Not one of the two thousand men in the two ANGES— Alaska National Guard Eskimo Scouts — believed that the four-foot-diameter, eight-hundred-mile-long pipeline that snaked its way from Prudhoe Bay on Alaska’s North Slope through the majestic Brooks Mountains, over the Yukon River and down to Valdez on Alaska’s south coast, could be adequately protected. Neither did Joe Mell.
Joe wasn’t in the Eskimo Scouts, and Mell wasn’t his real name, but white men could never get Athabascan names right, so he called himself “Mell.” “Fucking Eskimo,” was what one of the whites had called him. Joe never forgot it, along with all the other insults. “All right,” he said, taking another suck of Southern Comfort, looking down morosely at his snow-shoes — he’d made them the traditional way, from birch, and used caribou rawhide for the lacing — so the pink noses thought he was a dumb Eskimo. All they saw was a native with no teeth left and a rubbery smile.
He took another drag at the Southern Comfort. What did they know? Pink nose big shots from the oil companies down south, coming up with their prefabricated houses to give to all the natives. “No problem, pops!” they’d said. “You just stick ‘em together.” Yeah — well the pink noses didn’t think he knew about Bethel town, far to the southwest, where the Kuskokwim River flows into the Bering Sea. The big shots had guys put all the prefabricated huts up in the summer, but come the winter they all started to crack and buckle. Joe took another belt of the Southern Comfort, swallowed, and grinned. Sod houses were still the best — had a soul. They knew the Arctic winds and ice. Sod houses didn’t fight the weather like the white man. Sod houses let their earth give a little here and there, and the wind understood. No crazy stiff doors either — only sealskin storm entrances that started way back from the house in the earth and angled up to keep out the snow. All white men weren’t bad, though. Or stupid. One, from the other side of the ice bridge— the other big country — had paid him in the Cold War. A lot of money and booze, with a promise of much more if the Hot War broke out. Joe was to break the long silver snake. It wasn’t a big pipe. All you had to do was wait for the next blizzard so there’d be no tracks found after and wrap a belt of hide about the four-foot-diameter pipe with the white package attached to the belt. You pushed the white button and you had five minutes — plenty of time to get away, even in deep snow, the man said. Then the rest of the money — U.S. dollars — would come. And whose country was it anyway? When some pink noses bought Alaska, the rest of the pink noses booed them, said it wasn’t worth anything. So how come the pink noses had come up in the thousands? It sure didn’t belong to the native people anymore. The pink noses from across the strait weren’t much better. They stopped the Eskimo people from walking across the ice to meet their cousins and took everybody off the big island because some big pink nose secret had been going on there. One of the pink noses from across the strait said one of their sailors, called “Bering,” discovered Alaska. Joe had known it was there all the time. Another thing he knew: the pipeline didn’t belong here. It was like a scar on the land, as if a beautiful chukchee woman had taken her k/k — blubber knife — and slashed it across her face. It was a desecration. But if you put the strap on the silver snake, would the fire despoil the land?
“No,” the Russian pink nose had told him. “Not at all. The fire will only burn the oil.” Then Joe knew the white men sucking the oil from the North Slope would have to stop. Those who had insulted his Athabascan forebears with filthy talk about Eskimos wouldn’t try to scar the land again — they’d know what could happen.
Joe heard the wounded cry of the land in the Arctic storm and knew it would not end until he had placated its soul, healed its hurt. Unhurriedly he put on his kamleika, the gut raincoat that once belonged to his father, and taking the hide strap and its package he crawled out through the sealskin storm trap and called the dogs, now like white lumps of sugar in the swirling snow. From his sod house through the village to the stretch of pipeline that bent in a long, gentle curve in the frozen valley of the Dietrich River on to the southern side of the mighty Brooks Range — the pink noses even gave their names to the sacred places — would take only half an hour. The silver snake would now be caked in an icy sheet, running alongside the wide gravel trail from Fairbanks in the center of Alaska to Prudhoe Bay on the Beaufort Sea. The pink noses called it the Dalton Highway. He took another swig from the bottle. Worst of all, some of his people had been traitors, had gone into the pink nose courts and palavered for money to allow the silver snake to despoil the land.
Joe looked intently at the dogs. Only the lead husky had turned and paid him any mind. They were tired and he was tired and he took another suck at the bottle then murmured to the dogs in the dialect of his parents, who had come from Galena far to the west. But the dogs didn’t know his parents’ dialect, as he only used it when he was drunk. Throwing the empty bottle away, he reverted to the dialect again, shouting into the wind, the words meaning “To hell with it. I’ll use the Ski-Doo!”
Unsteadily he pulled the starter cord at least a dozen times and fell over once before the Ski-Doo gave forth its crackling roar. It backfired several times before settling into its high-pitched whine. He told himself the Greenpeace noses would be as happy as he was, because they were the only pink noses who understood about desecrating mother nature. The Ski-Doo plowed into heavy drift, but Joe gave the throttle sleeve more twist, and the steering skis went straight through it. Dogs were scattering in the village as he whooped at them — an old man shouting at Joe, telling him that he must show more respect for the dogs. But Joe was already through the hamlet, snow-curtained birch slipping by him on either side of the trail he knew like the back of his hand. The irony of the whole situation was that Joe Mell was considered by the Siberian Military Intelligence “canvasser” as one of the least reliable of the half-dozen natives they had suborned and the least likely to succeed in the mission.
