David Brentwood knew it was up to him. Now they saw more searchlights frantically sweeping through the smoke south of the burning midsection of the bridge. At least two patrol boats could be heard. David couldn’t risk it. This was where the speed of a STABO extraction was worth every penny of the taxpayer’s money. “In harness, Aussie!” he ordered.
“But—”
“In harness!” David shouted.
Aussie took a firm stand to snap on his harness and fell down, his injured foot having given way.
“We can wait a—” began Dennison.
David shouted into his throat mike. “Let’s go! C’mon, Aussie!”
There was a delay of another ten seconds before Aussie was in harness, but with that done the Pave climbed — as slowly as possible, but in a steep, almost hovering angle. The jerk would be abrupt when it came, and even as the men braced for it, they knew the spring STABO links wouldn’t cushion them from possible injury if they didn’t do it right. Without an order, they stood close to one another, linked arms, each man’s fingers interlocked in front of him as if in solemn prayer, and bowed their heads — pulling firmly on one another’s elbows, waiting to be literally lifted off their feet once the slack on the STABO lines had been taken up.
There was a grunting, slopping noise behind them. Dennison felt something gripping his ankle, trying to pull him back, and he kicked hard with the other foot and heard a crunch of bone. Suddenly the STABO lines lurched forward with a gut-wrenching sensation. The cold wind hit them, and then they collectively felt the steady tug of the five wires that, attached to the brace of harnesses being hauled up, were making a singing noise in the wind as their linked bodies swept forward into the void. There wasn’t a shot fired in their direction, or if so, they couldn’t hear it, the chaos on and about the bridge so panic-ridden and smoke-filled that they were away and being pulled one by one inside the Pave by Choir Williams and Salvini, most of whose effort was taken up hauling the last man in — who was not in harness, but hanging on to Dennison’s legs like a very heavy rag doll.
Within five minutes, well below the radar screen, they were on their way back to
“Temperature’s minus sixty, General,” reported a weary Harvey Simmet.
The change in Freeman was to be remembered by Norton and Simmet and indeed everyone in their HQ for a long time, and was to become part of the Freeman legend. “We’ve got the sons of bitches!” declared Freeman. “By God, Norton, full attack! Hit ‘em!”
No one understood it for a minute or two, several of the officers in the buzzing HQ signals hut quite frankly thinking Freeman had flipped his lid. But later even Norton conceded that he should have known that Freeman’s attention to detail, which bordered on the compulsive-obsessive, was about to deal a crushing defeat against the Siberian tanks.
“Well,” pressed one bemused captain, “what’s it all about?”
“The temperature, I guess,” said Harvey Simmet.
“So what the hell is it?” asked the captain.
“Minus sixty,” answered Simmet.
“No — Christ, I mean what’s — what happens at minus sixty? The old man grows horns? Becomes invincible or what? What the shit’s going on?”
“Captain!” In the babble of the communications hut the captain hadn’t been aware that Freeman had overheard him. “Yes, sir. Sorry, General, I—”
“You get my goddamn Humvee around here. And fast. You’re about to get an education, son!”
“Yes, General.”
“You coming, Dick?” asked Freeman, looking remarkably reassured, confident now that his tank commanders would do the rest.
“Do I have any choice, General?”
“No. You coming along, Harvey?”
“I think I’ll sit it out back here, General. It’s gonna get a lot colder.”
“Hotter, Harv. Hotter!”
As they took off in the Humvee, armored cars fore and aft, a TOW missile launcher atop the Humvee’s cabin, Norton couldn’t believe the intensity of the cold. With the heater’s full blast there was only a four-inch-diameter half-moon clearing in the windscreen through which they could see — the rest a sheet of ice. Already he felt his toes were going into frostbite, though he knew as long as he could at least feel them there was no immediate danger of that.
“By God, Norton,” said Freeman, “Harvey looks like hell. You watch him when we get back. Make sure he gets more sleep — valuable man, Harvey.”
As Norton spoke beneath his balaclava, he swore his breath was turning to ice particles before his words were out.
It wasn’t simply a victory for Freeman — it was the slaughter of the entire Siberian armored division, and within forty minutes Norton had seen why. The T-72s and the “little surprise” Colonel Soong had known about — over seventy T-80s with up-gunned 130mm cannon, also with laser sighting — were stilled, sitting ducks while the M1A1s broke cover, bursting forth like wild animals from snow-laden lairs, careening and wheeling and wheeling back again at over fifty miles an hour, and with unerring precision belched flame and shot, most of it APDS — armor-piercing discarding sabot — the projectiles hitting the Siberian tanks at over six thousand feet per second, often puncturing a hole only a few centimeters across. But through that hole came a molten jet of white-hot metal that, spraying inside the tank, created injuries and explosions unimaginable to any but the American gunners and tank crews who saw the T-80s and T-72s buck, snow flying off them like white flour, then engulfed in red, black- streaked flames. Many of the tanks, still a moment before, were suddenly jolted by the heat, moving — some forward, some backward — spewing sparks and lavalike flows as their ammunition stores exploded, the human and materiel detritus bubbling forth from the moving carcasses of what were once five hundred of the Siberians’ crack main battle tanks. The reason: long ago, Americans whose names were not known, who had attended to the dull, analytical side of war and who were driven by the demons of perfection and Department of Defense specifications — specifications in this case insisted upon by none other than Freeman himself — had produced lubricants for the M1A1 that would not freeze. Or, more accurately, lubricants in which the waxes would not separate out and, like cholesterol in the blood, clog the vital hydraulic arteries of the world’s best main battle tank. It was a tank that, thanks to American know-how, would keep running to temperatures below minus sixty degrees, at which point the Siberian tanks, good enough in themselves, simply shuddered and stopped, the petroleum waxes, because of more crudely refined oil, thick in their blood, with only the implosions of the American 120mm shells which killed them capable of heating them up enough to move.
Harvey Simmet forgave Freeman for disturbing his peace on the can, for when the temperature had fallen below fifty and showed no sign of easing up, Freeman knew all he’d had to do was wait. It was the kind of American can-do know-how that allowed Johnny Ferrago and the other “sandhogs” to dig the third tunnel under Manhattan.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
With the Nanking Bridge knocked out, the effect was not felt in the north for another three days, during which the southern arm of Freeman’s Second Army readied themselves for counterattack in the vicinity of A-7. But if it took three days for Colonel Soong to see the stream of ammunition and food slow to a trickle, the effect of the Americans having taken out the vital crossing across the Yangtze was felt within hours in Harbin.
If the American commandos could strike that deep in China from their carriers in the East China Sea, then,
