“Aussie bastard!”
It was said in a hoarse whisper, and he swung about to see a figure behind him and heard another voice in front. “Where the fuck you going?”
“Shit!” Aussie whispered in a surge of relief, the heavy, pulsating drone of a big plane — he guessed an MC-130 Talon — drawing closer. “You bastards frightened the friggin’ life out of me.” For a moment he felt the adrenaline draining out of him, a flood of weak-kneed relief passing over him as he gestured skyward with the 9mm. “Am I right? That the cavalry coming?”
“Sure is, boyo,” Choir said cheerfully.
“Where’s Sal?” Aussie asked.
“Up yonder!” Choir said, pointing to a sharp rise about sixty yards away and fifteen feet above the level grassland. “He’s signaling the big bird — penlight code. How come you got lost in the temple?”
“Lost, my arse!” Aussie responded, still keeping his voice low. “I just got out o’ there faster than you three.”
“Can it!” David ordered. “Let’s get ready for the FUST.” He meant the highly dangerous but last-ditch STAR, or more correctly Fulton STAR, surface-to-air recovery technique, used only by commandos and SEALs, the pilot of the MC-13 °Combat Talon on night vision devices, as were the SAS/D. Aussie of course called it the FUCK technique— the Fulton cock killer!
“We’ve been waiting for you for hours,” Williams teased Aussie.
“What d’ya mean?” Aussie retorted, the drone of the plane making it safe to talk, albeit in low tones.
“Got a truck, boyo,” Williams explained, “with a long bloody Ack Ack gun on it. Just drove straight out of the city and you, you poor sod, on your Paddy Malone.”
Aussie now realized that it had probably been their truck he’d seen earlier. “And I had to bloody hoof it,” Aussie quipped. “You bastards!”
The planes — the Combat Talon and fighter escort — were closer, but now there was another sound. At first it was as if firecrackers were going off, but it rose to a crescendo and the sky lit up, revealing the MC-Talon and fighter escort caught in the glare of a high flare, red tracer lazily crisscrossing the sky, seemingly filling the night with red and white dots.
“To the truck!” David Brentwood yelled, realizing that the attempted FUST rescue was over, the STAR technique dangerous enough when everything was going right. In this melee, it would be impossible.
It was David’s quick thinking that saved them, for once they were in the truck, a Zil-151, he ordered them to fire the twin 37mm AA gun at an acute angle skyward, its spitting flame masking it for the Spets or whoever else had reached the pickup point, making it seem as if it were a friendly vehicle, a truck manned by Mongolian regulars perhaps, trying to aid their Siberian friends in trying to deny the SAS/D troop, wherever it was, any possibility of rescue.
Aussie was on me machine gun, Salvini driving, with Brentwood and Choir Williams feeding the 37mm that was spitting out eighty rounds a minute to a height just under ten thousand feet. Aussie’s aim was well away from the U.S. aircraft yet in the general direction — enough to fool anyone watching nearby. But his tracer made an F-16 pilot mad enough to peel off and come at them with his 20mm rotary cannon blazing and dropping two of his six five-hundred-pound bombs from two hard points under the wings, the bombs whistling down into the night. Fortunately they were not laser guided, and exploded wide, but their combined shock wave almost knocked the truck over as me Zil jumped, sped up a small hillock, and came rattling down on the other side, the F-16’s cannon unzipping the earth in a furious run, churning up clouds of dust behind the truck, dust that was now mingling with the enormous dirt cloud thrown up by the bombs, which in turn obscured the truck from the Spets who were firing with everything they had at the American planes.
“East!” Brentwood yelled to Salvini. “Drive east!”
“I’m going fucking east!” Salvini replied, and then the night turned red, the MC-130 exploding, breaking in half, bodies spilling like black toys into the orange balls of flame, the bodies now afire, screams lost to those below in the flickering shadows of the plain.
The Combat Talon was now nothing but falling pieces of burning fuselage after being hit by a Spets ground-to-air conical-nosed SA-16, one of the Soviet Union’s most portable surface-to-air missiles. The truck with the SAS/D troop aboard, its lights out, continued to race over the flat grasslands, the Spets now being paid back in full by an F-16 dropping a napalm canister that turned the grassland to a long, bulbous rush of tangerine and black, incinerating four Spets, two of them struggling out from the fringes of the fire but so badly burned that the praporshnik drew his 9mm Makarov and shot them. He had no time to waste, for he now suspected that the truck he’d heard, its engine in high whine as it pulled out from the circle of flickering lights from the debris of the downed American plane, might well be carrying the SAS/D troop of which no evidence had yet been found.
By the time he had collected his three remaining men he knew the SAS/D troop must have had at least a fifteen-minute head start. But there was no need to be despondent. In a few hours it would be dawn and you could see the truck’s tracks — even if they hid the truck somehow — etched clearly for miles over the hard yet fragile grasslands.
“Like Hansel and Gretel,” he told the Spets troop, four of them now, including himself. “We’ll just follow their path. Back to the Helix.”
“We still have orders to take at least one of them alive?” one of the Spets asked.
“If we can,” the praporshnik said, but he said it without any real commitment. They — the Americans — had killed four of his best men, including the radio operator, and destroyed the R-357 KM high-frequency radio set with burst transmission system — the radio nothing more now than twisted and charred metal, its plastic components having melted over it like taffy.
“I say we kill the bastards,” one of the other three troopers said.
“Yes,” another said, “as slowly as possible.”
“We have to get them first,” the third member said. He was pointing at what remained of the Helix — a burnt-out shell no doubt caught in the F-16’s napalm run, the dead pilot and copilot still strapped in their seats.
“We’ll get them!” the praporshnik promised. “Whatever it takes.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Land’s end was hauntingly beautiful, the sky’s saffron ripples spreading forever westward over the Celtic Sea, white streaks of foam from an exhausted storm flung in a golden lace about the ancient pink-brown rocks.
Trevor Brenson, M.P., had a soft spot for Cornwall with its moody air of romance and its legacy of smuggling, of defying the proprieties of the establishment. His ancestors on his mother’s side had come from Cornwall, and though he’d been born and raised in London he liked the idea that the genes of Cornish smugglers were in his blood. It didn’t stop him from having his own grand plans for taxing the populace when Labour got into power.
Meiling didn’t comment on this more obvious hypocrisy of Brenson’s. To do so would have upset the mood as Brenson and she walked atop the cliffs, their hair blown roughly by a gusty southerly, the salty air of the sea both invigorating and relaxing at the same time. Turning from the Celtic Sea in the west south toward the Atlantic and the channel, Brenson held her hand with what was for him an uncommon show of affection for his mistress.
“I feel like I’m whole down here,” he told her, his gaze fixed on the horizon where there was nothing but sea. Meiling knew what he meant. The closeness of the sea, the enormity of it, gave them at once a feeling of insignificance and yet integration with the whole world, with one another, with all things. And it was then, as in a quiet moment with a friend, that he apologized for not seeing enough of her lately, for coming to her flat burdened with files and cares of the day. What he said next surprised her, because she had thought that when it happened it would be in the quiet exhaustion of having made love, the most unguarded moment of all.