Ian Slater: Warshot

Soong started to relax. With the arrival of the Shenyang brigade, A-7 would be bristling with gun and SA missile quads for which the tank traps doubled as ideal cover, bamboo ladders at the ready should the PLA need to move out of them quickly in the event of a U.S. armor attack. For Soong, however, it seemed doubtful the Americans could muster the wherewithal to attack, given that their general, Freeman, was in for a surprise during the big tank fight looming in the Yakutsk Oblast, and given that the logistical pipeline pouring weapons and food over the Yangtze at Nanking north to the Shenyang army was still intact.

The twenty minute count over, Dennison surfaced in the dark shadow of one of the trusses, his Remington machine/shotgun in his right hand, his left reaching forward to tear off the plastic protector cap. He found himself exactly where he wanted to be: no more than thirty yards from piers one and two. Flicking down the infrared overlay goggles, he could see Rose and Smythe still strapped to the railing above piers four and five, the white blur of their body heat eerily present as a ghostly outline around their wet suits, the radiant heat telling him they were still alive.

He lifted the Remington, its unfolded butt now pressing firmly but not too tightly in his shoulder. The gun’s telescopic sight was filled with the huge white sun of the floodlight high above the concrete base of pier one. Deliberately shutting out the noise of the bridge so he could better concentrate, Dennison took a breath, exhaled slightly, stayed his breath, and squeezed the trigger. Not even he heard the click, but he felt the kick. There was no explosion, only the “whoosh” then tinkling sound of the floodlight’s glass disintegrating, the light dying. Dennison gave a push with his right flipper, lifted the gun again, sighted pier two’s light and fired, the noiseless Remington expelling nine.33 bullets from a single 00 buckshot casing, taking out the second light, leaving him six shots in the mag and seven lights to go.

Now there was a lot of screaming up on the bridge’s top, four-lane motor vehicle deck; the first light’s demise, Dennison thought, probably being attributed by the Chinese to a bulb going. But two lights in a row had no doubt spurred the bridge’s guards into action. Yet they couldn’t have heard any other sound than the splintering of glass. Dennison noted the distance to the next girder shadow cast by the trusses in front of lights three and four, and once there — only a matter of three minutes swimming — he surfaced and took them out within ten seconds.

Now the searchlights from the city side were probing frantically out through the mist, crisscrossing one another. But after a quarter mile the beams were eaten up by the mist, the light too diffused, producing phantom images of light on light, one of which caused the PLA gunners to blast away with RPGs and a barrage of small arms at two of their own trip-wire platforms, obviously mistaking the shapes for enemy boats from which the light-destroying shots must be coming. This allowed Dennison, who was on his fourth “Hail Mary, full of grace…” to get off, his next two shots taking out lights five and six, leaving him only two shots, with lights seven, eight, and nine to go. But as he took aim at the seventh, a wash wave, perhaps from a patrol boat mid-river, slopped over him, knocking him off aim at the precise moment he pulled the trigger. His last shot took seven out cleanly. This left him with an empty chamber with lights eight and nine still on, and the other seven out. Most of the southern side of me bridge was in utter darkness anyway, except for the pinpoints of flashlights frantically dashing back and forth like fireflies on the top deck.

By then Robert Brentwood had reached the logjam of black shapes — the riverine craft that had been held up before the bridge and which were now tethered to the right bank. Taking the load of the explosives off him by tethering one end of the explosive line to the keel guard of the propane barge, the other end to his weight belt, it was easy for him to do a chin-up on the stern rub. Water dripped from the 7.62mm minigun slung around his neck as he hauled himself over the stern and crouched on the mist-slippery deck, every muscle taut. He could hear two voices approaching the stern on the narrow walkway that ran alongside the flat-roofed bamboo wheelhouse. Quickly he slithered back over the stern, holding on to the prop guard as he submerged, his head about a foot or so underwater directly below the prop. The voices above him were muffled, but he could still hear them, and then another sound — a sprinkling above his head — then more of it, the two Chinese continuing to talk as they urinated off the stern. In a few moments they were gone and he was back up and over, drawing his K-bar knife from its ankle sheath. Through the slats of bamboo he could dimly see a small coal fire, like a ruby heart, in the darkness, a man squatting beside it, brewing tea. The other man was still walking forward, disappearing on the catwalk a couple of feet above the decking of the barge, between the two huge cigar-shaped tanks which Brentwood guessed were about thirty feet long and ten feet in diameter. He knew earmuff charges alone would have been enough to weaken a pier if he could have climbed up on the bridge to place them. The idea had been that shock waves from either side of the pier meeting then rebounding would have stretched the molecular structure of the concrete to its limit. But there wouldn’t have been enough elasticity in the concrete to take the shock, resulting in a fracture. But with Echo Two gone, Rose and Smythe prisoners, surprise had been lost. He and Dennison wouldn’t get onto the base of the concrete piers, let alone high enough above them to place the earmuffs. What he needed was to cut the trusses, as with an oxyacetylene torch — use the C-4 plastique as a primary charge to raise the propane to its flashpoint.

Making his way quietly forward by walking around the starboard stern walkway, Brentwood felt for the stern line, his knife cutting its hemp with surprising speed, as if it was string.

The man in the wheelhouse immediately felt the slight shift, the barge yawning slowly out from the bank, the man no doubt alert to every nuance in the barge’s movement. As he turned about and stepped outside of the bamboo wheel-house to investigate, Brentwood’s left arm closed quickly, the man’s hands instinctively coming up to pull Brentwood’s arm from his neck, leaving his chest completely exposed, into which Brentwood drove the K-bar to its hilt and twisted sharply before he lowered the man to the deck. Quickly, almost slipping on the blood, he moved up toward the dark crevice between the propane tanks, and saw the other man coming back toward him. The man called out something.

“Chow mein?” said Brentwood. The man stopped, then turned, but Brentwood was already on him, the man’s body hitting the slick decking hard. For a moment Brentwood feared he’d broken the man’s neck, but he was only winded, gasping for air and dissuaded from yelling by Brentwood’s blood-warmed knife against his throat. The man was rigid with fright. Brentwood lifted him up, turned him about swiftly, slamming him belly first against the side of the port tank, and within four seconds had a slip knot of primacord tying the man’s wrists behind his back. Next, taking him by the collar, Brentwood steered him up toward the bow, the bowline — now extremely taut — cracking and creaking as the barge strained to be free. As he cut each strand, it protested with an anguished spitting and splitting. Then, just as quickly, the big barge was floating out into the channel, bow swinging out slowly, caught by the eddies at the periphery of the main channel’s current. Someone in front of the barge shouted up from a small sampan, and the shouting became a tirade. Then other sampan skippers joined in, cursing the barge and its turtle owner as the barge’s wash, if not its sheer bulk, threatened to swamp them.