“Ready, sir.”
“Good.” The general told Kegg and the marine’s two fire team buddies to go back with Melissa Thomas. “These vents are going to start really smoking in the blink of an eye. C’mon, people, move!”
They moved, and waited for Choir to activate the inititiator. The det cord — in effect a long, explosive-filled flexi-tube from a spool — had a burn rate so fast that once the initiator kicked off the firing sequence, the major explosions of the C-4 would occur in a fraction of a second.
But they didn’t.
“Aw—” came Aussie’s bitter disappointment. “Fuck a duck!”
It seemed interminable. Then they heard, saw, high up through the rain, five helos — a big transporter and four Black Shark gunships rising and turning above the minefield.
“Take those bastards out!” yelled Freeman. “I’ll take the big guy in the middle. Let’s see how they like their own medicine.” Freeman hadn’t even had time to take his gas mask off. The Igla on his shoulder, he placed his left foot forward, the ground power supply kit giving full surge power to the missile in four seconds. Gripping the launcher by its flanged neck, he gained visual contact, squeezed the trigger, and heard the gentle whirring of the missile’s automatic target lock and launch circuits, the primary booster igniting the missile, passing through the tube, disabling the first safety twenty feet from the general, the sustainer motor firing, blowing hot air and reed debris into his gas mask, the missile now streaking at over a thousand miles per hour in the two seconds since leaving the tube. Second safety was now gone and, unless the missile’s twenty-five-pound blast and fragmentation warhead hit something within fifteen seconds, it would self-destruct.
The subsequent “whooshing” sounds were the other four fire-and-forget Iglas taking off from the shoulder launchers on Aussie, Sal, Choir, and Johnny Lee. Johnny slipped on a patch of mud as he fired, the Igla going near vertical.
No one said anything, watching the five missiles, fierce orange streaks with the bluish sulfur exhausts visible.
“Terrorists are popping flares!” called Sal.
“Look at ’em panic!” said Aussie, watching the helos jinking hard left, right, right — trying to outmaneuver the closing Iglas, flares popping everywhere like hundreds of little meteorites burning up in the gray, rainy sky, but the Igla-E2, devoid of a friend-or-foe tone because terrorists didn’t need any such discriminating equipment, proved a formidable weapon. With infrared decoy override, the E2 ignored the tortuous, frantic maneuvers of the helos two miles up. There were one, two, three, then a fourth explosion as the “traveling fuel tanks,” as Aussie called the Russian choppers, blew up, sending down heavy golden showers of burning debris that, upon impact, detonated dozens of small anti-personnel and big anti-tank mines, cratering the snow-and rain-covered ground.
A lone Shark helo, the only survivor of the four attack choppers, obviously deciding not to risk any more MANPAD attacks, turned west, climbed higher and fled into the mountain fastness of China across the border. Freeman and Salvini thought they saw a chute blossom, but in the rain it was difficult to be sure whether it was that or a piece of fabric from the transporter caught in the air currents as the fuselage plunged earthward.
There was something wrong, however, as Freeman, taking off his gas mask, realized that there should have been explosions not above him but ninety feet below in the tunnels.
“Did you press that remote?” the general asked Choir.
“Yes, sir. I’ve checked the box and it’s middle tunnel’s det cord that’s screwing things up. There must be a break. Nothing’s wrong up at this end. Something must have fallen on it.”
“Or cut through it!” said Aussie. “One of those bastards—” His voice was suddenly drowned out by the combined roar of a Super Stallion and a Cobra gunship riding shotgun, both helos dropping decoy flares. Despite the noise, the booming voice of the Stallion’s crew chief managed to cut through it and the fury of the rotor wash. “Evac immediately. Mission is over.”
Every one of Freeman’s team and the marines around him wanted to leave, but no one thought that they should. They’d cleaned out the rats in the nest below, but not the nest, as Freeman told the Stallion’s crew chief through cupped hands that reeked of cordite and tear gas from the tunnels.
“Doesn’t matter,” the crew chief hollered back. “We got orders from
The general was cupping his right ear. “Can’t hear you.”
“I outrank him,” said Freeman, “but, dammit, all right,” he continued, and ordered everyone aboard. “Go! Go!”
No matter what their personal feelings, they were professional soldiers, Freeman’s team and the marines, and knew orders were orders.
As the crew chief helped lift Gomez to put him in a litter, the others scrambled aboard the overcrowded helo through a jumble of other bodies and weapons. The Stallion’s anxious copilot glanced back, saw no one on the ground, but spotted an armored vehicle spitting fire and bristling with MANPADs racing toward them from about a mile away on the edge of the frozen marshland that ran back to the lake. Because he too was looking in the distance at the armored vehicle even as he kept hauling the others into the helo, the crew chief noticed something in the rain-washed landscape previously hidden by the snow: a vast carpet of dead birds — thousands of them.
It wasn’t until six minutes after they’d scrambled aboard the already dangerously overloaded helo, which, like all the other Stallions, was trying to get as many of their fellow Americans out before the twenty-four-hour deadline, that someone noticed that neither Freeman nor the marine, Melissa Thomas, was aboard the Stallion. But the pilot and the copilot had their orders. On the other hand, marines didn’t leave their dead, wounded, or living behind.
“Those cocksuckers!” Kegg shouted. “Get a load of this shit!” He was watching the crew chief’s TV feed on the twelve-inch bulkhead inset screen. CNN was running an Al Jazeera tape, which the Arab station said had just been taken in overflight by a lone Shark helo and which showed patches of yellowish smoke rising in Lake Khanka near Siberia. Al Jazeera claimed the smoke was poison gas used by Americans against a defenseless refugee camp. Then there was a CNN clip, Marte Price thrusting her mike into the face of a nearly hysterical coed. “I–I—never thought I’d live to see the day
“Oh,” mimicked a marine who was also watching the feed. “Like you’re totally insane, you silly bitch. We colored the friggin’ tear gas with a yellow smoke grenade, you stupid whore. That’s all we did.”
“Yeah,” put in Kegg. “But it sure frightened the shit out of ’em.” His laugh was contagious, the marines’ pent-up emotions suddenly finding a release. But Aussie, Choir, Sal, and Johnny Lee weren’t laughing. They were petitioning the pilot to go back and pick up Melissa Thomas and Freeman.
“Can’t do it,” said the pilot, quite properly. To go back with a MANPAD vehicle on the loose and risk losing every man he’d picked up would have been the height of irresponsibility.
“Where the fuck did he go?” Aussie asked Sal angrily.
“And the woman,” said Choir. “It was so disorderly. We should’ve—”
“Never mind what we should have done,” cut in Aussie. What are we gonna do now?”
“Tell
“It’d be their only chance,” agreed Choir. “By the time they drop them a kit we can have a Herk on its way out of Japan and here in—” Choir did the math in his head. “—four hundred and fifty miles — two hours, tops.”
“Two
“I know,” said Choir, “but it’s a STAR or nothing. We can say the Herk’s coming in to pick up our wounded. Tibbet’s boys say we’re missing a few.”
“We’ll go plain language, if you like,” said the pilot. “Tell everyone to head for the lake.”
“Bit bloody vague,” snorted Aussie. “Lake’s four thousand square miles. Bigger ’n Rhode Island.”
“We’ve got a couple of dusters, Hueys,” the pilot told him. “They’re packed under nets near the ice as backup evac for any lost marines.”
“Then shit,” said Aussie, “send one of the Hueys in to pick up the general and Thomas.”
“Negative,” said the pilot. “A lot of guys have been given the location of those two Hueys, but those birds come out exposing themselves looking for our general and his girlfriend—”
