Ian Slater - Warshot

Quickly having gone over their recognition codes, call signs, and hand “squeeze” underwater signals, the four SEALs entered the water, but not before Dennison suddenly realized and pointed out to Smythe, Rose, and Brentwood that the emergency code “Mars,” chosen by the Bullfrog, was the same as the name of the Zodiac’s outboard.

“Well, if we have to use it,” whispered the more taciturn Rose, “our guys’ll know we don’t mean a frappin’ outboard.”

“Don’t sweat it,” Brentwood said. “We won’t need it.”

Submerged, Brentwood and Dennison as one pair, Rose and Smythe the other, were connected by a nylon feel line, Brentwood and Dennison heading for pier four, Rose and Smythe toward pier five barely a mile ahead.

The current was swift, and it seemed that in no time they were closing, only a quarter mile from the enormous black shape of the double-deck Nanking Bridge, hearing the rumble of the motor traffic on the bridge’s top lane and the roar of three steam locomotives in tandem thundering across the lower. Brentwood could also hear the putt-putting of the sampans through the water, a sound that was progressively overwhelmed by a slower but heavier and more persistent beat, shot through with a sound of metal on metal and then a lazy plump-plump-plump.

Dennison tugged the feel line, but Brentwood already knew — he’d heard it all before aboard both the Roosevelt and the Reagan —the sound of depth charges rolling off a boat’s stern. Brentwood estimated that he and the other three SEALs were now five hundred yards from the bridge. The whump! of the first explosion sent shock waves racing through the water at over three thousand feet per second, even the outer rings of the depth charges’ detonations so gut-wrenching that Brentwood felt a wave of cold nausea, and he could only hope for the safety of Smythe and Rose.

Flying side by side, the better to communicate while they observed radio silence, the two Siberian choppers, bulbous-eyed Hind A’s, taking the coordinates of Freeman’s position from General Malik in Nizhneangarsk south to Port Baikal and Irkutsk, beyond the blizzard, were halfway down the 390-mile lake. The overcast was still thick, metallic-looking and low, but visibility was at five kilometers when they spotted what looked like a SPETS chopper coming toward them. It appeared to be a Hind D but, given the near whiteout conditions, when depth perception suffered, it was possible that it could be a bogey, an American Sea Stallion — one of the enemy choppers that, coming in low over the frozen lake, were attempting to pick up remnants of the retreating and decimated American III Corps, whose tiny fleeing figures looked like white ants amid the black and burning detritus of their rout.

The Hind A pilot wasn’t about to take any chances, and had his copilot use the flashlamp to signal his comrade in the other Hind A — a hundred meters on his right side, nearer the western shore of the lake and Port Baikal — that he was going to warn off the oncoming chopper, even if it was a SPETS. The pilot in the other Hind gave a thumbs-up acknowledgment of the message and put his Hind in a tight right bank toward Port Baikal. The remaining Hind headed straight for the oncoming bogey, now only two miles away, but still indistinct in the blur of snow, and began a hard left-right, right-left swaying motion, signaling the other chopper to land. The chopper kept coming, and so now, Malik’s order in mind, the Hind’s pilot hesitated no longer and began to “jiggle” and “jinx” in response to his weapons officer’s commands coming up from the nose bubble below him. Switching on his “flowerpot” infrared suppressor, he fired two Aphid air-to-air missiles. The other chopper turned sharply, rose, then dropped like a brick, both missiles missing him, their white contrails now clearly visible to the fleeing Americans of III Corps beneath. But the chopper’s evasive action was to no avail, its cockpit disintegrating, the attacker’s undernose 12.7mm gun, slaved to the pilot’s sighting system, already pouring a deadly fire into the bogey, bits of rear rotor flying off. Now the attackers could see it was a U.S. Marine Sea Stallion as it fell hard to the right, hitting the ice with a whoomp, sending spidery fissures racing along the ice, its main rotors striking the frozen lake, wheeling the chopper around in ever-increasing circles until the rotor blades snapped. Six-foot-long segments of rotor flew into a fleeing American sapper company like errant boomerangs, making a heavy “chunka-chunka” sound, beheading and disemboweling clumps of U.S. troops trying desperately to cross the lake, their blood and entrails smearing the ice.

Alexsandra Malofs tongue was raw from licking the rough, wet stone wall of her jail cell. Chained to the wall, she had lost twenty pounds in ten days in the Harbin Number One Jail. On Ilya Latov’s express orders, her jailers hadn’t given her any food or water for the last three days. They were further instructed not to give her any until she told them who helped her in her escape from Baikal to Harbin and what information she’d given to the underground Chinese Democracy Movement which had aided her before she was captured.

Though she hadn’t been fed, her licking the condensation off the cell’s cold stone walls prevented her from becoming fatally dehydrated. But the stones were so rough, her tongue had become badly lacerated and swollen, and now her mouth was filled with the metallic taste of blood, her nostrils filled with the stench of her own waste emanating from the small wooden bucket by her side. But only once — during the moment of her arrest in the hutong — had she weakened, considered telling them anything. And even then she had been determined not to tell them about sending the message about the Nanking Bridge to Khabarovsk via Ling’s underground cell.

She had been afraid her determination would weaken with her body, but her refusal to talk had become the one thing that had kept her going — the one thing to which she could tether her sanity. Even so, Alexsandra knew that all the will in the world to resist couldn’t prevent her dying. Soon she must eat. But what? She had no strength left to try to catch the rats and roaches that scrabbled over her at night when she tried to sleep. And even if she could think of a way of killing them, the thought of eating them raw revolted her. She had managed to squash several of the cockroaches, but could not bring herself to devour them, the thought of their hard shell crackling beneath her teeth enough to make her almost vomit. Yet she knew she must eat if she was to survive.

One of the Chinese guards, whom she knew only as Wong, a middle-aged man — in his late forties, perhaps— took particular pleasure in her plight. In any other country Wong could have looked merely well-fed, but here in Harbin he looked positively rotund compared to the other guards. Wong smiled a lot at Alexsandra, and on the third day of her imprisonment — when he had come in to take out her toilet bucket — he had stood over her, holding a fresh stick of youtiao, the long sweet bread, undoing his fly with the other hand and pursing his lips, his gesture with the youtiao telling her what she had to do to get the bread. Contemptuous, she turned away from him. He laughed and left, making a snorting noise as he ate the bread, telling her that soon she would submit, that he had seen it all before. At the door he turned and declared that a prisoner would do anything for a scrap of bread, let alone sweet stick. It was a basic instinct. She refused to look at him, keeping her head facing the cell wall, but she’d been badly frightened, afraid he was right.