Ian Slater - Warshot

“Yes, sweetheart,” he responded, heard a bang, and felt his right wing going. He was in a spin. The sound and sight of black smudges against the blue told him that he’d been hit — orange speckles of American AA could be seen erupting from the blackish-green taiga that was spinning up at him at a frightening rate. In eight g’s, the crushing pressure on his chest feeling like a locomotive rolling over on him, Marchenko involuntarily gasped for air, his wing man hearing him on the intercom. Disorientated in the spin, Marchenko punched the krasnuyu knopku ChP —red panic button — on his control column, but it couldn’t stop the spin. He hit another series of air pockets, the spin momentarily decreasing.

Finally managing to reach down between his legs, he felt the rubber loop and pulled. He heard the bang of the eject rocket, felt the jerk, was thrown two hundred feet into the air, heard another bang — the small drogue chute out, slowing him. Then the main chute opened, the ejection seat dropping away from him, his chute a black mushroom in the late evening’s cerulean-blue, the Americans not shooting at him as he floated down, swept westward in a fast airstream across Kultuk into the Siberian taiga.

In all, Marchenko had bailed out only three times, but his reputation for survival fed more stories, eagerly pumped up by the sleazier western tabloids, that it was six times. Novosibirsk encouraged the lie, for the defeated Siberians were badly in need of heroes. The fact that he had been downed by AA gunfire became quickly changed to him having been hit by some new kind of Stealth missile the Americans were developing, or possibly by one of the new Mach-3 needlepointed AA Starstreak missiles. Marchenko’s photo, the bruises to his face caused by the ejection carefully masked by makeup, appeared on page one of Novosibirsk’s official United Siberian next to his old MiG-29.

“What will you do now?” asked a reporter.

“Get another plane. Fight again!” Marchenko had answered. It was understood by the Novosibirsk reporters to be a joking, quick-witted response. Quick-witted it might have been, but it was no joke. Marchenko meant what he said, fully expecting to be called on once again.

For Shirer, later that night, the sight of the long stick of bombs falling away into the blue, and the trails of silent orange explosions blossoming rapidly in the green-black taiga, should have been more rewarding than it was. But while gunner Murphy was chatting away excitedly on the intercom about how there wouldn’t be any “motherfucker airfields” left for the “mothers to fly out of,” so accurate had been the nine-plane load of over 380,000 pounds of five-hundred-pound contact bombs and cratering munitions, Frank Shirer felt guilty that he couldn’t join in Murphy’s excitement. No matter that in the closing hours the B-52s had rendered the Siberians’ three most important airstrips beyond Irkutsk useless. For Shirer, the news of Marchenko’s downing by an AA battery was a bitter disappointment, for his determination to get back to flying — real flying— had once again been thwarted.

From his forward HQ at Nizhneangarsk, Freeman insisted that before he would go to A-7, all prisoners must be exchanged. This list included the commando, Smythe, whom, or so it was claimed by the Democracy Movement, the PLA had cut down from the pier five railing as soon as they’d seen Robert Brentwood rescuing the other prisoner. All other prisoners would be exchanged, responded General Cheng on the phone, but not the man Smythe. “He is a spy.” This told Freeman Smythe was alive and that the underground information was correct, that the PLA, fearing his rescue, had got him off the bridge only a moment or so before the explosion.

“I insist he be returned,” said Freeman.

“This is not possible,” retorted an implacable Cheng. “He is ill.”

“Then we will release all Siberian prisoners but not PLA prisoners.”

“As you wish,” said Cheng.

“I told you, Norton,” Freeman said after the phone hookup. “Those Communists bastards don’t give a shit about their own people.”

“Maybe so, General, but should we press the point? They won’t kill Smythe, now that we’ve made a public issue of it. Besides, our contacts with the Chinese underground report that Beijing wants too much info from him to let him die. Reports are they’ll feed him up first.”

“A show trial?” Freeman proffered.

“Possibly. Smythe’ll have to hold up a sign saying how it was us who began the war, I suppose.”

“He won’t,” opined Freeman. “He’s SAS/Delta.”

“I hope he will. It’d be easier on him.”

“I agree. Can you try to get a message to him via the Chinese underground to say whatever the hell they want him to say. Nobody outside China’ll believe a public confession. You know that. Let him ‘confess’ and we’ll get him out on a fifty-to-one trade.” The general shook his head with the frustration he knew he’d have to live with. “God, Dick, I’d hoped to wrap things up tighter. Wanted to beat the bastards so bad they’d never—”

“If the underground movement rises up, General, maybe you can.”

Freeman’s head whipped around. “How do you mean?”

“General, Taiwan has the best air force and navy in Asia. They’ve never given up the mainland as their home. It’s through their agents we have contact with the Manchurian underground. If people inside rise up like they did before the Beijing massacre, Taiwan could go in — if they thought there was enough internal support.”

“How about external support?” probed Freeman, his blue eyes as intense as winter cold.

Norton gave one of his noncommittal shrugs, but Freeman knew that what it really meant was, I’m not going to say it.

Freeman was plainly excited. “Dick, who’s their head honcho? Taiwan?”

“Political or military?”

“Don’t fart around, Dick.”

“Admiral Lin Kuang.”

“We train him?”

Norton nodded. “Annapolis. Cum laude.”

“Dick, I want you to invite Admiral Kuang to Tokyo HQ. Incognito. We’ll ‘do’ lunch. Everything top of the line. American.”

“Yes, General. You have anything in mind?”

“Yes. I want that man back. He’s a brave man, Dick, and good. Brave men don’t belong in Chinese jails.”

“Yes, sir, but I mean the menu for Admiral Kuang.”

“What — oh, yes. Well, let’s see… soup for starters, clam chowder — Boston cream, not Manhattan. Main course — prime rib. American prime rib, Dick. Range fed. None of that damn chemical-feed crap.”

“Yes, sir,” said Norton, taking notes, the mention of “prime rib” making him hope he’d be at the table with Freeman and Kuang. He asked the general about dessert.

Freeman looked up into the cold blackness, and even though it looked like winter, he could smell, feel, that spring was stirring.

“What was that, Dick?”

“What kind of dessert will we offer?”

Freeman turned to him. “You haven’t been listening to me, Colonel.”

Norton looked at him, nonplussed. The general moved closer toward him, his face no more than six inches from Norton’s. “China, Dick! That’s the dessert. China!”

Norton felt himself taking a deep breath. The general, ice encrusting the stars on his helmet, looked southward across the vast taiga. “This is a wanker’s — a Yugoslav — ceasefire, Dick. Those bastards in Beijing are pinning the logistical tail back on their dragon. Well, if it starts breathing fire again, I’m going to give it something to roar about. I’ll chop the son of a bitch off at the neck! You still got that wolf dung in storage?”