double-blackout trapdoor. I don’t want a firefight up there or anything else that will draw any more attention to the forest. They picked up radiant heat from down here seeping up through the trapdoor.” Gently, noiselessly, the SAS/D team was quickly sliding its knives along the seam of the outer trapdoor. The NCO had lost face and begged to go.
“Very well, Comrade. Redeem yourself, but I don’t want any firing up there,” the OOD insisted. “We don’t know how many other Americans could be in the area or if any of Freeman’s Bradleys will hear a firefight on the perimeter and come to investigate. We risk revealing the whole complex. But I confess I don’t want that SAS/D team up there to get back to tell Freeman where we are. Use your knives or bayonets and go through the trapdoor they haven’t yet discovered. Remember it’s about thirty feet away to the east so you should have ample time to come up behind them and kill them all. No firing. Understand?”
“Yes, comrade.”
The OOD enjoyed the irony of it as the ChiCom patrol readied to make its way up again, the fact that the very land lines — fiber-optic cables that were far less vulnerable to EMP or other jamming from the Wild Weasels, etc. — were American made. General Cheng had purchased the best cable you could get from La Roche Industries.
Up above, Brentwood tap-signaled Aussie, Salvini, and Choir to back off, and having been alerted to the one TV camera by Salvini, his infrared goggles picked up the other three that made a square, and the four SAS/D men went beyond this square so they were no longer visible to the monitoring eyes on the four poplars that served as markers. What the SAS/D men had no way of knowing was that the alternate entrance and exit to the underground complex was not in the more or less cleared square area bordered by the four poplars but was some twenty to thirty feet deeper in the wood, so that despite the SAS/D precaution of moving beyond the cameras, the Chinese patrol would nevertheless be coming up behind them.
But then everything went crazy. The earth began to tremble, two enormous trapdoors were thrown open from the hydraulic pressure, and up from the thirty-square-yard piece of ground bounded by four of the poplars a thing began rising from the forest floor, looking for all the world like a great bat-eared beast, four radar dishes atop a steel girder tower ascending into the night.
Below, the Chinese OOD bellowed his orders — the American general had launched another TACAIR over the battlefield a few miles off and Cheng had ordered the camouflage mast radar be put up immediately so as to throw up a radar net that could serve the deadly ChiCom triple A anti-aircraft fire, which included SAMs.
The six Chinese rushed forward toward the SAS/D team, but Aussie and Brentwood were already to ground, having heard the ChiComs the moment they’d started to run, and in a deadly burst of Heckler & Koch nine hundred rounds per minute of 9mm Parabellum, Aussie and Brentwood cut down two of the Chinese less than thirty feet from the edge of the radar mast’s well. A
“Aussie, take the tower — Sal, you and Choir cover him!”
Before Brentwood had finished speaking there was another
He was reloading when he saw Brentwood using his Heckler & Koch as a staff, smacking aside a ChiCom bayonet and clubbing the man in the face with the H & K’s steel butt. It was in moments like these that the SAS/D men’s extraordinarily tough physical training stood them in good stead. The man went down, but to make sure Brentwood gave him a bone-crunching kick in the head.
“Come on, come on!” Aussie hissed. He was talking to the tower, willing it up faster so that he could jump one of the girders of the triangular construction. He had to wait for the bat ears to go well beyond him before he could step aboard the tower as one would an elevator as it passed your floor. The Chinese had fired no flares so as not to pinpoint their position for TACAIR.
“Christ!” It was Brentwood looking behind him at the tower, still rising.
“What?” the Welshman asked.
“Aussie’s arm — I forgot. Damn it!”
“He’ll be all right, boyo.”
“Should’ve sent Sal.”
“Too late now.”
“Yes,” Brentwood said. “Anyway, let’s keep them occupied down—” There was a splatter of earth against Brentwood’s uniform as a 7.62mm opened up from the well of the tower, the tower still going up like a Texas windmill.
“No wonder we couldn’t find this bastard!” Choir said, pumping another three shots into the well. There were screams and fierce yelling but the simple fact was that so long as the three men — Choir, Brentwood, and Sal — had enough ammunition they could hold down those in the well. But sooner or later the ammo would run out, and then the Chinese could swarm up and take the troop. Salvini dropped a grenade down — more screaming and more yelling than he’d heard in a ‘Frisco mah-jongg game. “Silly fuckers don’t know he’s on the tower!” Salvini said.
“Let’s keep it that way,” Brentwood said. “Look out!” A stick grenade lobbed the lip of the well. Choir calmly poked it back over with the barrel of his riot gun, then he pulled the pin on one of his own grenades, made a two- second count, and let it go. “They won’t catch that bastard!”
There was a scream that gave truth to his prediction.
“I’m almost out of ammo, lads,” Choir said. “Ten reloads and that’s it.”
“Come on, Aussie,” Sal implored.
In fact, Aussie Lewis could hardly hang on. With little or no power in his left arm he could only hold himself up by locking his legs together in a scissor hold and leaning his head forward into the right angle of the girder. Then he pushed and prodded the Play-Doh-like C4 plastique into the inside angle formed by two of the girders, using the slightly banana-shaped magazine from his Heckler & Koch as a tamp for the charge to better direct the blast in toward the beam’s angle. He then crushed the fuse’s vial of acid, which had a ten-minute count. By then the wire holding the firing pin would dissolve.
Next he put his right arm down then under the girder he was sitting on and, his Heckler & Koch slung over his shoulder, swung down, monkeylike, his boots barely touching the next girder. He repeated this two more times, his right arm now feeling the strain as he molded the second belt of plastique into an angle of steel. As he completed packing the second charge in and tamping it, he waited for a few seconds, looking at his watch, and then crushed the five-minute vial, swung down to the next girder, and from there jumped fifteen feet down to where the other three were. Salvini lifted Aussie’s good arm over his shoulder and started off down the land line back toward the FAV while Choir and Brentwood turned in a rear action, a hail of 9mm parabellum shooting forth with the darts as the ChiComs began to swarm up me steps.
“Go!” Brentwood yelled. “Go!”
Salvini wasn’t even looking back, but Aussie was able to run by himself while keeping the left arm tucked in by his side.
“Withdraw, Choir,” Brentwood said.
“Not without you, boyo!”
“Withdraw!”
Choir’s answer was to fire another three flechette-loaded rounds at the Chinese. Salvini was back with Choir. “C’mon, you mother!” he said, firing four three-round bursts to keep the ChiComs down in the well. Suddenly he felt something falling on him. It was a flutter of leaves, a ChiCom firing too high in his excitement. Then the earth shook a second time and went into a blur, a feral roar of fire erupting about the skeletal radar mast. The tower collapsed, telescoping in on itself in a reddish-orange column of flame, then another, after which the debris of the crashing radar tower and the fire spilled onto all of those in the well, igniting the gasoline and hydraulic fluid that exploded in a final volcanic fury, spewing bluish crimson flames hundreds of feet into the sky, scorching and setting the poplars afire like giant candles in the night.
A hundred yards to go to reach the FAV and the sidecar began rattling, taking a burst from another FAV