On Ratmanov Island more than two hundred SPETS commandos streaming out of the exits fired at the descending shapes as they became visible only a few meters from the ground. Had they been paratroopers coming down it would have been a massacre; the SPETS’ marksmanship with the AK-74s was highly accurate. They hit everything that had been used to weigh the chutes down. It took the white-uniformed SPETS, all but invisible against the snow, only two or three minutes to realize they’d been obmanuty—”had”—and, fearing an air attack, they quickly retreated to the exit/entrances like ants being vacuumed back into their deep hive, leaving the dozens of American chutes buffeted by wind and rain mixed with snow in the swirling blizzard now blanketing the island.
“Make sure the engineers have double-checked the exit/entrance seals,” ordered Dracheev.
“They’re already doing it, Comrade General.”
“Good! The Americans are obviously going to use their Smart bombs. They have deceived us into betraying our exit points. The chaff must have covered the approach of a reconnaissance aircraft.”
“Their Smart bombs cannot take out the Saddam entrances,” said his aide, but his voice betrayed more hope than conviction. The general asked his radar chief if there were any signs of another American air attack on its way. There were none. His aides crowded around him, the smell of sweat mixing with the oily odor of the tunnel complexes’ gun emplacements on rails behind sealed doors at the cliff face. General Dracheev was biting his bottom lip as he bent over the table’s map trace, computer consoles giving immediate zoom blowups on the screen whenever he touched any part of the island map. He was worried. The whole point of having made Ratmanov self-contained, self-sufficient, was so that it could survive without Novosibirsk having to risk vitally needed aircraft over the narrow strait. But now the American Freeman would know where the exits were, and he was bound to send in air strikes, though the heavy snowfall would work in Dracheev’s favor, effectively cutting the American flyers’ laser beams. Even so, the only exits Dracheev could now use with any reliability were the two emergency exits — R1, a quarter mile from complex one, at the midpoint of the northern half of the island, and R2, above complex two on the southern end of the island, the same distance from Dracheev’s control bunker. Two exits for up to two thousand SPETS.
It had the makings of a disaster. Dracheev knew that if he failed to hold the Americans until Novosibirsk HQ had time to reinforce the Siberian coastal defenses, it would be best if he stayed on the island rather than make a run for it aboard his chopper to the mainland, for he would almost certainly be shot for his failure. But then he had what he called his osenivshaya ideya— “brain wave”—born of the fear of what would happen if he didn’t hold the island — and from the deep anger he had experienced at being duped by the American Freeman’s fake paratroopers, a humiliation made worse for Dracheev by the fact that in addition to his regular troops manning the island’s underground AA network, he was answerable for the effective use of the SPETS, Siberia’s elite force.
“We don’t have much time,” he quickly told his aides in Ratmanov control. “We’ll use two emergency exits. Exit one for complex one, exit two for complex two.”
“Eto originalno”— “That’s original,” murmured one of the SPETS, but Dracheev did not demand an apology. He had made a serious mistake sending out the SPETS before he had visual confirmation that they were really Allied paratroopers descending and not dummies, and the SPETS had every right to expect him to correct it. “I ‘m confident,” he told them, “that the Smart bombs, while they may take out one or two of the exits the Americans have discovered, will not—”
“Samolyoty vraga priblizhayutsya!”—”Hostile aircraft approaching! Rising from Seward Peninsula.”
“All second-level plates are to be sealed!” Dracheev ordered. He meant each exit’s number two hatch, slotted in at the sixty-foot level in every one-hundred-foot spiral stair exit, had to be sealed like the hatches of a diving submarine, just in case any of the Smart bombs’ high-explosive charges were, despite the lack of laser beam accuracy, lucky enough to blow out the top Saddam seal.
Within minutes the bombs started to fall. The lights in Control flickered momentarily as circuits were broken and auxiliary generators kicked in. General Dracheev, his legs shaking involuntarily from the Smart weapons’ bombardment, turned anxiously and angrily to his aide. “The American flyer we captured. Do you think he knows what Freeman’s strategy is?”
“He hasn’t talked yet, General. He’s a tough customer. We’ve tried to…”
“Then try again!” snapped Dracheev. The aide nodded to one of the two SPETS nearby. “Anyone can be made to talk!”
“With pleasure,” said the SPETS who, on his way down the corridor, announced matter-of-factly to his colleague, “The general’s right. Everyone has their breaking point.”
“Even you?” asked the other SPETS challengingly.
“Yes. Of course. I couldn’t withstand what I’m about to do to that American bastard. You’ll see.”
Electronic monitors were telling General Dracheev that four of the manhole covers had been breached and that the other six should not have their secondary hatches opened, even after the air raid had ended, for fear of red-hot debris raining down the shaft.
