Ian Slater - Warshot

Dennison’s mask was misting up as he closed his eyes, fighting the temptation to scratch an indescribable itch that was moving malevolently up from his testicles to his backside, where the friction caused by the heavy flippers and explosive loads was exacting its toll. Or maybe it was something he was allergic to — something he ate on the Salt Lake City before the mission. The carrier was a world away, and he yearned for the safety of it, even though he’d joined the SEALs precisely to get away from the bigness of the surface fleet, where you were lucky to get to know your own section, let alone anyone else in the five-thousand-man crew. Or rather any of the five thousand men and women aboard, now that Congress had empowered females, including those in the air arm, to be combat soldiers. He wouldn’t mind one of them scratching the itch. It was crazy thinking about that at a time like this, but it drained off some of the tension. Still, unable to resist the itch now spreading up his loins like spiders, he was careful to use his right hand rather than the left. One hard jerk of the latter on the feel line would have signaled to Brentwood they were under attack. Yet despite Dennison’s precautions, Brentwood felt the tension on the line increase, and swam closer in the pitch-blackness, only to be reassured by the okay squeeze signaled on his upper arm by Dennison. Brentwood signaled him in return that it was time to go up anyway — this being as good a moment as any in Brentwood’s estimation to reorientate themselves.

When they saw it, silhouetted by moonlight, both men’s pulses quickened. You could practice all you wanted in Pearl, stare for hours at a scale model with wall-sized SATINT blowups, planning just where and how you were going to place the charges, but the Nanking Bridge, standing proud over two hundred feet high and over four miles long, its two decks separated and held in position by enormous X-shaped trusses, was massively impressive.

Only a hundred yards from it now, Brentwood and Dennison could quite clearly hear the movement of traffic, the faint sing of tires and boom-boom sound of wheels crossing the join grates between each section of the eight spans supported between the nine piers. The lower— railway — deck was see-through for a second, bathed in moonlight that silhouetted the crisscross trusses beneath it. Then suddenly it was blacked out by a long goods train, its boxcars traveling right to left across the moon, heading northward, carrying much-needed supplies for Cheng’s army. From the mission briefing, Brentwood knew they could expect another train within the next half hour.

Off to the right, from whence the train had come, he and Dennison could see bright dots of lights, searchlights, starting to probe from atop the ancient city’s wall. The beams were still concentrating on sweeping the eastern half of the river downstream from where Echo Two had been hit. For this reason the searchlights didn’t worry Brentwood now as much as earlier, and besides, the mist coming down from farther upstream, caused by the smoke from the factory, was spilling over both banks from flooded levees, helping to protect them. Brentwood was confident that unless they were actually caught, fully illuminated in the beam’s circle — the latter a hundred feet or so across — there was a good possibility of avoiding detection. And even if you had your head out — provided you stayed absolutely still in the light and betrayed no motion — you would stand a fifty-fifty chance. In any case, much better to have the searchlights up on the wall, if you had to have them at all, rather than farther down on the bridge itself. Now that they were on the surface and could see no immediate danger, Brentwood tapped Dennison’s shoulder and whispered, “When we get to the pier, we’ll wait till another train starts across to place the charges.”

“Copy,” acknowledged Dennison, and, discarding the feel line, they disappeared once more beneath the muddy water, the current having moved them to within fifty yards of the pier, stratus cloud sailing across the moon, obscuring more of it by the second. It was now that Brentwood saw how the tragedy of Echo Two had unwittingly helped him and Dennison, for while the ChiComs had been concentrating on searching closer to the right bank, their searchlight beams faded in the mist over about a quarter mile on the three-mile-wide river, and so had given the remaining SEALs time to get nearer the bridge.

Brentwood’s shoulders were already aching from the weight of his minigun and the heavy pack of his two eighteen-pound, champagne-bottle-shaped charges, detonating cord, waterproof tape, grappling tackle, stable blasting cap, and timers. He knew that the big problem for the two two-man teams now, providing Smythe and Rose hadn’t been picked up, was the question of the delay fuse timer. With the Chinese already aroused, it couldn’t be too long, but time enough to permit them to make their extraction point downstream. Brentwood decided that if he and Dennison were lucky and managed to place the charges as he’d planned, he’d be able to use a short-time ACAT — a ten-minute acid ampule timer. He had to trust that Smythe and Rose would do the same, “short fuse” being standard procedure when any member of the mission had been discovered and might jeopardize the remainder. He turned his immediate attention to two things: first, where exactly he would place the earmuffs on the pier, which was growing by the second as he and Dennison neared it; and second, how he would set the yellow-dyed and Play-Doh-like C-4 plastique between the flanges of two crisscross girders. The C-4 explosive would have to be fairly high up in order to literally cut through the girders with the heat generated by the explosion rather than by the explosion itself.

Brentwood felt two sharp tugs — for danger — on his weight belt, and immediately put his arms into a reverse breaststroke position, his long flippers kicking hard against the current to brake his forward motion, his backpack now coming forward, thumping into his upper back.

“Wake up, you Aussie bastard!” said Salvini. “You owe us money.”

Aussie was already awake, but lying dead still from habit, as any SAS/D man did — not moving before you knew exactly what the situation was. “First, put your brain into gear,” he could hear his instructor telling him. “Before you move.”

“Aussie! C’mon, get up.” Now he recognized Salvini’s voice — knew where he was — safe in a warm kip at Rudnaya Pristan’ after the abortive A-7 raid. His left foot was throbbing. “What’s up, Sal? What money?” Outside it was still pitch-black.

“Yeah. Big-time spender,” said Sal. “Let’s go. Briefing in five minutes. We’re outta here in twenty.”

“A mission?” Aussie was sitting up on the edge of the palliasse, the SAS/D teams preferring the straw-filled hessian bag to regular Special Forces foam-rubber issue. Salvini, who had been on the eight-to-midnight watch, was handing him a steaming cup of coffee. “That SEAL outfit,” said Salvini, “one Davey’s brother’s in…” He glanced about to see whether David Brentwood was nearby. “Well, SATINT shows at least one of the two Zodiacs bought it. We’re on standby for assist. And you, sweetheart, owe me and Choir some bread!”

This jolted Aussie more than the coffee. “Hey, hey, fucking hold on there, Sal. Just hold on a mo. This just happened, right? Out of the fucking blue, right?”

“Yeah — so?”

“So this had nothing to do with any friggin’ rumor. You and Williams here made up that bullshit!”

Choir was filling a C-mag for his squad automatic weapon. “That’s right, boyo. We were just guessin’. Playing the odds. There’s a war on, you know.” He smiled across at Salvini, then down at Aussie. “Fact is, Mr. Lewis, sir, you owe us fifteen ‘In God We Trust.’ “