Ian Slater - Warshot

“And everyone go over your sign language,” added the briefer. “With no radio, it’ll be sign language on the surface, feel line when submerged, and penlights only in an emergency. Study the model all you like for the next couple of hours. We leave for the carrier at oh four hundred, and you’ll go in tomorrow evening at eighteen hundred hours. Two squads, four men each. Designation Echo One— Captain Brentwood the boss; Echo Two — CPO Brady the boss. Flight to the Nanking drop-off seven miles south of the city and upstream will be three hundred twenty miles from Salt Lake City. One and a half to two hours, depending on head winds. Pickup four hours after dropoff. River currents estimated four to six knots. You’ll take thirty-five horsepower outboards on the Zodiacs, but only use them if you have to in strong local cross-currents. Questions?”

“Choppers have the range without in-flight refueling?” asked Dennison.

“No sweat. Auxiliary fuel tanks, detachable.”

“He makes it sound like a training run,” said one of Echo Two’s four-man squad.

“If you don’t screw up — it will be,” said young Rose, his desire for reassurance dressed up as a question. “Right, Bullfrog?”

“Yeah,” said Brady, turning to Brentwood. “Right, Captain?”

“What? Oh yes — absolutely. What is it the Brits say? Piece of cake’?”

“Yeah,” Bullfrog told Rose, “that’s it. Piece of cake. No sweat.”

Colonel Soong’s Fourth Battalion traveled light, as did all PLA infantry. They had even discarded their NBC masks, confident that the Americans were too squeamish to use gas unless it was used on them first. Besides, the PLA had discovered a moderately effective method of dealing with gas: they ran away from it. Oh, part of their force would be lost in any such attack, but maneuvers involving tear gas had demonstrated how valuable time was lost donning cumbersome gear. And rapidly changing local wind and humidity conditions had taught Beijing what the Pentagon had discovered years before — that at best a commander could contemplate using gas only as a tactical, that is, local, weapon in a tight corner during a large battle, and not as a wider strategic weapon.

In any event, General Cheng had saved the PLA millions of yuan by not purchasing gas masks, protective clothing, and sophisticated robot sniffers through paying the money instead to La Roche Industries for better artillery shells. In doing so, Cheng had also enabled his divisions, unencumbered by the heavy NBC protective gear, to move faster on foot than any other army. It counted for Soong’s battalions closing in so quickly on the southern side of the 3,770-foot-high Argunskiy 7. Even without his spotters, Soong could tell from the less intense yet more localized area of bombardment that the enemy battery, after losing most of their guns in their retreat to A-7, had regrouped atop the six acres of heavy timber that formed the horseshoe-shaped western part of the mountain’s snow-covered summit. Not surprisingly, Soong’s supporting artillery had been slower to move up than his infantry, but based on the PLA’s yuji paodui —mobile guerrilla artillery units — all of his artillery was capable of being borne by hand, broken down like so many pieces of a Lego set, with even the wheels of each gun in four segments, so that the guns could be hauled piecemeal and assembled by manpower alone. It was an old PLA tactic, but one the PLA knew continued to astonish more mechanized foes whose trucks were more often than not stopped by the taiga.

David Brentwood sat on the thin, hard seat by the door of the AC-130H — a four-engine Lockheed C-130 transport converted to a Spectre gunship — and checked his wrist altimeter and watch. It was 0607. Thirty thousand feet and no moon — as dark “as a bloody coal mine in a blackout,” as Aussie Lewis put it.

At 0611 David readied himself to lead the stick of the HALO-C — high altitude, low opening circle — jump from thirty thousand feet, after which the Spectre aircraft would rapidly descend in ever-widening circles, all the while pouring down fire into the mountain’s collar of timber that surrounded and ran about the lip of A-7’s horseshoe-shaped summit.

Hopefully his SAS/D team would be able to inject sufficient firepower on the ground to secure a perimeter around the horseshoe long enough for the battered survivors of the 155mm battery — no one knew how many there would be, due to the break in radio contact — to get to the northern edge of the horseshoe clearing. Providing a secure perimeter could be achieved, the area, no more than two acres, could be used as a landing zone for rescue helicopters which would follow on from the Kalga strip ninety miles to the northeast, lying in the valley between the Argunskiy and Nerchinskiy ranges. But it would work only if the SAS/D team could gather in the remaining defenders — probably by now no more than a score or so — fast enough, and lead them to the clearing before the whole mountain was overrun by the advancing ChiCom battalions.

“Check masks!” ordered Brentwood, standing up, one gloved hand gripping the canvas webbing, the other making sure his oxygen mask seal was secure. “Infrared goggles. Check!” Next he held up his left arm, tapping its wrist altimeter, looking down the line of fifteen SAS/Delta men who would accompany him, hearing himself breathing in the mask like some trapped animal lumbering forward as he carried the inverted Bergen pack that would dangle beneath him in the fall and which would carry everything from ammunition to a winter-issue 4,200-calorie MRE — meal ready to eat, otherwise known as Meals Refused by Everybody.

Everything changes and everything remains the same. It was the last phrase David Brentwood thought of as he dove from the Spectre into the void above A-7, the frigid air screaming about him in its banshee rage.

Aussie Lewis went out after him, then came Salvini, Choir Williams leading the S/D troop of one officer — David Brentwood — and fifteen men, each SAS man a veteran, and most graduates of either SAS’s CQB — Close Quarter Battle—”house” in Hereford near the Welsh Black Mountains or of Fort Bragg’s four-roomed “shooting house,” where they had been trained relentlessly for rapid deployment surgical strikes.

During the two-minute free fall, his arms and legs out in “frog” steering position — simultaneously braking and guiding his fall, careful not to “grab air” too much in front of him lest he put himself into a spin, and shifting the weight of his pack away from his center line — David could hear the feral roar of the AC-130 still in its pylon turn far beneath them.

The air force brass called the AC-130 an “aircraft capable of substantial support firepower.” To the crew of fourteen who manned the converted Lockheeds, however, the AC-130 was simply called “Spectre” or “Spooky Two.” And until this morning the official designation given the plane by the Chinese High Command was “special operations enemy gunship.” But from the moment it began unleashing its deadly thunder over the mountain, the AC-130 would be forever known as the “Flying Dragon.” It was so named because of the long, thin, red tongues spewing down parabolas of fire from the left side of the aircraft where its two 7.62mm, seven-barreled, twenty-millimeter Vulcan Gatling guns, forty-millimeter Bofors pompoms, and 105mm howitzer filled the air with hot metal.

The worst part for the Chinese below was the fact that the dragon was not flying blind, merely shooting for effect, its IRR — imaging infrared — and LLTV — low light television— sensors mounted mid-belly between the “Black Crow” radio direction-finder pod and the twin Vulcans showing up the Chinese infantry as clear white dots on the flickering gray screen. In this way the gunship’s target computers, in attaining their own vectors, were overcoming the failure, following the initial ChiCom attacks, to receive any radio beacon guide from the 155mm battery. The infrared sensors also obviated the necessity for using the two-kilowatt 1.5-million-candlepower searchlight mounted near the Diane’s rail, a fact which the five gunners aboard the Spectre appreciated, for while the beam would have better illuminated the moving targets below, it would also have pointed directly back to them.