“Then that’s decided it,” General Dracheev told his SPETS commando leader. “We only use the two emergency exits. Your men’ll have to move swiftly to get out in time—”
“To do what?” asked the SPETS commander. Red lights were blinking all over at the control center’s console, indicating that rock flour, thick in the air from the bombs, had choked off some of the air filters, overheating them.
Soon the red lights faded, the backup filters holding, and the duty officer informed him that all electronic indications were that the six exits he had decided not to use might be usable after all. Dracheev, however, would not be deterred from his plan. He never doubted for a second that an Allied airborne assault would now follow, but to use the six exits would be suicidal. They were almost certainly pinpointed by the Americans and would be among the first targets should another bombardment precede the Allied troop drop. Only this time, Dracheev told them, they’d outwit the Americans. To this end he called a hasty radio conference of the ten company commanders of the two SPETS battalions. He told the commanders, “The Allies’ll realize they cannot bomb us out, that no matter how many bombs they drop, ultimately they will have to use troops. In this, gentlemen, we have the overwhelming advantage, for when they try to dig us out they can’t be dropping bombs on their own men.” He turned to the SPETS commander, his tone crisp with confidence.
The SPETS commander, a full colonel, soon understood the reason for the general’s rush of confidence. Dracheev was good on his feet — a commander who didn’t need hours to ponder a problem and used the American general’s initiative as a spur to his own. The SPETS commander heartily endorsed the plan; it was brilliant and would cut the Americans to pieces. The colonel also knew that a citation from General Dracheev for the Ratmanov victory would slash his waiting time for an apartment in half. He told his battalion’s political officer, the Zampolit, that he almost felt sorry for the enemy.
Dracheev’s assumption was that the American general would attack soon after the bombing had shot its wad — and attack quickly. The American would know that every hour he failed to breach Ratmanov’s defenses was that much more time for the Far Eastern TVD to build up Siberia’s eastern flank. Some of the chukchee members of the SPETS — men chosen for their special knowledge of the area — didn’t like General Dracheev, as he was a Yakut from central Siberia. But even so they, like the SPETS commander, had to admit — grudgingly — that he was making it easier for them. It would be nothing more than a seal hunt: all you’d have to do after is go out and club them. American cigarettes, gold teeth, watches. Burial would be the hardest job of course; the American dead would be frozen solid. No good covering them up with the. snow; come spring the stench would keep even walrus away. Best thing, the Yakuts believed, would be to burn them, but General Dracheev probably wouldn’t allow that, fuel consumption being one of his priorities. So in the end the corpses would be left to the blue foxes and the murres. The birds’d clean them to the bone come spring. And there were the golden eagles from Alaska. A feast. For the SPETS the idea of American eagles eating American dead was appealing and spawned many a joke as they waited for Freeman to take the bait.
Freeman, standing in his blast-protected mobile-home HQ, was dwarfed by the wall map of the Bering Sea. He donned his reading glasses and contemplated the Diomedes halfway across the funnel, showing up on the aerial recon photos as white fists thrusting up through the ice. “I’m glad you’re here, Dick,” he said, turning to welcome Colonel Richard Norton, a solidly built, amiable, at times intensely serious, five-foot-eight logistics officer and New Yorker who’d been with Freeman in Europe. But there was no time to talk over old times. Freeman told the colonel that the Siberian commander wouldn’t be caught “with his pants down” twice. “Other problem, Dick, is half these jokers don’t know a damn thing about Arctic warfare. Like those poor bastards Washington sent up to the Aleutians in forty-two in summer uniform. No wonder the Japs were all over them. I told the quartermaster this evening to make everything ready for an airborne attack on Ratmanov, jump time an hour before civil twilight. Hell, he thought I was talking about some dame called ‘Sybil.’ Then he thought it was the end of the day. So I told him, first light—”
“Eleven oh six hours,” said Norton, taking his cap off, running his fingers through hair as gray as Freeman’s. “Sunset around seventeen forty-one?”
“Correct. Now, Dick, I go in with the airborne at civil and exactly one hour later — earlier if we radio or fire red flares—you come in with the marine choppers.” Freeman put the glasses back on, tearing off an incoming meteorological report on the fax. Looking down over his reading glasses at Norton he said, “Didn’t think you’d be too keen on a HALO.”
Dick Norton had a flashback to the time he’d been ordered by Freeman to fly in the back seat of an F-16B from Krefeld to Brest to hurry up air resupply from the French port for the beleaguered Fifth and Seventh American Corps and the British Army of the Rhine in the Dortmund-Bielefeld pocket. To this day Norton could actually feel nauseated just thinking about the terrifying night flight in the supersonic fighter. Hurtling through space and you couldn’t see a damn thing and it wasn’t nearly as smooth as it appeared from the ground. Everything shook. “I’m not too keen on any kind of jump, General,” Norton replied. “You clear this with Washington?”
“The mission? Of course.”
“No, sir,” said Norton, looking at the map’s order of battle clustered around Galena Field from where the marines would take off. “I mean you leading the drop personally?”
