Warshot

gunpowder!” Norton nearly had a stroke the moment Freeman said it, and had to corral the female correspondent from the L.A. Times who had heard the remark to tell her that if she used the “gunpowder” quote, she’d never again receive press accreditation anywhere in the Far East theater. “Will I need it again?” she challenged shrewdly.

“Well, miss,” Norton had replied, completely unashamed of his outright act of censorship, “what do you think the Chinese will do during the cease-fire? Go home to Beijing?”

“Are you saying this is a Yugoslavian cease-fire?” she asked, smiling.

Norton gave a noncommittal shrug. “Your phrase — not mine. Look at the map,” he said casually. “What would you do if you were the Chi—”

“Norton!”

“General?”

“Pardon me for interrupting, miss, but you can hear this, too. We’ve reports coming in from Baikal that some Siberian fighter aircraft haven’t got the message. About the cease-fire. There’s been reports of strafing. I have to go and talk with this — this Chinese joker at A-7. Goddamn colonel. I won’t go till they have a three-star commander there. The bastards!” He looked at the reporter. “And that’s off-the-record.”

“Which part, General? The strafing or the three-star bit?”

He forced a grin. “The three-star bit. Don’t want people back home to think I’m… proud. What I am proud of is my boys.”

A lie and a truth in one sentence, thought the correspondent. He was proud of his boys, but as vain as any Manchu that had sat on the Peacock Throne. “I’ll just report that enemy elements are still—”

“Elements—hell! They’re MiG-29s and they’re shooting at my boys.”

“Are the reports reliable, General?”

“Hell, yes. We’ve got SAT pics of them rising from forward fields around Irkutsk.”

It was another half-truth, though the general didn’t realize it. The Siberians were still fighting, but they weren’t strafing. What they were doing was trying to shoot all the Marsden- matting forward air strips being laid down at a frantic rate by Seabees flown in, under Freeman’s orders, from Khabarovsk. The general was doing a little last-minute reinforcing himself.

Indeed, while he was talking to the correspondent, in response to an AWAC report that four of Yesov’s MiG- 29 Fulcrums were flying in diamond formation over Baikal, a nine-plane mission of B-52s from Nayoro under his orders with midair-refueled F-16 Strikers were flying high, 35,000 feet above the AA missile envelope, toward Lake Baikal.

* * *

“Sleduyte menya.” Follow me, intoned Sergei Marchenko in the usual calm, devil- may-care voice that had become as legendary as his Fulcrum’s “Yankee Killer” motif. Suddenly caught in a series of buffeting air pockets, his left wing dipped, and just as quickly his tetka— “auntie,” as he called his rechevaya instruktsiya, or voice guidance system — came on, telling him to correct the yaw.

“Yes, sweetheart,” he responded, heard a bang, and felt his right wing going. He was in a spin. The sound and sight of black smudges against the blue told him that he’d been hit — orange speckles of American AA could be seen erupting from the blackish-green taiga that was spinning up at him at a frightening rate. In eight g’s, the crushing pressure on his chest feeling like a locomotive rolling over on him, Marchenko involuntarily gasped for air, his wing man hearing him on the intercom. Disorientated in the spin, Marchenko punched the krasnuyu knopku ChP—red panic button — on his control column, but it couldn’t stop the spin. He hit another series of air pockets, the spin momentarily decreasing.

Finally managing to reach down between his legs, he felt the rubber loop and pulled. He heard the bang of the eject rocket, felt the jerk, was thrown two hundred feet into the air, heard another bang — the small drogue chute out, slowing him. Then the main chute opened, the ejection seat dropping away from him, his chute a black mushroom in the late evening’s cerulean-blue, the Americans not shooting at him as he floated down, swept westward in a fast airstream across Kultuk into the Siberian taiga.

* * *

In all, Marchenko had bailed out only three times, but his reputation for survival fed more stories, eagerly pumped up by the sleazier western tabloids, that it was six times. Novosibirsk encouraged the lie, for the defeated Siberians were badly in need of heroes. The fact that he had been downed by AA gunfire became quickly changed to him having been hit by some new kind of Stealth missile the Americans were developing, or possibly by one of the new Mach-3 needlepointed AA Starstreak missiles. Marchenko’s photo, the bruises to his face caused by the ejection carefully masked by makeup, appeared on page one of Novosibirsk’s official United Siberian next to his old MiG-29.

“What will you do now?” asked a reporter.

“Get another plane. Fight again!” Marchenko had answered. It was understood by the Novosibirsk reporters to be a joking, quick-witted response. Quick-witted it might have been, but it was no joke. Marchenko meant what he said, fully expecting to be called on once again.

* * *

For Shirer, later that night, the sight of the long stick of bombs falling away into the blue, and the trails of silent orange explosions blossoming rapidly in the green-black taiga, should have been more rewarding than it was. But while gunner Murphy was chatting away excitedly on the intercom about how there wouldn’t be any “motherfucker airfields” left for the “mothers to fly out of,” so accurate had been the nine-plane load of over 380,000 pounds of five-hundred-pound contact bombs and cratering munitions, Frank Shirer felt guilty that he couldn’t join in Murphy’s excitement. No matter that in the closing hours the B-52s had rendered the Siberians’ three most important airstrips beyond Irkutsk useless. For Shirer, the news of Marchenko’s downing by an AA battery was a bitter disappointment, for his determination to get back to flying — real flying— had once again been thwarted.

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

From his forward HQ at Nizhneangarsk, Freeman insisted that before he would go to A-7, all prisoners must be exchanged. This list included the commando, Smythe, whom, or so it was claimed by the Democracy Movement, the PLA had cut down from the pier five railing as soon as they’d seen Robert Brentwood rescuing the other prisoner. All other prisoners would be exchanged, responded General Cheng on the phone, but not the man Smythe. “He is a spy.” This told Freeman Smythe was alive and that the underground information was correct, that the PLA, fearing his rescue, had got him off the bridge only a moment or so before the explosion.

“I insist he be returned,” said Freeman.

“This is not possible,” retorted an implacable Cheng. “He is ill.”

“Then we will release all Siberian prisoners but not PLA prisoners.”

“As you wish,” said Cheng.

* * *

“I told you, Norton,” Freeman said after the phone hookup. “Those Communists bastards don’t give a shit about their own people.”

“Maybe so, General, but should we press the point? They won’t kill Smythe, now that we’ve made a public issue of it. Besides, our contacts with the Chinese underground report that Beijing wants too much info from him to let him die. Reports are they’ll feed him up first.”

“A show trial?” Freeman proffered.

“Possibly. Smythe’ll have to hold up a sign saying how it was us who began the war, I suppose.”

“He won’t,” opined Freeman. “He’s SAS/Delta.”

“I hope he will. It’d be easier on him.”

“I agree. Can you try to get a message to him via the Chinese underground to say whatever the hell they want him to say. Nobody outside China’ll believe a public confession. You know that. Let him ‘confess’ and we’ll get