Ian Slater: Warshot

There was a tremendous flash of orange light, turning night into day, the barge going up in a feral roar, lifted ten feet out of the water, flames from it shooting hundreds of feet high, engulfing the two spans between piers four and six, the ball of fire a quarter mile across quickly narrowing about its central concentrated core beneath what seconds before had been cold steel but which was now plasticized. Brentwood could hear the steel groaning, starting to cave in, dropping then toppling like some enormous Play-Doh Lego set just behind him. In fact, swept down by the swiftly moving current, he was already a quarter mile from it. Still, the shock wave of the explosion hit him like a baseball bat in the small of the back, and a moment later his body was literally surfed toward the downstream shore by a series of five-to-eight-foot waves radiating from the explosion. He could see the river crimson behind him, its turbulent surface reflecting variegated colors, the blues and orange of the burning propane eating into the curling, thick black smoke that was tumbling over the water. Through it here and there he saw that not only the space between piers four and five, but that between five and six, had sagged, buckled, and come apart, pieces of them still falling into the river in a hissing stream; and he knew that Smythe was dead, vaporized in the fiercest fire he’d ever seen.

“Mars! Mars! Mars!” radioed Dennison, his message immediately picked up by the Pave Low as it banked hard south toward the GPS coordinates. The moment he finished the message and heard, “Fire delay flare,” he pulled the flare from his pack, stuck it into the mud at a thirty-degree angle and pulled the cord. It hissed off, the delay seven seconds, its chute opening two hundred yards farther downriver, the flare beginning its flickering mauve burn-off, the delay a safety precaution to divert the PLA away from the actual rendezvous point, which, it was hoped, would give Brentwood time to rendezvous. In fact it was Rose he saw, Brentwood nowhere in sight.

“Set, Aussie?” David Brentwood yelled over the thunder of the rotors.

“Set!”

“Right. Sal, you and Choir — cover fire from the chopper.”

“Right!”

The Pave Low’s electronic wizardry didn’t fail as its automatic fix took it down to a hundred, then a bare fifty feet above a marshy levee; for it to go lower and risk a wind shear in the unstable air currents from the fire would be to risk slamming down or getting bogged.

Within two seconds Aussie and David Brentwood were rappeling down two of the five dangerously swinging STABO lines. Dennison put himself in the spring harness at the end of one of the STABO lines and Rose did the same.

“That’s it?” yelled Aussie. “Anybody else?”

“Yeah,” called out Dennison, having no way of knowing he was talking to the brother of Robert Brentwood and making no effort to lower his voice under the roar of the Pave’s blades. “The boss.”

David Brentwood knew it was up to him. Now they saw more searchlights frantically sweeping through the smoke south of the burning midsection of the bridge. At least two patrol boats could be heard. David couldn’t risk it. This was where the speed of a STABO extraction was worth every penny of the taxpayer’s money. “In harness, Aussie!” he ordered.

“But—”

“In harness!” David shouted.

Aussie took a firm stand to snap on his harness and fell down, his injured foot having given way.

“We can wait a—” began Dennison.

David shouted into his throat mike. “Let’s go! C’mon, Aussie!”

There was a delay of another ten seconds before Aussie was in harness, but with that done the Pave climbed — as slowly as possible, but in a steep, almost hovering angle. The jerk would be abrupt when it came, and even as the men braced for it, they knew the spring STABO links wouldn’t cushion them from possible injury if they didn’t do it right. Without an order, they stood close to one another, linked arms, each man’s fingers interlocked in front of him as if in solemn prayer, and bowed their heads — pulling firmly on one another’s elbows, waiting to be literally lifted off their feet once the slack on the STABO lines had been taken up.

There was a grunting, slopping noise behind them. Dennison felt something gripping his ankle, trying to pull him back, and he kicked hard with the other foot and heard a crunch of bone. Suddenly the STABO lines lurched forward with a gut-wrenching sensation. The cold wind hit them, and then they collectively felt the steady tug of the five wires that, attached to the brace of harnesses being hauled up, were making a singing noise in the wind as their linked bodies swept forward into the void. There wasn’t a shot fired in their direction, or if so, they couldn’t hear it, the chaos on and about the bridge so panic-ridden and smoke-filled that they were away and being pulled one by one inside the Pave by Choir Williams and Salvini, most of whose effort was taken up hauling the last man in — who was not in harness, but hanging on to Dennison’s legs like a very heavy rag doll.

Within five minutes, well below the radar screen, they were on their way back to Salt Lake City. No one spoke, everyone utterly exhausted save for the crew of the Pave, who now gave the craft full throttle, their side gunners still alert should they be unlucky enough to give off a radar echo or two. And it wasn’t until they were low, north of the Yangtze’s wide estuary, that anyone, least of all Dennison, realized Robert Brentwood was aboard but unable to declare himself, his jaw and nose broken by Dennison’s vicious back kick. Thereafter, Dennison would be forever known as “Stomper Dennison.”

“Temperature’s minus sixty, General,” reported a weary Harvey Simmet.

The change in Freeman was to be remembered by Norton and Simmet and indeed everyone in their HQ for a long time, and was to become part of the Freeman legend. “We’ve got the sons of bitches!” declared Freeman. “By God, Norton, full attack! Hit ‘em!”

No one understood it for a minute or two, several of the officers in the buzzing HQ signals hut quite frankly thinking Freeman had flipped his lid. But later even Norton conceded that he should have known that Freeman’s attention to detail, which bordered on the compulsive-obsessive, was about to deal a crushing defeat against the Siberian tanks.

“Well,” pressed one bemused captain, “what’s it all about?”

“The temperature, I guess,” said Harvey Simmet.

“So what the hell is it?” asked the captain.

“Minus sixty,” answered Simmet.

“No — Christ, I mean what’s — what happens at minus sixty? The old man grows horns? Becomes invincible or what? What the shit’s going on?”

“Captain!” In the babble of the communications hut the captain hadn’t been aware that Freeman had overheard him. “Yes, sir. Sorry, General, I—”

“You get my goddamn Humvee around here. And fast. You’re about to get an education, son!”

“Yes, General.”

“You coming, Dick?” asked Freeman, looking remarkably reassured, confident now that his tank commanders would do the rest.

“Do I have any choice, General?”

“No. You coming along, Harvey?”

“I think I’ll sit it out back here, General. It’s gonna get a lot colder.”

“Hotter, Harv. Hotter!”

As they took off in the Humvee, armored cars fore and aft, a TOW missile launcher atop the Humvee’s cabin, Norton couldn’t believe the intensity of the cold. With the heater’s full blast there was only a four-inch-diameter half-moon clearing in the windscreen through which they could see — the rest a sheet of ice. Already he felt his toes were going into frostbite, though he knew as long as he could at least feel them there was no immediate danger of that.