“Dick,” said Freeman, turning to the map, tapping the map, using his glasses as a pointer, “main problem is going to be the palletized drops — we’re going to need hundred and five millimeters. Now Rat Island’s big enough, but our guys are going to be spread all over it, jamming C-4 plastique in every goddamn crack we find. We’ll have to smoke ‘em out, same way we did with the Japs on Iwo Jima. Same situation here — they’re dug in deep. And Siberians haven’t surrendered a fight in—”
“Except for the weather,” interjected Norton.
“What?”
“Same as Iwo Jima — except for the weather.”
“Minor detail,” said Freeman, grinning.
“You know, General, it’s minus twenty degrees over that ice pack.”
“How do you know that?” asked Freeman, not disputing Norton’s assertion but intrigued as to how he knew the specific temperature on the pack. “I can read upside-down type, General. Remember?” Norton indicated the fax Freeman was holding. “Anchorage says the satellite cloud cover indicates twenty-mile-an-hour winds. That drops the temperature to minus forty-six.”
“Chilly,” said Freeman. Before Norton could object further, Freeman slapped his arm on Norton’s shoulder. “Dick. You see? By God, you’re the right man for the job. No one else in this godforsaken peninsula knows that — windchill factor.” Except every Eskimo, thought Norton. “Details, Dick. You and I know that’s what wins wars.”
“And strategy, General.”
“That’s my department, Dick,” said Freeman, turning to the map, slipping his reading glasses back on. “And God’s.” There wasn’t a trace of insincerity. His right hand swept across the Bering Strait. “Speed, Dick! That’s what we need. Now we know where all those rat holes are. I’m personally going to see every one of those blown up — then you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to drop high explosives down those rat holes. It’ll be surrender or the for them, Dick. White flag or beef jerky!”
“If there are SPETS on that island, General — and Intelligence suspects there are — there’ll be no surrender.”
“I know, Dick,” said Freeman, pausing solemnly. “I know. We won’t butcher them. I’m not a butcher. My SAS-Delta team’ll give them fair warning.” For several moments there was silence, broken only by the howling of the Arctic wind outside. “ ‘Bout two seconds. I’ve thought it through, Dick. I’ve tried to think of every damn detail, but I know it’s still a gamble.” He turned to look straight at Norton. “Ultimately all great victories are. Time’s against us, but I say, ‘Go!’ “
Norton nodded, which meant that though he saw the general’s logic and the military necessity as clearly as he’d seen the giant bergs on the way over from Europe — glinting like glass castles beneath the Arctic moon — he couldn’t share in Freeman’s enthusiasm. Never had. Freeman was a warrior to the bone: brave and unapologetic in his quest for glory. All Dick Norton hoped for was that he would be alive after the war, when he would be quite happy to retire, mind and body intact. He had fought in the snows of Minsk by Freeman’s side and did not doubt the general’s determination, and SAS and Delta were the best-trained to jump from high altitudes and make pinpoint landings. Even so he wondered how many would end up on the ice flow, and how they might be the lucky ones. The normal ratio, one that Freeman well knew, dictated that an attacking force must outnumber the dug-in defenders by at least five to one. But denied the luxury of waiting, the need for speed disposed Freeman to go in now with what he had — the 140-man SAS/Delta Force team. The Pentagon boys were saying Ratmanov Island was more than an ancient wrecker of ships — it was a career disaster waiting to happen.
In the predawn darkness of a blizzard, two long lines of SAS/Delta troopers, seventy in each line, made their way along the tarmac at Galena air base on Alaska’s Seward Peninsula toward the gaping hold of the C-141 Starlifter.
“Bloody lovely!” said Aussie, one of the seventy-man SAS squad. The column to his left was made up of men from the American Delta Force.
“What are you whining about now?” asked “Choir” Williams, a fellow veteran with Aussie and David Brentwood, the leader of the SAS force, most of whose troop of twenty men had been wiped out in the Moscow raid.
“Last week you were getting right tired of Wales,” said Choir Williams. “So the president and the prime minister say, ‘What can we do now to placate Aussie?’ and ‘ere we are!”
“Very bloody funny,” said Aussie. “Wales in Alaska. Should’ve known better. All set to go ‘ome. Back to Sydney — up to King’s Cross. Give those sheilas a bit of the old in-out. And where are we? Freezin’ our burn off in another bloody Wales. I’m cursed with bloody Wales.”
“Ah,” replied Choir Williams, his deep Welsh baritone barely audible now as the noise of the C-141’s pitch climbed. “You volunteered, laddie.”
“Musta been bloody drunk!” said Aussie.
“Anyway,” advised Williams who, like Aussie and the rest of the men lining up for the C-141, had qualified in the most gruelling Allied commando courses in the world, “you don’t want to go back to Sydney. All those girls. You wouldn’t know what to do with them.”
“Yes, he would,” called out another Welshman. “Aussie’ll screw anything that moves, ‘e will.”
“You oughta know, Jones,” responded Aussie.
“Yeah?” asked Muldoon. “What’s Jonesy like, Aussie?”
“Very nice,” said Aussie. “But too tight.”
