The “Snick” David Brentwood heard off to his right about twenty yards was no file cabinet shutting but a SPETS AKMS butt stock unfolding, extending the 7.62-millimeter submachine gun’s length from twenty-eight to thirty-five inches. Not as heavy as the AK-47, the Kalashnikov 74 didn’t have the heavier hitting power of the AK-47 but with less recoil gained greater accuracy.
The burst hit an SAS trooper before he touched ground, and although Brentwood couldn’t see the barrel flashes, he heard the heavy thump of the SPETS burst hitting the man, his body dangling, its radiant heat a shiver in David’s Starlight goggles in which green snow enveloped the man as he fell dead into the soft powder. The trooper’s chute, its flapping audible, still invisible to David, was dragging the man along through the snow in a tug of war with the anchor of his equipment pack.
Fifty yards away Brentwood landed softly, shucked off his chute, and within seconds was crawling, sweat turning to ice about his collar, using his boot knife to quickly probe the snowy ground in front of him for mines. He saw then heard a ragged series of orange flashes off to his left, the air reeking of cordite. A “Bouncing Betty,” a Siberian M-16A1 antipersonnel mine, had jumped, disintegrating five feet above the orange-flickering snow, the mine’s shrapnel whistling through the snow-curtained air. He heard an agonized scream somewhere behind him and saw a flare illuminating another chute coming down, the SAS soldier kicking frantically in pain, hands clutching raspberry-colored goo that had been his face. In the same light Brentwood glimpsed SPETS — three of them — forming a defensive triangle no more than twenty yards away at ten o’clock. Mentally he marked the spot but could do nothing for now until he reached his pack and unhitched the nine-millimeter MP5K submachine gun. In any case it wouldn’t be any good until he knew which way he could roll to avoid the return bursts. Feeling the ice-cold outline of the gun in its plastic wrap and its thirty-round “banana” magazine, he flicked the safety on the left-hand side to the three-round burst position.
A machine gun’s rip sounded left of him, grenades exploded, and there was a steady, low “bump-bump-bump” as SPETS triangles continued to pour deadly fire through flare light into the white forest of descending SAS troops farther behind Brentwood. He could see at least two troopers dead in their chutes and another torso, the white blur in Brentwood’s infrared goggles the man’s blood bubbling from the headless body. “Jesus — Jesus—” Brentwood said. Two others hit mines as they landed, snow erupting, covering the troopers like icing sugar, deeper granular snow peppering the collapsing chutes like hail.
Brentwood saw the black blob of a grenade coming his way, followed by an obscenity, but it crashed ten feet beyond him, and he lay deathly still as the uprooted snow peppered him, the grenade’s purplish-blue flash a jagged cross that lit up one of the SPETS it killed, giving Brentwood a start that he was so close to them. Another two were momentarily visible in the flash, and he fired two bursts. One SPETS flew backward like a puppet jerked off his feet, taking the full shock of the burst in his chest; the other man managed to get off a wild burst as he slipped on the snow that had instantaneously turned to ice in the heat of the explosion. Now another trooper, his body sagged in harness, hit the snow, the chute collapsing around him, when suddenly, having faked it, the trooper came alive, announcing his arrival with a long burst that ended with “… fucker!” in an Australian accent.
Figuring the dead SPETS must be within a safety moat around a rat hole — they’d hardly put themselves in the middle of a minefield but rather would have “sown” the area around the rat holes — David made a split-second decision: if SAS had screwed up, not bringing any MIC LICs — the 330-foot-long mine-clearing line or “hose” charges, cables packed with explosive charges to clear an eight-yard-wide swath through minefields during an infantry advance — then he’d just have to improvise.
Taking off his gloves he quickly reeled in the tether line that had been attached to the equipment pack. He froze as a chute flare popped high to his right; it wasn’t shapes they’d be looking for as much as movement. As the light waned, the flare drifting east over the high cliffs only a hundred yards or so in front of him, David lined up the six HE grenades. The first three had seven-second fuses, the other three, designated for “room service” by the SAS, only three-second ones. He waited for the next SPETS flare — they’d been coming at fairly regular intervals near where he and Aussie had hit ground. But now that David wanted to see one none came, and he realized that his and Aussie’s drop, and possibly a few others, marked the southern extremity of the drop over the northern half of the island.
Then a flare mushroomed a quarter mile north of them, its fierce incandescent light macabrely beautiful, the snow acting like a million tiny strobe mirrors, turning night to bluish white day, the dazzling effect belying the life-and-death struggle most of the SAS stick further north were now engaged in, having bailed out only seconds before the abort command from Freeman. David knew he’d have to make, as calmly and accurately as he could, six throws in as many seconds before the first grenade exploded. Six arcs, each shorter than the one before it, using his seventy-pound pack as a shield for the one that should explode nearest him, the overpressure from its V-shaped detonation, as well as its shrapnel, hopefully setting off any antipersonnel mines. It occurred to him he might not even be in a minefield at all but in a mine-free zone used by the SPETS as they’d back-walked to the rat hole entrances after having sown the mines. But if he was in a minefield and took one step forward…
He slipped off his gloves, flexing his fingers quickly to keep the circulation up long enough. Ten yards or so back of him, Aussie Lewis picked up a rush of movement on his goggles’ green background. His trigger finger slipped off the guard at the same instant that he saw the top of a diamond — another SAS trooper — at one o’clock, thirty feet away. Ten to one, he told himself, it was Brentwood — no clear image to go by, of course, just the infrared blur of helmet and white thermal jump suit, but Brentwood, as leader of the seventy-man SAS stick, had been the first out of the C-141. “You beaut! You little—” Aussie whispered, his voice drowned by an earsplitting roar and earth-shattering “crump” of heavy 120-millimeter Soviet mortars.
David Brentwood took a deep breath, exhaled half of it, held the rest and tossed the grenades — one, two, three, four, five, the fifth one going off as he let go of the sixth, dropping to the snow and pulling his equipment pack against his helmet as cascades of powder snow and fragments of rock pebbles fell on him and a sliver of white-hot metal passed through the thermal suit, gashing his right thigh. A second later he felt a burning sensation on his back — hot or freezing cold he couldn’t tell. It was lumps of snow, now ice, fused by the grenade’s heat.
Using the pack as a rest he fired two long bursts, tattooing the ground along the twenty-to-thirty-yard line of the grenades’ explosion. Only one more mine went off, with an almost disappointing “pop,” but it was loud enough for Aussie who, though further back, had his face pockmarked by splinters, his goggles scratched so badly they were no longer of any use to him. David clipped on a fresh magazine and was up and running straight into the rough canal-like fissure cleared through the snow by the grenades, firing from the hip, Aussie covering him, two SPETS rising out of “fucking nowhere,” as Aussie would later recount, off to their left, the telltale stutter and flame of their two AK-47s silenced in a long, angry burst from the Australian. The Siberian commandos fell face first “while fucking Brentwood — no fucking apology for my face — does a fucking Babe Ruth for the home plate. Lucky bastard’s first one to see a ventilator shaft, then a sealed-off rat hole. Crafty buggers had it protected under an overhanging rock ledge.”
It wasn’t as easy as Aussie made out, the truth being that when David tried to fire into the ventilation mesh, a ricochet from the titanium-hardened grate, its apertures too small for a bullet to pass through, almost took off his knee. While Aussie covered him, David ran ahead, snatched two grenades from the dead SPETS he’d cut down, their faces so black with camouflage paint that he could only make out their eyes, put the grenades against the mesh, and then shoved one of the SPETS hard up against the grenades and ventilator grate before he pulled the pins. The concertinaed explosion blew a grapefruit-sized hole in the mesh and had one of the SPETS’ carotid arteries spurting blood like a hose, making it slippery on the now snow-free rock.
