Unable to see more than a foot in front of him, all Douglas Freeman could identify with certainty was the eardunning sound of the Cobra gunships’ chain guns, the Cobras’ tracers, if his sense of direction was intact, streaming toward the H-block. It was a maelstrom of fire, being delivered as punishment for the terrorists having violated the twenty-four-hour agreement, a venting of the Americans’ outrage against what the gunships’ pilots had clearly seen themselves and heard from rescued marine stragglers who had alerted the marine forces to the presence and activity of the T-90 tanks.
Freeman flicked on his mike to contact the pilots, but he could tell immediately that that bastard Murphy had struck again. All he could hear was static. And he was worried about Melissa Thomas.
At least the rain was easing, and a fragrant wind was rushing in from the Wanda Shan to replace the harsh, hot air of the detonation, an explosion which Freeman knew had completely destroyed the three tunnels, assembly lines, and the terrorists’ entire stock of shoulder-fired MANPADs, hypersonic small rounds, and torpedo prototypes. Boosting the general’s weary, yet decidedly effusive, mood, was the rapid withdrawal of the T-90 that had fired point-blank into the exit and was now paying for it by being attacked by the Cobras, who had initially come into Khanka as nothing more than escorts for the evac Stallions. The general’s celebratory high was quickly punctured, however, by his growing concern for Melissa Thomas. With the radio out, no flare gun, and the air around him thick with debris, how could he communicate his and her situation to the mission’s air arm? “Wait a minute,” he scolded himself. “Run, you bastard, run out of this crap cloud. No one can see you here. Run!” And he did, until he saw the two dead tank crewmen, whom he immediately checked for flares. Nothing. He ran on until his knees seemed to be on fire and he burst out into relatively clear air and the reeds. The choppers were gone, their gas tanks’ loiter times exhausted.
The general morphed into an angry savage, cursing with such force and volume that he dared any damned Russian terrorists who hadn’t had enough to show themselves and he’d personally shoot them. And when he ran out of ammunition he’d go strangle the bastards with his bare hands. Battle fatigue, he told himself. He saw a white blur coming at him and fired two quick shots. It was a small, man-sized parachute, one of half a dozen dropped either by either the unseen Cobra gunships or the Super Stallions.
“They’re message chutes. I’ve opened one.” He swung around, startled by her voice. Relieved, fatigued, and enormously embarrassed for having been caught firing at a parachute, and a small one at that, Freeman hurried over to the voice and found Melissa Thomas shivering violently, whereas he was perspiring profusely underneath the layers of Kevlar and battle tunic, with heat to spare. He embraced her in a bear hug.
The message in the milk-pail-sized canister attached to the chute was
ENCLOSED INFRARED X FOR SATELLITE OVERFLIGHT STOP MOTHER WILL THEN EXECUTE STAR STOP GOOD LUCK
“I’ve—” She was shivering so badly she could hardly speak. “—spread — the X over there.” Her hand shaking, Melissa was pointing to a flattened area of reeds. Freeman could see her face was tinged with the telltale bluish hue of impending hypothermia.
She pointed to the word STAR. “I — haven’t — a clue what—”
“Don’t talk. You’ll waste energy,” he advised her, while simultaneously trying not to show his alarm at the gross violation of operational procedure exhibited by whomever it was who had sent a message, especially one with such specific instructions. What if the enemy had picked it up? The fact that HQ had taken such a risk, however, told Freeman just how desperate operational HQ must be, the message, indeed the drop itself, stark evidence that time was quickly running out for him and Melissa Thomas. “We’ve got to get you warm,” he told her. “Don’t worry about STAR. It’s an acronym for a recovery system. I’ll tell you more about it if and when they see that X. They may wait till dark in case any of these terrorist bastards are wandering around—” He paused for breath. “—though I expect by now they know their money machine’s kaput, so what’s the point?” He looked around at the wood and marsh. Everything was soaking wet. “We’ve got to get you under cover. We’ll go into the tunnel exit. We can get dry clothes down there. Wrap ourselves in those and snuggle, if you’ve no objection. Warm you up. We’ll hear Mother when she comes.” He meant “if” a rescue plane comes, but Thomas didn’t need discouragement on top of her plummeting body temperature.
Once in the driest, least bloodstained clothes he could bring her, dressing himself only after he’d helped her, they set up an improvised machine gun nest just in from the tunnel’s exit, he dragging in the dead T-90 captain and crewman to use as an ad hoc barricade on which to rest his AK-74 and her sniper rifle, he down to his last clip of thirty rounds. He embraced her with his left arm, leaving his right holding the Kalashnikov, ready to fire. “No time to be shy, Marine,” he told her. “I’m old enough to be your grandfather!” he joked. “Come in close. I’ve got enough hot air to thaw a frozen turkey.” She tried to smile, but her mouth wouldn’t respond, her teeth literally chattering, but she did feel a suggestion of warmth.
As Freeman held the young woman, like other soldiers who had saved their comrades in the same manner from perishing of cold, he became aware of a smell other than their body odor and the reek of charred equipment and burnt flesh in the tunnels. It was the faint but very definite smell of a woman, and he thought of his first wife, Catherine, and Margaret. It was so distant, as if their love-making had been a dream long ago.
“Don’t you ever tell anyone,” he told Melissa, “that I shot at a damned parachute.” She said nothing, barely hearing him over the soft moan of the China wind whistling about the tunnel exit, the warmth of his closeness seeping into her. No one at Parris would believe it, and she sure as hell wasn’t going to tell anyone for the sake of both their reputations. She felt the general start. Something had spooked him.
“What is it?” she whispered.
“A vehicle,” he answered. “Maybe a truck.”
“Not the plane?”
“No. If—when—that comes, we’ll know it. They’ll use a four-engined Herk for our pickup.”
Although warming, Melissa still felt desperately cold. It was as if the cogs in a wheel in her brain had slowed with the precipitous drop in her temperature. For a moment she was confused by him mentioning “our pickup.” She thought he’d mentioned a plane, not a pickup truck.
It was a pickup truck the general had heard, and it was being driven by a sallow-skinned man in the navy blue padded uniform of Chinese and Russian workers and peasants along the border between the two countries, the map line separating the two running across the top quarter of the lake, about forty miles north of the tunnel exit.