“Watch it!” barked the SAS sergeant major. “Officer on parade. The man himself.”
A few turned to see Freeman, helmet down against the roar of the C-141 engines, and young David Brentwood, at five eight looking decidedly smaller than the general with whom he’d served on the Pyongyang raid.
One of the men in the Delta Force line noted that Freeman and Brentwood looked like father and son together, but it was an illusion created by the close attention Brentwood was giving his superior as they went over last-minute details. The other illusion was that Freeman was going to jump with them. He was certainly dressed for it, in full jump suit and helmet, wrist altimeter, and oxygen mask. But if Freeman, through ordering the decoding of a scrambled message from the president requesting him not to jump, had been successful in sidestepping Mayne’s directive, he had failed to avoid an outright order from Army Chief of Staff Grey who, like Schwarzkopf’s superiors in the Iran war, viewed Freeman as being infinitely more valuable directing strategy on the ground rather than risking his neck in combat. But Grey’s instruction notwithstanding, Freeman was determined to at least go up with the SAS/D force and stoke morale before the jump. Going over the additional infrared shots from satellite pictures taken before the onset of the blizzard, Freeman and David Brentwood had ringed each of the “rat holes” that Freeman had suckered Dracheev’s SPETS into revealing.
“Starting to snow again,” said Freeman. “Goddamn it! Well, we can’t wait, Brentwood. Another hour damn things’ll be all covered in fresh snow. Be one big white blanket over that island. Cover up the bomb scabs. Anyway, the moment we take off, Salt Lake City’s going to hit the holes with a final F-14 strike. Lasers’ll be chopped up by the snow, but they should get bombs near enough the exits to re-mark ‘em for us.” Freeman looked at his watch.”Tomcats should be halfway over the ice pack now. Remember: SAS out first, top half of Rat Island. Delta’ll take the southern half. Now our PVS-Fives—” The general meant the night vision goggles powered by a twelve-hour, three-volt lithium battery, “—are much better than anything the Siberians have, but they’ll be able to pick us up in civil twilight even if the snow keeps falling—”
“I know, sir,” acknowledged Brentwood, not meaning to butt in, but his adrenaline was up for the jump. “I’ve told everyone in SAS/Delta. Diamond glow recognition.” It was the foot-long Velcro diamond pattern that, like the inverted V of the Allied forces in the Iraq war, would distinguish friend from foe.
“Good!” said Freeman. “Then we’re all set.”
By now most of the troops in the two long columns, the first men in being the last men out during the jump, were inside the cavernous interior of the Starlifter. Last man in was Brentwood. Freeman was already walking up the center of the deck, nodding cheerily as the 140 men took their seats facing one another and began to buckle up. The plane’s engines reached fever pitch as it began its lumbering run down the tarmac. It was to take off and head eastward, away from the strait, to give the big C-141 time to gain sufficient height before it turned for the high-altitude, low-opening drop. The higher altitude would give the jumpers more time to steer themselves to the assembly points on the island, the PED — palletized equipment drops — scheduled to take place ten to twenty minutes after drop zone perimeters had been secured.
“You ready?” asked Freeman on the bullhorn.
There was a roar that for a second could be heard above that of the plane.
“Dumb question. Right?” hollered Freeman.
“Right!”
Freeman was walking down the center of the deck, holding onto the webbing net. “No need to tell you,” he told the paratroopers over the bullhorn, “how important this is. Those F-14s from Salt Lake City’ll keep the bastards’ heads down. Then we go in and whip their ass. I can assure you, gentlemen, that will send Novosibirsk a very clear message: ‘Back off! Before you all lose your ass!’ “
There was a chorus of approval and the stamping of para boots, which annoyed the air force jumpmaster intensely. The stomping was creating a minor dust storm inside the Starlifter.
“Well, Brentwood, we’ll have snow to contend with but least we won’t have the press. They aren’t gonna Vietnam me, Captain. All those goddamn liberal lap dogs in the press running around saying they didn’t lose us Vietnam — that the army did. Goddamn it, no one seems to realize we could have ended that war in half an hour. Two A-bombs on Hanoi would have done it. But we didn’t. We get any marks for that restraint? Not on your life. You know what would have happened, though, if those squealing bastards had been taken prisoner by the Commies. They would have wanted the U.S. Air Force to turn that place into a parking lot. Well, they’re not going to be allowed to do a Baghdad Pete on us. I’ve told the CO of that Patriot battery on Little Diomede to send that CBN son-of-a-bitch reporter and his Arctic fox headgear packing back to the mainland. They can all get pissed in Anchorage while we’re setting these Commie bastards straight.”
“Yes, sir,” said David Brentwood, remembering how a reporter once asked him, a thrice-decorated soldier, how he got used to it. You never did. The first moments of a battle were always as bowel chilling as the first time. Yes, you learned certain things, sensed when a firefight was more concentrated and more dangerous in one instance than in another, when there was twice as much noise as accuracy; you learned to husband your strength, ration it and not blow it all in the first few minutes; but you never got used to it.
“Vse gotovy?”—”All done?” asked General Dracheev.
“Da!”
