Ian Slater - Force of Arms

These were the men, scientists mostly and some soldiers, who knew that if any shots penetrated the liquid fuel tanks stored inside, then the whole mountain cave would become an inferno, consuming them. The warheads would probably not go off, but the rocket fuel surely would.

Choir was tired of searching the evacuees for arms, but those who had surrendered had to be checked out as a matter of routine.

Aussie, two of his troopers, and two of the prisoners donned their S6 gas masks and made their way back to the cave, Aussie ordering the Chinese prisoners to show them the door controls. When they found the wall panel that operated the door, they began to close it again until there was only room for one man to slip in or out at a time. The sky began to pass from blackness to a moonlit, suffused gray, and Aussie knew that dawn would soon be on them and it was still a three-mile trek to the lake for the helo pickup that Brentwood had ordered.

Having reached the right top exit-cum-air intake, Brentwood had followed Aussie Lewis’s method of dropping down CS canisters. Aussie and Salvini volunteered to stay behind until everyone was out of the way. Then Aussie with the Haskins — Salvini to provide covering fire if necessary — would finish the job, after which they would make for the lakeshore.

There was to be a delay, however, for Salvini, further in the cave than Aussie, had made a gut-wrenching discovery. Deeper in the mountain, beyond the stand of half a dozen missiles, the huge cave narrowed like the interior of a goat’s horn, this secondary cave much smaller in diameter, but one along which a narrow-gauge rail track ran, disappearing into the dark bowels of the mountain. Salvini had ventured only thirty feet into the tunnel when he saw the first storage room filled with fuel drums and a row of lights that seemed to go on forever inside the mountain.

Soon Aussie and two other troopers joined him. Following the rails for another hundred yards, Aussie experienced a gnawing apprehension that around the next bend in the tunnel they would find more Chinese regulars. They didn’t, but they did discover dozens of storage rooms hewn out of the rock, and that the railway line snaked around several sharp S curves that acted as blast protectors.

To ensure maximum destruction, Aussie saw that they’d have to jury-rig an explosive line of gasoline drums so that an explosion at the cave mouth could in fact negotiate the S bends and take out the string of thick-walled storage rooms of fuel, ammunition, food, and rocket supplies as well.

From one such gasoline dump — drums stacked to the ceiling — Aussie ordered two troopers with him and Salvini to puncture as many drums as they could and to roll these down along the narrow-gauge rails toward the cave’s mouth, the gasoline spilling between and around the tracks. In addition, he ordered some drums to be rolled down to ether, nonfuel, storage rooms, punctured there, and rolled in and out of the other rooms so that finally he had created a gas-sodden path along the rail track toward the cave’s mouth several hundred yards on as well as having created gas-sodden tributaries, as it were, from the main line into each storage room. When he and the other troopers, five of them, emerged from the cave mouth, the others, as agreed, had already left for the lake.

“All right,” Aussie said, “let’s head into those boulders — ’bout three hundred yards from the cave.”

“Roger!”

A quarter mile beyond the missile complex, Aussie looked up through a gap in the clouds to see a sparkling array of stars, then they were gone. He had no need of starlight, however, nor did he want to risk using a flare anywhere near the mouth of the cave. Through the infrared scope on the Haskins he could see the racks of missile fuel clearly enough, standing up at the rear of the gargantuan interior like huge stovepipes. He pulled back the bolt and fired an incendiary.

The explosion was immense, bigger than he or Salvini had ever seen — like a sudden sunburst, its feral roar escaping the cave in a one-hundred-yard-wide dragon tongue of flame, the ensuing rivers of flame issuing forth from the secondary storage explosions.

“Chri-i-st!” Salvini said, looking back at the sight, but Aussie couldn’t hear him, for the noise of the explosion had been so loud it left the Australian’s ears ringing. He tapped Salvini’s S6 filter as Salvini stood mesmerized by the spectacle. “Come on, let’s go to Lake Nam.”

“I don’t like that name,” Salvini said. He had to say it again before Aussie could hear him.

“Why?” the Australian asked.

“Reminds me of Vietnam.”

“So?”

“Spooky, man.”

“Bullshit. It’s a salt lake in the middle of nowhere.”

“Right,” Salvini said, and they set out — neither walking nor running but in that slow, commando jog that wouldn’t exhaust them yet would get them, they hoped, to the lake in time for the pickup.

Every officer and guard in Beijing Number One jail was in a foul mood because, with the missile threat removed, the United States, with local guerrillas involved here and there, was counterattacking all along the Orgon Tal-Honggor line.

Although they were only recapturing territory they had lost, the very fact that the Americans had turned and regained the initiative in some areas bespoke a commander who the Chinese knew would be loath to surrender. And in that way that it always does, despite official prohibition against it, the news of the American turnaround was already known by most of the prisoners. Only those in solitary, like Alexsandra Malof, had failed to hear the news, but the guard assumed she had.

“So, your guerrillas help.”

“Wo bu dong” —I don’t understand — she said.

“Your guerrillas help.”

“Help what?”

“Ah, you think Chinese authorities do not know.”

“Know what?”

The guard stepped forward and punched her in the face. “You think guerrillas will—” He punched her again.

She flailed at him with her hands. “Get away from me…,” He enjoyed the fear in her eyes. He hit her again and felt his excitement rising. “We will kill all Americans!” the guard yelled. “All guerrillas.”

Grabbing her prison dress, he pulled it up about her waist. She tried to fend him off, kicking at him, but, laughing, he wedged his left thigh between her legs and kicked her with his right boot and she collapsed. He hit her again and again, and she knew if she didn’t yield he’d kill her, but he took her sudden servility as encouragement. Beneath all her hysteria, he told himself, she was just like the other women prisoners — she wanted it. Not being on the outside for a while, she missed it. He felt her legs give way, and she lay like a compliant dog as he huffed and puffed his way to ecstasy. It was short-lived, and when he heard the heavy door clanking open all he saw was the gun, and it was the last thing he ever saw, his body knocked off her, his temple a fountain of spurting blood, and astonishment on his peasant face as his head crashed into the stone wall. The reverberation of the pistol shot and the acrid bluish gray smoke were still in the air.

The moment Nie had looked through the judas hole and seen what was happening he’d ordered his aide, Captain Shung, to fire.

“Get him out of here!” Nie said, his voice even but its timbre vibrating with anger. He took one look at the prisoner’s face — bruised and bloodied by the fool of a guard. “After you get rid of him,” Nie added without looking at the captain, “get her to first aid. If she has to go to the prison hospital I must personally sign the transfer order. Understood?”