Dragon Sim-13

7

Meng stared in amazement at the scene on the television screen. A single man, dressed in a white shirt, walked into the street with his right hand raised. He stood slightly taller than the sloping front of the tank, eye level with the invisible driver seated in its bowels in front of the turret.

The man placed his body in front of the first armored beast in the long column and signaled for it to halt. Amazingly it did, the treads of the lead tank clattering to a halt just a few feet in front of him. The man was yelling something at the tank, but whatever it was, the words were lost in the shouts of students from the sidewalks and the sound of gunfire that still crackled through the air.

The tank moved again, angling to the right, attempting to go around the man. He sidestepped to his left. The tank pivoted left. The man went right. The tank gunned its engine. The man stood fast. Tanks that were bottled up behind the first one gunned their engines, spewing diesel exhaust into the street. Then the man bounded onto the lead tank and leaned over the hatch, yelling at the crew inside.

The man stood on top of the tank for a little while, then climbed down. Two other men ran out into the street, their arms raised as if to say, Don't shoot. They grabbed the man and hustled him off the street. The armored snake crept forward again toward the center of Beijing.

Meng felt his heart torn. Pride at the man's actions was overwhelmed by shame at his own position, safe in America. He had never seen a more brave gesture than the one he had just watched. If an ordinary man could risk everything like that, why couldn't he do the same?

Seeing his dead son had caused him to reevaluate his^osition. He had always tried to justify his life in the United States with a belief that he was aiding a country that one day would help the people of China achieve freedom. He now knew that that was a shallow and misdirected concept.

The news shifted to a report that the American president was resisting suggestions of stronger sanctions against the Chinese government. The president apparently didn't want a total break in relations. Meng knew that that was the wrong course. The Old Men would see it as weakness. The Americans had to take a stronger stand or more would die. The news also reported rumored clashes between units of the Chinese Army.

The Old Men were doing it again. He rubbed his forehead, feeling an itch from the scar that was much deeper psychologically than physically. An idea had been plaguing Meng for the last twenty-four hours. Now he knew what he must do. He turned from the TV to the computer terminal behind his desk. His decision had been triggered by emotion, but Meng was an intelligent man. He would act on his decision with all his knowledge and expertise. After twenty-three years, it was time.

Riley and Mitchell had spent the day drilling the team on every aspect of the plan, running through their SOPs, practicing actions at the objective, simulating the placement of the charges on the cables. The lurking feeling that this was just an exercise was fading — this was the real thing and that somber fact was sinking in.

"Thinking about what's going to happen?" Jim Trapp sat down on Riley's ruck in front of him in the darkened hangar where the Talon awaited them.

"Yeah. How'd you know?"

"I was thinking about it, too. You had that faraway look. Remember, I've been there before. Of course, we don't know that this is real.

You've got to admit they've supported us pretty well so far, though. Enough to make you believe it's real. I think we can do it."

Trapp surveyed the team in various stages of sleeping and equipment preparation. "They're good soldiers," Trapp said. "Other than my second team in Vietnam, this is the best team I've ever been associated with. I appreciate your asking for me. Of course if this goes tits up, I'm gonna deny I ever said that."

Riley looked around. "Yeah, they are good. Exfiltration is the one part that really worries me. It's always been the weak link. You and I both know what happens when you don't leave yourself any slack with helicopters."

Trapp nodded in agreement. "For what it's worth I'm not happy about the chopper thing, either. Not much we can do about it. We've got to depend on the SFOB to a certain extent. They've got their hands on the aircraft and communications, which means they control our lives."

Trapp stood up and stretched. He looked at his friend and tapped him on the shoulder. "Hey, get some sleep, OK? We all should be thinking with clear heads when we hit the ground tonight. Murphy's going to be waiting on the drop zone, and who knows what he's thought up. We've done all we could do in the time we had. I'll tell you one thing I learned a long time ago: Always stick with the plan. Believe in the plan." Trapp gave Riley a thumbs-up as he walked off toward his gear.