“Thanks for shovelling my driveway, mate,” said Aussie as he and David dropped two tear gas grenades into the ventilator shaft.
It was of no use, for the exit had been sealed off at the sixty-foot level, besides which the ventilator shafts, being of Saddam design and built in the halcyon days of Gorbachev/German friendship, had no difficulty filtering out the tear gas. Aussie and Brentwood looked around for the rest of the SAS stick, but there weren’t any. At least fifty-six of the seventy had landed farther north of them in another minefield into which SPETS were pouring machine-gun and mortar fire from rocky enclaves on high ground. The SPETS were calling it the boynya— “butcher shop.” And it was still dark. Come civil twilight in another fifteen minutes the SPETS would have an even easier time of it, no longer inhibited by inferior night-vision goggles.
Surrounded by mines, the SAS would systematically be cut to pieces, as they were too near the SPETS for any close air support to help. Any strafing or bombing run would kill them as well as the SPETS. The terrible irony was that those SAS dropped farther north than Aussie, Brentwood, and a few others had made a textbook descent right on target having been guided by the heat-emission patterns seen through their PVS-7s. But of those fifty-six-odd SAS troopers there were now only thirty-seven.
They were no more than two hundred yards from an exit, one of the two hitherto unseen by Allied reconnaissance and designated by Dracheev as Rl and R2. But with the minefield between them and the SPETS they might as well have been two hundred miles away. A few had tried Brentwood’s method and had cleared a path, but here the SPETS heavy Vladimirov 14.5-millimeter fire was so concentrated and overwhelming, coming from over two hundred SPETS, that it seemed come civil twilight the SAS, and thus the Allied offensive on Ratmanov Island, was doomed.
South of the main body of SAS, Aussie, Brentwood, and two other troopers began placing C-4 charges about the double-armored cover of the sealed-off rat hole. With only ten minutes till civil twilight they knew their only chance of survival, let alone of doing any damage to the SPETS, was to penetrate the tunnel system. To make matters worse, the tear gas, albeit in weakened form after having been processed by the subterranean filter system, was being vented through the snow around them, adding to the eeriness of the place. For in the bitter, windswept blue of the cold, predawn light, it seemed as if sulfurous fumaroles were leaching up poisons from the earth’s violent interior.
Aboard the C-141 General Douglas Freeman was about to make one of the toughest decisions of his or any other military career. Twelve minutes to the first rays of civil twilight and Freeman didn’t hesitate, but the Pentagon and the president had, “advising” him to call the Ratmanov operation off but craftily leaving the final decision to him as “the man on the ground.” He wasn’t on the ground, but he knew what they meant: “You decide — you take the rap.”
The press, specifically CBN — how the hell did they know? Freeman wondered — had somehow gotten wind of the minefield catastrophe, and sniffing disaster in the air, reporters were collecting like jackals around the carcass of the White House, its authority bleak-looking beneath the low, leaden sky, its rose bushes forlornly naked but for traces of snow on the thorn. Press Secretary Trainor was swearing to get whomever was responsible for the “minefield” leak “by the balls”; he wanted a list of everyone who knew, from the White House ops room to C in C Alaska air command. Had anyone used plain language instead of the scrambler for God’s sake?
“No,” he was told — some CBN bastard was doing a “Baghdad Pete” on them.
“You mean he’s actually on Big Diomede?”
“Either that or close enough. Maybe Little Diomede.”
“I thought Freeman ordered that son of a bitch off?”
The aide, a bright young masters degree from Princeton’s International Relations program, was red-faced. “Ah, bit of a screwup there, Mr. Trainor.”
“Spill it, Simpson, spill it!”
“Ah — one of the Eskimos that came out on Little Diomede’s Evac chopper—” Simpson was looking down at some hurriedly scribbled notes. “Couple of hours before the attack. Well, far as we can tell so far, someone apparently saw the press credentials hanging around someone’s neck and figured it was the CBN guy”
“But it wasn’t!” snapped Trainor.
“Doesn’t look like it, sir. Uh, all rigged up in winter gear, snow flying everywhere around the chopper, they said — hard to see I guess.”
“Jesus! Jesus! Jesus! Who said?”
“Uh, Nome control.”
“Is it hard to count?” barked Trainor. “Why didn’t the son of a bitch in charge count the fuckers?”
“Maybe they did, Mr. Trainor. Guess no one was sure exactly how many were in Inalik.”
“In-a-what?”
“Inalik village. West side of Little Diomede. They’d already moved everyone down from the village on Little Diomede’s northern—”
Trainor was so upset, pacing back and forth in the operations room, young Simpson thought he’d have a stroke right then and there in the basement beneath the map of Siberia and the strait. Trainor raised his left hand in a fist, flattened it as if to strike the map, then suddenly pulled back, quietly fuming, holding his hand over his eyes like a tennis shade. “All right. So this son of a bitch is close enough to know Freeman fucked up. Close enough to see the minefields. How’s he getting the info out?”
“By phone, Mr. Trainor. A four-wire direct satellite hookup. Portable pocket-sized dish — unfolds to umbrella size apparently.” The aide paused, gulped, and continued. “We’re only getting sound bites. No pics.”
“Oh, that’s terrific, Simpson. That’s a big help. Whole frig-gin’ world’s hearing we screwed up—Freeman screwed up — but no pics. Beautiful. It’s worse with radio. People’s imaginations run riot. Think we’ve already lost it.”
Simpson had always been told by Trainor that you couldn’t hold back the truth if you had any hope of effective damage control. So he put it on the line. “Well, we have lost it, haven’t we?”
“The island, yes, but not the whole shebang. I mean—”
Trainor, for the first time in the White House, was at a loss for words. Young Simpson’s truth, like poisoned air, was quickly filling the whole room. Young Princeton had it right. If they’d lost Rat Island — the first game — the whole series could be lost.
Aboard the C-141—three Siberian SAMs had been taken out by the Patriots as they’d raced toward the big transport — General of the Army Douglas Freeman had other ideas, but he had only ten minutes till civil twilight — till, in the undressed phrase of Dick Norton, “slaughter time.” It was to be the most controversial decision in American military history: the kind of controversy that had followed his career from the night drop on Pyongyang to take out, in Freeman’s words, “Kim Il Suck!” to the Minsk front where he’d insulted the entire Soviet high command by insisting that they salute the Stars and Stripes before negotiations could begin.”Give the Alaska Air Command!” he shouted above the combined thunder of the C-141’s engines. “General Riley!”
Riley’s voice was crackling with static; even the most sophisticated electronics were prey to the vicissitudes of solar flare-driven northern atmospherics. “Riley here, General.”
“Colin. I want immediate FAE strikes. Coordinates one six niner zero three…”As Freeman was speaking, the mauvish brown screen display in the NORAD regional combat command at Elmendorf was flashing the status of all aircraft aloft in Alaska Command; the smaller green grids to the right listed, in descending order, weapon status, fighter, reconnaissance, and airlift mission schedules. In front of Riley the duty officer was bringing up the buffer zone signified by the map grids covering the Bering Strait from latitude sixty-six north to sixty-five south. On the five magnification Riley saw the position Freeman had given them for the FAE strike was on a midline running across Ratmanov Island near the eastern cliffs.
“That’s too close to our own men,” he told Freeman.
“Whole island’s too close to our own men, General. I want FAE strikes now. You’ve got — nine minutes.”
“I don’t know whether any—”
“I’m taking full responsibility.”
Riley had to gather spittle to talk, the terrible risk having made his mouth dry. “I know you are, Douglas. What I mean is that it’ll take five minutes or so to load up FAEs. We’ve got nothing up there carrying—”
“Then don’t waste time. Start loading, damn it! I want those airstrikes, Colin. Now!”