“Kharasho!”— “Good! A little surprise for the Americans, eh?”
“Sir?” It was the air defense duty officer. “Bandits. Looks like F-14s. Coming fast from the south. No more than a thousand feet. Trying for the exits one more time.”
“Neuzheli? “— “Oh really?” commented Dracheev, with ill-conceived sarcasm. “I thought they’d be bringing the mail.” This got a good laugh from the SPETS commander. So even with the snow making it difficult for the F-14s to use their Smart bombs with their normal accuracy, the Americans would chop up the snow a little — maybe even buckle a few of the superhardened steel plates around the exits.
“They’re not stupid,” said the air defense officer, trying to regain his bruised dignity. “I mean this Freeman. He will realize that some of the exits have probably not been used. That the pilots won’t see them.”
“So?” said Dracheev. “He’ll send his men looking for them.” With that the Siberian general looked up from the dull red light of Ratmanov Control — a hundred feet of solid rock above him. “All the better then.”
The air defense officer was even more offended, resentment growing by the second. Dracheev had obviously confided his plan only to the SPETS. Although this was normal procedure— SPETS always insisted their operations be kept as secret as possible — it still rubbed the wrong way. “Who in hell do they think they are?” the air defense officer asked his subaltern. “The elite.”
In his sod house in Little Diomede’s Inalik village, the hunter, the high cheekbones of his Eskimo forebears catching the light of the golden hurricane lamp, civil twilight, before daybreak, still an hour away, puffed heavily on his walrus-bone pipe.”It’s a lot of trouble.”
“It’s a lot of money,” countered the CBN reporter.
The hunter took another pull of salmon jerky. The silence was broken only by the unsettling groaning of the pack ice off frozen Lopp Lagoon, north of Cape Prince of Wales. They could see the navigation light right on the point — the westernmost point of the cape, the wind coming straight off the flat ice of the lagoon in a soulful wail.
“Well?” said the reporter impatiently, holding his hands over the Sanyo kerosene radiator, its heat waves rising like a mirage in the hunter’s sod hut. “I haven’t got all day.”
“Cash?” said the hunter.
“Hey, you think I carry that kind of money round with me?”
“Yes,” said the hunter.
A professional smile creased the reporter’s face. “How’d you know?”
“I can smell it.”
“Shit you can.”
“Yes, I smell shit. But I smell money, too. Up here you don’t smell right, you the. What you see is important, too. When the-”
“Hey,” interjected the reporter impatiently. “Time’s racing, Jack. Have we got a deal or not? Five grand now. Five when we get back.”
The hunter was thinking. It had been a bad year. The walrus had come south in a heavy fog and gone past the islands before they knew it, so they hadn’t got the usual number to cut up and store with the murre birds — for flavor — in the frozen earth.
“You won’t be able to show any light,” said the hunter. “Those guys in the Patriot bunkers — they could pick you up on infrared.” He thought for a moment. “Course there’ll still be a lot of heat coming up from the rest of the huts after they evacuate us. So you’d be all right in here for a while anyways.”
“They wouldn’t be able to see the moving about in this snowfall,” said the reporter. “Cuts down the infrared signature.”
“Maybe,” said the hunter, caught out.
“There’s another way,” said the reporter.
“No,” said the hunter.
“What? You don’t even know the fucking question.”
“Yes I do. You want to know if we could hike across to Big Diomede.”
“It’s only two and a half, three miles,” said the reporter.
“We could get killed.”
“Everybody gets killed. You ever do it?” asked the reporter, fixing the hunter with a challenging stare.
“Sure. Used to do it a lot after Gorbachev — for a while.”
“So?”
“It’s not a walk on an ice rink,” said the hunter. “Pressure ridges push up against one another.” He used his hands, pushing hard against one another, to demonstrate. “Ice as big as buildings.”
“Yeah, and it can be flat, too.”
“And how about the infrared?”
“I told you — not if we go when it’s snowing, Jack.”
“It’s not a hike, you know. You can get—”
“You scared. That it?”
“Yes.”
“So am I,” said the reporter, pulling out a wad of hundreds. “I’d bury this stuff here if I were you.” He started counting. “How long will it take us — not right up on the island but off the ice floe — close enough in so we can hunker down — close enough to get some zoom shots of the airborne going in off the southern tip?”
“Four to five hours.”
“That long? It’s only two and a half miles, for Christ’s sakes.”
The hunter smiled. Here was an ignorant man. What did he think it was, a walk in some park? “Hey,” he said to the reporter, “you the guy who was in Baghdad?”
“Nope. But I’m gonna be just as famous, Jack.”
“How you gonna send your stuff?”
“This little baby,” said the reporter, patting a four-wire, direct satellite-link phone. “Even if I can’t get a video because of the friggin’ snow, I’ll be in by voice. Live. Let’s go!”
The hunter agreed because he doubted that the white man could hack it, even with all the special thermal gear. Out there on the ice — with the wind it would be in the minus fifties.
“If the ice gets too jumbled — we get a sheer cliff — we’ll have to turn back. I get half — five grand!”
