“What’s that?” Gurt said, straining to see.
“I think it’s a column of tanks,” Murphy said.
“I’ll go to one side,” Gurt said, “and stay in the cloud cover.”
Along the side of the road, a Chinese tank commander was watching several of his soldiers repair a tread that had come loose. He heard the helicopter in the distance, so he climbed inside and called his superior on the radio.
“No idea,” his superior reported, “but you’d better find out what it is.”
Popping his head out of the hatch, the tank commander shouted down to his men, then he began to pass rifles out of the hatch. Two minutes later, the soldiers were hiking up the road away from their disabled tank.
“THERE’S the crest,” Murphy shouted. “Find a spot to touch down.”
Gurt played with the collective, but at this altitude he had little control. “Hold on,” he shouted.
The landing was more a controlled crash than a touchdown. The 212 came down hard on the skids, but they held. Murphy was already unsnapping his safety harness.
“Driver,” he said, smiling, “just keep her running—I’ll only be a minute.”
Opening the door, he stepped out and a few feet back and opened the cargo door. Then he removed a pair of snowshoes, which he attached to his feet. Pulling another coat over the one he was already wearing, he began to dig in a crate, placing the items he needed into a backpack.
“Hold down the fort,” he shouted to the front of the helicopter. “I’m going to set the charges.”
Gurt nodded, then watched as Murphy disappeared into the blowing snow. Then he began to play with his radio. He found little to hear, so he switched back to the regular frequency.
“SHERPA, Sherpa, Sherpa, this is the Oregon, over.” In the control room, Eric Stone looked at Hanley with worry.
“That’s the fifth time, nothing.”
“Sherpa, Sherpa, Sherpa, this is the Oregon, over.”
“Oregon, this is Sherpa,” Gurt answered. “Read you eight by eight.”
There was a two-second delay as the signal bounced off the ionosphere and down to the ship.
“Where are you?” Hanley said, taking the microphone.
“We’re on site,” Gurt reported. “Your man just left for the appointment.”
“We just intercepted a communication from the bad guys,” Hanley said. “Someone heard you go over and they’ve been asked to investigate.”
“This is not good, Oregon,” Gurt said quickly. “I have no way to reach Murphy and warn him. Plus, it’s going to take us some time to lift off.”
“Okay,” Hanley said, “we can send a signal to Murph’s beeper—we’ll tell him to return to where you are. In the meantime, keep a close eye for anyone approaching. If they do, you take to the air.”
“Send a message to Murphy to withdraw,” Hanley said to Stone, who quickly punched the commands into his keyboard.
“My visibility is around thirty to forty feet,” Gurt said, “and I’m not leaving Murph—no way.”
“No, we don’t want you to—” Hanley started to say.
“Oregon,” Gurt shouted over the radio. “There are Chinese troops coming through the snow.”
Murphy was bent over, placing the charges in the snow, when his beeper chirped. He finished attaching the detonation cord, then rose up and removed the beeper from his pocket.
“Damn,” he said, flipping the switch open so the charge could be remotely detonated. Then he pulled his M-16 around from his back on its sling and began heading back in the direction of the helicopter.
Gurt reached behind his seat and felt for a handgun in a rack. The Chinese troops were struggling through the thick snow, making slow but steady progress toward the Bell. They were holding rifles, but they had yet to take a shot.
Murphy stumbled along as fast as one could run on snowshoes. While he ran, he was folding out a grenade launcher. Reaching over his shoulder into the pack, he removed a rocket-propelled grenade and started fitting it into the launcher. He was on a sloping ridge, racing down, when he first caught sight of the Chinese troops. They were twenty-five feet from the Bell. Murphy estimated his angle and fired a grenade. It went over the heads of the Chinese troops and exploded. They flopped on their bellies in the deep snow.
“What the—” Gurt started to say as he turned and saw Murphy approaching in the distance.
