“Hey,” someone said in an urgent but subdued voice. “Use the bloody ladder.”
Lewis dropped to the ground, catlike, and on the swing around, his infrared picked up a long, white blob, a Browning 9mm High Power preceding it, on the rungs of a ladder cemented into the sheer wall, previously hidden by the snow. Then he heard the rip of an AK-47—Chinese or SAS/D he didn’t know until he saw the blur of the 9mm Browning dropping after its owner to the ground, and above the blur a bold white stick pointing out and down: the barrel of an AK-47. Aussie sprayed nine millimeter at the stick and lobbed a stun grenade up and over.
There was a tremendous metallic crash as the grenade exploded, and in the five seconds it took Aussie to get up the ladder and spray over the top before he had his foot on the last rung, the Chinese was on his knees, appropriately stunned. Lewis kicked him in the head, then with one swift movement, his Browning High Power in his left hand, he pulled the soldier to the edge of the thirty-foot cliff and pushed him off.
“Jesus, Aussie!” It was Salvini below, trying to get up the ladder, only to feel a close rush of air as the body passed him. “Don’t recycle the bastard!”
“Sal?” Aussie called.
“Yes?”
“I can see the exit.” What he meant was mat he couldn’t actually see it but rather its heat signature — obviously it served as an air intake as well for the cave. But when they got there, he and four other SAS/D men following, two turning to take up the rear defensive position, Aussie failed to move the exit cover by pulling on its ring bolt. “Fucking thing’s closed from the inside.”
“Blow it!” Sal said, and in seconds a whole seam was packed with donutlike C4.
“Everybody back!” he yelled before he detonated the plastique. There was a tremendous explosion, shards of ice and small pebbles bouncing off the boulders below, and from those that the men on top had used for cover. When they went back the seam had been ruptured here and there, but it still held.
“Shit!” Aussie declared. “Okay — let’s go again.” But as no one in the small group had any more of the explosive, he yelled, “Plastique! Left exit!” A volley of fire erupted from below as five Chinese around the burned-out shell of a T-59 fired in the Australian’s general direction. It was a bad mistake, as the volley of fire they got in return from the flanks and above killed all five.
“Room service!” Salvini yelled, helping three members of his troop up the ladder and sending them and their plastique over to Aussie.
The second charge exploded, the exit’s seams now turned up and curled back, blackened and scarred like chapped lips, but the steel core of the exit still held, though Aussie could see through a crack about three inches wide down into the cave and could feel the freezing air being sucked down into the mountain’s interior where he saw panic— blur upon blur of men trapped — and though some of them were undoubtedly among some of the most brilliant nuclear scientists in the world, they had no idea what to do about their predicament.
“Right!” Aussie said, hunched over the edge of the exit’s twisted steel. “Won’t take the fucking easy way then we’ll do it the hard fucking way. CS tear gas rounds — quickly!”
Each man pulled out two or three 37mm black rounds of CS gas from the thigh loops on his uniform and gave them one by one to Aussie, who put them in the baton stick and tired them, or rather dropped them, into the huge interior through the three-inch hole, finally plugging the hole with his white overlay hood, which he cut off with the knife. “Let’s see how the bastards like that.”
Suddenly a giant tremor, shook the mountain.
“The door!” Salvini said. “They don’t like that CS.”
“Aw, shit!” a trooper said in mock sympathy. “And they wanted to have more fun with their missiles. Aren’t we fucking awful!”
“Jesus,” one of Salvini’s troop cut in. “Does this mean we have to go down that friggin’ wall again?”
“No, it doesn’t,” Aussie answered, seeing David Brentwood’s troop over to his right fighting it out halfway up that side of the door. “Choir’s troop’ll take care of the ground floor and—” Aussie stopped speaking, then ran to the edge of the cliff, shouting down, “Hold your fire! Let ‘em go, Choir! Hold your fire!”
