Ian Slater - Asian Front

Murphy, his rear gunner, wasn’t happy about the mission either, but in Murphy’s case it was sheer unadulterated fright, though he tried not to show it. Murphy, for whom the there mention of China evoked childhood images of San Francisco’s Chinatown — mysterious smells and fearsome dragons, shot through with weird music — fervently wished the B-52s had had their turrets rigged for radar remote firing as they had been in the old days. However, with the new.50s with a higher rate of fire but not yet successfully slaved to the turret, the machine guns in the rear turret would have to be manned, albeit with radar assist whenever possible.

At Lakenheath in southeastern England, bemoaning the awful weather that swept in from the channel was de rigueur among the B-52 crews because it was the expected thing. Gunner Murphy always joined in, but secretly he couldn’t think of anything better than bad weather. So it might mean a rough ride, especially over the European Alps and the mountains of south central Asia, which included the Himalayas, but gray cloud socking them in would keep them out of visible sight, and as a rear gunner, despite all the advances in infrared, Starlite vision, and radar, Murphy retained an old-fashioned belief that lack of visibility in the enemy’s territory was your best defense. Besides, on the visual skyrange he’d brought down many more drones with line of sight than with radar assist.

Sometimes there were too many damn dials to watch instead of your sights. His big worry of course was that the bad weather wouldn’t hold. In spring the stratus could suddenly clear, revealing vistas of sky and earth that would be an antiaircraft battery’s heaven. To be on the safe side, Murphy went again to the Lakenheath PX and stocked up on the new and improved Pepto-Bismol tablets, tearing open the cardboard packages and stuffing the cellophane-wrapped pink tablets into every opening in his flying suit he could find. He explained away the Pepto-Bismol on the basis of having some vague stomach condition undiagnosed by the doctors but due, he was convinced, to the service food.

The PX quartermaster was shaking his head at the quantities of Pepto-Bismol that Murphy was concealing about his person. “Murph, you fart up there, the sky’ll turn pink.”

“Don’t be a smart ass. You got any more?”

“Christ, you’ve got the last six packs. You’ve bought enough for the whole damn flight.”

“What if we go down?”

“Christ, you’re a happy fella aren’t ya?”

“Cautious,” Murph said tersely. “I like to cover my ass. Rear gunner’s motto — right?”

“Listen, Murph, if you go down you’re gonna need a hell of a lot more than Pepto-Bismol.”

“Cheery son of a bit—” Murphy began, then suddenly stopped. “When’d you hear about the mission?”

The quartermaster shrugged. “Yesterday, I think. Scuttlebutt is your wing’s on call. Could be tomorrow. Could be next week. Right?”

“Right. ‘Cept you aren’t supposed to know. They tell you the target?”

“Nope.”

“Well that’s something,” Murphy said, and was gone.

When he got back to the NCO’s mess the buzz all over was that the mission had been scrapped. “Oh, shit!” Murphy said, as if he really meant it. “What’s up?”

“Politics,” someone said. “Some Labour congressman—”

“M.P.,” another cut in. “Member of Parliament. They don’t have congressmen.”

“Yeah, well, some Parliament joker’s heard about the request to launch a flight from here in England and threatens to raise shit unless the Labour shadow cabinet gets a chance to hash it over.”

“Aw, shoot!” Murphy said, really getting into the disappointed flier mode now. “That could mean weeks.”

“Could mean never,” another rear gunner said.

“Aw, shit!” Murphy said.

Shirer was ambivalent about the news. On the one hand, a cancellation might mean a bit of time to grab a C17 cargo flight over the pole to Alaska to spend a few days’ leave with Lana. On the other, he didn’t like just sitting around waiting. So what if the mission would mean driving a Buff? At least that was some kind of flying. Besides, the longer it took for the politicos to make a decision — to stop the Labour party from going public — the greater the danger that news of the exact target would leak out. At the moment hopefully all that would leak was a request for a U.S. Air Force overflight, the target unspecified.

But if Shirer was concerned about that, the one thing he had to feel good about was that Jay La Roche was about to go on trial in the States for “treasonable activity”—selling arms to China before the cease-fire, many of the weapons having been used in the slaughter of Freeman’s III Corps on Lake Baikal. He’d been out on bail ever since his arrest on the last night of the presidential moratorium — an Emergency Powers Act that had allowed police to arrest on due suspicion only and without having to Mirandize or to release their prisoner if a charge had not been made. Although the moratorium was over, there was speculation that it might be quickly reintroduced by the president if hostilities increased — to combat any potential internal sabotage in the United States.

In any case, La Roche had been arrested twenty minutes before midnight, midnight having been given by the president as the end of the moratorium, and La Roche had been flown from Alaska for trial in Manhattan.

The newspapers were full of it — except La Roche’s tabloid chains — and Frank was looking forward, like many others, to seeing La Roche put away. If La Roche had been locked up for what he’d already done against some of the underage boys and girls he’d had picked up to perform oral sex on him as well as beating them up he would the in jail. So far, however, his money and influence had thwarted any such charges. But now they had him cold on the selling of weapons to the PLA through his Hong Kong front men, one of the Hong Kong Chinese having “spilled his guts,” in La Roche’s words, in return for not being prosecuted and being under the protection of the government witnesses program.

The Pave Low’s blades chopped the air, its FLIR-forward-looking infrared sensor — guiding it over the corrugations that on the radar were the ridges radiating out of the Hentiyn Nuruu Mountains fifty miles northeast of Ulan Bator. The helicopter’s vibrations could be felt in the bone. Aussie Lewis and Salvini were asleep, Aussie snoring so loudly that, because of the Pave’s relatively quiet rotors, he could be heard by the others.

David Brentwood and Choir Williams were reassured by their colleague’s apparent cool, but David had seen it often enough before — something that civilians never believed, how men, going into harm’s way, in this case flying over hostile territory, about to land on a dangerous mission, could manage to fall asleep. But they did. For like mountain climbers who were sometimes able to strap themselves to the pitons on a narrow ledge and take a nap, their nervous energy had been exhausted by the meticulous preparation, the adrenaline put in reserve as the body demanded rest before the final push. David had seen SAS and Delta commandos catnapping with only a few minutes before the descent or the drop. David shook the Australian awake, then Salvini.

“What time is it?” Aussie asked.

“Oh four hundred hours,” David said. “Dark as pitch. No moon. Pilot must be sweating it.”

Aussie Lewis began strapping on his gear: haversack containing his Mongolian herdsman’s outfit, two three-and-a-half-pound Claymore mines, ten top-feed mags of 5.7mm ammunition for the P-90, a canteen of water, six hand grenades, folding spade, and furled “washing line” satellite antenna. They were still on radio silence and would remain so until they accomplished their mission and/or were back at the insertion point. Should their mission have to be aborted, a radio burst — an SOS giving their position — condensed into a fraction of a second would be permitted, plus any information on Siberian troop movements into Mongolia. The latter, often called the sixteenth Soviet republic, still had Siberian advisers and their units along the railroad from Ulan Ude near Lake Baikal south to Ulan Bator, the rail being a branch off the Trans-Siberian.