Ian Slater - Warshot

Brentwood heard the gentle hiss of air as Brady pulled the carbon dioxide cartridge on the other team’s boat. A moment later he heard another hiss, Dennison pulling the cord on Echo One, Brentwood feeling the gunwales of the rubber boat stiffening against his thigh as he caught a glimpse of Dennison steadying the WOX-5 underwater gun, its rocket projectiles against the belt-feed drums of ammunition for the minigun. The latter, a cut-down 7.62mm Gatling, had a hitherto unheard of firing rate of six thousand rounds a minute, another weapon Robert Brentwood fervently hoped they wouldn’t have to use.

Echo Two’s RTO — radio telephone operator — Petty Officer Jensen, had already slipped aboard Brady’s boat, his AN/PRC-77 radio in its waterproof pack on the back of his inflatable black life-preserver vest.

Farther back in Echo One, in a last minute check, Brentwood, his left hand firmly gripping the forward starboard lug of the boat, slid his right hand over the waterproof holster of nis stainless steel Smith & Wesson nine-millimeter Hush Puppy.

As Dennison, Rose, Brentwood, and Corpsman Smythe eased the boat into the ice-chilled water, Echo Two’s four-man team and their 1,300 pounds of equipment were already pushing off, making a sucking sound on the sloping bank, which seemed to them as loud as a gunshot. But Brentwood knew it was probably no noisier than a rat plopping into the river mud, the last of the four SEALs in Brady’s Echo Two ahead of them having stepped into a knee-deep silt hole. Brentwood pushed the thought of water rats out of his mind. It was one of the reasons he used to tell his younger brothers that he joined the pig boats — the submarines — and not the surface navy. In a sub there wasn’t enough room for a rat to hide.

Waiting several seconds for Echo Two to make some distance before his Echo One pushed off, Brentwood could already hear a distant putt-putting: river boats. He was surprised, however, that there wasn’t more sound, given the volume of water traffic Freeman’s HQ had told them to expect. Glancing at his GPS through the infrared goggles, he saw it was 2250. The current was running around three to six knots, and so all being well, using paddle assist, they could expect to be in the vicinity of the bridge well within the hour, only using the engines in the event of unpredictable swirl holes. Pickup, unless something went wrong and they were forced to go SOS on the emergency band, would be at 0300 hours. “Ample time,” as the briefer aboard Salt Lake City had put it, to recon the shore defenses near the bridge and slip in unseen, using the faint navigation lights on the sampans as pointers for the channel approach to the piers. If either boat thought they had been sighted, the decision to either start the outboard engine as cover or to engage would be left up to Brady, commanding Echo Two, and Brentwood in Echo One.

The two small boats caught the current, Echo Two already well offshore about a hundred yards ahead, Robert Brentwood back in Echo One, wishing dearly that the Chinese would never imagine, let alone suspect, such a daring raid.

The four men of Echo Two in Brady’s boat had a bad fright within thirty seconds of shoving off when an enormous barge — its navigation lights air-raid blinkered, port and starboard lights mere pinpricks in the vast blackness of the Yangtze — all but capsized the twelve-foot-long, six-foot-wide rubber boat, heavily laden as it was with anchor, ropes, tackle, C-4 plastique, and weapons. Brady, in the bow of Echo Two, only managed to see the barge, loaded with four rail-car tankers heading for the tank farm downriver of the Nanking Bridge, at the last moment, giving Echo Two a bare two seconds to avoid it, the barge’s wash alone threatening to swamp them as Brady managed to swing the Zodiac’s tiller, putting her bow on to the barge’s waves. The tank farm, faintly visible through the recon photos despite the smog over Nanking, had itself been a tempting target for the SEALs, but one that they’d rightly decided to forego in lieu of blowing up the bridge to sever the ChiCom supply line.

Another surprise for Echo Two, being the first boat out, was that though they had been told by Freeman’s HQ that according to China’s river traffic laws the right lane was the downriver route, in fact the rule, as evidenced by the sight of the enormous barge in the middle of the river, was made by the boats’ captains. It was the oldest rule in the world, on the river or anywhere else: the biggest won. Normally it would have been of little moment to the SEALs, but it made for an added hazard in their clandestine mission, Brady making a mental note of it for their debriefing.

The two boats — Echo One a hundred yards farther back, due to its later push-off, Brady farther toward the right shore — were about fifty yards apart going downriver. The smell of China washed over them, the odors of Nanking, like the few lights the great metropolis showed in the darkness, less exotic than anticipated — difficult to isolate in fact, beneath the pervasive smell of the ordure from the fields on either side of the mighty river.

Now Aussie Lewis saw the shape of an American helmet coming out of the artillery-cropped copse of aspen, and gave a low whistle. “Hey, mate! Buddy! Over here!” The man, about thirty feet away, silhouetted by a moon break in the clouds, stopped dead, then fell, his weapon spitting fire. As Lewis rolled, firing his HK in a tight, overbody arc, his face splattered by snow, he was aware of a searing sensation in his left foot. There was more firing off to his right from Choir Williams, and the man who’d fired at Lewis fell screaming, hands flailing in the snow for his dropped weapon. Lewis gave him a full burst and, in Lewis’s infrared goggles, the man’s body jumped, was still, then became a flapping gray. Lewis could smell a burning, rubbery odor where the man — who Lewis thought had obviously mistaken him for a Russian — had clipped Lewis’s left boot, singeing part of the Vibram sole. Lewis’s foot felt wet, but whether it was blood or snow, he couldn’t tell; he felt for the elastic-band-held medipac on the side of his helmet. SAS and Delta were bred to be tough. They were also taught it was false heroics — stupid — not to take a shot of morphine if it could keep you fighting rather than being a burden on your buddies.

It was David Brentwood who, under cover of a long burst of 5.56mm from Choir Williams’s HK 11 A1, made the dash across to Lewis to break the news. It had been discovered that the man they’d shot and a second one brought down by a Delta trooper on the northern side of the horseshoe of timber didn’t have dog tags. Special Forces — SEALs, the SAS, and Delta Force — did the same thing if they were on clandestine ops — but not regular army artillery. They never, but never, took off their dog tags. Some widow might miss out on the $50,000 death benefit.

“Christ!” said Lewis as the import of Brentwood’s “no ID” information hit him. “What you think, Davey? OMONS or SPETS?”

“Has to be Special Forces of some kind,” David Brentwood conceded. As he spoke, he saw more shapes slipping through the artillery-denuded pine into the thicker timber encircling the mountaintop clearing.

“Freeman was right,” said David Brentwood in a whisper. “We didn’t start the war.”

“Cunning bastards!” hissed Lewis, now grimacing, a sharp, hot pain piercing his ankle. “Siberian bastards started it — shelled the ChiComs themselves, made ‘em think it was us to get the ChiComs in on their side.”

“Freeman’s not going to like this,” said Brentwood, in what had to be the understatement of the war so far.

“Fuck Freeman!” hissed Lewis. “I don’t fuckin’ like it. We’d better get out of here, Davey. And fast. Fuckin’ Sibirs aren’t gonna want witnesses.”