But nothing was predictable. Certainly no one in the SAS/D company could have had any way of knowing that the MiG-29 was flown by Siberia’s top ace, Sergei Marchenko, whose Fulcrum sported the Yankee killer motif left forward of the left engine’s box intake.
Within hours Novosibirsk was boasting about Marchenko’s bravery, which was undeniable, but the propaganda broadcast failed to point out the element of sheer luck involved in hitting the gunship in the thick fog. In its spiraling turn, the gunship, its guns ablaze, had quite unexpectedly presented Marchenko with a target that a child couldn’t have missed. Having made only one pass, he easily downed it with a two-hundred-pound Aphid air- to-air missile traveling at nine hundred feet a second, before pulling out all the stops to disappear westward into the safety net of Baikal’s AA ring.
To all Siberia, Marchenko was a hero. But to the SAS/D men — several of them wounded and dying in their fighting retreat into the choppers, where ironically the downdraft from the Chinooks was so fierce that it knocked them off the rope ladders — Marchenko only added to the sense of bitterness they felt with their discovery that it hadn’t been the Americans who’d started the war. To them Marchenko was no better than a vulture. He’d come in not on equal terms, but merely to turkey-shoot the lumbering AC-130, and then he’d “hopped it,” as Choir Williams described it, to the safety west of Baikal, out of the American air striker reach.
To Commander Soong, now the victor of A-7, the MiG pilot was a comrade hero, having made it all the easier for him to conquer the summit and plant the red flag.
In the La Roche chain, Marchenko got more space than the president’s victory over internal saboteurs and the arrest in Central Park of the man who the FBI said had engineered the massive computer debacle.
For Sergei Marchenko, his downing of the Spectre meant another U.S. plane for his ground crew to paint on the side of his Fulcrum, his daring kill on near-empty only adding to his reputation in the Siberian air force for having
It not only added to his legend at home, but burned the ears of all those Allied pilots who’d come up against him. This was especially so for Frank Shirer, who, seeing a MiG crash, had claimed the Korean kill. Adding insult to injury, Shirer was given the information in the mess of the B-52 squadron at Nayoro, Japan. Here, so far from home, his sense of being a has-been—”from Porsche to bus driver,” as he’d put it — was confirmed when he was told of Marchenko’s resurrection at dinner, where ail the B-52 crews also heard it. Frank thought of Lana telling him it didn’t matter a fig about Marchenko, that what mattered to her was that he, Frank, was alive, that if La Roche ever conceded to a divorce, they could get married. But her hopes were no consolation to Shirer. There were just some things you couldn’t explain to a woman. Shirer’s gunner, a gregarious Murphy from Philadelphia, tried to make light of it, but as Shirer cut into his steak, he pressed so hard on the knife that the screech of the steel on china went through the mess hall like nails on a blackboard.
“Don’t worry about it, skipper,” said Murphy, who, as well as resident optimist, was the B-52’s “designated hitter”—the tail gunner, though he had not yet seen an enemy plane and didn’t plan on seeing one. “This Mar— whatever his name is.”
“Marchenko.”
“Yeah — Marchenko. He’ll get his.”
“How are those tail guns coming along?” asked Shirer, shifting away from talk of the Siberian ace. “Wandering a bit on the way over, weren’t they?” He meant on the flyover from the States to Japan.
“Ah, they’re okay. It was me wandering, skipper. Had some of that sushi last night. Don’t think raw fish agrees with me. Had the runs all night.”
“You should stock up on Pepto-Bismol,” said Shirer. Murphy thought he was fooling, but he wasn’t. “You might have a long flight if the weather clears up north.”
Murphy patted his left vest pocket. “Got me a whole packet. Ah, know what the target is, skipper?”
“No.” Shirer’s tone sounded like he didn’t care, either. “Only that it depends on clear skies, or enough to see where we’re bombing.”
“Could be important, right?”
“Oh, sure,” said Shirer, feeling as bitter as the coffee. “It’s always important.”
“Yeah, right,” said Murphy, confident he’d helped shake his skipper out of his depressed mood. Then quite suddenly Murphy turned pale.
“What’s wrong, man? You got the runs?” the crew’s navigator asked Murphy. “Look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“Sushi,” said Murphy, pushing himself away quickly from the table, obviously in pain. “Goes through ya like crap through a goose.”
CHAPTER THIRTY
“Big dick!” said Aussie Lewis, wearily unloading his pack. “That’s what got us out.”
The SAS/D team had lost seven men and four wounded, and for that they now had the hard intelligence for Freeman that the Chinese had been conned by what had been a Siberian artillery barrage into firing on American positions all along the northeast China-Siberian border, breaking the cease-fire. But Lewis’s prediction was borne out — it made no difference. The Siberian member of the U.N., representing the largest of the Commonwealth of Independent States, said the American allegations were “groundless” and “a pathetic attempt by the Washington warmongers to rationalize American aggression against the peace-loving peoples of Siberia and China.”
On the flight back to Kalga Field, northeast of A-7 mountain, before changing planes for a fast jet to Rudnaya Pristan’ on the Siberian coast, the Chinook pilots had a bad fright when fighters, in finger-four patrol formation, appeared on their FLIR — forward-looking infrared — screens, the pilots thinking that, like the downed Spectre, they were about to be attacked by more MiG-29s. But instead, the dots were American F-15 Eagles sent away down from Skovorodino to escort the choppers back. It was a tight-lipped bunch of SAS/D men who deplaned at Rudnaya Pristan’.
It was one thing to lose seven of your own in an attempt to rescue your own, but the sheer waste of the A-7 mission not only gave La Roche’s tabloids more screaming headlines, but was a waste emphasized by the failure of the Chinese to break off hostilities.
“You’d think they’d call their lot back,” commented Choir Williams as he watched a medic bandage up Lewis’s left foot. It was only a flesh wound but had made a mess of the boot.
“Nah,” said Lewis, looking at the medic who, Lewis saw, was carefully, obsessively, putting on a double pair of rubber gloves and rubber mask before he went anywhere near the blood. “Don’t worry, sport. I don’t have AIDS.” The medic didn’t answer, and Lewis turned his attention to Williams. “Ah, forget it, Choir. Beijing doesn’t give a shit who started it. Not now. They see their chance to gobble up more rich border territory — their price for helping the Sibirs. Anyway, what you think those old farts in Beijing are gonna tell the masses, mate? ‘Sorry, but we made a mistake and started a war. All our propaganda about Yankee aggression was a bunch of bullshit.’ “ Lewis watched the medic open a brown bottle of iodine, its smell bringing back unpleasant childhood memories. “They’d lose face,
