Ian Slater - Asian Front

“When, ma’am?” the sergeant asked.

“Four days time — five at the outside.”

Shirer was in shock. Squadron Leader Williams was a petite blonde.

“Christ!”

It was out before Shirer could stop himself.

“You’re Major Shirer, aren’t you?” she asked tersely, taking her mood from his.

“Yes,” he said.

“We’ve heard quite a lot about you. You and your nemesis, Marchenko. How many times did he shoot you down?”

Bloody hell, thought the sergeant, if he didn’t get in between them there’d be blood on the tarmac. “Squadron Leader Williams’ll be leading the Harrier cover.”

“I take it that doesn’t meet with your approval, Major?” she said tartly.

“What — er, no. I mean — fine. That’s fine.”

“I hope you’re a better flier than you are a liar.” She flashed an angry smile.

“I’ll try.”

“Good, because you’ve only got four days. Think you can handle it?”

“I’ll handle it.”

“We’ll see.”

Shirer knew rationally that there was no reason a woman shouldn’t be a combat pilot, no reason her reflexes shouldn’t be as quick as his, that she didn’t need a man’s physical strength to fly by wire, so what was his problem? He didn’t like it, that’s what.

“Ah, Major Shirer?” the sergeant tentatively said.

“Yes?”

“Ah, we don’t call the ferry tips ‘tits’ when the boss is around.”

“Anything else I ought to know?”

“Yes, sir. She’s a damn good pilot. Can turn this little gremlin on a dime. One more thing — she’s a stickler for discipline.”

“Sounds like fun.”

That night Frank sat down to write a quick note to Lana at Dutch Harbor. He had to be circumspect about what he said, and his letter was terse, not only because of what the squadron censors would take out or because he was fatigued from ten hours straight on the Harrier without yet having taken it up, but because he simply could not bring himself as a once-household name in America — an American ace, a Tomcat veteran — to tell Lana that his boss was female and younger than he. “My boss is English,” he said, and left it at that.

He knew he should be more broad-minded, more magnanimous, but damn it — he’d flown Tomcats, hooking the three-wire in zero visibility on a rolling deck, when she’d been going through puberty. No way he’d let on to Thompson, his replacement on the B-52, that he was under the direct command of a woman. Damn, now he knew why that toffee-nosed Fowler-Jones had talked him into it. They were so short of Harrier pilots they were having to use skirts. It was humiliating, that’s what it was. All right, so he was a male chauvinist pig, but hell — it just didn’t seem right. One thing for damn sure, he was going to learn every possible thing about the Harrier — this “little gremlin,” as the NCO had put it — that he could. He’d live on coffee alone in the next few days, if that’s what it took, and go over the gremlin inch by inch until he knew every part of it.

Why was it, he wondered, that men always called their ships and their aircraft “she”? He pushed it out of his mind and buried himself in the manual for the Ferranti 541 inertial navigation and attack system, the Smith Head Up Display much the same as he’d seen before.

Red-eyed and determined, Shirer mastered the vertical takeoff and landing over the next twenty-four hours and was ready for high-altitude tests. What was it she had said? “Your nemesis, Marchenko.”

Cheeky bitch! And whether it was her or some of the other pilots in the Harrier squadron, a rumor was going around that Marchenko was now stationed somewhere in eastern China as an adviser on the MiG-29s.

As the crunchy ice gave way beneath his boots, Freeman had pondered his strategy. To go south while the missiles remained intact at Turpan to the southwest would be suicide, yet to wait much longer for Cheng to build up his forces in Manchuria east of the bulk of Second Army would be equally disastrous. Yet to mount a frontal attack on the Manchurian border — all along the Amur — would also be suicidal.

He watched the small trickles of water formed by the stamp of his boots flattening the ice and was reminded how at night images of rivers had kept running through his dreams — not in a gurgling, hypnotic, sleep-giving way but more as impediments to his sleep. In childhood, rain falling on the barn roof in the Midwest and later on the barracks at Fort Ord and his home at Monterey had always given him comfort. So why not now? What was the running water trying to tell him?

Often before, a problem had resolved itself for him while he had been asleep, but, to date, the dreams of water were elusive in their message: If the ice suddenly melted on the Amur, his tanks would sink without a trace, but anyone knew that. The more he thought of the message of the water, the more he thought of the work of the ancient Chinese warrior whose book on the art of war had been beside his bedside along with the King James version of the Bible. What was it that Cao Cao, one of Sun Tzu’s lieutenants, had said to him? “The military has no constant form, just as water has no constant shape — adapt as you face the enemy.”

“Adapt,” Freeman told himself, and now another of Master Sun’s lieutenants spoke to him. “Use deception to throw them into confusion. Lead them on in order to take them.” Freeman stopped suddenly in the snow, more rivulets running from his boots like streams finding the easiest runoff path, the line of least resistance. Often the most obvious answers were hidden because of the maze of detail. What was it? You couldn’t see the woods for the trees. Well Freeman had suddenly seen through the trees into the heart of Sun Tzu. As he turned back to his headquarters hut, his “minders” found it difficult to keep up with him, he was walking so fast.

Aussie Lewis knew he was on the horns of a dilemma. The Spets knew he was headed east in the direction of Choybalsan, where he would no doubt turn north, but now all the river crossings that would take him north to the U.S.-controlled Siberian border would be manned — if not blocked — by BMP-1s. And the river was deep, wide, and particularly dangerous now; great lumps of ice were piling up at the bends in the river.

It was a strange landscape, the temperature rising daily, sending up forests of mist, dropping to freezing and below at night, and now the dust storm was beginning to abate. It was 3:00 p.m. Come morning the storm would probably disappear altogether, a fresh easterly overcoming the west wind that had brought on the storm. He saw a blur up ahead, then another. For a moment they seemed, in his fatigued, saddle-sore state, like sheep, but in fact they were the outlines of two or three ghers.

The question was, had the Spets had time to reach this settlement and spring some kind of trap? Shutting down the Kawasaki then lowering it with some effort to its side to break any possible silhouette, he took out his K-bar knife and moved forward into the dust storm. It was only as he got a hundred yards or so closer that he realized what had happened, why the settlement of the three or four ghers had looked like sheep, shrunken in size.

The smell of wood smoke now mixed with the dust, and he guessed in a moment what had happened. As he came stealthily upon the first gher, his guess was proven right. The ghers had been burned to the ground, and in a small depression in the middle of them lay the murdered bodies of the few families who had been there and who could not tell the Spets that they had seen the escaping American.