Ian Slater - Force of Arms

For several seconds Aussie could see parts of the F-15 Eagle sliding down the Pave’s radar screen. Both remaining Pave Low pilots wanted to go down and try to rescue some of the men from the downed chopper and, if possible, the pilot of the F-15 if the pilot had had time to eject, which was highly unlikely. But they both knew the rules. If they went back down into the mass of birds, which the Chinese had deliberately panicked and set to flight above the lake, then they too risked crashing — then everybody would be gone.

Lieutenant Reid landed northeast across the mountains down toward the Damquka-Naggu road. She knew her chance of being rescued by the choppers on the mission was nil, but momentarily at least she was pleased that if she had to be shot down it was triple A and not the result of making the wrong cut in a dogfight. There was no way she or the best pilot in the world could evade triple A by maneuvering — it was simply a matter of bad luck. But that satisfaction — that she was as good as any man — a conviction perhaps essential to the first woman combat pilot in any theater of operations — was short-lived.

In what was a whiteout, Julia took out her compass and headed north to where her military fold-out map of Tibet had “numerous nomad encampments” marked. It was a calculated risk, to go north, further toward China rather than south toward Lhasa, but with Tibet overrun by the Chinese she decided that keeping away from Lhasa, where there were thousands more Chinese than native Tibetans, would be the preferable risk.

In addition to her emergency rations and kit, which included a Nuwick forty-four-hour heat/light candle, she had what pilots called the “tit,” a small, arctic-type pup tent just big enough to lie in and zip up and have room for the candle. She could try a purple flare, but it was only a low probability that any of the aircraft, including choppers, were anywhere in the area — anyway their flight plan had called for them to fly south toward the Indian border, not north. And in that case the purple flare would only be an invitation to the Chinese. She felt, too, an added pressure — as the first female combat pilot. If she could tough it out in this godforsaken clime and somehow escape, then her fortitude would be another victory against the prejudices of those who didn’t want women in combat. History had also taught her that if she was captured by enemy troops, rape was a high probability. Far down on the white, icy north road she could see a black dot — a roadside shack, or something moving? A vehicle? She couldn’t tell. She would have to get closer. Just then she experienced a whiteout and felt a surge of fear — told herself to settle right down and took out her compass. If she walked north-northeast she should meet the road.

For Aussie Lewis and the other returning SAS/D troopers it was a somber helo trip back via the Indian border, and it remained so all the way to Khabarovsk.

Freeman’s dreams the night after the SAS/D returned were seamless, each running naturally into the other, despite the fact that in one dream he was at Trafalgar, where, after the broadside of just one naval engagement, all the men on the gun deck, as often happened, were permanently deafened. And he dreamed of the Russians, who had pioneered paratroop drops but without chutes when in winter they had to crawl out on the wing and drop off into the snow. Many were injured or killed, of course, but many were not and were quickly in action against the Wermacht. He dreamed of Hannibal crossing the Alps — of Napoleon’s retreat, how the Russian fastness soaked up the French like blotting paper soaked up ink — and he dreamed of the first land defeat suffered by the Japanese in 1942 at Milne Bay and of MacArthur’s triumphant return.

Suddenly he was awake and, hearing a noise outside, immediately reached for his shotgun. It was a mournful, keening wind fresh out of the great Gobi, and in its wolfish howling there seemed to be a warning that if he did not do something soon, the sheer weight of Cheng’s numbers would determine the outcome: China would absorb him as Russia had the French. It was in that moment that he realized what had to be done. Of course it was a gamble, but if it worked it would be a decisive blow — no, the decisive blow. He got up, ordered in coffee, and told the duty officer that as soon as the SAS/D team got back he wanted to see the four troop leaders.

“They’ll be pretty tired, General, after—”

“Tired! Don’t give me tired, son. Just get ‘em here. They’ve had fourteen hours sleep on the flight back from India through Japan,” Freeman said. “Besides, these are SAS/D, Major. They’re the best we’ve got. So don’t give me tired.”

“No, sir.”

Studying the SATPICs of Beijing, Freeman could see what looked like headless bodies along the east-west Changan Avenue and also in the square. Higher magnification showed the people’s heads were covered by a kind of muslin bag. Others, street sweepers, were busy with long straw brooms and wearing surgical masks against the dust Freeman pointed to the stretch of dirt that had no doubt once been a grassy meridian. Or at least that he knew had once been a grassy meridian.

“In the fifties,” he explained to Norton, “the Chinese government, with faultless Marxist logic, decided to do something to get rid of the millions of birds feeding off the city and defacing statues of the Heroes of the Revolution, and so the authorities encouraged the people to kill all the birds. Only problem was, with all the birds gone, there came a plague of insects that most of the birds had fed on. The insects destroyed the plants, and then the winds blew away the soil with no plants to anchor it. So now in addition to the west wind bringing all the dirt out of the Gobi, we’ve got the dirt from the city mixed in with it.” It was a yellowish pollution — a mixture of dust and grit from the deserts.

“Dick,” Freeman ordered, “get Harvey Simmet up here.” Norton glanced at his watch. It was three a.m., the time when most people die.

“Yes, I know,” Freeman said. “He’s probably having his beauty sleep, but get him all the same.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And get the aerial photo wiz.”

“It is late, General. Can it wait—”

“No! I don’t give a goddamn what time it is. You think Cheng shuts down past midnight? At night, Major, he moves entire divisions — thirteen thousand men at a time. The Chinese are a sea around us, and we’d better do something mighty quick before we drown.”

“Yes, sir.”

What in hell, Dick Norton wondered, was the general up to now? Had a little snippet of Chinese history — another point of the minutiae he knew about China — changed his mind about the strategy of the attack?

In fact, General Freeman was thinking about the night of June 3, 1989, when the PLA’s Twenty-seventh Army used a lot of tear gas at the Muxidi Bridge in Beijing.

Julia started out and anticipated feeling nauseated from altitude sickness until she got used to the relative lack of oxygen at fourteen thousand feet But whether it was her training in the centrifuge, the tight compression at high Gs, or the fact that she was in superb physical condition, she experienced little of the shortness of breath that they’d been briefed about before the mission.

She still couldn’t tell what the black dot was, only that it must be moving away from her at the same rate she was following it.

For minutes at a time the dot was completely lost in the sudden windstorms of snow and even hail that beat down, then just as quickly disappeared to reveal the denuded landscape of Tibet’s Chang Tang, a land of sky-blue lakes and vast green treeless grassland, pierced here and there by precipitous treeless mountains of somber, mustard-hued beauty.