He felt light when free of the weight. He and another man returned to the chopper and dragged out a heavy crate. He and his partner dropped the load amid stacks of others — the tiny battalion supply depot. The choppers were all lifting into the air. They had blinking red, green and white lights to avoid collisions. Andre monitored the sky. A good number of airmobile troopers had been killed by their own helicopters.
The downdraft from a low and unseen helicopter forced the two men to their knees. When it was gone, the night was markedly quieter. It grew quieter still with each helicopter’s departure. By the time they reached their packs, the Blackhawks were all gone.
‘Head up to the 60,’ the squad leader said — his voice a whisper. ‘Everybody clear the zone! Clear the zone!’ Andre and the other man marched into the darkness. There were six hundred men and tons of supplies on the drop zone. But after the departure of the choppers, the night had become still and peaceful. Andre had experienced the disorienting phenomenon on other insertions. Hours of steady noise. A rush into the rotors’ downdraft. Then total silence. It was a change for which you were unprepared.
But as soon as your ears adjusted, you had to guard against something else. You couldn’t let the roar of a firefight stun you into inaction. You strained to hear even the tiniest sound. But at the same time, you prepared for a cacophony of explosions. You steeled yourself against the fire and death which could spring from the quiet at any moment. For if you froze in the awful first seconds, you would almost certainly die. He’d ambushed deer in the headlights before. The real killing was in those first awful moments.
Andre hooked up with the rest of his squad. By random luck he lay next to the attached machine-gun crew. On the sergeant’s command, they unsafed their weapons and headed into Indian country. He hugged tight to the side of the M-60. The big gun would attract enemy fire. But it was the safest place for him to be. Because working machine-guns almost never got overrun. They were back breakers — the rocks against which waves of attackers would crash. They were the decisive weapons of modern infantry combat.
The platoon headed for the tall ridges and jagged rocks that rose all around the LZ. Andre felt tense at facing the great unknown. At stumbling blindly forward with no sense of what to expect. When they left the flats, word was passed from man to man. They were now in a free-fire zone — all 360 degrees.
Chapter Twenty-Two
There was a knock on Nate Clark’s door. It was his secretary. ‘Sorry to bother you, sir, but that woman reporter is back.’
Clark looked up, confused. ‘What woman reporter?’
‘Me, that’s who!’ Kate Dunn said angrily. She edged her way into his office. ‘You said you were sending me to the fighting! But there was hardly a shot fired!’ He began to object, but she pressed on. ‘And you used me! You fed me bullshit stories about how weak you were and how powerful the Chinese were! And I repeated them like some stooge!’
Clark nodded at his secretary, who left them alone. ‘Have you ever heard of a Strategic Deception Plan?’
‘I’ve heard of deception! “Strategic” just makes it sound okay because it’s a military thing! But my job is to report the truth! And you’ve been fucking me. over ever since we first met!’ Kate was going for maximum effect, but she wondered whether she was laying it on too thick.
‘I didn’t arrest your friend for possession of marijuana,’ Clark replied.
‘Possession of pot in the middle of Siberia? It’s anarchy! There aren’t any laws here!’
‘There’s military law, and you broke it by sneaking around that supply depot.’
‘I wasn’t sneaking, I was reporting! That’s my job!’
‘And you doing your job would prevent me from doing mine! And it would’ve gotten a whole bunch of men and women killed! Your countrymen! Your army in this war! You and everybody else in the press view yourself as supra-national. You follow some ill-conceived “neutrality principle”! You think you have to report from a position mid-way between the opposing sides even if one side is right and the other is wrong! China is trying to grab Siberia in a war of aggression, and we’re trying to stop them! Why don’t you try keeping that in mind when you choose which reports to file!’
Nate knew he’d gone too far. He’d vented months of frustration over the things the press had been saying about him. The disparaging remarks with which his boys had to live. He and the reporter were at a standoff now.
Kate switched tone, but not direction. ‘All I’m doing is busting my ass to do a decent story on what this war is really like. And you send me to that Mickey Mouse attack. I thought we had a deal. I thought I could rely on you to be a man of your word.’
Her last words seemed to have the desired effect. She imagined the conflict being played out in Clark’s head. The honest, straightforward soldier confronted with an uncomfortable example of his deceit.
‘Sergeant Scott!’ Clark bellowed. They stared at each other across the No Man’s Land of Clark’s desk. ‘Sergeant Scott!’ he shouted again. His secretary didn’t reply. Clark muttered something and went off in search of the man, leaving Kate alone in his office. It was a Spartan room, nearly devoid of interesting sights. The colorful map on Clark’s desk was a notable exception. Clark had been hunched over it when she’d entered. Kate glanced at the open door and walked over to the map.
It was upside down from her perspective. But she could make out the familiar track of the Amur River. It was a commanding general’s map — showing the whole war in one oversized picture. The blue marks were UNRUSFOR units. The red were Communist Chinese. Dots formed two blue spikes striking deep into the mass of red. In the east, the advance out of Vladivostok was modest, but the direction of the bulge was clear. It was driving straight into China. The far more impressive prong of the offensive was in the west. It was a dagger plunging hundreds of miles from north to south. Its tip barely crossed the Amur River. Kate had seen, however, what it was really like. Starving Chinese kids in search of food, water, shelter. Wanting nothing more than an end to the horror. The offensive looked great on the map. But there was no glory to be found in the field. No desperate struggle on whose outcome the tide of the war would turn.
One tiny pocket of blue caught her attention. It was buried deep in northern China. The dot was far separated from the rest of the allied forces. She half-turned her head to look at the map right side up. ‘75th/101st’ was written beside the island of blue. To have a number, Kate reasoned, they had to be large units.
She heard voices from the outer office.
Kate quickly noted three other things that were readily apparent from the map. The first was the massive red hammer of a Chinese army moving north toward the tiny blue island. The second was that the two prongs seemed destined to converge on that same blue dot in China. And the third was the name on the map closest to the ‘75th/101st.’ Tangyuan, she thought over and over.
Clark returned with his secretary and began speaking. She quickly realized he was dictating a memo. ‘To: All UNRUSFOR Personnel. From: Lieutenant General Nate Clark, Commanding. Today’s date. Re: Ms Kate Dunn.’ Kate stared back — waiting. ‘Ms Dunn is a correspondent for the National Broadcasting Company. On my authority, she is to be given complete access to all areas under UNRUSFOR control including, without limitation, all theaters of combat and all units engaged with the enemy. You are hereby instructed to cooperate by all means necessary to afford Ms Dunn and her camera crew the access herein specified.’