believed him until Choir saw it, too: poorly laid but a sliver of its black circumference showing. The loose soil dug up to cover it had almost completely been blown away.
“He’s right, boyo!” Choir confirmed. “Antipersonnel.”
“Jesus!” Aussie said. “What now? Must be all around us. They hear one of those going off and they’ll know—” He was interrupted by Brentwood, who was known to be “head fast,” as they called it in the SAS/D, and now showed why.
“Back up the dune — they won’t have laid them there — too much shifting sand. Come on, Aussie — back up.”
Aussie did so, and when they were back over the crest Salvini reminded them that if they didn’t knock out the RAM-C quickly the entire American advance would be incapable of receiving TACAIR support in time. Too much longer and the American and ChiCom tanks would be so close together, mixing it up at such close range, that not even the A-10 Thunderbolts could help.
“Aussie,” Brentwood said, “you get in the sidecar. Choir, you stay here with the FAV with the dashboard machine gun. Salvini, you behind me on the pillion seat. We’ll retrace their path through the mine field around the RAM-C.”
“Okay,” Aussie said. “Let’s go.” And within two minutes Aussie, taking one of the dead Chinese’s helmets, was in the sidecar behind a belt-feed PKS 7.62mm gun. Salvini, with his Heckler & Koch 9mm submachine gun slung over his right shoulder, sat on the pillion seat behind Brentwood, who had taken the other Chinese helmet and who was now adjusting his night-vision goggles, lowering them and blowing grains of dust off the eyepiece before he could pick up the two-wheeled track of the motorcycle and sidecar. It ran along a fifty-yard-wide porous clay gully between the dunes for a hundred yards or so and then turned left, through a man-made gap in the dune and on to more clay around what they were certain was a RAM-C trailer a hundred and fifty yards in front of them.
The La Roche reporter was licking his lips nervously. Suddenly one of the two side-by-side doors in the long trailer opened and shut. In that moment Choir had seen the dull, bloodred glow from the interior, and through the infrared sight could see a hot, white stream coming from the man who, facing away from the FAV, was urinating. When the ChiCom turned, shaking himself, buttoning up his fly, he looked over at the motorcycle and sidecar.
Intuitively, Aussie waved. The man waved back and reentered the control center. But a second later both doors opened and David could see the orange spit of a submachine gun, its bullets chopping up the dirt around them. Aussie pulled the trigger and gave the longest burst he could remember, and bodies were toppling from the trailer.
They were only fifty yards away now, with tracers arcing over from Choir’s position off to the left, ripping and thudding into the trailer until the motorcycle and sidecar were only twenty feet from it. But then the door of the mobile radar hut three hundred yards away atop a dune flung open, and several troops came out firing. Choir swung his fire across toward them. The door closed, but he could see figures moving outside in the dark, their bodies, warmer than the air, giving off an ample heat signature. He fired two bursts, saw one drop and another two scuttling under the van.
In the trailer it was chaos — men shouting, wood and aluminum splintering from Aussie’s and Salvini’s machine gun fire at what was virtually point-blank range. Brentwood tossed in two grenades and covered his ears. The explosions totaled the trailer, fire and smoke causing the remaining Chinese, about six of them, to come out, one firing a pistol, the other falling, another on fire, and Aussie felt himself slammed back into the sidecar seat, his left shoulder warm and wet. David could now see the motorcycle and sidecar tracks leading from the RAM-C to the radar van and within a minute was over by it, Aussie giving all the weight from his right shoulder to the machine gun’s stock and spraying the hut, one man falling down the stairs, dead before he hit the ground, another coming out from beneath the hut, his hands up, frantically yelling.
Salvini kept his Heckler & Koch on him while Brentwood tossed in two more grenades. The hut boomed and issued forth a rancid electrical-fire smell, smoke pouring through the shattered door seams.
Salvini told Brentwood to take them up close to the radar van, then pulled a pin out of the grenade, stood back, counted one, two, threw it at the radar mast, and quickly dashed under the van. There was a bluish purple flash above them, and then the mast was nothing more than a forlorn and tangled web of heat-fused steel, still standing, remarkably enough, but in no shape for reuse.
“What do we do with him?” Aussie said, indicating the Chinese soldier, his hands still thrust up high in the air, standing about six yards from them. “Can’t shoot the bastard. Can’t take him back.”
“Let him go!” Brentwood said.
“Vamoose!” Salvini said to the Chinese soldier.
“Go on!” Aussie added. “Piss off!”
The man took off in panic, glanced back briefly, and kept running.
“Oh, shit!” Aussie said, but he was too late, a mine exploding so powerfully that all Aussie could see in his night-vision goggles was a fine spray like a reddish fountain blown awry in the wind. It was the man’s blood vaporized by a mine that Freeman’s troops called “pink mist.”
As they were tracing their way back, Choir got on the radio network, informing Freeman’s HQ that “Mount Rushmore is ours. Repeat, Mount Rushmore—”
“No it isn’t — goddamn it!” Freeman’s loud reply came. “We’re still getting radar signals from the same damn sector.”
“Maybe so, General,” Brentwood reported, “but they’re not able to send their reports to any RAM-Center because—”
“Goddamn it!” Freeman shouted. “I called in TACAIR and we’ve lost three Thunderbolts already.”
It was at that moment that Brentwood, looking at Aussie, experienced a sinking feeling.
“Jesus!” Aussie said. “It’s in the forest. That trailer we shot up must’ve only been a relay. The friggin’ radar management center is in the bloody forest.”
“Then,” Freeman shouted, “take it out!”
With that, Freeman was off the air and silence reigned over the most embarrassed SAS/D troopers in all of Second Army, until Aussie proclaimed, “Must have land lines.”
“You’re right,” Brentwood said. “Fiber-optic probably. To stop our aircraft jamming their communication they’d have to use land lines running to a central control.”
“From that trailer we shot up,” Salvini put in.
“You see any?” Aussie asked. “Anyone?”
There was no answer.
“All right, let’s go back,” Aussie said.
“You’re wounded,” Brentwood said.
“Nah — just a nick in the shoulder. I’ll be all right. You coming with us, CBN?” Aussie added.
“I stay here,” the reporter answered.
“Can the bike and sidecar unit carry four of us back there?” asked Choir.
“Piece of cake,” Aussie said. “Come on.”
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
“So,” Jay said, watching Lana looking at the crushed ice like a crystal ball, turning the glass, her mind obviously not with him. “Tell me about this Shirer guy.”
“He’s a pilot,” she said, taking another sip. “I met him at-”
“I know when you met him. What’s he like?”
“Kind, considerate.” She touched the glass, tracing a line with her finger across the condensation. “He’s nice.”
“Well,” Jay said, with an air of magnanimity, “I hope it works out.”
“Thanks.”
“To—” Jay hesitated. “What’s his first name?”
“Franklin,” she said.
“Frank!” The glasses clinked again. “Sure you don’t want anything to eat?”