“All right,” said the reporter. “All right. Let’s get there before it’s fucking over.”
“How do you know there’ll be an airborne attack?” asked the hunter, pulling on his sealskin boots.
“Hey, Jack, look at the map. Doesn’t take a friggin’ genius to work that out. ‘Sides, Freeman’s the gung-ho type. Know what I mean?”
“Impatient.”
“Yeah. That’s right.”
“Like you.”
As the C-141 turned north then westward, having gained HALO height, the men made final weapon checks. The 12.8-inch-long Heckler and Koch MP5K submachine guns were coveted by the SAS. With its nine-hundred-round-per-minute, nine-millimeter Parabellum bullets, the gun was referred to by the troopers as a “room broom”—ideally suited for the anticipated tunnel fighting. The weapon was also capable of a high, eighty-yard line-of-sight accuracy if used in the open. For the men of Delta Force, the weapon of choice was the M3A1 Colt.45 caliber submachine gun, some of its mass-produced parts honed down or replaced by hand-tooled mechanisms for greater accuracy. As a general rule, Freeman told Brentwood, he didn’t like the idea of two different ammunition sizes, preferring one that could be used by both SAS or Delta Force weapons.
“That’s why the Brits lost Crete,” Freeman told him above the steady thunder of the C-141. “Freyberg had troops from five different countries running around with everything from point three oh three to nine millimeter. Quartermaster’s nightmare. A lot of troops — Aussies and New Zealanders — ran out of ammo. Hand-to-hand fighting, a lot of it. Could see the Nazis floating down. Sky was black with enemy chutes. Clear blue sky. Damn! What a waste of fine paratroopers. Even with the ammo screwup it was a near thing. A turkey shoot — lot of Germans dead before they hit the ground. Germans almost lost it — until Maleme was taken. Convinced the German HQ never to put their money on an airborne offensive.”
“Christ!” said Aussie, picking up the general’s comment and turning to Choir Williams. “What the fuck are we doing here, then?”
“Ah!” said Choir with more bravado than he actually felt. “Not to worry, laddie. Rat Island’s not Crete is it? Siberians are hiding — dug in.”
“Oh, that’s bloody nice. Thanks for reminding me. I ‘d almost forgotten.” And then, before the Aussie’s fear could, like most of the men, force him to bear the rest of the flight in silence, he was seized by the habit that had made him famous throughout the SAS — and after the Moscow raid, throughout the entire British army. “Odds on,” he announced loudly, “that SAS’ll be first in!”
“In where?” came a voice shouting above the ear-drumming noise.
“In the fucking tunnels, you twit!”
“Ahead of us?” challenged a Delta Force sergeant from Brooklyn.”Gimme a break. We’ll have coffee on ‘fore you even find your hole.”
“Aussie knows where his hole is,” shouted an SAS.
“Don’t be so fucking rude,” said Aussie. “Welsh bastards! Come on, you lot!” He was looking across at Delta Force. “Where’s your fuckin’ esprit de corps? How about it, boys? As you Yanks say, ‘Pay up or shut up.’ Two to one we’re down first.”
“On the drop?” asked Brooklyn.
“No. In the fucking tunnels!”
“You’re on, Aussie.” Aussie whipped a stubbly indelible pencil from under his helmet and began taking the bets on a palm-sized notebook. “Right, mate. That’s the ticket.”
“Pounds?” asked Choir Williams.
“Pounds, dollars — U.S., not Canadian — yen, deutsche marks, but—” And now Aussie, watched by Freeman, adopted a Mexican drawl, showing his teeth. “—I don’ wan’ no stinking rubles!” There was a patter of laughter, quickly lost in the plane’s huge interior, the jumpmaster landing his boot with a mud on the decking to get everyone’s attention as he stood up and announced, “Get ready!” Automatically every paratrooper, despite his heavy pack, slid forward, seemingly effortlessly, to the edge of the folded metal seats, some making last-minute adjustments to their chin straps.
“Who is that joker?” Freeman asked Brentwood, nodding toward Aussie.
“Australian called Lewis,” Brentwood answered. “He’d make book on the sun not rising. Took a lot of bets before the Moscow raid. Before the target was known we were doing practice jumps over Scotland. Aussie was convinced we were rehearsing for Korea, not Europe.”
“Must have lost a bundle,” said Freeman.
“No.”
“How come?” asked Freeman, realizing the moment he’d asked the question what the answer was. After the Moscow raid there’d been hardly anyone left to collect.
Across from Brentwood the Delta Force commander was looking down his line. Though the SAS stick would be first out, he was making sure that every sixth man, assigned the 5.56mm M-249 squad automatic weapon, was strapping it tightly to the equipment pack. The SAWs would be fed by the new transparent plastic magazines of two hundred rounds so the shooter could see at a glance how much ammunition remained. In addition, several of the Delta Force men carried M-203 dual purpose rifle/grenade launchers with FETS — flare, explosives, tear gas, and smoke grenade packs.