Freeman was off the air and relaying orders to Maj. Harold E. Morgan, leader of the Delta Force stick. “Goddamn it! Even from subsonic from Galena it’s less than a minute to Rat Island. What the hell’s the matter with him? All right, now listen, Harry. We’re going to keep circling in this big bird till we see the FAEs. Soon as the flames the down — which won’t be long in this blizzard — you boys go. Don’t bother looking for SAS, they’ll link up with you soon as they can. Go for that exit the Tomcats’ve reported.” He pointed to the circled position on the map. “It wasn’t on the photo recon. Must be one they had up their sleeve.”
“Yes, sir,” said Morgan, knowing what the general had meant by not “looking for SAS.” It wouldn’t only be a waste of time; there might not be many left if the fuel air explosive — the deadlier cousin of napalm — spewed out anywhere near them. In any case, Morgan wasn’t about to judge Freeman for using the tremendously high overpressure created by an FAE to detonate mines so close to his own men. The court of public opinion would put him in the dock soon enough.
“Sir,” said the Starlifter’s pilot, calling out to Freeman. “Elmendorf’s reporting Bogeys rising from East Cape.” It was the Siberian side. “Look like Fulcrums.” The Mikoyan-Gurevich 29-Fs were the piece de resistance of the Siberian air arm. As Major Frank Shirer, now held prisoner by the SPETS, had found out over the Aleutians, the eighteen-thousand-pound thrust of the twin Tumansky R-33Ds-powered Mach 2.8 fighter could put the Fulcrum into a near-vertical climb position, attain a hammerhead stall/tail slide, evade enemy radar, and come out of nowhere with six deadly pylon-mounted Alamo air-to-air missiles and a drum-fed thirty-millimeter machine gun sheathed beneath the left wing.
“Then by God,” said Freeman, “Novosibirsk must be worried to risk their air force. Is Galena intercepting?” Freeman asked the pilot.
“Affirmative. F-18s. And Tomcats—’fingers four’ from Salt Lake City. They’ve been refueled midair — flying protective screen for the carrier.”
“Good,” commented Freeman.
The Starlifter’s engineer didn’t agree. “Gonna be like the Fourth of July up here.”
No one answered. He was right. And there was the danger of collision with everyone flying on instruments in the bad weather and on radio silence as much as possible; the chances of slamming into someone else were high. Even so, it was nothing compared to the risk the SAS on the ground faced if the pilots, dropping the FAEs, weren’t on the ball.
“You reached anybody down there yet?” shouted Freeman.
“No, sir,” replied the copilot. “Siberians are jamming everything. You’d need land lines to evade that lot.”
Freeman said nothing; he didn’t have to. If the SAS weren’t informed of the impending FAE drops the risk to them was even higher. If the FAEs missed them and he secured the island with Delta Force he’d be a hero, but he knew that while victory would have many parents, defeat would be an orphan — his. The president and the Chiefs of Staff were right — it was his responsibility. It came with a general’s pay.
The SPETS were no longer interested in Shirer. Any information he could give them now was null and void with the SAS trapped and about to be wiped out in the dawn’s early light. Nevertheless, the SPETS resented the American’s stubbornness in refusing to tell them anything but name, rank, and serial number. It transcended all common sense. Everyone broke sooner or later, and if you didn’t, then you outraged your captors’ assumption of omnipotence. The SPETS had orders from Dracheev not to kill the American ace Shirer, and they saw the sense in this, for when the Allied commandos failed to take Ratmanov, Shirer, whose nickname in the Western press was “One-Eyed Jack,” might be useful in a prisoner exchange. Americans were soft — always willing to trade five of yours for one of theirs.
“Last chance,” the SPETS corporal told Shirer, who was tied to a metal chair near the base of one of the ventilator shafts. “Why do they call you a one-eyed Jack?” The corporal’s English was impeccable.
The other SPETS looked at the corporal, switching to Russian. “Why are you asking him that? You know he used to be one of their Air Force One pilots. They wear the black patch on one eye so if there’s a nuclear airburst and everybody else on the plane is blinded, the pilot still has one good eye to fly the instruments. We know that — what the hell are you wasting time for?”
“I didn’t know,” the corporal answered him in Russian. “Bastards think they’re tougher than we are. Need a lesson.”
“So give it to him. But let’s hurry, eh? It’ll soon be twilight. I don’t want to miss out on the fun.”
“You won’t. Here, hold him steady!”
The corporal unslung his AK-47, rested it against the far side of the ventilator, and pinned Shirer’s arms even tighter against the chair.
“That’s it,” said the other SPETS, and took Shirer by the hair, pushing his head back hard on the top of the chair so that Shirer was forced to look up at the heavy, steel-reinforced roof of the ventilator tunnel.
“Look at me!” he commanded Shirer. Shirer, his face contorted by his previous beating and bruised from the scrape against the canopy when he’d ejected, glanced defiantly at the SPETS. He wasn’t going to tell them squat about Air Force One. In one quick movement the SPETS slipped the ballpoint pen from his pocket and drove it into Shirer’s eye.
Shirer was screaming, but the SPETS’ voice was louder, reverberating around the ventilator shaft. “That’s why you’re called one-eyed Jacks.” Grinning, the SPETS looked across at the corporal, who was slinging on the Kalashnikov. “His flying days are over, Comrade.”
“C’mon!” said the corporal impatiently. “You’ll miss the party.”
The “party” had already started in the blizzard over Ratmanov Island as F-18s, their Litton inertial navigation system and Martin Marietta AN/ASQ-173 laser spot tracker and forward-looking infrared giving the Hornets the edge above the blizzard level where the Fulcrums had to pursue them if they wanted to engage. Below, in the blizzard itself, F-15C Eagles on afterburner went into the furball as other MiGs tried to take out the big Starlifter, which was now opening its ramp once more. Freeman, the first man in the Delta Force stick, cinched the straps holding the Winchester 1200 modified riot gun to his pack, its perforated heat shield already frosting under the plastic. Freeman quickly wrapped another layer of waterproof camouflage sheet about it to prevent the four flechette cartridges and the slugging shell in the chamber from getting too cold. If the FAEs did the job properly, he wouldn’t need the flechettes until he got inside the tunnels, but a slugging shell, which could go through an engine block at three hundred yards, might come in handy on the already bomb-rattled rat hole covers.
“General,” Harry Morgan advised him, the major’s voice whipped away by the slipstream, “you’re not supposed to be leading, General.”
“You have any objections, Harry?” Freeman shouted, one hand on the webbing net by the door as they hit unstable air, the other hand busy tightening the oxygen mask before the helmet came down.
“Hell, no, General, glad to have you along. But Dick Norton told the that I should remind you that General Grey—”
“General Grey ordered the not to lead the drop!” Freeman shouted against the wind and roaring crescendo of the Starlifter. “Now did I lead the drop, Harry?”
“Well, not technically I guess. The SAS—”
“Right. Major Brentwood led the drop. Hell, I’m just followin’ up the rear. Besides, what kind of commander would I be, sending men down into that without going myself?”
“Yeah,” a Delta Force corporal told his buddy down the line. “But he won’t be the one at the fucking barbecue!”
“Don’t worry,” his buddy told him. “Jumpmaster tells the Tomcats are coming in with those FAEs. They can land on an angled deck in the middle of the fucking night, man. They can drop those FAE babies just where they want ‘em. Like in Iraq.”
“Iraq! Those mothers were dug in miles from us. These fuckers are only a coupla hundred yards from those limeys.”
“Don’t worry. Our carrier guys are used to putting those birds down on a postage stamp. They’re not gonna screw up.”
