Ian Slater - Asian Front

The Spets were in no mood for any more noncooperation, especially by Mongolians whom they no longer thought of as the master race that had terrorized and subdued their world under Genghis Khan but as there lackeys of Siberian will. They glimpsed another gher village during a break in the dust cover, landed, and asked about the Americans. The herdsmen, eleven of them, had nothing to tell them and were quickly shot. Then two Spets held the youngest female — a girl of about thirteen — while a third Spets raped her by locking his arms about her neck, barely able to enter her because she was bucking so much, the other two Spets laughing until finally she was exhausted and groaning like a wounded animal, bleeding, having no option but to submit to his will. Then they shot her.

It was clear they’d get no information from the Mongolians, who were obviously more favorably disposed to the Americans, but at least from now on word would spread quickly through the ghers that if the Spets wanted information you’d better give it to them. The Hind took off through the dust cloud. “What are we looking for?” the Spets pilot asked. “Is he on a camel, horseback, walking, or what?”

“We don’t know,” the praporshnik, an Afghanistan veteran, snapped. “We’ll shoot anything that moves. Anything. Understood?”

“Da!”

Frankly, Aussie told the wind, he would have preferred a Harley MT-350cc — better suspension. Besides, he’d always fancied himself a bit of a rake on an Electra Glide in blue and like Fonda — not his commie fawning sister — out on the road on the old Harley-Davidson. Still, the Kawasaki’s whine was just fine and, head down, goggles firmly attached, he was making good time, though learning that driving virtually blind — visibility down to fifteen feet — took more courage than he’d thought. Man, if his Olga by the Volga with the big tits could only see him now — whoa! Through the dust he could see a darker dust, looking like a huge scab, a stationary Soviet-built armed personnel carrier — a BMP-1.

Aussie knew the odds immediately: a crew of three, three passengers with assorted nasty small arms, a main turret gun—73mm, killing range twenty-five hundred yards. Also armed with a coaxial 7.62mm and antitank guided weapons. Stifling inside, most of its infantry resting outside. Its hull armor plus or minus 19mm. Only thing in his favor was that the Kawasaki was almost twice as fast as the BMP-1, and if they’d seen him, by the time they’d loaded up with their full complement of infantry, he’d be a quarter mile ahead anyway.

“Say bye-bye to Ivan!” Aussie told the Kawasaki and gave it full throttle. The next minute he was airborne, the bike skidding furiously in front of him, the right side of his del shredded to pieces by the gravel rash, the spill driving the Makharov hard into his groin. He had the bike up, its wheels still spinning, and was resaddled in a matter of seconds, pride a little punctured, the earth exploding about him with small-arms fire. But then he was flat out again, into the curtain of dirt.

The BMP’s 7.62 started chattering as if it felt left out, followed by the steady thud-thud-thud of the 73mm, but the shots were wild and well behind him. But of course now the word would be out: the lone SAS was on a motorcycle heading east for Choybalsan. The BMP didn’t even start its engine, no doubt radioing his position to the next roadblock as he rode parallel to the Herlen River road.

Aboard the Talon combat aircraft David Brentwood, Salvini, and Choir Williams were grim-faced at having had to leave Aussie behind. The only good news they could give Freeman’s headquarters was that from what they’d seen, the Mongolians were clearly anti-Chinese, and that Marshal Yesov, if he did have any plans of attacking the Americans from the west, wasn’t going to get much help from the Mongolian militia or the regulars; otherwise the Mongolian president would have had the foothills and the flats around the Hentiyn Nuruu swarming with patrols looking for the SAS/D team. Instead, he’d left it entirely up to his Siberian “guests.”

The thing that struck Frank Shirer immediately about Peshawar was the smell of the northern Pakistani town — one of smoke, dust, dung, gasoline, and spices that he was unfamiliar with, which arose from the town’s bazaars, where one could wander down the Street of Partridge Lovers or the Street of the Storytellers, looking at the famed Persian carpets and watching the coppersmiths beating out their wares in the time-honored way. But if he thought he was in for any more sightseeing he was in for a shock, as within an hour of landing at Peshawar he was being familiarized with what had once been the Cinderella of the fighter production line: the Harrier vertical/short takeoff and landing close-support/reconnaissance fighter.

“Now, see ‘ere,” a British NCO said with me same kind of accent as that of the man called Doolittle who had managed to help Shirer fake his way through the eye chart exam at Dutch Harbor earlier in the war. “See we’ve placed two 30mm cannon — hundred rounds per gun — under the fuselage. Can carry up to eight thousand pounds of disposables if you like, but if you’re going up over the Hindu Kush, mate, it’s not bombs you’re gonna need, it’s height. So apart from the air-to-air missiles we’ll put on your underwing hard points, most of your weight’ll be extra gas and thirty-millimeter rounds. Okay?”

“Suits me,” Shirer said.

“Now, how many hours have you had in ‘em?” the NCO asked.

“None,” Shirer said.

The NCO looked at him aghast. “None? Blimey, mate, I ‘ope you’re a quick learner.”

“I can fly anything from a Tomcat to a B-52.”

“Yeah — maybe so, mate, but you got runways there, ‘aven’t you?”

“Well before the instructor gets here,” Shirer said, “why don’t you show me round the kitchen?”

“Crikey, you’re keen, I’ll say that about you.”

“Thanks.”

The NCO began with the ejector seat. “Martin-Baker Mark Nine — just in case. Right?”

“I like your sense of priorities, Sergeant.” The sergeant grinned, loosened up a bit. “There you’ve got your HUD— Smith’s — can’t get ‘em better than that, and a Smith’s air data computer. It comes to radar warning, we hand you over to old Marconi here, and if you get lucky you can lock on with the Ferranti laser range finder and target seeker. You’re strapped on top of a Rolls-Royce Pegasus vectored-thrust turbofan, maximum speed at low altitude plus or minus point nine, maybe Mach one if you fart.”

“I’ll remember.”

“This little baby’s big winner is the old Viff. Those two tits”—he meant the ferry tips or low-drag jet nozzles—”are little marvels, they are. Wivout them you might as well leave ‘er parked in the garage. That’s what you’ll be spending most of your time on — how to control those little buggers. Up, down, and around. Handled right can make a faster attacker look bloody stupid. Hopefully of course you won’t have anyone attacking you.”

“You mean there’s a good chance the mission might be off?” Shirer asked.

“Oh — I dunno about the politics of it, mate. But I mean the chows’d’ave to get their crackerjack fighters west in a big hurry in time to intercept any bombing raid, wouldn’t they?”

“I keep thinking they might have thought of that,” Shirer said sardonically.

“Only if they know about the mission, and with these dummy runs we’ve been making they probably don’t have a clue.”

The ground crew sergeant had no sooner finished talking than Squadron Leader J. Williams came out excitedly on the tarmac to exclaim, “It’s on! Just come through from London HQ. Turpan.”