Ian Slater - Force of Arms

“How did you know?” Rosemary began as Andrea dialed.

“Easy. Couldn’t sleep. Usual, first few nights after they go out. Saw your lights go on and phoned. No answer and I just knew there was trouble. You did good, Rosie — don’t worry about it.”

For some inexplicable reason, Rosemary, the English teacher, almost corrected Andrea—”You did well.” She hated the ungrammatical “did good” when they meant “well.” She said nothing, still shaking. “Andrea?” she called.

Andrea was on the phone.

“Andrea!”

“What is it?”

“The baby — I think—”

“Uh-oh — you better hurry with that ambulance, ma’am. I think we’ve got a premature baby on the way. What? Yes, ma’am, a mother in premature labor. And she’s in shock. So you hurry!”

Rosemary had never felt as ill as she did now — pain from the blow to her cheek and so sick in the stomach she just wanted to pass out, but she didn’t and could hear the ambulance siren wailing in the distance.

The flares were finished and it was down to killing by moonlight because there was no place to run — a hundred yards here, a hundred there, and then there would be a collection of new boulders. And in the darkness atop the cave a few triple A guns brought forward so they could be depressed to shoot down in front of the missile cave couldn’t do so for fear of hitting their own troops with ricochets.

The Chinese were brave. Ordered out to hunt down the SAS/D, they couldn’t contain the American and British commandos, whose morale, fitness, and equipment were superior. As the SAS/D shot their way past the tanks, the range was often point-blank, and here the small, thirteen-inch-long HK MP5 submachine guns firing at nine hundred rounds a minute were better than the longer AK-47s, pumping out two hundred rounds in less than a minute. Some SAS, however, carried AK-47s, it always being useful to have the enemy’s 7.62mm ammo as well as your own at your disposal.

More than a dozen Chinese were felled by the chest-sheathed knives of the SAS/D teams, and several of the SAS/D troopers had the Browning High Power 9mm pistol as a backup, the magazine holding thirteen rounds of hardhitting Parabellum. In the din of the battle, huge, flickering shadows crisscrossing the boulders could be seen as a result of the light from the missile’s dying fuel fire. Now and then a scream would pierce the air as another SAS/D chest knife found flesh and bone. Even so, nine more SAS/D were cut down, reducing the original force of eighty to sixty-two, counting the four who had not made the rendezvous after the jump.

Aussie Lewis’s and Salvini’s men were first to reach the open ground before the cave, the ground now littered with the smashed gantry, looking like some monstrous metallic stick insect that had crashed and fallen amid the flames, exposing its ribs.

Unhesitatingly Aussie Lewis began scaling the rocky cliff by the base of the door off to the left, searching for finger holes or anything that would help propel him up and lead him to the exit from where he’d seen the Chinese come.

“Hey,” someone said in an urgent but subdued voice. “Use the bloody ladder.”

Lewis dropped to the ground, catlike, and on the swing around, his infrared picked up a long, white blob, a Browning 9mm High Power preceding it, on the rungs of a ladder cemented into the sheer wall, previously hidden by the snow. Then he heard the rip of an AK-47—Chinese or SAS/D he didn’t know until he saw the blur of the 9mm Browning dropping after its owner to the ground, and above the blur a bold white stick pointing out and down: the barrel of an AK-47. Aussie sprayed nine millimeter at the stick and lobbed a stun grenade up and over.

There was a tremendous metallic crash as the grenade exploded, and in the five seconds it took Aussie to get up the ladder and spray over the top before he had his foot on the last rung, the Chinese was on his knees, appropriately stunned. Lewis kicked him in the head, then with one swift movement, his Browning High Power in his left hand, he pulled the soldier to the edge of the thirty-foot cliff and pushed him off.

“Jesus, Aussie!” It was Salvini below, trying to get up the ladder, only to feel a close rush of air as the body passed him. “Don’t recycle the bastard!”

“Sal?” Aussie called.

“Yes?”

“I can see the exit.” What he meant was mat he couldn’t actually see it but rather its heat signature — obviously it served as an air intake as well for the cave. But when they got there, he and four other SAS/D men following, two turning to take up the rear defensive position, Aussie failed to move the exit cover by pulling on its ring bolt. “Fucking thing’s closed from the inside.”

“Blow it!” Sal said, and in seconds a whole seam was packed with donutlike C4.

“Everybody back!” he yelled before he detonated the plastique. There was a tremendous explosion, shards of ice and small pebbles bouncing off the boulders below, and from those that the men on top had used for cover. When they went back the seam had been ruptured here and there, but it still held.

“Shit!” Aussie declared. “Okay — let’s go again.” But as no one in the small group had any more of the explosive, he yelled, “Plastique! Left exit!” A volley of fire erupted from below as five Chinese around the burned-out shell of a T-59 fired in the Australian’s general direction. It was a bad mistake, as the volley of fire they got in return from the flanks and above killed all five.

“Room service!” Salvini yelled, helping three members of his troop up the ladder and sending them and their plastique over to Aussie.

The second charge exploded, the exit’s seams now turned up and curled back, blackened and scarred like chapped lips, but the steel core of the exit still held, though Aussie could see through a crack about three inches wide down into the cave and could feel the freezing air being sucked down into the mountain’s interior where he saw panic— blur upon blur of men trapped — and though some of them were undoubtedly among some of the most brilliant nuclear scientists in the world, they had no idea what to do about their predicament.

“Right!” Aussie said, hunched over the edge of the exit’s twisted steel. “Won’t take the fucking easy way then we’ll do it the hard fucking way. CS tear gas rounds — quickly!”

Each man pulled out two or three 37mm black rounds of CS gas from the thigh loops on his uniform and gave them one by one to Aussie, who put them in the baton stick and tired them, or rather dropped them, into the huge interior through the three-inch hole, finally plugging the hole with his white overlay hood, which he cut off with the knife. “Let’s see how the bastards like that.”

Suddenly a giant tremor, shook the mountain.

“The door!” Salvini said. “They don’t like that CS.”

“Aw, shit!” a trooper said in mock sympathy. “And they wanted to have more fun with their missiles. Aren’t we fucking awful!”

“Jesus,” one of Salvini’s troop cut in. “Does this mean we have to go down that friggin’ wall again?”

“No, it doesn’t,” Aussie answered, seeing David Brentwood’s troop over to his right fighting it out halfway up that side of the door. “Choir’s troop’ll take care of the ground floor and—” Aussie stopped speaking, then ran to the edge of the cliff, shouting down, “Hold your fire! Let ‘em go, Choir! Hold your fire!”

The Chinese — most of them in heavy, padded Mao suits — were streaming out, choking from the gas, tears running down their cheeks, handkerchiefs over their faces then putting their hands up one or two at a time, whatever they could manage. Only a few, realizing precisely what was going on, were able to lose themselves amid the boulders either side of the rail track that extended out from the cave.