Adding fuel to the turbine, Gurt tried to lift off. Nothing. Murphy was twenty feet away now and racing toward the helicopter. The first few Chinese troops began to rise from the snow and shoulder their rifles. Gurt started firing the handgun from the window. A couple seconds later, Murphy’s M-16 opened up.
Ten feet now. Gurt reached across and opened the copilot’s door. Murphy paused in his firing, removed his pack, placed it gingerly behind his seat and climbed inside, holding the M-16 in his lap. Gurt was firing the handgun and fiddling with the collective at the same time.
“Morning,” Murphy said when there was a moment of quiet. “Anything exciting happen while I was away?”
“We have no lift,” Gurt said before squeezing off a few rounds. “I’ll need to milk the cyclic to get us off the ground.”
The Chinese troops had stopped advancing. Now they were digging in to make their kill shot.
Murphy slipped between the seats into the rear and yanked open both cargo doors. “Quit firing and take us up, Gurt. I’ll handle these boys.”
Milking the cyclic is bad for helicopters. It consists of jamming the cyclic from side to side while pumping up and down on the collective. It can create lift when there is none—but it can also easily cause the mast that supports the rotor to bump against other parts of the helicopter. Then you run the risk of a nick or a fracture in the mast.
Lose the mast and you’ve lost the helicopter.
The firefight had erupted so quickly that the Chinese tank commander had little time to rally his men. Now that he’d had a few minutes to prepare and his troops were dug in to the snow, he began to shout orders that would concentrate the fire in the right direction.
Gurt slammed the cyclic from one side to the other and the 212 began to rise slowly.
Right at that instant, the Chinese commander screamed for his men to advance, and the front line rose. At the same time, Murphy triggered the grenade and it left the launcher with a whoosh and a burning smell that filled the cabin. The round landed six feet in front of the lead soldier and exploded. Murphy followed that up with a complete clip from the M-16. He replaced the clip and prepared to fire again.
Just then, Gurt got the Bell off the ground and struggled to turn away from the firefight.
They were a hundred feet away from the Chinese troops when Murphy blew through the second clip and the bloody snow where the Chinese troops lay began to fade in the distance. He quickly replaced the clip, set the M-16 to one side and reached for the remote detonator.
The C-6 erupted with a force equivalent to ten thousand pounds of TNT. A slab of snow was ripped from the side of the hill and raced down the slope, covering the Chinese troops. Then the slide raced across the road with a wall of snow and ice twenty feet high. In sympathy, smaller slides broke loose from the opposite hillside from the shock wave that trembled through the rock and soil. These slides added another eight to ten feet to the mess already created. The few Chinese troops still living after the firefight were buried beneath the wall of snow.
42
THE pilot of the Gulfstream stared at his navigation screen carefully. The route he was taking did not allow much margin for error. He was flying above a small corridor of Indian airspace that jutted between Bangladesh and Nepal. The surface area was but twenty miles in width at the smallest point. The land below was hotly contested by all three countries.
Slowly he steered the Gulfstream in a sweeping turn to the left.
“Sir,” he shouted to the rear cabin, “we’re through the worst of it.”
The Gulfstream was now above the wider
strip of land between Nepal and Bhutan.
“How long until we reach Tibetan airspace?” Cabrillo asked.
The pilot stared at the GPS screen. “Less than five minutes.”
Juan Cabrillo should have been bone-tired, but he was not. He stared out the window at the mountainous terrain below. The rising sun was blanketed in a glow of pinks and yellows. Tibet was directly ahead. He reached for the secure telephone and dialed.
IN Beijing, Hu Jintao was awakened early. The actions in Barkhor Square had not gone unnoticed. Jintao quickly rose from his bed, washed his face, and went downstairs, still dressed in his nightclothes.
“What’s the situation?” he asked a general without preamble.
“It’s all fluid, Mr. President,” the general admitted, “but the Russian tank column has started moving into Mongolia. Their ambassador assures us the movement is just an exercise between their country and Russia. However, at the speed they are moving, they could enter China across the Altai Mountains into the Tarim Basin anytime in the next few hours.”
