The White Vixen (5 page)

Their only advantage now was that the Chinese didn’t know exactly where they were. The helicopters would have to deploy in a quick search pattern. Sure enough, Jo saw them split up, one heading away from them, toward the north, and the other turning toward the village. Once that pilot gained a little altitude, he would spot the truck and be after them. Jo figured they had half a minute or so before that would happen. Maybe enough time to get to the boat, maybe not. She hoped the other two commandos were ready.

Jamison had the Type 56 ready. Jo hoped they wouldn’t have to rely on it against the Hound. “You said two men at the boat?” he yelled, his eyes never leaving the nearer helicopter as it scuttled toward the village, climbing to about three hundred feet.

“Yes,” Jo answered, crouching next to him.
“Both SBS.”

“Good,” Jamison said, doubtless giving thanks that the troopers were Special Boat Squadron commandos, members of the Royal Marines’ elite Special Forces unit. It had been a tough go just to get this operation off the ground at all, given that the British commander in Hong Kong received only two days’ notice. Was it only three days ago she was on the beach in Singapore, enjoying a much-deserved leave? Jo forced those much more pleasant thoughts aside and kept her eye on the Hound. It was turning toward them.

“The bugger’s spotted us,” Jamison growled, bringing the rifle up. “How much longer to the boat?”

“Any second now.”

“Hope those lads are prepared,” he said, tracking the incoming chopper. “Joe Chinaman up there’ll make short work of us if they’re not.”

The truck was starting to slow as it rounded a curve. The shoreline here was rocky and barren, but the road led down to a small cove that was occasionally used by fishermen for relief from squalls. The Hound was closing on them, and Jo saw something winking from its port side pylon. “Incoming!” she shouted. To their terrified passengers, she yelled in
Mandarin, “Get down!”

The Chinese helicopter was perhaps half a kilometer behind them when it started firing. Jo couldn’t hear the sound of its gun over the roar of the truck engine, but she saw the dirt of the road tattooed as the shells traced their path, getting closer, closer. Jamison held his fire; the Type 56 would be useless unless the chopper got within a hundred meters or so, and by then…

The truck lurched violently to the right as the chopper’s gunner stitched the road right up to where they’d been an instant before. Jamison squeezed off a burst just before the truck sideswiped a boulder on its left. There was a screech of torn metal, screams from the Chinese woman and her nephew, and the wooden half-wall above Jo shattered to splinters. Covering her head, she caught a glimpse of the helicopter roaring overhead and peeling off to its right, preparing to come around for another run. The truck shuddered to a stop.

“Everybody out!”
One of the Taiwanese marines was leaning over the buckled sidewall of the truck, grabbing at Madame Zhi. Jo looked back and saw that the other marine was slumped over the steering wheel.

Jamison was firing at the chopper, and Jo thought she saw blinks of ricochets on its metal side as the agent found his target. Jo helped Madame Zhi over the side, then her nephew. “Here he comes!” Jamison shouted over the chattering of his weapon.

Jo knew her only chance was to get out and find cover in the rocks. Where were the SBS men? Had they taken the boat back out to sea, or been captured already? If they were gone, Jo’s little party was finished. “Come on, Brian!” she yelled at the MI-6 man.

“Get under cover!” he shouted back at her. “Bastards aren’t taking me again!” He took aim and squeezed off another burst as the Hound began its run, coming in at treetop level. Its gun started winking and this time Jo could hear its harsh clattering. She levered herself over the top of the truck bed’s wall and onto the ground. The marine and the civilians were huddled behind a large rock, and the marine had his MP-5 submachine gun out and aimed at the incoming helo, but held his fire, conserving his valuable nine-millimeter ammunition until the target got much closer.

The Hound jinked from side to side to avoid the fire from the ground, throwing its own aim off a bit. The chopper was perhaps two hundred meters off. Jo thanked God that it was lightly armed, with no air-to-surface rockets. But still, when it got closer, its heavier machine gun would overwhelm them. She scrambled behind the rocks, looking down at the cove where the British commandos should’ve been waiting.

Bullets were slamming into the truck and off the boulder, forcing the Taiwanese to pull back and hunker down. Jamison was still firing from inside the box, using its pitiful cover. With the light weapons they had, she doubted they’d be able to bring down the chopper.

