My American friend shook his head, then put on a cold face. “Alright. We need to move from here then. If any of them are captured, they’ll tell the PLA where to find us. Eat some food quickly so we don’t have to take as much with us. We’ll take as much of the ammo and new weapons with us as possible. In ten minutes, we head north.”
The Taiwanese supply drop had included three sets of thermal goggles, and I was thankful that I had been the one who unloaded that particular box. Barker might have demanded at least one of the precious sets if she had known that we had received them. As it was, I had held them back, knowing that McCormick, Dietrich, and I would make better use of them.
McCormick had given me a long, hard look when I showed him the goggles after Barker left, but I think in his heart of hearts, he knew that the goggles would have been wasted on the Airborne soldiers.
These particular thermal goggles had some interesting advantages over those used by the Americans or the Chinese. With the typical Taiwanese infatuation with tinkering, Taiwan’s military engineers had built significant computing power into the units. The goggles could identify highways, geographical landmarks, and, most impressive of all, the nationality of soldiers in view. The internal computer analyzed the shape of helmets and rifles and decided if their owners were American, Taiwanese, or Chinese, then colored the person blue, green, or (of course) red respectively in the goggle eyepiece.
The goggles were mounted on standard-issue Taiwanese infantry helmets, which we now all wore. We also put on another Taiwanese marveclass="underline" infrared-suppressant clothing. Of course, in theory that could just mean a thick coat, but the real trick of the system was a built-in heat-transfer system that sent our body heat through the soles of our boots rather than radiating out of our clothes in all directions. A PLA soldier looking at us from as close as twenty yards would see only a small white blip on the ground rather than a human figure. To all intents and purposes, we were invisible to thermal imaging scopes.
As we left our little camp, I couldn’t help thinking back to my previous life in Spetsnaz. We didn’t have all the damn toys the Taiwanese had, just brutal resolve. I remembered one mission where my friend Alexei had lain on the ground in winter in Ukraine for ten minutes so that, when he stood up, it would take a few minutes before thermal scopes could detect him again. He had lost a finger to frostbite on that mission, but he was successful. If only Alexei from Spetsnaz could see me now, I thought.
Now that we could move faster, we covered several miles over the next two hours walking toward the outskirts of Taipei and the rear of the Chinese forces arrayed against Pinglin. I detected and avoided a number of Chinese patrols as our path bent west, our new thermal suits and goggles making the whole exercise so easy that my Spetsnaz trainers would have beaten me for even imagining such a total advantage over the enemy.
We paused for a minute when McCormick received an urgent radio call from Colonel Concitor. Dietrich and I waited while he had a whispered radio conversation.
I asked Dietrich in German, “How are the stumps, you Kraut bastard?”
He grinned and replied in my native language, “It really should have happened to you, Dmitriy. As my great-grandfather recounted from his days on the eastern front, a Russian peasant only needs two or three fingers on each hand to enjoy the two loves of his life. One hand holds the vodka bottle, the other holds the sheep in place.”
I had to stifle my laughter. Rarely had I worked with Germans, and though Dietrich had taken some time to get used to, he was a dark bastard. Just my type.
Now McCormick, he was different. Not a dark bastard at all, though he was certainly willing to get his hands dirty. No, he had too much idealism to be a true bastard like me and Dietrich, too much of a desire to save the damn world.
Then again, what the hell are you after here if you don’t have some idealism? I asked myself. Excitement, I answered myself. Live a poor dull life in Russia, a rich dull life in the West, or an exciting, dangerous life here in Taiwan. Those were the options.
Was McCormick so different? He talked a lot about freedom in Taiwan, all the technological marvels that sprouted in Taiwan because it was the last really free economy, blah, blah, blah. That all was true in an intellectual sense. But maybe it takes a Russian to observe that people aren’t robots. We aren’t motivated by logic. We’re motivated by more visceral things: pride, hate, lust, and love, to name a few. Logic helps us get those things, but it can never supplant them. McCormick might love freedom, but he wasn’t a philanthropist. He was in Taiwan because he made the same fundamental choice I did: dangerous action over somnolent wealth.
McCormick came back to tell us about the conversation with Colonel Concitor. “Time sensitive mission, boys,” he said. “We’re going to Teatime Hill, and we need to be there in two hours.”
We had two options for a route to Teatime Hill, and we quickly dubbed them the scenic route or the high-traffic route. The scenic route involved a six mile hike looping around to the west that would essentially bypass all known major PLA encampments. The high-traffic route was an almost straight shot, two miles to Teatime Hill that would run parallel to the northern road into Pinglin. That route would almost certainly entail three or four encounters with PLA patrols.
McCormick quickly favored the high-traffic route, and I once again suspected he was letting emotions dictate his actions. He just wanted to kill some PLA. I was perfectly amenable to killing PLA, of course, but from a strategic perspective, we couldn’t afford to notify Colonel Fong that something was happening in the vicinity of Teatime Hill. Even if we could destroy the patrols without them firing a shot, the patrols would be missed if they didn’t call in at a regular interval, usually something on the order of fifteen minutes.
Ultimately, McCormick had to bow to the clear logic of the situation. “Don’t worry,” I told him. “This is shaping up to be the bloodiest mission yet. You’ll make them pay.”
We moved off on the scenic route. Teatime Hill was the last in a series of hills and valleys that stretched back to Taipei in the north, and we were essentially traversing three hills and valleys before reaching Teatime Hill from the northwest.
As usual, I had the point. Around the time we reached the top of the first hill, the artificial fog and rain broke for about twenty minutes, and we were afforded a clear view of Taipei to the north.
“Christ, look at that convoy,” Dietrich said, pointing to the road leading to Pinglin. There must have been six hundred tanks and a few thousand trucks and cars stretching back to Taipei, where the lights were all dark. “Think how much infantry they must be sending up.”
“Yeah,” McCormick said. “I hope they sent them all to Teatime Hill, it’ll make it a lot more convenient for us.”
As we approached Teatime Hill, the PLA infantry patrols became more thick. Though our thermal-suppressing suits hid us well and allowed us to slip through just a hundred yards from the enemy, when we reached the last hill before Teatime, we were out of options. It looked like a full PLA division had made camp at the summit of the hill behind Teatime, and through our thermal goggles we could see dozens of Chinese strewn throughout the valley separating the two hills.