The Tomcats didn’t screw up. Coming in low, wings fully extended for maximum stability, they risked lower speed and more vulnerability to the Siberians’ missile and gun AA fire. The snow was now falling only lightly, and the predawn darkness above the island was filled with what seemed to be the crazed patterns of contrails from wing tips and missile stabilizers in a cacophony of sound that made it all but impossible for the Tomcats’ RIOs and pilots to hear one another. Though lighter, the snow still segmented laser designator beams so that the Paveway conversion nose assemblies attached to the FAE pods of jellied fuel could not be taken advantage of. The pilots had to rely as best they could on wind-vector corrections to aid the computer in making the low-level drop. Wind shears, always unpredictable around carriers as much as above airports, were especially so around the island, where constantly shifting pressure ridges changed gusting north winds by the millisecond. The first two FAE pods tumbled, textbook perfect, close to the cliffs, the great, rolling vomit of black-edged flame consuming at least half-a-dozen SPETS’ heavy machine-gun positions, roughly twenty-five men in all, and drowning several elevator shafts in a river of flame. Dracheev’s northern complex could no longer be garrisoned. More than five hundred SPETS beneath were now directed south to the midline where most of the SAS had landed and were now in imminent danger of being wiped out by SPETS clustered in the rocky enclaves about the hitherto unknown R1 exit.
Despite increasing, almost hysterical AA fire, the second Tomcat released its single 12,573-pound “Big Blue 82” fuel air explosive mixture of gelled ammonium nitrate, aluminum powder, and polystyrene soap. The canards afforded it some stability in the fierce wind gusting about the cliff tops, but not much. A hundred feet above the minefields, its cloud detonators released, allowing the slurry of gelled explosive to blow out of the casing; it became a vast aerosol, or chemical mist, over the snow.
At twenty-three feet above the ground the cloud detonators ignited the now lethal explosive/air mix, wind gusts having pushed it sharply westward. The vast “in-curling” flame, over two hundred yards long and over a hundred yards wide, immediately killed over forty of the fifty-six SAS.
It was not the FAE’s ferocious heat or terrible overpressure or the detonation of all the mines in the area in one cataclysmic upwelling of black, rock-streaked snow that killed the SAS commandos, but asphyxiation. The flames instantly consumed all oxygen in the area, and in the process sucked every last bit of air from the trapped men’s lungs. Over seventy-three SPETS suffered the same fate, the heat and shock wave felt through the canopy of the following Tomcat that, dropping its Big Blue, killed another eleven SAS troopers, leaving only sixteen scattered further inland and several, like Brentwood and Aussie, to the south.
The second FAE did not kill any more SPETS but flooded ventilator shafts with fire, so that now more than a thousand SPETS were assembling beneath the Rl shaft. Their imminent exit was due not only to the befouled ventilation system but to their desire to combat the troops that were certain to be aboard the more than one hundred specks now showing up on Ratmanov radar — Apache gunships preceding a larger armada of over 15 °Chinook CH-47 troop transport choppers. Dracheev was in a rage; not only had this Freeman had the courage to call in FAEs near his own men, so destroying SPETS minefields, but had used the FAEs to clear landing space for a helicopter assault. Well, it wasn’t over yet.
“Flames still visible,” reported the Starlifter’s copilot.
“Okay,” acknowledged the pilot. “We go around again. Tell Freeman.”
“Roger.” There was an explosion at two o’clock high — either a Fulcrum or an Eagle, it was impossible to tell.
The next time around the flames had abated, partially because of the snow and the arrival of a bevy of rain-heavy squalls coming in over the pressure ridges in excess of a hundred miles an hour. Freeman was first out, diving toward the now-blackened drop zone. The rest of the Delta stick came behind him, hoping that the squalls would pass well over the island; otherwise they’d have one hell of a job steering into the cleared area. Two Delta men were already dead, one sucked into the starboard engine of a MiG-29 going down, the other man struck seconds later by the same plane’s canopy, his skull crumpling the cockpit’s Perspex, momentarily turning it cherry red before the froth of brain was consumed by the blizzard. Another MiG-29, having broken radar silence in the final moments of his attack, and frustrated by not having found the big Starlifter, glimpsed the unmistakable wing sweep of a Tomcat. But the Tomcat vanished before he could fire an Alamo or Apex.
Freeman was pulling hard, lowering the left toggle, going into a spiral. The drop point he had picked up in the eerie blue of civil twilight held three charred bodies — SAS or SPETS he didn’t know, but at least it would be clear of mines. There were several bright orange flashes a mile or so east of the cliffs and then a roll of explosions echoing off the cliff face: three Chinook choppers hit by Rat AA fire.
Freeman’s landing was softer than he’d braced for. His right foot passed through the black crackle of one of the corpses. The only solids left by the blaze were bone, ammunition clips — their rounds set off by the fire — a partially melted Kevlar helmet that told him it had been a Special Air Service trooper, and a Heckler and Koch submachine gun nearby. The air was pungent with the sickening-sweet odor of burnt flesh. Freeman saw his equipment pack in a black, oily pool where SAS and others — he guessed SPETS — lay charred beyond recognition, one tightly stretched, leatherlike face staring eyeless at the sky.
Already Freeman was under fire, the pyrotechnics of intercutting red and white tracer against the Prussian blue of a now spectacularly clear Arctic morning mixing with orange streaks from the marine expeditionary unit’s assault Apache as 2.75-inch-diameter rockets, fired in salvos, exploded against the high, dug-in cliff guns, followed by the skittering orange/red detonations of the ninety-five-pound anti-radar Hellfire missiles. In the distance writhing, smoking, umbilical trails of red-hot spent casings spun down from the Apaches’ 750-round-a-minute, belly-mounted Hughes gun, adding to the deadly kaleidoscope of colors passing through and blending with one another against the vast bluish-white tumble of the ice-bound strait — the thin squiggle of Siberia’s mountainous coast just visible twenty-five miles westward.
The CBN reporter on the southern tip of the island, two miles south of where the FAEs had scoured out a safe landing zone for Delta Force, was on a high, getting pics now as well as the clearest sound bites he’d ever heard, better than anything he’d gotten in the Iraqi war.
A wounded SPETS snapped off a burst in Freeman and Morgan’s direction. Having shucked his chute, Freeman instinctively went on his belly, reaching in the black ashes of one of the corpses for the dead man’s MP5K. The gun fired, and the SPETS rolled into Morgan’s burst, shuddered, and lay dead even before the white flecks of his overlay, torn out by the nine-millimeter Parabellum, had fallen to the ground.
Freeman, the MP5K cradled in his elbows, began a fast belly crawl toward his pack ten yards in front of him when he saw two SPETS, one hauling a light machine gun, its bipod swinging, momentarily silhouetted against the azure sky at the cliffs edge, the latter’s sharp black thrust of rock clearly visible now the snow had been melted by the FAE’s explosion. Freeman fired again; now Morgan was close in beside him.
The SPETS made it across the gap in the rock, splinters of basalt flying high, catching the sun. Freeman patted the MP5K he’d dug out from the ashes. “By God those Krauts make ‘em good, Harry.” But now the gun’s magazine, he knew, was nearly empty, and only a yard or two from the pack he used the tether line to bump it over a pile of shale, tearing out the Winchester 1200. Knowing he had the lead slug in the spout, he told Morgan to lead. The submachine gun was better able to sweep the SPETS’ position than Freeman’s lead slug, which was intended for steel doors and the like. The Delta major clipped in a new mag.
Having seen the Delta Force landing, Brentwood and Aussie and two other SAS had intended to join them, but with a sprawling half mile of snow, no doubt mined, between them and the Delta drop zone, the best the three SAS men could do was to try to work their way up along the line of the cliff where there were no mines but plenty of SPETS.
