Ian Slater - Asian Front

“East!” Brentwood yelled to Salvini. “Drive east!”

“I’m going fucking east!” Salvini replied, and then the night turned red, the MC-130 exploding, breaking in half, bodies spilling like black toys into the orange balls of flame, the bodies now afire, screams lost to those below in the flickering shadows of the plain.

The Combat Talon was now nothing but falling pieces of burning fuselage after being hit by a Spets ground-to-air conical-nosed SA-16, one of the Soviet Union’s most portable surface-to-air missiles. The truck with the SAS/D troop aboard, its lights out, continued to race over the flat grasslands, the Spets now being paid back in full by an F-16 dropping a napalm canister that turned the grassland to a long, bulbous rush of tangerine and black, incinerating four Spets, two of them struggling out from the fringes of the fire but so badly burned that the praporshnik drew his 9mm Makarov and shot them. He had no time to waste, for he now suspected that the truck he’d heard, its engine in high whine as it pulled out from the circle of flickering lights from the debris of the downed American plane, might well be carrying the SAS/D troop of which no evidence had yet been found.

By the time he had collected his three remaining men he knew the SAS/D troop must have had at least a fifteen-minute head start. But there was no need to be despondent. In a few hours it would be dawn and you could see the truck’s tracks — even if they hid the truck somehow — etched clearly for miles over the hard yet fragile grasslands.

“Like Hansel and Gretel,” he told the Spets troop, four of them now, including himself. “We’ll just follow their path. Back to the Helix.”

“We still have orders to take at least one of them alive?” one of the Spets asked.

“If we can,” the praporshnik said, but he said it without any real commitment. They — the Americans — had killed four of his best men, including the radio operator, and destroyed the R-357 KM high-frequency radio set with burst transmission system — the radio nothing more now than twisted and charred metal, its plastic components having melted over it like taffy.

“I say we kill the bastards,” one of the other three troopers said.

“Yes,” another said, “as slowly as possible.”

“We have to get them first,” the third member said. He was pointing at what remained of the Helix — a burnt-out shell no doubt caught in the F-16’s napalm run, the dead pilot and copilot still strapped in their seats.

“We’ll get them!” the praporshnik promised. “Whatever it takes.”

Land’s end was hauntingly beautiful, the sky’s saffron ripples spreading forever westward over the Celtic Sea, white streaks of foam from an exhausted storm flung in a golden lace about the ancient pink-brown rocks.

Trevor Brenson, M.P., had a soft spot for Cornwall with its moody air of romance and its legacy of smuggling, of defying the proprieties of the establishment. His ancestors on his mother’s side had come from Cornwall, and though he’d been born and raised in London he liked the idea that the genes of Cornish smugglers were in his blood. It didn’t stop him from having his own grand plans for taxing the populace when Labour got into power.

Meiling didn’t comment on this more obvious hypocrisy of Brenson’s. To do so would have upset the mood as Brenson and she walked atop the cliffs, their hair blown roughly by a gusty southerly, the salty air of the sea both invigorating and relaxing at the same time. Turning from the Celtic Sea in the west south toward the Atlantic and the channel, Brenson held her hand with what was for him an uncommon show of affection for his mistress.

“I feel like I’m whole down here,” he told her, his gaze fixed on the horizon where there was nothing but sea. Meiling knew what he meant. The closeness of the sea, the enormity of it, gave them at once a feeling of insignificance and yet integration with the whole world, with one another, with all things. And it was then, as in a quiet moment with a friend, that he apologized for not seeing enough of her lately, for coming to her flat burdened with files and cares of the day. What he said next surprised her, because she had thought that when it happened it would be in the quiet exhaustion of having made love, the most unguarded moment of all.

“We’ve got the Conservatives where we want them,” he explained. “They’re sucking up to the Americans as usual.”

“Oh?” She was careful not to ask why, and looked out to sea, affecting disinterest, listening more out of politeness, her focus fixed on the vista of sea, land, and sky.

“Yes,” he continued. “Yanks want to overfly Europe-bomb China. I don’t know why London didn’t tell Washington to go take a—”

“Is that a petrel?” she asked suddenly, in what she considered a flash of brilliance, even more to convey a profound indifference that only encouraged him.

“What?” he asked. “Oh, yes, I think it’s a petrel. Stormy petrel.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I interrupted. What were you saying?”

“Americans want to send bombers to China.”

“Which China? Not Taiwan, I hope,” she said flippantly.

“No. Of course not. In the far west apparently.”

The west — the “far west.” She felt her heart racing — it had to be the missile site at Turpan. It was the only target of any real military significance. She took his hand. “It’s all right,” she said of his apology for not seeing her enough. “You’re with me now.”

“Yes,” he said, and stopped, looking down at her.

“What is it?” she asked.

“I love you,” he said.

“I love you,” she lied, and kissed him. She would have to keep seeing him after she’d passed the message to the Chinese embassy via the dead drop near Hampton Court. Besides, it occurred to her that if she complained about him not seeing her enough over the next week, she might get the actual target, though she believed she probably knew enough already.

On their way back to London they stopped for tea at Penzance, and when she went to the ladies’ room she had the urge to phone but had enough control to stem her excitement, her trade craft quickly reining in her emotional high, reminding her that in a world of beam-fed directional microphones that could pick up a conversation through glass across a street, you were never to use the phone to contact the te wu— the resident or head of station. Instead, that night she worked off her nervous energy by letting him try a half-dozen positions before he finally settled on one — rear entry, mounting her like a dog.

“God, I love you,” he gasped.

“You too.”

Having sped eighty miles east across the plain with dawn only two hours away, David Brentwood, Aussie Lewis, Salvini, and Choir Williams knew they would soon have to abandon the truck, for come first light the Spets would be looking for them.

In fact the Spets, whose chopper had been gutted — all but vaporized in one of the F-16’s napalm runs — had had to walk back to Nalayh before calling in helicopter gunships, among them a Hokum, and this gave David Brentwood’s SAS/D troop more time. But they were still three hundred miles from the northeastern Mongolian-Siberian border, and to be in the truck come daylight would be asking for certain death. The trouble was that, because of the distance from the nearest American chopper base, a helo pickup in time was out of the question, even given the possibility of in-air refueling. The most they could hope for was a drop of heavier weapons and supplies.

In the early hours of dawn, before the pale gray was transformed into cerulean blue, the four SAS/D troopers approached a group of ghers, the round felt-and-canvas dwellings of the Mongolian nomad herders a welcome sight. They had deliberately chosen a group of six or seven ghers south of where they had abandoned the out-of-gas Zil, assuming that any search party would naturally fan out north of the abandoned truck, which had been heading northeast toward the Mongolian-Siberian border and not south. It was a calculated risk to buy time, for if the Siberians and/or Mongolians who were looking for them came to the ghers before any U.S. aircraft could reach them for a drop, it would all be over for the four men.