“I know. But goddamn it, we have no choice. We have to take out the ICBM site or we’ll lose this war. We nave to get someone on the ground, and Brentwood and Co. have HALO and HAHO experience.” He meant the parachute troops’ high-altitude, low-opening and high-altitude, high-opening missions involving high-altitude drops into the heart of enemy territory.
“Notify Khabarovsk,” Freeman told Norton. “We’ll need KC-135 in-air refuelers. I want them here and ready within twelve hours. We’ll use fighter-protected Hercules for transport. Fly from here to Lake Nam — via Mongolia if necessary to avoid Chinese radar and triple A. Thank God we’ve got air superiority.”
“The Mongolians might have something to say about a U.S. overflight,” Norton cautioned.
“If they do,” Freeman said, already drawing in the route from Orgon Tal to the Tibetan ICBM site, “I’ll turn Ulan Bator into a parking lot.”
Norton was on the scrambler to Khabarovsk.
In his dream Aussie Lewis couldn’t hold her any longer. Her hand was reaching for his, but in the quicksand there was nothing more he could do. He felt her fingers touching his — he reached, strained to grab her, but she was gone.
“Aussie!” David Brentwood was speaking in an urgent but subdued tone, trying to bring the Australian out of the dream sleep gradually. With the commandos of the SAS/D trained for hair-trigger response, more than one orderly had ended up on the floor with an SAS/D man atop him, chest knife drawn before the commando realized where he was.
“Aussie—”
Suddenly Aussie was sitting upright on the edge of the bunk, staring at Brentwood. “Alexsandra?” he said, expecting, hoping for, some news of her.
“No,” Brentwood said. “Sorry, chief — it’s not about her. We’ve received orders from Freeman. An ICBM site is cutting our boys to pieces. We’re going in.”
“HALO,” Salvini added from the next bunk, already checking his oxygen mask.
“How many?” Aussie asked.
“A squadron of us,” Choir said, meaning eighty SAS/D troops would be involved in the drop, broken up into four troops of twenty men each.
Aussie nodded and, trying to shuck off the weight of his worry about Alexsandra, commented wryly, “Be a bit chilly. What’s the altitude?”
“We’ll go out at fourteen thousand. Night drop of course, NV goggles — the lot.”
“Weapons?” Aussie asked.
“Each to his own. Somehow we’ve got to get inside a mountain where the Chinks have their ICBMs stacked to send out on a rail launcher. Once we’re inside we blow it up.”
“Oh, that all?” Aussie said. “I thought this was going to be something difficult.”
“Nah,” Salvini said, adopting Aussie’s nonchalant mood and glad to see his comrade in arms fight his way out of his depression about the woman he loved. “If it was difficult,” Salvini continued, “we wouldn’t have asked you along. Right, Choir?”
“Right, lad,” Choir said, loading the magazine for his thirteen-inch-long Heckler & Koch MP5K submachine gun with 9mm Parabellum cartridges, the gun’s rate of fire nine hundred rounds a minute.
“Each of us will command a stick of twenty going in,” Brentwood told them. “Regroup soon as we land best as we can.”
“We got any pics on this?” Aussie asked.
“Yes,” David Brentwood said, dropping a manila envelope of high-quality “fax-fotos” onto the bed. “Sent up from Orgon Tal. Beautiful scenery.”
“Fuck the scenery,” Aussie said, pulling out the photographs. The valley between the peaks looked to be about a mile across but would appear as nothing more than a scratch at fourteen thousand feet, the mountains towering above it.
“We’ll go in the northern end of the valley, which is a mile or so wide,” Brentwood said.
“Bound to be high winds,” Aussie said.
“That’s the fun part,” Salvini said. No one laughed.
Outside, the Galaxies, Hercules, and fighters were readying for the flight to Orgon Tal HQ.
Hartog was exhausted from climbing the hundreds of stone steps of the Potala Palace to reach the thirteenth story of the 406-foot-high Red Palace its majesty highlighted by the wings of the older White Palace on either side. The Dutchman walked quietly through the seven mausoleums of the Red Palace, seeing the salt-preserved remains of the nine Dalai Lamas, their tombs lined with gold, silver, and jewels — stunning even in the monks’ poor candlelight. Respectful of tradition, he was careful to walk clockwise around the holy shrines but wondered how long it would be before China desecrated this place, too, the Chinese having already built an unsightly jumble of brutish, modern apartments at the base of the palace, the style of the apartments, if one could call it style, owing more to the Stalinist school of architecture than to Tibet.
Before he set off down toward the Dragon King Pool on the north side of the palace, he glanced across at the Iron Mountain, Chagpori. Once a prestigious medical school that was destroyed, like so much else in the “Cultural Revolution,” it was now a cavernous fortress. It had enough supplies of ammunition, frozen food — primarily meat and rice — and winter uniforms to fully supply the garrison for months of seige, which might happen, Hartog thought, if ever the two and a half million Tibetans rose against the occupying Chinese as they had in 1959 when they were viciously repressed.
As Hartog began walking down to the north exit, tired after seeing inside only twenty of the one thousand rooms and hundreds of shrines, the Chinese major at the Holiday Inn dialed 22896, the number of the Potala Palace. It was answered by a monk who was in fact a member of the Gong An Bu.
It wasn’t until he reached the seventh level that the monk, all but breathless, caught up with him and told him he was wanted in one of the lower rooms. Hartog looked down in the bright sunlight that was below him, his senses alert to the smell of alpine flowers, from which direction he couldn’t tell — or were they crushed flowers near a shrine? The only thing he was sure of was that a group of monks below him with their drab oxblood-colored shawls about their saffron robes suddenly looked strange, advancing hostilely up toward him.
More monks materialized behind him from dark corridors and dimly lit rooms. What had they been told? That he had violated one of the Dalai Lama’s
CHAPTER ELEVEN
“All right,” Robert Brentwood called out, his voice echoing in the hangar to which the Galaxies and Hercules had taxied after the hop from Khabarovsk, “everyone listen up. We’re using the GQ three-sixty chutes and going in HAHO.” He meant the high-altitude, high-opening technique as opposed to high-altitude, low-opening, or “HALO.” High altitude, low opening meant you were in free-fall up to two to three minutes at two hundred feet per second. It got you to the drop zone much more quickly than HAHO, but they wanted to avoid going straight down onto the ICBM site for fear that the triple A would chop them to pieces on the way down and that the PLA guards at the site would be onto them before they could break free of their harness and unlash their drop pack of extra ammo, food, etc.
Even so, Aussie Lewis, a veteran like David Brentwood, Choir Williams, and Salvini of high-altitude, low- opening, preferred to free-fall for two minutes then open the chute. Very few ground troops, he had found, could respond in under five minutes. But Brentwood said it was the CO’s idea to go high-altitude, high-opening two miles north of the ICBM site and therefore away from most of the triple A that SATREP revealed was clustered in the
