“Reminds me of a story,” said Smythe, his voice made tremulous by the rotor’s vibration. “This guy’s at an outdoor Indian convention—”
“Is he Indian?” asked Rose.
“What? Yeah, ‘course he’s Indian,” said Smythe. “Anyway, the head honcho asks him what tribe he’s from — ticking ‘em off on a clipboard, right? Indian guy says, ‘I’m a member of the Farkarwee tribe.’ Head honcho looks down, reads through the whole list from Apache to Sioux, says to the guy, ‘You sure? I can’t find the Farkarwee tribe on the list. How many are you?’
“ ‘Only me and my granddad,’ says the guy. ‘But I know we’re definitely the Farkarwee tribe.’ “
Smythe shook his head, like he was the guy with the clipboard. “Head honcho didn’t know what to do. Didn’t want to offend the guy, but he couldn’t find the tribe. Maybe it was extinct, wiped out? So he asks the guy again. Says, ‘You sure it’s the Farkarwee tribe?’
“ ‘Sure I’m sure,’ says the Indian.
“ ‘You positive?’ says the head honcho. ‘ ‘Cause it’s not on my—’
“ ‘Look,’ the Indian says, ‘there’re only two of us left, but I know we’re the Farkarwee tribe.’
“ ‘How can you be so sure?’ asked the head honcho.
“ ‘Because,’ says the Indian, ‘every mornin’ when we were comin’ across the country to this convention, my grandfather’d go out in front of the tepee, put up his hands and say, ‘Where the fark are we?’ “
Brentwood saw the cargo hold light go to red. They were five minutes from the landing zone. Once they reached it, they would rappel from the chopper down onto the muddy bank seven miles south on the river’s western bank, where the Yangtze, straightening out upstream, was at least three miles wide. A seven-mile-long, spatula- shaped island lay three-quarters of the way across from their touchdown point on the western shore. Both four-man teams and Zodiacs would be out and the chopper gone within three minutes, the men having to take out the Zodiacs semi-inflated. “Like pallbearers!” as Rose had indelicately put it during the briefing. Full inflation of the rubber boats by carbon dioxide cartridge would take place once they were outside the chopper, moments before carrying them to the riverbank.
The Pave Lows banked left to the southwest in a wide, end sweep that would be longer man a direct run in, but would keep them low over the rice fields and levees and, most importantly, clear of the three 425-foot towers situated north of the bridge.
Two minutes from the insertion point, the Paves’ pilots went from manual to hover coupler. The latter’s computer-fed data from the gyroscope inertial guidance system and altimeter automatically altered trim and yaw through rotor control to keep the chopper coming in on a steady vector low over the levees, toward the preprogrammed drop-off point by the river, now four minutes away.
The pulsating red light turned to amber.
As leader of Echo One, Brentwood, like Brady leading Echo Two, would have preferred a drop-off point closer to the bridge, and to land on the eastern, down-channel traffic side, but most of Nanking’s population lived on the eastern shore. Besides, the island would shield them from the more populated eastern bank.
Inside the cargo hold, Brentwood felt the tremulous vibration prior to the drop-off, saw the amber light switch to green.
“Go!” said the copilot, and the Pave Low’s gaping door ramp opened. Within seconds Brentwood’s Echo One and Brady’s Echo Two teams were both out of the choppers. The second Robert Brentwood touched ground, the smell of riverbank mud and human excrement from the rice fields snatched his breath away. Then his infrared goggles revealed a broad shimmering expanse that was the river, and before it a gradually sloping gray that was the riverbank. From the first step in his rubber reef walkers, which doubled as fin slippers, he could feel an icy wind moaning about his rubber suit. Through the infrared, the shimmering negativelike image that was the expanse of river became crazy-quilted, dark patches caused by gusts that had ruffled the surface and suddenly lowered the temperature of the water-air interface.
