Ian Slater - Asian Front

When he went back to his bunk he couldn’t sleep. The thought of her thousands of miles away in the wind-blown loneliness of Dutch Harbor, a speck in the vast darkness of the world, brought tears to his eyes, and with them the animal urge to be with her, to feel her warmth, to give her his, to be in her, to possess her so that he tossed and turned, nothing but the low moan of a channel storm blowing about the eaves of the Quonset hut for company and the gray dawn creeping.

Aussie Lewis didn’t think the day would ever come when he’d be happy to see a Siberian, but now in the gathering purple dusk the presence of other Caucasian faces, no doubt Siberian advisers and the like, afforded Brentwood’s group added protection as they lost themselves in the crowds milling about the temple. Long shafts of golden moonlight shone through the pillars, the beams getting thinner and thinner as the moon passed in a golden wafer through cloud.

At the entrance to the temple several pilgrims were prostrate, while in the temple itself others moved so silently that all that could be heard was the wind sweeping down from the Hentiyn Nuruu, the shuffle of feet, and the soft whir of prayer wheels whose spokes, containing the little paper messages that the Buddhists believed would find their way to Heaven, spun about like small merry-go-rounds. The notorious Mongolian cold was already seeping up from the ground like dry ice, the change dramatic and particularly uncomfortable for Salvini, who had worked up a sweat during the long hike dressed in his del. The only firearm he, like the others, carried into the city was his 9mm Browning, and it was irritating his skin beneath the silk-lined tunic.

Soon the official presidential party arrived, the president’s entrance to the holy place as low-key as they’d been briefed it would be. Now everything depended on Jenghiz handing the president Freeman’s sealed note, the same size as those that were inserted in the prayer wheels, requesting free passage for the American troops in the hostilities against China. If anything went awry, David Brentwood knew that even with the 9mms hidden under their dels it would be “dicey,” as Aussie was wont to say.

As Jenghiz, in a silent, respectful attitude of prayer, made his way closer to the president, the latter, acting as yet another pilgrim with no special prestige within the temple, bowed his head to the Buddha in respect. One of the bodyguards cast an eye over the crowd in the darkened temple, its candlelight casting huge, flickering shadows on the monastery’s temple walls. The four SAS men moved into the throng of worshippers, trying to form a rough protective semicircle around Jenghiz as he faced the Buddha. Aussie Lewis said a prayer of his own — that there would be no fighting in the holy place. The Buddhists subscribed to the theory of nonviolence, but he knew the presidential guard wouldn’t.

It was then, however, that Aussie felt strangely uncomfortable. Was it that, the Claymore explosion aside, everything had gone so smoothly — too smoothly, almost — that there was an air of unreality about it all, as if they were somehow going through the well-rehearsed motions of a play written by someone else? Perhaps, he thought, it was the relative silence of the monastery itself and the almost ethereal sight of the saffron-robed monks, some with small scarlet skullcaps on their heads, the whole atmosphere added to by the thick aroma of incense in the air. It had been only seconds since Jenghiz had pressed the piece of prayer paper into the president’s hand, but now Jenghiz, having said his prayer, was talking to one of the bodyguards.

At the same moment David Brentwood saw a white face near a candle’s flame, then caught a glimpse of Spets military fatigues beneath it, and yelled, “Abort!” into the darkness. In that instant Aussie saw Jenghiz’s hand shoot out toward him, and Aussie fired through his del, an explosion of orange silk, dark in the dim light, filling the air, Jenghiz hit twice, falling dead, and the crowd into which the SAS men turned now surging in panic, all trying to head for the exits.

There were shouts from the Siberians, a burst of jagged red fire over the crowd’s heads, but to no avail, the crowd moving even more frantically now, surging through the temple’s entrance, passing around the Spets commandos in a dark river of dels and fur caps, a roar coming from the street as the panic spread like an instant contagion. Each of the four SAS/D team members was now on his own, separated from each other by the mob and being carried along by it, past the incongruous sight of animals that one moment had been wandering in, grazing peacefully around the square, now in stampede, each SAS/D man knowing that Jenghiz had betrayed them. Each of them had to assume that their insertion point and therefore extraction point was known, realizing they would now have to revert to the emergency extraction plan. The latter called for them to rendezvous sixteen miles southwest of Ulan Bator, just north of Nalayh, the actual EEP, or emergency extraction point, at longitude 107 degrees 16 minutes east, latitude 47 degrees 52 minutes north, in a valley between two mountains, one to the north, seven thousand feet high, the other to the south, five thousand feet.

With each man carrying a hand-held, calculator-size GPS, none of them had any doubt about finding the place; the GPS could get you within fifty feet of a grid reference. The problem was, would they get there alive? And if they got there, would they get there in time? Their “window,” or time frame, was thirty hours. It was far too deep in enemy territory for a helo pickup, and so it would have to be a fighter-protected STAR — surface to air recovery — pickup. If they weren’t picked up first by the Spets seen at the monastery.

It was only then that Aussie realized that it hadn’t been a deer tripping the wire at all. It had been Jenghiz. All he’d needed was a piece of string, the resulting explosion no doubt pinpointing their position, whereas a transmitter would have been boxed in by the boulders. But right then neither Lewis, Salvini, Choir Williams, nor David Brentwood was burning with the rage of betrayal — survival being first and foremost in their minds.

Meiling hadn’t found anything in the briefcase of any interest except a Xeroxed sheet notifying Brenson of a shadow cabinet meeting on the “China question.” The problem was, what China question? Was it confirmation of one of Beijing’s biggest fears: the possibility of a Taiwanese invasion on its east flank while the Americans invaded Manchuria? The PLA, with over four million in arms, counting the reservists, could more than cope with two fronts — could in fact turn them into victory. But its Achilles’ heel was what foreign businessmen like Jay La Roche had euphemistically called its “internal distribution system,” by which they meant a bad road system — one that was prey to monsoons much more than to enemy action.

In short, the difficulty for Beijing was transporting troops quickly from one part of China to another. Before the ceasefire, the double-decker road-rail bridge across the three-mile-wide Yangtze at Nanking had been hit by some of Freeman’s commandos — SEALs — and the result was a catastrophic bottleneck on the southern shore of the Yangtze that had extended as far south as Wuhan. It had been the biggest single factor forcing Cheng to sue for a cease-fire.

Now the bridge was repaired and the waters about it thoroughly mined, patrolled by Chinese frogmen, the bridge itself ringed by a thicket of AA missile batteries and by two squadrons of Soviet-built MiG-29 Fulcrums. But this kind of protection could not extend to all of the convoy’s rail links, and, taking heart from the resumption of the hostilities between the American U.N. line and China, the underground Democracy Movement was increasing its sabotage.