Ian Slater - Force of Arms

“So when we get near the door,” a trooper said, “instead of going for it we go for the exits, right?”

“Right!” Aussie cut in. “The exits — that’s our ticket.” It was then that Brentwood heard through the darkness the distinctive unoiled squeak that was either a bicycle or a fifty-ton tank.

The new boys, about six of them, in Aussie’s seventeen-man force, looked at one another and tried to smile. Aussie Lewis had commanded them to smile whenever they saw a tank — said that it helped overcome the natural terror of seeing the monster bearing down on you and made you remember that if you did it right, if you kept your nerve, one man could kill a tank.

“T-59 probably,” Aussie said. “Fucking tin can. We’ll take care of the bastard.”

The mortar attack had eased off — the ChiComs had either found the killing zone they’d zero in on should the SAS/D attack, or they might have wanted to avoid hitting Chinese infantry that might now be halfway across the two-mile-wide, boulder-strewn gap between the lakeside and the mountain fastness towering in front of them.

“Arpac!” Aussie called out. He was calling for the disposable French antitank missile and launcher. The launcher was small — forty centimeters long with a bore less than three inches wide and weighing just over three pounds with a range of one hundred yards, so small in fact that an old SAS joke was that if you weren’t careful you’d lose it in your pocket.

Once the trooper with an Arpac came up, Aussie told him, “We’ll have to get a lot closer, mate. But just be ready. If we advance quietly and fast enough and nobody shows their noggin, the Chows won’t see—”

They all heard the crack of the hundred-millimeter cannon.

“Down!” Aussie yelled as an HE shell slammed into a boulder fifty yards behind him.

“Shit!” one of the troopers said. “Bastards must be on infrared.”

“Okay,” Aussie said calmly, “let’s draw ‘em out a bit. He’s at the maximum of his range now.”

“Christ, Aussie, we can’t draw ‘em out much further. How far back can we go?”

“To the fuckin’ lake if necessary.”

Now they could see another two tanks joining the one that had just fired. “They can’t climb boulders, son,” Aussie assured the SAS man with the Arpac. “They’re going to have to come closer if they want us.”

It was a stalemate — the SAS/D could go forward with its leapfrogging or bounding overwatch advance, but the ChiComs’ three cannon and six machine guns — three coaxial with the cannon — formed a formidable barrier unless the SAS could get closer, which meant dodging behind boulders and emitting infrared signatures that meant you might as well wave “a bloody flag,” as Aussie told it, and yell out, “Here I am!”

Some of the younger Turks in the four troops were sorely disappointed. Nearly all the training they’d done was for hit fast, hit hard operations: rappel down the side of a building, stun grenade through a window, take out terrorists, clear the room. Quick, fast, furious, and efficient.

“What the hell are we sittin’ on our butts for?” one said.

“You want to die?” Salvini said. “Then just stick up your head and that T-59 will oblige.”

“Where the hell’s all the infantry we saw piling out?” another asked.

“Doing what we’re doing, sport,” Salvini answered, “keeping behind cover, and when they do move, staying right behind the tanks. Where would you fuckin’ be? Want to try to rush ‘em? SAS/D ‘who dares wins’—is that it?”

“Well it’s better than ‘he who sits, shits.’”

“All right, Joe, when we move in,” Salvini said, “you can lead. Right?”

“Right!”

“Okay?”

“Okay!”

“You want it like the movies,” Salvini said.

“I want to do something, not just stay out of range and freeze my nuts off.”

Salvini gave him a wicked grin. “Oh, don’t worry, sport. You’ll get your chance. You can be tunneler one.”

“What?” There was a chattering of 7.62mm opening up again and long, orange flashes of tracer in the blackness.

“You can be tunneler one.”

“We goin’ down a fuckin’ tunnel?”

“No, you asshole. We’re going into one, and you can lead the way. Attach the infrared goggles and take us in.”

“Where?”

“The mountain, for Chrissake.”

“When?”

“When Aussie’s got it figured out, that’s when.”

“He’s not figurin’ anything out. He’s still yakking up there with Brentwood. Think they should have planned better right from the start.”

“Oh, spare me,” Salvini said, getting mad. He didn’t mind the open give and take that NCOs, officers, and privates had among one another — it was the same in most elite units where mutual respect was earned in the tough, gut-wrenching, mind-building training, but it was still a team effort, and this kid was opening his yap once too often. He was from Brooklyn, like Salvini.

“We didn’t have all the info, did we?” he put it to young Brooklyn. “If we’d been told exactly what to expect, exactly what was here, we could have planned it better. We didn’t know. You never know the whole story so welcome to the fucking war.”

Aussie, Brentwood, and Choir knew as well as Salvini that they were in a stalemate situation. “Both looking down one another’s throats,” Salvini explained.

“You think,” another trooper asked, a black Kentuckian, “they’ll be firing another rocket soon?”

“Aha!” Salvini said. “Give the man a cigar. That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question, buddy. Longer we hold them up, more time our boys back along the DMZ will have without being dumped on every half hour.”

“Well, hell,” young Brooklyn said, “we’re not gonna stop ‘em sittin’ here, are we?”

“Maybe you’re right,” Salvini said.

“Well, Jesus, man, we oughta just break radio silence— pull out the four phone, spring open the satellite aerial, and call for pickup.”

“Where would you suggest?” Salvini asked.

Young Brooklyn looked hard at Salvini. Was the troop leader taking the piss out of him or what? He seemed serious, so young Brooklyn said, “Down by the lake’d be the best place to get us out.”

“I agree,” Salvini said.

“You want me to make the call?” young Brooklyn pressed.

Salvini smiled. “You do and I’ll blow your fuckin’ head off.”

A trooper from further down the line walked in, crouched down behind the row of boulders, and hissed, “Can anyone tell us what the fuck we’re doing?”

“We’re waiting to see if they’ll fire off another rocket,” Salvini said.

“What if they don’t?”

“Then we’ve done our job.”

“All right — what if they fucking do?”

“Ah,” Salvini said, “now that’d be different.”

Over in Choir Williams’s troop, made up of most of the Delta contingent of the SAS/D force, Choir was quietly humming the stirring “Men of Harlech.” Gwyn Jones joined in, and a cockney from Kilburn said it was nice to be serenaded “before we all die.” David Jones, no relation to Gwyn, said that maybe if the Chinese heard Gwyn Jones sing it one more time they’d surrender. They were all on edge — they’d wanted to hit hard and fast, to do what they were trained to do. This waiting around was the worst kind of enemy — gave a man too much time to count the odds.

Salvini lifted the flash protector on his watch and saw it was 0420 hours. At 0425 there was an enormous rumbling sound like the echo of a storm way to the south toward the Himalayas. It was the hundred-ton door moving.