Ian Slater - Force of Arms

“They don’t look too fuckin’ happy, do they?” Aussie observed. The laughter started to build, and in the relief following the enormous tension of the mission, Aussie’s wry comment took on the aspect of one hell of a joke, then one man slipped and fell, butt first, on a pile of bird droppings that were all around the edge of the lake, it being a bird sanctuary. “Oh, shit!”

“That’s right,” Salvini said, and some of the commandos were laughing so hard, tears were streaming down their faces.

“Okay, settle down,” Brentwood said. “Remember Pave Lows will have their hover coupler on to bring ‘em to this exact GPS spot through all the cloud and mist. But if the weather closes in, the choppers won’t risk landing when they can’t see the ground — it’ll be standard hover coupler procedure. Means they’ll be about forty or fifty feet above us. They drop the rope ladders and we go up to them. Divide yourselves up into three groups of around twenty each.”

By now three ski platoons from the PLA’s Damquka camp on the other northeastern side of the twenty-thousand-foot mountain range had been dispatched via six Shenyang-made M1-4 fourteen-seat helicopters over the pass and on down toward the direction of the lake, but they were still airborne a good two miles from its nearest shoreline.

“Why don’t the bastards come right on down?” someone asked. Aussie Lewis had his Haskins and eight incendiary bullets ready. If a chopper got much closer he’d have a target that would fill the scope. Another commando readied one of the two Stinger ground-to-air missiles.

“Come on, you pricks…” Aussie said, “come closer.” But that was as far as the Chinese would come, and it puzzled Brentwood.

“Hey Aussie,” Salvini called out, “they must have heard about your sharpshooting with the jolly Hask.”

“They don’t want my Stinger,” one of the two antimissile missile commandos called out.

“Kawowski,” Aussie quipped, “nobody’d want your ricking Stinger! Dunno where it’s been.”

The six Chinese helicopters disappeared from view in mist that suddenly swept down through the pass and hid everything, including a good part of the lake.

“I don’t like it,” Brentwood commented. “Not coming closer like that.”

“Neither do I,” Aussie concurred. “Bit bloody queer isn’t it? I mean, it’ll take them a good half hour to get here by foot. By that time we should be outta here.”

“Maybe,” Choir Williams said, “they’re worried about our fighters jumping them and they want to stay close up there by the mountain range. Harder turning for a fighter.”

“Maybe,” Brentwood said, unconvinced. “Anyway, we’ve got to get to work on the defensive perimeter before they get here and—”

The trooper next to him was lifted off the ground and flung back with the force of the AK-47’s burst, and the next second another SAS/D man was dead.

“Down!” Aussie yelled, and in the scramble for cover behind the nearest boulder he dove into the snow, which racked the end of the Haskins’ barrel with ice. He put the muzzle brake at the end of the fluted barrel into his mouth, inhaling then exhaling into it, like giving a drowning victim the kiss of life.

He had made an understandable but disastrously wrong estimate.

The ChiComs from Damquka camp on the other side of the range weren’t regular mountain troops — they were ski troops. In a mogul-jumping advance that would have pleased any professional skier, they had cut the normal hiking time between where they had landed and the lake’s shore by more than a half. What would have been a twenty-minute or half-hour journey for an average hiker in good condition was slashed to five minutes via the speed of collapsible skis, telescoping poles, and Silvretta step-in bindings — and, where they needed them, light, tough magnesium snowshoes, their camouflage overwhites as effective as those of the SAS/D contingent. In another four minutes the fresh eighty-four ChiCom ski troops were all around the little more than sixty SAS/D troops.

Brentwood prayed that the three Pave Lows wouldn’t show up for a while, as an attempted evacuation by helicopters now would prove suicidal. Brentwood had no sooner clipped a new magazine into his HK MP5K submachine gun than he heard two fighters overhead.

“Our Eagles,” one man in Salvini’s group proffered.

“Don’t know,” Brentwood said. Then they could hear the steady chopping of the air that marked the approach of helos in the mist.

“Everybody,” Brentwood ordered, “defensive positions.” Within seconds the SAS/D had all but disappeared between the rocks along the foreshore, or in their white overlays were lying inert against the snow.

“It’s all right!” Brentwood shouted. “Must be the Paves.” There were three rope ladders dangling from the mist. Aussie and the other SAS/D men materialized from their hiding places to go up the rope ladders, the mist and fog rolling down the mountainsides and mixing in a bone-chilling whiteness that completely obscured the sight of the helicopters that were hovering in the pea soup, presumably no more than forty feet above them.

But the ChiComs from Damquka could be heard — a kind of eerie shuffling noise — obviously hoping to kill the Americans before they could get anywhere near the rope ladders and disappear into the churning mist and fog, the deadly stutter of Chinese T-85 submachine guns complimented by a lot of shouting. The sound of a Chinese bugle and the chatter of older but effective Soviet-made PPSh-41 submachine guns that filled the air was coming closer with dramatic suddenness. The initial wave of fifteen or more Chinese was cut down by the defensive circle of SAS/D troopers, but at the cost of four men from Salvini’s group.

The second wave, taking advantage of the first wave’s shock, took protective positions amid the many rock spills and boulders that lay covered in snow. Brentwood grabbed the radio and warned off the Pave Lows and the fighters, even as he was struck by the irony of having the world’s best strikers above him while he was unable to call them in as TACAIR, given the close proximity of SAS/D and ChiCom troops. And he knew that the longer he waited to call in the helos the more fuel they’d burn up, to a point where they would have to turn back as their fuel was consumed in the waiting.

Meanwhile, the Chinese were lobbing stick grenades all over the place. A few SAS men tossed the grenades back, but in all it was mainly a game of bluff on both sides— neither knowing exactly where the others were. Now the fog and mist became thicker, and Brentwood didn’t hesitate. “Withdraw to purple!” he called, and fired the flare, guessing the distance at about a hundred yards — nearer the edge of the lake. Reverse overarch — that is, retreating in stages of overarching protective fire — was something the SAS/D troops had rehearsed and performed elsewhere many times. The fog made it more difficult and dangerous, but still they could do it, and in squads of four they began the withdrawal to the purple smoke — a purple halo in the falling snow, the sound of the choppers near but out of the purple corona and glow that would have given them away to the Chinese.

Seven more SAS/D men were lost during the pull-back, but those that made the purple were next to two SAS/D from Salvini’s troop — or rather, what was left of it — and were pointed in the direction of the hanging rope ladders just beyond the penumbra of light cast by the flare. In another five minutes most of the remaining fifty-three SAS/D troops had made it to safety beyond the surreal purplish world of swirling snow, whiteout, and the deafening sound of rotors, approximately seventeen men allotted to each of the three Pave Lows. In another ten minutes they should be safe.