CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
“Aussie!” Brentwood whispered hoarsely. “You got the bag?”
“Got it!” Aussie answered, referring to the plastic bag of wolf dung.
“He’s full of it,” Salvini joked. Brentwood ignored him. “Choir, you there?”
“I’m here.”
“Salvini?”
“Here.”
It was in that order that if Aussie was hit, the wolf dung would be passed. It was not to be lit before dawn — about a half an hour away — and in Freeman’s words, “God help the son of a bitch who doesn’t keep it dry!”
The advantage of the ChiComs having seen the Pave Lows come down was offset now by the fact that as the PLA company spewed out across the rail line and briskly made its way toward the areas where it thought the three choppers had landed, the SAS/D teams were invisible in their black uniforms against the dark forest. And the ChiComs were making the mistake of bunching up, a natural tendency of men facing danger, and their harder, cruder boots made more noise on the ties.
David Brentwood, his ear to the rail, having picked up the first movement of men coming toward him, quickly had the SAS/D team fan out left and right of the tracks. The natural move for him was to have his commandos melt into the woods either side of the track; but he resisted the temptation because it would mean the danger of them crossfiring into their own men, and so they went to ground instead and stayed there, those closest to the rails packing C charges against the rails wherever they could, waiting. Then everything went wrong. They heard the
“The trees!” Brentwood shouted, and as he did so crushed the acid timer ampoule for the nearest C-4 plastique charge. The bravery of neither the ChiComs nor the SAS/D troops was in question, but Captain Ko’s decision with an advantage of six to one that offense was in this case the best form of defense overlooked a vital component: that once in the trees the SAS/D commandos became the defenders and Ko’s men were exposed. In order for Ko’s men to uproot the commandos, who, as well as having the natural defense of the woods, were still making their way through the woods either side of the railway up to the rail yard and control hut, Ko’s men would have to go in after them.
“Scopes only!” Brentwood yelled, and a burst of AK-47 fire erupted in his direction, shredding some pine bark. It was an order that referred only to those SAS/D troops who had longer rather than shorter range submachine guns, the longer range weapons having been allocated infrared night-vision scopes. With only scopes firing, “blue on blue,” or, in other words, being shot by your own men in the dark, could be avoided. It was a classic case of the Americans adapting to new circumstances quickly, and in the process suddenly turning a dangerous situation to their advantage.
“Right,” Salvini muttered, “here we go!” And with that he rested his AIS rifle against a low pine. The accuracy of the international supermagnum sniper rifle came from its Kigre KN 200 F night-vision image intensifier. Through the scope he could see a PLA cap and torso crouching. He squeezed the trigger and the torso was lost amid an explosion of green flecks as the depleted-uranium bullet tore right through him and kicked up the snow back of him. Within seven seconds Salvini had felled three more ChiComs in the green circle of his night scope, and he could hear the single whacks of the Heckler & Koch MP5K submachine gun and an occasional quick rip of it set on three-round bursts, which meant that some of the ChiComs were reaching the edge of the wood and could still be seen in the fading flare light so as to be easily targeted without night-vision optics. The last thing Ko wanted was another flare light now he’d seen his strategy backfire on him, but Brentwood yelled, “Choir! Flare!”
Choir lifted his M-203 grenade launcher that was attached to his M-16 so that its skyward flare shot would not come back at him from overhanging branches, screaming aloft instead, well clear of the timber. There was a quick sound like the belch of a sinkhole emptying, and moonlight went to daylight again as the magnesium sun floated slowly down.
Ko ordered his men into the woods, and the Chinese, about fifty yards on either side of the snow clearing, charged into the woods to fight it out man to man. There was a roar of fire, AK-47s, AK-74s, 7.62 bayonet-equipped type-56 Chinese carbines, rype-43 and -50 7.62mm ChiCom submachine guns, and from the woods either side the eruption of the SAS/D’s Heckler & Koch 9mm Parabellums streaming out at over eight hundred rounds a minute, the crash of grenades, and the terrible whistling of flechettes. These steel darts, fired by the SAS/D Winchester 1200 shotgun, twenty darts for each shot, drove through ChiCom helmets at a hundred yards as if they were butter, those without helmets falling, their heads exploding, spraying blood everywhere.
Ko was not to know that the enemy was the SAS/D elite, otherwise he might have elected to withdraw, but close-encounter warfare was what the SAS/D called a “specialty of the house.” For the SAS this meant the CQB — close quarter battle — practiced at the house in Hereford, England, and what the Delta men referred to as the “shooting house” at Fort Bragg, both houses training the commandos for everything there was to know about CQB. Adding to this, the Varo flip-up/flip-down night-vision goggles supplied to the SAS/D men helped reduce what had been a six-to-one ChiCom advantage to a three-to-one advantage during the firefight. And now, the fight being closer in, SAS/D cold steel found bone, ripping the ChiComs to pieces.
Ko’s contingent fought bravely, and it wasn’t until the first light of dawn after the C charges had blown, injuring two SAS/D men with shrapnel, that the full extent of the carnage could be gauged, the snow pocked red with the dead, the wounded, and the dying. The victory for the SAS/D was somewhat hollow, however, when it was discovered that as well as four SAS/D men killed, all of the Pave Low’s crewmen had died, despite the best efforts of the SAS/D men to protect them.
“Damn!” David Brentwood said with an uncharacteristic vehemence. “I should have told them to wait with the chopper.”
“Ah, rats!” Aussie said. “None of us knew whether the Chinese would find the chopper and—”
Commandos were now setting charges in the railway control boxes and on other lines. With radios unable to get through the jamming of Freeman’s Wild Weasels, the SAS lit orange and purple flares for pickup. The wall of Genghis Khan had clearly been breached by the SAS/D team, but to make it official two SAS/D men — Salvini and Aussie — were dispatched to light the wolf dung fire by the base of one of the watchtowers atop the old wall.
“What the fuck’s all this about?” Salvini asked Aussie.
“Don’t ask me, sport. Davey’s the only one that knows, and he’s apparently under orders to keep it mum till we’re out of here.”
The arrival of the Pave Lows was interrupted for a minute or so by a Chinese sniper hiding out in the woods, but he was taken out by a scope-mounted M-16 and the helos came down and took aboard the living and the dead.
“So?” Aussie yelled as the Pave Low rose with the dawn, heading away from the tall but distinctly gray-white trail of wolf dung smoke. “What’s all this business with me wolf shit?”
“Wait till we get a few hundred feet,” Brentwood said, his face still grim after the loss of the crew from the Pave Low, which they had blown to pieces with a C charge before takeoff, denying any of the helo’s weapons or electronics to the ChiComs.
“Why?” Aussie began, and then he and all the other commandos saw it: All along the front for as far as they could see, spirals of the same grayish smoke could be seen rising straight, high into the dawning sky.
“What’s the idea?” Salvini asked.
“It’s the traditional Chinese signal,” Brentwood explained. “For some reason the chemical composition of wolf dung makes it burn thick and go straight up — straighter than any other kind of smoke.”
“Yeah, but signal for what?” Salvini pressed.
“The wall — China’s defenses being breached.”
“I get it,” Aussie said. “Cheng and his buddies can’t get squat info from his radios, so with the smoke signal they’ll think we’ve broken through all along the line.”
“We have,” Brentwood said. “But what they don’t know is for how long. Hopefully Cheng’ll be rushing fresh troops — all his reserves — up north instead of westward.”
“While Freeman’s armored spearhead heads south,” Salvini said. “Brilliant. Meanwhile, we go back to base. I
