Ian Slater: Asian Front

“Yes, sir.”

Up in Jay’s room the manager was still fussing.

“She’ll be fine,” Jay told him for the third time in as many minutes. “But listen, maybe you should hold off on the meal. I’ll call down when we’re ready.”

“Yes, Mr. La Roche. Of course. Anything…”

Not long after the manager had gone, Jay heard the phone ring. It was his lawyer downstairs who had been sitting a few booths away.

“Everything okay?” Jay asked.

“No problems, Mr. La Roche. They cleaned up the booth real nice.”

“You switch her glass with mine?”

“Yes, sir, Mr. La Roche. Be through the washing machine in a few minutes anyway.”

“Fine. Now I don’t want any interruptions for at least half an hour. I’ll call down when I want you. When I call, get your ass up here quick. I want you here when she wakes up. Right?”

“Of course, Mr. La Roche.”

When they returned to the dune overlooking the shot-up trailer there was an eerie silence due to the wind having dropped considerably in the last quarter hour. They found a clump of land lines leading into the reforested area and heard voices coming from the direction of the willows.

Aussie estimated there were about six ChiComs, and that was the number he tapped out on Brentwood’s sleeve. The SAS/D withdrew a hundred yards back up the dune, and Brentwood had his night-vision binoculars resting on the crest. For five long minutes he watched as the ChiCom patrol emerged and walked around the trailer, assessing the damage but careful not to go too near the mine field. Even when Chinese whispered it seemed to be at about thirty decibels. The SAS/D group by instinct and training knew what to do — follow the patrol back from whence it came. Brentwood took the point.

Aussie, holding back for minute, taking the tail end position, gave himself a jab of morphine. It wouldn’t last long, but hopefully long enough.

As the Chinese returned to the forest, the SAS following them — the infrared footprints an easy pickup with the SAS’s night-vision goggles — not a word was said. From here on in through the willow trees and if necessary deeper into the poplar, not a sound would be made, everything done by feel and by a touch code very much like that used by me SEALs when they too went “in-country.”

Brentwood, following the fiber-optic line, was sure of only one thing, and that was that for ease of repair, should a break appear in the line, the ChiComs would not have mined the area either side of the land line, as it ran parallel to a line of poplars deeper into the man-planted forest, the ChiCom patrol, by Aussie’s reckoning, no more than five minutes in front of them.

The four SAS/D men did not rush but used their weapons as one would use a stick to sweep either side of the fiberoptic line to make sure there were no trip wires from ankle to neck height. Had it not been for the infrared goggles that the SAS/D were equipped with, the ChiComs would have vanished from view, but the residual body heat of the six-man ChiCom patrol was visible — at least for a while — and then, suddenly, all trace of them, infrared or otherwise, was gone.

Brentwood took out his K-bar knife and soon, joined by the other three, was probing the ground for any unnatural seam that would be formed by a trapdoor or tunnel entrance, concentrating on the area where the optic line ended and suddenly plunged underground. That the radar management center was immediately below them they had no doubt, but where the trapdoor was they still couldn’t tell, until by virtue of moonlight that had penetrated the dust beyond the great tank battle, Salvini was able to spot a rather jerky infrared camera ten feet up the poplar as a squiggle in his infrared goggles, the heat caused by the friction of the camera moving so often.

The Chinese officer of the day, his red armband signifying that he was in charge of the first night watch, was watching the four SAS men on the video feed from each of the four poplar-mounted cameras. He saw the six-man patrol come in and asked them, “Were you followed?”

“No,” the NCO replied confidently. “Not a sound.”

With that the officer of the day nodded to the video screen, the heat lines of the four SAS commandos plainly visible on the closed circuit.

Immediately the NCO apologized and offered to take his patrol back up — take care of them right now.

“Oh yes,” the OOD said, “and what will they be doing in the meantime? You go up the steps, open the double-blackout trapdoor. I don’t want a firefight up there or anything else that will draw any more attention to the forest. They picked up radiant heat from down here seeping up through the trapdoor.” Gently, noiselessly, the SAS/D team was quickly sliding its knives along the seam of the outer trapdoor. The NCO had lost face and begged to go.

“Very well, Comrade. Redeem yourself, but I don’t want any firing up there,” the OOD insisted. “We don’t know how many other Americans could be in the area or if any of Freeman’s Bradleys will hear a firefight on the perimeter and come to investigate. We risk revealing the whole complex. But I confess I don’t want that SAS/D team up there to get back to tell Freeman where we are. Use your knives or bayonets and go through the trapdoor they haven’t yet discovered. Remember it’s about thirty feet away to the east so you should have ample time to come up behind them and kill them all. No firing. Understand?”

“Yes, comrade.”

The OOD enjoyed the irony of it as the ChiCom patrol readied to make its way up again, the fact that the very land lines — fiber-optic cables that were far less vulnerable to EMP or other jamming from the Wild Weasels, etc. — were American made. General Cheng had purchased the best cable you could get from La Roche Industries.

Up above, Brentwood tap-signaled Aussie, Salvini, and Choir to back off, and having been alerted to the one TV camera by Salvini, his infrared goggles picked up the other three that made a square, and the four SAS/D men went beyond this square so they were no longer visible to the monitoring eyes on the four poplars that served as markers. What the SAS/D men had no way of knowing was that the alternate entrance and exit to the underground complex was not in the more or less cleared square area bordered by the four poplars but was some twenty to thirty feet deeper in the wood, so that despite the SAS/D precaution of moving beyond the cameras, the Chinese patrol would nevertheless be coming up behind them.

But then everything went crazy. The earth began to tremble, two enormous trapdoors were thrown open from the hydraulic pressure, and up from the thirty-square-yard piece of ground bounded by four of the poplars a thing began rising from the forest floor, looking for all the world like a great bat-eared beast, four radar dishes atop a steel girder tower ascending into the night.

Below, the Chinese OOD bellowed his orders — the American general had launched another TACAIR over the battlefield a few miles off and Cheng had ordered the camouflage mast radar be put up immediately so as to throw up a radar net that could serve the deadly ChiCom triple A anti-aircraft fire, which included SAMs.

The six Chinese rushed forward toward the SAS/D team, but Aussie and Brentwood were already to ground, having heard the ChiComs the moment they’d started to run, and in a deadly burst of Heckler & Koch nine hundred rounds per minute of 9mm Parabellum, Aussie and Brentwood cut down two of the Chinese less than thirty feet from the edge of the radar mast’s well. A boomp! erupted from Choir’s Winchester 1200 riot gun, sending a cloud of perfectly aerodynamically constructed darts or fléchettes cutting through poplar and willow leaves like a scythe and taking out another two attackers.