Ian Slater: Warshot

Invisible in his black wet suit, Brentwood took the man into the bamboo deckhouse, lashed him to the tiller spar, then just as rapidly hauled up the bag of explosives from beneath the prop guard. He heard a voice yelling aft of the barge, and another. “Huo!” yelled Brentwood. Next to pi-jiu! — ”beer!”—it was the most important phrase for any U.S. serviceman in prewar China. “Huo!” Brentwood yelled again. Fire!

There was pandemonium.

Suddenly the long traffic jam of riverine vessels came alive, the shouts of “Huo!” galvanizing every Chinese throughout the long string of backed-up craft. Frantically, vessels began casting off, terrified they might get caught in the fire, the sampans nearest the propane barge using their long stern oars, as well as the putt-putting motors that were coughing awake, trying to put as much distance between them and the barge as possible. But it was chaos as sampans collided with other sampans and junks, the air filled with accusation, counteraccusation, and ancestral insults both in Mandarin and Cantonese. The docile water was slapped with jettisoned tether lines under the orders of the PLA guards, themselves running about confused on the river-bank, screaming orders to the boat owners, many of whom instructed the guards to perform acts that were anatomically impossible.

The extent of the confusion was a bonus that Robert Brentwood hadn’t counted on, but one he felt the SEALs were due for after the disastrously unlucky beginning of Operation Country Market.

Standing by the man at the wheel, gripping his arm in a half nelson, cutting him loose, Brentwood held him under the threat of the knife and directed him to start the barge’s engine. The man nodded furiously with a string of imprecations which Brentwood took to be a plea for his life. Once the huge barge was under way, nosing out under its own power, the cursing from the motley flotilla trying to escape through the darkness rose to a frenzy as the sheer bulk of the barge overruled any questions as to who had right of way. To add a touch of authenticity to his shouts of “Huo!” Brentwood tore a rag strip off the hang curtain from the wheelhouse’s sleeping compartment, stuffed it into a large Tsingtao beer bottle of cooking oil by the stove, lit it and tossed it astern. There was a small whoof! as it exploded, a flash of light, and a sampan afire. It was now definitely huo. What had merely been angry profanity rose with hysterical urgency all down the line, and in the added mayhem Brentwood indicated to the bargeman exactly where to steer. The man nodded again, talking quickly, not one word of which Brentwood understood, but the man’s terrified tone revealed a universal language. It said, “You’re in charge — whatever you say.”

As the barge entered the channel proper, Brentwood heard a dull thud, then a slight vibration — a junk rammed amidships, followed by a string of obscenities in the dark night, made blacker by the moon now being totally socked in by cumulonimbus. The PLA on the bank were shooting in the air, not knowing exactly who was responsible for the sudden exodus in direct violation of their orders, but none of the shots was aimed at the sampans, junks, and especially not at the propane barge. One shot into either of the tanks and the ensuing blast, in its heat alone, would be the closest thing to an A-bomb going off that Nanking had seen in its thousands of years on the Yangtze. Brentwood tapped the 7.62mm minigun about his neck and gestured the man to move away from the wheel or he’d get it. After already losing the four men of Echo Two to the Chinese, and seeing Rose and Smythe tied up on the bridge, Brentwood was in no mood for half measures.

On the bridge itself, off to the left a quarter mile down-stream, black squares, army trucks, were pulling up, blocking oncoming traffic from either side, searchlights mounted on their flatboards, the beams now beginning to sweep over the water, around the concrete piers and upon the dozens of boats farther aft heading toward the bridge or, more specifically, toward the two deep channels between piers four and six. Collisions continued on the way, but the putt-putting of the two-stroke motors kept up with what would have struck Brentwood as a comic insistence had it not been for the task and dangers that lay ahead of him. There was another bump, then another, more obscenities, but the barge moved inexorably toward the bridge, slowly at first, then like a monster possessed as it caught the full thrust of the current, smacking aside any craft that was so impudent as to get in its way.

Then everything changed.

Dennison, seeing the barge on its way, had dived and was already on his way downstream, jettisoning all equipment, save the Browning nine-millimeter automatic pistol and GPS with which he would rendezvous at the grid reference pickup point two miles downriver on the western bank, as agreed on by him and Brentwood. If Brentwood managed to carry it off, the GPS should bring him within a hundred feet of Dennison.

Dennison had been under way only two minutes, submerged and beneath the bridge, when he heard the muffled drone of a loudspeaker coming from the vehicular deck. Or perhaps it was from the lower railway deck, the noise being too indistinct to betray its exact point of origin.

On the barge, Robert Brentwood had no such difficulty in hearing the loudspeaker, the PLA interpreter shouting that the two prisoners tied to the rail would be beheaded in ten minutes unless all American commandos surrendered.

“What’s the forecast, Harvey?”

Simmet, red-eyed from fatigue, which gave his face a peculiar, rodentlike stare, glared at Norton as if he was to blame. It was misdirected anger at the general, anger for asking what Harvey called “the fucking forecast for the fourth fucking time in the last fucking hour!”

Harvey Simmet snatched the latest computer printout from the isobar printer and took it through to Freeman.

“Storm’s still heading south, General. Gusts to sixty kilometers per hour and rising. Visibility near zero.”

“The temperature, Harv — the temperature?”

“Minus fifty, General, and falling.”

“Thank you.”

“Yes, General.” As Simmet walked away, Freeman turned to Norton. “Dick, I think Harvey’s a bit pissed off.”

“Oh?” It was so painfully obvious to Norton that he didn’t know whether the general was kidding him or not. Norton had no time to decide, for the next order Freeman gave him was a shock.

“Radio our tank commanders — burst code — to fire, then to fall back ten miles and go into defilade positions. When I go up there, I don’t want to be able to see one turret. Tell them to camouflage the guns with snow netting if the snow lets up — which it doesn’t look like it will.”

“Fall back, General?”

“Something the matter with your hearing, Dick?”

“No, General, but you’ve never—”

“Now, Dick! Tell ‘em to fall back!”

What in hell did Freeman think he was doing? Norton wondered as he took down the pad and pencil for the number-for-letter burst code. He knew it would be nearly impossible to hide every one of the 227 M-1s. If the Siberians’ forward patrols were to spot even one or two hidden behind the snowbanks, experienced Siberian scouts would be sure to guess that there were many more around, and before the M-1s could move, hundreds of T-72s would be all over them.

For these troops, who had been brought up on the legend of Freeman as the swift attacker of Pyongyang and the unstoppable general who’d kept pressing home the offensive against Ratamanov Island — despite appalling losses — and won, the fallback order smacked of impending defeat. And wasn’t it Freeman who had preached that “withdrawal is the first step to disaster”? The enemy, he had said, can smell it, and it “spreads like a great fart across the battlefield — gets ‘em riled, eager for the kill.”