Ian Slater - Warshot

In that split second of Echo Two being hit, Robert Brentwood had to make his decision: to go and try to save whoever, if any, of the SEALs had survived, or to head immediately left, closer inshore, to avoid the mid-channel trip wire. He told Rose in a harsh whisper, “Hard left!” instructing Dennison and Smythe to man the paddles. Almost immediately he felt the Zodiac picking up speed, water slopping over the gunwales as it moved beam-on to the current, heading at a sharp angle inshore.

Ten seconds later the cold darkness was lit up again as the Yangtze was swept by searchlights, their stalks reaching out like long, white fingers from the right bank, and from the city beyond came the distinctive wails of sirens. Robert Brentwood pulled hard on the front starboard paddle, all the time wishing to God he’d given the order to row to shore a second after the searchlights had appeared; the searchlights would have vindicated his order — his decision not to go looking for the men from Echo Two. Even though he knew he’d made the right decision — that the mission was the thing that counted, that every man knew that — his gut was still in a knot. Machine gun fire was now raking the river at the floating debris several hundred yards ahead of them.

“They’re just guessing,” whispered Dennison.

“Right,” said Smythe, unconvinced. Rose kept paddling.

“Soon as we get ashore,” instructed Brentwood, “we hide the boat — swim down to the bridge in two pairs. Dennison, you’re with me. Smythe, you go with Rose. Rendezvous extraction point in two hours. Remember — no grace period. Chopper’ll come in and out. No chance for a second run. Understand?” Rose, Smythe, and Dennison nodded, intent on putting on their Litton M983 B night vision diving goggles and closed circuit oxygen apparatus. In their quarter-inch-thick neoprene wet suits with the flexible breathing hose and small front oxygen tank attacked, the four looked more like jet pilots than divers as they deflated the Zodiac, making it, the outboard engine, and paddles easier to hide on the bank in the vegetation that spilled down from the rice field to the very edge of the river.

Cloud broke, revealing the moon, and for a moment or two the three-mile-wide Yangtze took on the sheen of molten quicksilver. As Robert Brentwood chalked his rubber shoes before slipping them into the long flippers, he was struck again by how cumbersome, even absurd, they looked. But he knew that once in the water — a small amount of which would almost immediately form a body-heated layer between his skin and the rubber suit — with the first breath in the rebreather suit and the first kick of the long fins, a metamorphosis would occur. Probably they would have to go deep — thirty to thirty-five feet — to avoid the kind of trip wire that Echo Two had triggered, but not below the safety limit of forty-five.

The searchlights were still sweeping the wide race of the river, beams splitting then reconvening like flocks of ghosts finding their way over the floating body parts that had been the men in Echo Two. Brentwood heard the distinctive, long rattling sound of a Chinese RPK machine gun on the more heavily defended right bank. But because of the RPK’s limited nine hundred-meter range, its bullets didn’t pose any problem for Echo One, the rounds plopping in the mustard-colored, spotlit water like tired hail around the flotsam of Echo Two — the boat’s halves floating now like two dead manta rays, wings torn and shredded by the explosion.

The moonlight breaking through clouds revealed what looked like staggered platforms in the river, several hundred yards apart, of the kind Robert remembered kids in the States used in the summers to push out in the lakes and dive off. It told him how the river traffic they’d heard earlier was able to get past the trip wire or wires without incident, whereas Echo Two had been blown up. The ChiComs had anchored the floating platforms and mounted them with RPGs — not in a straight line across the river, but rather in staggered fashion, as one would place a series of overlapping gates at a sheepdog trial. You would have to know where they were, of course, in order to weave through them; for the sampans, he guessed, it must be akin to a motor vehicle driver in any other country having to negotiate a series of overlapping staggered speed bumps, like those the Communists had rigged up at Checkpoint Charlie in the days before the Berlin Wall had come down and the United Siberian Republic had arisen.

As clouds closed back over the moon like a cloven hoof, not even the night vision goggles could pick out the platforms, except for the one from which the RPG had just been fired, a residual infrared blur from its heat still hugging the platform. The brief glimpse of the platforms — he’d seen at least six of them — told Brentwood he’d made the right decision in bringing in his boat. He’d spotted at least one pair of platforms, possibly two, between him and where Echo Two up ahead had been hit.

He listened carefully for any increase in the putt-putting sounds of the river, for any indication of a patrol boat moving cautiously around the trip wires — but could hear none. Perhaps one of the sampans’ or barges’ putt-putting was in fact a patrol boat. He didn’t feel lucky — not after Echo Two being hit. The odds against a single round from an RPG hitting it smack on like that weren’t good, and if the Chinese luck kept up like that, well…

“Sounds like the sampans are bunching up downriver,” whispered Rose. “About the bridge.”

“Yeah,” added Dennison. “Maybe they’ve closed the upriver channel on our side. Sounds as if they’re working the river traffic like a single-lane bridge — opening it for down traffic for an hour, then to up traffic.” Smythe agreed, pointing out the ChiComs could watch one channel more easily than two.

“Maybe,” acknowledged Brentwood, simultaneously smelling the polluted stench of the river and hearing the heavy, somehow ominous-sounding heavy breathing of the other men testing their COBRA circuits. The flexible air bladders, designed not to give off any telltale bubbles of air, rose and fell like an anesthetist’s bag, responding to inhale and exhale as dangerous carbon dioxide was absorbed by a soda-lime compartment and oxygen bled in from the small, eight-hour waist tank.

To Robert Brentwood the flexible breathing bags rising and falling imparted a tension that was unrelieved by a new development: smoke from a factory on the eastern bank wafting down over the river. Though cooling rapidly over the water, the smoke was joined by water particles to form a rolling mist which, because it was still relatively warm, interfered with the infrared goggles. But even if he could see whether there were any patrol boats, Brentwood knew he couldn’t do much about it. Anyway, he told himself, it might simply be that the PLA had thought they’d already got all the saboteurs; probably content to pick up the bodies from Echo Two, or what was left of them. Maybe the ChiComs thought the Zodiac had been manned by Democracy Movement underground saboteurs and not U.S. SEALs. Yes, said Brentwood’s alter ego, and what happens when they pick up the debris and discover they were Americans? That’ll bring out more than a sampan or two.

But he knew he had to put such worries on hold and press on to the bridge. And the thought of the tens of thousands of Americans whom Echo One might save if the SEALs could sever the vital supply artery helped him quell his fears.

Easing himself quietly down the riverbank, from which the Zodiac was hidden beneath a camouflage throw wrap, Brentwood went over the equipment, giving most attention to the four “Javex” bottles, as the “upgunned” M2A3 conical-shaped charges were called. Twenty-four inches long by sixteen wide, the charges looked like four big magnums of champagne sawed off at the neck. If they could “earmuff” the charges on the south side of piers four and five, the four pairs of earmuff TNT charges having a 26,000-foot ROD — rate of detonation — pentolite detonating cord, the two simultaneous explosions should create shock waves to penetrate over four feet from either side of both piers into the solid concrete. Brentwood hoped that the ChiComs, always afraid of high-altitude bombing attempts despite their wall-to-wall AA SAM missiles about the bridge, would keep the bridge in darkness, observing their full blackout. But he thought it a vain hope. The PLA troops guarding the bridge mightn’t be first-rate — most of those would already be at the front — but if he were the ChiCom commander in Nanking, after the destruction of Echo Two he would order the bridge lit up and have every available man on and around it looking for and shooting at anything that moved in the river.