Ian Slater - Force of Arms

“Chin-eze,” the man repeated.

“Yes,” she replied. “I know — Chinese.”

He nodded to confirm that she understood. “Chin-eze,” he said again, and headed off into the snow, the yak Julia was riding tethered to the first. Julia could still hear the motor sound she heard just before his arrival. Suddenly she was struck by a bone-chilling apprehension that he was not taking her away from the nomad encampment for her safety but to deliver her to the Chinese for what she knew must be a substantial reward for a downed American pilot. She just as quickly dismissed the idea as absurd. As far as she knew, the Tibetans hated the Chinese.

Of course there were those who didn’t, who, during the madness of the Cultural Revolution in the sixties when Mao sent out his Red Guards, had collaborated. The Chinese had forced the nomads into communes, and those who had wealth had their animals stolen, their silver earrings torn off, and other goods confiscated. The nomads were branded “class enemies” of the people and as often as not were evicted as outcasts, even from the lowest level of the communes. During this time, some of the very poor had become powerful officials of the Chinese. Then after the Cultural Revolution had faded, the old order of nomadic society had reasserted itself, to the relief of nearly all the nomads. But there were still those who, once having had the power of the Chinese behind them, wanted it again and would do anything to ingratiate themselves with the Chinese.

What bothered Julia most was having had her .45 revolver stolen — if only for a few hours. Perhaps it was a local custom to share anything new brought into the camp.

It was like instrument flying in bad weather. She could see nothing through the darkness. Having placed all her faith in the guide, all she knew for certain from her watch-compass was that she was headed east into the wilderness of the Chang Tang.

She could hear the sound of the motor about a mile away, she thought, behind them, and it kept getting louder. Then abruptly it stopped. The old man turned to her in the saddle, pointing back toward the camp. “Chin-eze.”

Then the old man slid off his yak and, still holding its rein, came back to her and motioned for her to get off. As her feet touched the snow, the old man pointed down at their track marks. They were discernible at least twenty to thirty yards back, the snow not falling heavily enough to fill in the yaks’ footprints. The old man now indicated that they must walk with the yaks. It would mean more but lighter footprints, which the snow would fill in more quickly. At the campsite, the woman in the tent had given her a beaded necklace of carved bone and stones, said to ward off evil spirits that lurked in the mountain passes to trap the unwary. She fingered it like a rosary as they went higher into the Chang Tang.

Aboard the USS Reagan in the South China Sea, the high-speed burst message received gave Robert Brentwood his orders from Freeman, CIC Far Eastern Forces. Eight SEALs would be parachuted over a rendezvous point, their purpose a beach survey. It wasn’t Robert Brentwood’s favorite occupation. You never knew when your sub might be the victim of magnetic, or worse, nonmagnetic, mines activated by the sound print of the sub, depending on how good, how current, the PLA’s threat library of sound prints was. Since China had purchased some Russian subs after the collapse of the Soviet Union when the minorities rose there, there would now be more need to update the Reagan’s threat library of sound prints given off by the PLA navy, particularly as the Reagan entered Bo Hai gulf.

On this mission Robert Brentwood wouldn’t be part of the SEAL team as he had been before the cease-fire fell on the Yangtze. His job now was to insert the team of eight “surveyors,” one officer swimmer and seven other members, off the middle beach and then extract them four hours later after the SEALs, equipped with bubble-free Draeger rebreather systems, “cased the joint,” in the words of the chief of the boat, Petty Officer Rowan, by which Rowan meant they would go in in four pairs, a hundred yards from one another.

The SEALs would drop their lead-weighted sinker line every twenty-five yards to get the depth, which would be marked on their plastic thigh plates. Then they would work in grids to check systematically for any undersea obstacles, making a note of these on the slate and getting their exact position by waterproof GPS, or global positioning system.

The divers could then place a magnetic pinger, with a battery life of at least four days, or they could use malleable lumps of C4 plastique with primacord inserted. Then all the primacords could be attached to a master detonating cord.

It was a long, painstaking job in the darkness, particularly as the men found a fence of “hedgehogs”—six-pointed steel tripods, Chinese versions of the old Normandy landing’s Belgian gates — where a wall of twelve-by-twelve-foot cross sections of steel girders was supported by a large, backward-sloping, and flat-based system of girders. With floating contact mines attached to the top of the obstacle, they could blow a landing craft right out of the water. While the officer made his way toward the so-called “shark” net — in reality a sub net — the other seven swimmers in his team found over fifty of the China gates that made up an almost solid line of obstacles across the deepest channel at high tide.

The officer in charge had crossed the shark net of the middle beach and threaded it with primacord and Hagensen packs of C2 explosive and affixed his primacord to the master cord, which in turn was attached to a subsurface floater or bladder buoy, which would not be bobbing around on the surface but which was anchored by means of a Danforth anchor and which would be marked on the grid system as the detonation point for any incoming force.

When they returned to the sub — they had been out for over four hours — every SEAL was dog tired reentering the chamber, which had to be pumped free of water before they could dry off and earn a well-deserved rest in the sub. When the last man let go of the hatch too quickly and its bang resonated throughout the sub, the passive sonar operator tore his headset off. “Jesus Murphy!”

Brentwood heard it, too. In fact he doubted whether anyone else on the watch hadn’t heard it. There was one, the assistant cook, but he’d had his head stuck in the freezer, moving around heavy lumps of frozen beef.

The Chinese Navy had heard it. It wasn’t one of their few nuclear subs that had picked up the sound racing through the water at four times the speed it would have in air, but the Perch, a refitted diesel electric, one of the early Russian clankers known as “honeymoon machines” for all the noise they made — like a toolbox on the move. Normally the Reagan would have picked her up had she been under way with her diesels, but the Chinese sub was still, on station, diesels shut down, maintaining her position only by means of her battery power. As such she was silent as a tomb, much quieter man the pump of the nuclear sub Reagan, which had to be kept on at all times.

The question for the Chinese captain was whether the other submarine would give off any more noise “shorts.” And yet his battery power would last for only another hour. Should he move in closer to shore or wait? It was unlikely the other sub would be going in any closer to shore but would rather be egressing into the gulf.

He decided to wait. Meantime, all his torpedo tubes were loaded with warshots. Besides, the gulf was relatively quiet, so that subsurface sea clutter should be at a minimum and make any unusual noise easier to detect.