Riley tried to nap but couldn't. Thoughts kept flitting through his head — live border missions early in his career in Thailand, various training missions to other countries. Soldiering was a profession— a way of life. A soldier didn't just get up in the morning and punch the time clock in at eight and out at five. A soldier's life was funny, Riley thought to himself. In other professions people wanted to do what they had been trained to do. A soldier spent years training to do something he hoped and prayed he'd never have to do. At least Riley did. He knew others, like Trapp, who liked going on live missions. They felt that it was the only time they really came alive. They enjoyed living on the edge.

Riley started running the operation through his mind from start to finish, trying to find something he hadn't thought of. Something they'd missed in their planning. He could imagine a thousand ways this mission could get messed up and a thousand ways he could end up dying. Too much imagination was dangerous. "I think too damn much," Riley muttered to himself.

Meng had not slept. He'd been too busy modifying the Dragon and Sim-13 programs. He was finally done. With a perverse sense of pride, he knew that it was his greatest creation yet. He pressed the send key. It was started.

Meng stood up and left his office, heading down to Tunnel 3. Wilson was at the tail end of his night shift as Meng came in. "How's it going? Want me to stick around for the infil simulation?"

Meng shook his head. "You can go home now. I'll cover everything."

Wilson pointed at the map board. "When do you want to send the mission termination message to the FOB? They're probably pretty anxious right now." Wilson checked the clock. "It's only two and a half hours before they're supposed to lift off."

Meng waved a hand. "I just sent that from my office. Kept it off the screen in here so it wouldn't confuse them more than they already are."

Wilson frowned briefly. He hadn't seen the message go by on his console. Still, he knew that Meng could bypass the master console from his office. He stood up. "The program ready?"

Meng replaced Wilson at the master console. "Everything is quite ready. We will find out shortly how well prepared these people are."

"See you tonight, then." Wilson stretched his back and wandered down toward the front of the Tunnel. A thought occurred to him. He walked over to Major Tresome, the communications specialist, sitting at his console in the front row. "Did you see the mission termination message just go out?" he asked in a low voice.

Tresome shook his head. "Just the normal mission traffic between SFOB and FOB. No administrative stuff."

Wilson looked back up the Tunnel at Meng and then back at Tresome. "Meng says he sent it."

Tresome shrugged. "He probably did. Meng usually does a lot of stuff from his office. He doesn't like using this terminal for admin traffic. Whatever goes through here comes up on the screen and in the printouts. That means the exercise participants here in the Tunnel see it. Meng can bypass all that from his office or from the master console."

"But wouldn't you or I have seen it go by?"

Tresome shook his head. "Nope. There's no record of that. Like I said, Meng can bypass."

Wilson was too tired to pursue it any further. "Well, you might as well shut down the SATCOM link with the FOB if Meng has already closed down with them."

Tresome reached forward and flipped a switch. "We're on the computer now." Tresome scanned the board. "Hell, Meng's damn office terminal is still linked into the FOB." He looked up at Wilson. "Should I shut that down too?"

Wilson thought about it. "No reason not to. We've nothing more for them. He probably just forgot to shut it down."

Hossey grabbed the message as it came out of the machine. He felt his heartbeat pick up as he read the message.

Hossey took the message and drove to the hangar. The team had spent most of the day there trying to relax and rehearse various tactics. He pulled up to the personnel door and Hooker, who was standing guard just inside, opened it. Hossey showed the sergeant major the message. Hooker whistled lightly and commented, "I didn't think they had the balls in D.C. to do this."

Hossey shook his head. "I guess the massacre pushed the powers-that-be over the line."

He headed across to Riley and Mitchell, who were leaning back against their rucks. He handed the message to Mitchell, who read it, then silently passed it across to Riley.

Riley looked at his team leader. "Does this mean what I think it does?"

Mitchell nodded. "Get the team together."

Riley whistled to wake up everyone. "Gather around."