The Chinese — most of them in heavy, padded Mao suits — were streaming out, choking from the gas, tears running down their cheeks, handkerchiefs over their faces then putting their hands up one or two at a time, whatever they could manage. Only a few, realizing precisely what was going on, were able to lose themselves amid the boulders either side of the rail track that extended out from the cave.
These were the men, scientists mostly and some soldiers, who knew that if any shots penetrated the liquid fuel tanks stored inside, then the whole mountain cave would become an inferno, consuming them. The warheads would probably not go off, but the rocket fuel surely would.
Choir was tired of searching the evacuees for arms, but those who had surrendered had to be checked out as a matter of routine.
Aussie, two of his troopers, and two of the prisoners donned their S6 gas masks and made their way back to the cave, Aussie ordering the Chinese prisoners to show them the door controls. When they found the wall panel that operated the door, they began to close it again until there was only room for one man to slip in or out at a time. The sky began to pass from blackness to a moonlit, suffused gray, and Aussie knew that dawn would soon be on them and it was still a three-mile trek to the lake for the helo pickup that Brentwood had ordered.
Having reached the right top exit-cum-air intake, Brentwood had followed Aussie Lewis’s method of dropping down CS canisters. Aussie and Salvini volunteered to stay behind until everyone was out of the way. Then Aussie with the Haskins — Salvini to provide covering fire if necessary — would finish the job, after which they would make for the lakeshore.
There was to be a delay, however, for Salvini, further in the cave than Aussie, had made a gut-wrenching discovery. Deeper in the mountain, beyond the stand of half a dozen missiles, the huge cave narrowed like the interior of a goat’s horn, this secondary cave much smaller in diameter, but one along which a narrow-gauge rail track ran, disappearing into the dark bowels of the mountain. Salvini had ventured only thirty feet into the tunnel when he saw the first storage room filled with fuel drums and a row of lights that seemed to go on forever inside the mountain.
Soon Aussie and two other troopers joined him. Following the rails for another hundred yards, Aussie experienced a gnawing apprehension that around the next bend in the tunnel they would find more Chinese regulars. They didn’t, but they did discover dozens of storage rooms hewn out of the rock, and that the railway line snaked around several sharp S curves that acted as blast protectors.
To ensure maximum destruction, Aussie saw that they’d have to jury-rig an explosive line of gasoline drums so that an explosion at the cave mouth could in fact negotiate the S bends and take out the string of thick-walled storage rooms of fuel, ammunition, food, and rocket supplies as well.
From one such gasoline dump — drums stacked to the ceiling — Aussie ordered two troopers with him and Salvini to puncture as many drums as they could and to roll these down along the narrow-gauge rails toward the cave’s mouth, the gasoline spilling between and around the tracks. In addition, he ordered some drums to be rolled down to ether, nonfuel, storage rooms, punctured there, and rolled in and out of the other rooms so that finally he had created a gas-sodden path along the rail track toward the cave’s mouth several hundred yards on as well as having created gas-sodden tributaries, as it were, from the main line into each storage room. When he and the other troopers, five of them, emerged from the cave mouth, the others, as agreed, had already left for the lake.
“All right,” Aussie said, “let’s head into those boulders — ’bout three hundred yards from the cave.”
“Roger!”
A quarter mile beyond the missile complex, Aussie looked up through a gap in the clouds to see a sparkling array of stars, then they were gone. He had no need of starlight, however, nor did he want to risk using a flare anywhere near the mouth of the cave. Through the infrared scope on the Haskins he could see the racks of missile fuel clearly enough, standing up at the rear of the gargantuan interior like huge stovepipes. He pulled back the bolt and fired an incendiary.
The explosion was immense, bigger than he or Salvini had ever seen — like a sudden sunburst, its feral roar escaping the cave in a one-hundred-yard-wide dragon tongue of flame, the ensuing rivers of flame issuing forth from the secondary storage explosions.
“Chri-i-st!” Salvini said, looking back at the sight, but Aussie couldn’t hear him, for the noise of the explosion
