the left- to right-side panels, sliding into a spiraling corkscrew trajectory that would bring him away from the snow-covered timber around the clearing. Each of the fifteen SAS/D men knew he had to establish a perimeter fast.
There was another snap, but this time it was followed by the steady tattoo of a machine gun, and Aussie Lewis saw red tracer climbing lazily toward him, its deceptively graceful arcs curving past him. His feet hit the snowy ground and he tumbled, the tracer arcs lowering in his general direction. “Don’t shoot, you stupid bastards!” he yelled ineffectually into his mask, furious, for all his training to be cool, and at heart deeply and truly afraid of only one thing — the ever present possibility in each rescue mission that you could end up as “collateral damage,” killed by “friendly fire.” Everyone on the SAS/D team was more aware than most in Freeman’s Second Army of the acute danger of being hit by your own side — that even in America’s most successful war, in Iraq, twenty-four percent, 35 of the 148 Americans killed, died because they were mistaken by their own side as the enemy. It was a percentage that Brentwood, Lewis, Salvini, Choir Williams, and the rest knew could double here in as many minutes, given the fact they’d been unable to make radio contact with those they were attempting to rescue.
Dragged a few feet by the chute, Lewis punched the release, and within a minute had hauled the Bergen pack across the waist-deep snow and had the Heckler & Koch 11 A1 out of its wrap. The butt stock of the forty-inch-long gun in place, its safety off, his thumb moved from the white S through E to full automatic as naturally as he breathed, the gun’s barrel tooled to accept either the old NATO 5.6mm round or the heavier but harder-hitting Siberian 7.62mm— Soviet surplus. It had been an important consideration, given the unlikelihood of being resupplied by air should they find it necessary to counterattack into the timber, where, if their ammo ran out — some ammo boxes would inevitably be lost — they might have to use abandoned ChiCom-Soviet 7.62mm in their attempt to secure a perimeter.
Snapping out the bipod, Lewis planted the gun left of a shattered tree stump at the edge of the clearing and unwrapped the spare barrel, placing it by his side should he be forced to overheat the first barrel in what he already expected to be a massive counterattack by the ChiCom. The one thing on which the SAS/D team was depending was that most, if not all, of the artillery battery’s gunners they were trying to extract would have Starlight infrared binoculars and/or goggles, so that although not being in radio contact, they would readily make out fellow American shapes in the clearing. Even so, it was risky, for it was possible that a PLA patrol had penetrated farther into the timber about the clearing than anticipated, the tracer coming at Lewis just before he touched down a case in point.
Through his own “bug eyes” Lewis could see the infrared blur of Brentwood, who had made a perfect walk- away landing, immediately taking up his position to the right of Lewis on the westernmost arc of the snowy, horseshoe-shaped clearing. Meanwhile, Salvini, Choir Williams, and others were spreading left of Lewis around the eastern curve of the horseshoe. Then, through the trees, he saw a shape moving through a clump of pine that had been stripped of their needles by what he guessed must have been artillery and mortar rounds, the stripped trees looking strangely naked, like so many huge, torn umbrellas upended in the snow. And through this wild, denuded wood, Lewis saw shapes moving; several others, their outline more indistinct because of a stand of unshelled timber, following the first; Lewis and the other SAS/D men who’d spotted them, holding their fire while peering anxiously through their nighttime goggles to make a clear friend-or-foe identification.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Devoid of star- or moonlight to guide them, coming in low westward from the East China Sea, lost to enemy radar because of the sea clutter, the two MH-53J Pave Low helos carrying four SEALs apiece skirted the wide confluence of the Huangpu and the Yangtze deltas ten miles to their south. Sea clutter gave way to the low stratus and cumulonimbus thunderheads massing along the coast, and the two SOS — special operations squadron — choppers were still below the ChiCom coast radar net, their look-down radar guiding them up and over the contours of the earth, no more than fifty feet above ground. The seven men aboard each chopper — four SEALs and the chopper’s crew of three — were hoping and praying NOE flying would keep them undetected.
On all the aircraft specifications charts provided to avid journalists in the Iraqi War, the big, fat, squat Pave Low hadn’t been featured — it didn’t look “sexy” enough in some editors’ opinions. But it was the unmentioned Pave Lows, four of them — despite the Apaches reaping all the glory in the press — that had struck the decisive blow against Saddam Hussein. Loaded with DEPNAV — the highly precise deep-penetration navigation computer — and nap of the earth early warning equipment, including their Doppler radar, the four Pave Lows had
With insertion by air rather than by submarine having been decided on by Freeman because of the unknown configuration of sub nets at the mouth of the Yangtze and Huangpu, Robert Brentwood felt even more that he was the odd man out among the SEALs. Though with his rank he was the “wheel”—the senior officer in charge of Operation Country Garden — he was at least ten to fifteen years older than most of the two four-man Echo One and Echo Two teams.
And there were dozens of details he had to worry about, any of which, if not attended to, could foul up the mission. Even the relatively quiet purr of the muffled thirty-five horsepower outboard engines, should they have to use them, might be picked up by river traffic, though during the bull-pen briefing board
But the other SEALs were giving all their attention to their weapons. In the first Pave Low, carrying Brentwood’s Echo One team, Rose was checking the number-four buckshot cartridges for his AAI — Aircraft Armaments Inc. — ”double S,” or silent shotgun. Using a plastic pusher piston, the gun could send the buckshot out at over four hundred feet a second, the shell’s expanding metal preventing any gases escaping; meaning that if the weapon had to be used, its only sound would be the soft click of the double S’s firing pin. Apart from the explosives, the remainder of the SEALs’ small but lethal arsenal included Smith & Wesson .38 pistols, fragmentation and smoke grenades, emergency flares, and in Bullfrog Brady’s Echo Two team, a Smith & Wesson Model 76 submachine gun carried by Echo Two’s radio operator. In Echo One, Robert Brentwood was also armed with a Smith & Wesson Model 76, while Diver First Class Dennison packed a Stoner MK-23 with a 150-round belt-box feed.
In Echo One’s last-minute check, Brentwood had Rose, Dennison, and Medical Corpsman Smythe — who was also Echo One’s radio operator — make sure each of the three thirty-second-fuse Claymore mines was in the semi- inflated boat, trusting that Brady was making the same equipment check aboard the Echo Two Pave Low, a quarter mile aft of them. Unconsciously, Brentwood felt for the Griptite sheath of the high-carbon steel knife strapped to his calf and for the small, pen-sized signal light. Glancing at the C-4 plastique explosive packs, he detected an odor that shouldn’t be aboard the helo. He’d ordered everyone to eat one of the regional Chinese meals before they’d taken off from the carrier. ChiComs could smell American food a hundred yards away. More than one U.S. soldier had died in Korea and ‘Nam because of that, the Americans’ red meat diet especially detectable by Asians.
“Everyone on rice and fish before we took off?”
Dennison, Rose, and Smythe all nodded affirmatively, the perfume-like smell of gum apparently coming from the chopper’s electronic warfare officer. Brentwood told him to get rid of it.
“Well, gentlemen,” Brentwood noted, to ease the tension a little, “according to my GPS here, we’re right on the money.” The handheld global positioning system, fed by satellite atomic clocks in orbit, was giving him a second-by-second readout of precisely where they were over the velvety blackness of rice fields south of Taizhou, just seventy miles east of Nanking. “We’re exactly five hundred and eighty-eight miles east sou’east of Beijing. Error factor — no more than twenty yards — in case you were wondering where you are.”