The idea was quickly abandoned, however, upon their sighting the MEU’s choppers coming straight for the cliffs, albeit on a vector a hundred feet or so below the top of the seventeen-hundred-foot-high cliffs. Once they saw the choppers — AH-64 Apaches out front, the cliff taking a lot of hits, much of the shrapnel whizzing above them — the SAS men knew the chopper force, despite all the best intentions in the world, could not avoid overshoots of friendly fire. The choppers were forcing the SPETS aboveground to keep their heads down — likewise the few survivors of the SAS, the air now literally singing with warhead fragments. The whole idea had been for Norton and the marines to come in and secure the island after the SAS-Delta Force had “cleared the rats’ nest,” in Freeman’s happy phrase.
“Little ahead of schedule,” said Aussie wryly, keeping his head well down, waiting for the marines to sweep in. “Hope to Christ those leathernecks don’t blast away at us.”
Aussie wasn’t alone in his estimation of the operation. A quarter-mile north in Freeman’s drop zone, Brooklyn, another trooper, declared the operation “FUBAR”—fucked up beyond all recognition — as he hunkered down by an ice-veined rock a hundred yards from the Rl exit that Freeman and Morgan were now moving toward, Morgan calmly ejecting one mag and inserting the other in a smooth, three-second change that would have done any drill instructor proud.
The approaching choppers were no longer the size of gnats but football-sized as they began to rise for the final “hop stop” over the jagged lip of the cliff tops into the big FAE-cleared strip now occupied by Delta and being fiercely contested by SPETS who were oozing out of the R1 exit at an alarming rate. In fact, thanks to the FAE’s ancillary benefit of having overwhelmed the ventilator filters, there were still over a thousand SPETS filling the tunnels leading to the bottom of the R1 shaft, eager to join their comrades above.
But the SPETS heading for R1 were now the victims of their own ingenuity, for to use R2 would be to split their forces, the southern contingent boxed in by the minefields they had sown on the lower half of the island to help trap the enemy paratroops. General Dracheev, although surprised by Freeman’s coldblooded daring in ordering the FAE drops though it risked the lives of his own men, now almost wished that Freeman had ordered in more FAE strikes to the south to clear a wider defense area for his own men now that R1 was so overcrowded. SPETS were pouring out into the thirty-foot-diameter rock basin that bulged protectively from the exit on the landward side of the cliff.
A Delta Force spotter, fifty yards to Freeman’s left and on slightly higher ground, saw the SPETS come streaming out and tried to get a radio man to tell Freeman he’d seen at least thirty of the enemy exit in just over a minute. The spotter killed three of them before he’d been forced back from higher ground by fire from an RPK 7.62-millimeter light machine gun, too far away to toss his grenades. But the SPETS jamming was still effective, and the radio man couldn’t get the message through to Freeman. Instead, a runner was dispatched — and cut down before he’d gone five paces.
The frustration of the seventy-plus SAS/Delta Force survivors, of men trained for lightning-fast IKO — in-kill-out — action, but who, because of the minefields, had been bottled up, forced into open-ground warfare without the assist of heavy mortars and the like, manifested itself in Freeman. He now saw the choppers getting smaller, Norton having presumably seen that despite all the noise and thunder of ordnance being thrown at the cliff face, most of the dug-in AA batteries were still intact, putting up a wall of lead that had already created seven gaping holes in the chopper line of attack. Norton had obviously decided that to take the marines in would have been nothing less than suicidal. It was a call he’d have to square with Freeman, if Freeman survived, but it was his call.
“Two oh three!” yelled Freeman, his shout immediately attracting AK-47 fire, albeit inaccurate, the SPETS probably on the move deploying a defensive line. Morgan and others responded to their fire immediately in an enfilade of semiautomatic fire erupting from the C-shaped Delta Force line, whose northern and southern arcs spread out left and right of Freeman. This time the sustained firing of Delta Force successfully covered the ten-yard dash by one of the two Delta men equipped with an M-203, in effect an eleven-pound M-16A2 rifle with a circular-ribbed, forty-millimeter-diameter grenade launcher — a replacement for the old M-16A1’s forestock — with the 5.56-millimeter mag serving as the handgrip when pulling the trigger of the launcher. “You figure that basin of theirs is about thirty, fifty yards from here?” Freeman asked the commando.
“Split the difference, General — forty.”
“Suits me, son. Lob six of those babies right in there. Start with HE and alternate with smoke and tear gas canisters. One after the other, son, quick as you can and we’ll have a fuckin’ rat trap sooner’n you can fart!” Freeman turned to Morgan, who was firing another burst on the other side of the M-203. “Henry, get your flank ready. Hand signals. Gas masks on. We go on ten.”
“Go on ten. Got it.” A loud bang stunned Freeman, the SPETS bracketing them with heavy mortar, and even as he was signalling the crescent of Delta men on his right to ready for an attack on ten, he couldn’t hear anything but buzzing in his ears, as if they were covered by a mass of wasps. Then he lost sight of his men, a thick cloud of tear gas enveloping both Delta flanks — from where he couldn’t tell. Through the buzz he heard the crash of the first grenade in the basin, said, “Good shooting!” but couldn’t hear himself, and was struck by the terrible thought that the SPETS, many of whom he knew were trained in English, might have picked up his shouted commands. Whether the tear gas fired at them had been a coincidence or was their own, backblasted by a change in the wind, he couldn’t tell. Either way he knew he had no choice. He heard a second explosion, this one clanging, the HE grenade shrapnel ringing in the rock basin. There were screams of men hit, his or theirs he couldn’t tell. Another grenade went off, then more — coming from the SPETS. He tried to look through the smoke but could see nothing. Next moment it cleared. Morgan fired, and there was a soft, red explosion — blood — no more than twenty feet away. The SPETS shooter slumped, not making a sound, his nose and right cheek missing. Freeman brought his wristwatch close to his face: nine seconds. Grasping the Winchester tightly he yelled, “Go!”, the sound of his voice coming to him as if in the distance, through a long pipe.
La Bataille du Bassin—The Battle of the Basin, as the French papers were later to describe it — was not, as the headline suggested, some vast, sprawling engagement in the Arctic but it was fierce and unyielding to the seventy-plus Delta/SAS men who charged, following Freeman, through the tear gas screen to engage the enemy in a swirling, smoke-filled cauldron of firefights. The sounds of the battle reverberated off the rocky amphitheater as Americans, British, and Siberians closed hand-to-hand after exhausting their magazines and when the attacking Delta/SAS Force was so near the Siberians that further fire endangered their own men.
Morgan and Freeman were side by side as they reached the rocky basin’s rim. Freeman had no option but to fire the lead slug, a metal projectile punching through three SPETS in the congested basin, blowing holes the size of sledgehammers and sending flesh and bone flying as if they themselves had exploded. Before the third SPETS fell, Freeman, a formidable sight coming through the haze of battle with his shotgun, had already pumped — Delta hands eschewing semi-automatic shotguns because of their proneness to jam — one of the four flechette cartridges into the barrel and fired, then another, then another— in all, sending out 180 grek- or polyethylene-bedded steel darts in an expanding cone that killed at least six SPETS outright, injuring another half dozen or more.
Seven Delta Force fell under sustained AK-47 fire from the SPETS who, a moment before Freeman fired, had been a compact mass about the R1 exit. A shouted order from among the SPETS preceded the closing, or rather the attempted closing, of the R1 manhole. But by now another Delta commando had fired his lead-slug-loaded shotgun from only ten feet away and with a deafening ring, akin to the sound of some enormous bell being hammered, the steel manhole cover, once cold and therefore undetected and untouched by the Allied infrared guided aerial bombardment, was now billowing smoke like some fumarole.
The warmer air of the hundred-foot-deep tunnels streaming through the ragged, baseball-sized perforation blown out by the Winchester’s slug immediately created a fog as it hit the Arctic air, adding to the confusion of the smoke-filled basin. Freeman went down, the victim of a SPETS stun grenade concussion, the Winchester clattering on the R1 cover. Brentwood’s small band of SAS survivors breached the basin’s rim to the right.
