Ian Slater: Asian Front

“Hey,” he said easily, “that’s fine.”

She moved her head away from him, her hair catching the golden sheen of the candlelight. She turned back angrily and looked across the table at him. “Jay, I have no interest in you. I don’t want to see you anymore. Ever. There’s no point in all the smooth talk or the smutty innuendos that your whores probably think are so cute. Have you brought divorce papers or not? We’ll need a witness.”

“Yes. I’ve got one of my staff Xeroxing the damn set for you now.” He looked uncomfortable, jabbing at the crushed ice with his swizzle stick. “Hey, I’m sorry, all right? I didn’t want to screw this up but — I guess with you and me it’s oil and water now.”

“Yes,” she said solemnly. “I guess it is.”

“Okay—” He raised his glass, beckoning her to pick up hers. She hesitated. “Don’t tell me I got that wrong, too?” he said smiling. “Give me a break. You haven’t gone off martinis? Used to be your favorite poison.”

She loathed him now and couldn’t hide it. Her stare seemed an eternity to him.

“What’s wrong?” he asked. “Now you’re not gonna drink with me? Was I that bad to you?” Quickly he held up his hands. “Okay, I was. If you don’t want to drink with me, fine, but it’s, well — it’s kind of petty isn’t it? Christ — I’m going to give you a fair settlement, babe. A lot of bucks, believe me.”

She was still staring at him. “I remember,” she said, “in Shanghai one time you slipped me a drink. All friendly, lovey-dovey—”

“Jesus, Lana! Is that what you’re on about? Paranoid. Want to switch drinks? Unless,” he jibed sarcastically, “you think I got some venereal disease? Besides, I haven’t touched it. Been waiting for you. For my old flame.” She said nothing.

“Cheers,” he said, ignoring her, raising his glass. Reluctantly she lifted her glass and let his clink against hers and took a sip. The truth was, she was thirsty and would have killed for a Manhattan after a long shift at the base and another day of worrying about Frank — where he was, wondering when next they’d see one another — if ever. She couldn’t bear the possibility of him being killed.

The sound of the patrol motorcycle and sidecar was muted, its rattle absorbed by the enormous walls of sand that rose on either side of the gully between the dunes, a whirligig twisting along a crest, throwing the fine sand up like brown sugar. Then the rider turned up toward the crest, not fast and not at a steep angle but making a gradual, unhurried approach at no more than ten miles an hour.

It gave Aussie no choice. He flicked up the sand guard on the Haskins’s scope, fixed the machine gunner in the sidecar in the cross hairs, inhaled, let out half his breath, held it, and squeezed. The suppressor kept the noise to a quick “bump” sound, the machine gunner’s head and arms flying back like a rag doll’s against the white smear of the infrared-sighted exhaust. The driver made a quick U-turn but Aussie had the cross hairs on him and squeezed again. The bike coughed once or twice like some animal and fell over on its right side, the wheel of its sidecar still spinning. Aussie made his way quickly back to the FAV, the sound of the tank battle roaring unabated in the distance. Whether Freeman was winning or losing he had no idea — every crew was fighting its own war. Handing Salvini the Haskins, Aussie buckled himself in, saying quietly, “That Haskins is the best fucking rifle in the army.”

“The M-fourteen,” Salvini opined.

“Balls,” Aussie replied, starting the FAV up. “Ten to one you’re wrong.”

“Yeah — who’s to judge?”

Aussie slipped me FAV into low gear and moved toward the crest. “We pick two guys each — four in all — and they fire the Haskins and the M-fourteen — winner’ll be the Haskins.”

“Balls,” Salvini said.

“Come on — you in or out?”

“In.”

“Right,” Aussie whispered as they made the crest. Going down the other side they were all silent, Aussie confident that the thunderous reverberations from the tank battle would cover the approach of the FAV.

“No windows,” Choir observed, looking through his night-vision binoculars at me RAM-C.

“There will be when we hit it,” Aussie said.

“Remember,” David cautioned, the trailer hut now only three hundred yards off, “you stay in the car, Aussie.”

“Yes, mother!”

They were at the bottom of the crest where sand gave way to hard, cracked earth, when a hand clamped Aussie’s shoulder in a viselike grip.

“What the—?”

“Mine!” It was the first time in the last hour or so that the La Roche reporter had said anything. No one believed him until Choir saw it, too: poorly laid but a sliver of its black circumference showing. The loose soil dug up to cover it had almost completely been blown away.

“He’s right, boyo!” Choir confirmed. “Antipersonnel.”

“Jesus!” Aussie said. “What now? Must be all around us. They hear one of those going off and they’ll know—” He was interrupted by Brentwood, who was known to be “head fast,” as they called it in the SAS/D, and now showed why.

“Back up the dune — they won’t have laid them there — too much shifting sand. Come on, Aussie — back up.”

Aussie did so, and when they were back over the crest Salvini reminded them that if they didn’t knock out the RAM-C quickly the entire American advance would be incapable of receiving TACAIR support in time. Too much longer and the American and ChiCom tanks would be so close together, mixing it up at such close range, that not even the A-10 Thunderbolts could help.

“Aussie,” Brentwood said, “you get in the sidecar. Choir, you stay here with the FAV with the dashboard machine gun. Salvini, you behind me on the pillion seat. We’ll retrace their path through the mine field around the RAM-C.”

“Okay,” Aussie said. “Let’s go.” And within two minutes Aussie, taking one of the dead Chinese’s helmets, was in the sidecar behind a belt-feed PKS 7.62mm gun. Salvini, with his Heckler & Koch 9mm submachine gun slung over his right shoulder, sat on the pillion seat behind Brentwood, who had taken the other Chinese helmet and who was now adjusting his night-vision goggles, lowering them and blowing grains of dust off the eyepiece before he could pick up the two-wheeled track of the motorcycle and sidecar. It ran along a fifty-yard-wide porous clay gully between the dunes for a hundred yards or so and then turned left, through a man-made gap in the dune and on to more clay around what they were certain was a RAM-C trailer a hundred and fifty yards in front of them.

The La Roche reporter was licking his lips nervously. Suddenly one of the two side-by-side doors in the long trailer opened and shut. In that moment Choir had seen the dull, bloodred glow from the interior, and through the infrared sight could see a hot, white stream coming from the man who, facing away from the FAV, was urinating. When the ChiCom turned, shaking himself, buttoning up his fly, he looked over at the motorcycle and sidecar.

Intuitively, Aussie waved. The man waved back and reentered the control center. But a second later both doors opened and David could see the orange spit of a submachine gun, its bullets chopping up the dirt around them. Aussie pulled the trigger and gave the longest burst he could remember, and bodies were toppling from the trailer.

They were only fifty yards away now, with tracers arcing over from Choir’s position off to the left, ripping and thudding into the trailer until the motorcycle and sidecar were only twenty feet from it. But then the door of the mobile radar hut three hundred yards away atop a dune flung open, and several troops came out firing. Choir swung his fire across toward them. The door closed, but he could see figures moving outside in the dark, their bodies, warmer than the air, giving off an ample heat signature. He fired two bursts, saw one drop and another two scuttling under the van.