“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?”