“Medic!” Morgan shouted, and then died, lungs pulped to a pink mass by an AK-74 burst at near-point-blank range. Brentwood evened the score, emptying a mag into the SPETS, punching him back into other comrades falling about him. Not pausing for a second Brentwood popped one, two, three grenades down through the hole in the R1 cover, the thumps and clanging of the explosions sending ricocheting metal zinging about amid the screaming and choking tear gas, adding to the general confusion and making it impossible to know friend from foe for at least seven seconds.
It was a relative silence in the roar of noise, and noticed only by the final group of four SAS and one Delta paratrooper who, like Brentwood and Aussie before them, had had to work more slowly than Freeman’s “cavalry” through a grenade-shovelled path in the minefield in order to reach the basin.
No one except Dracheev, in his Saddam bunker a hundred feet down and a mile away, realized what the immediate implications of the Allied grenade attack in the shaft were. One moment the Siberian commander had been watching his men moving toward the R1 shaft, the next they stopped. Within seconds he could detect the unmistakable reek of cordite and throat-searing whiffs of tear gas streaming back through the tunnels. He knew immediately that the top section of Rl must now be penetrated. In fact, the whole of R1 had been penetrated insofar as the sheer mass of bodies — some barely alive — writhing in the hellish cauldron of the top fifty feet of the R1 shaft was preventing the steel trapdoor hatch at the sixty-foot level from being closed, thus risking the integrity of the entire system, the shaft jammed with dead and dying.
At the top of the shaft David Brentwood was yelling, “Half with me, half stay topside. Watch the other exits!” Brentwood knew that most of these rat holes would already be warped, even if they’d not been actually penetrated by the air strikes, and would therefore be effectively unopenable by the SPETS. Still, the Siberians would need only one or two exits to enable them to swarm up again. Even now the ten-man Delta squad deployed on the rim were readying to stave off any counterattack by ad hoc teams of SPETS who, having made their way along the cliff tops north and south of the rocky depression, were now attempting to head back to try and retake the R1 basin.
In the basin a medic, readying to give Freeman a shot of antitetanus, almost finished what the Siberians had begun, barely seeing Freeman’s tetanus allergy bracelet in time as the general groggily regained consciousness long enough to give Brentwood an order.
“Yes, sir!” responded Brentwood, looking around, yelling, “Radio!” He had to call again before he saw a whip aerial swinging wildly like a fishing rod through the clearing smoke and fumes that were still issuing from R1. “They still have us jammed?” he asked the radio operator.
“Yes, sir. All static.”
“All right. Get to the cliff top. Aussie, you cover him. Take two more with you.” Brentwood turned to the radio man. “Use your lamp if you can’t get a frequency. Signal Little Diomede for the MEU to come in. They’ll pass it on. Four Apaches attacking first, the transports to follow fifteen minutes later, coming down on the other exits. But no spreading out — just secure the exits. There are still minefields on our flanks.” Brentwood tossed down two more three-second SAS “specials”—stun grenades of the kind SAS had used to clear the Iranian Embassy in London of terrorists in 1980. Stepping back quickly from the cover, he heard Aussie telling him, “Cliff AAs are still active. They’ll blow the MEU Apaches to pieces.”
“Do what I tell you!” shouted Brentwood. “Take another two men with you.” Within seconds two more Delta commandos were moving with Aussie up toward the rim to cover the rear right and left flanks of the signal operator, whose lamp was blinking eastward where anyone but the Siberians could see it. Dick Norton’s scopes on Cape Prince of Wales spotted it the second it began winking — the radio relay from Little Diomede’s Patriot battery not needed.
As the four AH-64s were taking off and heading out over the jagged twenty-five-mile ice flow toward Ratmanov, their Hughes gunbelts fully loaded and rocket pods resupplied, Delta Force and SAS were in their element, doing what they had trained months, in some cases years, to do. Every man of them was highly trained in a cross section of skills, and every one was in top physical shape. Eighteen headed north of the basin to carry out Freeman’s order; twenty-seven headed south, where the AA fire from the recessed, rail-mounted batteries had been heaviest. Map references from the fighter aircrafts’ largely futile attacks on the recessed AA positions were of some help, but the references couldn’t be relied upon to any high degree.
“Clever bastard!” quipped Aussie to the radio man, but the latter didn’t answer, his concentration eastward, lips moving with his Morse message. When he’d received the acknowledgment blink from across the pristine air of the strait he noticed shadows, scattered clouds sliding ominously across the ice pack. “Who’s a clever bastard?” he asked Aussie. Aussie fired a long burst at a SPETS who, looking the worse for wear, was dodging between rocky outcrops thirty yards down from the basin’s rim. The SPETS stopped then fell, twisting about, trying to reach his backpack. He slithered down into a pocket of dirty ice, streaked by FAE detritus.
“Who’s a clever bastard?” repeated the radio man. “Brentwood?”
“What? Oh, yeah, him too. But I meant the old man.”
“Von Freeman,” grunted one of the Delta men, who’d lost two of his best buddies when the general had called in the FAE strike.
“Okay,” said Aussie. “He’s a rough customer, but this is a smart move, boyo!”
“You hope.”
Aussie thought he saw the SPETS move in the snow — or was it a sense of movement created by passing cloud? “Five to one on it works,” he whispered, clipping in another mag, not taking his eyes off the SPETS but not wanting to waste ammunition either.
“You mean what he told Brentwood?” said the Delta man.
“Yeah.”
“What’s five to one on?” asked the American to his right.
“He means,” said the radio man, “you bet ten bucks to win one.”
“Fuck you,” said the other Delta man matter-of-factly.
“Hey, hey,” said Aussie, adopting a quiet yet schoolmasterish tone, still not taking his eyes off the SPETS. “Watch your language. Three to one on.”
“Done.”
There was an explosion so violent that it shook ice from the cliff top, sending it on a sheer fell sixteen hundred feet straight down, where it shattered like glass on the floe.
“Christ, what was that?” said Aussie. There was a towering pall of smoke above R1 seventy yards behind them and the stink of human ordure.
“C-four,” the radio man said quietly, his dull monotone suppressing his fear, so determined not to overreact he hardly seemed to react at all. “Brentwood must have dropped a whole—” He stopped, and the others knew why, for it might well have been a SPETS-induced explosion. Taking his eyes off the SPETS, Aussie glanced back toward the middle of the basin, the towering black column of smoke now hundreds of feet in the air.
Because Joe Mell’s Skidoo conked out — he’d had to clean the plugs and tinker with the carburetor to get it going again — it was civil twilight when he reached the snake. Mumbling that he should have “used the dogs” instead, he cinched the belt charge securely about the four-foot-diameter pipe, took another swig of Southern Comfort, and pushed the button.
They found bits of him as far as two hundred yards away, untouched by the inferno that followed the explosion: the charge had not ignited the oil until it raised the temperature of the crude gushing out of the pipe to its flash point. Forensic analysis of the molecular structure of dime-sized pieces from the charge’s casing recovered by disc metal detectors confirmed what Anchorage FBI had been quick to surmise — namely that the material was of Soviet manufacture and that there had been no timer, a guarantee that Joe Mell, identified by dental records, would never be able to identify Chernko’s Alaskan sleeper.
Only twelve minutes elapsed between Joe Mell’s attack and the two other points of sabotage — one on the North Slope itself, the third at Valdez depot, where the crude was now afire and fouling the pristine beauty of Prince William Sound, huge globular tarballs of unrefined “mousse” crude suffocating every sea creature in their path. The fire at the spill’s periphery was so fierce that it split the ice-cold fir trees lining the sound, their sharp “cracks” heard for miles along the frozen shore.