Normally the jumpers would have been wearing the tried and trusted T-10 general-purpose drop chute, but the big twenty-eight-foot-diameter umbrella chutes couldn’t be maneuvered as well as the arching, rectangular MC1-1B chutes. The latter could be steered by pulling down the left-right riser bars above the jumper’s head, causing more air to spill on one side than the other, allowing the jumper to shoot forward at over four meters a second. In all the MC1-1Bs would make it aerodynamically a much more controllable drop, of the kind made by sports jumpers. The latter, however, as SAS/D instructors frequently pointed out, were unencumbered by 70- to 120-pound battle packs.
The red light was on. “Stand up!” yelled the jumpmaster.
“Stand up!” came the shouted response followed by a sound like a herd of elephants rising with planking strapped to their flanks. Normally, with the 120-pound pack, it would have been a lot louder but even with the QAP — quick attack pack — of 70 pounds, mostly ammunition, emergency rations, radio and grenades, it was still an effort for the 140 paratroopers.
“Hookup!”
There was sudden, tension-splitting laughter punctuated with a few catcalls. The huge rear ramp went down, and had it not been for the dimly lit interior, the jumpmaster’s face would have appeared as bright as a Day-Glo buoy. So used to the massed jumps of the 101st Airborne and the static line used during most drops, he had forgotten for a split second that it was a HALO jump — free fall. Each paratrooper would dive head first, falling at 130 feet per second until, no more than two and a half minutes from jump-off, each man would pull a rip cord at two and half thousand feet above the island, steering the double-ply nylon air foil canopy to the snow-covered target.
The green light was on.
“Go!”
The shock of the cold hit Brentwood’s face with the force of a body blow, and for a split second it was déjà vu, going down over Moscow, only this time the scream of the wind was louder, the cold already penetrating the double thermal suit, the oxygen mask fogging the infrared goggles momentarily. His arms were hard against his sides, his feet up behind him, forcing his head down to counter the tendency to spin. The air screamed like a banshee around the bulbous headgear. It was a third larger than the usual helmet in order to accommodate the starlight goggles, creating more resistance than usual. Now he was pulling his left arm and leg in unison, in tighter to his center line, the maneuver giving him left drift.
Far below him he spotted a flash of light through the goggles, light which he took to be the last of the Tomcat’s bombs, and used it as an aiming point. Several seconds later he felt the shock wave of the explosion hitting him. A fierce crackling invaded the echo chamber of his helmet as radio silence was broken by the C-141, General Freeman shouting, “Mission aborted… mission aborted… field…” The rest was a surge of static. What the hell? Brentwood knew that by now most of the SAS stick would be out of the plane, possibly even one or two of the Delta force. He looked at the altimeter, couldn’t make it out for a second, then saw he was less than a minute away from two and a half thousand feet. Then he glimpsed a bluish white dot, two of them, flitting by a thousand feet below him like tiny fireflies, and guessed, correctly, that it was one of the twin-engined Tomcats, probably on afterburner. It was split-second timing by the navy but cutting it a bit fine all the same.
Then the unfinished part of the message he’d received from the C-141 made sense, hitting him with the force of a high explosive shock wave as he saw orange pinpoints of light, like flashlights switching quickly on and off beneath the dim blanket of snow, racing up at him from the northern part of the island. The “field” in the radio transmit must be “minefield,” set off by the Tomcat’s bombs. The C-141 had broken radio silence to tell Brentwood and the other SAS already speeding down toward the island that Ratmanov had been seeded with mines. The whole island was a minefield. More splotches of light, white swellings on the infrared’s green background, confirmed it. Worse — by now the snow would have covered any footprints, giving no clue to the pattern of mines laid — if there was any — nor indicating the positions of the rat holes. The Siberians had had at least an hour to—
There was another surge of static in his helmet from the C-141. But now all he could pick up was “… abort… abort…” and all he could see was the snow field becoming wider and wider as he neared touchdown. Had the mines been scattered willy-nilly, or were they, in SPETS fashion, laid so as to funnel attackers into deadly triangulated COF—”cones of fire”? But no matter how the mines had been laid, David knew the Allied paratroopers — mostly, if not all, SAS — would find themselves unable to move, forced to fight and the where they landed.
For a split second David thought of increasing the leftward drift and heading out over the cliffs for the relative safety of the ice floe. He’d save himself, but he’d be no use to anyone else. The altimeter showed he was at three thousand feet, two thousand nine hundred… In three and a half seconds he’d be at twenty-five hundred. Pull the cord or drift eastward, away from the island?
He pulled the rip cord, heard the snap, felt the sudden deceleration, and tugged hard on the right toggle, feeling that side of the chute curl and brake as he went into a tight, controlled spiral, the sky around him alive now with lazy arcs of red and white tracer, the air exploding with the rattle and bang of AA fire, the screams as men died in the harness and the pop of flares adding to the cacophony of sound. Suddenly all was bright. A moment of civil twilight; then the flare dropped away from him. He could hear bursts of machine-gun fire like paper tearing. Quickly he paid out the fifteen-foot-long tether line attached to his equipment bundle, evening the pull on both toggles, his heart threatening to burst out of his chest. Below he could see long, black shadows piercing a white, flare-lit circle of snow.