Twenty meters away toward the cove, Jo saw a solitary figure rise up and bring a weapon to bear. Faster than her eye could follow, a rocket leaped out of the man’s launcher. A Stinger missile. Jo barely had time to turn her head and follow its flight before it slammed into the Hound and exploded. She dove to the ground and covered her head. The helicopter seemed to bellow like a prehistoric beast as it broke apart and crashed, hurling pieces of itself in all directions. Jo felt something thump into the rock just above her head. She opened her eyes enough to see a bloody hand lying on the ground two feet away. She swallowed and looked away.

Seconds later, she heard no more sounds of anything falling; instead, she heard the crackling of the fire consuming what was left of the helicopter, the crying of Madame Zhi, and the sound of boots scrambling over rocks, coming toward them. She struggled to her feet, keeping the pistol ready.

“Anybody hurt?” The British-accented English came from a man dressed entirely in black as he ran across the rocky ground toward them, his Uzi submachine gun at the ready. It was Colour Sergeant Powers, one of the two SBS commandos she’d left behind only what, twelve hours ago? They’d put her and the Taiwanese marines ashore just before dawn, then returned to their ship. Thankfully, they were able to keep the rendezvous for extraction; there’d been the possibility that harassment from Chinese naval units might delay them. Jo was never so glad to hear a voice in her life, but she knew they weren’t safe yet.

“Check the men in the truck,” she said. “We have two civilians. I’ll take care of them.”

“I’m all right,” Jamison shouted. Jo turned and saw him, half falling out of the bed of the truck. Blood was seeping through a cut in one sleeve of Sergeant Lu’s ill-fitting green PLA tunic.

“Have you been hit, sir?” Powers said, running to the agent.

“Just a crease, I believe. Check the bloke at the wheel.”

The marine who had made it out of the truck was already at the open driver’s door. Jo saw the grimace on the man’s grimy face and knew the other marine was dead. “Here, now, let me give you a hand,” Powers said gently. The British sailor and Taiwanese marine, men who had grown up half a world apart, then united for a brief time on this mission, began to work together wordlessly in a task dreaded by soldiers throughout history. Somewhere, a mother would want to grieve over her son’s body, and his comrades would risk their own lives to make sure she would get that chance.

Madame Zhi and her nephew had recovered themselves enough to be able to walk. Jo began helping them over the rocks toward the cove. The other SBS commando came up to help them. “Glad to see you, Captain Geary,” he said, addressing Jo by her U.S. Air Force rank.

“Not as glad as I am to see you, Lieutenant Smythe,” she answered. “We have three passengers to take back with us.”

“Colonel Jamison?”

“He’s all right, but he’ll need medical attention on the ship.”

“He’ll get it. Come along then, folks.”

“Lieutenant,” Jo said, “the Chinese put two Hounds in the air. If the one you shot down managed to get off a radio report of the pursuit, his partner will be here soon.
Any more Stingers?”

“‘Fraid not, Captain. It’ll have to be small arms till we’re out at sea.”

“I’ll use your radio and see if we can get some help.”

“Capital idea. Okay, folks, nice and easy now,” the lieutenant said to the Chinese as he helped them down to the black Zodiac boat, bobbing at the shoreline.

The boat was designed to hold a squad of fully-loaded commandos, so Jo had no doubt about its ability to handle her party of eight, including the body of the dead marine. Even though Jamison technically outranked her, she was in overall command of the mission. She had a lot to do and a short time in which to do it.

“Powers, let’s get everyone aboard on the double!” she shouted to the SBS sergeant, who was helping Jamison down the stone-strewn slope to the shoreline. The Taiwanese marine, kneeling near his comrade’s body, crouched at the top of the slope, waiting for Powers to return. The marine was a professional, though, and instead of watching the Englishmen, he kept his eyes turned inland, his weapon at the ready.

“Lieutenant, prepare to shove off the moment everyone’s on board,” she ordered.

“Aye, ma’am.
Radio’s in the box.”

Scuttling to the middle of the boat, Jo flipped open the waterproof box and turned on the radio transceiver, pulling the antenna upward with one hand as she worked the controls with the other. Finding the approved frequency, she held one earphone to her left ear and keyed the mike. “Dog Pound, this is Golden Retriever. Do you copy?”

