side, sat facing one another, each man thinking about the mission, about whether or not he would get it, or the man opposite him, or perhaps most of them would get out, perhaps all of them would get out. Sure. They were all experienced in high-altitude drops, but never over such terrain as they could be in Tibet in eight hours time, depending on the head winds over Mongolia, the western province of Qinghai, or in Tibet itself. The mission involved many more planes, F-15E Eagles and F-18 Hornets as fighter cover, and a logistics nightmare of carefully coordinated inflight refueling for the fighters.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
In the Iron Mountain, opposite the Potala Palace, they had the Dutchman, Hartog, under interrogation. They kept asking him why he was in Tibet, and he kept telling them he was interested in holistic medicine, especially in moxabustion, which could warm the affected nerve.
“We have another nerve treatment,” the major said. “In order to take away pain from one area of your body, we place the pain elsewhere.”
“Sounds interesting,” Hartog said.
“Yes,” the major said, “but we don’t use needles.” Hartog said nothing. The major barked out an order, and within the minute a pair of long-nosed pliers was brought in and placed on the bare table beneath the naked bulb.
“Now, Mr. Hartog,” the major pressed, “we both know what will happen.”
“Do we?”
“Oh yes. You will withstand pain for some minutes, then you will be unconscious. We will repeat the process, and in the end you will give us the names of your Tibetan contacts. Who sent you? The CIA?” The major put his face down so close to Hartog’s, the Dutchman could smell it. “Why resist when you know you will tell me the truth sooner or later?”
The major affected disappointment as he told the guards to begin. Two men held Hartog, even though he was tied securely in the chair, and one began pulling out his fingernails, tugging, twisting a little, then tugging some more.
The major said he would be at the Holiday Inn, and left. He was not at all convinced that the Dutchman knew anything. He, the major, had certainly not given any information out about the Lake Nam site, but why then had Hartog sent a fax with what had seemed to the clerk a line or two in it in some kind of code? On the other hand, it could have been nothing. By the time they had pulled out the second fingernail, the Dutchman had fainted, just as the major had predicted.
“Come on,” his comrade said, slapping Hartog’s face and pouring cold water on his head. “Wake up, you bastard!” But the Dutchman made no sense, talking as if he were half-drunk, his fingers curled up, paralytic with pain, the slightest breath of air on the red, raw, exposed roots where his nails had been an indescribable agony. In addition he had contracted giardiasis, an intestinal bug that only the drugs Tiniba and Flagyl would remedy and which the Chinese garrison in Iron Mountain either did not have or would not give to him — until he talked. Outside the prison could be heard the baleful howling of packs of wild dogs and the sound of firecrackers being set off, whether to frighten off the curs or for some kind of celebration Hartog had no way of knowing, but dogs howling seemed to him the most terrible and forlorn noise he had ever heard.
The moon was a huge, golden disk over Inner Mongolia, made so by the dust blown up by the typhoon.
“Bogeys ten o’clock high!” The warning didn’t come from any of the fighters riding shotgun for the Hercules but from an E-2C Hawkeye, a hundred yards aft of the main force. As two F-15 Eagles, Angels One and Two, made the first cut hard to the left and right, one of the bogeys, a Fulcrum-29, had already fired a Soviet-made Acrid air- to-air heat seeker, and straightaway the F-15 that the missile was going for started dumping flares out the back.
The action suckered the fourteen-hundred-meters-per-second Soviet-made Acrid infrared or heat seeker. But the other Fulcrum was on Angel Two, firing a radar-seeking missile, and clumps of foil were being jettisoned as the second F-15 made a defensive turn hard left toward the Fulcrum and fired its cannon. The Fulcrum went straight up, and Angel One fired a Sidewinder, saw the Fulcrum tailslide, but it was too late, the missile hitting the Fulcrum’s left wing, creating a ball of flame. The second Fulcrum disengaged.
Out of chaff, or foil, to dummy a second radar-seeker missile fired by the second Fulcrum, Angel One released its lure, a small, cable-attached decoy emitting strong false echoes. The Fulcrum’s missile made a sharp left and slammed into the decoy in an orange-black ball that roiled and rolled upward into the night.
The Hercules pilots felt well protected but began veering away from their original course deeper into western Mongolian airspace so as not to give away the previous vector, which, because of fuel considerations, they had drawn straight to the target in Tibet — still hours away.
“Bad sign,” the copilot said.
“What is?” the pilot asked.
“Well, I mean we’re out just over an hour and to get picked up like that.”
“Ah, don’t sweat it,” the pilot replied. “Probably saw us on local radar — had to send up the bogeys to have a look see. Nah, they’ll figure we’re on a resupply run.”
“Where to, Mongolia?”
“You worry too much.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“Relax. How’d you like to be those poor bastards back there?” He indicated the rear of the plane. “Going for the big bungee jump into the pitch dark. Freeze your balls off for a start.”
The copilot said nothing, so the pilot pressed him for morale’s sake. “Come on, where would you rather be? Up here with the defrosters going or in the middle of fucking Tibet?”
“Up here,” the copilot said.
“All right, then, let’s get it done.”
They saw two F-15s going up behind the tanker, saw the tanker’s “shuttlecock”-tipped refueling boom arcing down, the small pinpoints of light for the final few seconds of the hookup, the lights out, and beyond them the moon so bright it would have given triple A a perfect shot, radar or not.
“Relax,” the pilot repeated. “The moon’ll be covered by cloud where we’re going.”
“Then how we gonna see?”
“Why is it that you have no confidence in instrument flying? You’re qualified.”
“Yeah, sure, but I like to see where I’m dropping my cargo, that’s all.”
“Relax, Mel. They’ve been in cloud before. This isn’t some weekend sky-jumping gig, you know. These guys
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. SAS and Delta boys can do it in their sleep. Man, you know what kind of training they go through? Tough as fucking nails. Out on their own, days at a time in stinking below-zero weather — can stay concealed in shallow trenches — can even shit and piss in those trenches and not move they’re so good at it. You remember the Falklands War?”
“Yeah.”
“SAS first in — blew up an Argentinian squadron on the ground. Every one of them can take an eye out of a needle with a submachine gun.”
“Yeah, how about the needle? Anything left?”
The pilot pursed his lips and shook his head. “Not much, Mel.”
“You stupid bastard,” Mel said, grinning, and felt better in the warm near-darkness of the instrument panel. He
Thousands of miles away across the Pacific it was early morning, and Rosemary Brentwood was sleeping fitfully, her dreams of childbirth at once reassuring and frightening — reassuring because Andrea Rolston kept
