the mountainous cold. They might as well have been carrying a neon sign, however, saying, “Here we are,” for the F-16s and F-15s, while they didn’t kill all of them in the narrow defiles, did get most of them.
As the Pave Low banked, Aussie felt his Bergen pack shift despite its tight rigging, and now they were coming into the darkness of Manzhouli, the rail lines ribbons of steely light beneath the moon running east of the wall, which was now being breached by the Pave Lows.
“Bloody great orb!” Aussie said, cursing the break in the clouds. “Might as well send up a flare.” The Pave Low took a whack and seemed to skid in midair, but it was shrapnel from AA fire hitting the second chopper and perhaps the third.
“Second chopper’s going down!” someone said.
The red light went to green and they felt the icy rush of air.
“Go!”
And one by one they went down the rope, the big Pave in a clearing not a quarter mile north of the railway station. The choppers would return in forty-five minutes.
Aussie felt the heat through his black gloves as he descended on the rope and fell back into gritty snow. Within a minute he had the 9mm Heckler & Koch MP5K in one hand, shucking the chute with the other, then joined the other nineteen men from the three Paves. The chopper that had been hit had landed, albeit bumpily, and discharged its six SAS/D men but was now unable to take off, the other two choppers already up and away.
“Right!” David Brentwood called out to the crew of the damaged chopper. “You’re with us. Keep in the center.” There was a chance — just a chance — that the Pave Lows, some of the best nap-of-the-earth fliers in me world, had come in so low via their ground-sensing radar that despite the AA fire that could well have been directed at the helos’ sound, none of the ChiCom guards atop the wall several hundred yards in front of them, or at the railway complex a quarter mile ahead of them, had actually
In fact, the whole garrison of 12 °Chinese troops at Manzhouli was alerted, having seen one of the Pave Lows pass like a bulky chariot across me moon, and the garrison’s commander, an unafraid twenty-three-year-old Captain Ko, made the eminently sensible decision to go out straight away to meet his attackers head on rather than do half the job for them by staying bottled up in the railway station. Surprise was to be met by surprise. To begin with, the small town of Manzhouli had been evacuated by all its citizens, and only the military remained.
CHAPTER FORTY
The navigator in Ebony One informed Air Commander Thompson, the pilot of Ebony One, “We’re coming up on Buyuk Agridome. Otherwise known to you peasants as Mount Ararat.”
“Which one?” the radar navigator asked, crammed in next to him. “There are two peaks.”
“The big one, dummy,” the navigator replied. “The ‘dome’ is a sixteen-thousand-foot massif, the twelve- thousand-foot twin is four miles to the southeast. Four point two to be exact. Iraq and Iran to your right.”
“How far to target?” Ebony’s captain asked as he glanced out to try to pick up the two arrowhead formations of Purple and Gold, assuming they were carrying out precisely the same computations, but not absolutely sure as all cells were on interplane radio silence, the only conversations allowed being those within each aircraft.
“Damn!” Thompson said.
“What’s up?” his copilot asked.
The captain was looking out the port side. They were out of cloud, though mountainous cumulonimbus was all around them, the captain indicating the long contrails that in the moonlight had taken on a sheen that could be seen for miles as the three cells progressed in perfect formation. “Should be cloud pretty soon,” the copilot said reassuringly. He’d barely finished speaking when the entire wave was swallowed up by more cumulonimbus as they approached the mountains of northern Iraq and Iran. “What’d I tell you, Cap?”
“Yep. God’s on our side, Captain,” cut in Murphy, at the rear gun controls.
“Never mind that, Murphy,” Thompson responded. “Keep your eyes peeled. Radar nav — anything on the scope?”
“Just our eight compadres, Captain. A milk run.”
“Right,” Thompson said, encouraged by the esprit de corps after his concern about the contrails. As air commander as well as captain, he shouldn’t have said anything about the vapor trails that might have induced anxiety in his crew, but this was his third combat tour and sometimes he just felt jumpier than others. Besides, like the other fifty-three men in the wave, he had an abiding hatred and fear of the religious fanatics who inhabited so many of the Islamic countries over or near which they would be flying.
One of the most vivid memories of his childhood was the nightly broadcasts of the Iranian-held American hostages, and even though he was too young then to fully understand what was going on he well understood the humiliation of the blindfolded and tortured Americans as they were daily taunted and paraded before the world. His great-grandfather had told him the Iranian fanatics reminded him of Hitler’s SS — they weren’t simply fanatical but were fierce fighters, and their hatred of America knew no bounds.
So intense were the crews’ feelings about falling into the hands of Muslim fundamentalists that everyone aboard Ebony One had opted to carry “the pill” in his first-aid kit just in case.
“Hey,” Murphy said from the rear barbette control above and aft of the swivel-mounted cannon. “Ara— Whatsit?.”
“Ararat,” the navigator told him.
“I’ve heard that somewhere before,” Murphy said.
The electronics warfare officer leaned forward over his plot, shifting his canvas-holstered service revolver further around on his belt to keep it from digging into his pelvis.
“Yeah,” Murphy said eagerly. “Ararat — isn’t that where they had some winter Olympics?”
The navigator drew a line on his plastic overlay from Ararat to the Hindu Kush and from there to the Turpan depression, a red circle the size of a dime on Ararat. “Olympics?” the gunner responded. “Not unless Noah was a hotdogger!”
“Noah?” Gunner Murphy said. “Noah who?”
“For Chrissake—” the copilot chuckled.
“You know, Murph,” the radio nav cut in.
“I saw that,” Murphy triumphantly said. “I don’t remember any Noah.”
“You jerkin’ us off, Murphy?” the copilot asked.
“What? No,” Murphy said. “Why?”
“He’s jerking us off,” the EWO said. “Right, Murph?”
Freeman waited for word that Cheng had fallen for the bait and was now moving the Shenyang army and other northern reserves up to the Amur front. Once this happened, if it happened, Freeman could launch his armored attacks south across the Chinese nose that poked into Mongolia, then across the eighteen miles that comprised the Mongolian toe of land that likewise stuck into Manchuria, and then onto me semidesert plains of the Gobi and China’s Inner Mongolia.
With the B-52s having taken off from Lakenheath and traveling around six hundred miles per hour, depending on the altitude, it would take them seven and a half hours before they hit Turpan, and Freeman knew that if he was to take advantage of faking out Cheng by his Amur front deception he might have to order his armor south