A British voice crackled in her headphone.
“Golden Retriever, this is Dog Pound, we copy you five by five. What is your situation?”

“Retriever has the prize, plus two souls. We have one KIA. The rooster is awake.
I repeat, the rooster is awake.”

“I copy, rooster is awake,
we will have a chicken hawk at the ready, sent from Coop Two.”

“Our ETA is approx one-five minutes.
Retriever out.”

Three kilometers out to sea, the Royal Navy destroyer HMS
Cambridge
was waiting for them, and its radio operator was now alerting the frigate HMS
Cumberland
, some ten klicks further out, to put its helicopter in the air to support the extraction.
Cumberland
’s Lynx Mk7 helo could reach them in minutes.
Cambridge
normally carried a similar helicopter, but the quick deployment for this mission had caught it in the middle of extensive repairs. Fortunately for Jo’s team,
Cumberland
was in the area and its helo was fully operational. That additional distance would mean they’d be without air cover for an extra few minutes, though. She had to hope the other Chinese Hound would give them that time, but she had a feeling it wouldn’t.

“All aboard, Cap’n,” Smythe said as he scrambled past her to the stern. “Everything okay back at the pound?”

“Help is on the way,” she said.

“Right, then.”
Smythe pulled the crank on the Zodiac’s small but powerful outboard motor, and it purred to life. “Shove off!” Powers pushed the boat off the rocks and leaped over the bow as Smythe’s outboard bit into the water and began pulling them out to sea. “Hang on!” Smythe shifted the motor into forward, pushed the tiller hard to the right and twisted the throttle to full open. The boat swung sharply to port and headed out to sea, waves crashing into them as they challenged the cold surf.

Jo knew that the boat’s top speed might be twenty-five knots, perhaps thirty, but that was with a light load over calm seas. Now they’d be lucky to get twenty knots; struggling with the math, she estimated at least five minutes’ travel time to
Cambridge
. What was the top speed of the Lynx? Something around 180 knots; if the helo’s pilot had a decent fix on their position, he might be able to give them cover just before they reached the ship. So for a minute or two, they’d be on their own.

Where was that second Hound?

“What have they got in the air?” Smythe had to shout the question at her, even though he was only three feet away.

“One other H-5, like the one you brought down,” she yelled back. “They might be able to scramble one or two more.”

“Anything from the mainland?”

“Don’t know.” The nearest PLA Air Force base was about thirty klicks away. Jo knew from her hastily prepared briefing that the base was a mid-sized field that had a full squadron of F-6 fighter jets. She wasn’t worried too much about those; by the time the elephantine PLA bureaucracy figured things out and launched the fast movers, they’d be safely aboard
Cambridge
and in international waters to boot. No local Chinese general would risk an attack on a British warship on the high seas unless he received direct orders from Beijing.

There was one other possibility, though—and it depended on whether any PLA Navy units were in the area, and if the base C
.O. could cut through the red tape quickly enough to get a ship vectored their way. She was more worried about the remaining Hound.

For good reason.
“Incoming!” Powers screamed.

The second Hound had found them, no doubt helped by the funeral pyre of its companion. Now it was coming for them, still half a mile away but closing, only a hundred feet above the waves. The helicopter’s machine gun started to wink.

“Evasive action, Lieutenant!” Jo yelled. Smythe yanked the tiller, and the Zodiac yawed to starboard, breaching a wave and spraying everyone aboard. The Hound kept tracking them, and Smythe cut to port, but not too sharply, not wanting to risk the boat getting swamped. Sitting near the bow, Powers opened up with his Uzi, joined shortly by the marine with his heavier MP-5 and then Jamison with his Type 56. The Chinese weapon loosed a short burst before running out of ammunition. The MI-6 agent tossed the useless gun into the ocean. Jo picked up Smythe’s Uzi and tried to aim, almost an impossible task considering the Zodiac’s violent turns and the heaving of the swells, combined with the Hound’s maneuvering. She knew they’d have to be extremely lucky to bring effective fire on their target. The Hound’s gunner, though, would have a much easier task.