Brentwood heard the gentle hiss of air as Brady pulled the carbon dioxide cartridge on the other team’s boat. A moment later he heard another hiss, Dennison pulling the cord on Echo One, Brentwood feeling the gunwales of the rubber boat stiffening against his thigh as he caught a glimpse of Dennison steadying the WOX-5 underwater gun, its rocket projectiles against the belt-feed drums of ammunition for the minigun. The latter, a cut-down 7.62mm Gatling, had a hitherto unheard of firing rate of six thousand rounds a minute, another weapon Robert Brentwood fervently hoped they wouldn’t have to use.
Echo Two’s RTO — radio telephone operator — Petty Officer Jensen, had already slipped aboard Brady’s boat, his AN/PRC-77 radio in its waterproof pack on the back of his inflatable black life-preserver vest.
Farther back in Echo One, in a last minute check, Brentwood, his left hand firmly gripping the forward starboard lug of the boat, slid his right hand over the waterproof holster of nis stainless steel Smith & Wesson nine-millimeter Hush Puppy.
As Dennison, Rose, Brentwood, and Corpsman Smythe eased the boat into the ice-chilled water, Echo Two’s four-man team and their 1,300 pounds of equipment were already pushing off, making a sucking sound on the sloping bank, which seemed to them as loud as a gunshot. But Brentwood knew it was probably no noisier than a rat plopping into the river mud, the last of the four SEALs in Brady’s Echo Two ahead of them having stepped into a knee-deep silt hole. Brentwood pushed the thought of water rats out of his mind. It was one of the reasons he used to tell his younger brothers that he joined the pig boats — the submarines — and not the surface navy. In a sub there wasn’t enough room for a rat to hide.
Waiting several seconds for Echo Two to make some distance before his Echo One pushed off, Brentwood could already hear a distant putt-putting: river boats. He was surprised, however, that there wasn’t more sound, given the volume of water traffic Freeman’s HQ had told them to expect. Glancing at his GPS through the infrared goggles, he saw it was 2250. The current was running around three to six knots, and so all being well, using paddle assist, they could expect to be in the vicinity of the bridge well within the hour, only using the engines in the event of unpredictable swirl holes. Pickup, unless something went wrong and they were forced to go SOS on the emergency band, would be at 0300 hours. “Ample time,” as the briefer aboard
The two small boats caught the current, Echo Two already well offshore about a hundred yards ahead, Robert Brentwood back in Echo One, wishing dearly that the Chinese would never imagine, let alone suspect, such a daring raid.
The four men of Echo Two in Brady’s boat had a bad fright within thirty seconds of shoving off when an enormous barge — its navigation lights air-raid blinkered, port and starboard lights mere pinpricks in the vast blackness of the Yangtze — all but capsized the twelve-foot-long, six-foot-wide rubber boat, heavily laden as it was with anchor, ropes, tackle, C-4 plastique, and weapons. Brady, in the bow of Echo Two, only managed to see the barge, loaded with four rail-car tankers heading for the tank farm downriver of the Nanking Bridge, at the last moment, giving Echo Two a bare two seconds to avoid it, the barge’s wash alone threatening to swamp them as Brady managed to swing the Zodiac’s tiller, putting her bow on to the barge’s waves. The tank farm, faintly visible through the recon photos despite the smog over Nanking, had itself been a tempting target for the SEALs, but one that they’d rightly decided to forego in lieu of blowing up the bridge to sever the ChiCom supply line.
Another surprise for Echo Two, being the first boat out, was that though they had been told by Freeman’s HQ that according to China’s river traffic laws the right lane was the downriver route, in fact the rule, as evidenced by the sight of the enormous barge in the middle of the river, was made by the boats’ captains. It was the oldest rule in the world, on the river or anywhere else: the biggest won. Normally it would have been of little moment to the SEALs, but it made for an added hazard in their clandestine mission, Brady making a mental note of it for their debriefing.
The two boats — Echo One a hundred yards farther back, due to its later push-off, Brady farther toward the right shore — were about fifty yards apart going downriver. The smell of China washed over them, the odors of Nanking, like the few lights the great metropolis showed in the darkness, less exotic than anticipated — difficult to isolate in fact, beneath the pervasive smell of the ordure from the fields on either side of the mighty river.
