Norton was starting to get worried. It wasn’t uncommon for commanders to come a bit unglued, albeit temporarily, under extreme stress. Schwarzkopf could lose his temper— blow a gasket. At times Freeman dealt with the pressure by trying to be the Far East Jay Leno. But any hope of a joke with Simmet died as the outside door slammed. It was a messenger coming in from Signals. A forward American observation post was reporting that the spearhead echelons of the Siberian tank army were less than seven miles away from the dug-in M-1s.
Harvey Simmet, pulling his trousers up, was reading off the printout, “Snow gusts increasing to one hundred kilometers — sixty miles per hour, General. Visibility zero.”
“Not zero visibility for infrared and laser sights, Harvey!” Freeman commented.
“They’ve got infrared sights and laser, too, General.”
Freeman said nothing, but his frown told Harvey that Jay Leno was gone for the night. Coming out of the cubicle, Harvey looked apprehensively at Norton for reassurance that Freeman hadn’t miscalculated. Norton couldn’t give him any.
“Temperature?” Freeman asked Simmet.
Simmet dropped the printout in a puddle of melted snow by the urinal as he was lifting his suspenders. He cussed. “Minus fifty-five. Going to get worse,” he warned, looking up at Norton.
“Norton,” ordered Freeman, “signal all commanders to fall back another ten miles.”
Norton didn’t argue. He didn’t know what to think. It made sense to withdraw, given the odds, but that wasn’t the general’s style. Was Freeman finally seeing the light, or had Jay Leno metamorphosized into “Duck-Away Doug”?
Watching the vertical and crisscross-trussed girders of the lower railway deck coming at him like huge X’s in the darkness, truck-back floodlights above them on the vehicular deck, Robert Brentwood took off his Mae West vest, cut the Chinese bargeman free, pulled the cartridge on the Mae West, handed the inflated vest to the man, and gestured back over his shoulder to the river. The man was off the stern in three seconds. Brentwood heard the faint splash even amid the babble and excited yells on the Nanking Bridge and all around him in the jumbled bumping of sampans and junks, caught in the wash of the searchlights, scattered every which way, putting as much distance between them and the oncoming barge as possible.
Fifty yards from the channel, between piers four and five, he reached over to the rope trailing from the barge’s capstan and jerked out the holding bolt, the resulting run of the anchor chain sounding like a dump truck upending a load of marbles. Now there was a splitting sound that grew rapidly: a volley of gunfire aimed at the bamboo housing but well aft of the propane tanks, in the PLA’s desperate attempt to stop what they now realized was a boat with American commandos aboard.
The barge’s bow struck the pier and shuddered, its stern swinging about, pivoting on the anchor chain, the stem bashing into the concrete midway under the bridge along the base of pier four. The barge was now completely covered by the rail decking above it, the small arms fire ceasing because of the danger of ricocheting off the crisscross trusses into the propane tanks. Brentwood had determined that to spend time trying to rescue either Rose or Smythe would be to jeopardize the whole mission, and against impulse had to weigh the lives of thousands of Americans that lay in the balance to the north should the Nanking Bridge not be blown. He pulled the ten-minute acid-ampule timer. But then, with heart-stopping suddenness, he realized that with the PLA’s fear of firing down at him for fear of hitting the tanks, he had a sudden chance, albeit a short one, as he climbed off the barge onto the narrow maintenance ladder running from pier five’s base to the rail decking and the vehicular deck above it. A roaring like another great river entering the Yangtze could be heard off to his right, the glaring headlight of a northbound goods train starting across the bridge. Halfway up the ladder, his left hand on a rung, he swung the mini machine hard right, firing from the hip, several of the long bursts crashing into the train’s headlamp, denying the PLA any clear sight of him. Immediately above Rose he saw several PLA figures silhouetted against the rail. He fired another burst, and cut Rose loose as the PLA clambered over the rail, still too frightened to shoot but determined to exact a price.
“Go! Go!” It was Smythe yelling, tied high above pier four off to the left, cheering them on.
“C’mon!” hissed Brentwood, Rose following him down the ladder above the propane tank so quickly that, his muscles stiff from having been tied up, Rose almost fell, his left heel smashing into Brentwood’s nose.
With only three minutes to go before the acid ampule would eat through the primacord, igniting the charges, Brentwood went back up the ladder another two rungs, putting himself above the level of the passing train, its hot slipstream buffeting him. He saw three black figures on the northern side ladder under the bridge and fired a long burst. Two men fell, their screams barely audible above the rush of the goods train, one body bouncing off a boxcar into the girders, the other falling into the river over a hundred feet below.
The moment they hit the barge deck, Brentwood handed Rose his penlight. “Rendezvous point with Dennison — two miles down the river. If we get separated, head for the west shore. One flash — I’ll respond with two, ten seconds apart. Got it?”
“Got it.” Suddenly the train was gone, and in the half slice of a flashlight’s beam on a girder Brentwood saw two more PLA figures fifty feet above him. He fired a burst, saw one slump, and holding the gun tightly to his chest, dove off, feeling the cold current moving him swiftly downriver, feet kicking as he submerged more powerfully than in the most rigorous training session. Immediately in the underwater blackness he made for his left, where the current would carry him to the west bank. For several seconds time raced as he tried to make as much distance between him and the barge as possible, waiting for the sound of the detonation. Then it seemed as if minutes had passed, that something had gone wrong, that the primacord had—
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.”
