“Goddamn infantry!” Freeman shouted. “Run the bastards over!”
For some inexplicable reason the driver started to laugh and couldn’t stop. The loader, hearing him on the intercom, also started cackling. Freeman glowered as the loader only with difficulty thrust another round home but couldn’t stop laughing. It was like a child being chased — full of fear and excitement, the vision of every M1A2 breaking formation, frantically taking off after individual Chinese, having struck the crew as insanely funny.
“What in hell’s the matter with you!” Freeman said, while pressing the thumb “traverse” control and hearing the rattle of machine gun bullets hitting the cupola. The loader was laughing so hard, hunched over by the shell racks, he was afraid he might have to urinate into his helmet. It was a kind of hysterical terror that only tankers and submariners know.
Several miles southward, beyond the ChiCom tanks, the dust was thinning out as Aussie’s FAV stopped just below the crest of a dune. Aussie and Brentwood, crawling on their bellies to the crest, looked down between two giant hills of sand on a sight so unexpected that it literally took their breath away — a forest so ordered and alien in its sudden appearance that they knew at once it was like the massive windbreaks of forests around Turpan — a reforestation project with menggulu or Mongolian willow forming the outer acres like a moat. There was also some shaji or seabuck thorn among them. Most of the forest, however, that looked to be about a mile wide and, through the scopes, about five miles deep, was made up of huyang — Chinese poplars, an island of green amid a sea of brown dunes.
“Well I’ll be buggered,” Aussie said. “So now what d’we do?”
“Over there,” Brentwood said, pointing to a dune about two hundred yards off to their left. “There’s one.” It was a ChiCom mobile radar van whose rectangular dish, the size of a collapsible bridge table, and housing set atop a hydraulic-legged ChiCom truck resembled a U.S. TPQ-63 type so much that Aussie suspected it was an American unit, probably bought, despite U.S. law forbidding it, through Chinese front companies in Hong Kong.
He was right. Jay La Roche had bought ten used units supposedly on sale for Taiwan and instead delivered them to China by diverting the cargo through Hong Kong.
Not far behind and below the radar unit on a wide, stony flat nearer the closer, or northern, end of the reforested area between the dunes there was what looked like a long refrigeration truck on stout hydraulic legs beneath a webbed camouflage netting, possibly an RAM-C, a radar management center, where the radar inputs from the various mobile sites would be collated and from where the deadly AA fire network would be operated. And in a flash David Brentwood realized that if the RAM-C unit could be taken out then no matter how many mobile radars there were — Freeman’s intelligence now suspected five on the move — destruction of the RAM-C would be killing the brain of the whole radar network.
The dust was clearing and the sun sinking fast. David Brentwood yearned for more smoke and dust cover, long enough for the attack. “Use the TOW!” he ordered Choir Williams.
“Yes,” Aussie put in, “but for Chrissake don’t miss!”
“I won’t, boyo,” Choir said as he aligned the weapon. He tried to fire it again — still nothing. Its circuit was dead.
“All right,” David said. “Now listen. We’ll have to go in with the FAV — straight for the RAM-C. Choir, you and I’ll hit the RAM-C. See those two doors midway along it?” It looked like a long camper.
“Yes.”
“You take the left, I’ll take the right. Aussie keeps the motor running.” He said nothing to the La Roche reporter who was sitting down next to Choir, his eyes glazed in a terrified stare. “Salvini, you cover us. Got it?”
“Got it!” Aussie cut in. “You have the fun while I sit on my ass!”
“You and Salvini take out any guards stupid enough to try and stop us.”
“I don’t see any,” Aussie said.
“That’s good,” Brentwood said. “Come on — let’s go!” The FAV mounted the crest. They heard a motorcycle/sidecar unit starting up, and Aussie put the FAV into reverse. Darkness had fallen, but with their SAS-issue Litton night goggles that in the daytime converted to binoculars they could see clearly between the dunes but were still at a loss to know precisely where the noise was coming from. Choir couldn’t tell, as his ears were still ringing from the thunderous sound of the titanic tank battle not far off.
“Between the dunes to the right somewhere,” Aussie proffered.
David Brentwood had his 7.62mm machine gun mounted on the dash pointed in the direction of the noise. Aussie reached over for the Haskins rifle strapped to the right seat strut, Choir unclipping it for him.
“Let me have a go with the suppressor.”
“Quickly then!” Brentwood said. Aussie had cut the engine and was out in a second and at the crest, looking down the dunes both ways. The dust was thinning, but it was still falling like pepper in the night-vision goggles. Soon, through this curtain, he could see a high rooster feather of dust, the motorcycle and sidecar unit now just a dot four hundred yards away and moving along the flat, skirting the RAM-C or whatever it was and climbing up toward the dune and coming in the general direction of the SAS/D group. If he didn’t have to he wouldn’t shoot at them and would let them pass, but if they kept coming up over the dune toward the FAV he’d have no choice. They sure as hell were taking their time — bloody putt-putting along, as his father would have said.
Four thousand miles to the northeast in the Aleutian Islands, a bitterly cold wind howled across Dutch Harbor as Lana Brentwood, her parka hood dusted in fine white snow, made her way quickly from the motor pool’s shuttle bus into the warmth of the Davy Jones Restaurant. As she entered, CNN was interrupting a pretaped senior citizens’ pro golf tournament in New Orleans with news of the massive tank battle now taking place in China some three hundred miles north of Beijing and only 280 miles from the Great Wall, bad weather apparently preventing the effective use of the tank-killing American A-10 Thunderbolts.
Jay La Roche had been the only one who, complaining, “Where are we here — Hicksville?” had objected to the TV being turned on in the first place, conspicuously not watching it while most of the other patrons in the dimly lit booths had paused to hear the news flash. He sat desultorily stirring the Manhattan in front of him, having complained to the waitress that he’d ordered “on the rocks,” not “a fucking iceberg!” The young, ruddy-faced reporter from the Anchorage Spectator came in, spotted Jay, and once again tried eagerly to get a few words from him.
“Fuck off.” La Roche told the boy, who, acutely embarrassed, started to apologize profusely, but La Roche wasn’t interested. He saw Lana taking off her parka by the door and hanging it up. Immediately his expression of surly discontent vanished and he rose, smiling, moving out of the booth. She knew he was going to try to kiss her. Quickly she slid into the opposite side of the booth. “Sorry I’m late. Quite a flap on at the base. We’re part of the logistical tail for Freeman’s tooth. He takes quite a bite.”
“No sweat,” he said. “I could wait for you all day.”
“Weather over there’s been lousy,” she said. “Some huge dust storm or other coming out of the Gobi Desert. And the Chinese are apparently using some U.S. radar equipment against us and are trying to—”
“Hey — no shop talk. Okay?” He sat back, spreading his arms imploringly.