The environmental catastrophe that was fouling the waters and killing thousands of animals, from seabirds who had become trapped upon landing in the sludge to marmots hibernating in the Brooks Range, enraged environmentalists from Nome to Washington. What would cause the lights of Congress to burn late into the winter night, however, was the stunning realization that the United States — its consumption of fuel in the war five times normal usage — now had its vital oil artery cut.
The pipeline could be mended within a week, but with the Middle East wells afire, the awful vulnerability of the pipeline and of the tankers shipping the oil from Valdez meant that most of the Pacific Fleet’s submarines would have to be deployed to protect the 1,900-mile-long tanker route from Valdez to Cherry Point, Washington to Point Conception in California. This meant drastically reducing the number of submarines available to the Pacific Fleet for action in and about the Aleutians and in America’s ability to interdict the Siberian resupply routes from Vladivostok, Sakhalin, and the Kuril Island bases.
The only positive thing about the situation as far as the Pentagon was concerned was that the few peace protesters around the White House now dried to a trickle. Even those who advocated the United States should let the Siberians have their way could not stomach what the Siberians had done to the pipeline. You could kill a marine, but not a marmot.
Commander in Chief Pacific immediately requested Alaska Air Command to increase chopper patrols over the pipeline and ordered all available subs from Bangor, Washington, to the testing range at Beck Island in Behm Canal, twenty-four miles north of Ketchikan on the Alaskan Panhandle. They were to make ready for increased patrols up and down the West Coast, the chief of naval operations now convinced that with the pipeline under tighter surveillance, the weak points in the vital supply link would be the natural attack lanes between the offshore islands all down the coast, particularly those from Valdez to Vancouver Island in British Columbia to the San Juans off Washington State.
CINCPAC’s orders sent another of the Brentwood brothers-Robert, the eldest — into action. His dual purpose ICBM/attack sub, a Sea Wolf II, the USS Reagan, dipped her moorings at Bangor, Washington, within hours of the Alaska pipeline having been severed. Heading out for another seventy-day war patrol off the West Coast of North America, her “blue” crew was not happy. Being submariners — men who, in order to accommodate all the gadgetry of modem warfare, were forced to live in confined spaces that would have driven landlubbers into a neurotic frenzy in two weeks — they were not whiners. But during their refit and testing runs on the range, they had been within a week of being relieved by the sub’s “gold” crew. The nuclear reactor of the Reagan produced so much power, so much fresh water, that the overflow had to be jettisoned every day. It was the men who wore out first, not ship’s supplies.
One deck below the control room, the missile warfare officer was moving slowly through the red light of “Blood Alley,” batteries of computers on either side of him winking green, red, and amber in response to his testing, his earphones trailing cord as he and Petty Officer Patrick went through a dry run. The captain, like most of his Annapolis-bred ilk, was wont to give orders for a launch any time during the long night of a patrol. You never knew, the officer informed the newcomer Patrick, whether it was for real or not until the last thirty seconds.
“Keeps us on our toes,” said the MWO. The petty officer had another phrase for it, but he was a petty officer because, along with his efficiency, he knew when to keep quiet in the silent service. Besides, he had learned that Brentwood was considered a fair man by the crew — the quiet, shy type — though lord help the crewman who screwed up. In the world of the Soviet Alfa II, not as quiet but faster than the Sea Wolf, a split second either way meant life or death.
The cliff face erupted in gun and surface-to-air missile fire. The Apaches flew in zigzagging attack pattern, but it didn’t help them. Two-thirds of the way across the twenty-five-mile floe, one of them erupted in flame then disintegrated. The SAM-10 on the retractable launcher took only thirty seconds to slide to the cliff opening — a pinhole from where the choppers were— and unleash the missile that even the nimble firefly-evasive tactics of the Apaches couldn’t shake. But the rolling smoke from the cliff base, as Freeman had anticipated in his order to David Brentwood, told the men whom Brentwood had deployed south and north of R1 along the cliff face precisely where the SAM opening was, as well as that of the medley of other AA weapons whose assorted fire the remaining three Apaches were drawing.
David Brentwood and Aussie Lewis strapped their ice cleats onto their vapor barrier boots, preparing to “visit,” in the SAS lexicon, the AA position nearest R1. A SAM “hole” had surprised Aussie and the Delta radio man when it opened up, seemingly only yards away but in fact a hundred feet almost directly below them. Aussie quickly staked the piton for his white nylon ply line, took the strain in his left hand glove, and abseiled in a controlled hop/fall down the wall of the cliff, another Delta man having taken his place to guard the radio man from any landward attack by the SPETS.
For a moment Brentwood was worried that his ice cleats would be heard cutting into the cliff face but just as quickly forgot about it as he went over the lip into the sustained roar of the Siberians’ ZSU — quads — throwing out their tracer and the din of the SAM’s flashback in its man-made cave. Aussie was abseiling down the cliff on the other side of the SAM hole, thirty feet from Brentwood.
From his vantage point on the island’s southernmost end, the CBN reporter could see the dots of the three Apache helicopters and the cliff coming alive through the smoke, but because there was so much smoke, particularly the exhausts from the SAMs, whose breath immediately turned the frigid air to fog, the zoom on his Sony 5000 video camera was useless. “We’ve got to get closer,” he told the hunter urgently.
“Through minefields? No way. You’d better signal a chopper ride if those troop whirlybirds make it back again.”
“You’ve got an SOS flare haven’t you?” shot back the newsman.
“So? That’s for emergencies.”
“What the hell do you call this? Moment you see those troop Chinooks going in, you pull that tab.”
“You divert a chopper just so you can get pictures, man, you’re gonna be in a lot of shit.”
“I’ll take the rap. It’s worth another grand.”
“Okay,” agreed the hunter, “I’ll fire the flare, but I’m staying here. I don’t like those whirlybirds. I’d rather walk back to—”
“All right, all right,” said the CBN reporter, anxiously looking through the eyepiece again. “Damn that smoke!” Now and then he could see white dots moving against the black cliff where one of the earlier and unsuccessful air attacks had blasted the ice off, exposing the black basalt beneath.
Had it not been for the smoke the reporter would have seen at least twenty dots: seven two-man teams and six individuals abseiling down the cliff face. Apache fire killed half a dozen of the Delta/SAS commandos as shrapnel ricocheted across the race. It killed two commandos outright; others lost their footing or had their lines severed and fell down on the floe. Aussie, Brentwood, and the other teams ignored everything else, focusing only on the particular rat hole below them on the cliff face.
At ninety-five feet, which had taken them less than a minute to reach, Brentwood and Aussie were above the SAM site, either side of it. None of the twenty commandos had used grenades but rather lumps of C-4 plastique with three-second detonator/fuses. They didn’t want to simply snuff out the operating crews but knock the AA batteries and SAM transoms right off their rails, hopefully bringing down the rock ceiling as well.
Two commandos were spotted by SPETS loaders who had gone forward, right to the sheer dropoff of their cave’s ledge, in order to clear rock and ice debris shaken loose by the vibration of their own firing. It was also the only place to get a draft of fresh, ice-cool air now that the ventilators that had kept the weapon bays clear of smoke weren’t up to capacity due to Freeman’s and Brentwood’s attack on the R1 basin. But the remaining eighteen Allied commandos did the job, each man in the seven two-man teams tossing in the C- 4 simultaneously. Only one missed falling, the charge exploding at the seven-hundred-foot level, sending up ice shards, some over six feet long, that caught the cloud-filtered sun before they shattered, killing two of the remaining six individual line commandos as the Delta/SAS team hauled themselves back up the cliff.