“What about aircraft?” Jintao asked.
“They have several paratroop units at the staging area inside Russia,” the general said. “Our satellites have detected transport planes moving on the tarmac. As of right now, nothing has left the ground.”
Jintao turned to the head of foreign relations. “We don’t currently have any dispute with Russia,” he said. “What possible reason would they have to launch an attack on our border?”
“At the moment, our relations are peaceful.”
“Most odd,” Jintao said.
“The Russian ambassador has asked for a meeting at ten A.M. this morning,” the man added. “The request came overnight through a priority channel.”
“Did he disclose the nature of his request?” Jintao asked.
“No,” the foreign relations head said.
Jintao stood quietly for a moment, thinking.
“Mr. President,” the general said, “there’s more. We just received reports from the capital of Tibet that a protest has formed in one of the main squares inside the city.”
“What’s the chairman of the region say?” Jintao asked.
There was a pause before the general answered. “Well, Mr. President, that’s the problem. We have been unable to reach Chairman Zhuren.”
“DAMN, Gurt,” Murphy said. “That was close.”
“I think one of the rounds hit a hydraulic line that controls our forward pitch. As for me, I was hit in my left shoulder.”
“How bad is it?” Murphy said quickly.
“She’ll fly,” Gurt noted, “but it’ll be a little hairy.”
“I mean you, Gurt,” Murphy thundered. “How bad are you hit?”
Gurt was steering the Bell down the slope leading off the pass through a thick cloud cover. The helicopter’s nose was pointed down and both men’s bodies were tight against the seat harnesses.
“Hang on,” Gurt said. “I’ll lean forward so you can check.”
Gurt moved his upper torso away from the seat back and Murphy leaned over and looked. Then he reached over with his hand and felt around. A second later he pulled a flattened slug from inside the foam of the seat.
“The round passed clean through and was stopped by the metal back plate on the seat,” Murphy noted, “but you’re losing blood.”
“It wasn’t hurting until now,” Gurt disclosed. “I think I was on such an adrenaline high I didn’t really notice it much.”
“I’m going to need to bind the wound,” Murphy said. “Hold on a minute—let me make a call.”
He reached for his portable radio and called the Oregon.
“WEDGE it in there,” Gunderson said, “but make sure the spent cartridges have a way to blow out the side door. I don’t want any live rounds cooking off inside the cargo area.”
The Dungkar soldier assisting Gunderson nodded. Ten minutes earlier, they had yanked a rapid-firing antiaircraft gun from its mount on the border of Gonggar Airport. Now they were fitting it to the cargo plane to make a crude gunship. The soldiers worked quickly, as did those at the other end of the hangar.
George Adams watched as the Dungkar troops filled the fuel tank on the attack helicopter. For the last ten minutes, he had climbed around inside the ship in an effort to determine the controls and weapons systems. At this instant, he was convinced that he could probably fly the bird—making the weapons perform as desired was a little iffier.
“Welcome to the Dungkar Air Force,” Gunderson said, walking over. “We fly, you die.”
“How’s it going over there?” Adams said, smiling.
“I’m not sure,” Gunderson admitted. “We have the weapon lodged in the rear and supported with enough planks to build a barn—if it doesn’t fly out the opposite side the first time we light it up, we should be okay. How about you?”
“My Chinese is a little rusty,” Adams said. “About as rusty as an iron ship on the bottom of the ocean. But I think I can pilot this beast.”
Gunderson nodded. “Let’s make a pact, old buddy,” he said, smiling.
“What’s that?” Adams asked.
“When we get up there,” Gunderson said, “let’s not shoot each other down.”
He turned and started to walk back to the cargo plane. “Good luck,” he said over his shoulder.
“You too,” Adams answered.
Right then the door started to rise, and sunlight and cold air swept into the hangar. A minute later the attack helicopter was wheeled onto the tarmac and a motorized cart was attached to the front of the cargo plane to pull it onto the runway.
