“Hurry!” the praporshnik told his six-man squad.
Aboard a Boeing E-3A Sentry AWAC — airborne warning and control aircraft — the thirty-foot-diameter rotodome picked up the green blip of the Helix-B chopper rising from the vicinity of Ulan Bator, and given that this was during the time slot allocated for the SAS/D mission into Ulan Bator, the AWAC crew automatically notified Freeman’s HQ of its presence. But there was nothing more that Freeman, who’d retired for the night, or Colonel Norton, who’d received the “in-trouble” burst transmission from the SAS/D group, could do at this juncture. The drill was straightforward. If something had gone wrong, the radio burst transmission from the SAS/D troop would indicate this and they would have to rendezvous at the backup position near Nalayh. An MC-13 °Combat Talon aircraft with fighter cover would be dispatched for a quick STAR extraction.
Such an extraction, Norton knew, as did everyone else who’d tried it, was highly dangerous. But first the SAS/D team had to reach the emergency extraction point. Norton, wish though he might, could do nothing. They were on their own.
Unfortunately this wasn’t Norton’s only worry. Even if the SAS/D team had got the message through to the Mongolian president, any American drive south in the coming days would be in high jeopardy so long as the Chinese could use their IMF missiles, which Israeli intelligence had confirmed were in the Turpan depression in western Sinkiang. Meanwhile all Norton could do was tell Second Army’s logistics officers in the U.S.-held Siberian zone to get ready with as much matériel as was needed at railheads south of Ulan Ude and Chita, which would be the main supply hubs for any southward drive of Freeman’s.
Meanwhile SATRECON showed the Chinese still massing troops on the border between their Inner Mongolia and Mongolia proper as if rushing to form a reverse-seven defense. Troops on the top of the reverse seven — in its northern sector — protected the Manchurian-Siberian border along the Black Dragon, or Amur, those units constituting the vertical section of the reverse seven forming the PLA’s left flank. Norton could only hope that the new whiz kid, General Jorgenson, a brilliant forty-five-year-old flown out from the States to take over as chief logistics officer after the previous one had died in the action around Poyarkovo, knew what he was doing. Jorgenson had been selected because of his experience in the Iraqi War. Even so, Norton knew that, given the distances and varied terrain here, it would take more than logistical brilliance to sustain an American counterattack either to the south or against the Chinese northern or left flank.
While General Cheng was taking care not to move his troops before the chaotic small-arms mess was sorted out at the front, he had used the time to bring up ten companies of self-propelled 122mm howitzers mounted on Soviet-style M-1967 amphibious fighting vehicles, twenty companies of Zil-151 launcher vehicles carrying sixteen 132mm rockets apiece with side-mounted reloads, and three hundred sixteen-tube Zil-157 truck launchers for 140mm rockets, along with three hundred of a PLA favorite — the twelve-tube 107mm rocket launcher. At four hundred pounds, the 107mm unit was heavy enough but sufficiently light that it could be manhandled — that is, pulled by a squad of Chinese infantry or, if they were lucky, by a BM-13 truck or mules as they passed through the Manchurian mountains under cover of strato-nimbus cloud that stretched like a thick, gray ceiling all the way to the Sea of Japan.
Colonel Soong, hero of the A-7 capture — A-7 being a mountain on the Siberian side of the Chinese-Siberian border that he had overrun earner in the war — was honored to be placed in the breach at Poyarkovo. Cheng knew that Soong was under no illusion about the Americans. It was popular in Beijing to decry them as capitalist degenerates turned soft by a consumer-crazed democracy, and while this might have been true for some of the conscripts at the war’s beginning, it no longer held for the soldiers of Freeman’s Second Army. For the most part they had already been blooded from the landings at Rudnaya Pristan on the coast to the battle for Lake Baikal, and their SAS/D troopers were the jin rui bu dm— the elite. Had there been more SAS/D troops atop A-7, Soong knew it would have taken another battalion as well as his own to dislodge them. And Soong knew that it was because of his experience with the SAS/D commandos that General Cheng had placed him at Poyarkovo, for the Americans, as the Iraqi War had shown, were prone to using their Special Forces as the tip of the spear. It was a spear Cheng wanted to first blunt then smash.
Nearing the rendezvous point in the valley between the two mountains east of Ulan Bator, Aussie paused to get his bearings with the hand-held Magellan GPS — global positioning system—2000. Using the folds of his del to hide even the faint greenish luminescent glow as one hand held the small, fat, cigar-size aerial, the other the GPS, he saw on the computer diaclass="underline"
USING BATT POW
SELECT OP MODE
QUICK FIX
And within seconds, via the GPS’s MGRS, or military grid reference system, he had a readout and knew he was barely a half mile—867.3 yards, to be exact — away from the rendezvous point in the valley between the peaks. Suddenly there was an approaching thudding sound, and he dove to the ground, whipping out the Browning 9mm, swinging it in the direction of the noise, only to see a ghostly apparition as three shaggy wild horses, manes flowing, were momentarily and beautifully silhouetted against the cutout-moon sky above the steppes. They headed down into a depression off to his left. The thing that struck him was how these wild, semidesert Przhevalsky horses, as the briefer at Freeman’s HQ had described them, had been spooked quickly, either by him or someone else already in place.
He donned the night-vision goggles, which, contrary to public belief, were not easy to wear — indeed they were notorious for giving the men, especially the pilots, who had to use them severe headaches from eyestrain, but at least now they were smaller and easier to carry than earlier models.
Aussie had no sooner put them on than he heard the distant drone of a plane, and above it a higher-toned sound of fighters. Obviously Salvini, Brentwood, and Choir Williams had already reached the rendezvous or perhaps, more accurately, were about to do so, having sent the SOS-AEP — alternate extraction point — burst radio transmission. Whether the AWACs had picked it up before Second Army signaled HQ, Aussie didn’t know and didn’t care. “You beaut!” was the only whispered comment he allowed himself as he made his way toward the pickup point. Then, dimly at first, he saw two shadowy figures moving about a hundred yards ahead of him. He went to ground, wondering if they’d seen him, and in that moment, for a reason he couldn’t explain, he became acutely aware of the sweet smell of the early spring grass sprouting up between the ice crystals of crusty snow.
As his senses were on high alert again, an alert downgraded when he thought one of the figures was Choir Williams. It wasn’t a front-on view he had, but it was one of those moments in which you recognize someone you know from the back. Choir had a lazy monkeylike slouch when he was in the head-down position, a slouch that Aussie unmercifully teased him about during maneuvers. Then both figures disappeared beneath a knoll.
Cautiously Aussie made his way forward, 9mm at the ready, toward the knoll. He had gone about thirty yards when his throat was so dry it felt like leather, a manifestation of his almost obsessive fear of being a victim of what the SAS called “blue on blue”—or friendly fire.