped forty-four-gallon-size drums and waited with the AK-47.

Within a minute he could hear the tired shuffle of boots through the snow. They weren’t lifting their feet up and placing them down “smartly!” as the SAS sar’major would say. No, they were obviously regular army troops out patrolling the godforsaken perimeter of the site, probably convinced — until they’d heard the exchange between the HK and AK-47—that they were thankfully out of the fighting that they could now hear two miles back over the two snow-covered, treeless ridges.

The moment they saw the body, covered in its winter overwhites as they were, its head covered by an Allied special-forces helmet, a Heckler & Koch SMG by his side, there was a celebratory call for their forward scout.

“The HK is mine,” one of the Chinese claimed, and as the others fanned out slightly, still calling for their point man, one of them put his foot under what he believed was the dead American’s torso. He glimpsed the grenade and the snow-covered face and turned to run. It was too late. The grenade exploded, killing him instantly. But Lewis wasn’t watching him.

Instead he had already thrown two other grenades, and as they detonated in flashes of brilliant purple, cutting down the tail end Charlie and the two men nearest him, Lewis moved the AK-47 to the remaining two, who were running for cover, one tripping in the snow, his partner brought down by a single shot from Lewis sixty feet behind him. There was a click from the Kalashnikov. Without hesitation Aussie Lewis drew his thirteen-shot Browning .45 and started running, unclipping a flash-bang stun grenade now his HEs were spent.

The man who fell never got up as Lewis fired two shots on the run from his Browning automatic. The last man swung around, out of breath. He looked like a polar bear enraged but at a distinct disadvantage. He was up against one of the SAS who had spent hundreds of hours in calm to gale-force winds pursuing one another across the wild moors and in the Black Mountains on the Welsh border. If you weren’t fit enough to run miles at a time and fire accurately on the run then you failed the course. The last ChiCom sprayed left to right with his AK-47. Lewis hit the snow, used both hands to fire, and hit the ChiCom, and in his mind’s eye saw the mustachioed SAS regiment’s sergeant major berating him, bellowing, “You bloody wastrel, Lewis. Queen pays for your board and keep and you go wasting bullets. Pull yourself together, man. One target, one shot!”

Lewis was too busy to celebrate his one-man ambuscade. Picking up his HK and helmet, he only hoped that he wasn’t missing out on the action at the missile base, and then there was the small matter of “extraction”—getting out via the Pave Low choppers after the raid.

He began a steady, loping, long-distance run toward the two ridges, fervently hoping that all the troopers who’d made it near the target were as lucky as he had been.

They weren’t

The mountain cave that had been selected by the Chinese for expansion into a bomb-proof shelter for the launching of its ICBMs was at the bottom of a north-south V that was formed by two enormous toes or foothills coming out of the twenty-thousand-foot mountain range opposite Lake Nam.

Back-checking on the Pentagon computers had ascertained that it had been the site some years earlier of a Chinese underground atomic test for which, taking advantage of a natural fissure in the rock, had been excavated a hole a mile into the base of the mountain range. A hundred-ton rolled steel door on left-to-right slider rails blocked the entrance of the cave and was opened only long enough for the rail-mounted missile-firing rig to be wheeled out, or rather shunted out, by two locomotives, just long enough for the launch. It was this out-in launch procedure that had given birth to “Cuckoo Clock,” Freeman’s code name for the attack on the Chinese ICBM site.

“Jesus,” one of the men in Salvini’s team said, “we’re the ones that are cuckoo.” He was looking through Salvini’s infrared binoculars, and the door, even half a mile away, did indeed look impregnable. But that would only be the start of it. If they could blow it, they would still have to go inside and wreak such damage on the site that it would be permanently out of action.

The Second Artillery — Chinese nuclear arm — was renamed the “Strategic Rocket Troops” in 1984, but many of the older commanders like General Wei still knew it as the Second Artillery and referred to it as such in their communiqués.

To protect the massive cave site, Wei had two hundred specially trained mountain troops from the Damquka base from the other side of the mountain range, and upon one of their patrols’ report that at least fifty, possibly a hundred, enemy paratroopers had landed, Wei sent a hundred of his mountain troops out to deal with them, leaving a hundred in reserve inside the cave.

Wei knew that an attacker needed at least a three-to-one advantage if he hoped to make any headway at all, and even at that it would be tough going. Besides, his mountain troops and his one-hundred-man company of regular troops were already acclimatized, anyone who had suffered from altitude sickness having been weeded out and returned to the lower-altitude regiments. Wei expected his men to make short work of the enemy paratroopers, who had no support akin to that of his own troops.