As he re-formed the tanks for another attempt on the corridor, the first FAVs appeared, the lead vehicle being manned by Aussie Lewis as driver, David Brentwood as codriver and machine gunner, with another SAS/D trooper on the back raised seat behind the TOW missile tube. Brentwood ordered the seventy FAVs to spread across the ten-mile-wide, twenty-three-mile-deep corridor. This meant that there were approximately seven FAVs to a mile of front, but while they tried their best to keep no more man a 200-yard spacing between them it was impossible to be sure because of the visibility being no more than twenty feet.
“What the hell’s he doing now?” a CBN reporter demanded of Norton.
“Attacking,” Norton replied tersely, uncharacteristically adding, “What the hell’s it look like?”
“Well, we’re too far back to see.”
“Exactly,” Norton commented. “Didn’t report that to your paper, did you — that Freeman was in a lead tank?”
But right now the CBN reporter was more alarmed than insulted. “But Jesus, he’s trying to drive through the corridor before the chinks turn their big guns from the Mongolia border on him. Shouldn’t take them long to tow them into position.”
“No,” Norton said. “It’s a race all right. He’s running for gold and they’re coming in from the flank.”
“Jesus Christ! It’ll be nip and tuck, won’t it?”
Norton waved over a FAV.
“Yes, sir?”
“You fellas got room for an observer?”
“Sure, in the back,” said Salvini, who was driving with another SAS/D man on the machine gun in the codriver’s position and Choir Williams in back, manning the TOW. “Next to Choir — you can get a grip on the roll bar.”
“Ah — listen,” the reporter said. “If you guys are pushed for space—”
Norton had his sand goggles up and winked at Salvini, who waved encouragingly at the La Roche reporter. “Hell, no trouble, man. Always glad to help the press.”
The reporter hesitated.
“Don’t want me to tell the New York office you’re chicken, do you?” Norton pressed, only half-joking.
The CBN reporter smiled weakly. “No—”
“Right, off you go then.” And within thirty seconds they were gone, Choir Williams advising the reporter against the sound of the wind and the whine of the ninety-four-horsepower engine, “You hang on, boyo. When we get to those holes it’ll be bloody murder!”
“What holes?”
“Them bloody manholes that Cheng has popped here and there atop his nest of runnels. Throw you clear off if you’re not careful. You just get a grip on the roll bar here like Mr. Salvini says. Okay?”
The fear in the reporter’s eyes was hidden by the goggles.
“We’ll be testing for mines,” Choir informed him, having to shout over the FAV’s engine.
“Aye. Freeman doesn’t know if the chinks ‘ave mined the corridor as well as tunneled it. We doubt it — but the ChiComs sure as hell are having mines dropped on the dunes now that Cheng thinks we’re taking the dune route on our left.”
“Until he
“Aye,” Choir said. “But he’ll be getting reports of our tanks over by the dunes and he’ll have to decide where he wants to concentrate his strength.”
“Why can’t the tanks test the mines?”
“Don’t be daft, laddie. M-1 costs four million dollars. Fast attack vehicle comes in around twenty-five thousand.”
“Thanks,” the reporter shouted. “That makes me feel better.”
“Oh it’s a fine dune buggy is the FAV. Your readers might be interested,” Choir said. “Thirteen and a half feet long, five foot high, six foot wide — tubular steel frame, can negotiate almost any terrain, and faster than a bloody tank. Seventy mile an hour attack speed, boyo.”
“Is there someplace I can get off?” the reporter asked.
Choir smacked the newsman good-naturedly on the shoulder. “Ah — you’re a cool one, boyo. Stand-up comic we have here, lads!” But Salvini and his machine gunner couldn’t hear him in the wild banshee sound of the storm.
The next minute they were airborne at fifty miles an hour, the reporter’s legs off the steel floor, his knuckles bone white on the roll bar. Choir pulled him down. Salvini saw a blur on the enormous blur of the mustard-colored dust storm. The blur seemed to be turning, or rather spinning, and looked about the size of a baseball.
“Sagger!” he yelled, yanking the wheel hard left while his codriver, manning a.50 machine gun, fired in the general direction of the Sagger. He couldn’t see the man firing it but knew that the operator had to remain in line of sight of his target in order to guide the Russian-made antitank weapon to its target. And the U.S. soldiers had learned from POWs taken before the cease-fire that machine gun fire coming in your direction had a way of unsettling your concentration on the Sagger control toggle. The Sagger kept coming toward them, and Salvini turned hard right. The Sagger couldn’t make the acute turn and passed them by.
A quarter mile on, Brentwood saw another Sagger’s back-flash. “Two o’clock!” he yelled at Aussie. “A hundred yards.” The FAV was doing fifty-five, and Aussie pressed his boot to the floor. The two-man Sagger team, though they needed only one man to guide the missile, was scrambling back into the manhole. The first one made it. Aussie braked hard to prevent engine damage and hit the second man full on, rolling him under the car, fast like a big, soft log. Aussie backed up to make sure and David fired a long burst into the manhole cover, its sandy wooden top flying apart like cardboard, then he dropped in two grenades, and they were off again. “No mines so far!” Aussie told Brentwood.
“No,” Brentwood said, “but we’re only five miles into the corridor — another bumpy seven straight ahead.” The next two miles were not the hard-baked semidesert terrain that they’d been bouncing through so far but a mile-wide spill of sand, and in this the FAV was superb, up one side of a dune and down the other in its natural element. Aussie’s FAV was still in the lead when he slowed and pointed off to his left. “TMD.”
“Shit!” the response came from the usually moderate Brentwood.
“What is it?” the SAS/D man behind them on the TOW asked.
“Wooden-cased mine — bloody worst.”
“So metal detectors wouldn’t pick it up,” the man on the TOW said.
“Right,” Aussie answered, “and we’re only running on seventy pounds overpressure. Which is why we mightn’t have set off any — if we ran over them. They could be the TMD-B4 type. Only go off under a main battle tank — won’t waste them as antipersonnel. Need something really heavy to detonate them. A buggy probably wouldn’t do it.”
“How can we be sure?” David said.
“Everybody out,” Aussie said.
“I’m in command here, Aussie. I’ll do it,” Brentwood said.
“Fuck off!”
“This is an order,” Brentwood said. “Get unbuckled. I’ll drive.”
David looked up at the man on the TOW. “How about you, Stansfield?”
“I can’t get out,” he lied. “Something’s wrong with my buckle.”
“You stupid bastards,” Aussie said. “All right, hang on!” With that, Aussie drove through the howling, spitting wind directly at the 28cm wooden-cased mine. As he saw it looming up he shifted uneasily in his seat and, driving over it, cupped his left hand under his genitals and closed his eyes. Nothing happened. He put the FAV quickly in reverse and ran over it again. Then he pulled the pin on a five-second grenade, dropped it by the mine, and put his boot to the accelerator. A hundred feet from it the explosion sent out a shock wave through the sand that was like a ripple through water.
“Well,” Aussie said, “we know they’re not dummies. Bastards are genuine enough. But they won’t be set off by a FAV’s overpressure. That’s something anyway.”
