Asian Front

“What?” Salvini asked, his anxiety, for all his SAS/D training, suddenly betraying itself.

“Bet you ten bucks,” Aussie repeated, “that they take longer to winch you in than me.”

“Oh yeah? And how do you figure that?”

“Easy,” Aussie retorted. They could hear the tracer getting closer. “You’re heavier than I am.”

“I’m as fit as you are.”

“Course you are. But you’re heavier. Come on, pay up or shut up.”

“You’re sick,” Salvini said, his anxiety written all over his face.

“All right, five bucks. I can’t do better than that. Right?”

Salvini nodded, thinking that the Australian was now asking him if he was in the proper position for the jerk. He was, but Aussie always liked to make sure of a bet. “Five bucks, okay?”

“Yeah — five bucks, all right, all right. Where’s the Talon?”

“She’s making the turn,” Aussie said. Just then a small sandstorm broke locally and they could see nothing.

“Damn it!” Salvini said.

“Don’t sweat it, sport,” Aussie encouraged. “The Talon’ll pick it up. We can’t see them, but they can see the rope up higher. Just you get ready for the—” Before he finished, Salvini simply disappeared into the dust, Aussie barely glimpsing his boots as he was jerked aloft.

“Two up, two to go,” Aussie said cheerfully. David Brentwood was thanking the Mongolian herdsman who had risked his life and family to help them. Already the herdsmen were gathering up their ghers and packing, ready to move, to avoid any punishment patrols that might be sent out from Ulan Bator.

“Come on, Dave!” Aussie yelled. “Or you’ll miss the friggin’ bus.”

Within two minutes Brentwood was in his harness, Aussie having already released the balloon from its small bedroll-type wrapping. As it expanded, disappearing into the dust, it looked like some fantastic ghost in a mustard cloak.

“Palms down,” Aussie instructed him. “Davey, you want to make a wager?”

“No.”

“Ten bucks they winch me in faster than you?”

“No. You’ve got some scheme to help pull yourself up a few feet on the cable and beat us all, is that it?”

“No way,” Aussie said. “Look, I’ve never been on one of these things either. I just figure my luck’s in. What do you say — ten bucks.”

“All right — anything to shut you up.”

“That’s my man.”

“Where’s that damn Talon?” Before Aussie could answer him, there was a loud explosion, followed by another.

“I hope to hell that’s one of theirs,” David said.

“We’ll soon know if the Talon doesn’t reappear.”

“How will we know in this dust storm? Lord, I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“Huh,” Aussie said, “locals tell me this is only a bit of a whirly. In the Gobi they say you can’t see your hand in front of your face during a dust storm.”

“All very educational, Aussie, but how the hell can we tell where the Talon is?”

“Keep your bloody head in position. Don’t want a case of whiplash on top of—”

Suddenly Brentwood was being dragged along the ground, swearing, bumping on pebbles, then he too suddenly disappeared into the whirling dust storm.

Next Aussie, already in harness, pulled two helium tanks to fill the balloon, and within minutes could hear the Talon off to the north, making its circle, his balloon now ascending. The old herdsman shook his hand, and around them, like shadows in the darkness of the dust, he could see the various odds and ends of the herdsmen’s life, as the canvas-and-felt homes came down to be loaded onto a wagon, a small TV being wrapped carefully in a carpet, and camels laden with bedding and harness, the Mongolians wishing him well with their Eskimo-like smiles and golden teeth.

There was a crash like thunder, either a Siberian or American jet hitting the desert floor, then in less than a second, Aussie, his arms now crossed tightly in against his chest, was airborne, the spring in the nylon cord making the initial ascent smoother, faster than he’d anticipated. But then the spring was at its end, and this was followed by a sudden jolt, so fierce that Aussie felt his head was about to come off.

Once above the two-hundred-foot-high dust storm that had invaded the ghers, Aussie could see far above him the three, now small, balloons that had been severed free once the V-shaped scissor clamp had got hold of the previous three lines. Now from the tail of the aircraft another vertical line descended that would hook onto the rescue line and haul it up and into the belly of the plane. The Talon was flying higher than usual because of the loss of visibility due to the dust storm. They liked to see their man as quickly as possible before engaging the winch.

With wind and dust screaming about his ears, Aussie could hear the staccato of machine gun fire off to the west where the American and Siberian fighters were engaging, and now and then he caught a glimpse of tracer as one of the Siberian fighters would try to break out of the American fighter’s box to try to bring down the Talon. A Fishbed-J MiG-21 was visible for a moment when Aussie, dangling like a toy at the end of the enormous rope, was six hundred feet above ground, but as soon as he’d seen the Fishbed-J with its green khaki camouflage pattern he saw an F-15 Eagle on its tail and the spitting of fire from its 20mm, six-barrel rotary cannon. The Fishbed immediately started making smoke, rolling into evasive action, its twin barrel GSh 23mm cannon firing from its belly pack. Suddenly Aussie knew he was in free fall, the line severed.

He had less than a second to make the decision that was no decision at all: either pull the key ring release on his chute or smash into the ground. His right hand grabbed the key ring and jerked hard. There was a flurry of air about him like a hundred pigeons being released, and suddenly his downward thrust was slowed as the chute filled and he descended back into the dust storm. The Talon, already having overstayed its welcome, was forced to turn back northeastward across the Mongolian border into Second Army territory before the Siberian MiGs got lucky again.

Aussie used swearwords on the way down he thought he’d forgotten. Whether the line had somehow fouled in one of the props despite the safety wire rigged in front of them or whether it had been a lucky tracer bullet didn’t really matter. Whatever severed the line, he wasn’t going back with his three buddies. But, like all members of the elite SAS and Delta Force commandos, he was trained in how to turn a losing situation into a winning one.

Cold reason also told him, though, as he entered the gritty dust storm and hit the ground harder than he had wanted, that the Spets helicopters and patrols would soon head out from Nalayh and possibly Ulan Bator looking for him. And right now he had four hundred miles of grassland and desert between him and the safety of Second Army. It seemed impossible, yet the only thing he could think of was the motto of his unit: “Who dares wins,” or, as General Freeman, echoing Frederick the Great, would have said, “L’audace, I’audace, toujours l’audace!” But meantime Aussie was stunned by another realization: that he had just lost fifteen bucks cold.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Next afternoon, a Friday, when Mike Ricardo walked into Con Ed’s eight-story-high fossil-fuel Astoria Station for his four-to-midnight shift, he paused for a moment to look up at the five sets of high twin stacks belching their white smoke, in sharply etched columns, against the cerulean blue. He’d been working at the Astoria fourteen years, his job a member of one of the maintenance crews for the six giant white log-cake-shaped turbines that sat on an immaculately kept rust-red-painted boiler-room floor over a hundred and twenty feet below the 217 miles of piping that bent and curved like the exposed innards of some enormous refrigerator. But here it was far from cold, temperatures soaring to 120 degrees Fahrenheit as the fossil fuels, coal mainly, burned twenty-four hours a day to drive the turbines that helped feed the enormous appetite of the New York grid.

At the same time that Mike was beginning his shift, at Indian Point in upstate New York, thirty miles north of