Dracheev’s force, however, paid a much heavier price: seventeen of the eighteen holes or caves were hit, wiped out, AA quad mountings and SAM launchers blown off their rail mounts, inclining roofward or pointing at the ice floes at ridiculously inoperable angles. They were too heavy to manhandle back onto the rails — the latter buried in any case by collapsing rock piles and scaffolding.
From a distance it looked like a dust storm was issuing forth from the cliff, the rush of black and white rock — now gravel-pouring down the cliffs like molten waterfalls plunging to the ice floe fifteen hundred feet below, the air steaming up as if volcanic vents had been unzipped all along the cliff’s base, the bodies of some of the more than fifty-three SPETS, AA, and missile crews momentarily visible in the Allied-made avalanche.
“Let the up, goddamn it!” ordered Freeman, getting up off the litter. “I’m all right.”
“General, you took a bad fall. Concussion sometimes doesn’t—”
“Let the up!”
It delayed the takeoff of the Apache chopper, which had been turned into an air ambulance heading back to Cape Prince of Wales. It was now sprouting two litters for wounded on either side.
At the moment when his control room shivered, photographs splintering from the enormous shock waves of the Allied charges on the cliff, Major General Dracheev knew his garrison was defeated. His SPETS would fight to the death if asked, but it would be nothing more, he told his duty officer, than apodpolnaya boynya— “underground abattoir.”
It was impossible to get a message through the jammed hub of wounded up to R1 and so, tearing off a piece of his bed sheet, sticking it on the bayonet of an AK-74, he personally made his way through the choking dust of the tunnel leading out to the nearest AA gun emplacement.
Weaving his way carefully through the burning remnants of what had been a ZSU quad, he saw the bodies of its crew, or rather what was left of them, cast about the tunnel so violently that it only added to his resolve. The stench of human ordure mixed with the sulfurous stench of the C-4’s aftermath and incinerated guano, hitherto frozen by the ice, almost overwhelmed him. Dracheev saw two Apaches, now alarmingly big, passing up then out of sight above the cliff. “Hello!” he called from the tunnel, his voice echoing out from the cliff as he disgustedly thrust out the AK-74, the white sheet slapping stiffly in the breeze.
The surrender formally took place eleven minutes later at 1411 hours, though there was sporadic fighting by groups of SPETS along the island, until Dracheev was taken aboard one of the Apaches and, using a booster hailer to overcome the noise of the chopper, told his troops below it was all over.
“Brentwood!” It was Freeman congratulating him. “Good job, son. Damn good job.”
“Thank you, sir,” said Brentwood, but his mind was clearly on something else. Behind him Aussie Lewis, Choir Williams, and others were steering the SPETS to the ad hoc weapons dump in the basin. There AK-47s, 74s, even HK MP5K and rounds of nine-millimeter Parabellum along with grenades clattered on the heap. Many of the SPETS had to come up so fast they’d not had time to put on their white overlays; they were already shivering. But no one suspected for a moment that it was from fear, a strange air of equality between the two forces even in the SPETS defeat.
“Ah, General,” began Brentwood, his tone betraying his unwillingness to go on, “ah, we’ve got a bit of a problem here, sir.”
“What?”
“Sir, that CBN reporter you ordered off Little Diomede at the beginning—”
“What about him? Where’s Morgan?” Freeman was looking about.
“Morgan bought it, sir,” said Brentwood.
Freeman, hands on hips, stared at the pile of weapons. “Son of a bitch.” He turned to Brentwood. “The news guy, too?”
“No, sir,” replied Brentwood. “He’s still with us.”
“Well, can’t kill those bastards.” Someone thought he said, “Unfortunately,” but this was pure speculation, the men around Freeman waiting for the general to explode on hearing that the reporter hadn’t followed orders.
“Deliberate?” shot back Freeman.”Or couldn’t they get him off in time?”
“Ah — deliberate, I’m afraid, sir.”
“Send him to me.”
The cluster of SAS men looked at one another. Normally there might have been a wink or two, relishing the reaming out of one of the “news nits,” as the SAS called them; all of them hated the press. But none of the Brits were in the mood for entertainment just yet; too many of their closest friends were charred lumps, wasted by the FAE that the American general had called in.
“What’s your name?” Freeman asked the CBN reporter.
“Lamonte, General — Rick Lamonte.” He indicated his press card pinned to the Arctic fox collar. “CBN.”
“That the Communist Broadcasting Network?”
“No, General.”
Freeman grunted. “You send all your equipment to Major Brentwood here. Understand?”
“General, I’m—”
“Listen, Lamonte, I’m not having you invading America’s dinner hour with your blood-and-guts footage — least not before any next-of-kin is notified. You got that?”
“I haven’t got pictures of any wounded, General. Wasn’t close enough — too much debris in the air.”
The general said nothing, and there was an unnerving silence, broken only by the wokka wokka wokka of the rotors on the marine expeditionary unit’s Ch- 47 transports. Most of the leathernecks were disgusted — some relieved — that they were to be used only for mop-up, or, as one sergeant put it, “roundup” duty.
On the ground everyone was waiting for Freeman to respond to Lamonte. Everyone knew that “Ratmanov Rick,” as he’d already been dubbed, must have at least the FAE strikes in glorious technicolor and that the Pentagon’s PR types would be scrambling for damage control.
“We’ll check your tape out,” Freeman told Lamonte.”Make sure you’ve got nobody’s mug shots on there. I don’t want the mother of some—”
“Fine,” chipped in Lamonte.
“You got any film left in that thing?”
Freeman knew very well that it was a video camera and how to run it — he’d taken enough shots of his children when they were young — but he enjoyed affecting ignorance about such matters in front of the press; it gave him tactical advantage when they least expected it.
“Not much, General,” said Lamonte.
“How much is that?”
“Couple of minutes.”
“All right, follow me.”
Lamonte, visibly relieved the commandos weren’t going to confiscate his tape and equipment with it, followed Freeman toward the cliff side of the basin. The general carefully made his way over bodies, Siberian as well as British and American, till he got an angle for the video from which no faces of American dead could be seen. “All right,” he told Lamonte. “Take a shot here — no further than five paces from me. Alright?”
Lamonte couldn’t believe his luck: the legendary Freeman on tape, surrounded by SPETS, oily smudged air wafting across the basin from persistent pockets of FAE and smaller fires still burning, would have a dramatic effect before the lens. And that look of Freeman’s — helmet on, chin strap tight. The New York anchor would flip. The son of a bitch had the pose down to a T, as if he’d practiced it before a mirror. Tough face but creased with concern, as moved by the enemy dead as his own, the cerulean blue sky and black-and-white jagged cliff behind him a perfect backdrop. Christ, he’d win an Oscar.
“Thirty-second clip,” instructed Freeman, not breaking the pose. When Lamonte had finished, Freeman called Brentwood and several Delta men over. “Get in the next shot, men!” he told them.
“Big of him,” said Choir Williams sarcastically, his earlier mood of high optimism now gone, wiped out when the FAE had burned the rest of his mates alive.
“ ‘E doesn’t realize it,” chimed in another Brit, “but ‘e’s putting himself on trial. They’ll have to weigh this glory bullshit against the shots of the jelly.” He meant the FAE.
“Freeman knows that,” said Brentwood. “That’s the point. Do we want to win or not?”
“Well, jocko,” posited Choir, his familiarity with an officer nearing contempt, a tone that only the closeness of commandos could tolerate.”You weren’t one of those who was cooked, were you now?”
Brentwood didn’t reply, refusing to be drawn into it any further. It wasn’t for him to judge; the American people, the Pentagon, every barroom “expert” would do that. All David Brentwood knew was that they were running up the Stars, and Stripes and the Union Jack over Rat Island.
“You bastards!” It was one of the marine medics shouting at the SPETS prisoners while helping another marine steer Shirer toward a Medevac chopper, the first-aid bandage they’d put about his eye already soaked with blood.