Ian Slater: Asian Front

“Aussie, take the tower — Sal, you and Choir cover him!”

Before Brentwood had finished speaking there was another boomp! from the shotgun and one more member of the Chinese patrol fell, propelled backward, screaming and clasping what remained of his face. Choir fired yet another fléchette round down into the retractable radar tower’s well to keep Chinese heads down. He had the high ground advantage like the other three members of the SAS/D troop, and, like two men guarding a narrow bridge, they only had to stop a few who were trying to run up from the well on two narrow stone stairways.

He was reloading when he saw Brentwood using his Heckler & Koch as a staff, smacking aside a ChiCom bayonet and clubbing the man in the face with the H & K’s steel butt. It was in moments like these that the SAS/D men’s extraordinarily tough physical training stood them in good stead. The man went down, but to make sure Brentwood gave him a bone-crunching kick in the head.

“Come on, come on!” Aussie hissed. He was talking to the tower, willing it up faster so that he could jump one of the girders of the triangular construction. He had to wait for the bat ears to go well beyond him before he could step aboard the tower as one would an elevator as it passed your floor. The Chinese had fired no flares so as not to pinpoint their position for TACAIR.

“Christ!” It was Brentwood looking behind him at the tower, still rising.

“What?” the Welshman asked.

“Aussie’s arm — I forgot. Damn it!”

“He’ll be all right, boyo.”

“Should’ve sent Sal.”

“Too late now.”

“Yes,” Brentwood said. “Anyway, let’s keep them occupied down—” There was a splatter of earth against Brentwood’s uniform as a 7.62mm opened up from the well of the tower, the tower still going up like a Texas windmill.

“No wonder we couldn’t find this bastard!” Choir said, pumping another three shots into the well. There were screams and fierce yelling but the simple fact was that so long as the three men — Choir, Brentwood, and Sal — had enough ammunition they could hold down those in the well. But sooner or later the ammo would run out, and then the Chinese could swarm up and take the troop. Salvini dropped a grenade down — more screaming and more yelling than he’d heard in a ‘Frisco mah-jongg game. “Silly fuckers don’t know he’s on the tower!” Salvini said.

“Let’s keep it that way,” Brentwood said. “Look out!” A stick grenade lobbed the lip of the well. Choir calmly poked it back over with the barrel of his riot gun, then he pulled the pin on one of his own grenades, made a two-second count, and let it go. “They won’t catch that bastard!”

There was a scream that gave truth to his prediction.

“I’m almost out of ammo, lads,” Choir said. “Ten reloads and that’s it.”

“Come on, Aussie,” Sal implored.

In fact, Aussie Lewis could hardly hang on. With little or no power in his left arm he could only hold himself up by locking his legs together in a scissor hold and leaning his head forward into the right angle of the girder. Then he pushed and prodded the Play-Doh-like C4 plastique into the inside angle formed by two of the girders, using the slightly banana-shaped magazine from his Heckler & Koch as a tamp for the charge to better direct the blast in toward the beam’s angle. He then crushed the fuse’s vial of acid, which had a ten-minute count. By then the wire holding the firing pin would dissolve.

Next he put his right arm down then under the girder he was sitting on and, his Heckler & Koch slung over his shoulder, swung down, monkeylike, his boots barely touching the next girder. He repeated this two more times, his right arm now feeling the strain as he molded the second belt of plastique into an angle of steel. As he completed packing the second charge in and tamping it, he waited for a few seconds, looking at his watch, and then crushed the five-minute vial, swung down to the next girder, and from there jumped fifteen feet down to where the other three were. Salvini lifted Aussie’s good arm over his shoulder and started off down the land line back toward the FAV while Choir and Brentwood turned in a rear action, a hail of 9mm parabellum shooting forth with the darts as the ChiComs began to swarm up me steps.

“Go!” Brentwood yelled. “Go!”

Salvini wasn’t even looking back, but Aussie was able to run by himself while keeping the left arm tucked in by his side.

“Withdraw, Choir,” Brentwood said.

“Not without you, boyo!”

“Withdraw!”

Choir’s answer was to fire another three fléchette-loaded rounds at the Chinese. Salvini was back with Choir. “C’mon, you mother!” he said, firing four three-round bursts to keep the ChiComs down in the well. Suddenly he felt something falling on him. It was a flutter of leaves, a ChiCom firing too high in his excitement. Then the earth shook a second time and went into a blur, a feral roar of fire erupting about the skeletal radar mast. The tower collapsed, telescoping in on itself in a reddish-orange column of flame, then another, after which the debris of the crashing radar tower and the fire spilled onto all of those in the well, igniting the gasoline and hydraulic fluid that exploded in a final volcanic fury, spewing bluish crimson flames hundreds of feet into the sky, scorching and setting the poplars afire like giant candles in the night.

A hundred yards to go to reach the FAV and the sidecar began rattling, taking a burst from another FAV closing in on them a hundred yards to the left, a ricochet ripping open David Brentwood’s left cheek before Salvini reached forward around him, cut the throttle, and got off the pillion seat, throwing up his hands. “Don’t shoot! We’re Americans.”

“Stay where you fucking are!” a skeptical voice came.

“Mount Rushmore’s ours!” Salvini yelled.

“Stay where you fucking are, buddy!”

When they were close enough to sort it all out, there were apologies aplenty, but the apologies didn’t do anything for Aussie’s wounded arm or David’s face, which, as Choir drove over in the other FAV to meet them, was being held together by tape until they could get him back to a field hospital.

Cheng now committed his reserve battalions to the battle as Freeman’s line had seemed to falter. But Freeman had just given orders to slow down his advance, as he did not want to start mixing it up at close quarters with Cheng’s armor and troops until TACAIR — now that the sky was clearing somewhat — had a chance to inflict maximum damage.

Cheng interpreted the slowing down of Freeman’s armor, however, as a sign that his, Cheng’s, advantage of four tanks to one was starting to tell. Hurriedly he ordered up more reserves as Freeman’s echelons began to slow, throwing up a steady barrage of thick white smoke grenades from their launch tubes on both sides of their turrets.

With the falling off of the dust storm and darkness having already descended, the ChiComs’ T-59s and T-72s could be picked up by Freeman’s TACAIR — spearheaded by the A-10 Thunderbolts. With their tank-killing seven-barrel Gatling gun, its ammo drum the size of a Honda Accord, the Thunderbolts’ guns poured out seventy of their 1,350 30mm armor-piercing shells per second, the planes appearing to be in a near stall as the weakest part of the Chinese tanks, their cupolas, seemed literally to soak up the fire before bursting.

Without their radar and RAM-C, taken out by Brentwood’s SAS/D team, to pick up the low-flying Thunderbolts, the ChiCom tanks were swooped upon. In eleven minutes of the most intensive infrared A-10 attacks since and including the Iraqi War, the ChiComs lost forty-two tanks, some of them reserves. But the burning Chinese tanks added to the smoke, and soon the A-10s’ usefulness, impressive as it was, was nullified by the chemical-made fog of the battlefield and dark black exhaust of the ChiComs’ diesel engines as opposed to that of the M-1s’ clean gas turbine.