Force of Arms

“General,” Dick Norton said, “you once told me that no war is black and white — all have a gray area — but you said the degree of grayness is what separates us from them — an American from a totalitarian.”

“Did I?” Freeman said.

“Yes, sir, you did.”

“Well, Dick, don’t worry — just wishful thinking. I didn’t order the scientists shot. We’ll find out when Brentwood gets back. A few taken prisoner wouldn’t hurt.”

“Won’t know till he’s here, sir.” Dick Norton looked at his watch. “The three evac choppers should be reaching that Lake Nam pretty soon.”

“What are our casualties?”

“No word yet. Brentwood just used enough air time to send in the call for pickup.”

“What are we using?”

“Pave Lows.”

Freeman nodded approvingly. The MH-53J Pave Lows were superb NOE — nap of the earth — fliers. Just the kind of machine they needed in the bad weather swirling down from the twenty-thousand-foot mountain range.

“Air cover?” Freeman asked.

“F-15 Eagles on their way now — drop tanks and tankers.”

“Good.”

“We shouldn’t have any trouble with ChiCom fighters,” Norton added. “Eagles’ll eat a Shenyang alive.”

“Thank God for that. Listen, Dick, I’ve got to get some sleep.” He slapped his aide on the shoulder. “Otherwise I’ll get so goddamned tired my judgment will start to go. End up shooting scientists.” He winked.

Norton smiled. Sometimes even Norton couldn’t tell whether Freeman was kidding or not The general did have a point: The way you got air supremacy was to shoot down pilots, not just planes. The missile site near Lake Nam had been taken out, but how long would it stay that way? How long would the Chinese take to get it going again? Freeman was right; Second Army had to do something spectacular in order to shorten the war before missiles started raining down again.

Before he fell asleep, his Winchester 1200 riot shotgun by his bed, the Sig Sauer 9mm beneath his pillow, Freeman read again those sections he’d underlined from Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. The master had said surprise was a good tactic. Well, hell, it didn’t need a Chinese sage to tell you that. He made a note in his diary to the effect that one of the reasons Second Army had not collapsed along the Orgon Tal-Honggor line stemmed, he believed, from the simple fact that the U.S. soldier normally fires about 4.7 times as much live ammunition in practice as his Chinese counterpart. With all the modern weapons of war, it gave him a sense of pride that, like the long rifles of the American Revolution, American marksmanship was probably the best in the world. Even so, he was outnumbered, and he knew the U.S. front couldn’t hold forever without urgent resupply along lines that were stretched, straining to the limit, all the way from Khabarovsk to Orgon Tal.

He knelt by his bed and prayed for all his men and that he might be given a chance for victory.

* * *

On the shores of Lake Nam the SAS/D detachment was met by the four paratroopers who had not made the rendezvous. With them they had brought six Chinese prisoners, four of them scientists whom they’d picked up on their way down to the lake after they’d heard the enormous explosion and figured correctly that the missile site had been blown and that the best they could do was to make the rendezvous for pickup at the lake.

“Well stone the crows!” Aussie said upon seeing the four SAS/D men. “About time, fellas. Where you been? Wanking yourself off by the lake? Lovely!”

“We damn near drowned in the lake,” a corporal said. “Damn lucky we made it to shore.”

“Where’d you find this lot?” Aussie asked, swinging his Haskins in the direction of the six forlorn-looking Chinese, their padded Mao suits the worse for their escape from the inferno.

“Here,” the SAS/D corporal said. “They were here by the lake. When they spotted one of our guys with an AK-47 they thought it was Christmas — till they saw our mugs.”

“They don’t look too fuckin’ happy, do they?” Aussie observed. The laughter started to build, and in the relief following the enormous tension of the mission, Aussie’s wry comment took on the aspect of one hell of a joke, then one man slipped and fell, butt first, on a pile of bird droppings that were all around the edge of the lake, it being a bird sanctuary. “Oh, shit!”

“That’s right,” Salvini said, and some of the commandos were laughing so hard, tears were streaming down their faces.

“Okay, settle down,” Brentwood said. “Remember Pave Lows will have their hover coupler on to bring ‘em to this exact GPS spot through all the cloud and mist. But if the weather closes in, the choppers won’t risk landing when they can’t see the ground — it’ll be standard hover coupler procedure. Means they’ll be about forty or fifty feet above us. They drop the rope ladders and we go up to them. Divide yourselves up into three groups of around twenty each.”

* * *

By now three ski platoons from the PLA’s Damquka camp on the other northeastern side of the twenty- thousand-foot mountain range had been dispatched via six Shenyang-made M1-4 fourteen-seat helicopters over the pass and on down toward the direction of the lake, but they were still airborne a good two miles from its nearest shoreline.

“Why don’t the bastards come right on down?” someone asked. Aussie Lewis had his Haskins and eight incendiary bullets ready. If a chopper got much closer he’d have a target that would fill the scope. Another commando readied one of the two Stinger ground-to-air missiles.

“Come on, you pricks…” Aussie said, “come closer.” But that was as far as the Chinese would come, and it puzzled Brentwood.

“Hey Aussie,” Salvini called out, “they must have heard about your sharpshooting with the jolly Hask.”

“They don’t want my Stinger,” one of the two antimissile missile commandos called out.

“Kawowski,” Aussie quipped, “nobody’d want your ricking Stinger! Dunno where it’s been.”

The six Chinese helicopters disappeared from view in mist that suddenly swept down through the pass and hid everything, including a good part of the lake.

“I don’t like it,” Brentwood commented. “Not coming closer like that.”

“Neither do I,” Aussie concurred. “Bit bloody queer isn’t it? I mean, it’ll take them a good half hour to get here by foot. By that time we should be outta here.”

“Maybe,” Choir Williams said, “they’re worried about our fighters jumping them and they want to stay close up there by the mountain range. Harder turning for a fighter.”

“Maybe,” Brentwood said, unconvinced. “Anyway, we’ve got to get to work on the defensive perimeter before they get here and—”

The trooper next to him was lifted off the ground and flung back with the force of the AK-47’s burst, and the next second another SAS/D man was dead.

“Down!” Aussie yelled, and in the scramble for cover behind the nearest boulder he dove into the snow, which racked the end of the Haskins’ barrel with ice. He put the muzzle brake at the end of the fluted barrel into his mouth, inhaling then exhaling into it, like giving a drowning victim the kiss of life.

He had made an understandable but disastrously wrong estimate.

The ChiComs from Damquka camp on the other side of the range weren’t regular mountain troops — they were ski troops. In a mogul-jumping advance that would have pleased any professional skier, they had cut the normal hiking time between where they had landed and the lake’s shore by more than a half. What would have been a twenty-minute or half-hour journey for an average hiker in good condition was slashed to five minutes via the speed of collapsible skis, telescoping poles, and Silvretta step-in bindings — and, where they needed them, light, tough magnesium snowshoes, their camouflage overwhites as effective as those of the SAS/D contingent. In another four minutes the fresh eighty-four ChiCom ski troops were all around the little more than sixty SAS/D troops.

Brentwood prayed that the three Pave Lows wouldn’t show up for a while, as an attempted evacuation by helicopters now would prove suicidal. Brentwood had no sooner clipped a new magazine into his HK MP5K submachine gun than he heard two fighters overhead.

“Our Eagles,” one man in Salvini’s group proffered.