While they waited for the men to assemble, Hossey went over to alert the Talon crew. Mitchell took a deep breath, then addressed the team. "The mission's a go, men. We just got infiltration authorization. No offset or cancelation. This is the real thing." Mitchell looked at his watch. "We load in two hours."

Without a word the team members turned and went back to their rucks, each man absorbing the information in his own way. All day long the tension in the air in the hangar had grown as the uncertainty dragged on. Now the uncertainty was replaced by apprehension. They were really going.

The men reacted to the news in different ways. A few, such as Mitchell and Olinski, seemed to withdraw and become even quieter. Others, such as Lalli and Reese, got louder, even cracking jokes. Both reactions were a way of dealing with the stress.

Each man did final weapons checks. Rucksacks were rigged for jumping. They were going in heavy, equipment-wise, for a three-day operation, but they were prepared for almost any eventuality.

The men were dressed in jungle fatigues dyed black. Over the fatigues each soldier wore his combat vest, configured to carry extra magazines and ammunition for the weapon he carried. The vest had straps that were buckled around each thigh through the crotch, so the vest could serve as a safety harness if no pickup zone was readily available for the helicopter, and extraction became necessary. The extraction harness consisted of two snap links fitted into the shoulders of the vest, which would hook into ropes hung below a helicopter.

Riley, along with Trapp and Comsky, carried the Soviet SVD sniper rifle. It fired the Soviet 7.62 by 54mm cartridge. All three men were school-trained snipers and could hit a two-inch circle out to twelve hundred meters, under favorable conditions. Riley felt that the use of the Soviet rounds to take out the cameras would shift suspicion for the raid to the Soviets. The Soviet-Chinese border had been the sight of numerous border clashes since the end of World War II. The Chinese might even suspect a Soviet Spetsnaz, or Special Forces, team.

Additionally, Riley and Trapp carried cutoff M79 grenade launchers, attached to their combat vests with a snap link. Hooker had a hard time tracking down the M79s for them. They supposedly had been made obsolete years ago and replaced by the M203, a weapon that combined the M16 rifle with a 40mm grenade launcher, which was hung below the Ml6 barrel. But Trapp remembered the effectiveness of a cutoff

M79 from his Vietnam days. The short, stubby weapon could be attached to the vest, out of the way, until needed. The 40mm grenade launcher acted in effect like a large shotgun. The M79 used high explosive (HE), and special flechette rounds, which consisted of hundreds of sharp little metal slivers. Riley and Trapp each carried twenty mixed rounds for the M79s.

The captain, and the two communications men, Walt O'Shaugnesy and Paul Lalli, each carried MP5 SD3 submachine guns — silenced 9mm guns that held a thirty-round magazine. They could be fired on semiautomatic or full automatic with a flip of the selection lever. Although accurate only out to about a hundred meters, the guns would be effective for silent, close-in killing of enemy security personnel if needed.

Olinski and Hoffman each carried the Italian-manufactured SPAS 12 semiautomatic shotgun. These twelve-gauge shotguns were carried because they could be used without leaving a distinctive signature. They were in limited use by the local population throughout the target area. A corpse riddled with twelve-gauge 00 buckshot or slugs would not immediately point to a foreign source. Additionally, Riley liked them because a shotgun was a very effective weapon during an ambush. It was an area weapon with devastating results at close range. Each shotgun could be loaded with nine shells, which could be fired as fast as the trigger was pulled. To add to their effectiveness, the gun's magazines were loaded with alternating double-aught buckshot rounds and solid slug rounds. The twelve-gauge slug round was guaranteed to put a man down permanently if it hit him.

Chong, Reese, Smitty, and Devito all carried the squad automatic weapon. The SAW fired 5.56mm rounds from a hundred-round drum magazine. Not as heavy as the more commonly used M60 machine gun, the SAW could still reach out nine hundred meters with an effective field of fire. Riley was counting on these for suppression of the enemy if they did make contact or had to fight off a reaction force. With the SAWs providing area suppression, and the SVDs giving accurate, long-range fire, Riley felt that they had a good chance of beating off a reaction force, at least for a little while. For close-in work, the M79s, shotguns, SAWs, and submachine guns would do the job.

