was something that made one feel invulnerable, pulling leather gloves on tightly, flexing the knuckles, seating each finger snugly. Aussie looked across at the black man, a longtime friend and colleague. “Thanks a lot, you fucker.
“Keep the riot for the Zhongnanhai,” the Tennesseean said good-naturedly.
Up front in Chopper One Freeman held up his hand. “You boys ready?” There was a unified and boisterous response. It could have been a football game. And going out into the darkness each man had the same gut- tightening experience.
“Ten minutes!” Freeman announced, holding up the fingers of each hand to underscore the point, and everyone fell silent, most watching the red five-minute warning light and feeling the Chinook’s buffeting by a dying monsoon.
David Brentwood, who stood behind Freeman, the general’s backpack pushing against him as they dropped suddenly in an air pocket, had been quiet for most of the trip. He was thinking of Georgina, his wife — how they’d been honeymooning in the Canadian Rockies when he was recalled to Second Army. A master’s degree in political science from the London School of Economics and Political Science meant she knew much more than David about the political situation and intrigues that so often led to war, and it had taken awhile for David to accept the fact that she was more intellectual than he and wasn’t talking down to him. It was her British accent that created that impression. She spoke so beautifully that he worried about what he figured would be the inevitable clash between Georgina and his friend Aussie. Well maybe everything would be all right — maybe the same thing that happened to the Australian once he’d met and fallen head over heels for the Alexsandra Malof woman would occur and he would show his politely spoken better half. Or was that the better half? Once they landed on the square that rougher side of Aussie would help get the job done. They would all have to be uncivilized if they were to go in and take the Zhongnanhai.
“That’s what I heard,” came a voice on Choir’s chopper, a first-timer from further down the line. “Chinks don’t like to fight in the rain.”
“Ferris, you’d believe any fuckin’ thing.”
“I’m just tellin’ ya what I heard. Right?’
“Yeah, yeah, you know that’s the same kind of shit they gave us about the Japanese.”
“What?”
“Said there was no way a Japanese could fly at night ‘cause his eyes were too fucking narrow.”
“Yeah, well, hell — that’s just plain dumb!” the first-timer said.
“That’s right. About as dumb as believing Chinks won’t fight in the rain.”
“Well,” the first-timer said, snorting with superiority, “you know the kind of shit you hear from the grunts.”
“Yeah, well just remember the moment you hit terra firma you’re a Delta commando. Remember what you’ve been taught.” He paused. “You’ll be okay. Hell, we’ve been through that mock-up ten times at least, right?”
“Right.”
“Five minutes!” Freeman called aboard Chopper One, holding up his black-gloved hand and making his way back from the pilot so that he would be one of the first to go down on the ropes. The worst part about fast-roping it was the downwash of the rotors — like a water bed on your head it was so powerful.
They had been flying over the city’s outskirts for some time, but there were few lights. Not only was the city normally dimly lit by modem standards, but Cheng had put a blackout in effect the moment he broke the cease- fire.
Up in the cockpit before he’d taken his place by the leftside door, Freeman had seen through the infrared binoculars that coming in from the northeast they’d already passed over Purple Bamboo Park, avoiding the high chimney between the park and the Beijing Zoo, and had started a right-hand turn above Xizhimen Railroad Yards, over the Xinhua printing plant and the bird and fish market where they saw the infrared blobs of white faces looking up at them from a gray wash of background — the market people being early risers along with the farmers and fishermen. They were passing by the chimney before the old Presbyterian church and everything went crazy, the sky lighting up in deceptively lazy-looking traces of green-and-red tracer and over the sound of the passing monsoon the steady bump, bump, bump of triple A fire.
Straight ahead the pilots could see the bell and drum towers across the Houhai, the top of each tower alive with triple A streaming from it, then both towers exploded from Hellfire missiles as the Comanches came into play. Now all they could hear was the rain and the explosion and the Comanches leading the Chinooks over the art college before turning right again down over Number 101 High School, the Ministry of Culture, Congan Hospital, turning right again over the Post Office and now hovering over the Museum of the Chinese Revolution on the eastern side of Tiananmen. Suddenly there was a terrific bang by the chopper, the scream of its engines, and the pilot’s voice: “In your seats — we’re going down! In your seats!”
It was a double shock to most — the announcement and
‘‘We’re hit!” the woman’s voice came. “We’re going down — hold tight!”
“Hold—” Brentwood began, but whatever he said was lost in the crunch of the chopper buckling over its landing gear.
“Out!” Freeman yelled as the ramp went down, slaming hard on the concrete.
“Terrific,” Brentwood said, his finger on the H&K safety. “No damn ropes.” Last to leave were the chopper crew: the captain, her copilot, and the three gunners.
In the drumming rain of the metallic dawn the sky above them was pockmarked with black smudges of AA fire, and one Chinook, Salvini’s, was ablaze a hundred yards from them. Some SAS/D were fast-roping it as the big, banana-shaped Chinook kept hovering. Only three men made it down, however — Salvini and two of his troopers free of the ropes before the Chinook exploded, breaking in half and spilling men from it like so much burned detritus, their screams heard above the roar of the Comanches attacking every possible AA fire emplacement, one of them sweeping low over the square, flames issuing from its belly and decoying three heat-seeking missiles intended for three choppers now on the ground, fast roping forgotten with surprise having been lost.
Freeman was already in contact with the Comanche’s leader, who had flown over the Zhongnanhai to check for any mortar or heavy machine gun positions. He reported none. Repeat
He banked the Comanche hard right over the vast Forbidden City, ready for another run over the Zhongnanhai, again to match any infrared images he saw with his preprogrammed threat library. Any matchup between the target seen and the target in the computer would automatically tell him what weapons should be used and would also “prioritize” the targets in order of their danger.
He was at five hundred feet above the Working People’s Cultural Palace, then over the Tiananmen Gate as he leveled off from the turn to go over the Zhongnanhai again. Oh, he picked up infrared neutrals — that is, the heat exhaust from the State Council’s furnaces and the like — but there were no guards, no soldiers, a fact he quickly conveyed to Freeman.
“Women and kids are out,” Freeman said. “We know that. Maybe they’re in some underground shelter in the Zhongnanhai,” he posited.
“General, there’s no one — Jesus!” The copilot-gunner saw the rocket streak for him and dropped flare and foil decoys. The missile exploded twenty feet from the chopper, but the missile stabilizers or fins had chopped into the pilot’s four-axis control unit and slashed open a port-side fuel tank beneath the copilot who sat up and behind the pilot. Simultaneously the threat library identified the AA missile as an AA-6RH Acrid. The Comanche’s left- hand-side retractable claws slid out and opened. Within seconds a Hell-fire air-to-ground was selected and fired, not at the Zhongnanhai, for the pilot was right — it had been abandoned. The Chinese ground-to-air missile had come from the Forbidden City!
“Comanche leader to S/D leader. They’re holed up in the Forbidden—” The end of the transmit was swallowed by the explosion of the Comanche as it fell from the sky like a fiery rock into me south lake inside the