BARKHOR Square was rapidly filling with Tibetans. The crude human telegraph system that operates in time of crisis was working overtime. Four blocks away, a platoon of Chinese soldiers were attempting to make their way by armored personnel carrier from their barracks to the square after receiving a call that there was action at the chairman’s home.
Tibetans clogged the streets and the going was slow.
“Piper, Piper, this is Masquerade.”
“Masquerade, this is Piper, we read.”
“Request immediate extraction,” Reyes said. “We have the target.”
“State point of extraction, Masquerade.”
“Spot one, one, primary, Piper. Spot one three, secondary HH.”
“Acknowledge extraction coordinates, Masquerade, they are inbound in three.”
Upon receiving the order, the helicopter that had delivered them to the river lifted from the ground at a spot ten miles between Lhasa and Gonggar Airport, where the pilot had been waiting. Once he had the helicopter in forward flight, the pilot stared at a map listing the extraction points they had arranged, and glanced at the note he had scribbled on a pad attached to the clip on his knee. He flew fast and low toward Barkhor Square.
IN Little Lhasa, the Dalai Lama waited inside the communications room near a bank of radios. In the last few minutes, his network of spies inside Tibet had begun to report the progress. So far, at least, the operation appeared to be going flawlessly.
He turned to an aide-de-camp. “Are the preparations completed for our trip home?” he asked.
“As soon as word comes from Mr. Cabrillo, Your Holiness,” he said. “We can have you there in two hours by jet.”
The Dalai Lama thought for a moment. “Once we take off,” he asked, “how long will it be until we are over Tibet?”
“Half an hour,” the man noted, “give or take.”
“I am going to the temple now to pray,” the Dalai Lama said, rising. “Keep watch on the situation.”
“Yes, Your Holiness,” the aide said.
CHUCK Gunderson was helping George Adams strap himself into the attack helicopter. None of the Chinese helmets inside the hangar were large enough to fit his head, so he was using his own personal headset, plugged into the radio for communications. He was squeezed into the seat like a fat girl in spandex.
“They don’t make these for big guys like us,”
Adams joked.
“You should see mine,” Gunderson said. “The Chinese still believe in quantity over quality. My cockpit looks like I’m back in World War Two. I keep expecting Glenn Miller music to start playing over the radio.”
“Look at this dashboard,” Adams said as Gunderson finished and stood upright on the ladder. “It’s got more metal that a fifty-seven Chevy.”
Just then, Eddie Seng walked over quickly. “You need to get airborne and clear the runway. Cabrillo just called. He’s five minutes out.”
Gunderson pushed down on the Plexiglas shield over Adams’s head and held it as he fastened it in place. Then he thumped the top and gave Adams a thumbs-up sign. Climbing back down the ladder, he motioned for the Tibetan helpers to wheel it out of the way. He began walking with Seng toward the cargo plane as he heard the igniters in the turbine engine of the attack helicopter begin to wind up.
“Mr. Seng,” Gunderson said, “what’s the latest?”
“I interrogated the Chinese lieutenant that was the ranking officer here,” Seng said. “He was not able to get word to Beijing before we captured his forces.”
“So for now,” Gunderson said, reaching the door of the cargo plane, “we don’t need to worry about an attack from Chinese fighters from outside the country?”
“If the Russians do their job and keep the Chinese on their toes,” Seng said, “your role right now seems to be to provide close air support for the Dungkar forces.”
“I’ll do what I can,” Gunderson said, climbing into the side door of the cargo plane.
“Good,” Seng said, patting the side of the plane. “Now get to work—the boss is coming.”
At just that second, Adams pulled the collective and the Chinese helicopter lifted from the ground. The helicopter wobbled a little as Adams fought to get the feel, then it moved forward, broke through the ground effect, and headed in the direction of Lhasa.
Gunderson walked up the slope to the cockpit, slid into his seat, then began the engine-starting procedure. Once the pair of engines were running smoothly, he glanced back to the four Dungkar soldiers manning the gun in the rear.