Each man also carried two pistols. One was a 9mm automatic of choice, either Beretta or Browning High Power, in a holster on his vest. Strapped inside his shirt in a shoulder holster, each man also carried a .22-caliber High Standard semiautomatic pistol equipped with a silencer.

These were last-resort weapons, carried more for survival use than anything else: Using the silenced .22 pistol, team members could kill small animals for food if they had to evade for an extended period. To use a .22 on a person required a high degree of accuracy and luck, because the small-caliber round could not be counted on to stop whatever it hit.

Every man also carried one thermite grenade and three small Ml8 high-explosive grenades, which had an effective bursting radius of five meters. A Claymore mine was packed in the top flap of each rucksack. The Claymore was a crescent-shaped mine full of small ball bearings. When fired, it exploded thousands of these balls on a wide front, out to a range of twenty meters. The effect was devastating on anyone caught inside that arc.

O'Shaugnesy and Devito each carried a Soviet-made RPG rocket launcher and five rounds, since they would be the security team on the service road during the actual target hit. The RPG could fire accurately out to five hundred meters and disable most vehicles. The shaped charge in the rocket warhead could even penetrate a tank if it hit in a vulnerable spot.

In addition to the demolitions, the team carried an assortment of special equipment. Every other man carried PVS-5 night-vision goggles. The men would work the goggles in pairs, switching off every hour. Extended wear of the goggles caused eye strain and diminished their usefulness.

O'Shaugnesy and Lalli each packed a PSC3 satellite communication radio, which weighed twenty-seven pounds when combined with its antenna and digital message device group sender (DMDG). This made their rucksacks significantly heavier than the rest of the team's. Once the men were on the ground, the SATCOM radios would be rigged with thermite grenades for emergency destruction. Four PRC68 FM radios were carried for internal communications among the team, if needed.

Two 120-foot ropes were carried. Riley had long ago discovered that he always found a lot of potential uses for a rope whenever he didn't bring one, so now Team 3 always carried two. Every other man also carried a small vial of CN powder, which was a condensed form of the powder used to generate tear gas. This powder could be sprinkled along a trail behind a person if dogs were tracking. A good whiff of CN and a dog would be done tracking for a long time.

The basic food load was five meals, each dehydrated and weighing less than a pound. Heat tabs were carried, which could be used to heat water in canteen cups. A Goretex poncho and bungee cords were taken for shelter if needed, and to sleep the men could crawl into a waterproof Goretex bivy sack.

Each man wore an internationally manufactured brown Goretex boot. Goretex gloves and black watchcaps completed their outfits.

Colonel Hossey had questioned the relatively large load each man was carrying for a three-day mission, but Mitchell and Riley had stood by their decision. Fully loaded, each man had an approximately forty-pound rucksack. Their combat vests weighed almost thirty pounds apiece when filled out with spare magazines, pistols, grenades, survival kit, butt pack, and two full one-quart canteens.

While heavy, the seventy pounds of total gear each team member carried was actually far lighter than the load carried on training exercises. Picking up his ruck with one hand, Comsky referred to it as a "nerf' ruck, it was so light compared to what he was used to. The team had once deployed for thirty days without resupply — just one meal a day added up to thirty pounds of food alone. Riley remembered an exercise they had conducted the previous winter in the mountains of Korea when the team had carried almost a hundred and thirty pounds of gear apiece.

Mitchell and Riley felt satisfied with the choice of weapons and equipment. They had prepared for the worst possible scenario, which they envisioned as making contact and/or having to escape and evade for several days before being picked up. Despite all the ammunition they carried, Riley hoped only three rounds would be fired — the three rounds needed to blind the surveillance cameras.

Riley checked his watch. Two hours until the Combat Talon took off. He considered doing one last verbal run-through of the mission but decided against it. He'd allow the men to spend this remaining time with their own thoughts.